Thoughts on thinking

It starts with the nerve endings; billions of them, all over your body, receiving input, sending little packets of data up the pipeline like tributaries feeding into a river.  The data is immensely specific, and there's an immense amount of it, all flooding up your spinal column and into the brain.  And your brain, on the bottommost level, is the hub in which all this data is sorted, repackaged, formatted and redirected to the factory floor of the subconscious for manufacturing, for processing and building.  This is where the magic happens.

It's a factory too vast to comprehend.  It's where memories are stored, where tactile data is interpreted, where involuntary muscle reactions are programmed and sent out.  This is where impulse is created, where light and colors, smells and sounds become emotions, where emotions become urges.  This is where what happens to you passes through the filter of who you are, where data beyond comprehension is turned into a sphere of understanding.  It's the powerhouse of the brain, but you 'see' very little of it.  

What you 'see' instead is consciousness.  The phonographic loop, the internal monologue.  If the subconscious is a factory, the conscious is surely the marketing team of the brain, constantly working, advertising, slapping together disjointed thoughts and memories with bureaucratic ineptitude in a vain attempt to create something meaningful.   The subconscious is full of specialists who are staggeringly competent; the conscious is the suit-and-ties who attempt to put it all together, but understand very little.  This can be good - the subconscious knows how to spell words, play notes, but the conscious is what writes the poem, or plays the song - but it can also be bad.  The conscious doesn't really have any impulse control.  The world is their sample group.  When you're driving on the freeway, you don't know whether your next thought will be a gleam of understanding into the song on the radio, or a terrifyingly clear flash of desire to see what happens if you slam the parking brake right now.  You really just don't know.  

So you don't want the marketing team in control of everything.  Think of when you're at your best, when you're doing something - a sport, music, art, for me this has never been as pure as it was in marching band - something that takes up all your focus, and the conscious mind just stands back, their skills no longer needed.  Suddenly you don't know who you are, or when you are, you only know what you're doing, and all those workers down on the factory floor are doing their jobs as well as they ever had.  This is nirvana, the real deal, the one and only.  It is mind and body in unison.  When the world is burning and nothing makes sense, when rage or terror or love grips you and the instinct kicks in, this is who you are.  The conscious mind will always have its part to play, but when it comes down to doing something real, without the second-guessing and double-checking, you don't want a think tank.  You want a construction crew.  

This is just the way I like to think of it.  Scientifically speaking, there's not a lot of research that went into this.  I don't study brains for a living.  But I do have one, which I think makes me qualified to at least think about it.

The Final Days of Elizabeth Garvey

New short story!  A bit longer and a bit different from my previous two.  More to come, hopefully!  Enjoy.


Eleven years ago I was offered a job as a technician for a mining rig in the central pacific, an experimental super-facility sunk halfway to the bottom of the ocean.  Built by a massive corporation with footholds in everything from oil to fast food to entertainment, the rig was almost completely self-sufficient, a 22nd century city-state floating twenty thousand leagues under the sea.  Future home to some of the leading experts in a broad range of fields, the place was to be a hub of functional science, the magical world young scientists and engineers go to sleep dreaming about, where every new inspiration is publicly celebrated, backed by unlimited funding and unanimous support.  I leapt at the opportunity, despite the fact that it meant leaving behind a very comfortable life in California with no promise of ever being able to return, even for a vacation.  This was the chance of a lifetime, the culmination of everything I had ever done.  It had paid off, someone had recognized my genius and hard work.  Or so I thought.
Despite the decisive advances of women over the past few centuries, engineering still remains a field dominated by men.  So imagine my surprise when I showed up to discover that there were almost as many women on board as there were men.  A nice surprise, perhaps; it was several months before it occurred to me that my femaleness might have been the decisive factor in my recruitment.  I was good at what I did, easily competent to operate of repair and of the many vital systems that ran the rig, but it seemed that every day I ran into some new person whose intellect and drive made me feel impossibly out of my depth.  On shore I was a genius; here I’m only average, maybe a little bit below.
The rig is a massive tower, radiating out from a central shaft that holds the mining and fracking equipment.  A needle, digging slowly into the crust of the earth.  I was stationed near the bottom, operating remotely on the massive drill and collecting rock samples for the geological branch.  And for eleven years, the rig was my world.  To be grouped with so many other intelligent people in that kind of setting was exhilarating.  If you’re not a scientist, I’m not sure I can explain how euphoric it is to have a dedicated source of funding and support, one that you could have utter confidence in, that would always be there.  To live in a community that really, truly respected the work you did, that prized innovation and creativity above all else.  The rig was a magical place.  I suppose we changed the world.  You would know better than I; none of us could really spare enough time from whatever we were doing to really check on how our innovations had affected the world at large.
It was during the energy crisis of 2113 that I first met Jack Lee.  It wasn’t, strictly speaking, a global crisis, though it certainly felt like it to us.  Environmental changes had caused several cubic miles of jellyfish to drift on a course that intersected our hydroelectric farms, rendering the rigs’ main power source effectively useless.  Technicians and engineers from all departments were put on repair duty, which is how I found myself that summer in a scuba suit, holding a welder and a ‘jellyfish vacuum’, with a thin, dark-haired man named Jack babbling excitedly at me about the ecology of moon jellyfish.  Two and a half years later I married him in the decadent glass heart, a shimmering chapel that sat on top of the rig.  We were given a week off and a private submarine for the honeymoon, paid for by the rig.  Such marriages were not uncommon, even encouraged.  By that time, the first children of the rig were beginning to read.
Our marriage was a happy one, it certainly did wonders for our social life.  The jade band on my finger was a seeming all-access pass to the more exclusive clubs and hangouts, places where actual liquor was served, not just lab ethanol mixed with whatever sodas could be found.  In the beginning, the paranoia that I was only there for the purposes of marrying some man was rampant, but time eased that fear into a dull suspicion, and finally into acceptance.  To put it simply, life was good.
2117 was a big year for the rig.  In May, the first international underwater school was opened, consisting of two observation levels near the top of the rig.  Enrollment, supplies, and transportation were available free of charge to all official citizens, the curriculum featured everything from daycare to core college classes, with some of the most brilliant minds in the world providing one-on-one training and education for graduate degrees.  All married couples were scheduled to take a tour of the new facilities; Jack and I came back from ours with spinning heads, hearts bloated with euphoria like helium balloons.  We sat down, talked long into the night, and eventually made up our minds; the rig was our home, and that meant a place to start a family.  I’ll never forget the fire in Jack’s eyes four months later, when I told him I was pregnant.  It was exhilarating, and overwhelming, and terrifying, but it felt right.  Life went on, much as the sun still rises, rain still falls on the cocoon of a gestating caterpillar.  Inside, the caterpillar liquefies, rebuilt and molded by turbulence, but is the outside world changed by inner catharsis?
Yes, it is.  Because we changed, and the way we saw the world changed with us.  And if that had been the biggest change in our lives, perhaps we could have died happy.
But that’s getting ahead of the story.  The other reason 2117 was a big year occurred in November.  Our child was a genderless lump that had just developed fingers.  Jack took on a part-time job teaching ecology 101 as a night course.  Mining and drilling found a highly unprecedented rock.
Within twenty-four hours the rig was ablaze with the news of large, flat fields of porous, grey stone featuring large calcite crystals and a high silicon content.  Jack was more excited about it than I was; my interests had always lain mostly inside the rig, on circuitry and metal, moving parts of machines.  But apparently the rock, which had been nicknamed ‘end-stone’, after an old video game, was a very big deal.  Theories bounced across lunch halls and break rooms.  Someone in oil analysis developed a silicon-based form of radiometric dating for the sole purpose of dating the stone; preliminary tests indicated that the stone was seemingly older than the earth itself.  The results were largely ignored, but some people, my husband included, incorporated the results into their theorizing, which grew ever wilder the more information came in.  The most plausible suggestion that took into account the supposed age of the stone was that the end-stone was remnants from the earths’ past collision with Remus, the collision which had supposedly formed our moon.  The fields could contain well-preserved records of an era of our history which had been mostly lost to space.  Now, the discovery of a new rock wasn’t exactly huge; the pacific basin was a goldmine for discoveries of all types.  It is because of what happened afterwards that I count the discovery of the seemingly innocuous end-stone as such a major event.
In early June of 2118 I gave birth to Florence, seven pounds and very healthy.  The end-stone craze had mostly died down, though I suspect among geologists the excitement was still burning strong.  After nine years the pocket of oil we had originally drilled was finally running dry; talk began of moving the rig, a two-year operation that sounded just crazy enough to work.  Crude scans showed high quantities of hydrocarbons to the east, a solid indicator of possible oil.  The October ballot would feature a number of articles on the subject of moving, namely concerning the how and the where to.  The rig had adopted a sort of representative communism, in which people only voted on issues pertaining to their field of work or study.  I voted on a number of technical and mechanical decisions, Jack joined a committee to discuss where and how they were to set up the rig, with respect to the environment.  It was through him that the end-stone came directly into our lives.
To Jack, the ecology of the region to our east had been fascinating, even before the end-stone had been found there.  It was heavy with chordates, but lacked any plant life.  And there were no sperm whale carcasses, which meant no giant squid.  All in all, a very odd place, and Jack’s ecological/geological committee dredged up more strange facts every day.  He came home rambling about it, how the composition of vented gases was considerably different, x-rays showed signs of dinosaur-sized fossils that predated the mesozoic era.  Three new species of crab had been discovered, including a wacky ten-legged species that Jack developed a serious crush on.  New crabs!  I mostly tuned him out.  We had a child to raise, and he was becoming more and more work every day.
Still, while the nature of Jack’s work held little interest to me, the consequences of it were inescapable.  The man who had recruited Jack was a geneticist named Harvey Sommers, a history enthusiast from Texas who had recruited an all-male committee with a hidden agenda that became clearer every day; he wanted the eastern end-stone fields declared off-limits, a kind of wildlife sanctuary.  And the more he dragged our family into his political shenanigans, the harder it became to feel sympathetic to his cause.  With my job in oil, most of my co-workers were adamantly against the cause my husband supported, and as 2118 became 2119, the resentment against my family became almost palpable.  Jack was no help; Harvey had so thoroughly indoctrinated him that he refused to even discuss the matter with me.
It happened slowly, as I’m sure it always does.  Obsession is a sneaky thing, it falls over a man like the shadow of a stormcloud, darker, darker, until one day you wake up and realize that this is no ordinary stress, that the man you married is gone, and you fear there’s no bringing him back.  So you pretend, you hope against hope that you’re wrong, that he’s still there, somewhere, because when all you can do is hope, it’s the scariest thing in the world to let go, to admit that you truly have nothing, however hard you cling to the ledge, you’re already falling.
So for months, I just... endured.  Floated through scorn and resentment, going home to the non-comfort of a man who, on the rare nights when he was actually home, was barely there at all.  The committee was taking a toll on his health, yet he refused to see a doctor.  All of us on the rig were pale, but Jack had developed a waxy sallowness, sunken and blue around the eyes.  He would mutter in his sleep, looping, nonsensical ramblings about prehistoric worms, lava monsters and buried cities.  I would wake to find him already up, drinking triple-brewed tea and looking worse than ever.  On the worst days, the days where he was manic, babbling, practically screaming about God knows what, he hardly seemed to recognize his son, moving about the apartment like Florence was a watermelon I spent my days dressing up in costumes.
Everyone has a breaking point; mine was June 12th, 2119.  Florence was turning one.  It was a small, low-key event, neighbors and close friends.  I cooked Florence a small honey-raspberry cupcake, though he seemed far more interested in the candle.  By the time Jack burst through the door, three hours late, the only guest left was Alena, my co-worker of eight years, close friend and only confidante.  I still remember everything from that night, from the smear of frosting on the wall behind Florence’s chair to the dark spot of wine on Alena’s beige scarf to the faint rings of moisture around my husband’s eyes, the way it welled up in the corners, wetting his eyelashes into jagged spikes.
“...hollow, Liz, there’s air under the rock!  Caves!  Do you know what this means?  There could be anything down there, with this level of heat and moisture, sealed up for millenia, and you just wanted to drill through it, destroy an ecosystem that’s been untouched since-”
I rose up and slapped him across the face.  “What the hell is wrong with you?”  I screamed.  “Today was our son’s birthday, and all you seem to care about is some stupid rock, and crabs, and you’re never home, you don’t seem to care about anything that happens in my life, and you’re sick, Jack, you have to take a break.  You have to see someone.”  The tears burned riverbeds into my cheeks.  Jack stopped, blinking like a fish out of water.  Florence began to cry, Alena took him into another room.
“Look, I get that you’re stressed, but-”
“Stressed!  Jack, you’re killing yourself.  You’re killing us, this can’t go on any longer,”
He grabbed me by the shoulders  “Liz, I know these last few months have been hard, but you have to understand what this means for us!”  He shook me, the world wobbled.  “This is it, the tipping point!  We can never move the rig now, with this discovery the entire place will have a whole new job, one that’ll last for years.  And I’m on the committee that discovered it!  We’re going to be famous, baby.  We’re going to be rich!  We can move into a better apartment, we’ll finally have the financial security to start a family...”  He danced away, lunatic fire burning in his eyes.  And from somewhere outside of my body, I heard myself whisper.
“Get out.”  I took a deep breath, he stopped.  “Get out, get out get out get OUT OF MY HOUSE, NOW!  I don’t know who you are, but you’re not the man I married, you’re not the man I want our son raised by.  You have no place in this family, and I never want to see your face again.”  I stepped forward, everything blurred through a veil of tears.  “So get OUT!”
He paused, confusion, anger, pain swirling over his face.  After a moment of desperate struggle, anger won.  “I see what this is about,” he whispered.  “It’s all so clear now.”
“Is it?”  I sobbed.
“You want to move the rig!  Just drill through all that unknown life, destroy invaluable history just to get at your precious oil, make a few bucks and then walk away.  You don’t even care about the possibilities of what could be down there!  Or are you just doing this to spite me?  Well, you know what?  It isn’t going to work.  You want me out?  Good!  I’m leaving, we’re going to win, and when you crawl back to me, I will just leave you in the street.  So goodbye, my love,” he spat.  “I hope you rot.”  He turned around, I sank to the ground, anguish settling across the universe.  His words as he stepped out the door flickered through the air like shimmering, venomous bats.  “no respect... we’ll show her.  She’ll never get the better of us... selfish bitch...”
Alena rushed back into the room, still holding a crying Florence.  I grabbed him, cradling him to my chest.  Alena held me as I rocked, long into the night.
The next day, I woke up and went to work.  Co-workers offered condolences; I ignored, them focusing only on my job.  After putting in three hours of unpaid OT, I went home to discover a letter waiting for me; Jack was requesting a divorce.  Full custody to me, no alimony.  A clean break.  It was a week before I could bring myself to sign off.  I wished we had fought; hell, sometimes I wished he had hit me, just to give me a sign that he wanted to stay.
Life went on, grey and inevitable as ever.  It’s my way of dealing with grief, I suppose, to just... push it down, keep it all inside and throw myself into the biggest distraction I can find.  During the days I was happy, content and confident that I had made the right decision, but at night, lying all alone in my bed, I took out my secret box of hurts and inadequacies and guilts and let them wash over me, crawling back into the comfort of pain and pity, out of the warmth and light I knew I didn’t deserve.  Still, time soothed me, gave life new light, until only occasionally did grief overtake me as it once had nearly every day.
I only saw Jack alive one more time, in November of that year.  Florence was at day-care, I was shopping in the grand mall, a six-story panopticon of innumerable shops and department stores.  I was walking out of a J & C’s, he was headed somewhere to my left.  Our eyes met, neither of us said a word.  I’m not sure he even recognized me.
He looked terrible, like an untreated mental patient, or a prisoner of war.  Emaciated, smelly and unshaven, hunched over and pale.  Nervous shivers racked his body, he stepped gingerly, as if walking hurt.  But worst of all was his eyes, sunken, bloodshot pits framed by sallow, loose skin draped over sharp bone.  They were the eyes of a man who is truly lost, lifeless and unseeing.  Eyes that belonged in a wax museum, or a jar of formaldehyde.
Just behind him stood Harvey, who was guiding this empty, pathetic shell through the crowds.  He practically had my ex-husband on a leash, and when he saw me, his eyes flashed with victorious wrath.  Homicide flashed through my mind, but I shoved it down.  Maybe someday, when Florence was old enough to understand.  Now, of course, I wish I had done it then.
And that was the last time I ever saw or heard of him until his obituary on February 3rd, 2120.  Harvey, of course, was everywhere, the firebrand protector of the east.  But his right hand, his faithful pet?  Not a word.  Jack Lee had disappeared.  Then he slashed himself open, wrote a small novel with his own blood on the glass wall of an observation deck, and hanged himself.  You can find a record of what he wrote on Pacific News, if you want, but much of it is incomprehensible.  Stories of ancient life, cities inside the earth, sleeping, dreaming intelligence locked under the end-stone to the east.  All unconfirmed speculation far beyond even the wildest theories of the geologists and ecologists studying that area.
Also disturbingly similar to the whispers that used to slip from Jack’s lips in the dead of night.  A creeping suspicion rose up in my mind; what if he was right?  There was end-stone extending for hundreds of miles to the east, what if some crazy Jules Verne world was hidden down there, shut off from all other life for millions of years?
What if it was communicating with Jack across some telepathic link?
As outlandish and cheesy as it was, I never quite shook the idea, if only to convince myself that perhaps Jack hadn’t gone mad for nothing.
I wasn’t unduly upset at his death, though it did sting; there was finally absolutely no hope of bringing him back.  Life merely went on as usual, moments slipping through our fingers as if they would never run out.  Despite the fascination and rich political complexity of the are to the east, it remained largely untouched, nobody exactly sure how to go about exploring the mysteries beneath its surface.  Moving the rig was postponed indefinitely, and for the first time, funding for experimental research and experimenting was cut.  Pay cuts, decreased availability of everyday commodities, harsh reminders that for all our freedom, we were still governed by a corporation.  I changed back to my maiden name, Elizabeth Garvey, but doing so caused me to fall through the cracks in the social security system.  My insurance was frozen, and I barely made enough to support me and Florence as it was.  My home, that simmering pot of intellect and creativity, was falling apart.  Yet part of me remained detached, some kind of perspective center in my brain assured me that this was no big deal.  Then I learned that Florence might be taken away from me, and it became a very big deal indeed.
It started small, with a little public outreach, some blogging.  But the activism bug was rampaging through the rig, and it bit me early.  My story was striking, and I attracted followers early on.  If there were an award for bitch of the year, I would probably have won it.  Single mom, divorced and in her thirties, taking on the world, asking tough questions and not taking no for an answer.  Florence was not yet two.  I was making enemies to the point where the size of the opposition was a better indicator of my success than the size of my supporters.  Then I remembered something, a new angle that changed everything, doused the flame that burned in the back of the mind of nearly every woman on the rig with gasoline.  Why were we here?  It was no great secret that the ratio of men to women on the rig was roughly equal, but under the right light the fact became sinister, ominous.  Were we just breeding stock?  Only there to pass on the proud male heritage of brilliance that was the trademark of our little underwater country?  My arguments were dismissed as wild extrapolation by skeptics who didn’t understand that the purpose of my arguments was wild extrapolation.  Nevertheless, people were listening.  My life began to form purpose I never knew could exist.  The influence I held was intoxicating, perhaps too much so.  Embroiled as I was in national politics, I had been neglecting the reason I had started it all in the first place.
June 4th, 2120 I received a letter informing me that I now shared custody of Florence G. Lee with Entretech corp. child services, effective immediately.  He would no longer live with me, moved to a group home near the school/daycare facilities.  It was as if the light had gone out of my life, I was a candle without a flame, and the darkness crept up on me from all sides.  
By far the lowest moment of my life occurred during a psych evaluation, part of the hearing to determine visitation, child support and so on.  Throughout the eval I could tell I was doing poorly, but when it drew to a close, I learned that the outcome had been fixed all along.
“You know, Ms. Garvey,” my interviewer said as he pushed his chair back and stood up.  “I’ve been following your activism work for some time now.”  My heart leapt into my throat; did I have a supporter?
“He leaned in and whispered in my ear.  “And I intend to see to it that an ungrateful cunt like you will never have the privilege of raising a child.”
All I remember after that is waking up in a hospital, sick and tired, with a nurse telling me that my son had been taken to California for adoption.
I won’t bother with the period that followed, the endgame.  Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t put it into words.  Just know this; there are moments in life where the world itself seems an illusion, time and space and matter and mass, all meaningless.  When isolation, grief and anguish and not enemies, but friends, lights in the dark.  But the dark is a sheet, the blindness that you impose upon yourself, and the lights are only the missing patched, holes through which you can see the true darkness of life.  And is there anything more horrible than that?
Yes.  It turns out there is.  The universe is a cruel master, with no respect for the quibbling emotions of those who see light where there is only shadow.  July 9, 2120.  I woke to the sounds of panic and mayhem, and stepped out of my door into what could have been someone else’s nightmare.  Mr. Sanchez, my neighbor, fan into me, terror clouding his face.
“Eggs, Elizabeth,” he cried.  “They’re eggs!  All this time, he was right.  Jack was right, and now...”  He trailed off, a tear rolling down his face.  “This is the end.  The rig is doomed.”  He took off, swept away by the current of people sweeping through our hallway.  Then I too was swept away, pushed on all side by people who had no idea where they were going, around and around in circles through the mad sirens and flashing lights.  Eventually I found myself in the hollow of one of the east-side windows, people still streaming past me in terror, separated from me only by the guard rail I had somehow slipped through.
Eggs.  The end-stone was eggs, buried under the skin of the earth for countless ages.  Something scaly punched through the surface of one of them, black tendrils streaming out like worms.  The monster that emerged looked, if anything, a little like a jellyfish, amorphous and translucent.  Glittering organs shone through black skin, uncountable limbs moved like smoke, bending and twisting in ways that defied depth.  Blue eyes, pointed slits over malignant orbs, glowed from any number of possible places, like a cubist painting.  Then it... moved, only, it didn’t move.  I mean, it moved, but not in any particular direction.  But then it was closer.  The only way I can describe it is that, the thing stood still, and moved the rest of the world around it.  Shapes flickered and flared through the air, balls and pillars of darkness that split apart and came back together again, moving towards and then through the rig at impossible speeds.  A nebulous shadow flashed through my window, bulbous black skin fading in and out of reality as it passed me.
The thing that had hatched came closer, indescribably large, framed by distant mountains, silhouettes shadowed by endless miles of water.  The terror, the... wrongness of it is impossible to put into words, it doesn’t come through the senses we learn about in kindergarten.  It’s like the image of a smell, the sound of a picture.  Whatever it is, it gets inside your head, under your skin. it reshapes your reality.  And still the thing moved closer, blurring its surroundings like light around a black hole.  A tendril the diameter of an airplane smashed through the rig several stories above me; shattering glass, screams, and the pneumatic hiss of forty-ton airlocks sealing shut.  The room I was in detached, spinning my vision on its head.  We were sinking.  The room slammed into the monster, throwing me against the glass, six inches from its skin.  It was rough, like a frogs, pores he size of my head like screaming mouths.  Slimy, viscous shadows oozed out of them, crawling long the glass before slipping away.  And still, that inexorable, inconsolable wrongness just washed over me, tearing apart my mind.  In that moment, I knew what it felt like to go mad.
And then... it was gone, behind me, above me, the entire room was sinking, spinning slowly on a downward trajectory.  Once, I caught a flash of the end-stone fields through the window, and I swear I saw beams of light radiating out of it, perhaps the streetlights of some demonic city, perhaps something I can’t possibly fathom.  I can’t compare that creature to any living thing, it is part of a world we know nothing about, can do nothing about.  No thought of fight ever crossed my mind; it would be easier to extinguish the sun.  I just sank, trapped in a steel box at the bottom of the ocean, and knew the true despair of life.
The engineers who designed the rig did their jobs well; these walls will probably hold for another dozen years.  But the air certainly won’t, and the power could go out at any minute.  The fact that I can still type is a miracle.  I have no real hope of rescue, death is a certainty.  I’m surprised I’ve made it this long without being crushed under some monsters’ foot like an empty can of soda.
And yet, I’m okay.  I haven’t gone mad, I know that for a fact.  And I feel fine.  I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking back on my life, the events that made me the woman I am today.  Thinking about Florence.  I’m sure he’s safe in California, at least for the time being.  Something tells me that within a few months’ time there will be nothing left of humanity.  My window is face-down, but I think at least two more have hatched.   But it’s funny.  Even if my son does survive, I wish that he had never been taken from me, that he could be here to die in my arms.  Whatever the world is to become, he shouldn’t have to live in it a single day.
In the face of such total evil, it seems reasonable to assume that it was all for nothing, but I can’t accept that.  It’s not as much that things happen for a reason, it’s that things have a reason because they happened.  And everything that’s happened to me, everything I’ve caused to happen, it all created meaning, it changed me, it changed the world around me, and what more meaning could there possibly be to life?

-Elizabeth Garvey

Addictions

are gene-deep.  Addictions aren't caused by any drug, or a certain type of food or video game or style of being.  Addictions are a lifestyle that some people are born living.  This is why some people are addicted to weed, and some people can drink every day for ten years and quit with relative ease.
     Me?  I'm one of the first types.  Not that I ever got hooked on weed.  But I do get hooked on other things.  Sugar.  Video games.  Impulsive spending, obsessive online window-shopping.  More recently, nicotine.  It's a lifestyle, something I was born doing and will probably be doing the rest of my life.  For me, it's not the object of my addiction so much as it is the craving itself, and the satisfaction that comes when it's fulfilled.  An itch, in other words.  One that doesn't go away.  My question is, is it really so bad to scratch it?
     "Well, if you scratch a mosquito bite, it gets worse, and then it starts bleeding and you die."  True, but that's a mosquito bite.  An external source, I would think of it the same way I think of heroin, which is totally black-hole-level addicting even to non-addictive people.  You do heroin, and then it gets worse and then you die, no matter who you are.  So I suppose you have to decide for yourself what is an internal addiction, and what is an external one.
    The difference, in my opinion, comes down to brain chemistry.  All addictions, when satisfied, release some chemical in your brain, be it dopamine, or whatever.  External addictions like heroin release this chemical in massive amounts, then your brain says, "oh look, yummy chemicals" and lowers production of that chemical on a regular basis.  In short, external highs fade with time.  Internal highs do not, they continuously refresh.  Also, they're usually harder to define.  These are the kind of highs that are mostly natural and come from doing something you love, or something like a runner's high or an orgasm.  They're hard to define and difficult to do, especially considering they seem tedious at first.  (Except for orgasms.  But why we don't go around having more of those is a discussion for another time.)
     "So Chris, what the hell are you saying?"   I don't really know.  I'm trying to figure out why I suddenly have to force myself to write this while I wait for my energy to recharge in a flash game, and why I'm suddenly torn between Doctor Who and that same flash game.  It's because I'm an addictive personality type, okay.  It's an internal addiction, okay.  It's also slightly dangerous.  Flash games are not like orgasms.  Flash games are stupid time-wasters, orgasms are beautiful.  So maybe it's not an internal addiction.  That would also make sense.  Yeah, I'm going to go with that.
   Fuck.  Basically, I started trying to justify me own playing of flash games, said some profound things as to the nature of addictions, and wound up telling myself to get out from behind the screen and run a marathon and get laid.  See?  Overthinking things does sometimes lead to good stuff.  Now, excuse me, my energy is finished recharging, and my sister is starting Doctor Who.  I'll be seeing you guys later.

Flicker

There are many worlds to walk in, many existences to live by.  Don't be so quick to assume that there is only one reality.

The candle molds were actually supposed to be used for popsicles.  We had cut the tips in order to thread the wicks through.  The tray had six molds, one for each of us, little blue obelisks pointing up from the counter.

     To be honest, I wasn’t sure what I was doing there.  I was barely sure why I had come at all, all I knew was that it was some sort of cult ritual, and I would rather be anywhere than at home, starting my chem paper.  Dylan had called around six to ask if I would come, saying that it was something his girl and her friends had found.  Girls, chem paper, there was just no competition.  So there we were; me, Dylan, and Jack sitting in a basement belonging to El, or Eleanor, a sophomore who I had never seen before but wouldn’t have missed for the world.  She was tall, thin but not overly so, with black hair and a pale, elegant face with just enough gothic to be sexy.  Black clothes emphasized her figure, which was beautiful bordering on perfection.  There were two other girls; Rose, Dylan’s girlfriend, and Skye, both of whom were also wearing black.  Rose was a short, pixie-figured girl with brown hair and a fiery spirit.  I had known her for a while; Dylan and I had been friends since high school.  Skye was new, not unattractive, but relatively plain compared to the other two.  Slightly wider, blonde, nice form, classic sorority girl.  Jack and Dylan were also wearing black, I noticed.  I was wearing blue jeans and an orange sweatshirt.  Guess I had missed the memo.

     Skye was the one who had found the book.  It was a little thing we had read through maybe half an hour ago, describing a ritual whose importance was far outclassed by the importance of El’s fantastic curves.  I mean, don’t think I was just sitting there drooling, I was actually listening, but the little book was written in some Shakespearean English that was impossible to understand without concentrating fully on it.  It involved candles – I got that part – but past there it was so much distracting babble.

     By the time we got around to making the candles, we should have been either bored, or drunk.  We were neither.  There was a pale, oppressing silence over the room that seemed to urge you to speak and yet threaten anyone who dared try.  I was standing by the range, watching a cube of black wax melt in a small pot.  El was leaning against the counter, cutting lengths of white twine for wicks, but even watching her didn’t quite take off the edge the room had acquired.  Jack was next to me, watching the wax and stirring every so often with a wooden spatula.  It seemed like a bad idea; how does one clean wax off of wood, exactly?  But I didn’t say anything.  Dylan and Rose were sitting on a dirty couch, bent into opposing ninety-degree angles and not touching.  Rose was pacing the back of the room, in front of the staircase.

     Somewhere outside, there came the sound of screeching tires, and we all jumped.  The sound seemed to reverberate between my ears, bouncing back and forth until it died down.  Suddenly, I wanted to leave.  I could call a cab, if Dylan wouldn’t give me a ride back.  But I didn’t want to stay here; I had the strange and utter sensation that we weren’t alone in the room, that we were sharing it with spirits and demons and things I didn’t want to see.

     Then El was next to me, turning off the burner on the wax and wrapping one thin, warm arm around my waist.  “You excited?” she whispered.  “I am.  I can feel it in the air, this is going to be good.”

     Oh, I could feel it.  I wasn’t as sure about the ‘good’ part, but I could certainly feel it.  Still, I let myself be led over to the small, hexagonal wooden table in the corner, below the stairs.  I sat down on a stool, and El got up and walked to the stool opposite me.  Skye sat on my left, holding the lengths of string and a stack of small china bowls with a pattern of red and blue spirals painted on the outside.  I might as well stick around for a while, I thought.  See what happens.  I can bail later, if things get too weird. 

     If I only knew.

     She took a bowl and passed them to me, I passed them to Rose, who was on my right.   They went around the circle, ending with Jack.  Then Skye cleared her throat and began to speak, and the tension snapped like an old guitar string, replaced by a surreal innocence.

     “All right, guys.  So here we are, time to start, I guess?  Um.”

     El nodded at her reassuringly.

     “So, how this works is, in modern English, I think; we are going to separate ourselves from location, and reality.  The purpose is to deny space and time, evolve, I guess you could say.  To escape the bindings of the physical world.  The ritual was created by the cult of Scarbo six hundred years ago, and has been passed down ever since then. 

     “The six of us – the thing needs six people – will transcend our mortal forms, set our spirits alight.  That’s the purpose of the candles.  The hexagon of alternating sexes forms a microcosm of human society, the candles the lifespans of our mortal forms.  I have to stress that, for all of you here, we are bonded.  There is no turning back now.”

     The phrase sent shivers up my spine, but I didn’t put too much stock in it.  I could bail.  Anytime, I could quit, if I wanted to.  El got up and walked to the counter behind me, taking something out of a drawer.  I watched her, starstruck.

     She was beautiful.  Mesmerizing.  The soft, organic curves of her hips, back, and breasts seemed absolutely perfect, beauty in its purest form.  The thing she held was a knife, small and cold.  It wasn’t a sexual desire, as much as a powerful hunger, a need to be with her, to watch her, to take her form into my eyes, my mind, my body.  She was left-handed, I noticed.  Her head tilted slightly to the side as she looked at me, the faintest trace of a smile upon her lips.  There was no turning back; how could I leave her now?  How could I ever, ever have enough?

     Snap out of it, I thought, frightened and confused.  All of the sudden, she was just a girl, a pleasant person holding a not-so-pleasant item.  I stood up, knocking the table a little with my hip. 

     “No,” I said.  This was madness.  This couldn’t be happening.  It wasn’t the knife that scared me; it was just the whole attitude of the place, the feel.  It was tense, excited and yet scared in a bad way, it made me feel sick.  Vertigo struck me; I grabbed hold of the edge of the table. 

     “There’s no turning back,” Dylan said.  “For any of us.  You can’t leave, not now.  Nor do you want to.”
     “Well, you’re wrong about that,” I muttered, walking towards the door.  None of the others stood up.  I stepped onto the first stair, looking up at the basement door.  Blinding light streamed out from the edges of the door; I noticed for the first time that it was completely dark in the basement.

     Dark, but I could still see.

     Arms wrapped around me.  Such sweet arms.  “Don’t worry,” she whispered.  “Don’t be afraid.”  A pair of soft lips touched my neck.  “This is fate.”  I turned around, confused, disoriented, breathing heavily.  The light from behind the door had burned itself into my retinas; everywhere I looked was obscured by the glowing rectangle.  Hands turned me around, and then touched my face.  The kiss was ecstasy, lighting a fire that burned against her cool touch.  I didn’t even feel the knife as it slipped down and into my palm.

     We sat down in our place, me and El opposite each other.  I held my bleeding hand over the small china bowl in a daze.  I felt somewhere between waking and sleeping, in that grey area where thoughts take on a life of their own, the conscious and subconscious merge.  I could feel my heart beat, my eyes dilate.  The subtle flexing of my diaphragm sent air through my lungs.  I could feel it all, and yet didn’t acknowledge that I did; my mind was elsewhere.

     The world began to leach the color from my eyes; everything faded to black and grey.  The blood trembled in its’ cup, reality trembled in time.  Lines became curves, non-Euclidian shapes drawn on spheres and viewed at the wrong angle.  Entropy became a dark shape, the shadow of a shadow crowding in from all directions.

     This is location, I thought.  The thought swam through my head like some dark fish.  This is location; this is reality in all of its flaws, in all the unbelievable, uncontrollable chaos that we never see.  This is true reality.

     It was bizarre, disorienting.  It was a world I think that we, as humans, shut out, hide from.  It was a world from which the order and normality, all this time nothing more than a thin veneer of perception, had been stripped.  We passed around the wicks, white against the black of the table, the black of our blood.  Then the wicks, too, were black, stained with what might have been red, in daylight.  Daylight, what a joke.  There was no daylight here.  We poured the candles, threading the wicks through the molds and holding them as the wax was poured in.  We never got them confused; each one of us got the candle made with our own blood.  I don’t know how.  The wax took an eternity to cool; I watched the rise and fall of galaxies, reflected in a mote of dust.  The physical had become transparent, like stained-glass.  Microbes grew in my intestines, multiplying, consuming. 

     We lit the candles, the flame from the lighter, a blinding yellow; the flame from the candles, black.  The flames sucked light from the room, their progress only visible by the slow melting of the wax and the curling of the wick, which fizzed as the blood boiled away. 

     Dylan’s candle was the first to burn down.  I watched as he grew translucent, transparent, and then invisible, and something rushed by me, like a bird in the night.  I didn’t flinch.  His shadow still danced in the non-light of the other candles, multiplied fivefold.  Rose went next, then Jack.  My own candle had burned maybe half of the way down.  I felt the slow passage of time, movement along some unsuspected axis.  Skye faded away, her shadow a mere double now.  What would she look like, I wondered, when all the flames have died?  Eleanor disappeared.  I didn’t say goodbye.  Why would I?  I waited.

     And waited.  The shadows watched me, the last mortal remains of the other five, held back only by me.  I waited.

     The candle flickered, sputtering at the bottom of its inexorable downward journey.  Then a sound like a train whistle, or maybe a woman screaming.  The candle began to build itself back up in a reversing process, a black obelisk growing from a black flame.  The air turned white, and for a moment it was just that, the black candle, the black flame, the white world, I looked around and saw something a little like a sphere, a sphere that pulsed along some cracked, unknown reality, something that I could not perceive, but only imagine; the growing dark, the crack, spewing light, the pulsing, maddening beat, like a heartbeat that resonated across planets as a sound wave resonates across molecules.

     The flame flickered, flared, and vanished.

Time

has the most amazing way of slipping by.  Grains of sand on an infinite beach, constantly washing away moment by moment.  The moments themselves are so small, they don't exist, you know?  They're just moments, single, tiny things.  But they're all we have.
     Some people say that someday, time will start to rewind, snapping back like a rubber band, or a ball thrown into the air, until the universe recollapses in on itself and we'll have what Douglas Adams called a gnab gib.  Then time will start moving forward again, big bang, gravity, fusion, heat, life.
     Life will then ponder the existence of time.
     Over and over and over again.
     This is all from an outside perspective, of course.  From our perspective, time has already snapped back an infinite number of times, sure as it has once.  Yes, we are accepting this theory as true for the moment.  This doesn't seem like such a problem, except when you consider the question of free will, that eternal goal of humanity.  In my opinion, free will is bullshit.  It's a fancy way of saying we don't know what's going to happen next.  It's an excuse for being unable to change the past.  See, the timeline already exists, your life is laid out before you, determined by a near-infinite number of factors jumbled together in the most complex equation in the universe.  Indeed, it's the only equation in the universe.  Abstractly, that equation is the universe.  The outcome?  It determines what you'll have for breakfast tomorrow.
     To us, Benjamin Franklin has no free will.  He can't decide, all of the sudden, to become and actor's apprentice instead of a printer's apprentice.  It can't happen, because we already know what he did.  Likewise, we will have no freewill to those in the future, because they will know what we did.  We don't, though, and that makes all the difference; the discovery, the journey of life that only sounds corny because no one stops to think about what it means.
     This is true whether or not the time-rolls-back-and-forth theory is accurate.
     But enough about the future, let's move on to the past.  A fixed world, a dead world, a world that, for whatever reason, humans want to preserve at all costs.  The funny thing is, how do we know it exists?  How do we know it's anything but a story our subconscious came up with on the fly to explain your present situation?
     We don't.  But, whereas we refer to the future as free, we refer to the past as set.  Oh, sure, you can interpret history any way you like, but no one disputes solid fact.  At least, no one reasonable.  That's because once you start disputing it, suddenly there is no truth anymore, only perception.  There are very few people who can live on perception alone.  I know I'm not one of them.  Some people dispute, and then turn to an alternate 'truth' because they can't live without at least something.  How do you know that the world isn't 9000 years old, that it wasn't created in seven days by a being we then went and killed?  How do you know it wasn't sneezed from the nose of the Great Green Arkleseizure, or congealed from a drop of oil from the spear of an inbred demigod hero?  We don't.  And yet, we don't have 'free will' to believe the past.  We have facts.  We have a nice little reasonable worldview that we hide in because we don't want to know what might be out there.  It's the human condition, hiding in a cave, watching shadows because shadows have no power to hurt.  We separate past from future because its the only way that makes sense to live.  And the crazy part is, we're the only species that does it.  Sure, you can train dogs, you might say that that indicates that they have some sense of past, but it's not true.  It's just a matter of chemical bonds in their brain; they could care less if they were trained, or had been born knowing to roll over when the big thing spins its fingers.
     You ever see a pet on antidepressants?  A bird taking therapy, or a lizard reading philosophy?  No, of course not.  They're too busy surviving.  They're totally and fully occupied with the present.  We humans, though, we broadened our vision; we chose to look past the present and now, the present is mainly empty; we live most of our lives in either the past or the future, focusing on what we believe to have happened and what we believe might happen.  The result is that we can build machines, harness fire and electricity, play with life itself.  The cost?  Possibly the sanity of every single human being on the face of the planet.
     Cheer up, though; it's not so bad.  And if it gets you down, just remember that this is all we have.  It may seem pointless, but when the point itself doesn't exist, when there is nothing more out there, nothing more than the next moment, the next word, the next line, the next day, the next class, the next shift, the next job, the next child, the next generation, the next flare of life on this wonderful planet, well.  When that's all there is, what you do with it makes all the difference in the universe.




     This started out as a sort of lament, an epitaph for something I did in my past that I can't change.  I suppose the fact that you can't change the past is obvious, but to me it wasn't.  From there, this came out, the idea that the past and the future aren't so different.  This combined with two other theories of mine, that free will is bullshit and that maybe my memories are just a subconscious explanation for where I am right now, and you get this thing.  The funny part is, it made me feel much better about myself, knowing that there's a story beyond what I may or may not have done, and that there's no use dwelling on the past.  The intention was to do the same for you, though, knowing me, this will just end up sounding extremely depressing and drive the larger part of the Albuquerque area into a homicidal nihilist rage.
     New short story soon.  Candles, chicks, and cult rituals.