Mess and Transcendence III: Kaleidoscoping and crispy tofu

(The story began here, and then continued here.)

When I shut my eyes as I lay in bed kaleidoscopes sped swirling, a wash of jewels inside, which I relished seeing but would have given anything to shut off right then. After several days off work, I had to be back in five hours. The cough medicine must have re-charged the acid. My mind buzzed. While (G) slept, I buzzed with fast thought and color.

Kaleidoscoping within myself, finally I woke (G). Caring soul tried everything, warm milk, back rub, belly rub, talking. Nothing worked. I’d been unstoppably re-charged. Finally he suggested I get up and do something. Get up! I thought. I can’t get up. I have to go to work. I only have a few hours left. This is awful!

Then he broke it to me that I was too dependent on time, because what was time anyway, arbitrarily designated markers along the sun’s course, the clock. I was a slave.

He was right. All my 22 years to then this had been true and my slavishness had never occurred to me. I allowed myself to be trapped by a circle on the wall, its needle spinning hypnotically. Artificially. I’d been attaching myself to artificial things, fleeting things, desperate to lock down some meaning. But meaning wasn’t in a pair of jeans or in some arbitrarily designated minute on the clock-face. I was in the extreme right then, with no lockdown at all, no structure, no sleep, no time, momentarily free even from any idiosyncratic pattern-hold on the day. I was unbound though not unhinged.

Clearly, no matter what happened at this point, I wasn’t going to get proper sleep for work at 8:30 in the morning. There was no use fighting—the clock, myself, or otherwise. I sat on the couch in the living room and wrote a letter to Heather, as my mom had suggested, and already tension loosed. I wrote and wrote, and at eight in the morning, still awake, I called my boss.

It wasn’t like me to miss work or class for anything. That’s what brought me to my Greek class in the midst of snow and fever. I wondered about transgression. First my mom, now this. Something new was trying to impress itself upon me, or yank me out of my thick cocoon. It was sticky and uncomfortable. Dutifully, I worked at accepting it.

I’d planned on going to work for only half a day anyway, so I asked my boss if she minded my coming in for the second half of the day instead, thinking I’d sleep before then. I did not sleep, however. The gods were chasing me, ensuring that I got the message: to free myself from the self I’d twined myself so tightly into.

At noon I arrived at the dim-lit ORDA library, no sleep. With my co-worker, I became more talkative than I’d ever been. Normally we had clipped, antagonistic dialogue—pretentious garage-rock schmuck was wrought with all sorts of too-early domestic settling and condescended to me as if he were middle-aged, even though I had years on him. Because he was intelligent, I secretly enjoyed arguing with him anyway. And this day the sun was effervescing in my brain.

After work, I met up with (G), (T), and later (K). I told them my epic odyssey. I ate crispy tofu in spicy sesame sauce, with noodles instead of rice, from New Kahala. Around eight in the evening, flushed, I thumped down on the couch at home and into sleep.

I no longer wear a watch, but that I still involuntarily adhere to the on-the-minute tells me I’m still a slave. I suppose artificial time is my catholocism, rooted in me since youth, hanging over my every move, mythic war-body imposed upon me, which I fear betraying. I consider it my duty to stretch and test it. That colorful night still has not ended.