I was very
hyper when I stopped inhaling smoke.
O.K., crazy. “Full of vim and
vinegar” as my neighbors would say. I
craved secondary smoke and ate M&M’s like I was on overtime. Another way to keep speeding. As if, unconsciously, I figured on moving
away faster from the monster nipping at my heels. Only problem with that strategy, if I could
make the leap and call anything I did a strategy, is that Nic is a subtle sort
of fellow. A most amusing guy. At times closer to Henry Higgins from My
Fair Lady than your average vampire.
Slick and confident, Nic assures you there is no terror. “Be calm.
Don’t rush. I’ll let you go.” Then, as circumstances prove all gentlemen’s
agreements are off, you recognize that Nic is getting at you ‘round the
back. You see the wickedness, the subtle,
insidious, vindictiveness of his ways.
Speed alone won’t serve you well enough in distancing yourself from him.
There’s
probably a manual, as the Hindi have one for the million odd thoughts that will
come to you while trying to meditate and ruin your at-one-ness, for the ways in
which Nic will attack your peacefulness.
If you haven’t got hold of the Hindi book or haven’t yet reached
enlightenment, then you should know that Nic will come at you just where it
will hurt you the most. Right, smack in
the middle of your daily itinerary.
It’s like
this. If you were a chess champion you
could anticipate twenty, maybe twenty-five moves ahead. If you’re like me when getting directions,
lost after the second turn, you’ll know that it’s not easy to outmaneuver
Nic. What do you do? One night, after too many bridges in the
wrong direction, I thought, “One or two puffs would clear my head and make
things better.” Not true. It would have been two to three cigarettes
depending on the number of turns, stop signs and bridges to the restaurant
where my fast food was heading towards quick frozen. Viswanathan Anand I’m not. I couldn’t anticipate getting lost. Nic counted on it.
Watching
every move you make through your first days of withdrawal you get to wonder if
you’re the creator of your own reality or not.
Is your life fiction or non-fiction?
There’s no flow. Everything is an
improvisation. Let’s see what happens if
I do this. What about that? Do you participate in your life and then
claim it, with flag posted and all? Questions
popped up like old tires in a junk yard.
They were everywhere. If I
could’ve laid them down like planks I’d have been able to walk clear through to
a new reality.
I frequently journeyed between what
I’d call the inner and the outer worlds.
After a while the commute became fluid and I became aware of vehicles
that helped me move from one state to another.
I called them jumpers because they described or intuited a point of
departure that I could use. Jumpers are
the fertile crescent of crescents. The
Orient Express of trains. A jumper
evokes a deep response that becomes a vehicle for change. It could be an image, a phrase, a song, a
painting, even a gesture or a rich sentiment.
It could be that comes from the blue.
It could be feeling blue. The
world’s lousy with jumpers.
The word
jumper takes into account the sure sense of the physicality of the move. Eventually, if you do enough of this sort of
thing you find the jumps from one world to another easier to take. Not that you can’t tell the difference
between one realm and another, after all, “the difference is all.” It’s just that the transitions are smoother. Experience in the changes is like greasing
your psyche for the ride. If you decide
to wrestle with demons in any of the realities that you experience than,
greased as you are, they can’t really get a good grip on you. Not to say that it’s a carefree enterprise,
because in truth it’s not. And sometimes
the demons might decide to wrestle with you.
But you do get to move on and move through.
http://amzn.to/14jUNUs Nic link to
Kindle copy
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