floatation

I arrived at the room number in the building where Blue Light was...and didn't realize that the floatation tank is run out of this guy's apartment. He was a really mellow guy and when I remarked about my surprise at the fact that the tank was just in his apartment he told me that he had ben doing it there for 23 years. After I used the bathroom, he showed me the room where the tank was, opening it briefly to allow me to see inside and see where the light switch (well, button) was.

The tank itself was essentially a modified jacuzzi that he had built into an isolation tank, surrounded by soundproof walls and in a soundproofed room, about half the space of which the tank itself took up. He closed the tank up, not wanting the treated atmosphere to leak out too much, and we went into the living room where he gave me a prep talk. He had a gorgeous living room with high, stuffed bookshelves. I saw one shelf that read DMT: The Spirit Molecule, LSD: My Problem Child, Tripping: An Anthology, etc. from left to right. A glowing crystal adorned one corner table, African style carvings peppered the high tops of the bookshelves. The whole atmosphere in the apartment was remarkably calm and relaxing.

I was given some instructions on how best to settle into it, different positions to try, and then was left in the half of the apartment with the bathroom and the floatation tank. He cut himself off from that part of the apartment with Japanese sliding doors and I went into the bathroom to shower - he doesn't want the saltwater mixture to get too polluted so it's important that you wash your hair and body thoroughly. Then I went, naked, to the floatation tank. Yep. I was naked in another man's apartment the other day. Go figure.

When you enter the tank, you want to do your best to minimize the amount of disturbance you inflict on the calm water. It is a viscous water, far thicker than I expected, even knowing how loaded with salt it was. I shut the door behind me, then I sat back into the water and then leaned back. The sensation was very unsettling. Instant buoyancy came up from beneath me. I laid back, steadying my hands on the sides of the tank and holding myself still while the thick water sloshed back and forth, and with my left hand turned the lights off.

The water was lapping the sides and I was holding on, my eyes trying to deal with the fact that there was absolutely no light. Or was there? I thought I could see the contours of the tank, which was as tall as a regular shower stall. But could I? My eyes started playing tricks on me immediately. I lay my head back in the water, only my face protruding, my ears submerged, and I hear my heart beat loud and clear. It doesn't take long for you to become hyper-aware of the lack of audio or visual input coming from the outside world. I could hear myself blink. It was crunchy.

I was very uncomfortable and couldn't find the right position for my arms and legs. Relaxing your body, even in a semi-weightless state, is not as easy as you might think it is. I tried breathing deeply, but a terrible anxiousness was creeping over me and I came very close a couple of times to just throwing in the towel, getting out of the tank and just quitting. It was really bothering me, the amount of "What do I DO with myself?!" that was bubbling up inside me. But then I realized how much of a parallel there was between this need to let go and the need to let go when tripping. And I realized much like when tripping becomes overwhelming in the come-up, that I was a source of most of the things distracting my mind. I was being my own worst enemy.

I calmed myself down through deep breathing and tried to do a yoga exercise the owner told me about, where you scan your body with your mind, thinking about the individual parts and trying to relax them. It was a very strange experience, because I would become aware of my calf muscle...there would be a sensation there as I would think about it. My mind would jump to label it pain or discomfort, but that was just because those are the only times when I am really in touch with my body, when it is hurt or uncomfortable. This was something else, this was just a throbbing awareness, an is-ness on the part of my muscles.

Meanwhile, my arms were tingling from the elbow to the fingertips. Absolutely felt like all the cells in them were vibrating. MY upper back muscles hurt and so did my neck so I tried floating with my arms stretched behind my ahead instead of at my sides. I immediately grew far more relaxed and was able to give myself over to the experience...

By the time I was really getting deep into the float, and letting go to it, I don't think there was much time left. I entered this semi-dream state that was unbelievably pleasurable and relaxing. It felt like all the best parts of being asleep, while being aware. With my eyes closed (though there wasn't really any difference between having them closed or open) I would see slow, unfurling explosions of the darkest purples and browns occurring behind my eyelids. With my eyes open, sometimes I would see little vectored lines against the darkness.

Towards the end of the float, there are speakers in the bottom of the floatation tank, and he begins to play light, soothing tones when you have a few minutes left, so as not to startle you from your trance but gently wake you from it. I really did feel like I was waking up from a dream. I sat up in the water, breathing heavily, feeling quite a glow all around me. and in fact, I thought I saw light in the room. I thought to myself, wait, is it really lightproof? I sat back and took in the last few minutes by soaking in the darkness, and I thought I could discern where the corners of the tank were, how far I was sitting from the walls.

I reached out my arms to where I thought one wall and one corner would be and realized I had absolutely no idea what angle I was sitting at and where anything was. Laughing, I turned on the lights, which are dim so as not to hit your eyes too harshly. I then rinsed off in the shower and dressed, and went back out to the living room where a chilled cup of delicious herbal tea awaited me. I sat drinking it for a bit while the proprietor prepared the tank for his next customer, then he came out and we discussed the experience a little bit.

I told him that I saw a lot of parallels between the psychedelic experience and the float, especially in the beginning of the float when you really need to Let Go and give yourself over to it. Sometimes when I trip I try and lay back and just quiet my mind and it will seem so unbelievably hard to do. There are so many distractions. And just like in those moments tripping, when I was trying to relax in the tank I realized I was creating all those distractions myself. Despite his impressive collection of books on psychedelics, he seemed less than eager to follow this line of conversation.

I told him that one part of my body I could not calm down the whole time was the underside of my belly, and he told me that was where the Hara, one of the chakras, is located. Apparently there are schools of meditation where you try and quiet the head-mind by redirecting your energy flow down to your other mind, which is located in the Hara, and that you can attain a quiet state that way. He gave me the names of books to read on the subject which I scribbled down. Then I finished my tea, walked out on to the street, and was quite aglow. I walked about 40 blocks feeling like I was on air the whole time.

So what did I get out of all this? I'm not quite sure, to tell you the truth. I wasn't entirely mentally prepared for the experience, which is kind of how I have been feeling in regards to many of my consciousness-expanding pursuits lately, especially my adventures with dimethyltryptamine (DMT). This experience reaffirmed my feeling that I have a lot of work to do on myself, on my mind, on the way I process information and float through the world and let the world float through me. My mind is not quite open enough, I'm not as prismatic as I aim to be. But I also realized I can't overthink that and I just need to BE it.

What do I mean by prismatic? Well, I can't stop thinking about that idea after this experience, because there was so little coming from without into me. I had a vision once, on LSD. Everyone I looked at had a prism nestled deep in their being. And in fact, they were an extension of that prism. The basic unit of human life was this prismatic soul. Each one formed completely uniquely, with its own bends and divots. Each prism accepted external input, and as that input crossed the threshold of their perception is was bent and bounced around inside them in the way only their minds could singularly bounce those ideas and concepts and things around. And then we each would refract those things back outwards. There is breathing in, and breathing out.

In the tank, when I breathed in, my mind was completely empty except from the knowledge of being alive and breathing. And when I exhaled, my mind would rush, scream, sing, yell, ideas would stream like hi-speed traffic in between my eyes and out my third and into the æther. I'm able to process input. I'm able to flow through life quietly and suck it in and experience it and engage with it. But the goal now is to attain a level of quietness and consistency in the way I exhale the world, the way I breathe back into the spiritual ecosystem that's nourished me all my life. I must learn to quiet my monkey mind. Every day is a step towards that. There's no attaining quiet mind on the turn of a dime.

I'll definitely go back into the tank. I don't know when, but I will. It was an experience I don't quite know how to process, and that is what is drawing me back to it, though it may be some months before I try it again. Much like tripping, the experience is a question mark. And I know it will never be the same twice. And while I don't necessarily have anything to hold on to or show for what it's taught me, it has left me with something, even if that something is nothing more than a quiet moment that can serve as a reference point for the more turbulent times in my life.

finishing and starting up

[last year, in the coat check, he wrote:]

A book is not a worthy investment of your time and energy unless its final words send chills joyriding your nervous system. These words don't have to sum things up, they need not be eloquent metaphors or intricate symbols. They can be any words at all, as long as they are the right ones - the ones that bring the totality of the novel rushing back to wash over you as you consummate the act of completion. You read them, and all the arrhythmic stop-and-start moments you've spent exploring the world between the covers builds back up out of fragments riddled with interruptions to become a beautiful, significant whole. You don't always achieve some sort of "deeper understanding," sometimes you don't even feel fulfilled, but the words tell you that the story ended the only way it should have. The words, they wring you out like a sponge swollen with fiction and images. Only you don't drip your learnings into any sink, down any drain, they just pour back into you from different angles, arranged in different formations, like a piece of wood shattering into millions of splinters and reforming wholly renewed, identical on the outside but completely reconfigured on the inside.

The right words make it hard to put the book down. You push your forehead up against its cover and you brush the pages against your lips, letting them flutter against you as you breathe in their scent. You hold it close, then far, seeing it from all perspectives. And finally, knowing full well that there are more mysteries to be unearthed within its bindings, you slip it back on to a shelf somewhere, letting it fade back into the scenery of names and titles that pepper your room, allowing someone else and their ideas to step into the limelight.

There is time, until then, time that fills you up like a blank space, a cinematic moment of blackness when only the ghosts of the silhouettes of the seats in the theater are left drifting across your eyeballs. The words don't let you forget so quickly, move on too soon. That silhouette drags across your vision like the flash from a camera that's just taken a picture of you - and in a way every book you read that has this effect is like a picture of yourself. It takes you outside yourself, and gives you an extraneous vehicle through which to discover yourself in new ways.

Books and photography, they are a-temporal forms of art. Painting and sculpture, too. Unlike music or film, which move to the beating drums of ticking seconds, minutes and hours, books are a self-contained reality. No two people can read the book the ame way, at the same pace, lingering on the same sentences, drawing in deep breaths at all the same subtle moments. Music, movies, they morph time similarly for all spectators but a novel is timeless. it is a floating story.

---

[this year, in the coat check, he wrote:]

Of course, there is the alternate thrill of cracking the spine of a brand new adventure. The inside cover of this book, The Slynx, is a shade of green that invites meadow visions in stark contrast to the barren wasteland that graces the cover, a weed-strewn Mad Max landscape that seems ready to be greeted by the rustling roll of tumbleweed at any moment. Smoggy skies on one side, leaf pigment on the other. What the hell is IN here?!

faces in the tablecloth

putting myself places
breaking myself up
scattering my molecules
gathering the fruit
expenditures, logistics,
no real strategy of which to speak
scraping coal with fingernails
polishing the loot,
inspect it with a lazy lens
send it nowhere fast
keeping time with steady breathing
ins and outs to frame the
in-betweens where everything does happen
so fast, too slow, this is a
race that no one wins.
i get ahead, i fall behind
there's only one real finish
and a set of staggered
goals
kinship
creation
connection
collision
conception
love, all kinds
faces in the tablecloth remind me
anyone can freeze.

fedora thoughts.

"tonight's the night,
tonight's the night."

I want to wear a hat. I want to dress myself in alternate illusions.

Words linger on the horizon of my mind and I turn the cerebral world to my liking, letting the inner sun creep around the bend and illuminate those things that hide from me in dark places. I'm making strides. I'm taking down fear. I'm not running away from it, or sidestepping it. I'm facing it and moving, passing, right on through it. And when it is gone past, only I shall remain.

Funny. I just spent seven and a half hours coat checking for the who's who of the NYC fashion scene, riffing on them for being such superficial fucks and yet here I sit, admiring my reflection in a subway mirror with the Brooklyn skyline as a backdrop, contemplating how to construct a persona for myself, thinking that now that I have some money I'd like to spend it on new clothing to help recreate myself. But hey. It's a form of expression. It's the face you put out to the world, but also - it's a costume. And you can become what you make of yourself.

I exist in a state of narrative lunacy. If there's one thing that acid did to my mind, it was teach it that each point...and by point, I mean, really, everything. Kind of the mathematical definition of a point, which is really just an abstract an idea. You are a point. I am a point. Time is a point. Life is a point. Death is a point. Lobster is a point. You dig? So what it taught me is that each point, is a window to every other point. And that you can tap into various points and receive worlds of wild information from them. I think I've always done this though, and that's my narrative lunacy that I speak of. I think I've always touched into various points of the world and pulled stories out of them.

I say I have no fiction, I say I'm not making stories. Well maybe I'm not writing them. But I'm certainly creating them. You see, I struggle. Because my father and I used to walk the streets, and I'd listen to him talking about various people. People on the street, faces in the crowd, who he thought we were standing high above even though our feet tread the very same pavement as theirs. He used to talk about people like he knew them in and out. Psychiatrists, what else do you expect sometimes? He'd see a person and think he knew their life story. But it always came from an angle with a motive. For some reason, he had to find a reason to put everyone below him.

Me, I see people, and I write their life stories. It's happening every moment. Every single face is a point that I travel through. And I see their life, all of it, tiny details, moments as a toddler, favorite toys, a father slapping them across the face, a mother fucking a strange man with the bedroom door wide open, wide open Kansas skies while driving across the country, corduroy pants on tiny legs, L.A. Lights, the funeral they went to after their friend shot up too much heroin. I feel like I can see it all sometime. The good, the bad. The things that created every crease in their beautiful, terrible faces. LSD has a way of making you feel like you're god and I suppose I'm always straddling this divide between myself and my father, and what my experiences (LSD, and otherwise) have taught me, rushing like a river between my outstretched trembling legs.

I try not to let myself think I know these people for sure. But it seems like each tiny fragment, each moment, opens up into a fractal universe that communicates some sort of truth to me. I wouldn't speak it to them, because as soon as these thoughts are catalyzed into language they complicate endlessly, proliferate unbearably...So I don't let myself think I actually know who these people are or what they've done. I'm not God, I'm just a god, just like each of them is a god, all of us acting very ungodly towards one another.

But there's fiction there. And I create it.

There's a woman who seems to live in my subway stop. She's tall, thin, black, and obviously has her fair share of drug problems. She's a skeleton with her ashy skin pulled taut over her frame, dressed in rags, sitting on a suitcase. Always reeking of urine. When I first moved here I looked at her with scorn - why, i thought, why must you stink up my subway stop perpetually with urine? There's a McDonald's nearby. Couldn't you just piss there?

Then one day it was raining terribly, a fierce torrential downpour. I'd been doing well, as I have been lately, and even though she never, ever asks anybody for money, I saw an empty cup near her and decided to put three dollars in and tell herself to get some soup when the rain cleared up. When I put the money in, she snapped towards me a little, her hood falling back. Her eyes, wild, straining, lost - god only knows where she was just then, not in the 7th Ave. stop with me, there, then - pierced into mine.

"I'll sit here if i want to! Don't you tell me what to do! I don't wanna go! I don't wanna do that! Don't tell me! I want to stay here!"

There was a child in her voice. And now I can't look at her in any way but as a child who never grew up because something simply terrible happened to her. I wonder if she even remembers exactly what it is. I wonder if she can even talk about it, or if she's just stuck there. Tonight, she wasn't wearing shoes. It was less than twenty degrees in that station. I wanted to tell her put her shoes on, lest she catch death of cold. But I felt that was her trip - rebellion against logic, against parental suggestions such as keeping oneself warm. I don't know. Do I know her? Do I understand her? At all? Or am I just creating a fiction for her that is the easiest for me to understand?

i met a kid once.

his name was corey. i met him in the woods in the summer of 2005, among a bunch of hippies having a good time, we camped, we got our fair share of psychedelically intoxicated. he was a big lovable teddy bear. i have fond memories of a brief weekend spent with him, when i escaped from the city for a good time jaunt. it was a good time. i remember his hug like it was yesterday, and it was about 2 and a half years ago. i had brought a bunch of music - i gave it all to him to keep. he remembered that. we'd see each other around the message board we met through, how everyone met that arrived at that wondrous gathering...life goes on. people go in different directions. up, down, that's not for me to decide. it's all sideways til someone loses an eye. corey lost more than that. on new year's eve he lost his life. he'd been fucking around with the Horse and we all knew it was gonna get him in trouble, but you can't make someone stop from 3,000 miles away over the internet. you can just tell them to stay safe and that you love them, even though you barely know them - but goddamnit, when you connect with people, "knowing" them in the way we so highly value in our personal lives, well, it doesn't seem so goddamn important. all you need to know is what you shared. however momentary.

bye corey. you were a lot of fun to hang out with that weekend and a shining presence of positivity on the boards. i really won't forget you. ever. i just wish you'd been smarter than to mix the wrong things and overdose on the birth of a new year. i feel like this is my year to shine, to rise, and i'm sad you can't be here on this earth to turn things around with me. i think we're all gonna turn things around, for the species, for the planet. i'm hopeful. i'm a less than cautious optimist. i throw caution to the wind and scream out, fuck yes. see ya corey. i thought i was writing this poem about myself, and about looking for love. then in the middle of the night tonight i realized i was writing it for you. your screenname was Dreamer. yeah, i am too. but i'm gonna chase mine here on this earth, not down a needle, not down a vein, not to the next phase of existence. my dreams are here for me. see ya corey - i'll see you in The Big Dream. this fucking sucks, you being dead. i barely knew you, but i'll miss you.


so tell me, dreamer
what will you do
if serendipity turns
its back to you?
you've read the novels,
heard the music of chance,
and your mind is awake
to the synchronous dance
of the patterns and threads
in the fabric of breath;
but what if the end
doesn't match your intent?
it's just a hop and a skip
from a leap of faith
down the oubliette.....

(gone, but not forgotten)

the universe is built for our minds to hold
our memories bring you back into the fold
the door never closes
death is nothing but a hallway
to another crowded room
where a flurry of voices carry choral tunes
and through the pinpoint
we drift to you
and bring you back around the fire
singing songs til dawn arises;
this heavy life does make us tired..

Is something missing?

(print above: something's missing, by bre zack)


either something's truly missing
or i've become fixated
on this picture i've created
in my head

maybe i'm chasing symmetry
too closely for true comfort
and my dreams are like projectors
but the movie never ends;

it flushes through my eyelids
and becomes the rain that falls
on prospect park..
the actress is a silhouette
with tresses in a purple dress
who dances in the dark...
and under moonlight's yawning breath
we twist away the twilight hours,
poodle skirts turned loose on dancefloors dj'ed by dick clark;

this is the mirage of my daydream cinema
and when the eyelids flutter open
the reels don't stop spinning, they just
throw a soft hallucination out on to the world;

fractal visions
of a
heart
that's split in two
but always
one

slowly then
i'll realize
that love can be
idealized but only if i
love myself before all others
instead of chasing pop-up dreams
like instructions in a children's book

so i just sit here in this chair
and next to me there's only air
where i think somebody once was loving me

and i can see
the dotted line where she once sat by me
the words are clearly printed - cut here
fold here
color the numbers
but something's still missing

one day
i'll meet somebody
who'll fold for me
like origami
(mm, but doesn't that just sound too easy?)

Who the Hell Does Orson Scott Card Think He Is?

I guess this story starts with Netflix. I am notoriously bad at returning things. Books, movies, you name it. The way I see it, I support libraries by paying more late fees than your average borrower. I also watch a lot of movies. I have late fees at most video rental establishments. I just set up an account, rent some movies, and then a few weeks after they're due, return them to the drop box in the dead of night and never go back. Netflix is the obvious solution to my problem, so I got it. I freaking love Netflix.

About a month ago, I had two Netflix DVDs sitting at home. I'd already watched them, I just can't be bothered to put them in the mail. You know how it is. Anyway, we wanted to watch something new, so I walked down the street and set up an account at Hollywood video. I got the movies, and actually returned them on time. Every time I went there, I noticed this Xbox game called Advent Rising sitting there in the "Nobody will rent me, please buy me instead" discount rack. Each time I passed it, I made a mental note to pick it up and give it a try. I was familiar with it, but I don't like to pay full price for games I'm not really excited about.

The reason I wanted to try Advent Rising is because it was written by Orson Scott Card. Now, mister Card and I don't really get along. Which is to say, I think he's a blowhard with a ridiculous vision of the world who wrote a seriously good science fiction book (Ender's Game). I'm really interested in the branching out of video game culture and I thought this game could be really interesting.

I read Ender's Game as a pimply little fledgling geek and then re-read it a year ago. It held up pretty well. Steal it or borrow it from your local library. Don't buy it, though. Card doesn't deserve to get paid any more than he already has because I'm sure they paid him to write Advent Rising and he doesn't deserve another cent.

This game is utter trash.

It's a half-assed Halo rip-off that doesn't have an original line of code in its entire design. It has this gun and super-powers style of play that is implemented so horribly you're better off just picking one or the other and neglecting the rest. The game Second Sight did this really well, but Advent Rising managed to bungle it beyond repair.

The worst part is that the back of the case listed controls for when you're on foot, in a vehicle, in a turret, and in a space ship, leading me to believe that this would be a game with some depth, or at the very least variety. The game opens and you have to pilot a shuttle into a hangar. The space graphics are really good, and the control is fun. I liked it a lot. You land the shuttle and the story continues and then YOU NEVER PILOT A SPACE SHIP AGAIN. The only good part about this game lasts ten seconds. Sometimes you drive an alien tank which is too powerful to be fun and sometimes you get to use a jeep-like vehicle that is almost identical to the Halo Warthog (which, as Halo players will know, is extremely boring in a one-player situation).

But I'm not here to complain about the design. I'm here to call Card out for his atrocious writing. The main character is a smart-mouthed, cocky pilot (like we've never seen that character before) who gets caught up in an alien invasion. The aliens in question have searched long and far for the human race, afraid of their power. They are called... you are not going to believe this... the Seekers.

The Seekers? Come on, Card. I can hear him now, "Oh man. I forgot to name these evil dudes. Oh. Think, Orson, think. Uh... Um... They're seeking humanity... I'll call them the Seekers! YES! I am so great!"

"I wrote Ender's Game!"

Card shamelessly steals his ideas from other sci-fi stories. When humanity first meets the friendly aliens who try to save them from the Seekers, they are given little slugs that crawl into their ears and translate everything they hear (Hitchhikers Guide). The humans, however, use a computer program called the Universal Translator (Star Trek).

I'm really not sure why they decided to pay someone to write this game. Anyone could have written it. No character besides the main character lives long enough to be developed at all. At least one major character dies in every level.

Card, you are a hack. Ender's Game is great, don't get me wrong. You must have blown a few neurons coming up with that one, though, because your work after that has been utter crap. From sci-fi to politics, you've managed to make yourself look silly whenever you turn your thoughts into words. Stick to World Watch (or is it War Watch? I can't keep track) or keep your unoriginal and inconsistent blathering to yourself.

What's up now, Card?