2008-05-28 - 2:05 p.m.
Continued from Previous Post...
The mushroom, I anticipated, would start to kick in any time now.
In the meanwhile, I decided to go out and weed my pirate garden. (A pirate garden is, for those of you not already in the know, predictably, a garden that is planted in pirated space. In the case of my pirate garden, this space is the previously overgrown bramble between the balcony that is part of our first floor apartment and the fence that partitions off a mysterious adjacent field that has been ploughed several times during the past year, but never used to grow anything.)
On a whim, I took my shoes off and plodded around in the garden barefoot. This was fun and funny because it felt kind of good to have the warm sun shining on the tops of my feet and cool soil below and because it gave me something in common with grimy hippies, thus making a mockery of myself. A calico cat that comes around sometimes, pretends to hunt in the still overgrown areas around the garden, and then runs away when I attempt to lure it closer came by and actually let me pet it this time. I played with its ears and tail for a while before it took off to resume its fake hunt.
It seemed regrettable for me to be ripping up weeds that were such interesting shades of green, and that was when I realized that I was high.
My little pirate garden, despite its many fascinating colors, could no longer suffice to contain my wandering stream of consciousness, so I put my shoes back on and took myself for a walk.
Walking felt good. Ridiculously good. Walking was incredible. I was stupended by the flawless, inscrutable functioning of my own body. Muscles flexing and releasing, tendons working like some kinds of miracle glue, totally supple and yet completely unwilling to come unstuck, respiration occuring at a cellular level, and blood (and lots of it) coursing all the while.
I thought about walking a little slower. Immediately, my body complied. Amazing. I wasn't even sure yet whether or not I was going to slow my pace, I was only thinking about the possibility of doing so, and my body went ahead and did it.
I tried walking a little faster, and then slower, and then faster again. I could feel my heart pounding now. Perhaps it was only my imagination, but I could feel the energy, the vitality, that every beat was bringing me. I knew it was demented for me to be having such a great time simply walking, but I didn't let that hamper me. I hoped that other people were as impressed and entertained by my range of walking speeds as I was and that I wasn't the only one appreciating the spectacle that I was creating.
I thought about running for a while, though I was a little scared of what was going to happen if I did. My lung capacity is nothing to be proud of and I didn't want weasiness to make its appearance and ruin all the fun I was having.
I was still thinking about whether or not to give running a try when I realized that I was already running, and that I had absolutely nothing to worry about. I was a much better runner than I'd thought. Houses, parking lots, mail boxes, offices, convenience stores. As I ran, I saw things as if from very far away but at the same time noticed details in them that I'd never appreciated before. Mail boxes, for example, may be badly dented, but the paint on them is never chipped.
I felt strong and healthy. If anything, I was less tired now than when I'd started running. I ran and ran and ran. I had no idea where I was, but that didn't bother me in the least.
And then I saw a road sign informing me that I'd just arrived in, and welcoming me to, Utsunomiya. A sick feeling came over me, a wave of deeply unpleasant concern.
I had run hundreds and hundreds of kilometers and I didn't know how to stop.
I tried to make my legs stop moving, but my brain's commands only fired back and forth inside my head and refused to be translated from the language of thought into an encoded neural message bound for the muscles in my legs.
Desperate, I gave up trying to make my legs stop and tried a different order instead, dance.
That, too, got no response. I was still running, faster now than I had been before, and it was going to be dark soon.
I appreciated now what I'd know before, but pretended not to know in the interest of preserving within me whatever remains of reckless youth, that it's probably not a very good idea to take drugs that mysteriously arrive in the mail from who-knows-where.
The Magnificent Traveler from the Outlaws of the Marsh came to mind and I considered the possibility that I was now the victim of some kind of Buddhist sorcery. At first, I couldn't think of anything that I'd done to beget the revenge of Buddhists. Then I remembered the sarcastic joy my Sai Baba charm bracelet brings to me, the facetious things I'd written about members of Aum, the time that I'd peed, drunk, behind some bushes at a nearby Buddhist shrine, and also the time that I'd drawn farts coming out from the picture of Buddha in a book of folk tales that I'd been working on. Sacrilegious behaviors are funny to me. There were probably more incidents that may be relevant to my current situation than only the events that I could recall.
The Magnificent Traveler attached charms to legs that enabled his magic, magic that allowed him to travel extraordinary distances in a single day. Looking down, I now saw that my jeans were covered in strange writing that I didn't recognize and couldn't remembered having written myself. Stumbling badly, but still running, I somehow managed to pull off my jeans.
Now in my underwear, it seemed as though I had slowed down a little.
The Magnificent Traveler also kept a strictly vegetarian diet while working his magic. Perhaps a cheeseburger or two would stop me? I turned into the parking lot of the next McDonald's I came to. Unable to slow myself enough to get through the door, I headed for the drive thru.
"Cheeseburgers! Cheeseburgers!" I yelled. I couldn't stop and had no choice but to run around and around the building, yelling for burgers everytime I passed the pick up window.
The McDonald's employees soon noticed me but, unfortunately, no cheeseburgers were forthcoming.
