Wine (Part XIV)

I'm a working man again; a beer-drinking working man; a socializing, all-or-nothing meat-and-potatoes man. A man whose boss is riding his ass at work, a man with problems that can get would down by jacking up the 5-HT receptor for a little while. And then I sit; I'm a mass of flesh like the flesh of the masses. No stars here. No exams; no pixie-dust exploration of the origins of the cosmos. Just a kind of edgeless fuzz that is most prominent when taken out of a social setting. In old days I used to have an entire bus ride to sober up. These days I try to read texts while the words dance, and as I nod off the sentences reform themselves around the edges of my consciousness into wholly new meanings, into paragraps about one or two or three characters doing their dyadic or triadic interactions. As I nod off I see visions of trees growing, roots opening up like a fist unclenching, colours like red or ochre or brown--mandala colours--replace the sentences. Propositional thought gives way to tentacled analog mental imagery; it's as if the two visual streams in your brain gave a collective neurochemical "fuck you" to Wenicke's area. Take that, oscillating dual inhibition, cascades of biochemistry, analogical explanations, syntactical volleys of synaptic vesicles. (Sometimes when I drink I get nerdy. Other times mystical. Other times stupid or incoherent--though rarely these days. But I suspect it's all nerdery anyway.) And then I pop back into consciousness, read a sentence or two from the book, fail to process it, nod off and repeat the cycle, except no trees this time. Something else that's reticulated: an octopus, perhaps?

This is fucked up; you've just caught me at the introvert-extrovert transition.

Consider: "Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people."