To search for the perfect person to make me be the perfect me. I once felt her (myself) slipping through my veins like a past life character better than who I was before, she stayed during a brief illumination.
"You're the one who has been touching all the doorknobs" he told me.
During some brief flight to who knows where, I was transferring energy from doorknobs on the gates in Little Villageand blessing them, some kind of strange esoteric ritual I seemed to have subconcious knowledge about.
How did he know i wondered. "I think I'm waking up," I tell him. "I've been awake for a couple of years now," he says, "first I was a prep then i was a......" he goes on and lists an array of genres of words I can no longer remember. Now he's wearing a baseball cap with a tattoo on his arm, cannot conjure now. It was maybe a woman. I'm not sure if she was naked. I feel this charge from him like his being makes me higher. And I feel like I never want to leave him but soon I do. "How did you meet me?" I ask wearing big black wrap around sunglasses although it is night, to protect me from the gamma rays of artificial lights which maybe can be abrasive I think when you've stared at the moon as much as I have. Well I think so, the details now blur. At one point, maybe after that question, he tells me "My hand is my ally" I nod and this seems to make sense in some abstract metaphysical way.
There are other people on the porch we are sitting on, the porch asking to invite myself onto during my long aimless strollthrough Wicker Park. The other people seem to be speaking in random intellectual jargon in this backwards sort of way as if it is some sort of game to ramble without meaning what you are saying or making any real tangible sense. They are drinking beer. "He" isn't and neither am I. The fact that neither of us are drinking as drunk people ramble all through Wicker Park saying drunk things, seems to heighten the already maybe obnoxiously extreme superiority complex I am feeling. "We are both so special" is something along the lines of what am thinking secretly.
Later will witness more speaking like this from other people and become convinced in a paranoid nightmare that it is part of some deliberate psychic energy draining vampire world conspiracy.
He tells me that "the women are all better looking than the men" and seems to imply that I am one of some sort of tribal lineagethat he is talking about. He doesn't go much further to explain. At that moment am feeling illuminatedand yes egotistically so, if such a thing is possible, and am wanting to tell him to run away with me become part of a secret world of illuminated ones with me, ones that never hurt anyone but stand high and illuminated above the regular world of regular consiousness. Arrogant, I know, but in that moment all I cared about was my new found identity that felt unburied after a thousands years which felt so cool, and him and feeling high on life itself.
"I can tell it's going to be a Neutral Milk Hotel summer." he says. At the time think he is just referring to the music called that, as I leave the porch not having exchanged names. Somehow names had seemed irrelevant.
Wander on through Wicker Park then have a waking nightmare that am in a holocaust and every truck that rolls by could be a Nazi truck and start doing this elaborate dodging sequence that am thinking I learned from someone who told me how to navigate the urban landscape in a roundabout way. Wearing no shoes at this time. At dusk I go to a coffee shop, there is a message taped to the counter that says both yes and no over and over and am thinking then that it is some kind of conspiratorial code designed to steal illumination from the illuminated and transfer it to the unilluminated that are being maniacal in their pursuit of illumination. My inquiry is further exasperated as am now shoeless, no longer illuminated but unaware of my increasing insanity. Wondering now if they will notice that I am not wearing shoes, no one says anything to me about that. But someone does approach me, he asks me if I am looking for my friend "blank."He says something along the lines of "aren't you always looking for him?" I tell him I don't know a "blank" and that I don't know what he is talking about. Even though I know exactly who he is talking about and was hoping that "blank" would be there.
He is the same strange gentleman I had met numerous times at this coffee shop, who was always trying to talk to me when I was always trying to talk to "blank" and "blank" was usually talking to attractive girls or other people when he was there. The man wore some kind of Super Bowl ring, at least so I remembered it to be. He was the same man who bought me a coffee after I had just come downfrom a mushroom tripand told me a story about Franz Kafka telling his friend that there was no hope for people like them. He said in a tone that seemed to intend it was an anecdote he was telling specially to me as if to presume that I was one of those people that their was no hope for. He and another guy start talking and, as I recall it, he turns to tell me that the Dalai Lama has told him how to get enlightenment. This could have been an ordinary statement. But he says this with a grin that to me seemed maniacal.
Take him to be involved in some kind of Dali Lama conspiracy like the one that Ivan Chtchglov, one of the Situationist International writers supposedly thought was against him, according to the book Lipstick Traces, A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, by Marcus Griel. Then I leave the coffee shopand find a box of books outside that someone seems to be giving away. I take out a book called The Emperors Children, thinking its some kind of evil metaphor and start tearing it shreds without reading it,then wander on without completing my ripping.
Sitting down by a gate outside a highschool, a man comes along and I think in my waking nightmarethat he is my good friend, "blank #2" but that "blank #2" has morphed into someone else that looks entirely different from "blank #2" and is now an older black man rather than a young white guy and that anything is now possible in the seemingly alternate universe I feel I have found myself in. I ask him for one of his cigarettes, he shakes his head no as I recall it and tries to hand me his coat and open his pants to me. I ignore him.
Stare at the sun which I feel I can no longer feel. I feel like a tiny speck of consiousness and I sit there, my third eyeseemingly open to the emptiness, to a nothing void, (or maybe it was closed) as the sun shines and I imagine all of Wicker Parkto be a concentration camp with joggers who look past as I lay dying. I get up and walk to a sort of courtyard with bushes some blocks away from the highschool, An ambulance pulls up, a woman in what I think was a police uniform tries to grab me to take me to the truck, so I lay down on the ground in the dirt and pretend to be invisible. This does not work, apparently I have not become invisible and they can still see me. So they grab me and pull me into the truck and strap me down in restraints.
When I get to the hospital they inject me over and over again and screaming in terror but this does not stop them," Act normal," a nice nurse tells me but I am not sure what normal is nor how to act it. Okay so maybe I got the drift of what she was trying to tell me but all i really honestly felt I could do at the time was scream in fear.
Later admitted to the mental hospital, which later I figured out was what i think the awake guy meant when he said Neutral Milk Hotel. He was right that it was going to be a Neutral Milk Hotel summer, mental hospitalsalways have plenty of small cartons of milkand they do seem to sort of neutralize the mental hotel experience when you drink them, so I think anyway. Spent alot of time ripping out the pages of the books people would bring me with the old kind of papeback paperand thinking it was a magical kind of ink and paper and wrapping them on my skin under the hospital gowns thinking they would protect me and wrapping anything shiny and metal in toilet paper also for protection seemingly against the evil seeming metal.
So I've been on medication now and I haven't been having any illuminations lately but I haven't been having anymore nightmares either. This was not intended to be a commercial for pychiatric medication.>