It was well past midnight. The graveyard shift. I was wired and angry. I was also dying. Spitting blood. This was a secret... a secret secret. As a project on the side, I was working up a deal with the Devil. To destroy my enemies...
I was thirty at the time. I'd gone through many phases in my life; optimist and intellectual; thief and addict. Now an invisible star was shining on me. Shining on me while I ranted and raved in silence. The silence oscillating. Though it was servitude, my night job was my sole comfort. I lost myself (sometimes I miss my night job).
One must be certain of their enemies. A sloppy curse is like an arbitrary explosion. As my disease progressed, day by day the repercussions of my spell filtered back to me. Here a break up. There a professional disaster. There were innocent bystanders, collateral damage I would later regret. Madness was like a clumsily wielded magnifying glass; the object of my displeasure had become distorted beyond meaning. I was the one who was upside down.
And then it came to pass that I literally dropped in my tracks. I found myself in a semi-antiseptic hospital room, a room that felt strangely like the filthy hole I toiled in many long hours on the graveyard shift. Which, in turn, had some similarities to the cold cells I had shivered in courtesy of unfriendly local law enforcement. I could trace a linear and demented course from being busted, to paying my dues, to being felled by my own ill will. This course always seemed to run through a series of small, lonely, usually fluorescent-lit rooms. The room where I write this is small and lonely. However, I accept this like a hermit crab.
Some true Buddhists can describe an experience of "being aware of being aware". I forget what this is called. But I think I have known this experience. I've known it in the solitary hours well past midnight; when the only thing I can attest to with any honesty is my own horrible irresponsibility.
I was thirty at the time. I'd gone through many phases in my life; optimist and intellectual; thief and addict. Now an invisible star was shining on me. Shining on me while I ranted and raved in silence. The silence oscillating. Though it was servitude, my night job was my sole comfort. I lost myself (sometimes I miss my night job).
One must be certain of their enemies. A sloppy curse is like an arbitrary explosion. As my disease progressed, day by day the repercussions of my spell filtered back to me. Here a break up. There a professional disaster. There were innocent bystanders, collateral damage I would later regret. Madness was like a clumsily wielded magnifying glass; the object of my displeasure had become distorted beyond meaning. I was the one who was upside down.
And then it came to pass that I literally dropped in my tracks. I found myself in a semi-antiseptic hospital room, a room that felt strangely like the filthy hole I toiled in many long hours on the graveyard shift. Which, in turn, had some similarities to the cold cells I had shivered in courtesy of unfriendly local law enforcement. I could trace a linear and demented course from being busted, to paying my dues, to being felled by my own ill will. This course always seemed to run through a series of small, lonely, usually fluorescent-lit rooms. The room where I write this is small and lonely. However, I accept this like a hermit crab.
Some true Buddhists can describe an experience of "being aware of being aware". I forget what this is called. But I think I have known this experience. I've known it in the solitary hours well past midnight; when the only thing I can attest to with any honesty is my own horrible irresponsibility.
