…
By Nines
I am still in the belly of the beast, but at least it’s at my safety zone in the Berkeley hills instead of down where freeway exhaust settles on every surface, coats yer lungs, pisses off yer contact lenses, makes you feel as though you only dreamed you just took that shower ten minutes ago.
We struggled through the last day of the conference. Too happy and too fried and too disoriented from making heartspace in the bowels of hell to make much sense to a casual observer, to anyone who had their bearings, used to the bowels of hell, “normal”… or just plain so beaten down by it they don’t notice it anymore.
You are not going to believe this for a second, but I swear it’s true. After the chaos of circus clowns piled three deep in an SUV spilled me out into the drive in front of my room, I made a beeline for my bed, dropped myself flat and splayed myself as far as I would splay for about fifteen seconds, popped back up and stripped off my grimy clothes. You’re thinking I then dove under the covers. I dove under a COLD shower.
Threw on my dollar Calvins and a t-shirt and my coveted Solari cap and ran up to Farrell’s room to party. Yes, yes, my run slowed ridiculously by the time I was up the first three of the steps, but, well, you get the picture. I was so hot and wiped and parched whistle that I bought a coke to help perk me up. I poured about a quarter of a shot of Chuck’s scotch in it so I could clink plastic with everybody involved in a toast about friends delivered by Catherine.
She wanted us all to do toasts. I only have my cowboy toast and delivered it in my effort to enunciate quite more slowly than usual, but still fast. Nobody else had a toast to mind. But everybody was willing. Most of the younger ones went off to the bar around the corner. And most of the older ones stayed in Farrell’s room.
Carol Rosin and I went down to party with the young ones, but stuck with sodas… mine just plain with a squeeze… and then I went back up to Farrell’s room where I belonged, plopped into a chair, held upright by my own ghost alone, while we laughed and scratched and smoked and joked… only a little gossip… I swear… but the coolest part is partying with these people is a fabulous blend of goofy and outrageous and dissertation and deepest sincerity.
My body had given up even trying to gripe about it. I just said, “Later, dudette. STFU till later. We’ve got the rest of our lives to deal with that noise. Not now.”
…
Monday at the motor court was checkout for me and a little meeting to review what was right and what needed fixing for the future of this conference… this breakaway conference… this departure from the same old sh*t [Woods says I can’t swear outright. I hope I haven’t messed up without seeing it.] I got to tell them about how the energy we bring and develop and generate is what makes the prison doors of heroes unlock, not even the importance of what we are coming together to discuss is as urgently needed as that particular energy… the energy we bring to this that matters to us so much we each will die for with in of it.
How many years have I been missing my feeling, my knowing, my core being? Not gone, but not handy, not able to evaporate enough useless mundane mental blather and truck with the robotic imperatives of getting from A to B in this world. It’s agonizing and I have been too clocked for too long. You already know it got harked up from parsecs inside at the luncheon last week… or so… what day is it? Is it July now?
But at the conference it came out. Out. My whole life it was in me, sort of like where you would imagine my spine is located. My skin still mostly encased it. It only shot out in cases where people needed to be moved from unacceptable to acceptable and then was completely invisible again.
…
There’s a little trick I learned from my old friend Hong a thousand years ago, Don’t aim. Your brain is more talented than you are. You want to hit the bullseye? Get the ball in the pocket or the hoop? Just let your brain see where they are, close your eyes and shoot. Try it. If you don’t hit your mark with your eyes closed, you need healing worse than your next meal.
There’s another little trick I got from my teacher half a thousand years ago. Don’t thrust. You gotta have your power. You aim that, but you don’t thrust it. This is for when you know for sure your physical senses are too crude for real life and you want to advance into more recondite but exponentially more powerful modes of getting from A to B.
I’m still not exactly sure how to best describe how it is when all that we’re supposed to be fluent with just comes out and stuffs your body and senses into the back room, but that’s what I did. I wasn’t looking at anyone. I wasn’t seeing anyone’s faces with my eyes. Yeah, yeah, it would register if I aimed them, if I consciously made the effort to aim them and focus them on someone, but mostly all that flood of inputs was being dialed down to the barest trickle so the important part could do my living for me.
When still the crowd was rattling me, hundreds of different essential emanations bombarding me, I just headed for my temporary boyfriend and sat with him for a while. Not to brag, but I have never not had the ability to identify the spiritual safety zone. They’re almost always, but not exclusively, men.
The brutes! How’d they do that?
Anyway, I kind of thought this would turn off after getting out of the crowded conference, but it didn’t. And I don’t want you to think it was out to protect me from you. Balderdash. I don’t need that kind of protection. You can nail me with your energetics till the cows come home and it blows right through me. Nice try, but no dice. That’s not it. The true me, nines in her most essential form was, I guess you might say, out on a fact-finding mission and didn’t want me f**king her up. [Woods! I can’t not swear. Please fix me where I didn’t notice.] So I didn’t. I didn’t give me any choice.
This can only be when you MEAN it.
Deceiving yourself is all kinds of fun, literally endlessly entertaining, but what a filthy despicable bottomlessly lamentable waste of a perfectly gorgeous opportunity to experience life itself. Stop it. Let you out.
So I just threw all my stuff willy-nilly into the trunk of my car to be obediently checked out by eleven and ended up in that little upstairs conference room with most of the speakers and the organizers to go over the positives and negatives and the ideas for improvement and straightening out of any misunderstandings… the works. We got through that, and, of course, I was needed for chain smoker attendant duty outside.
…
I have this daffy, demoralizing, weird, sad thing where I can’t see my friends off at the airport without weeping uncontrollably as the plane’s door closes behind them. I go over to a window to watch the plane back out onto the runway and take off. Sobbing my fool head off the whole time. The people left milling about the airport think I’ve just sent my child off to be dismembered or something and so mostly just try to give me a comforting glance and leave me to my mourning unmolested.
It’s not as bad when I just drive them and dump them off in front of the terminal, don’t go in to see them onto their planes, but still I cry behind the wheel as I’m driving off. Even when it’s just a coworker on a short business trip. Even when it’s someone I don’t see often anyway. I imagine if I took a monster psychopath to fly away I might just smack my hands over a job well done, grin and skip down the escalator steps, but I am unsure even of this because… there are humans aboard that plane and I just foisted a subhuman menace on them.
I’d still cry. I think I’d still cry… as I skipped off back into my life.
…
I am out there with Farrell. People I love are starting to exit the little conference room. They are heading off into the beginnings of skipping back into their lives. I start crying.
Just like airports.
I love you. I don’t want your ions ripped away. I want you with me forever. Don’t not be immediately to hand. Don’t. Oh please. It hurts too damn much to be borne and I bear it and bear it and bear it and have borne it my whole life. I never stop loving you! I can’t make it stop. It’s utterly actual and I can’t make excuses to un-actual it, so I just continually learn to stay alive with the loss, the pain as acute as that first moment… when I’m crying as I see you go.
Related Reading:
Fear & Loathing in Silicon Valley, Part V: All on Maybe Three Hours’ Sleep
Fear & Loathing in Silicon Valley, Part IV: Interlude
Fear & Loathing in Silicon Valley, Part III: Paint it Black
Fear & Loathing in Silicon Valley, Part II – Part II – Update
Fear & Loathing in Silicon Valley, Part II – Report from the Motor Court
Fear & Loathing in Silicon Valley, Part I: Dear Solarian Hordes
Photo’s from the Secret Space Program
