It began to dawn on me that this world I lived in, Earth, was horrible. Everyone who has ever lived, everyone since Jesus, who wasn't Christian, is now burning in hell for all of eternity.
I didn't want to believe this. I wasn't a Christian now because this was a reality I wanted to be a part of. I was now Christian out of sheer fear. Fear of that misery I had been drowning in in my sleep, that I was now protected from now that I was saved. I knew that the sleep stuff was just a warning, a warning of something real that existed after we died, to the lots of people who did not accept Jesus as their savior. I wasn't baptized, but I was still saved. I didn't need to make a public announcement of it, all I needed to do was profess that Jesus was lord by mouth, and I was saved.
Sure, I was saved. But what about everyone on Earth that wasn't saved? Muslims, Jews, Hindus, atheists. They were all going to hell, unless I could somehow stop that. But I couldn't. I would be labeled intolerant of their personal belief system.
Not only was everyone going to hell after they died, but the ice caps were about to melt, flood the planet and turn Earth into a living hell.
God, this is horrible. Just give me some Adderall. Adderall will make the misery go away.
I started every day with my pill of Adderall. I felt horrible, I felt miserable, then I would swallow my pill, and immediately, I would feel relief.
It was kind of like I was in the Matrix, and I had just taken the red pill. I had just woken up to what a miserable place Earth was. Everyone here was oblivious to how horrible this planet was. God had fucked up the planet. For the love of God, get saved!
“Rachel has this really good song in her iPod called Fear of a Blank Planet by Porcupine Tree. I liked it so much that now, I listen to Porcupine Tree,” I heard Brandon say.
The lyrics to this song always spoke to me. I was reminded of myself in high school. I looked up the lyrics online.
Don't try engaging me
The vaguest of shrugs
The prescription drugs
You'll never find a person inside
My face is Mogadon
Mogadon? What's Mogadon? I googled it, and discovered that it was a prescription sedative, a benzodiazepine, used to relax people. So having a face that was Mogadon would mean a relaxed facial expression.
Curiosity has given up on me
I'm tuning out desires
The pills are on the rise
How can I be sure I'm here?
The pills that I've been taking confuse me
I need to know that someone sees that
There's nothing left, I simply am not here
The song goes on to complain about the acting in pornography.
I sat and thought about this. What other messages were hidden in the songs I had on my iPod?
I thought of the song Breathe by Prodigy. “You're the victim.” I thought about Amber's livejournal entry. I was the victim. The victim of all the crap people had been talking about me since I was delusional. I looked up the lyrics.
Breathe the pressure
Come play my game, I'll test ya
Psychosomatic addict insane
I was the psychosomatic addict. My addiction to Adderall was psychosomatic. It was just in my head. That's why I got immediate relief following swallowing the pill.
In mid February, Facebook shut me down. At least, they shut down my Weird Zombie Girl/Smirkydesmirkster accounts. I made fan pages instead and added all my friends, but I began to realize that I was delusional. No incident in particular drove this point home, I guess my brainwaves just returned to normal. I came down over a couple of days.
So where was I now? Well, two major things had come about from me being delusional. I was now Christian, and that had been a lasting change. I was also friends with Chance on facebook. I still really had a crush on Chance.
So what ended up happening was, I diverted all the energy I used to put into thinking about Brandon, and used it to think about Chance instead.
So the only thing I could really do now was, try to have interesting facebook statuses.
God and I have slumber parties. We do each other's hair and makeup and tell each other secrets. So if you were wondering how I got to be so wise, there you go.
Over the next couple of months, I grew immensely. I got into shape. My mom and I started working out at a different gym in Lake Oswego, one closer to downtown.
One day at the gym, this random thought popped into my head. What if, out of the blue, I sent Chance a message on facebook that said “I'm sweaty?” Wouldn't that be like the stupidest, weirdest thing ever? God, that would be stupid.
Because I thought things like that. I thought really random, stupid things in my head all the time.
After that, that thought occurred to me every day at the gym. Me sending Chance a message that said “I'm sweaty.”
Everyday I woke up in the morning, took a pill of Adderall, showered, worked out for a few hours, took another pill of Adderall, then worked on my book, studied mobile device programming, or both.
My goal was to make a version of my bug computer game into a game for smartphones or mobile devices, and that's how I would make money.
I was still in a relationship with Erik. I was going to move back to Coeur d'Alene to be with him eventually. However, it started to dawn on me that I didn't really want to. Was I really all that interested in him? What did I like about him? He was a Scientologist. He was there for me at a time when I needed someone. His dad was a survivalist talk show host. Was I in love with him? No. I was more interested in other people than I was in him.
So the thought entered my head one day, you know, I could just end it. I could just break up with him. I remembered January, how I had gone on and on about how I would never leave him. But that was January. This was March. A lot of things can change in two months.
I put off breaking up with him for the longest time. Finally, after a couple weeks, I decided it was time. I told him we should call the relationship quits. He was devastated. I was not.
I spent quite a bit of time talking to people online. I talked to a girl from Innercept, Izzy. She told me about this website that uses the power of the number eight to grant wishes. I was skeptical, but I figured I would try it out.
To have your wish granted, you enter your wish into the browser. Then you write down the number 8 on a small piece of paper, and carry it around with you for eight days. Each day at 11:11, you take the piece of paper into the bathroom, stare at it in the mirror and repeat your wish eight times. The piece of paper also needed to be exposed to the moonlight each night for 30 seconds, or two minutes if it was cloudy.
I wished for my book to be published, then I wished for guys I like to like me back.
I looked through the comment section. It was full of people raving about how their wish came true, or how now that they made their wish, they see the numbers eight and eleven everywhere.
Izzy was wild, imaginative, and into fiction. She told me how she wished for the goblin king to be real and for him to be her friend. The goblin king was from a 1980's movie called Labyrinth with David Bowie. In the movie, the goblin king turns into a barn owl. Izzy made this wish, and then she went camping, and there was a barn owl like in the movie hooting and making noises at her. She was freaked out by this, it must be her wish, she never quite completed it so maybe that was why it didn't manifest fully.
I thought it was silly, but I tried it out anyway, and for the next several weeks I was carrying around little pieces of paper with the number eight on them.
The night after I first got the wish, I was sitting there when I got a really funny feeling telling me to look at the clock. I did, and it was 11:11. The website had said that you have made a wish, you will see 11:11 with greater frequency.
I was on facebook late one night when I received a message from a popular guy from my high school, Jeremy. I was excited that someone from my high school who wasn't considered a loser would actually talk to me (not that I actually cared that much about that sort of thing, though). So I talked to him. And I was excited when he talked to me the following day too.
He was obviously interested in sex, but I thought he was hot so I agreed to meet him. I even rolled around a little bit on my bed thinking about him, beforehand, because we had exchanged pictures. He picked me up from my house. In the car I looked at his iPod and made fun of him for listening to Justin Bieber. We went to his apartment and smoked weed. I had myself under control until he asked me to cuddle with him, and when I leaned up against him I lost control and started grinding against him, and ended up going down on him, while dancing the entire time. Afterwards, I danced all over the apartment. He told me I was a good dancer.
Afterwards, I noticed his best friend Abel, another guy from my high school, removed me as a friend.
Jeremy kept trying to get together with me again, but when the time came for us to meet up he would make some sort of excuse.
My marbles are very scattered right now. I better pick them up before I lose them.
I had this problem where I would imagine people having conversations about me. I didn't really believe they took place, but these conversations would pop into my head anyway. Except one day, it suddenly got really real and intense. I started imagining that Chance and Brandon had met each other and were talking to each other about me. I felt a presence in my energy, and as I sat on my bed I felt like I wasn't alone. I was being crowded. God, get the fuck out of my energy. AHHHH!!!
But I didn't believe it. I didn't believe any of it. They weren't talking about me. Why the fuck would they be talking about me?
After being absorbed in this all day, I got on facebook, and looked at this status that Chance had posted. “If I were a white collar criminal and I had a cleaners, I'd call it Ponzi Steam Cleaners.” I closed my laptop, thought about it, then opened it abruptly and clicked “like.” I laughed. “Ponzi Steam Cleaners. Ponzi Steam Cleaners.” I whispered to myself.
The next day, Brandon and Chance were in my head talking again. This was from the day before. “Rachel likes bad puns. Try posting a pun as your facebook status and see if she likes it.”
I still didn't believe it. But I was going crazy now. I looked up bipolar symptoms, and compared them to spiritual awakening symptoms. This seemed more like a spiritual awakening than bipolar disorder.
Later though, I got another idea. I looked up schizophrenia symptoms. This sounded a lot like schizophrenia.
By the end of the week I was starting to doubt everything, doubt spirituality, doubt everything beyond the physical. It was all just chemicals malfunctioning in my brain. I was mentally ill.
Then Erik contacted me, and told me that he had just finished his Scientology training and he had been astrally projecting himself to me all week. He said he wouldn't do it anymore. My problem didn't happen again after that.
.
A good game to play with your friends is a game I made up called the cannibalism game. You ask, if we were stranded in the desert and had to resort to cannibalism, who would we eat first? Then you discuss the pro's and cons of eating each person.The trouble I was having was that now that I was home, I wasn't the same as I was before. Now I was a lot more social. Yet, having hardly talked throughout high school, I didn't have very many people to hang out with.
I started meeting people through a dating website. On my profile, I tried to make it very clear that I was crazy and a low-life, as in I didn't have a job. Plenty of people talked to me anyway. I talked to a guy who suggested we meet up at Starbucks at Pioneer Square, all the way in downtown Portland. So I took the bus downtown, and on the way we were texting and I mentioned I didn't have a job at the time.
It was a beautiful spring day, and I soaked up the sights, the sounds, and the experience. I loved downtown Portland. I waited at Starbucks for a while, walked around the mall at Pioneer Place, then waited some more at Starbucks before I texted him and realized he wasn't coming. He was standing me up. He didn't like that I didn't have a job.
I was beyond frustrated because I had just spent my time and money coming down to downtown Portland to meet this guy. I left Starbucks. On my way out, I bumped into this big black guy.
“Excuse me miss, your beauty is a duty.”
He asked me why I was so down and I told him. I was kind of fascinated by this guy. I didn't know any black people. He was really nice and friendly, and he told me that this guy wasn't worth my time anyway.
This guy's name was Larry. As we walked around, he seemed to know a lot of people. He was also writing a book about his life.
We sat outside on the brick wall around the square, and I gave him my number. In my mind I knew that this was someone that I wanted to be friends with. He called the number immediately after I gave it to him so that I could program his number into my phone. I answered.
“Hello?”
“Oh hi, is this Rachel?”
“Yes.”
And we laughed, because we were just sitting right next to each other.
He was going to get me some marijuana, so I gave him twenty bucks and we rode around the max and then came back to the same spot. I was supposed to wait for him. I waited about thirty minutes, left the spot to get food and use the restroom, came back, then waited some more. I called him a few times and he didn't answer. I realized he wasn't coming back.
Dejected, I walked back up towards Starbucks, and bumped into yet another black guy, Andreas. Andreas was thinner, younger, and tall with dreadlocks. He was the same age as me. By this time I was open to just about anything, so we started walking some place. A club he likes to go to. On the way we talked about our past drug use and current living situations.
So we walked to this club, which ended up being a porno theater right next to a really popular doughnut shop in downtown Portland, Voodoo Doughnuts. I noticed there was a long line outside the door of Voodoo Doughnuts. "Is there some event happening there?" I asked.
"Nope, just people buying doughnuts like always."
At the club, we had to sign something to get in. I signed “Rachel Zu.”
We walked into the dark theater, and I was vaguely reminded of my dream about the past life with the theater. We sat down in a little compartment thing with a cushioned bench.
We watched the movie. A girl writhing all over the place seductively on a bed. Then a man entered and they started getting it on.
This is when I should have asked to leave. But that's not what I did. Instead, I let Andreas go down on me because well, he wanted to, right? And then I went down on him because, well, I had to return the favor. By that time, the other old men from the theater were gathering around and watching. I didn't mind people watching. I liked the attention. But I didn't want to have sex with this guy. He was trying to, and I said no. Then he pulled out a condom. And then I just gave in. He had a condom, we were using a condom. That meant there wouldn't be any repercussions from this sex. He started having sex with me doggy style, I didn't like it, I wasn't into it and he knew that and said “she's shy.” So we left. And it was over.
We walked around Portland for awhile, exchanged contact information, and then I had my dad pick me up.
When I got home, I posted a status. "I think it's odd that people are lined up at nine o'clock at night to buy doughnuts.
To which this guy Todd, a guy whom I had gone to high school with whom I had a crush on, responded. "Buy you a doughnut."
Another good game to play is a game I made up called the baby name game. You think up names you wouldn't want to name your kid, which have normal sounding nicknames. Like “Dementia” (Demi), “Syphillis” (Phil), or “Rubella” (Bella).
Eventually, Larry got back to me. He had had a run in with the cops, that's why he hadn't come back.
I took the bus downtown. Another beautiful day.
I just wanted to do drugs. Larry rolled a blunt on the sidewalk while I played lookout, watching for cops. As he rolled it, he explained to me how to do it so that I could do it later. Larry said there were specks in this weed that made you really really high. We borrowed someone's lighter, and I walked down the street, smoking a blunt, and choking and dying. I kept trying to hand the blunt back to Larry. “No, it's yours! You paid for it!” He didn't understand that I wasn't doing it to be polite, but because I wanted to breathe.
I imagined someone witnessing this. I felt like a celebrity, people were fascinated by me, following me and talking about my every move. “I saw Rachel downtown, walking down the street smoking a blunt with a big black man.” I imagined Brandon saying this.
Back in Starbucks, the marijuana hit my bloodstream. I started thinking about how sad it was. These people, these humans on Earth, they don't know. They don't know what happens after they die. They don't know the true depths of human misery. I remembered when I smoke weed on the beach back in high school. At the time, I had thought, I didn't know. I didn't know it was possible to feel misery this deep. But with hell, it goes even deeper than that. On Earth, when alive, you don't know how horrible it is possible to feel. It was sad.
God had a sense of humor. He also had a temper. God was joyous. He was also very, very sad.
We walked around, and I thought. Everything you do, it's for pleasure. All life is is the never ending pursuit of pleasure.
“So many thoughts, Larry, I need a journal! To write them all down!”
“All right babe, I'll get you a journal.”
We wandered around some more.
“Larry. What is enlightenment?”
I don't remember what he said. But I remember asking this. And thinking, I claimed to have an enlightenment. But I didn't even know what enlightenment was.
We were buying something at Rite Aid, and I wandered over to the frozen food section. There were frozen meals labelled “Baked Dinners.” I almost fell down laughing. “Larry, Larry look! Baked dinners! Those are for stoners!”
Later, I made this my status on facebook. Three people liked it.
“Larry, do you think some people are evil?”
“Yeah! Like, child molesters.”
“No Larry, child molesters aren't evil. At least, that's a lesser form of evil. But what real evil is, is knowing you are causing someone pain, and enjoying it.
After wandering the streets that day, feeling blissed out, drinking tea samples from vendors at the mall, losing myself in philosophical thought wherever we went... I decided that this had been one of the best days of my life.
So I am thinking that God created life on Earth to rid himself of some sort of an infection. We are all pieces of God, the pieces surrounding the infection. The problem is, the infection prevents him from seeing which pieces are infected. So he sends us to Earth and watches us carefully, and upon death either reels us back in or casts us out into a state of eternal separation from God, based on whether we seem infected or not.Facebook was always changing, in terms of its features and how it was laid out. There was an update, and a new thing was that you got to see your top nine friends, visible to only you, on your facebook profile.
I noticed something. From time to time, Chance would appear as one of my top nine friends. Which was strange, because we didn't interact on facebook, and he beat out people who I did interact with for that spot.
I had heard a rumor that who appears in your top friends is partially based on who views your profile. After googling it for awhile, I decided to just see for myself if that's really how it worked. I ran a little experiment. I linked a bunch of my fake profiles, (by having them friend each other). Then had one of them view another one a whole bunch of times, without the other one viewing that one.
After some extensive research, I determined that your rank in the top nine friends was partially determined by who views your profile, it wasn't just a rumor. But I also knew that it was also determined by whose profiles you view.
So, it could have been because I was viewing Chance's.
I think that the people who are most offended by references to sex, those are the people who are secretly the most deeply perverted.
I went downtown to meet Larry again. We met at Starbucks, and he hooked me up with some more weed. This stuff he gave to me for free. I was alarmed when he pulled out a bag of weed in the middle of Starbucks and handed it to me.
“But what if people see?”
“Rachel, I've been doing this for years. No one notices if you don't draw attention to yourself. Just act casual.” He gave me two bags, each worth ten bucks each.
Larry was a drug dealer. That's why he hung out downtown all the time. He didn't live downtown. He wasn't homeless.
I took the bus home. I arrived at the house to find it empty. I furiously searched the internet to find a way to smoke or cook this shit without a pipe.
I ended up taking it over to my sister's apartment the next day to use her pipe. I smoked some, and then she made me take pictures of her. We walked around and I thought about how all thoughts and concepts could be reduced to binary, ones and zeros, a set of conditions that are either true or false. That's all thoughts were. That's all logical mental ideas were. They were all binary.
Then there were feelings, the emotions that concepts evoke, and this was something that could not be reduced to ones and zeros. In fact, it couldn't be reduced to anything. The way emotions feel, or the way things smell or the way colors look, at the deepest level they cannot be described. They just are. No logic could be applied to them.
I started to go back to normal and I asked my sister to light for me while I took another hit. This time, I must of hit one of the specks Larry warned me about. I suddenly got lost in a whirlwind of thoughts, and I felt as if I almost lost contact with the outside world. I had to keep moving, or I would get so lost in what was going on in my head I would forget where I was, that I was in a body on Earth.
The hell problem. The most basic, low-level problem God faced when programming the universe. Once someone goes to hell, they can't come back. It wasn't just like, if God searched hard enough He could find these lost souls and reel them back in. It was an impossibility. Once God loses His connection to someone, they are gone. They are completely separate from God, and anyone else for that matter, in this alternate dimension called hell. When you die, you are either with God, or you are lost forever, and you need to accept Jesus while you are alive to make sure you are not lost forever.
This was like a memory of something coming back to me. I already knew this. The fundamental truth of the universe. God is all-powerful, but the one thing He couldn't do was bring someone back from hell. This was a paradox.
I wrote about it on facebook:
So I reached enlightenment and I realized that the one fundamental truth of life is that God programmed the universe and the one fundamental problem that he can't program around is that once someone goes to hell, God can't pull them back out. And this is the paradox, because there is one thing an all-powerful God can't do. Because the universe is a paradox. But the thing is, this one fundamental truth of life isn't true for everyone. This is my personal truth and way of understanding the universe. But you realize when you reach enlightenment, or go through whatever the hell it was I went through, that the one fundamental truth you come back with is actually only meaningful to you and utterly meaningless in the scheme of things. Everyone has a different fundamental truth, but they fall into major categories, thus why there are so many different religions and schools of spiritual thought. It's kind of like when you are a little kid and you go to someone's birthday party, and you have a good time but all you leave with and can bring back from the experience is this bag of crap they call the party favors. That's what the fundamental truth is, it's the party favor, something utterly meaningless in the scheme of things that you bring back from the party of enlightenment.
I decided that this was enlightenment. I came home from my sister's apartment, flopped down on my bed and started writing all over my notebook.
I used to wonder why anything at all exists. Why is there a universe with stars, planets, and animals and humans who drive cars, smoke cigarettes, and drink martinis? Why not just absolutely nothing. I was thinking about it wrong. The universe was absolutely nothing. The universe exists because it doesn't make any sense for it to exist, and it is the absence of logic. Logic is an illusion.
I thought to myself, this is living. Smoking Larry's weed, flopping down on my bed and writing all over my philosophy notebook, this is living.
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