Now Here's This (or: Don't Forget Not to Puke)
I came around a light bend and emerged at the top of a long curving path down through a valley my friend and I had been warned earlier might be dotted with coyotes. The twisted path coursed a mild downhill hike followed by a mild uphill hike to a horizon-line that, when reached, would no doubt reveal the agonizing expanse of the Pacific Ocean. On either side of me stretched Southern California dried-out desert winterized vegetation, a long field of harsh tinder broken intermittently with the odd lively green push of somehow-living, somehow-breathing plants. This is when the magic mushrooms took hold, digging their neon claws into soft underbelly of my own private narration. I feel giggly and absurd.
It was then that I began to think about where I've been, what I'm doing here and where I'm going to be tomorrow.
Seven million years ago I was probably already dead. If I wasn't, I was walking with my family in this same valley that was overrun with coyotes and god knows what else. If I had somehow managed to avoid a major calamity, a common disease and the inherent threat of starvation in a hunter-gatherer uncivilization, I would be a seasoned veteran of the hunt, my hands raw and calloused, my wisdom of survival a deep and yet narrow pool which I passed on to my offspring more through the gleaned wisdom of my behavior than by direct tutelage. My mind a surging locomotive delivering the protection of my family from wild animal attacks, the threat of gang-related violence at the hands of my fellow homo sapiens who were still grumpy from having awakened from the ignorant bliss of the beast, the procuration of food to feed my family, and probably a concern over the sudden illness that was harvesting death in my youngest child. Dark clouds in a mighty distance over the ocean signaling something I'd have to figure out before it was too late and we were bogged down in a deluge.
Today I am on a Saturday hike through Malibu Canyon and I am a-bubble and a-giggle as the world's friendliest poison flips my brain upside down and lets it sizzle in the sun. I am at once nauseous and ecstatic. Something I describe to my friend and companion as "neaseousty." We're both carrying fist-sized rocks in case the weird foreigner who earlier warned us about the coyotes in this valley was right. Not that they'd be of any particular use to two stoned-out funny monkeys.
Tomorrow I'll be seated in a cubicle that I call my office because I'm in denial. I am employed in one of the world's most unromantic and unnecessary jobs. Tomorrow, instead of challenging myself with productive effort, I will be looking up various health maladies on the Internet, wholly convinced I have some terrible disease. I am a borderline hypochondriac and have already been diagnosed as having a generalized anxiety disorder.
My life consists of waking up in a warm apartment, going to work in one of the most laid-back atmospheres in the work world (a laid back attitude befitting toil at the far periphery of societal usefulness), coming home to a refrigerator full of food and doing some reading and writing before I go to sleep and start it all over again tomorrow. A cake-walk life. And yet I have a generalized anxiety disorder.
How can this be?
It dawns on me, or at least the me that I am when I am both rejecting and being seduced by a psychotropic poison, that my near-constant state of anxiety is based largely on the juggernaut brute I had to be when I descended from the trees and began to manipulate the environment to suit my many needs seven million years ago.
Seven million years ago I had real reason to have generalized anxiety. Every day was a mortal battle on a particularly unforgiving terrain within a particularly indifferent universe. Every waking moment a battle for my life and the life of the only people in the world with whom I shared a constant bond and the earliest vestiges of love that went beyond that of beast for fellow beast. A poetic love. They, and I, were in constant danger.
Those were legitimate worries. And while things got easier over time, the crashing wave of evolution has, until recent centuries, always been a white-knuckle ride. The brains of the lowest beast to the great mortal monkey Man have always been operating at full bore. Survival of the fittest goes far beyond a bench-pressing competition. The engine of our minds has always been in overdrive.
It's an adventure.
Or at least it was.
Now it's a day job, a warm apartment and, for me, the constant worry that it will all come crashing down due to neurodegeneration, malignancy or some unseen menace -- a stray bullet, a rogue wave, a foreign aggression.
When I compare my two lives -- my life seven million years ago and my life now -- the only constant I can see is the still-surly stupor of man, again, having molted the protective layer that kept our minds from meta-thought and asking the bittersweet question, "Why?" My children have doctors. My stockpiled food contains bacteria-destroying preservatives. My hands are soft and pudgy and well oiled from near-constant masturbation. I don't have a family. At my age, I am yet young enough that I need not concern myself with that ticking clock.
My brain, having developed over the course of billions of years white-knuckled grasping for a hold on the tidal wave of evolution is not sure what to do in such a controlled and calm environment. While it's true that we'll never truly descend from the trees entirely -- that we'll always be animals -- we are very strange animals at this point. Without life-and-death concerns occupying our amazingly capable minds, we make trivial matters into life-and-death problems.
Take what you find on reality television shows, where 15 people with no job and nothing to do start throwing their own shit at each other over little nothings like opened peanut butter jars and who might be drinking too much. These are not things they should concern themselves with, yet they do with revolting passion. Take what you find coming from groups like the Christian Coalition, who regard exposed nipples with the same fervor we used to hold for a pack of stampeding wooly mammoths crushing our slower ancestors' spines. Or from organizations like the NFL, which subvert overt aggression and creativity and regard themselves as something far more important than very, very wealthy entertainment organizers whose function in society is about as important as flatulence. Good for venting pent-up pressure, but whose
fervor and sense of self-importance lie at tremendous odds with its actual benefit in the grand scheme of things.
Perhaps this is why Ayn Rand advocated man striving to be the best at whatever he was undertaking -- be it architecture, engineering or what have you. Perhaps she knew that our minds have been in a certain high-octane gear for millions and billions of years, and when those minds aren't being put to useful purpose, they don't simply slow down and relax, but instead turn into runaway dynamos.
It's all a matter of the things we choose to care about. We're going to care either way, but what matters most is in which direction the dynamo goes.
For now, as I mount the distant hill and overlook the agonizing oceanic expanse, the direction of my mind is every direction -- thanks to chemical manipulation. But I will come down, and the soft light of my mind will refocus tomorrow and will most likely turn inwards again, searching within for certain malignancies. For now, I just want to throw up, because although it is certainly the best and most smile-inducing kind, my stomach is lined with poison.
"Don't forget not to puke," my friend says to me. If I puke, it only makes sense the toxins will spill and my light will refocus and this runaway dynamo will find its awful track again and I will agonize over the misdirections I have followed. But if I don't forget not to puke right now, well I'll have found temporary relief from the bittersweet reality that what I -- and we -- do best is also what we do worst.
So I sit atop what my friend has titled, "Simba Rock," which overlooks this whole valley, and I do what I do while I'm doing it. I am abuzz with a buzz and it feels like each and all of my cells is giggling. It is a joyous vacation from the responsibilities and worries of sobriety. A rare opportunity.
The sun is slowly and quietly dipping into the water, and we must return soon to the lovely-awful buzz of civilization. My buzz is wearing off. The day is ending.
Now here's this.