Got a couple dudes I play dominos with on Friday evenings, and I’ve found it becomes difficult to talk about these recent endeavors with them. Before I can even get to the realities of time tunnels and shape shifting, even something as simple in the beginning of this story as music coming out of an old weather-beaten jukebox in the field gets them tripping, being like, “Damn, you must’ve got too high!” or looking at me side-eyed with the judgmental gaze of devil scientific knowledge born deep in the infertile fissures of mind. So I’ve learned to keep it to myself.
This creates a new dilemma in that In Real Life friends start to suffer, those relationship are not nurtured, because they negatively judge and are generally dismissive of these Other Realm friends and realities, seeing them as not real. The conflict between In Real Life and Other Realm gets too much, because honestly I am far more comfortable in the Other Realms. In Real Life is mundane and repetitive and many days, for ten hours of it, I feel like one of those genetically engineered white chickens stuffed into the cages on the tractor and trailers rolling west on I-64 to the slaughterhouses. I’m just riding along, stuffed into my little work pen, administratively tasking after the tasks that are most pressing, pushing the others aside, not invested emotionally at all – in fact deeply detached from feeling anything because to let feeling in would be painful.
There was already enough pain embedded in my existence already, perhaps from born DNA clusters, perhaps environmental, likely a combo deal of both (with a free super-size by society), and I come from clans who are adept at self-medication. This I understand all too well – the desire to numb the pain, to let the dark unexplainable hurt be swallowed by opioid or alcoholic fog. The sharp edges of suffering are not gone, but you don’t see them so clearly, and don’t feel them nearly as much. Thankfully, I recognized that as a cycle going nowhere, and stepped off it, not without a lot of struggle, which continues to this day.
In Real Life seems to be getting more pokey, sharper, shivs and shanks and broken glass from all directions, and yet the civilized fog seems to be pumping harder, probably to dull our sightline on all those painful realities which should be obvious. And when I look around at others In Real Life, it seems to be working. They don’t seem to be freaking out, many of them are shinefaced and successful, able to buy things. Often I am not able to buy simple things like more groceries, so comprehending how to get the complex things like houses built in the past twenty years or vehicles less than nine years old is almost like reading Urdu, in that it certainly looks great but I got no idea what the fuck.
Thus, as I am forced by circumstance to navigate In Real Life more and more, it becomes more painful, and I want to disappear into the Other Realms. But In Real Life won’t let me. In Real Life has timely demands that require timely response and expect timely reactions. Flux time Other Realm nonsense only gets in the way of In Real Life demands. So I am forced to ignore the Other Realms, and take care of business, so to speak. Take care of business. Taking care, of “business”.
That shit is painful, a clenched fist of a heart painful that sometimes becomes unbearable, and you want to actually go ahead and get too high. But you know you shouldn’t, because that repeats failures you saw as a kid, as an adult, through both sides of the family tree. So you suffer it, and try to keep going, without giving up and laying down on the train tracks and hoping to sleep forever, no more In Real Life to fucking judge you.
Thus, I am thankful for the Other Realms. Without them, all I’d have is In Real Life.
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