The In Between of Things

The In Between of Things

Brilliant photoreal replicas burned deep lacerating scars into the fragile tissues of my less than conscious forebrain. perfectly realized three dimensional bullet proof memories of angry and raw red meat clinging to still warm soft black leather upholstery, pulled taut and distended over jagged white slivers of auto grade steel, fractal like safety glass and wet-glazed bituminous tarmac. Eldritch illuminations casted off the nearby conflagrant wood pulp reflecting off gasoline, blood and rust tainted radiator fluid. Confluent droplets of matter, bitter in their aftertaste.

The afterimages fade as sudden as subliminal frames of film. memory and matter dissolve into void as amnesia and loss of cognition clamp steel trap jaws over my mind. The electrical impulses that made for concept and retrospection obliterated cleanly and effectively by behind the scenes physics that could have been a car crash just as easily as it could have been a black hole.

Extricated from the depths of my own personal oblivion, white coated prevaricators obliquely explained to me the functions of my grey matter. Explained that while I lay there, a mass of sundered flesh and comminuted bone my mind had simply shut down to avoid dealing with the trauma. The explanations were succinct and brief, perhaps only because even they do not fully know, understand, or even care. truth be told I could not recall any by products of an unstable mental process. No floating astral bodies or obligatory lights in any tunnel. I do however still look back and think that i may have learned something that day.

Though I gained no evidence of life after death, god or drifting heavens, I became in no small part obsessed. I had developed an unnatural preoccupation with a single word. In the disjointed cistern of my mind the word is both evocative and involuted, unfettering thousands of years worth of images and words both profound and profane.

Images of abyssal cavities emerged buried deep within the earth. basins filled to the bursting with flame and fire and the souls of the damned. Sulfur and brimstone (Had I ever even seen what brimstone was before this?) floors. The mind conjuring both the devilish and the demonic evils ranging from the mildly disturbing and somewhat repulsive to the violent and the beautiful. Reflections of the self imposed and the wretched damned summoned forth by a single utterance, doomed to spend a single eternity being brightly vivisected.

These ancient and primitive mythologies remain to this day, as potent as physical lobotomies. Despite hundreds of years worth of religious darwinism these parables are still as effective as psychosurgery. Even now, disdainfully, I find myself often invoking images of subordinate fiends cracking whips over the backs of indentured sinners while Old Nick himself picks at the fangs of evil with a broken but immediately recognizable human thigh bone. In sinister though, plotting the eventual downfall of mankind for whatever grievance he has against us.

I can't help but laugh at myself some days, humored at my own fallibility in this concern, though I guess I should worry more about the state of my own mental health, when my thoughts fluctuate between the horrible, the perverse, the comical and the pornographic.

the more enlightened opinion of my small circle of acquaintances, dogmatized egoists to the last of them, is that the word is not defined by this amalgamation or dusty allegory. Rather the word is defined as the total and complete separation from the Divine. This I can accept, somewhat waveringly, given my own beliefs that some sanctified and astoundingly powerful creator, benign or mot, accidentally sparked off some primordial cosmic chain of events that spread like nuclear waste in drinking water that eventually led to the birth of the universe and ultimately here, to me being strapped into this wheelchair.