45s on 33 – #92: “Sombras”

As I chilled inside the vast and vivid membranes, Rey-Rey continued to explain, “This is where we counter the darkness, where we fight off those manufactured shadows meant to swallow up all this, and people like this.” Sitting in the midst of this vibrant lava lamp baseship structure, I couldn’t really fathom the power of the darkness in the moment. I mean, I knew that shit existed – it swallows me up regularly, the shadowed depression of comparison, of desire, but right now with Rey-Rey in his baseship, it made no relevant sense.

Rey-Rey still reading my mind though was like, “It might not seem real in this reality, but this reality don’t penetrate the whole universes. I mean, it did, that’s what universes get born from, but it ain’t like that no more. Go back, and you’ll see.”

Many years ago, as a teen, after a period of sleep deprivation, I was deep breath meditating in the backyard behind my mom’s house (which was then mine too) right where we ended up building a Unabomber shack, and I had what I would consider an out-of-body experience. I was floating up in the air over myself, watching myself sit there on the ground, good twenty feet above. But then my conscious mind registered, “Oh shit, you’re floating above yourself looking down!” and immediately, as if connected by unseen umbilical cord, my seeing self was sucked back down into my physical self. I’ve never been able to recreate that moment either.

Until now, because as soon as Rey-Rey said, “Go back, and you’ll see,” the psychic umbilical cord activated itself again, and I shot through the technicolor tunnel for ten seconds or so, and found myself right back in the field, near the broken ass jukebox, sitting on my favorite orange milk crate. No colored orbs were pumping out the jukebox now, but I could hear the gears jiggling and something manifesting. With a cough and sputter, a coal dust grey cloud of sound bleched out the jukebox.

It was warbling some horrible unscrewed and unchopped sounds I couldn’t make it, but it float at me, and I heard horrible demon voices singing of desire and want and lust and greed and all that nasty shit that pretty much every mythological spirituality since the dawn of monkeys thinking of themselves as better than monkeys has spake about. The jukebox kept spitting out the dark grey demon bursts, but then – finally – a little colored cloudburst sang out in contrast. It almost ran to my head (or me to it), and it sang in slow syrup Space Espanol, “Easy to get lost in shadows, but the demons lurk behind; beware of getting lost in shadows, to where demons control your mind.”

The grey was everywhere though, and a few of those clouds fogged over the little colored cloudburst. I heard the demon shrieks of “great American novel” and “genius grant” and oh god the wretched ear worm of “M.F.A. master of fine arts, creativity mined from well-trained minds, never hearts”. I tried to hear the Space Espanol shadow chant again, but it was being drowned out by the others, and I wanted to get up – I was in my own fucking field again, wasn’t I? – but I couldn’t. The shadows were literally weighing me down. I recognized this as what science calls clinical depression, what I call not being right, or being lost in the fog. The fog is shadows and the shadows are made by demons and it gets thick to where, even though it’s not necessarily a scientifically validated physical thing, it weighs you down, and you can’t even get out of bed in the late morning without exerting a day’s worth of effort. It sucks the life right out of you, just to be alive.