The brain is but a personal road map to the universe, a holographic microcosm of the entire spacetime continuum. At least that's how Tina felt after coming down off a 3-day acid binge, during which time she swore she'd left her body and gone on a multi-century tour of at least 36 different parallel dimensions. "Parallel" wasn't really the right word, she felt, since they weren't really parallel at all, but integrated and concurrant, like the dye in the fabric of a shirt. To the woven material, the colored dye might be invisible, non-existant, but it's integral and yet separate at the same time, fused at the cellular level. Only to an outside observer would it seem that the color and the fabric it was dyed into were one. Even that was a woefully inadequate description of her new deep understanding of the Way of the Universe, but it would have to suffice.

In the meantime, Tina was finding it difficult to concentrate at work anymore. She was a systems analyst for a major insurance company, and her new ability to see beyond superficialities inherent in everyday existence was severely impeding on her ability to care about the abstractions and anal retentive fixations required in analysis. In short, she didn't give a fuck about it at all.

But she still needed to pay the rent. What to do? She contemplated selling her Lexus and auctioning off her mother's silver left to her when her mom died 6 years ago, moving to a commune in the country and growing lettuce. You couldn't really go wrong with lettuce: It was yummy, healthy, and pleased the flow of life gurgling up from the nexus of the universe. How did she know this? A powerful intuition had been unleashed in those 3 days she'd spent hoola-hooping non-stop out in the upper Mojave. Being primarily a thinker and not a feeler, this was a profound development in her growth as a human being. There was no answer to be sought, for there were no longer any questions. There just "is."