When it finally occured to James that he may in fact be dead it was too late to do anything about it. Acceptance was simply common sense, nothing Zen about it. You either accepted the circumstances or created your own hell trying to battle them. So it was with some sense of relief that James felt he could grow to accept being dead. He wasn't quite sure what it was all about, but James, for once, was being a team player. He was willing to do whatever it took to finally get along in a way he never could seem to while living; he was ready for this whole death situation.
Thing is, it was all so new. The no body thing, that would take some getting used to. Turns out, once you get rid of the sleeping, fucking, shitting, eating and scavanging for food and water (i.e. shopping at Trader Joe's), what else was there to life? Sure, after maybe 45 solid minutes of hard core totally intense yoga he'd finally have the sort of quiet, internal experience people wrote about in books on meditation or whatever. But it was fleeting and felt like illusion. It didn't take long for the desires and needs of living to crash his little Om party. But it did, in some weird way, prepare him for death.
So no body, check. But he was thinking, he was conscious. So what's the deal with that? Was this heaven. He could sort of sense that he was floating in some kind of space, but it was more like...goo. Psychic goo, like his mind/spirit/soul was floating through a thick pudding. Lame as it sounds, that's as good an analogy as he felt like coming up with at that particular moment, and frankly, he was just too dead to care about originality.
Thing is, it was all so new. The no body thing, that would take some getting used to. Turns out, once you get rid of the sleeping, fucking, shitting, eating and scavanging for food and water (i.e. shopping at Trader Joe's), what else was there to life? Sure, after maybe 45 solid minutes of hard core totally intense yoga he'd finally have the sort of quiet, internal experience people wrote about in books on meditation or whatever. But it was fleeting and felt like illusion. It didn't take long for the desires and needs of living to crash his little Om party. But it did, in some weird way, prepare him for death.
So no body, check. But he was thinking, he was conscious. So what's the deal with that? Was this heaven. He could sort of sense that he was floating in some kind of space, but it was more like...goo. Psychic goo, like his mind/spirit/soul was floating through a thick pudding. Lame as it sounds, that's as good an analogy as he felt like coming up with at that particular moment, and frankly, he was just too dead to care about originality.
posted by morphitologist at
2:22 PM
2 Comments:
James had never been at a loss for originality while alive--oh no, in fact, originality was his stock in trade. He'd been a concept guy, a big picture manipulator, and had wielded a considerable amount of power on the earthly plane. In fact, he was so powerful that he believed that he would create his own after-death reality when the time came. Thing was, his vision did not include this goo he was--well, what was he doing exactly? Floating through it, or swimming, or what? He wasn't even moving really, but rather being while in (something like) motion. And it wasn't really goo he was in at all, but more liquidy than that--it was a substance that had no terrestrial corollary, something like a perfect combination of air and water; it was comfortable.
Yeah, he thought to himself. This is great. No gravity, but no absence of gravity, no oxygen, but no absence of that either. A neutral zone of sorts. Nice. He put his arms behind his head and floated along, quite content, and certainly happy to be rid of the outrageous amount of daily maintenance it took to live in a body.
And just as he thought he might get quite used to being dead--quite used to it indeed--he felt a tug on his heart strings, and saw a light, and then a cloud opened right before him in the goo--we'll call it wair from now on (water+air), though it might not be for too long, because what James saw, as if from above, behind and below all at the same time, was his own body, lying on an unfamiliar carpet, its neck turned in an impossible angle, eyes open and staring right back at him.
By
rob, at 3:44 PM
He could smell the deep pile carpet, feel the neck of his shirt digging into his skin, a result of his twisted neck and a lopsided shoulder pulling his t-shirt askew. He felt it and he saw it simultaneously. He was both observing and feeling his dead body, back on earth, in this room. His livingroom.
Then, in a poof and a WHIIZZZ!, that vision was gone. He was back in the wair, warm and liquid-like, wriggling in the non-ether of anti-space.
Motion. Light. A squeezing sensation. The light again, from up above (or was it down below?). Another contraction and suddenly he was being forced down a canal (or was it up?). He resisted this motion, hated this disturbance, and began to struggle with all his might against it.
For he knew what it meant. He knew it was birth anew, and as he struggled against that massive force shoving him down the warm wet canal, he felt all memory lifting away from him. Everything he remembered about who he was and what he was about began to sift away, simultaneous with his move down that damned canal.
Light, so much light. And noise. And foreign hands and cold objects invading his warm space to pull him out against his will. He could not believe this was happening. He couldn't stand the idea that he would have to go through it all over again, from scratch.
He decided then and there he was going to try to keep his memory.
By
morphitologist, at 12:13 PM
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