Party On

Dance_with_shiva

So anyway I was OUT of it. Out of my mind. Out of my brain. Out of my tree. My new address was Cloud 9. In a parallel universe. Somewhere out there in the Twilight Zone. Where all the weird stuff happens. The really weird stuff. This shit was good, I realized. It was the good stuff for sure. And there I was thinking that I had been ripped off, that the guy had sold me something cut from the back of a packet of cornflakes. Walking around the streets for the last two hours cursing myself for being stupid enough to hand over my last bit of dosh for what he claimed was a sheet of factory-fresh acid. Only a couple of days old, still damp from whatever they dip them in. Fresh out of the dipping tanks. Some random guy I’d never see again as long as I lived, someone with a good line in patter. Only it wasn’t patter. The guy was straight-up. It was kosher stuff. It was the gear. It was the business. It was the genuine article.

 

I knew it was kosher when I started to get that metallic taste in my teeth. Almost like a toothache it was so intense. Then that uncomfortable feeling like your brain was being squeezed. Headachey. Like something heavy was sitting on your head. And then the next thing is that everything just opens out like a card dealer doing something fancy and fast with a deck of cards. Bang! Just like that. I don’t know what it was like really, it all happened much too quickly. Then I found myself in this new world. Only it wasn’t a new world so much as the old one full of lots and lots of holes. Aerated, you could say. Each hole was a passageway to a hidden dimension. A passageway to some kind of unsuspected hidden interiority. There were dimensions within dimensions. There were worlds within worlds. Worlds without end. World upon world upon world like the beads of dew on a spider’s web. No one else knew about these worlds, I realized. Only me. Only I knew that they were there. It was as if there were rabbit burrows everywhere like the holes in Swiss cheese. The world was rotten with holes. The Hollow Earth hypothesis, I thought. The richly mythological implications of this insight were not lost on me. Every student of esoteric knowledge knows what happens when you fall down one of these rabbit holes – it’s a classic motif.

 

Then the next thing after this was that I could see the little people everywhere I looked, milling around the place gaily, busily going around doing whatever business they had to do. I presume they came out of the rabbit holes even though I never saw them emerging. There were fairies and sprites and gnomes and goblins and kobolds and elves and brownies and leprechauns and kelpies and merfolk and nixies and pixies and dyads and hamadryads and nymphs and niads and devas and dakinis and gandharvas and selkies and menehunes and all sorts of other little folk that I couldn’t even begin to go into. And they were all running here and running there, doing this and doing that, sitting around in groups laughing and roaring and telling jokes and having conferences of some sort or another. Some of the little folk were clearly great for the music and were sitting around wherever they could find the space belting out tunes for all they were worth on little banjos and fiddles and flutes and all around them was dancing and merrymaking and all sorts of goings on. I felt quite dizzy in myself from looking at it all. I found myself wishing they would stop. “Would these mad buggers just ever leave off,” I thought, irritated by the constant frenetic energy of it all.

 

And yet the whole time none of these little people seemed to take the slightest interest in me – my existence was clearly a matter of no significance to them whatsoever. You might almost say that it was as if I didn’t exist. After a while I got the distinctly odd feeling that all these little people were partying in my brain. This was a very strange feeling altogether and not at all pleasant. They were laughing and talking and singing and shouting and dancing around and around and generally behaving in a thoroughly mad way and it was as if I wasn’t there at all. “There’s a party in my brain and I haven’t been invited!” I said to myself, trying to ease things with a little humour but it wasn’t working. The strange feeling persisted. In fact it got worse, reaching the point where I felt I couldn’t bear it any more. I wanted to shake my head violently from side to side so as to dislodge all the craziness that was going on there. I was growing more and more perplexed by it all and feeling stranger and stranger in myself when all of a sudden my attention was caught by my jeans. The same seething, teeming activity was now evident there, only on a smaller scale again. It wasn’t just around me that it was happening but on me too. It was like being infested with jubilant microbes who were eating everything in sight. Not only my clothes but my skin was teeming with frenetic microscopic life.

 

The same teeming life that I had been observing around me was taking place inside me, it seemed. As I stared at my hands I found myself being drawn into it and as clear as anything I could see the same party going on inside my body as was going on outside. The party was catching. It was spreading. It was as if I was being eaten alive by dancing termites and the termites were all partying for all they were worth. It was mad, heedless partying no matter where I looked. A veritable frenzy of partying. An orgy of partying. And I had the frightening feeling that it was heading towards some sort of unimaginable climax, some sort of unspeakable crescendo. “Party on little dudes,” I heard myself saying. My voice was a hollow croak. No humour in it at all. Like the creak of a coffin lid. Horrified doesn’t come close to describing how I was feeling. I could see it all now. This was the party of the century. The Party to end all Parties. It was the Cosmic Party, the Universal Party. It was the Eternal Partyand I hadn’t been invited…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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