Thinking That You’re Timothy Leary

Do you know that sensation where you are trying to maintain some kind of control over your vehicle but it feels as if you’ve got a hyperactive monkey on the end of a very long piece of elastic and nothing you do has the result that you wanted or anticipated? Naturally enough, you start to panic, you start to react in an irrational way and even though you know that you’re making matters worse you just can’t stop what you’re doing. You’re powerless to stop. And the ‘vehicle’ in question is you, in other words it’s your actual life that we talking about here, your way of being in the world. That’s what you might call a ‘sticky situation’, right? It’s good to talk. It’s good to talk and I’m glad of the opportunity to share this with you. Very glad. I feel better already. And do you know do you know do you also know that feeling when you’re trying to guess what it means to be a human being and you’re shooting in the dark and everything you say just sounds so wrong and everyone is just looking at you but you persevere anyway and before very long it’s not just that you’re coming across as being very weird indeed but that you are actually frightening and people are backing away from you on all sides? I’d say we all know that one! Ultimately though it’s life that’s the problem – or rather, it’s not life but our (or my) inability to understand it or know what to do about it. Or perhaps it’s my inability to pretend to know what life is all about. Like everyone else does. It’s hard to know really isn’t it? I must confess to not really knowing. I must confess to not really being able to make a call on that one. I have made mental images of things and then I inhabit those mental images. That’s one of my problems. I don’t know if it’s the biggest problem I have but it is one of them. I automatically create thought-forms that are like the blank, sterile, generic suburbs of reality, and then I dwell in them. I become what you might call ‘a wretched insipid creature of that sad suburbia’ and then I lost all track of the actual sense of my existence. I lost complete track. I didn’t know whether there was any sense or whether there wasn’t, in other words. I spend a lot of time these days doing what I like to call ‘managing the robot’. I am ‘the robot’ in question, in case you’re wondering, or rather, you could just say you could just say that we’re talking here about the mechanical aspect of my identity, which is made up of reflex-routines linked up in series and in parallel. That is the robot and it has to be kept on track in some way. It has to be coaxed to behave, without directly telling it (or rather me) what to do because it’ll get angry then and start sabotaging everything. The biggest stumbling block is to actually form a relationship with it – at the moment I have to say that there is a huge gulf between us, an absolutely insurmountable gulf, or so it seems. The damn thing is just out there, all on its own, spinning out of control, behaving in the most frighteningly surreal fashion. It functions as a nexus of stupidity and short-sightedness, as far as I’m concerned. It has the mark of evil on it too. Definitely the mark of evil. Probably it has been corrupted and contaminated by evil spirits and this makes me very wary of it. It is a doomed vehicle; it’s teetering on the edge. Maybe it will be okay though, I don’t know. Maybe I’m just habitually pessimistic in nature – always looking on the dark side of things, me. Always looking on the dark side. I used to fantasise about what it would be like to be to be Timothy Leary when he was taking a mega-dose of LSD and going on retreat for a week. You would be telling everyone not to disturb you because you’re embarking upon an experiment, because you’re pushing the boundaries of tripping further than they’d ever been pushed before. I really used to get into that, imagining how cool that would feel. I used to wonder what it would feel like to be Timmy Leary taking all that laboratory-grade Sandoz acid; I used to wonder how far out that must have felt. That was a long time ago now though. When I was in my late fifties. I’ve kind of grown out of it now, I suppose you could say. It was just a phase I was going through, I suppose you could say. I never think about being Timothy Leary anymore these days however. Not much anyway. Just the odd time…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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