The Wide Refocusing

Once, many years ago, a couple friends of mine and I dropped a mighty load of LSD with some waitresses we didn’t really know. It was a truly mixed bag, walk-of-life wise. We were scrappy punks with guitars and they were college students with trust funds and new Volvos. At the end, when the smoke cleared and the epic psychic washing machines had gone still, I could sense the same takeaway in all of them- if life was truly as fragile as we’d been led to believe, we’d all be dead. It was life affirming. I see this same expression in the faces of strangers now. The news this morning illustrates an interesting tributary to this mindset. Delta is on the rise, burning its way through our gullible Republican rubes. Europe just flooded. Oregon is on fire again. Drought. Voting rights. On and on. Overpowering tragedy, utter blackness, all is lost… just like in the middle of that particular acid trip, when we’d just come off the shocking pre-dawn experience of hallucinating tornadoes on the freeway as a group and then, in the sudden, quiet safety of a basement apartment, one of the waitresses stepped on an enormous tree roach. Barefoot. We were still a deer at that awful crunching sound, minds blown past the ephemeral red line, and then… then… we could all hear what could be metaphorically described as a distant Buddhist gong. I could see it in their faces. It was all going to be okay, and more than that, a certain personal detachment would be easier to find again in the future. I see now the resonate eddies of that gong in the eyes of the convenience store clerk, the mailman next door, pretty much everywhere. This may be a divided nation, with lunatic Republican suckers to the right, and judgmental, whiny liberals to the left, and not much in the middle, but I can’t help but imagine that the center is growing again as the bad news and warped social media that forces all of us to pick a side loses its potency. If we’re lucky, we are entering a period of post-overload Zen. Fingers crossed. That’s my hopeful observation for today, July 17th, the year of we don’t care anymore let’s just be cool. Here’s a useful tool to help you on your way if you’re struggling to get there- instead of looking at CNN or FOX every morning, check out Phys.org for the latest in kick ass human achievement.

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