Sick

I'm back at work... and, in a way, at life... after a looong weekend of flu/fever delirious bed-riddenness. And I think I've seen God.

I truly did have some fever delirious cosmic shaman experiences while I was laid up. Okay, well, maybe only one or two. But I have been having dreams so vivid I could paint them, or reconstruct them and photograph them. Have you seen the movie "Duets?" With Gwyneth Paltrow? You know the guy in that movie who's having a mid-life crisis? Not the Huey Lewis guy; I'm talking about the guy who killed a habitat for sea turtles to put in a water slide park and went off to get a pack of cigarettes and never came home. Remember that guy? Well, that guy was in my dream... only he just looked like that guy, he wasn't really that guy. He was really Robert Plant. And, as Robert Plant, he wasn't only the lead singer of Led Zeppelin. He was also in Fleetwood Mac. And he was wearing a park ranger hat. He didn't really do anything, but his eyes were a really clear hazel with a hint of green.

Then I had another dream that someone threw me in a hole and was about to suffocate me with a plastic bag, but decided not to. Then I woke up.

I guess the main Divine Experience I had while sick though was I realized in a very visceral way that, despite it all, despite my worrying and unhealthy habits and nagging pessimism, I think life is really beautiful and I want to live. I usually live pretty deep inside my head, but I came out for a few minutes because for some reason during my fever delirium I thought I was dying and I felt my being coming out of its hiding spot and fully inhabiting my whole body, down to the tips of my toes and almost making my eyes bulge with itself, extending out of my pores and shining like gold and I prayed to God to let me live, and I told Him I was so sorry I was always being so negative and taking my life for granted, but, dammit, I want to fucking live. 

And, somehow,  this whole experience made me feel that I really need to go to the zoo. I was convinced that if I really were dying, or if I had a day to live or something like that, I would spend that day at the zoo.

I asked T if we could go to the zoo.  He said no way. He said it's smelly and the animals are never doing anything and it's depressing to watch them in fake mock-ups of what someone thinks resembles their natural habitat. Then I asked him if I had a day to live and that's what I wanted to do, would he do it then? He said, "Of course, yeah, I'd do it if you had one more day and that's what you wanted." "Pretend it's my last day," I told him. It was obvious an explanation was required on my part.

So I tried to tell him about my epiphany that life is precious... sacred, even... and that every day I just took it for granted that I was alive and there were all these really little things... like watching a flight of geese take off, or being in the suburbs and looking south through layers of bare black tree limbs to the city-lit pink sky... that make me go, "Wow, I'm lucky to be alive to see this!" Where my explanation got goofy was how all this had to do with going to the zoo. I couldn't really explain the whole thing without laughing, anyway, because I was so self-conscious of its cheesiness, so T thought I wasn't serious... well, anyway we came to a compromise. (Ah, that magical word in a marriage :D) He really likes fish, and the aquarium we used to have just kind of self-destructed, and T found out on-line that they have free days at the Shedd Aquarium, so after the New Year we're going to go there.

Another, more minor epiphany I had that was more like a notion than an epiphany-- and I'm sure countless teenagers getting high their very first time to "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" have thought of this before me-- is that the difference between being sane and being insane is that sane people are all tuned in to the same radio station, whereas insane people are each tuned in to different radio stations. Usually, everyone is pretty much tuned in to separate stations from each other, but every once in awhile some of the people who aren't listening to the sane people's radio station will start tuning in to a radio station that another insane person is listening to, and as that station gets more listeners a kind of revolution of thought will occur, like in the Italian Renaissance or during the 1960s.

"Someone told me it's all happening at the zoo... I do believe it, I do believe it's true..." --Simon and Garfunkel

"I've never seen light, but I sure have seen God" --Tori Amos

"I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations"
"I can't stand my own mind" 
                                              --Allen Ginsberg