I'll be honest with you – I'm sort of writing the following not so much for you (or in the interest of good blogging material), as I am for myself. To work things out in my mind, to gain perspective. So this post itself might be sort of word-heavy and meandering. Just so you know.
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In 1993, I was in my second year of college. I had no plans, other than to complete a degree in some field where I could make money I guess. I picked my career in a bloodless manner devoid of any passion or thought. Attending these classes, I noticed that many of my fellow students had done the same. And we were all supposed to become high-school teachers. Wonderful.
We would teach the next generation how to do it, how to make one's way in society without feeling ANYTHING. What we were learning outside the curriculum, just in our motivations for being in college in the first place, would be valuable lessons for our charges. They would repeat our mistakes, buy into our values. Maybe once in a while we'd encourage somebody to aim higher; maybe we would simultaneously encourage them and give them the ANTIDOTE, the warning not to disappoint themselves by trying in such a heartbreaking world.
Quietly, however, I had written my intended vocation off and decided to instead pursue a career as Creative Underachieving Slacker. I had no picture in my mind of how graduation would be. I was very aware that I was going through the motions, marking time. It was if this time was meaningless, merely "filler." I would later refer to this way of living as "collecting bananas," or "working for bananas." The idea was, it was living as a monkey might, mindless, receiving a banana as a reward, as wages. "Why are you here?" Answer: "I'm here for the bananas."
I have always had the knack of seeing the bigger picture. But this has been, ultimately, not so much a helpful thing. Because I would anticipate the hills and valleys ahead of me, and label everything else "bananas." You know the saying: "it's not the destination, but the journey"? Feh. I saw the bigger picture. I was currently living the part of the Godzilla movie without Godzilla in it. That's more than 75% of the entire goddamn movie. I gotta watch poorly dubbed Japanese actors and Raymond Burr. Who the fuck wants to watch that? How does that benefit my life, truly, other than to dilute my focus, to seduce me into the Filler World, the world without Godzilla, the world of collecting bananas?
The only part of life in "Filler World," sans-Godzilla, that seemed vital to me was when I wrote or painted. And of course such activities would have felt vital, because it was sort of operating in a realm outside of time. And that creative realm was the true heaven, the truest nirvana. I mean, you always think it's going to be those so-called peak moments when you win something or get a lot of money etc. That ecstasy you feel when Godzilla finally gets on the screen, eating subway cars, stepping on watertowers. But that's not the true heaven. The true heaven is the aligning of your Self with your true purpose, and that's timeless, and that's jumped the guardrail out of the world of struggle and bananas into something else entirely.
Anyway, they didn't teach any of this to me in college. I just went along on my way and collected bananas. And then I traded the promise of steady bananas and banana-insurance for an uncertain future of just about any crappy job that came my way. Silently, I had made the decision to merely support myself enough to allow me the timeless moments with my art.
Then through a series of coincidences I ended up being "talent scouted" and sent to a special academic program for "the nation's next leaders." Yes, I know: "ha ha fucking-ha." But a professor approached me in class and said I had rare talent, and that he was the head of a special program for gifted students. One student in every discipline would be chosen for this program, representing every different nationality. Stop me if you heard this one before.
The program was literally based on Classical concepts of learning-as-personal-enrichment. To place a vocational spin on any aspect of it was tantamount to smelly farting. We had special rooms within the college proper to operate, special times for class, special privileges. And: money!
I always had money thrown at me back then. I was given money and told: "go contemplate something profound." So I did. They didn't want me to waste my beautiful mind on the ugly world of working in retail, of numbers and products and spreadsheets. Because I was one of the nation's future leaders. As I wrote before: "ha ha fucking-ha." But you know, I appreciated it. The money bought me enough time to enter the Timeless. In fact, if I wanted, I could dwell in the Timeless – writing, drawing, reading, appreciating, viewing – as much as I goddamn wanted to.
This is the portion of the story where I mention that certain aspects of this special program were FUCKING WEIRD.
You just don't get something for nothing. Even in the case of benefactors, sponsors, patrons, etc. It's a trade-off. It's not purely philanthropy. It's still a business. And I can respect that. That makes sense to me, and I don't think it's evil in the least. I'm not looking for utopia.
But you know, the architects of the program I attended actually WERE looking for utopia. That was literally the entire focus of the first year there. Utopias. I mean, you hear these paranoid conspiracy-theorists talk about "New World Order," all this stuff. Crazy, right? But that was literally what we discussed. We were told that we were enlisted to help bring about a paradigm shift in each of our respective fields, culminating in a new social order. And I could now start talking about the funding of the program, and I'm sure the paranoids would have a fucking field day.
But I never really appreciated/was aware of that aspect at the time. Hell, I barely read the books on our syllabus. I wrote poetry most of the time. Sometimes I sketched trees. Sometimes I listened to Tracy Chapman in the lounge. That's about it.
Except –
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OK, now here is the fucked-up part. I knew you were expecting a fucked-up part, that some talk about how I was forced to study Thomas Moore & Aldous Huxley just wasn't cutting it on the scale of fuckedupness.
Almost concurrently with my acceptance in this special program, I began to have really weird things happen to me. Weird, fucked-up, Jacob's Ladder Mothman Prophecies weird-ass fucked-up shit.
Now, even at my wildest as a teenager – bringe drinking, trying a little bit of pot, etc. – I have never experienced what I experienced starting that crazy Summer of 1994 when I first attended this program.
It started with really subtle cases of deja-vu/prophetic dreams. Really subtle, meaningless. The sort of things where you go: "huh." Like, I'd dream what my friend would be wearing the next day. Or, I'd dream I went to the ticket counter to buy a ticket from a certain person I've never seen before, and that person would be sitting there selling me that ticket the very next day. And I think all of us have had little stuff like that happen to us – it happens, and we just write it off as coincidence. No big deal.
Then I started having stuff that felt like going on LSD: out-of-body experiences, hyper-lucid dreams, prophetic dreams beyond the realm of coincidence, etc. Freaky freaky shit. Whitley Strieber-level shit. Jose Chung's From Outer Space-level shit.
Now, had I been the only person in my class experiencing such weirdness, that would be one thing. But a classmate was also noticing crazy shit happen to her. Hell, we even shared the same dream one night, ending up in the same dreamtime Chinese restaurant, looking at the same dreamtime spilled pork fried rice on the floor.
She was sure it was all CIA. She thought we were all a CIA experiment. She thought it was a set-up. She thought our food and drink had been laced with something.
I don't know if that conclusion has any validity to it whatsoever. Maybe all the funky stuff we discussed in class simply had a subconscious effect on our minds. Maybe it was electromagnetic waves accidentally hitting our school. Maybe we drank too much coffee (we sure as hell did, up to our fucking eyeballs with mocha-laced caffeine).
Whatever the case, I had produced massive quantities of writing and art at that time. Massive. I couldn't even sleep sometimes, wired, just typing away at my word processor. I would just take a whole legal pad and write one poem after another during class. Not like a normal way of writing, a consideration of words, any sort of structure. Just mountains of words and ideas pushing through my head, like shoving an apple through a pinhole. It was glorious. I was in the Timeless. I didn't care about selling my work, or publication, or anything. I was in the Zone. You don't need drugs to get that sort of high.
And maybe, when you get so far into the Zone, so far into the creativity, crazy shit and weird phenomena just sort of happen to you. Because you've opened yourself up so much. I mean, when you work your job and come home and draw or write – the job sort of acts like a buffer. It keeps you grounded. The "bananas," as I call them, are banal but they do nourish you. It's your one foot on the ground.
I think a problem artists have sometimes, though, is that these "Filler World" activities, the pursuit of the everloving banana-wage, can seduce you into giving up your Timeless pursuits. Suck the energy out of you. Convince you that your art is a pointless pursuit. And more than just pointless – it's a selfish pursuit. And immature. And Grant Morrison can do it 100x better than you, Jim Lee can do it 100x better than you, so why even fucking bother?
I know that special program in college was most likely training me to become "A Soulless Tool Of The Upper Illuminati (or is it "The Court Of Owls"?). But in the process, they afforded me the money and time and space to be truly creative. I mean, shit lot good it does me now, and true I might have been better off learning a skill like Accounting. But I will look back on those years with a great deal of fondness nevertheless. Because, in spite of everything: I was MYSELF. I was the purest, undistilled version of me.
Anyway, that program had me on the track for a Rhodes Scholarship, for a PhD at an Ivy League, maybe even a side job as some sort of Manchurian Candidate-cum-semiotician working for the spooks. Then I was offered a job editing some comics, and promptly pissed it all away. All that investment in me over the last several years: wasted.
Or was it?
***
Well, thanks for lending an ear to another installment of my crazy anecdotes and theories about the world. And Evil Illuminati Masonic Merovingian Overlords, if you are reading this: I can always use more money. As Sally Brown might say, you can give it to me in tens and twenties.
