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Caught in an irrelevant frame

By Monica Wood

As was to be expected, the waiting room was clinically cold. I was alone, although I had expected to see other men there. The –what shall I call her? doctor, coach, fetishist, torturer?– appeared in the doorway. She was slight of build, very slim, not shapely, but sexy. She had on tight blue jeans, zip-up blue suede boots, a slim black jacket, and straight brown hair which reached a couple of inches below the shoulder. Jim?, she called, as if there were others in the room she needed to discern me from. She smiled warmly and I followed her down the corridor.

We entered a small square consultation room. In it was a tiny square table, and a chair. Everything was very white. My tormentor-to-be (it was clear) sat on the table and rested the toes of her boots on the edge of the chair. She motioned me to sit on the chair. I had to sit with my legs apart, to avoid her toes. She leaned in towards me, holding a clipboard (I could not see where it had come from) and asked me: How small do you want to be? I replied: I am not sure. She went on to ask: Do you find me sexy? I replied: Yes. She paused for a moment, looking deadly serious. So, very small then, she said.

She leaned in further and said: This frame you are in is shrinking smaller and smaller. I could see myself from outside the frame: it was true. Her head and her toes pushed against the air around me, so that I seemed to fade and constrict. I felt like I was being relegated to the back of a photograph. This is your true size and relevance, she said, small and irrelevant. Come back next week for an even smaller frame. I said: Okay. She said, You can go now Jim. Little Jimmy. I walked to the door. One more thing, she called as I had my hand on the handle, ready to exit. I turned to look at her. Do you find me sexy? she asked in a mocking tone. Yes, I replied, and left.

Psychedelic Collapse

Psychedelic Collapse

Many aspects of the ongoing Collapse of contemporary civilization can be seen to be psychedelic, in that they do not conform to our perceptual expectations of daily life, and in that they are a revealing of deeper levels of reality than are usually in our consciousness. In this context, I wonder what ingesting psychoactive substances might do to deepen acceptance and understanding of Collapse.

Recently, my wife and I have experimented with psilocybin in the form of so-called magic mushrooms. The last time we took some, we ingested just over one gram each, the highest dose we have yet tried. We were strongly driven by the desire to end my wife’s depression and other psychological dis-ease, which she has been suffering from for several months (actually, years). Conventional anti-depressants / medication are having a limited (although important) effect, and in any case she wants to be free from these, eventually. In times of Collapse, it is also unwise to prolong reliance on any form of medication longer than necessary, considering the instability of global and regional supply chains.

After experiences with lower doses which had affected me but not my wife, we were worried that the effects of psilocybin might be blocked by her medication (venlafaxine, lamotrigine and aripiprazole) but as it turned out, on this highest dose, we both experienced feelings of elation and clarity, there was a lot of laughing (this is the first time in several weeks I had heard my wife laugh for longer than a second), and she was able to reflect with self-deprecating humour on her thought patterns that only hours before had had her deep in depression.

On a protracted and mass scale, what insights into the ‘depression’ of collapsing modern civilization might us humans collectively gain, were the use of pyschedelics to become normalised? Might organic substance-induced psychedelic experiences help us align more usefully with the distortions of Collapse?

Ecology of the absurd, Modern poetry is anarchism

So Big the Sun

Parents left alone eat leaves

peel their dreams

so big the sun

in their throat

there is still a struggle

a count

a weapon

a garland

let`s go

I will tell what I see

*

we open our doors

the tornado is a locomotive

with debris

we want to help children

from the sky

*

it was incredible

in the basement, we could hear the wind

when we got back up

we were outside

*

all the steam

of life

when it disassembles

is fear

facing the deadline

*

can I sit here

on this gnarled trunk

do you have everything you need

you touched my heart

*

the child draws a sentence from the bowl

it is written:

*

“You have to understand humans,

bury them outside under the magnifying glass of the elders

who doze under the tree and push away our bodies

which get whiter and whiter“