I was napping existentially, like Air’s Somewhere Between Waking and Sleeping. While I was waking, I was aware of my swollen tonsils and the dry canker soar deep between my bottom lip and gums. The sensation of pain was relegated to my head, which was like a pea floating through space. And while I was sleeping, my head was floating into a dream, on a thread, like a brainstem. I moved through space and time, made decisions, and felt sensations that motivated me to respond. As I responded to the environment, a body became intact.

While waking, again, the pea was in pain, and the thread activated the appurtenances responsible for easing the pain, calming the senses, distracting the perceptions. It was that kind of epiphany available between waking and sleeping, when it all makes sense, until you wake up. It dawned on me that waking up meant becoming aware of my body and my thoughts, all of which erupted as extensions of an underlying real, they and became the experience of the waking state, confusing me to think that my experience is outward and not inward, anywhere but in my head, floating on a thread.

My flesh is soothing me as I float through life, make decisions, and respond to stimuli, but what happens when the flesh becomes the stimuli? What happens to the pea and the thread, when it cries after being confronted by sensation, and wants a different perception? The experience and source of life become masked by temporary pleasures. The pea on the thread forgets what it is and where it is, mistaking the shadow of itself for itself.

Lately, I’ve been wondering what to do with my underlying anger, my confrontational attitude, my want of snacks and booze and other short-lived pleasures. Am I doing things to just comfort me? Am I dealing with the source of pain? Am I trying to self medicate? My body does it for me, until my body just becomes me, and I lose track of myself.

I wonder if I can get back to the pea and the thread on a mission toward clarity, when life is simpler, where life is simpler, why life is simpler, how life is simpler.