Something incredible happened to a friend of mine recently. We were sitting on hay bales in the back of a truck, driving thru fields to a bonfire in the Arkansas c0untryside. I was talking to a little girl named Avery about hunting animals and shotting BB guns and dumb guys who hits deer with cars to kill them, and in the background, I heard my friend say something about how strangely nice the hay smelled. I didn't pay too much attention because I was preoccupied with my own thoughts all night, and my senses felt dull.
But later that night I was sitting next to my friend on a bale in front of the fire, and he took a hit of San Francisco pot. He left minutes later to search for water, and there were rumors that he wasn't doing well. Near-fainting in a truck bed somewhere. (Meanwhile I was kicking it with the queer folk at the party, wishing I was queer too.)
On the car right home, my friend, who left San Francisco over twenty years ago when an embarrassing incident made him to quit high school, told me what had happened. After hitting the pipe, he had immediately felt ill to the point of passing out. He stumbled around like a man whose death was super-imminent, and finally climbed into the back of the truck (this was incidental; he just needed a soft place to rest). The hay was all around him, and as soon as he inhaled deeply enough to really smell it, something clicked into place. "I could see every star in the sky. I went from feeling the worst I've ever felt to feeling amazing. And I knew it was the best I'd feel for a long time..."
The thing is, the incident was based on (almost) a strange prescience. He told me that somehow he's known earlier in the night that the smell of the hay was special--that it carried some poignant significance. "I stole the smells from you."
Are we still on middles? I love the story itself, but it also had a nagging effect me. My friend is a complete nut. He's so nutty that he's actually, in many ways, saner than everybody else. He lets the world act on him instead of forcefully trying to shape himself. And so he believes in supernatural forces and whatnot--and he's also a pain in the ass, because he's impossible to predict. But after he told the story, he launched into this seemingly tangential rant about rituals, and how American's suffer because of our LACK of rituals. His example: wouldn't a sixteen year old girl have an easier time of adolescence if her family threw a bonfire ceremony to signal her transition into X-phase of her life. She'd know, by rite of the ceremony, that the texture of her life was about to change. I'm not quite sure what he was getting at--how ritual related to what had happened to him withe the pot and the fire and the hay (he's 47), but I guess it's possible that he was trying to signal something personal without coming right out and saying it...
Ok, I really wanted to tell that story. But there is sort of a "moral" that can relate to middle, or endings, or beginnings. Recently I've been experiencing radical shifts in mood: life is hard and treacherous one day, then it's totally beautiful the next. To some extent, I do feel as though I control my outlook. I know that I control my reaction to events. At the same time, I appreciate and value the power that external events and things have over us. I think I like that idea of surrender, of letting go and reacting. Elena, you spoke about this a bit. My boss and his gf are in their late 40's, but at the same time, they can be totally childlike. They get erratically angry, flirt shamelessly, joke constantly. At first, I thought it was immaturity--and to some extent, it is, in the way we're conditioned to regard immaturity--but I also see it as a kind of openness (and acceptance of one's self) that I really like.
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