on out of body traveling, and resigning
Like my expressions usually, my vessel was wandering. I corner cut and halfassed my way to the quickest possible exit from my job, which, with a twist of cruel irony, provides me with more social mediums, self confidence, and adjusted functionality than my real life does. It was Fiveish on a Sunday. I had nowhere safe to travel and no inspiration to hack it in the unfamiliar. I’ve been attempting less numb lately, so even a beer felt ugly. I ate two dinners. Wandered home, wandered back into town, considered a third, and ended up nursing a water at a buddy’s tavern. It was still way too early. At the tavern, I met a man named after a city, or after something more important that perhaps the city was initially named after. He had a density to his personality. His words came out thicker, you could hear it in his voice undoubtedly, but you could feel it too. The tiredness of his content contradicted his massive delivery of humanity of which I had immediately latched myself to in an unfamiliar way of admiration. He spoke of his late wife, of the struggles of dating at such a late age (55, maybe?) and his unfamiliarity with the particular tavern where he was now dining at and where I was postponing wander.
His hands moved like fish being tossed around the docks while we spoke. His head, even his teeth were bigger than most people I knew, I wondered if he was from the city he was named after, which has a certain legend of growing people bigger.
Before long I got him to wander with me, conversationally. We began to speak about a certain Dr. Robert A. Monroe. With a certain unintelligible Midwestern pride, I take my fact checking and personal research without much seriousness. A sort or resentment built upon a 1/3-lifetime of reading New York voices and realizing what a shitty poll position my creativity has drawn in the great writers’ race. I choose to blame it on the public schools, rather than genetics, or passive parenting, but either way, I assert my school of intuition in the presentation of my facts and that’s exactly what I plan on doing over the course of the next paragraph.
Dr. Robert A. Monroe spent decades researching and acting out a scientific theory he called hemi synching, which was designed to synchronize both hemispheres of the brain and allow the consciousness to leave the body. He wrote three books on the matter and built a giant institute that carries out these methods today, over a decade after his death. Dr. Alex P. Gara has had countless conversations with his roommate, Dr. Trevor S. Jelonek, on matters concerning or surrounding the core of this practice. The amateur doctors have dabbled with Eastern Religion, hallucinogens, and bestselling books on physics to further understand their gut feeling, that we are not our bodies. Monroe, the real doctor, used sounds called binaural beats, to achieve a separation of consciousness and body free of religious affiliation or harmful drugs. The man with the hands like Mahi Mahi has been to Monroe’s institute twice, and told me about his out of body travels on that fated Sunday at the tavern.
Funny thing is, I believed in him. I believed in him like I used to believe in grown ups or morals to stories or myself. He told me about flying with his dead wife, seeing the world through unconscious eyes, about familiarizing himself with past lives and his inner conscious tour guides, whom he described as annoyed and agitated. By accepting my distance with the material world he brought me a little bit closer to it and I needed that. Those same public schools that taught me distance equals depression were getting to me lately, hence the wandering. So, with the combination of the research that Dr. Jelonek and I spent so much of our post high school years on and the practical cynicism that Andy has helped cultivate within me and the wonderfully domestic mistakes I’ve made with great women and the love and fear that my family has showered me with and the fated encounter with the man named after a city, I’m taking this circus on the road.
