Psychonaut: latitude 0°

An Introduction

Alessandro Ingusci

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"Hi!".

"Hi! ... good monin'!", some kids wet voice shot straight into my frontal lobe.

An overenthusiastic sports announcer belches through the static at me "...anastic L.A. morning! (A radio station barely came though the interference and it´s the only thing I hear.) From here on, it's going to be a scorcher of a day, that's for sure, Bob!"

A level toned second much older man by the low raspy voice and obvious annoyance with the over-the-top positivity of his partner, "That's for sure Carl! No doubt about it! A big hollar to the boys of "New Hound Solutions". If you have a big need. We have the Rig for the job..."

         

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Introduction _ 2.5

Welcome,

         Whatever might have it been, chance, magic, an excentric friend, your intent, a starved mind searching for expansion, boredom, perhaps by the whim of a cosmos while she cradles us all, she waved her snow-white frail fingers, lazily nudging, deciding for you, to receive an opportunity behind this door of many, to happen by, to share a humble human experience.
         I thank you for your time, patients and interest. I humbly hope something here becomes of service, damage control wise, may become proof it is possible to stand back up at the age you may be or motivation to take advantage of a wonderful Plant.
         We have made contact, most undoubtedly for a very good reason. Perhaps a close relative has cancer, you, yourself on the quest to find a cure for your own illness, decided that the rude awakening, if attention is being paid, is on its way.
         I feel dreadfully the chase of time and my dwindling interests. Means a lot of me, so far away from everyone.
         I want to walk through how I beat brain cancer, just with Cannabis oil and change of diet, no chemotherapy whatsoever. All in the frame of my family’s unhealthy way of dealing with our shared mental issues. And the ripples that spread wide touching so many parts of our lives.
         The ever-present family mental health menú, depression, anxiety, megalomania, borderline personality disorder, all of this, all of it placed in a blender where it goes on and on.
         Profiled and boxed off, by the fact that I’m forty-nine and have achieved nothing in education, nor work, my second marriage instantly imploded. Life in general, was always a storm of chaos, change and wandering through oceans of time, that funnel away, and nothing is achieved.
         This is my understanding of how mental health seared through my family by never addressing it and made everything worse. Mental Health issues that go un unchecked tend to become strange creatures that knit peculiar realities. This added to the humiliation of an education system, now forgotten, mix in a bit of grandma’s abuse towards my mom, how a bit of an unloving stepmother. It’s an honest account of what it’s meant throughout my life, absence of any mental treatment, this leads me down a dark winding path, wrong decisions, and grave mistakes.
         ...and yes, I hold myself as a Psychonaut, an explorer of inner space. Of love and my connections to all of them.
         I was done, then the whole having cancer thing, it’s painfully eye opening, a place where you surrounded in oddity, feels of dream like aloofness towards existing, “Wow! I am going to die...”, it hardly ever sinks in. Family eventually attacks you, wives grow more and more unstable beneath the skin, to eventually walk away without a word, and to top it all off, this gargantuan, slimy, money monger, was part of my life, I was gazing into the eyes of who I expected to help me and realized all it wanted was my death for profit.
         This sort of laid down the foundation for me to wanting to me launch myself, metaphorically, far away, mentally, socially, in some way. A metaphor that fits. It fits with where I feel, I have been left.
         The wake of the cancer just shot me out of my own life, like an astronaut into nowhere, deep into the dark hungry void of space, with just a vague hope for finding something. Far from everyone, disconnected from the world, and lost. I felt completely hunted by the people who were supposed save my life.
         I wasn’t going to drag my recently married wife, my daughter, my parents and family through, expensive treatments, the burns from the “chemo”. Put my wife through my body falling apart as I am pushed to the brink of death.
         How friends, relatives, acquaintances, you know people, just decide to make some sort of sorry excuse and disappear. Yep, for sure nobody needs that kind of drama, right?
         My whole dynamic with people was changed, the three tumors that had popped up in my brain gave me a stroke with a side of aphasia. I was once a quick lad with words, my life dream has always been to write a book someday, and then I became just a muzzled dog. Add losing my last attempt to get a college degree, on my second year, and I simply couldn´t write my own name, much less study Business Administration.
         The loss of a mother, who I loved with all my heart, and my very first person to open the doors of chaos to me. One day early in the morning, in my groggy fog I was rushed out to an airport. She had become just the lady who abandoned me, who shielded me from Gene, a violent drunk and the growing violence. Her life imploded while I lived at her aunt’s house. The woman who said she was my Mom, was a saddened stranger, desperate, the woman I would try effortlessly to bring back to life, make her smile, have a mom. It just turned out to be a very bitter and long failure.
         All I wanted was to make my mother happy.
She fell to pieces, an over controlling psychopath father’s egomaniacal deeds and cackling. It all became a matter of, containing my mother, neutralize her so she can’t drink herself to death, smoke crack cocaine, or morphine. Somewhere to die off where she wouldn’t bother anyone. But boy, did she get those laughs at family meals, everyone got a good hoot at the things she shared, or was it at her...
I had just turned Ten, and in a dazedly stupor I was in a barrage of blinding airport light, planes, and just a few years before, what was home somehow became corrupted. A dark stain, festering from the gloom beneath the skin. Violence, unemployment, alcohol, drugs, and me standing between a grown man and my mother demanding him to stop. What’s next?

Cigarettes and leather, was what mom smelled like, and anxiety, shroud in sadness, but, even for a ten-year-old, she was bleeding regret. Acting strange, pulling me inside an airport music store. “Get whatever you like.” Her face all distorted, in my tunnel sight.
My hand tight inside a hand I haven’t known for eternity, I was cast to the four winds, bound by my big toe to an endless silver thread, though it always led me home, the problem it wasn’t ever clear the place. Off it was then, into the great unknown.
I was just used to getting as much as you could while things are going well, for so long it just took a drop of a hat for everything to go back to wearing socks made from some well-fare kids unwanted, Transformers PJs. It goes from chawing down on a happy meal, to a swift slap upside the head for failing to act like the pauper you are, what’s rare, hardly ever happens, should be left alone.
And obviously my experience with psychedelic drugs, from the failed trips, where me and my wife at the time, decided it would be a great idea to drop a whole square of LSD for our anniversary at a faraway hotel in the hills of the Imbabura province? All fancy and with natural hot water springs that even go into our room, even had a private jacuzzi with a nice Inca face that spat out the water.
Well, she never took that much acid, and now she is yelling at the top of her lungs, in a knee high filled jacuzzi, and kicking my ass outside. And receiving a nice earful of how she doesn’t want to be here any longer, and basically how much it sucks to be with me. And now with my head full of acid, I have to get her down the mountain, through six different towns, to get home.
What a freaky strange trip home! With my wife losing her shit and me trying to keep the car on the road. A really colorful creep homewards.
I sincerely hope that this comes full circle, besides the strange metaphors and oddities which are tentacles of despair, you know those things that come out from left field and slaps your very existence off keel.


2.1

Breathe.
Breathe, again,
eyes closed.
Again, and again, and

again...

3, 2, 1...

         I even made a pleasant face as I spoke into that cold, object; a "mic", industrialized, a design with an end in mind, a purpose conceived in the brains of those who made it, but still a soulless machine. I'm acting, you see, a performance hinged upon... (I lose my train of thought, my mind is full of, "Absence".) ... oh, yeah, only me animating a mask. Making it work. I was giving a perfect rendition, of "The!", most upbeat and useful version of me I had ever been able to muster up in front of somebody.
         It takes just few seconds of "nothing" coming back from the other end, not much at all, to have me spill myself all over the floor. My chipper well-mannered persona dissolved into self-contempt and a quiet resignation to bad luck, used to all the constant presence of calamity. Cold sweat and a knee buckling urge, I can barely fight off, while a deep dark pit of fresh anguish was beginning to sink into my gut, again.
         After the silence, again, the raging nausea spurring me to vomit, but as always, never without copious amounts of brain clawing anxiety. I froze, I thought, "What the hell was that?". Radio's been dead for almost five years, in about three more earth weeks it will officially be five!
         The damn machine began to pop, squeal, reverb, to slowly let way to the blizzard-like static of an absent frequency, endless wide mouthed growl kind of an endless song, of late-nights... insomnia.
         "Is there anyone? This is "White-13/Lucky420!", anyone copy... (my intentions go soggy, just a cold sad mush, useless, and disappointment creeps into my voice.), in the (I pause) immediate vicinity? Anyone out there? Why? Hello!", my left brow and raised lip pointing up, up to the high left. "Any one copy? Here "White!", I made my voice as low and manly as possible, "Old White 420!!! Copy!"...
         My mind saw how helplessly, I began to spin, part of an infinite loop, falling, never moving, just, falling. noise kept crashing along, as did the high-pitched frequency wave looking for a fellow channel. "Radio silence,". I turn away from the mic, I sound distorted from there on, "four earth years! ...ten months, take or give!"

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         "Welcome, if anyone, anything can receive..." my voice breaks at the end and I pause a second.
         "I'm still glad you are here, or not, it has been so long...", so much time speeding on and on, navigating into a place that mostly consists of emptiness: space.

MISSION OBJECTIVE:
SHUTTLE # 94.420.

         To voluntarily venture, into the apparent nothing, far into the void, away from humanity, in search for an asteroid. One big enough to become our last answer to Earth's conundrum. A last faint prayer set out to the heavens to stop an incoming planet killer.
         Humankind's last hope to knock the asteroid named "Wrath, the planet killer", off of its' course. If some poor dope actually finds success, the hope was, for at least one ship out of all of us to succeed.
         A one-way trip gliding through a pitch-black uncertainty. So shamefully lost, but at the same time, I supposedly where I'm supposed to be.
         "Far from the chaos, the nonsense, my overall experience, with people, friends, relatives, family, women, a daughter has been lousy, much so the concept of leaving it all behind, my cancer, the offer was ideal!"

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         Day after day wondering at the speed of light almost, into a terribly infinite nothingness, it's been days, months, years, perhaps I never even left. They chose to hurl my scrawny 137-pound, boney left-over ghost of the person, I thought I was, into deep space. At speeds I just stopped trying to comprehend my humanity was sent to a place that literally is constituted of empty space. I've came to accept the fact that I'm simply continuing a lifelong journey directly to nowhere.
         Everyday bleeding into the next until it all becomes one big blur of chores, measurements, masturbation, sleep, lame half-hearted masturbation, feed myself besides I´m physically falling apart. It feels, static after a while, time loses relevance, though the body shows wear and tear of unforgiving ageing.
         "Too far.", a hollowed out abused adult voice wrang out, a female's voice, from far away. From far away?
         "Too far. I went too far out." whispered my own voice so close to my ears.
         Radio barely emitting these, ghoulish non-human, synthetic howls. Attempts in my perception, closer each time to become a call, a name, then, pools of radio silence and the loop begins once more with the faint, random bleeping.
         "Too far Mike."
         For a quick instance, I disassociate from reality. Tumbling backwards in a gut hiking vertigo. In a gleaming bright snap of time, I’m abruptly standing on pristine white sand, "Pang-Ghiara!", a salt scent delicately brushed into my first pull of air, I opened my red, crusty, sore and irritated face holes where my eyes should be and I was back! Pang-Ghiara sprawled endless, wild before me!
         I bore down deep by tightening my toes into the milky-white sand, anchoring them. A swift breeze blew across the dunes and into the tall savanna grass that rustled while it grew into waves. My ears hear the wildlife, I can smell a savage white-water river miles away, the law of survival was this lands truth, in a shot, making the solitude irrelevant.
         Pang-Ghiara exists in a hidden pocket dimension, fit snugly in a forgotten space between time, worlds, dimensions themselves, life, death, the light and the darkness. A savage land oblivious to the tread of man. Almost endless savannas tumble on and on until they appear to touch the sky. Virgin white beaches and blood red reefs adorn the entrance to an ocean of plenty.

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         My particular darkness, essentially my ID, the evil side of me, lust, wrath, greed, all these and countless more, was found. My "ID" has a face, way out here, deep within the void.
         Raggedy black robes, old, worn-down, a good number of loose strands, flailing bandages, twisting and reaching at the empty. Probably from wounds only he might remember. Seaweed, levitating all about his sickly figure, directly connected with his shitty attitude for some reason.
         He told me to call him "Rooster" apparently blind, Rooster had sacrificed them both, he never tells me why, he received two dark, black bottomless worm-hole looking fluorescent voids. They irradiated a green light, "ghoulish" is the only word that fits in my mind and a deep, deep feeling none of it´s his power, it's a kind of cosmic rot, he's dying perhaps.
         Oh, yeah, he expels the same green aura as a fog, or breath, at times I´ve seen Rooster ignite on fire, a green ghostly stack of him trailing, high, long and away on the night breeze. Where I have to admit he becomes more than just a dying shadow he becomes some sort of legend whispered in the winds of the void.

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