To: Gravity
From: jericho
Subject: the trick is not to bleed

for the most part this is gonna be kind of a half-assed recollection and it certainly doesn't capture the feeling as a whole. i'm still too spooked to really do that and i'm not sure i ever can.

anyway, here's what happened, kids...

it just fucking spiraled. that's been a theme lately, either spiraling down or laterally drifting. sitting here at the desk. moby was on, i was having a pretty cool time, and then i could feel my heart racing. And wouldn't you know that that was the start of the end of it. though i wonder where the beginning was these days.

a lot of what went through my head as i watched some name named mitch (please take no offense to any of this...) spit back my phone number that i had never given him and then see my address pop up on the screen without me adding that either. i thought back to all the weird things happening on irc lately, since i haven't been reading gravity. all the times i came back to my account with strange /msg names in the tabkey, the bouncing back and forth between lsd.gravity.edu and the undernet, the weird messages i'd been getting... and i started thinking someone was watching me. not someone but Someone with a very big capital S. anon started mentioning all the weird vehicle accidents lately. so i bailed. physically. on the computer... i left it connected. took my wallet and my datebook and my keys... and was aiming for the park. but somehow i wound up in the mission district, a not so very nice neighborhood. every corner i turned i felt like i was being redirected by these people i saw again and again. as though they were trying to narrow down a search for someone. and of course that someone was me. and i kept thinking what had i done? had MindPlay become a crime? was it suddenly Irretrievably Wrong to try to rewire your brain a bit? i had nothing on me, except my ids and stuff when i finally sat down on a curb, crying, and the police rolled around. said i looked kinda out of place in that neighborhood. and i'm thinking well no shit. i have no idea where i am and you're the ones looking for me. you fucking figure it out. take me somewhere, just stop shining those lights in my face. of course they wanted to know where i lived. but that's where the phone was, that's my address... those things that were on the screen before. and since everyone was looking for me and had found me, they were just trying to bust me for something. MindCrime, i guess. so i had no idea what to tell them. all they had was my post office box address, and i would have been overjoyed if they had just taken me there. but i was so incoherent and dehydrated that they sent me
to the hospital.

so anyways... at the hospital i wrote down what i was thinking as they kept giving me water to drink and tried to make me eat this awful sandwich with mustard and meat. and here it is...

How... Huh?... Why?....

So here i am crouched in the corner of the triage room in a hospital somewhere in san francisco.

gravity seems to have mentally and psychically exploded into not just one or two dimensions but all over... to the point where Someone seems out to get not just me but Everyone.

this whole electronic world of gravity and irc and the internet (illusion/deception?) has erupted into this tumultuous side against side against the middle. the emotions are running too high for it to be something passing. Something Weird (tm) is going on.

And there's a bottom somewhere, i know. but who's gonna be there? who can i trust at this point? who can i call without thinking something huge and ugly and sinister is gonna come down on me?

There is a whole history that no one seems to know. i feel like we're on the verge of something so dark that if we even bring it to the surface... everyone seems to be just straining around the edges to communicate. the threads seem looser, the web not quite so tight as it used to be. it's that "just being tolerated" feeling Everyone seems mentioning.

i wish i could feel like i could go home [meaning my apt.], but every door to get there seems shut.

and i wonder how much of it was ever real?

i mean, someone i intensely trust is telling me that so & so is just being tolerated and * says he feels that he's just being put up with because he's entertaining. who among us knew what the fuck we were doing when we tried to create something larger than just the individual?

yeah, i'll play the mind games to a point right up there with you, but how did it get me here to this hospital and is it safe to come back?










and well, that's where they said they thought i was rehydrated enough to send me home. but this general paranoid feeling stuck with me. and even though i've talked about it a little, touching that Edge touched something a lot darker than i was prepared to handle.

"The Edge is a nice place to be... The trick is not to bleed." -hunter thompson

i feel physically safe at least now. more or less. i just think it's time to kick back, rethink the strategy a little...

my hopes for a lot of things that had to do with you all were so high, my trust so great, and it's not that you've violated it at all, but i wonder what it is that i'm afraid of. i wonder what it is that made me so paranoid. the vast amount of information that flows freely, electronically between us all? the fact that i had always just placed my trust into these electronic bits moving around the screen, never really knowing if the faces and the souls were as friendly as they seemed? it just turned too ugly, too fast last night for me to pull it back from that Edge. and i can see now that this was unavoidable in some ways. i knew that it wasn't always gonna be happy and fun and coolly but clearly educational. i couldn't get into it though that i was the one in control.

take it easy... time for this trouper to hit the showers...

love & a few sparkly rays of sunshine somewhere,
jericho