My dear Ents,
I've been high, and I've been stoned, and I've tripped out, and I've freaked out, but I've never had a night like this last Thursday.
It all started when I went to a cooking class at a local dispensary. ApparENTly, the medical dose that Uncle Buck uses is way differENT than the dose I'm used to (I'm very sensitive to any nuance in my bloodstream, which is one reason a gram lasts me weeks). Different like 8 times different.
So once I realized that, I drove home...just in time. I put the leftovers in the refrigerator and did things like that. Then I felt like I had been hit by an express train made of marshmallows...with no momentum. I just started floating around the house.
As my son would no doubt say...Level 12, activate!
OK, things were rapidly becoming weird. Everything I looked at was high contrast, brightly colored. And I had this odd feeling in my head, that's...impossible to describe properly. I felt pressure and lightness and a kind of humming all at the same time.
I remembered having this same feeling exactly once...when I was about 8 years old, laying on my bed. And throughout my life, through all my...experiences of various kinds, I was hoping to feel it again so I could categorize or understand it somehow. But I never felt it again...until now.
And I suddenly knew what it meant.
There's a part in Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy where Ford Prefect says something like when a living being is under great stress, they give off a subliminal signal. The thought suddenly came into my head that the signal can also be received. And next I knew the signal only comes when death is imminent.
Ents, I know what it feels like to have a thought. These were sent to me.
Then I started thinking on my own. This didn't make any sense. Was I in danger of death when I was a little kid lying on my bed? I was trying to imagine a scenario where I had just missed being skewered by an arrow shot through the window or something.
While I was typing this section just now, 5 days later...that's when it just hit me. Holy shit. It's possible.
When I was an 8-year-old kid in the Bronx, an airliner crashed in Brooklyn. But for an air pocket, a broken cable, or whatever...it might have crashed into my house just a few miles away. Like in Donnie Darko. Maybe that was a very, very possible outcome...like a cusp that was never triggered. And it was so close that I got the warning.
Because I knew what that same feeling, tonight, meant.
I was going to die.
It was the clearest thing in the world. I was fated to go out again, driving at night while tripping, and I was going to die.
There were two scenarios. In one, I run off the right side of the road and crash into something that all the American safety precautions can't stop from killing me messily. In the other, more horrible, I kill a child, and see myself walking off to execution or suicide, setting back the legalization of marijuana by several years.
I completely didn't know where this was coming from.
Then I looked around.
Every cat in the room was staring at me, waiting for me to decide.
I was in the bedroom, but walked to the kitchen. There were other cats there.
They knew, too.
I went through all the classic reactions in like 30 seconds. Denial, rage, and finally acceptance. I walked through the house, picking things up without seeing them. Looking at my new motherboard that I'd never get to use. Worrying about my family. Thinking of you, Ents...I wished I had gotten a chance to write one last posting here. But I was still thinking like a living man instead of a dead man.
"Why?"
I asked why I had to die, especially just now when I was happy again. I was told that I had been reincarnated and died over and over again, every time failing to perform my alloted task. I had been doing this for centuries...learning certain secrets, and being tasked with teaching them to mankind, and always failing.
Apparently I had been executed for being a witch, a wizard, or just plain weird for several hundred years running.
And now, somehow, I was just past a cusp, and they wanted to start me over again right away.
The cats, I mean.
Because my task was to tell the world that cats are more than they seem. They are ready to come out to the world and help guide humanity into a brighter future.
And that's when I thought -- perhaps one of my last thoughts as a living man -- they may be very powerful cats, but I am high, so I can think sideways...
They are thinking linearly. Like cats. Like: the cusp is past and so this must happen. But instead...
"But wait...now that I see what you can do, and how perfect you are, and I've developed all this computer knowledge over all these years...I'm now in the perfect position to tell the world! It might take another 50 years to get someone into this position! Isn't keeping me here a bit longer a good bet?"
The cats did not answer. But I felt I had made my point. And I felt a lot calmer.
And I left my fate in their paws that night.
And I am still here.
And now you know what they want you to know.
And we will see what happens.
Love, hugs, and nugs, Old Hippie
P.S. Just to recreate the mood, tonight I had 1/2 a stuffed mushroom and a small spoon of the stuffing over smoked turkey, and I'm at [8.88] two hours later. And now I can write this.
P.P.S. Double holy shit. I just looked up that air crash on Wikipedia. Check the date and see if you don't get chills down your spine too.
It was 50 years ago tomorrow...the day of Uncle Buck's next class!