Young Writers Society

Hey y'all who may be reading, the grammar isn't necessarily conventional, so don't tell me about mistakes unless you really really really want to, because chances are that the mistakes are intentional. Thankees--Psylynx

P.S. but it was indented at the beginning of paragraphs...don't know why that didn't convert over.

Jack Olson’s Vision Quest

7-26-05

“Just relax,” Jack Olson’s human-sister said, and exhaled her oily perfume. He found it amazing how he could be taken in by moods, by emotions, by dreams...and keep awaking to patterns that he called the same-old-reality. He relaxed, let go of his heart, thought about his ideas, and inhaled...

He thought about how he believed that all religions were inspired by the same things, and about how they weren’t really mutually-exclusive at all...how all of that ‘we can’t have the same God because mine is a woman and his is a goat’ stuff was just words...and that though the words might be mutually exclusive and hold a logical argument if framed correctly, the Gods themselves weren’t mutually exclusive...the entities and consciousnesses, and beliefs...

It burned on the way down, and he felt a steady drumbeat of guilt, as he felt its irritation build, and he suppressed a cough, his cough, suppressed it...and he passes the joint on...

He can handle it, though. It is all cool. Well, he can’t ‘handle’ it, because it’s not really something to handle is it....what was it? But Jack does feel something, in the way its raining on his face and he sees life, feels its emotional presence, but it is in an onion’s body, and he sees it being slowly peeled away, revealing new levels, new antechambers, new confusions...

And he thinks that this isn’t normal, because it isn’t healthy because...he’s been told it isn’t, but more than that, there’s the guilt, the pain, the

Awakening! Yes, that’s the word! Call it awakening! bUt

there’s a penis in the fire, and he stares at it and contemplates it, because it’s really just ash, and he knows that, but he sees this thing, too, and he laughs at its lovely absurdity...

Jack Olson sits sitting now, staring into a fire, and he’s with his friends, and their eyes meet and glint, and then they give him something that looks like a joint, and he picks it up and ponders ineffability, before downing it and drowning it in an inhalation...

He holds it, for a moment, a second, a lifetime, a cough spews it out, and that cough fades into laughing.

Phhzoom! Phhzoom! Pphhhzoom!

He awakes, he dreams, he listens in his listless way, and then, he’s back behind his closed eyes, watching Pong be played in his arcade mind, and everything makes these electrical phzoom! sounds, and then he feels that his body is moving with it...incredible...

Wasn’t there something he was here for?

Phhzoom! Phhzoom! Pppppzoom! Voom!

A hand appears on his shoulder, and he spins around as though he’s going to complement the devil, but instead, he sees a lady friend, and they kiss, sweet supple liquid kiss, and then Jack Olson feels the kiss being pulled away from him as a storm of a Phhzoom! catches him, and he sees colors...pastels...as the lines of everything fade immeasurably...

And does he now remember that nobody really knows what consciousness really is or how it works? So how can they ever have a clue that this is real or not? How can they ever knock this until they’ve tried it?

Jack lost.

A game. Moo!

Knock it? Yes, knock it...out! Cut it out, as in awaken, awaken from the dream, so now Jack Olsen tries to, and he looks at his watch, and it hasn’t been very long, or has it been? He can’t remember what the time was before he inhaled his new life.

Awaken from the dream, awaken from the dream...

Jack Olson sucks on Buddhism, and he remembers reading about wisdom, and the lives of these East Indian peoples...who achieved wisdom, and live in states of being that we can’t even understand, well

Jack Olson is riding quickly towards them, or he would be, if he didn’t suddenly feel this certain, indefinable, growing

Phhhzooom! He’s being kissed by her, and she by him, and that’s love, and it’s soft, and, “where am I?”

Nobody answers, maybe they don’t hear him, and so Jack Olson asks, “am I speaking?” and soon...

he thinks that he must not be so doing, well...that’s okay, that’s okay.

Phhzoom! Phhzoom! Phhzoom! Images of farms wheel through his mind, and he’s a tornado, and they’re but images of the same farm, on a reel of film, from the Wizard of Oz, and he’s the tornado that ties them together, well

he can’t remember much, but something is trying to awaken inside of him, yes that, yess, he remembers that, so he flexes his arm, and he twists around and Phhzooms! to higher stages of being...

He sees God, meditating upon his heavenly plane, with perfect blue skies, with a lovely warmth, and with a grin that is infinite...that sucks him in,

in, in, into now he is, into a paintshop, and he is painting a picture with picasso, and picasso tells him–Tells Jack Olson–that if he just makes his eyes crooked, he will understand picasso’s work...and oh-my-God, it’s true, and they’re picture of naked lady d-

into the future, out of respect, he looks at his watch, but he forgets what time it says a second later and laughs and grins, then Phhzooms!, but he’s losing something, he’s losing something...

“Awaken!” Jack Olson does, and he looks around, and he sees that he is in the middle of a group of laughing, giggling people in someone’s basement, no, outside, in the woods, with a campfire in front of him...it really looks nothing at all like a basement.

But he has awakened, he sees. He has talked with God, but...has it really meant something? Meant something?

Phhzoom! He follows the sound with his body, swirls with it, runs into someone and stumbles, and oh-my-God, he’s laughing on the floor by someone else, and they’re laughing! What a coincidence!

Or is it? Well, if it isn’t, why is he laughing at it? What was he trying to remember, earlier?

Meditate. Yes! Meditate! He Phzooms! once, but it doesn’t take anything away, and then he sits cross-legged, remembers how this roots him to the Earth while letting him grasp the heavens, and

he does grasp the heavens, he feels the joy that therein lies, he lets it smack over himself, and he sees that he can exist as only a haiku, a single word, a single emotion, experience, or even Shakespeare, William, himself, and so now, he can travel, travel, and just learn...

Phhzoom! “What’s your oldest memory?” Friend asks.

Well, isn’t that the question, the one that merits a journey into a new realm, a new world, a new sunset, into his

Phhzoom! Child comes, walks up, phhzoom! Birth, birth! complete sensory confusion, everywhere, PAIN! Recognizing pain, Jack Olson is not yet Jack Olson, because Jack Olson’s birth certificate does not yet exist, but yet, Jack Olson is here! Someone should write a letter to their senator, a

senator who is staring, transfixed, with war paint on his cheeks, and he’s an old white man in a bow-tie and tux-e-do, and he is moving, wheeling, his gut is confused and his stomach is screaming away from the senator, but Jack is meditating, so he wants to learn from the rapidly-evacuating senator, and the senator understands, and says, “politics is the way to corruption, it is the battle over the Realm Of Order, yet here, Order slips away, it’s a lie! There, too! Phhzoom!

Phhzoom! Jack Olson, is he talking? Wow, wow, wow, now he is but a character, being narrated by the senator, but the senator is gone! Well, let’s dance...

And this is where Jack Olson realizes that a man being narrated is the author is the reader, for they all share the bond of that one amazing experience, and Jack Olson keeps reeling farther into before him, and keeps fall fall falling into the future!

Falling through realms, through an onion, through realms, more and more and more realms, and it’s rebirth, yes it is...and some realms, he sees before him in a child’s eye, are infinite, so people enter them and are there forever, and Jack Olson sees that every moment, he is reawakening and falling asleep, being reincarnated and dying! Wooooaaaw!

And what is death? He looks for it, zooms towards it, but that isn’t it...phhhzooms towards it, yes! with graphics of mario arcade games, oh man, and there is dead mario, lying there, a shotgun in his head, and his eyes are cloudy, like a cloud, which he phhhzooms! to, and

can nothingness exist? Well, now, Jack Olson feels the power of holiness taking him, and he respects and cherishes all of this, oh man, and oh woh-man, and that’s that, there is only the circle of infinite reincarnation, because there is no Jack Olson who is really experiencing all of this, there are just egos that come and go, lies that come up in the spring and snap to dust in the fall, wilt into nothingness, can

can nothingness exist? Of course not! The egos just don’t leave those lives, but the lives leave the egos, ah yes, that makes sense, and Jack Olson sees it all clearly now, and wonders, he wonders, if this could really be marijuana, or if it was laced? No, of course not! God is showing him all this, by which he means all gods...are there more than one gods?

Phhzoom! “OH MAN, OH MAN, I HAVE AWAKENED!” He screams and shrieks, because he sees a world of suffering, but it isn’t just one or just two, it is really an infinite, and he doesn’t have to count, because he sees infinite, he understands that rotely, as a person can rotely understand one or two or three objects without counting them...only he sees infinite...

And why can’t a mind do all of these things? Jack Olson wonders. A mind can exist in the first place, and we still can’t really explain that...

oh man, Jack Olson is falling, falling, phhzoom!

He lost.

Falling into a dreamcloud, he lands head-first on time of headstart students, that’s bhk, but not BK, which is burgerking, and he can really smell that food now...

Awakening, this time is holy, and he is learning a thousand lessons that he’ll believe forever, awakening.

And what is genius, that thing which he’s looking for, anyway? Well, he hasn’t known that in a lifetime, but Jack Olson sees before him a man spurting lightning, God, and–he’s Jack Olson! But he was seeing Jack Olson! Phhzoom! In the middle of a digital lake, and maybe belief is just the ability to believe, well, he believes now, yes, yes, yes, he does.

“Wake up, Jack Olson, do you believe in me?”

“Who are you?” Jack asks, because he’s surrounded by darkness, infinite pools and realms of darkness...

“Do you see how the world is but one realm, a great realm of great order and great safety?”

Yes...

“And how the people are insane, because they eat and are trained to become bored and overstimulated and watch TV and have apathetic minds, and even worse than all of that, they’ve been trained to believe that the world is doomed and that there is nothing that thbey can do about it, isn’t that terrible? Don’t you wonder how many cultures that’s happened too?”

And feel that place that is a classroom, where the teacher talks about these strange people that just vanished, that were stupid enough to breed until there wasn’t enough natural resources, no place to go, and then they collapsed, oh how sad, and

Phhzoom!

Jack Olson looked around. Everything was calm now, he was sitting by a campfire with friends. Everybody was serious and normal...

“Your turn man,” someone said, handing him a joint.

Jack Olson looked to his clock and stared. It hadn’t happened yet.