Maintaining on the Queen Mary

The tickets were freshly printed on our wobbly printer and safely folded twice and jammed into my back pocket with my ID fold. That way I could feel secure that I still had them in my possession when I felt them rub on my ass with every step I took.

In a bit of a rush, we headed to a local spot where I had been used as an idea man for the owner's editing of his establishment's offered fare. Once an appropriately twisted state of consciousness had been attained, we lit out for the two mile trek over to the permanently moored erstwhile luxury liner.

We were heading to the thee-ayter.

It was part of the local university's program, a play about a scientist who through his own arrogance wound up accidently killing himself by way of radiation poisoning. It took just nine days for him to die. Gnarly. These were the facts I knew before boarding the ship and feeling a little out of place.

In New York so many people feel out of place that it feels like home, but in Austin at the college age bars someone like me feels really wrong...my entire world view and life experience list had me saying things like, "What's with all these dorks and their hair?"

It was the same on this old vessel. Besides the dorks from the university in attendance, you could feel strange vibes the moment you stepped on board. The ship had been painted to look like a merchant ship during WWII just so they could run secret supply missions. Or something...but it had been painted for subterfuge.

But there I was, in a cramped theater in the bow of a seventy-year-old vessel, appropriately twisted, and my brain nearly overwhelmed with the idea that an extremely smart man could have killed himself through trying to show off. Deadly bravado of the worst kind, since he also affected other folks.

The show started. The scene of the macho bravado and the accident itself shrouded behind a sheet of plastic. Neat, I thought.

Memory as a layer...the true events of history are separated from our experience by being in a different immediacy.

Then the accident, and soon after the layer of plastic is removed. Something begins to set in for me...the permanency of arrogance in dangerous situations. I think quickly to our bed fire in 2004 or me telling that stupid Bed-Stuy kid "You don't have a gun" when he was demanding money and had his hand in black bodega bag and pointed at my head.

In the theater my attention returned to the main actor addressing the crowd directly, castigating himself. The scene progressed and my neck started to sweat.

I had to start stretching my neck and found myself breathing out of my mouth. My scalp started to sweat, and then crawl, and then I was on to deep breaths.

Not good, Patrick...not...good.

I took whatever jacket thing I had on off quickly as the show dissolved from my world. I had to adjust how I was sitting, which had been back and relaxed. I rolled forward and placed my elbows on my knees. I think I was quietly hyperventilating.

If someone had been sitting in front of me my chin would have been on their head.

My mouth started to water while my stomach churned. I was wiping my profusely sweating brow and eyeing the theater's exit door.

The goddamn thing was behind the protruding stage. It was about here that I fully regained consciousness of the performance being held all around me.

We were sitting in the second row, and I remember thinking I could probably leap over the empty chair in front of me and bolt for the door if I needed to.

Just maintain, dammit!

For what was probably only five or six minutes of other people's real time, that patch of my life was focused on simply maintaining. "Minutes" is not a word I would use to describe that patch. More like a few hundred "hold-your-shit-togethers".

It reminded me of summer evenings past where myself and my partner in crime, after ingesting various things by various means, would jabber endlessly at the young people of Roseville, and occasionally get twinges that could interrupt stories in mid-sentence.

Once the show got to intermission after an over one-hundred-minute first act (no fucking joke), I had a laugh and told Corrie, "Wow. For a few a minutes there I had a hard time maintaining."

Her response was the same heard countless times by heads who, after having a rough time on a psychedelic or after having been in some other twisted state, tried explaining those rough moments to squares (a breed of folk to which Corrie does not belong):

"Rilly? Crazy."

Not really. Just the way it goes sometimes.