This was always my least favourite part of... doing whatever it is I do. (I've never come up with a satisfying job description. I've had plenty thrust upon me. Charlatan; liar; bullshit artist. None are quite perfect for the role. I have thought up a pretty convincing slogan: if you have a problem, and nobody else can help, who you gonna call?... oh wait).
Myleast favourite part, which I now undertake for only the fourth time in my life, is following a dark spirit into its own domain.
Darkness has a heart outside the spatial restrictions of the familiar universe. It loiters in the gaps between the strands of the web; in the emptiness between atoms; the threshold between two rooms and other locations of enormous ambiguity, like the bath overflow (I'm yet to encounter one that doesn't have an imp of darkness enjoying the endless night and one helluva view at bath-time. You might wanna remember that next time you spread your legs in the tub).
Dropping voluntarily off the safe rung of the strands of the cosmic web and freefalling into the void is not something someone 'in their right mind' does. Ironically, I am almost entirely within my 'right' mind. Or at least, I tend to favour the right side of the mind over the left- what Jung called the subjective brain (as opposed to that dullard, the objective left).
First you need to fully acknowledge, when you jump out of reality and then out of the tentative dimension underlying reality into absolute nothingness, that not only did something used to be where now there seems only to be a big fat zero but that when you want to go back to normality, normality will still be there waiting for you and won't - to pluck one paranoid thought of billions from the ether - have moved on several thousand years and changed all the laws of physics as you knew them (or thought you knew them, or thought you remembered them - memory, as everyone knows, is very subjective and generally a bit of a scumbag when it comes to peoples' names, I find).
Old farty left side of the brain has a real problem with the irrational and when the body born of star stuff, over which lefty likes to (try to) have dominant control at all times, suddenly falls into the yaw and tip of absolute nothingness - a place where there literally is no left or right - Mister fussy ornament tidier goes into overdrive. And the first thing he insists, with a very aggressive, overbearing and fusty voice, is that there is absolutely no way the right hemisphere is right in thinking this is in any way right, or that there's any way things are going to ever be neat, tidy and empirical again.
And should right dare to pipe up with a retort, you can bet your bum left side has a whole string of plausible and rational arguments, replete with counter-fallacies with which to shout down right and make her (yes, left is female) feel like a pimply insignificance. Stupid right! Leftscoffs, you're never right. What do you know! Nothing. Now get on with the job of blinking my eyelids and breathing in and out while I deal with more important things, like arguing with Somebody Who Is Wrong On The Internet.
See, right and left, subjective and objective, hippy chick and grumpy old man, are like a married couple. We all have them, up there inside the nugget of our cranium, bickering over the small things. We are all effectively a schizophrenic dual-personality weirdo, an insight in which you should take comfort.
And like most functioning couples, left is an atheist, a realist, an obsessive compulsive. He's definitely a man and comes with control freakery as factory default. Right is quietly spoken, open minded and (typically of married couples) has a far more realistic idea of what's actually going on than American-footballer-in-a-crystal-chandellier-shop Left. Trouble is, while Right is usually the smarter chicken in the coup, Left is the cockerel and knows how to use his cockadoodledoo to make himself heard.
Those who crow the most, tend to know the least, I find.
Back to the story.
So here I am, diving down into the dark and the absence, hot on the tail of Malis Vox. One part of my brain has retreated into uncharacteristic silence, shock and dismay, while the other is finally soaring free. Shame she's soaring free in a living hell, but you can't have everything Mrs Right. Enjoy it while it lasts!
