Psychedelic Inconsistencies
By Emmy Favilla

When you get so dizzy that you’re running through a field of cardboard daffodils and tissue-paper pansies and newspaper sunflowers with the power of a scissor in your hand and a blindfold over your eyes and you reign supreme like all of those anime characters with their dragon-slaying swords and conveniently accompanied by blurbs of Japanese jibberish that you can figure out from context anyway and you feel cultured and highbrow and all of those things you never thought you could feel as a little girl growing up on your Brooklyn stoop drinking 25 cent blue sugar drinks with more pigment than you realized could safely pass the FDA regulations for ingestion as you listen to the salsa station booing from the radio of the guy who owns the deli across the street and you watch Lee-Lo with the one hand without fingers just knuckles pass by and say hello and you say hi back because if you don’t maybe that same thing will happen to your hand one day from 3rd degree burns from a boiling pot of soup like all the old Italian ladies on the block rumored was the reason for his deformity and you’ll scare all the little kids sitting on their stoops drinking blue drinks too one day and you’ll feel bad and want to cry when they don’t say hi back at you so you do it and only 15 years later you realize how brilliant you were as a 5-year-old who could anyways the reasoning for your saying hello to Lee-Lo and wonder why you weren’t so empathetic anymore when you saw someone in a wheelchair or with acid burns on their face begging for change on the subway platform and didn’t have the time anymore to realize you wanted to cry when you tried to imagine what it would be like to be like them.

In other words, punctuation doesn’t mean a thing when you’re about to fall asleep.

Neither do big words.

(Welcome to my ponto-geniculo-occipital waves in the cholinergic nuclei of the dorsolateral mesopontine tegmentum.)

What matters is just a combination of all the small words and small concepts rearranged in the most unfathomable spiral of nonsense that really does make sense in a terrifying, psilocybin-elucidated way, once you’re coherent enough to trace each thought back to the prior.

Kinda like a caffeine-induced delirium after 48 hours awake and one hour of asleep.

The point is, the only thing that matters is that nothing matters until you put it into the big picture. And even then, it borderlines worthless unless you have a real fucking firm grasp of what the big picture is.

Like why diet and nutrition are separate sections in Barnes & Noble.

Like how writing doesn’t really get you anywhere at all, but just brings others to where you are.

Like how nihilism is the ultimate hypocrisy. Because not caring is the most powerful conscious decision in existence.

Like how freedom from desire is the stark opposite of getting everything you’ve ever wanted.

How true happiness is never really there, but exists only at the expense of at least a minor ignorance.

Because to be aware of all misery and still retain contentment is impossible. Figuratively.

Things like that.

And in the moment before you’re about to fall asleep, the big picture is never clearer than ever before in your life.

Because sometimes, sleep is a bit more crucial to survival than calculating the annual gross revenue as of the quarter ended March 30th, 2004 for A and B as compared to E, F, and G.

Usually.