Christopher Jones' Insatiable Ego-Sphere - November 23rd, 2005

More than three months after being swallowed up into the dark, swirling vortex and cacophonic mayhem that was first the death of my friend Jackie and then the hurricane that sank my city New Orleans I have been coughed up in a New Age bookstore in Fairfield, Iowa. People around me are discussing the pre-rational goddess cultures that they believe once dominated the earth and I am wondering where I am, and where I have been, and how the hell I got here. I know that just last night I got to the part in The Sheltering Sky where the author shows off his temerity by killing his protagonist in a typhoid-induced, fevery, existential hallucination in which he is swallowed into the terrifying void of the darkness behind the sky...I feel that I have just been coughed up from that same darkness. Was I just dying of typhoid in the Sahara desert? I wouldn't know to say...but I do remember something about Nashville, and Memphis and some crazy chick that I met on Friendster, and then something about Baton Rouge, and Amarillo, and Santa Fe, and Phoenix, and San Francisco, and Portland, and going back to New Orleans which I thought wasn't supposed to still be there but somehow still was, and a lot of stinky refrigerators painted with clever graffiti, and houses with bathwater rings, and then Portland again where it was raining, raining, raining and so was definitely not the Sahara desert but whose clever citizenry nonetheless continued to deftly deflect my affections, and then St. Paul, Minnesota and a beautiful river named after La Santa Cruz, and then almost out of nowhere I find myself sitting in Faifield, Iowa in a New Age book store filled with Maharishis chattering away about ancient pre-rational goddess cultures. Water flowing under ground. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Did anything happen while I was away? How do I find my way home from Iowa? Where IS home, anymore?