It’s the ’90s, and everyone is weird. We are the age-less, culture-less, state-less, God-less generation raised by the Internet. Which is to say, we are raised by each other. We march through life together, many of us in lock-step as we topple right off the edge of conventional social reality.
The steps off the cliff differ from person to person. Maybe your parents fight, or you have an unusual face. Perhaps it is weird hair, or too many idiosyncrasies. Or maybe you just want to learn, about technology, about culture, about whatever. The great hunt for an even greater truth. And it turns out, the hunt is very lonely.
Whatever your trap, your physical peers, the ones stuffed inside of your classroom, hear a message that you do not. There is a mould, they fit into it, and you do not. That’s it, that’s all. And so you withdraw. Like millions of others, you find your solace on the Internet.
So starts the story of one lonely computer boy. In the tender first grade, realization strikes him. It becomes clear that his previous years’ institutional sentence is not a one-off occurrence. It is, in fact, a pattern that will continue for the foreseeable future.
Upon delivery to his classroom and a farewell from his mother, he refuses to let go. He clings to her legs for freedom and pleads to stay home. He tries to bargain through tears: I’ll be quiet, I’ll be good! But to no avail. Back again the very next day.
Mother is no help, but far worse is his teacher. The classroom’s matriarch knows that he has no inclination towards learning. She has seen his type before. She knows that even something as simple as sitting still is well beyond his 6 year old capacities. But no matter. For this, she has methods. She has a magical bullet that evolves even the most spirited and wily little creature into a calm and phonetically excellent warm body of learning. The great chalky, candy-like wonder pill: Ritalin.
Unbeknownst to the boy, who continues to bounce around his classroom, a discussion takes place behind administrative doors with his parents. If he does not begin his regiment of federally approved attention medicine, then they will no longer be interested in attempting to try and educate him. The boy’s parents, to their infinite credit, are deeply offended. “But he’s just a boy!"
In bittersweet victory, the boy moves instead. He meets some new friends at a new school. It doesn’t last, parents have work to do. So he moves again, meets newer friends, better friends, at an even better school. Then a further move… But now, life catches up. This time, everything falls apart. His hormones arrive, and he withdraws to his bedroom, sulky, insecure and alone.
But it is there, in awkward solitude, with electric glass twinkling late into the night, that his eyes open and an entirely new life begins. It turns out that the best friends yet are still out there, each weirder than the last, all willing to share things and to listen. To play, and to fight.
Being in a well-to-do neighbourhood, connected to a computer and a loving family, online activity appears harmless and quietly well intended. Relationships form, hobbies appear, skills develop, and suddenly this boy becomes a name and transcends his flesh. He arises anew through the wires, a conduit for information, channelling unfathomable facts large and small to all possible corners of the world.
This once inattentive boy finds an environment aligned with the rapidity and creativity of his mind. He learns secrets. So many secrets. Wisdom, bordering on magic. Some of it dark, manipulative and dangerous. Much of it light: bright, helpful, inspired and altruistic. But this wizardry, as is so often the case, comes not without consequence. And at some point, he has to “grow up”.
Reality, the one he wakes up to, the one that awaits him when he packs his lunch to leave for work, seems unbothered by his constant revelations. The people around him simply do not care. He begins to feel further and further away.
Social obligations become just that. Gatherings become careful set pieces, the people drifting within them like actors in a foreign play. His hands, by night full of glittering gold, melt with the dawn into a sore back, wary fingers and a commute. His ambition, embraced in moonlight, fades with the morning sun.
At work, he endures important conversations with very fancy titles: “Chiefs”, “Directors”, “Managers”, and he learns to apply patience as best as as he can. But how much self-important puffery can he endure before the moon-light warrior snaps a spell or two out from under a bored breath?
Depression is inevitable. A soul exists in one place, its body in another. A lost scroll of technical talents and anonymous international accomplishments, a resume destined to become a cog in a spirit-less machine. And, eh, times change.
Freedoms in digital exploration are reigned in, and friends start to disappear. The voices that used to speak the loudest and clearest suddenly stop signing in and trying to build or fix things.
Somewhere in all this, the awkward boy becomes an awkward young man. And men need to find ways to provide for their families and loved ones. Men need to learn how to fit into modern existence. But he cannot. He feels too broken. And then, at once and everywhere, everything becomes dark and hopeless.
Desperation sets in. One night, years later, he is at his breaking point. Death is better. He cries out for help, to anyone who will listen. There is one there, he knows. God is dead, religion is mind-control. He cries out anyways. And yet, most unexpectedly… Something answers. And even more unexpectedly, he listens.
This is how a man winds up in Peru of all places, with a plastic cup full of thick, chocolate coloured, freshly brewed potion in his hands. Surrounded by strangers and a pair of traditional Amazonian medicine men, he feels no fear in the middle of the Amazonian jungle, about to consume the strongest hallucinogenic concoction known to man. After all, his time is borrowed. He might as well be dead. He brings the cup to his lips and he drinks.
Comparisons to chocolate exist only in colour. A bitter, bean-like, basic flavour sludges down his throat. The shamans begin to sing haunting melodies and shake their shakapas.
An hour passes. A second hour is close. He feels nothing. Maybe he should drink more, he thinks. The shamans continue to sing; they have begun pounding on drums. He feels something, a tingle. This must be it, this must be “the medicine”! It is coming! Or is it? But, no… He sighs.
Why does he still feel empty?
Why does he still feel lost?
His head is still too full, his government is still too crooked, his culture still doesn’t fit right, and he still feels like he was born into the wrong planet. Hurry up, he thinks. This is expensive. This is dangerous. This is foolish. This isn’t science! It is fake, witchcraft, a useless cult of money-taking. The potion does not work for him, he decides. What a waste! What a bunch of loons!
He stands up, set and sure, and heads to the washroom. His stomach is a little funny. It will pass, and then he will go to sleep. And then when he wakes up, he will go home, and never talk about this again. It’s too much.
Seated on a toilet in the heart of the Amazon with his pants around his ankles, he surrenders himself to anger.
Anger for thinking there are any answers in the Jungle that the Internet and a life-sentence of unfiltered knowledge could not have provided him.
Anger for being naive enough to dream there is something better and brighter in the world, something that could help him.
Anger for being unable to fit in with peers who have such different, material motivation.
Anger for being helpless, and unable to change a world so thoroughly broken.
Anger and disappointment for being unable to just shut up, be normal, and love those in his life who have loved him.
It is too much. Finally, he cries.
A calm voice appears on the breeze, bringing him an unexpected sense of ease: “These are just your demons speaking”.
“I know that!", he snaps back at the voice, through snot and salt, not nearly as calm.
The voice smiles at him: “You asked for this…”
In an instant, the man dies. His universe shatters. A figure appears before him — or is it two figures? One male, one female. They exist together, infinitely, in an indescribable labyrinth of statelessness.
They encompass everything there ever is, was, and will be. Past, future, and present possibility appear with them — in them, part of them, behind them, above them, through them. They do not speak, they instead communicate to his very being with impossible precision and clarity.
Any feeble mental attempt to analyze, interpret, or translate fails to process — his mechanisms of interaction have departed and no capacities remain to contemplate whether they may ever return.
An ancient, patient being exists — as it always has — where the mind of a single man used to be. Understandings beyond comprehension and recollection are folded with immense weight into memory as human emotion and symbolic circumstance. A depth of presence too deep to fathom elegantly weaves the realities of an interconnected and unified existence deep into his consciousness.
Time does not exist here. This is where he comes from. This is where all go. This is where one is right at this moment, and in all moments. You just forgot, so silly.
A man is aware of his mind again and the entity is still with him. Their communication appears to be over, but their work is not. The shattered threads of his human-being are wrung out then straightened with grace and love. The entity performs their work with such joyful ease; each twist bleeding out darkness, each re-arranged thread brighter than sunlight. Its work is so gruesome, yet it does not toil; it is pure joy.
On some level, the man registers being on the floor of a hallway. Someone helps him into a shower. He is covered in vomit, yet immaculate, clean to the pure centre of a soul he never knew existed. He tries to leave the shower, his face glowing in the light of an unseen sun before a young boy almost forgotten dives head first into his heart. He falls to the floor complete and crushed with an absolute unawareness of who, what, or where is occurring at present.
What are these clothes for?
He babbles something with his face-hole.
What language is this? He wonders in shapes.
Does he speak the same language? He tries to vocalize… Oops! Wrong shape.
Hmmm. That does not sound the same. Somewhere a beautiful voice is singing. His physical body returns to its space. Its location, its purpose, its feeling of identity, still too far outside the grasp of any of its senses. At once, an ensemble of beings stands before him. Tall, feminine, angelic, bright, loving, joyful and more than a bit silly.
They sing for him, and just for him. He is embarrassed, he does not deserve it. He tries to hide from the love, but it is futile. He does not deserve it, he tells them, he urges to them. This is the truth, he knows it and knows it deep, as deep as it goes. They refuse to listen. But you do! They insist. You do!
Arms of a transcendental length reach to him from the world from which he just returned. They rub his back… A gentle shush washes away his anxieties as his mind returns to his surroundings.
Am I broken?
"…Shhh…"… they giggle and embrace him.
Who was that?!
"…Shhh…", they giggle again, beautiful and full of music.
They laugh because they know his soul is going to be back within his body soon, the prior question an indication that his two-eyed humanity is taking hold again.
They stay with him for an eternity. Capable of nothing but love, they accompany every thought back into his mind as he slowly comes to grips with who he is… where he is… what he is. A soul has returned and whatever existed in its place has been released into pure love.
After, he returns North to the world of the technical, where countless internet packets stream across borders and into homes, carrying lost spirits. But he is different. He is healed, he is whole. The shamans call it medicine. And now he understands.