Millennial Madness

Mellinnial Madness
[Hang on tight boys and girls, this one is a quite long ramble about New Year’s Eve…]

There it is…2000…no nuclear explosions, no plagues, no riots, famine, or chaos…just the passing of a day…
Oh, but what a day it was! United celebrations around the world…extreme intensities of happiness spreading about the globe.
I was at one such gathering…and the single best moment was an eternity of instances…at 12:22am

A gathering of friends…
All had known each other through people in the group, but some of us meeting for the first time…
The setting…Agent Scolley’s house…the total ‘anti-FBI agent’ if there ever was one…think amazingly cool monetarily comfy hippie type…yeah, that works…Him being the host of the ‘gathering’…a Smoky Mountain log cabin type house on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere being the setting…complete with a cleared out view twenty miles towards the spot where the first sunrise of the year 2000 will occur [well, for us anyway]…

I’d spent the last few months growing mushrooms for this event, and had actually made enough for everyone to take a whole quarter ounce of them [regular ‘ole garden variety P Cubenis kind…but that much is just an incredible amount].

It was getting near 10pm and people were itching to start the trip…[I was trying to hold out for two people that were going to be late]…eventually, I gave in and I passed out everyone’s capsules and/or dried mushrooms [I had a bit of both…Oh wait…time for a tangent{meow} now…Just in case there’s any ‘agents’ from any governmental organization trying to use this ‘entry’ as a way to get me busted, I’ll state here and now for the record that I, and I alone grew them for that party and just for that party…no one but me had them, and there’s nothing left here in the house…sorry …Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe I’m being paranoid, but hey, at least I and everybody is covered.]

I’d made the mistake of drinking and smoking a bit before injesting [something I normally don’t do], and it wasn’t too longer after that I started to loose it…
I quickly became the most vocal…The harder the mushrooms kicked in, the more it seemed that everyone was just zoning into the fire…everyone sitting around but me…just staring…all quite and solemn….I couldn’t help it…bubbling with energy, I laughed like a maniac, giggled like a madman, and just annoyed everyone in general I lost it…rambling and screaming, I didn’t have a clue what was happing around me…lights and darkness morphed into a kaleidoscopic pattern of undulating latticework before my mind…
I suddenly felt like an unleashed whippet…
I WAS the Y2K bug!!!…
Reality couldn’t be perceived anymore except for an occasional ‘snapshot’…I’d be like I’d catch once clear look at reality around me, like a picture, but then instantly the whole image would pixelate and disperse into an amazing array of patterns…then again, another ‘snapshot’ which would again, just as quickly, disperse.

At the time, I thought everyone was trying to be all quite, sacred, and holy for this monumental event…but damnit…This was a time for screaming with ecstatic joy…and the more I tried to stifle the energy, the more I giggled…and the giggles turned into uncontrollable laughter, and the laughter just spread from there…eventually I could bring myself back down to the giggles, but could never end up just being quiet…
I later found out that it was just Scotty who wanted the music shut off for just a moment to ‘cope’…but his request seemed to spread throughout all the group…but me…
I got wrapped in this cycle of saying "Sshhhhhhh….supposed to be quiet because this moment’s all sacred and holy"…
I felt like an atom in constant motion, and knew that the others were trying to become ‘still’…but knowing we were all atoms, I knew they were trying to deny their natural state [that being movement], so I kept at ‘it’…
I became some sort of M.C…My personality was gone, but instead I was flooded with the ‘cult of personality’…the best way I could describe it…I was Jim Breuer…I was Tom Green…I was Robin Williams [someone said]…I was the M.C. of the show at the Restaurant of the End of the Universe [by Douglas Adams…you know]…I was the crude ‘Monk’ in Tibet from that movie ‘the Golden Child’ [not that I enjoyed that movie or anything, but that’s who I felt like at times]…There was that whole thing of the ego loss from the mushrooms, but all these other interpretations of egos kept flooding into my being as I stumbled, mumbled, jumbled, and tumbled around in front of my once friends…
Now, it wasn’t like I was trying to be those people, but as things were coming out of me, a small part of the back of my brain would notice the influence from those particular people on whatever actions and/or phrases I was doing and/or saying…yeah, that makes total sense.

[After looking back through the 32 minutes of video tape which happened to be captured, I know now that I was a total laughingly annoying idiot, but at the time everything just seemed so great]…I’m sorry to everyone I drove off while in my stupor…See…They all left the confines of the fire…
The fire was ‘our space’…I mean, we’d set up tents, collected wood, run electricity for the radio, had a cooler full of any beverages needed and/or wanted by man…
but still eventually, most of the people migrated back up the hill to Agent Scully’s house…
I found out later that they’d just all wandered off on their own particular trips, not actually driven off by me [,a bit of my own inner-guilt messing with my head there, that’s all].
The house which soon became this Zeusian temple towering above us, where people milled about on the patios staring down at us primitive man dancing around the fire and madly crying into the night…The best way I could describe it was that those of us [all men] down by the fire were the primitive cavemen from three millennium ago [that being the dawn of man at the time for my mind at that moment], throwing a bone up in the air [hmmm, sound familiar?], and those above us [in the Temple] were the ascended ‘gods’, or higher conscious individuals.

Of the few which were left around the fire, one wanted a cigarette…handing the unlit thing to me, I attempted to stick it in the fire to light…of course it doesn’t work [anyone who smokes the things knows you must ‘draw’ on the opposite end to get the thing lit’]…so there it was, I couldn’t light it…
On the dawning of the third millennium of man, with a blazing fire before me, I couldn’t light this damn cigarette…
I turned to look at the others vegetating around the fire and begged for a lighter…a simple flint and tinder device…
three thousand years of civilized evolution and I couldn’t get a simple little fire device to light this frickin’ smoke!!!…meanwhile, behind me, the fire blazed on.

Then I realized one of our group was just sitting there, head between his hands, and staring down into the dirt [well, ok, I’d noticed him doing this before, but I’d just remembered to come back to him at that moment]…forget about the damn lighter and whoever it was that wanted the cigarette…I had a new mission…
See, right over our heads was the cleanest, purest, most beautifully untainted virgin sky of stars that I’d ever seen in my life…there it was…not obscured by city lights or pollution…just a little firelight…but all around, as far as you could see…stars….and this one friend sitting there, staring into the dirt for who knows how long…tripping into who knows what…
It became my mission to make this man look up…
You know, not a hard thing to do…"Hey man, tilt your head and look up."…just a simple twisting of muscles causing a tilt of the neck…
But you know what…try as I might, he wouldn’t do it…
Even others tried to join in with me…but I drove them away…don’t make a big deal out of this I said…it’s just a tilting of the head…Bud, please, look up…the Universe is up there as your playground…spread out over us all…please look up…
he wouldn’t…
SO, I moved on…[I later found out that he was tripping into the thought that he was in Hell]

It seems that one of our friends [Scotty] had melted into and become part of the ground next to the fire…we all saw it…we all accepted it…

It all hit me at once:
Oh sure, we might have evolved enough as a species to build this house, and clear this land, but to save my life, while standing in front of a blazing fire, on the dawning of the third millennium of man, none of us could produce a fire making device [YES, I KNOW there was a blazing bonfire behind me, but that wasn’t the point!!!], one individual couldn’t even tilt his head up towards the heavens, another had become one with the Earth, and the rest had ascended unto the Scullian Temple…
Suddenly, it became this ‘divided’ thing…like the ‘Mud People’ at Woodstock, like the original Star Trek crew and those Athenian guys, like our Alien Overlords and us conscious lab rats…they were there, up on their high mountain, gazing down at us…separate and devoid of passion…
Things started to come together and the person whom I couldn’t even get to look up was suddenly not only dancing around the fire…but the freaky bastard WAS on fire!!! Yup, he somehow managed to get the bottom of his pant ablaze…
[See, by this time, we were so out of even he didn’t even know what was going on…]
Stumbling around, both his pant legs caught on fire and started to blaze right up to his knees! He happened to stumble by me and that’s when I realized I was hearing people shouting at him…You’re burning up man!!! He was just oblivious to it all and kept walking around…I grabbed him, but he tried to keep walking…he knew he was on fire, but it just didn’t seem to ‘sink in’…I yelled the only tangible thing I could think of that the moment, that old phrase, "Stop, drop, and roll", and luckily, it seemed to hit home because he let me yank him to the ground where I proceeded to stomp on his ankles…
This whole time I was also totally out of it…I mean, I remember something about his pants already being down around his ankles as I stomped on them, so I guess he already tried to put them out or something, but it didn’t matter…his clothes were just totally torched, and he spent the next several hours quite nekid’

I thought at the time that him being naked was probably what kept the ‘female’ members of our group up on the Temple Balcony [the cool thing about Agent Scully’s porch is that it’s covered by black lights, creating a nice glow from above].

I remember looking up…
There we were, in the middle of nowhere, total darkness, several hours before the moonrise, it was amazing…all the stars so bright you couldn’t even pick out the known constellations…
Staring up into the limitlessness before out eyes….Knowing that the total expansive universe is now our species’ conscious playground, and all realizing…HOLY SHIT!!!! This is the millennium people! Wake up…here we are, now more confused and scattered as a species than ever…
You know, we’re finally at the point to be able to realize that it doesn’t take three thousand years of sitting on a rock staring at a Zen Garden to realize that it doesn’t take three thousand years in the first place to realize that we ARE the ‘shit’ when it comes to this planet’s consciousness!!! At the dawn, we’ve evolved to know this, but now we don’t have a clue.
At one point I remember screaming towards the heavens, the open sky my microphone, "Here we are…we’re all so confused, we don’t have the slightest idea where to look, who to turn to, or what to do right now…but dammit, we’ve made it to the dawning of the third millennium of man and we’re….[and well, I think here was about when I started to fade again…but rest assured, that though I did fade, I made sure to ramble on about the fact that the only reason I was fading in the first place was because I as a human individual I am part of a species of conscious individuals who’ve lived long enough to be able to create/find/or grow these interesting psychedelic/marijuanic/alcoholic beverages/mushroomages/jointagees to keep said individuals buzzed/questing/wondering in the first place, and that thought it might have taken us this long to realize all of this ‘this’ in the first place…it’s only a matter of time before I…remember the other stuffs in the second place…and such is our species, and so on, and so forth…

I actually kept trying to get everyone else in my tribe to shut me up, I really did, but then, just as I’d get quite, no one would say anything…I mean, they all were just quiet, no one wanted to talk….if someone would have taken the ‘reins’ and led the group that would have been the greatest thing in the world to me!!! But it didn’t happen. I kept pointing the celestial spotlight at others, give me a lighter, look up, get out of the dirt, come down here and find the play button, give me a damn joint!!!…whatever!!!!!…But all I got was something from like a choir, the "Amen, brother" type things [not those actual words, but words of encouragement none the less], or some of the intangible attempts to just say ‘shut up for a minute’.

Sometime around 5am the first of the Tribe was ready to move on… Others had already crashed, and none had returned from the ‘Temple’, save one…[Uh, one came back down…]

We didn’t need them up there in the Temple I screamed…We’d not only made fire, but we’d discovered flashlights, pot, music, and whippets without their divine intervention…and I went[ however you spell the noise made by sticking your tongue out, waggle it around while expelling air…however you spell that…Yeah, I know it’s called a ‘raspberry’, but it’s just that much more fun to try and figure out the spelling of ppppffffttthhhhhhhfffffvvvvvvvvv……..ain’t it?]

So there it was…everyone cocooned in their little tents, up in their temples, or just passed out in the cold cause their clothes had burned off…
None other than myself and one other dared to taunt the dawning of the year 2000…

Suddenly, there was a third…yes, believe it or not, the one who’d previously blended into the dirt around the sacrificial fire had now returned…
[Just to make sure we’re all up to speed…Your ever loving host had gotten so worked up with energy that he’d puked…which all heard…another had started off so closed up he couldn’t even do the simple act of tilting his head up towards the stars…then when he did open up, he turned into one of those Buddhist Monks who’d torched themselves with fire to prove their worth…[later he told me that he threw his watch and class ring into the fire]…he ended up naked around the fire he opened up so much.

Scotty…came back from the living dead to join in the new dawn… Ok, ok…
Way back when I mentioned that the first of the tribe left…she’d mentioned that it was around 5:15am…
I was determined to remain standing until the dawning of the first sunrise of the year 2000, and now I had a frame of reference…

The weird thing was that, the farther it got into the night, the more coherent I became…mushrooms wearing off, but alcohol or pot wouldn’t kick in…weird… I listened to the one other remaining individual [beside Scott] as he babbled incoherently for the most part…wondering if I sounded as bad earlier.

I stood on my feet, staring across the open mountain side, watching as the starry night faded into the dawning morn’…It took several hours, but I stood there…watching as the hazy light grew along the tree lined drive of the ‘Agent’s house’…Marveled as the shades of pinkish blue mist began to glow with the morning twilight along his land…you could see for almost 20 miles, and no one but us two [and a half] were awake to see the first of this dawn…
Suddenly, the other half was awake…
Oh, this is bad, but for the most part think, dropped off, early 1980’s rodie…
Awake, and suddenly finding Agent Scully’s renegade fireworks that we’d all forgotten to remember…

KABLOOM…KAPLOWWIE! and WEEEeeeeeeeeeee
I guess I might have forgotten to mention this but…weeeeeeeeeeeeeee

All in all, an amazingly intense night…we all feel bad about Crispy though.

Peace,
techno-shaman
www.technoshaman.org