Recently my life lost all meaning. I woke up one day and couldn’t string a thought together with the noodles of my brain. I felt it was time to soak them in something with values, beliefs and ancient knowledge. The Chinese Year of the Tiger was on the prowl, the astrological symbol I was born under, so it made absolute sense for me to try and live my life by the rules and principles of Chinese philosophy.
Once the decision was made and I’d found my new path, it was like a huge profound weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Immediately at once I felt like losing myself to wild abandon. This was a very fortuitous state for me to be in, seeing as I was destined to go to a party that very night.
My heart was full of joy with the promise of the enchanted evening only about five miles away south on my new path. The darkness was winning the battle against the light, quickly seeping into the colourless sky, like black ink in water. I breathed in its intoxicating fumes, happy for it to pollute my mind once again with unreachable fancies that forever twinkled at me, enticing me farther and farther into its unfathomable dimensions. Because now I had my new path and it would guide me through the tricky temptress that was the darkness.
Birds sang at the streetlamps as they industriously radiated a yellow glow of light, an attempt by man to defy the natural order of things and to make sure money could be made and spent eternally, without rest. An instinctive desire to visit the cash machine one more time pulsed through my veins, and the feeling of the fresh, crisp notes in my hand comforted me ineffably and beyond my mortal comprehension.
As I approached my enchanting evening, I was shocked by its unnatural appearance and extraordinary proportions. It was as if the fabric of spacetime had been stretched and then a rather crude and somewhat delusional attempt had been made to gather it back to its original state, the result of which was a crumpled heap in the middle of nothingness. My unfaltering belief in my new path meant that I didn’t stop myself from entering this enchanted evening, but instead let every atom of my body and soul become absorbed in it absolutely, until I didn’t know where the evening stopped and I began.
After what could have been years, minutes or mere nano-seconds (much later when such things could be understood, I discovered that it was in fact 25 hours) I found myself staring into an abyss, the most tangible part of which was made of stained porcelain. I was retching like a cat with a fur ball, the strangest sensation of this experience being that my cognisance of it was only through my reflection in the water below my head. This water continued down into an ominous black hole.
I was shaken and confused, but then heartened at the realisation that the water wasn’t yellow. One of the teachings of my new philosophy was “Not having arrived at the Yellow River, the heart is not dead.” So I knew that hope and life was still with me. And my body certainly followed this doctrine literally as although my bladder felt like it was fit to burst, not even a yellow trickle, let alone a yellow river, could be tempted to flow out. I finally managed to crawl away from the abyss and into sublime oblivion, thanks to the trusty transporter of incomparable softness and comfort; my own bed.
For the following 5 days I undertook the necessary work needed to rebalance my accounts and play my part in ensuring that the readings on the machines that run the world are kept in the safe zone. And then like a dancer with strong thighs and an invigorating rhythm, the weekend was upon me once more. I embraced it and rode it along my path, which took me to club after club after club. These became so infinitesimally small and dense that in the last one I entered (and I don’t for the life of me remember how I physically got into such a tiny, packed place) I closed my eyes and waited for the resulting implosion of matter.
It didn’t seem as if it was going to happen anytime soon though, and eventually, I was brave enough to re-open my eyes. And when I did, there in front of me was such a strange-looking fellow that I couldn’t help but stare. His head was the shape and texture of a peanut husk, one that has been left out in the sun for too long and has become withered and paper-thin. So much so, it gave me the impression that if anyone was to touch him, he’d immediately crumble and turn to dust. At first I couldn’t see his eyes, as I mistook them for being more blemishes in his skin. But then a coloured light flashed over them, briefly revealing their greedy intentions.
I suddenly realised that I was regarding him through the thick bottom of my empty pint glass. I steadily lowered it, yet noticed that it had provided no visual trickery and that he was exactly the same abomination he had been behind it. He ran a dry tortoise head across the crevices and protrusions below his broad, flat nose, and only by their position could I conclude that they constituted his tongue and lips. He then cracked a smile and inside his mouth, I discovered gold in the form of teeth.
I knew I should have just turned away, but my morbid fascination got the better of me. He appeared to be beckoning me over the few feet to where he was leaning against the bar. I took comfort in the idea that he possibly couldn’t make his way over to me without the aid of a walking stick, so I had the gazelle’s agile advantage, should it be required.
I waited apprehensively for his next move. He wrote something on a piece of paper and gave it to the glass collector, who came over and passed it to me, a look of bored bewilderment on his face. I unfolded the paper, and saw a series of numbers on it, followed by the moniker, Alfonso. I looked back up at the old peanut husk and he was making the sign of a telephone with his hand, holding it against his ear. I didn’t need him to be any clearer, and stumbling slightly in my haste, I made my way to the dancefloor to look for anyone I could still recognise. I cursed myself for not remembering sooner one of the key teachings of my new philosophy. “ The old horse in the stable still yearns to run 1000 Li 1.”
The disc jockey was pumping out a short anthology of the history of dance music, in no particular order, and I paused in nineteen hundred and ninety-five to dance next to a fellow with invisible maracas and another who looked like he was attempting to take off. Then totally unexpectedly, a shaft of the brightest, whitest light my eyes had ever looked upon, cut through the dancefloor. Those split in half by it shrieked, while everyone else cowered in the shadows. I looked in the direction it had come from and saw that the door to the club had been opened, letting in the midday sun.
I recalled the doctrine that “All crows in the world are black” and understood that my new beliefs were telling me that you can’t turn day into night, no matter how hard you might try. So with a keen determination and resolute march, I left the club and my path took me home to where I found a basket of laundry that desperately needed attention.
Another 5 days passed where I was forced to work to prevent the machine’s readings from becoming dangerously low. It was the next weekend that I came across a teaching in my philosophy I hadn’t noticed before. “I dreamed a thousand new paths. I woke up and walked my old one.” After reading it for the tenth time, a change came upon me, one which was almost undetectable to my human mind. It was unimaginably subtle and incredibly meaningful. In one moment, the air and everything within it was clear. I tried to put it into words in my head, but the more attempts I made, the less sure I was that I had had anything meaningful to express in the first place, until I knew that it had just been my imagination playing tricks on my rational brain.
And the only thing that dawned on me was the sad fact that my life had lost all meaning. I decided that maybe Buddhism was the answer to where my ‘true path’ lay. I cracked open a beer and looked it up on wikipedia.
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