The Night Hits Different in anticlimatic

There is this long driveway past a couple old apple trees to a tall farmhouse that haunts my memory for some reason.

Inside there were a bunch of puppies running around a laundry room with their mother, a golden retriever, happier than anything I’ve ever seen. I was fixing something there but I don’t remember what. All I remember is watching the sun set and thinking about my dad, back at his house, cooking something over the stove that I was heading over to eat when I was finished. I felt like a kid with adult privileges. Like someone still on deck for Life, not quite there yet- still living in someone else’s world, no REAL responsibilities. Just adult privileges.

Like the ability to work and drive and indulge in vice.

I think about the night I got back from that week or two in California as well. I walked through my door with my luggage around 9:00 PM, got hit with the smell of that apartment that was half the place itself, and half the smell is entirely mine- both of which go undetected until I leave long enough for my nose to forget.

I spent the trip with my good buddy Justin, cruising around Palm Springs in a red Grandam with a stereo system bumping Dr Dre, smoking joints and exploring by day, and being floated around hot springs drunk by night, staring up at those clear desert stars.

My desk was in the corner of my bedroom, which was on the second floor of an old residential converted to apartments, overlooking a street with a streetlight. I remember sitting down and looking out that window and seeing my street as though I were seeing it for the first time, a consequences of airplane travel and travel in general completely reshaping my perspective on the world, the size of my own town, my place in it, and its place in the world- and some kind of sublime realization washed over me.

It was the same realization I had when I ate mushrooms.

It was both this feeling of fitting in, of being perfectly at home in myself and in the world- this contentedness and coziness of being Not Alone, and just this One simple Small thing- and it was also this feeling of grand and new scale that I hadn’t realized before- a size and scope to things that I hadn’t yet considered- cosmic in scale, spectacular, and terrific. (horrible; horrific - terrible; terrific!)

When I was a child that sense of grand scale was there too. It’s the thing I miss the most about adulthood. The magic of life comes from that sense of wonder, which can always be cultivated, but there is something about the necessity of growing up and being an adult and taking on the responsibilities of the world for all the rest of the children our dying parents left behind, young and old, that can’t provide for themselves plus a surplus (my new definition of adult)- there is something about it that forces a dominance and knowledge over the Great Plain of existence whose magical harvests are wholly dependent on creeping through it blindly at night for inspiration.

It just doesn’t hit the same when you have it already mapped out by daylight.