These feelings are pulling like a fish hook in the softness of my lip. Leading me around forcefully, wincing. Trying to pre-cogitate where that hook might go, so I can swing my body that direction, my lip that direction, and avoid that terrible, searing reminder that I've fallen behind and must catch up.

Stay one step ahead of that feeling!

your lips and anus
a worm's two soft ends
twenty feet long; blind
groping primal and senseless
through this superfluous flesh
its contents an endless procession
gurgling and squeezing
bubbling
its gossamer sheath
extracting what is good
awash in vital nutrients
fertile, rich and boggy like the Nile
endless switchbacks; a nourishing coastline
lush, its shores grow muscle
bone and brain
a weird, squirming crop
rooted in dependable excess
like civilization on agriculture

Anton had expected the vast emptiness of space. Not really space, but the celestial aether of the multiverse. Light-less, colorless, breath-holding silence that whispered lazily for eons between each glittering universe. A disorienting nothingness navigable only through decades of meticulous research. Instead his tracking and communications display had exploded into chattering activity the moment the worm-hole closed behind him. His scanners were reporting an overwhelming 4,096 vessels; he was being hailed simultaneously on 256 channels.

The following are notes recorded during and directly after medicinally induced self-dissolution. The medium here is a psychoactive substance isolated from a climbing, flowering vine.

Listen: I was surfing high on an astronomical wave of mania the other day. That helplessly happy bubbling that comes writhing up from my bowels and spills out in a wide, disgracefully stupid grin. And laughing out loud, of course, as is custom.

I read somewhere that one of the basic personality traits recognized in many people is a tendency towards either intrinsic or extrinsic processing. This is not the same as intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, although there is some similarity.

Individuals who process their world on the intrinsic side of the gradient tend to see their circumstances as a product of their behaviors. Those on the extrinsic side interpret the world from the other side of things, feeling that their behaviors are a product of their circumstances.

There's the dream trip, in that maybe we're dreaming right now and who's to say we're not, and then there's the acting trip. That we're always acting. So first things first, dream wise. I dream myself into scenes, sometimes, and then when I'm aware, all of a sudden, I notice we're all acting, in roles like, and I've got to know who these people are.

I've drained the last of the fuel alcohol into the silver stove and I'm heating a long, round bolt there on the fire. It hangs over the searing blue flame from the jaws of gray needle-nosed pliers. The boat is rolling gently beneath me, moored to a solid anchor system underneath the swell and slop of the green sea. An orange sun hangs low on the clouded horizon, illuminating the heavy cumulus clouds that stretch from the surface of the ocean to the thin, wispy air miles above.