Speculations 12:04 A.M.

The general spiritual experience is accessible to everyone who wants to enjoy it and irrelevant to those who don't. When it comes, please interpret it according to your own experiences, if you have a choice.

The general spiritual experience will be articulated by a non-household name who figures of authority will compulsively condemn. This name will be whispered, hushed and erotic, in the more dissolute corners of Borders and Barnes & Nobles.

Speaking my name, the pretty gash in the coffee shop who calls herself a barista becomes irresistible. However, there is no such thing as a baristo, designating a man in (physical) make-up, so how can I tell the difference without removing her pants or performing a DNA test?

The Needle

There's a giant sewing needle in my right eye. I think it's called a doll needle, and it measures about four inches in length. Sometime between last night and this morning I must have stuck it in there. I shouldn't have left it near my bed, but who could have predicted a dream about sleeping with my own mother?

I have looked in the mirror and have poked at my eye with pliers, but the needle is too deep. I cannot see its eye within my own. I know it's there because it's no longer on the bedside table, and I can feel it needling my brain. My eye, not used to such treatment, constantly spots cockroaches in its peripheral vision.

The needle digs deeper. Oh, why did I enjoy so many brands of beer so carelessly?
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Out for a walk

I know that liquid water is essential for the development of life, but still I did not expect a tiny bespectacled man to climb out of the drain in my kitchen sink.

I was staring guiltily at a YouTube video in which a boy-shorted blonde no doubt a year or three under the legal age of consent was shaking her physically well-formed yet emotionally underdeveloped ass when I heard a metallic clink from the sink. I paused the video, and Nelly fell silent (for once).

Now I usually stack my dirty dishes to avoid settling since a loud crash from the kitchen has more than once terrified me out of a nightmare, so I waited. I was just about to resume her sweet sixteenth when I heard a sound like silverware being dragged.

I popped out of my chair and after a moment of indecision, grabbed a can of diced tomatoes in case I needed to bludgeon a sewer rat. I approached the sink, tomatoes held high. Something rustled from beneath the cookie sheet that I had foolishly placed atop the festering pile.

With my right arm cocked and ready to throw tomatoes, I yanked the cookie sheet back. It fell crashing to the floor. My right arm froze halfway through the throwing motion, and I felt a twinge in my shoulder. Between the salad bowl and the Teflon pan, no bigger than my index finger, a filthy little naked man stared at me with mouth wide open. We gasped. In his little right hand was a leash made of hair, and on the end of that leash a centipede. The centipede reared up on fifty legs, and before I could throw up, they both disappeared down the drain. The only things remaining were one tiny string and one tiny pile of poop.

A moment later, sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of Bombay Sapphire in my left hand (diced tomatoes still in the right), I realized that the man had been wearing glasses. Glasses? This spoke of an advanced culture with doctors, and with doctors come lawyers, and with lawyers come criminals. Even Jonathan Swift could not have imagined such a society in the sewer system of Chicago.

Balance

The city's night pulse makes me feel like I belong. If I am just a belonging to this great mass of life, then that is okay. I haven't asked for much, and so I should not receive much. The act of receiving less, by math, equals the act of someone else receiving more. The ideal is that someone who needs more receives more, and I think the ideal is close to reality. Despite all the quantitative imbalances, there is a qualitative balance to the city, to the world.