Second Handers

One day, I got stranded living in the present moment. It happened when I was reading a review of some book by Eckhart Tolle (1) on Amazon.com. I was reading on my bed, my laptop providing the light in my blanket tent. I hadn't slept for a few days due to a high victory of the mind over the body: I was going through a spell of beautiful, beautiful depression. A good book used to put me to sleep but I did not read books anymore, I merely experience and recreate them through other people's explanations. See, reality had long become too cumbersome, and the traditional escapism of internet role playing games held no appeal for me (due in part to the social stigma, but mostly the lingering precariousness of dependence on internet and other escapees/players), so I was on a mission to retreat entirely into my brain. My first step was to internalize sex, which was pretty easy, most people have already done this in one way or another. Food, or specifically, sustenance was the most difficult. I eventually lived on a diet of plain boiled unsalted rice and watch people cook on youtube and imagine what flavor I'd experience with their end product. I prefer youtube because unlike cooking shows on television, people on youtube sometimes end up preparing something awful, just like real life, and they must eat it regardless. Adherence to pleasing fantasies weakens the mind, but creating the nuanced damnation of pineapple-salmon with cream sauce nearly grants the imagination arms and legs to excuse itself from the "table of the body", so to speak. The final hurdle to complete self-immersion was to learn to breathe vicariously, thus conceding all biological functions to the power of my thoughts. I completed that as the oxygen ran out in my blanket tent at the same time I finished reading the book review, and when my Self saw it's polar opposite reflection, it surged out from my body, essentially like I sneezed my psyche inside out. The book review was like pepper in the nose of my brain, its mouth full (having consumed my Self), spewed its contents out into the astral plane where it vanished forever.

Having no Self is difficult. I now assume the moods and emotions of anybody around me, my mind merely a tool for perpetuating wretched reality. Some people go grocery shopping; I walk the streets trying to harvest a pleasant conversation that I can absorb and take home every single day. There's nothing more frustrating than capturing a happy moment that can echo through my empty head and ricochet around my nerveless body all night, only to encounter a downer just before I walk into my apartment, so I am stuck with their agony until I find someone who is at least mildly content. The worst part: if I accumulate pleasant conversations, I become a source of synthetic, nearly pure positivity, which is annoying and slightly depressing to others. My feelings mimic their annoyance and depression, which makes me even more annoying and depressing to be around. So people simply avoid me until my misery makes someone who is less miserable than I am happy that at least they aren't THAT miserable, and I can harness their happiness for myself. The only benefit to being marooned on this incarnate island without my Self is that I save money on rice.

(1) Which one is not important.