…..he didn’t quite know what to expect as he walked into the crackling fire. How could anyone possibly know? Obviously it isn’t an experience that you live to talk about afterwards while sitting around a campfire bullshitting and roasting marshmallows with close friends, sharing embellished stories as you pleasurably tip one Bud Light after another. Therefore he was filled with trepidation, surely, but also an overwhelming sense of relief. Relief that he no longer had to contemplate doing this rash, self-destructive act. Relief that his torment would finally be over once and for all. Relief that he was being proactive, albeit certainly allowing for how insane and suicidal this provocative act genuinely was as opposed to just shambling around feeling utterly miserable while allowing others to chart his life’s course for him like he had inveterately done in the past. He was feeling all these emotions plus more as the bluish-yellow flames lapped at him fiendishly from every direction. He continued forward with mulish absolutism anyway. And as the heat started becoming unbearable and as his eyelids began welding shut and as the bottoms of his feet screamed in agony while their bottoms chemically decomposed and as he could feel his skin begin the first stages of melting grotesquely inward onto his viscera and skeletal frame and as the raw pain he felt throughout his body exceeded by a googolplex cubed any he had felt before in his lifetime, he permitted himself a cryptic, ever-so-brief smile. Because this was what he had always lived for; this was what he authentically wanted to do; this was what he would die for today. He was merely walking through a portal separating two distinct realms of being; it all seemed so entirely natural to him. But I’m certain readers are probably asking themselves this question right now: How did the protagonist know with such vainglorious certainty there was another realm of existence awaiting him on the other side of consciousness? How could he possibly? Well, in truth, the suicidal fellow didn’t know for sure, but he was one hundred percent certain consciousness was a gargantuan hoax foisted on the aggregate Homo sapiens population by grandiloquent entities unknown ever since our distant ancestor Lucy found herself foraging for nuts and other edibles on the vast African savannah untold millennia ago. Hence anything he might encounter after voluntarily forfeiting mindfulness today couldn’t possibly be any more of a ruse than what he had been theoretically “living” for the past forty-five years. Could…..could…..could it?????…..
Fred's Soapbox 