Resurection

I use to work at the North Suburban Postal Facility, a two-city block long mail warehouse in River Grove, Illinois. Sometimes I’d work in a cubical in front of a compartmented stand with slots for all the north suburban zip codes. Somebody would come by with trays of miscellaneous mail that did not get sorted by the letter sorting machines and I would sort it manually. If you’ve read Post Office by Charles Bukowski you have some idea of what that was like, but that’s a story for another time.

I think of the brain as somewhat like that stand of compartmented slots, each with a category to store information. In the stand at the PO was a miscellaneous slot for mail I didn’t know what else to do with, say a piece of mail from Peotone, clearly not north suburban. I figure there’s a miscellaneous slot in my brain, too, for information I don’t know how to categorize.

I used to have what I called blank spots. In them I was very confused and I couldn’t figure out what was going on with me at all. When I came out of them, days, weeks, sometimes months later, it seemed I had figured things out I didn’t know before they started. Eventually I figured the blank spots were my brain shutting down because the miscellaneous slot in my head had got to full. At the PO, someone came around to empty the micsilanious slot every now and then. In my head I figured the way it got emptied was for my brain to kind of go off line, except for the thing that got me through my day, and reexamine all the information and experiences and reshuffle and make new categories to fit and explain the new information and how it related to the old.

Thinking this, I had an idea. What If I could induce the blank spots artificially? Wouldn’t that make me figure out thing faster? I decided to give it a try. Better living through chemistry, I figured. Work or not, it became my rationalization for getting extremely high every now and then, once or twice a year or so, until the experiments gradually merged with my everyday life style. I ended up in Wisconsin in a crummy farmhouse with retreads on a car that wouldn’t start without a jump. For a while though, from my perspective the self-induced black spots actually seemed to work.

A word of warning, though; along with the bad car in Wisconsin, I figure I lost ten years of economic productivity doing this, so it is not something I would recommend, not to mention the risks involved when not thinking clearly in the blank spots and the very real possibility of overdose. I consider myself very lucky to have survived my experimentation and one of the reasons I undertook them is I probably figured it would be no great loss if my brain shut down permanently.

That said, I hadn’t noticed a blank spot for a very long time, decades. Now, looking back, I think I’ve been in one for quite some time and I’m wondering if it started with the first stroke. If this is so, the implications are quite astonishing, especially when I think about the Christian walk and brokenness and resurrection. Add to this the Zoloft, which is, for the first time, supposed to take away the negative aspect I’ve been putting on things all my life, and give me the ability to concentrate more and think more clearly. This puts me on the verge of the biggest paradigm shift and leap of understanding I’ve ever been through.

I find it quite exciting and interesting to be in the unusual position of witnessing my own resurrection.