While researching a few details for my novel this afternoon, I came across a declassified CIA document about detaching from time and space through experiments with “color breathing” and “energy balloons.” There’s also a discussion about weaponizing Tibetan metaphysics and techniques involving the frequencies of an air conditioner. It felt like a document that I shouldn’t look at for very long.
I’m already detached from time and space. Each day feels as if I’m waging the same staring contest with my screens. I’m getting restlessness and craving the road. America is eating itself alive these days, no doubt, but I want to fall in love with this country again, with the physicality and widescreen weirdness of it all. I remember speeding across a blank Oklahoma plain dotted with pump jacks and cattle pens. I thought I was hallucinating when replicas of Buckingham Palace, the Roman Coliseum, and the Arc de Triomphe appeared on the horizon, surrounded by dancing lights that advertised cheap steak and the loosest slot machines east of the Rockies. The disorienting effect wouldn’t have been out of place in a CIA report.
