Song Of The Day: Hallelujah / Leonard Cohen
Word Of The Day: Scelidate / Having legs; legged

I've been sick. Two days, flat on my back. As always, got it from my daughter. In that regard, daughter's are like LSD. My dot hit me with a dose of sick so severe it induced those fevered hallucinations normally adminsistered through illegal means. But this was free. Prostrate, temperature of 104, I had a nice long chat with Bjork. For real. All I remember from the exchange is Bjork's squeeky little pixie voice telling me

"Stuart, you're mirageing".

I was like, "Word is 'mirage'. It's not a verb. You can't..."

"That's because you're mirageing. You don't have the senses about you, with all this mirageing."

"Mirage."

"-ing."

"Whatever."

I happen to like fevers for exactly this reason. They are a singular oddity in the pantry of altered states. High fevers carry a quality, an X factor of perspective shift that is magnificent. Of course they're unpleasant, but it's a weirdly agreeable unpleasantness. There's no synthetic drug, no organic property, that will produce an equivalent. And what makes a fever cool is not so much the events that transpire within them, but the atmospheric awareness. Ever notice how when you have a really high fever, consciousness becomes diffuse and non-localized? It is a field, and you its reaper. In the course of my life in fevers (there have been many), I've been fortunate to have numerous insights, eurekas -a few genuine Kenshos- in the fevered state. The problem is the insights do not translate, not to my normal healthy states. They don't apply to *this* perspective of reality. But they are legit, nonetheless. I'm talking about meta-apprehensions, where awareness GETS IT. Not a delusion, not a phantasm, but a real, enduring insight. Then, the fever breaks, and I'm left holding a million dollars of fever money in a fever-less economy. I can't spend the windfall in this reality.

BUT. Here's what's cool. One of things that does translate is the understanding that even though I can't spend my fever insight here and now, in this reality, I will definitely rely on them again in the future. At the time the Essential Self departs the human biological machine (in the words of E.J. Gold), a much, much wider reality opens again. Those insights will be germain when I'm dead, and I will recall them. That's another wild thing about fevers, in fevers I recall the insights of earlier fevers and they are still as profound, still as relevent, still as true. But they're not thoughts, not ideas, not conceptual insights. It's more like you put your foot back in the river and go "Oh yeah, that's what water feels like."