STATE OF MIND



    There was this man.  His mind would expand and contract in the
usual manner so he functioned normally from day to day.  He had a job,
lived in a three bedroom apartment, was single, and listened to music.

    "I need a pen," he screamed at himself in the mirror.

    You see he had this problem.  States of consciousness represented
floors of a building and his mind was an old, manual, broken-down
elevator.  Everytime he switched states the elevator would switch
floors.

    From sleep to awareness.  From mild conversations to vivid
hallucinations and everywhere in-between.  He would ride from the
bottom to about three floors from the top and then to about a third of
the way to the top.

    The floors were not numbered.  They were all relative.  The top
relative to the bottom.  High relative to low.  There was no middle.
No straddling the fence.

    The problem was the elevator never exactly reached a floor because
 it was broken.  Not only did the elevator never reach a  floor
 exactly, it never arrived at the same floor at the same place.  A
 little high, a little low, or a little higher than before or a little
 lower than before.  Never in the same place.

    Usually, when a person changes his state of awareness he returns
to the same floor he has been before remembering everything while
previously in that state.  But what frustrated the man the most was he
never reached the exact same state.  The exact same place.  His
memories disappeared like a spark on flash paper.

    Giant teeth would pierce through and pertrude out of his stomach
as people would ask him what he meant or why he did this or that.  And
since more and more people went to him and he changed more and more,
the teeth would increase and would glisten with his blood a he
screamed in pain.

    Finally, people left him and he died from his pain, loneliness,
and suffering.