I wasn’t sure how we were going to manage. Or to be more specific, how I was going to manage. Because If I didn’t manage, we would likely die. We were on some windy road on the way up to some trailhead from which we were going to go on a multi day hike. Unless I fell asleep, which was fast becoming an inevitability, we would go a multi story crash to the earth. The only consolation was that we most likely not only not see it coming, as it was pitch black, but we would also die quickly and painlessly.  At least that’s what I’d hoped, or at least that’s what I probably had been planning on hoping had I fell asleep at the wrong moment. My friends of course were no help. All sleeping. The only company I had was the quickly lulling tones of In a Gadda Da Vida. It was way past the lyrics, and into the repetitive sleep inducing riff. No other stations came in. And I didn’t dare drive in silence.

There is an interesting story behind that song. I heard from an old roomate that one of the band members came home drunk one night, with a great idea for a song. And he said that because he was drunk, he slurred his words, and the song came out with the the words slurred. Funny how that works. If somebody does something, and they made a mistake while they were doing it, but they keep the mistake to themselves, nobody knows it’s a mistake, and they just keep repeating it over and over and over.

Like that one scene in Fight Club, where one of the characters was trying to get across the point that some dead guy was a real person, and they misunderstood and repeated his name over and over again. Now there was a movie based on a misunderstanding.  It was like a misunderstanding inside of a misunderstanding. 

It’s wierd when you have thoughts like that. Like you’re sitting there, now, reading all these letters put together to make words. And you can feel the feeling of yourself sitting in your chair. And you can see all the things on the outside of this particular column of words with your peripheral vision. And that, of course, leads you to think those thoughts. And thinking those thoughts, naturally, means that you have more thoughts about those thoughts, and even maybe about the thought before that. Until you can forget, now, the original thought that led to this one. Which is strange because just by choosing to point your thoughts in a direction that can lead you to realize that, most people, like you, can understand that thoughts produce results. And when you just take a breath, and feel the air going in and out of your lungs, you can choose good results that you want to be able to achieve easily, and by breathing that certain way, you can realize it’s not so hard after all. It actually can make it natural to live life easily.

But, yea, I was totally surprised when Ed Norton’s character and Brad Pitts’ were the same guy. When they were fighting after that part of the movie, I wasn’t really sure who to root for. I guessed it all worked out in the end, though.

And the views on the way back after our hike were incredible.  The cliffs were really high. Had I actually fallen asleep and crashed off the side, I might have woken up from fear for a little bit, and then probably fallen back asleep on the way down. My friends probably never would have noticed until after we were all dead. Then they would’ve probably been really mad at me.  All that planning, and we wouldn’t have been able to go hiking.

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