Sex and Adventure: Part 1

I lost my New Age Hippie crystal while fornicating on the beach in Paia. I almost lost my cell phone too, but I remembered to look for it immediately. The crystal slipped my mind until I returned to my bedroom the next day. There was my little setup–a mandala, a bodhi bead, a pivotal rock from the morning of the Great Soul Explosion 2007, and the Dalai Lama. My experiment in iconography.

In a flash I remembered pocketing the crystal in the morning with a plan to pull it out down the road over some coffee and invoke it like a crystal nut should invoke it. Crystals are loaded visual signals suggesting both clarity and a flexible openness to crystal nut insanity. They combine geological time and geometric harmony with cultural lunacy and the magnetism of bright, shiny things. If I had my way, crystals would start growing out of every cream adobe wall in this nation, followed next by mushrooms. I probably won’t get to bring that vision into being. Just as, in a related vein, I dropped my Crystal ‘o Clarity in an excited haze of sex.
~ ~
A month into Maui now, I am faux jaded on the ‘Maui Magic.’ Maui is a magic lamp Genie. Anything I ponder out loud comes true. It’s creepy, but, ya know, I’ve accepted it and my brain has moved on. Wednesday morning I said a couple of big things without thinking.

I had been sad for two days straight, destructively lovesick and lonely. My friend Weronika has been sad for months straight due to the break up of her marriage. She has been persistently moving herself from the depths of despair closer and closer to mental health and, though still stuck, has in the process become extremely insightful on the topic of Sad. She seemed to have made progress that day–her away message had been implying sadness and alienation for awhile but had changed to a more optimistic tone that morning—so I imed her:

Weronika, what is this depression curse, why does it make brains so damn lazy, and what are you doing to combat it now?

To my disappointment, Weronika told me she was making an appointment with a psychologist and considering antidepressants. She told me she’d done some research and psychologists and drugs cured many cases of depression each year. I agreed it would work on her, she was ripe for treatment, but as psychologists and Prozac don’t gel with my opinions in life, I was forced to tell her my dynamical systems theory of depression.

A dynamical systems theory can be spun on anything. They go: The thing in question is a dynamic system; it can settle into a static equilibrium; there can be many non-optimal equilibriums, stable equilibriums, unstable equilibriums, no equilibriums. These theories can be used for many colorful points, like: There is no such thing as Utopia because the social world is a dynamical system and any equilibrium would be subject to decay and eventual disequilibrium. Or: Evolution does not necessarily progress forward because, as a dynamical system, it can get stuck in a non-optimal equilibrium.

For depression it went: With depression, the brain has stabilized into a different (non-optimal) state of equilibrium. The goal of psychologists, drugs, endorphins, life changes, shock therapy is to shake the brain out of that stable point with the hope that it will reform in a higher configuration. This allowed me to propose my more glorious strategy—Sex and Adventure.

12:34 PM me: i don’t think a psychologist is what i need. i need sex and adventure

I said it. Unsaid were a few other potent thoughts:
–Just a little love would go a long way.
–I have a love deficit.
–Love is as crucial as vitamin B!
–I wish some sweet Hawaiian guy would seduce me.
–I wish men liked me.

I continued to Weronika:

me: and more dead german philosophers

12:35 PM me: i think i have to rile up passion, basically

I had uttered the incantation to Maui, I just didn’t know it yet.

(go to Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)

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