astral-guyed

Usually I don't like talking to strangers. Let me rephrase that -- usually I don't like being forced into awkward, uncomfortable conversations with strangers. Dude in the elevator, shut up, or I swear to God I'll fart in here. Checkout lady at the supermarket, make another comment about much toilet paper I've purchased, and I'll explain to you loudly and in detail why I have purchased it (wait, I already have done that one once). Of course, there are rare exceptions to that rule, like the elderly gentleman from Holland who chatted up Ang and I about his extensive world travels while we rode the Mandalay Bay-Excelsior tram in Vegas.

Then there are those rare gems in the craggy rough, the horrid encounters that are so stunningly disturbing that you actually don't want it to end. It's the ubiquitous car accident analogy. You don't want to look at the stomach-churning carnage, but you can't look away. Sometimes, you even walk right up to the crumpled, overturned car, poke the headless driver's torso with a stick, then fuck the glistening, crimson hole where his arm used to be. I had just such an experience during our last visit to ValleyFair.

As Ang and I detailed in our wildly differing accounts of that evening, I ended up going off to ride one of the coasters on my own. The Renegade, a wooden roller coaster new to the park last year, had the longest line of any of the rides we had been on earlier in the evening. While standing in line, I couldn't help but notice the massive dude in front of me. He had a good half a foot in height on me and was a relatively hefty guy to boot. Add a tangled mane of White Snake-era hair halfway down his back, and he couldn't fade into a crowd any more than giant fire-belching penis robot shooting lasers out of its chrome urethra at a church bake sale.

After maybe 10 or 15 minutes of standing in line without any forward movement, Chucky Chrome Shooter turned around and asked me if any of the other rides had lines this long. I had barely finished answering when he began telling me about a dream he had involving one of his friends. I found this to be highly unusual and uncomfortably inappropriate to be standing there listening to a guy referring to his friend by his full name (as if that would mean something to me) in a rambling tale about the vivid dream of riding with his friend driving a car like a bat out of hell toward an oncoming truck on a remote highway. He bails out of his friend's car, and it smashes into the truck, killing the truck's driver. I'm sure it was quite the traumatic dream, but it certainly was not worthy of an attempt to regale a stranger trapped in line with you. But it definitely was the most cohesive tale I would hear for the next half-hour.

Without stopping for a breath, he segued into a spacey tale about a dream that involved him following electricity through a series of corridors. "Because you know how you can follow electricity?" Uh, no, but you have my full attention, I can assure you of that, Timothy Leary. At the end of the corridor, he came to a room full of desks. On the far wall there was sheet metal covered with scribbled notes. The next day, he started a new job in a new building, walked down a corridor, and came to a room with sheet metal on the wall where engineers had scribbled measurements and notes.

By this time, I thought I had reached my tolerance for this space cadet's glassy-eyed tales, but then it took a turn for the delightful and fantastical when he revealed that he could astrally project himself during dreams. "I must sound totally crazy, but it's real!"

I blurted out "No, no, no, man! I totally have an open mind about stuff like that!" Which was my way of saying "Fella, I don't know where this is going, but if this is going to tickle me in the places my instincts tell me it will, then I say go the fuck on!"

And go on he did. Eventually it became impossible to tell when he was talking about things that really happened and when he was talking about his "astral projection" dreams. He drifted between the two as if the barrier between them didn't exist, likely because for him, there was no distinction between the real world and the misty land of magic toad stools and butterscotch raindrops that shimmered and swayed in his overclocked brain.

"One time I was floating above my body and saw myself bathed in the light of the LED on my stereo. Then I floated through the ceiling -- you can float through walls like a ghost when you astrally project yourself -- and I floated up and up and up into outer space. But then I petered out and came back down. I told my friend about it, and he said you need to have a goal when you astrally project. So before I went to bed the next night, I wrote a note that said 'I will leave my body tonight,' signed it, and put it on the night stand. You see, my goal was to get to the seventh level of heaven, so I floated up there, and there was this bright place with blue lights and green lights and yellow lights. Then I was in this cubical chamber with two giant columns, and I saw this woman with long hair who looked like an angel kneeling down. [At this point, he actually knelt down to the ground to demonstrate] I floated toward her, and when I got close to her, she just looked up at me like this. [Still kneeling, he dramatically jerked his head up gave me a crazed look like Ozzy Osbourne at the end of the video for "Close My Eyes Forever."] It freaked me out, so I floated backwards away from her. Then she said, "Here, let me give you a shot of adrenaline" and moved toward me. Then her body merged with mine."

Well, don't stop now, motherfucker! Keep going! I wanted to draw more out of him, so I related my issues with insomnia and how I tried meditation with little success due to my now-medicated racing mind. "Oh, you need to eat a lot of raw fruits and vegetables. It just opens up the electrical paths in your body. You know what Tibetan monks did? They took a crystal and focused on the facets of the crystal. I did that. I focused on the crystal, put it by my bed, then floated out of my body toward the crystal." No, sir. I did not know that.

Maintaining his pattern, he drifted into his next story without a moment's pause. "One of my coworkers makes trophy mounts for deer horns. He had this black dog with a long tongue that pointed down to hell [I realized he was now talking about one of his dreams again]. I went to work the next day and told him about that, and he totally has a black dog! Then his girlfriend called him and told him his dog had died." You don't say!

As we edged toward the front of the line, he mused about such academic topics as Azteks, pyramids, ancient astronauts, the lost city of Atlantis, and the origins of the Bible. By this time, he could have hovered in the air, removed his human mask to reveal his true lycanthropic form, and pulled a small green alien mid-autopsy out of his ass, and I wouldn't have blinked.

Finally we were next in line. Since we were both solo, I suggested we ride together. Why break up this perfectly delightful discourse? As we waited for our turn, he continued to espouse his views on motorcycles, synthetic oil, and how best to correct bigfoot's underarm odor (ok, not really the last one -- I mean, this guy does have STANDARDS after all).

The only time he had nothing to say was during the roller coaster ride itself. Afterward, he started right in again, but I absolutely had undoubtedly had enough by this point. Ang had been waiting for me nearly 45 minutes, and I seriously needed to float out of the astral plane and plop ass-first back onto solid ground, or surely my head would explode in a shower of meditation crystals, Crystal Pepsi, Crystal Gayle, and almost certainly crystal meth. On the way out of the ride area, he suddenly stopped and continued yammering. Dude, why do we need to stop walking for this conversation? I want to leave now. Finally I convinced him that I really did have to get back to my girlfriend, then he hopped the rail for some reason and disappeared into the man-made fog. He was just gone. As if he had never existed. Had I completely imagined freaky astral guy? Maybe he's the other side of my personality. I have the feeling that someday I'll receive an anonymous package containing a memory card holding a security video of me riding that roller coaster by myself, chatting away happily to a massive figure who doesn't exist. Then there would be a lot of video of me masturbating on the bus and then a photo of a burglar with my toothbrush up his ass. I just can't tell what's real anymore, and I'm not sure I want to.