The Odyssey and The Ecstasy

We have found it.

Truth be told, we didn’t even know we were looking for it. For that matter, we didn’t know we needed it. We could have happily gone for days, weeks, months, not knowing, not caring, not realizing something was missing, because consciousness has a way of hiding the seams of reality.

Really. Ever notice your blind spot? Why doesn’t it show up as a hole in your vision, like a missing pixel?

Anyway, that’s where it was hiding, in our blind spot. And when we found it, we couldn’t look away, and we can’t stop looking away.

For we have found the most precious of treasures in these dark times. We have found…

A Distraction.

Ours is not a casual distraction. Ours is not This Summer’s Fad, or This Summer’s Movie, or This Summer’s Song. Those are fine distractions, don’t get us wrong. Something interesting turns up on Netflix, we’re more than happy to preoccupy ourself while it lasts. We’re more than happy to take a break from our other preoccupation, the one where our nation has been attacked and is being attacked by a foreign power, and half our leadership welcomes the invasion because it augments their power, and we all know that power is all that matters, fuck all that fancy talk about sovereignty and such.

That’s a mighty Preoccupation. Countering it requires a mighty Distraction.

We want to tell you about our Distraction, we really do. We want to say this about it, and that, and did you know, and that’s how you do it. We want to bring in some history, some philosophy, some psychology, even, God help us, some Sport. We want to drop some names. We want to try some ideas. We want to talk that sucker to death.

But we can’t.

We can’t, because to say anything would deprive you of the Distraction itself, and then we would have nothing to talk about. It’s the ultimate Spoiler Alert, the Zen of Spoiler Alerts, filled with silence. You must begin at the beginning, because that’s the only way in, and there’s no way out.

That’s the Distraction: Something so deep, so profound, so beautiful, that we can’t stop thinking about it. And then we realize that we’re thinking about what we must think about, what we were born to think about, and not what we’re forced to think about. Months of suffocation, and suddenly, air.

We thought we were beyond having our mind blown. And then something goes and blows our mind.