How to Avoid a Complete Mental Breakdown Whilst Driving on Steeply Curving Mountain Roads Late at Night in the Middle of Nowhere: A Tale in Two Parts (Part 2)

(Hello! This post is Part II of a two-part series. To read the first half, go here.)

Blurry photos of passenger side mountains: always a treat.

Or . . . not. Despite (or, perhaps, because of) my obscenity-laden ranting against this man, Dan stepped in as the voice of reason once again: "Dearie, do you think it might be a good idea to let him pass you?"

Ugh. UGHHHHHHH. Fine. I would let him pass me but only after I shook my fist out the window and honked twice for good measure. He zoomed away in a cloud of grit, and the pebbles he kicked up crashed into my windshield making tiny nicks with the force of their projection, and I knew he'd learned his lesson.

Georgie Boy's voice came back to me over the airwaves and my grip on the wheel relaxed from viselike to Hulk-ish. We'd completed our descent of the mountain during the Yukon-Toyota death match, and I was grateful to be on the straight shot of I-17 again: I hit the cruise control and settled back into my seat and we continued our journey through the complete desert darkness.

High moon in New Mexico.

Russell, at this point, began to describe the kinds of questions he would use to lead the team into a remote viewing session. The most important thing, he said, is to quiet the chatter of our conscious minds, to turn off the noise of daily life. He spoke of "nonlocality," which is the separation of cause and effect over time and space, or  explained differently, it is the direct influence of one object on another, distant object (a sort of butterfly effect, if you will, except it's not at all like that crappy Ashton Kutcher movie circa 2004). He explained how most of us already have a type of precognitive or presentiment ability, and that consciousness is a shared awareness amongst all humans (read: I KNOW WHAT YOU'RE THINKING RIGHT NOW. AND YES, IT IS OKAY TO GO EAT THAT SANDWICH.)

As he spoke, the world took on a sort of hazy brightness: the normally proletarian road reflectors now stretched endlessly as one long, diamond-studded finger, shimmering and beckoning me to come further, further into this limitless landscape which itself seemed crafted from cinnabar and solid gold. My head rolled around on its shoulders, neck made jelly, tongue hot in my mouth, and the consciousness of all seven billion members of humanity oozed out of me like sap from a maple.

I was, in the most literal sense, high on life.

A Motel 6 parking lot with mountains in the distance.

And while you should assume that, yes, it might be dangerous to drive whilst high on life, I recommend that rather than worry about the curves of black tar or the brilliant Ping! in your ears from dazzlingly white reflectors, you instead give in to the drip of that sweet, sweet consciousness. Let it smooth out all over you and leave your eyes to the thinking. You can function this way; headlights flashing the lonely mile markers until you're magically deposited again in civilization, highway flora cut and arranged in sharp, triangular designs, a nod to history's Native tribes.

You'll miss your exit, circle around this alien runway, and right yourself again.

And the only thing that'll take you out of that high is pulling into the parking lot and shutting off the engine, dropping your duffle in the hallway of a too-bright Motel 6 studio, hot and tired beyond showering, too lazy even to lift one finger to crank the A.C., and as you bury your face in the crisp, freshly laundered sheets you'll wish that humanity had retained some vestiges of our animal past, like fur, or feathers, or a tail for swatting the flies away.