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.

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 I)

A classic New Mexican adobe home.

In other news, Dan's driver's license rather inconveniently expired while we were in Europe last year, which sucked balls for me because the Southwest is WAY bigger than we previously thought or even really expected. 

Case in point: I drove through the crazy ass tornadoes that hit Dallas pretty badly at the beginning of April. Two of them. For twelve point five hours. That's 750 minutes. I just googled that because I can't do math it's easy. 

And I can't do math.

Anyway! Only three days after our ride to Dallas, I drove eight hours to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Then, just four days after that, I drove another nine hours to Scottsdale, Arizona. Somewhere along the sixth hour, I became delusional. 

This is that story.

Green alien tree.

We were listening to Coast to Coast AM, an excellent radio program and podcast that just so happens to cover my favorite topics: conspiracy theories, time travel, UFOs, life after death, alien abductions, and other unexplained slash inexplicable phenomena (see what I did just there? I spelled out the punctuation mark period Pretty funny right question mark This is probably so annoying for you guys comma but I think it apostrophe s pretty hilarious period Sorry period I promise not to do it again period After this one right ellipsis now.).

The host is George Noory (or as Dan and I so fondly refer to him: "Georgie Boy") and his guest was Russell Targ, a physicist who had been successfully using astral projection to aid the United States during the Cold War, a project funded by the C.I.A.

Maybe I should also mention here that it was late, and dark, and we were riding on steeply curving mountain roads.

The previous hours had been pleasant, even serene, as we drove along the interstate through majestic desert scenes: the simple adobe houses and putty-colored dust of the New Mexican landscape gave way to exotic flora and colorfully striated rock formations. We pulled over several times to marvel at the beauty and sheer enormity of the formations and, though I tried, no photo ever really captured the bittersweet feeling of rapturous insignificance those rocks give rise to.

Typical flora of Arizona.

Our frequent stops were probably what led to my downfall, as I quickly turned from a cooing, Mother Earth-loving, sweet-as-pie tree-hugger to a wheel-gripping, road-raging monster with my shoulders crunched up around my ears in white-knuckled tension.

Although I have something of a lead foot when driving (I do as the Italians do and consider interstate speed limits as mere suggestions), I slowed down as we spiraled our way to the top of the mountain: the sunset had been so bright it left me with a temple-splitting headache, so I turned my attention to the radio program and listened as Russell explained methods of "remote viewing" - that is, how to compel oneself to achieve an out of body experience.

He had trained a team of Army Intelligence officers how to find and gather information on Soviet targets, and to accurately describe and experience what was going on in distant places - without them ever leaving his laboratory. It was fascinating, especially later as he conducted one such experiment on air, by placing an object behind his chair and asking listeners to sketch what they saw on paper, without being analytical or naming it at first.

Dan and I played along, and it was fun for awhile. Of course, I couldn't make my own sketch since I was driving, but I attempted to clear my mind and allow the universe to tell me what was behind Russell Targ's chair. I saw warm fuzziness, which I presumed to be the body of a beloved pet - a sleeping cat, perhaps. I saw something flutter to the ground, and I thought it could be a stack of papers, or a pile of reports. I saw the sharp drop of cliffs to my left and - Great Lion of Judah! FOCUS ON THE ROAD WOMAN!

Mexican Day of the Dead skeleton woman: a sign of things to come.

I swerved our rental back into place behind an 18-wheeler carrying Lord knows what to God knows where - all I know is that he was doing it  s  l  o  w  l  y. Like, 40 mph in a 65 zone slowly. I would have to pass him if we wanted to get to Scottsdale sometime before the Apocalypse.

I gingerly started to pull into the left lane. No sooner had I flicked off my turn signal than some a-hole in a supersized Yukon deigned it necessary to pick on the dinky rental car: flashing his high beams at me, zooming up within inches of my bumper, blinding me with his ridiculously overwrought LED light system.

"You heathen spawn of dishonorable birth stupid son of a bitch!" I cried. "YOU WANT A PIECE OF ME?! NOW YOU GOT IT!"

And so he did. On those winding mountain roads, ears popping from the altitude, eyes throbbing with the pain of prolonged concentration, I decided to engage this backcountry creature in a high speed death match.

(Thanks for reading. Come back again for the second installation of this two-part series.)

Correspondences: Cat and Human

Hello friends. I'd like you to take a moment to go back now, back to the short while ago when you turned on your computer. Maybe you have a little internet routine: perhaps you check your email, have a look at Twitter, do a little Facebook stalking. After that you might have thought to yourself, "Hey Self, I wonder if Of Revolt has updated lately? Maybe she's got some great photos of California, or perhaps she's reminiscing about the warmth of spring in the south of France? I ought to click over and see what she's up to."

So you did: maybe you typed the URL into your browser, or - bless your little heart - scrolled over to your bookmarked sites. And when you did, you saw this:

Just your average creepy housecat, sitting on a ledge and
sticking her tongue out because she hates life.

Okay, so it's not exactly LOL Cats, but it IS kind of weird and funny on its own. But then, just I was about to leave this cat photo up as a post by itself, I stumbled upon this little gem sitting innocuously in my iPhoto folder: 

Same. Eyes. EXACTLY.

And therein lies the proof that I was not kidding when I told you that I have the personality and disposition of a disgruntled housecat.

Good day sirs.