Another Perspective

Acid-Washed Activewear

Jogging. Acid. Nike. God. What the hell is going on around here? Our AP man might have the answer. Then again, he might not.

I had already laced my running shoes when I looked down and felt that first dreadful wash of guilt. As if it were not bad enough that my footwear boasted a logo that had come to be seen as evil by my townsfolk, I had inadvertently thrown on socks and a T-shirt of the same brand affiliation.

Having determined to assimilate into a self-consciously freakish society, I was adopting a few of its mores. Easiest for me to assume was the conviction that it is good for the whole person to get out and run on a regular basis. Yet I only had half an hour in which to stretch, get to the trail, bust out a couple laps, and shower before class. To do anything less, one might say, would be to sabotage the whole trip.

Gripping an ankle and contorting my left shoulder onto my right knee, I resolved not to do a thing about my apparel. There simply was not time. I mused a bit about my friend on the East Coast who had said to me, "Do you like that town? I mean, I know someone who went to play for the Em's, and he said the place was just, like, weird. I mean, just a conglomeration of people who are just, you know, bizarre, who think and act differently than anyone anywhere else." I had responded that while this perception was a bit of an exaggeration, my chosen community was indeed composed of individuals who collectively endeavor to be a sort of photo negative of the typical picture of American culture. My stretching complete, I hurried out the door. I was a bit worried about my mind's sudden propensity to flit from unnecessary thought to unnecessary thought, and about the possibility that, due to my attire, I would be regarded by the people I would pass as some sort of demonic convoy.

The approach to the trail at Amazon Parkway was surreal, uncanny. It felt as though I had stretched too far, tweaked my back, and actually stretched into another time-spacial continuum. I thought it might have taken me a couple hours to get from 24th street to the water fountain. A soccer mom turning the corner in a sport-utility vehicle... they usually exude such pleasant wholesomeness... this one glared at me wickedly as her black Labrador barked with wanton malice, saliva flying from his teeth, half his body hanging out the window.

I was definitely having a flashback. Some of the old d-lysergic acid diethylamide-further evidence of my eagerness to acculturate, one might say-had managed to dislodge from the old spinal column during my stretch. This could go either way. Would I stand paralyzed at the trailhead until the authorities arrived, or would I clock my best time ever? Would I descend a mental staircase into my darkest fears and obsessions, or would I transcend pedestrian mundanity to spend a few hours in halcyon bliss? Would I be "seeing those damn bats soon enough"? Would I be seeing God?

It was six of one, a half dozen of the other, as they say. I decided to go for the gold. Soon I was sprinting so fast I couldn't see. My legs were components in some mad pendulum mechanism, its speed ever increasing, the logic of its movement beyond my comprehension. I thought damn! Nice shoes! At least my mind was free to flit, as it was bent on doing. It seemed, as I bumped into walkers and joggers on that trail and overtook them, that they were anonymous factory workers from Southeast Asia with bloody fingers and empty stomachs. My effort to achieve some sort of conceptual homogeneity with my fellow counter-cultural urbanites was giving me this dialectic: either it is simply my fortune to unquestioningly live the relatively good yet funky life of a middle-class American, or it is my duty as a decent life-form to carry the prime directive of non-interference to its absurd extreme by aesthetically refusing any privilege which may slight another creature. Half of those I passed cheered; half cried fie.

The acid's influence upon my mental functioning was that of a corrosive. The excessive sediment of generalized moralizations, long pondered and weighed against one another, washed out of my consciousness like hair and shampoo from a drainpipe. It seemed obvious then, though it is a leap in logic to assert now, that everything, from the grass on the side of the trail to the gasoline burning in an SUV to the world's socio-economic structure, is entirely organic. The concepts that humans entertain, it seemed someone was telling me, are mere graspings at a single unifying principle, our differentiations no more than shadows seen on the wall of a subterranean cave. What was that principle and who was intimating its existence? I fell on my knees in the trail and yelled, in the cautious fashion of trippers everywhere, "What? Who? Why? If you don't mind my asking?"
"On your feet, cretin!" a voice bellowed from nowhere. "I'm so tired of humans trying to kiss my ass!" I stood up slowly, brushing dirt from my legs and mumbling something about not knowing to whom I was speaking but having no intention of kissing his ass. "Let me tell you something about your stupid questions," the voice continued. "You people are always talking about change, and justice, and mercy, and responsibility, and on and on-it all gives me thunder. You're all following the same law, doing the same thing, yet you're so hung up about being righteous that you mentally construe other people to be committing atrocities. If you really wanted to change anything-which you don't-you'd think about yourself instead of making up fancy theories to describe the villainy of others, who are just like you."

"I don't get it!" I protested.

"Alright, I'll see if you get this, but damn it, last time I showed The Sign to someone, the fool superimposed some symbol from his own guilt-ridden subconscious all over it, and got the whole thing wrong! Ol' Constantine got what he wanted with that silly cross, I guess, but he played you for a bunch of dolts. A couple millennia later, you people are more full of shit than ever!"

Then I saw a gleaming icon rip the sky apart. The symbol for the Greek Goddess of Victory, resplendent and sublime, obscured the sun and gave off twice the light. Underneath it was the message: In hoc signo vinces! HOC signo! "What is that, Latin?" I asked the voice, to which he replied, "You'll figure it out." "Well, um, what if I don't like your message? What if I don't want to keep following the same law and doing the same thing?" The voice laughed a short, introverted snigger, before a long silence. "Well, I suppose," he finally declared, "you'd be on your own up shit creek without a paddle."

When the image no longer burned upon my retina, I found myself alone in the Amazon Parkway dog pen, puppy poop up to my elbows. The sun had set. Standing up, I resolved to call my friend on the East Coast just to tell her how much I love it here.

Bryan Roberts, a junior majoring in Existential Movement Science, is columnist for the Oregon Commentator