What’s in my head, it’s a miracle, a disease.

I don’t remember when it all started. I never remember anything particularly like most people do. Maybe it was Nietzsche. Maybe it was Schopenhauer. Maybe it was that night I read Being and Time with a bottle of whiskey, reading along Bukowski’s terrific fuck shit, and woke up feeling like I had personally lost the meaning of existence.

This is a philosophy of self-slapping. Have you ever slapped yourself for no reason, just to wake up your meditative station of sobriety? I have done it. I did slap myself just to feel alive. In this moment I can’t trace the origin of this ‘sickness’—memory’s tender archive. But I do remember the few moments that made me think my aliveness was pure and infected with ‘God torn apart’.

The noodles! Yes, it started from there, might be, or might not. But this oscillation between ‘madness and miracle’ had a long ancestral history; it’s one history having parents, God, Mother, Father, and… one little strand of noodles. We will eat a bowl of noodles in the next post.

What did I take? My head was like inside the blender; every muscle of the cortex was having a nightmare on itself. It feels like I am giving greatest obeisance to katabasis, to chaos—to venture something forbidden. Next to the bedside lamp had a weapon—like a philanthropist’s Powerball, Bible for philanthropy, The Gospel of Wealth. Ah, did I devour that misfortunate book, which was disease for architects of oppression? This weapon penetrated me, I think, into my deepest marrow, or not. I cannot say anything at this moment because that instance was ‘veiled in moral righteousness’, full of weakness. “Devouring” it reflects how ideas—poisonous or enlightening—can enter the psyche like substances.

What did I do with my mind? I slapped my own face twice, I remember this, and woke up immediately like I had done some kind of purge to my cracked mind. I never wanted myself—or say, wanted my mind—inflicted with kindness. Was that terrible meditation?

I saw her for the first time in a tobacco store, hand shivering a bit from withdrawal tremor, or maybe cold turkey shivers. Anyway, I saw in her hand Being and Nothingness. Yes, it all started from the tobacco store. The queue was way too long; I was just behind her, seeing her quivering hands. Her hair was not too long but curled. Her complexion was white like milk but had a freckle around her nose—it was cute. She was like Ariadne waiting for her Theseus. “Next,” the counter called. She moved. Her legs looked like she was dragging them from the abyss, pulling right up to the surface of the unprosecuted world. She quickly took a packet of cigarettes and left.

At first, philosophy was a weapon for me. Let me introduce myself here in this morbid sentence: I am nothing. Full of shit in my head—a Molotov cocktail for the mind. I wanted to burn through the illusions, strip away the bullshit, and find something real beneath the wreckage.

But the more I read, the more it felt like I was jousting at ghosts—a modern-day Don Quixote, charging headfirst into a windmill of abstract concepts and existential dread. I too ran like a mad believer of humankind so long ago; I preached my own soul with horrible enthusiasm of Greatness! What is this, Greatness? But the more I believed in this Greatness, the more my mind felt cracked, sealed! I took, ate, digested, chewed every kind of LSD and vocabulary of illusory phenomenon. Nothing happened until that day.

Which day? I am misfortunate to remember anything, but that day felt like lightning on my head. It came down like Zeus’s thunderbolt, like Indra’s thunderbolt; it smashed my headfirst, gave birth to the millions’ progeny of despair. It happened too quickly.

This is the story of how I tried to fix my mind with philosophy and psychovarium and ended up more insane than before. I was a normal person once. Or at least I think I was. Memory is a fragile thing, like a spiderweb in a hurricane, and I can’t trust it anymore.

The webs that shudder—I can sense them. I had a lot of quarrels with these threads of fragility but devoid of anything I hung my consciousness like a slow hanging of Balthasar. First, my thoughts were peeled off, flogged, disemboweled... I saw my heart thrown onto my face. I was not scared, but I had accepted it as an offering, all those quartered and hung pieces of memory. It is a slow descent into madness; I knew it though.

Did I ever believe in the world? Did I ever laugh without feeling the weight of history on my tongue? Whose history? Did I ever eat an apple without wondering if it was an illusion conjured by my decaying brain? Once I tried eating an apple. Have you heard the chewing metaphors emanating from my mind? It was a situation like having Adam in my kitchen! Was he not angry? I even told him—‘Relax, it is just an apple.’

I don’t know.

I only know that I read too much, ate apples too much, injected synaptogen too much, thought too much, and now I’m trapped in a house of mirrors that won’t stop multiplying. It grows even to a greater extent. It doesn’t scream but silently stares into my guts; it was not easy to hear those humdrum backs of my nerves.

I was a normal person once. I tied my shoes without questioning whether the laces were real. But I did even with hard-some-effect. Never asked anyone, not even my unseen voidbloom. What is voidbloom? When you see emptiness everywhere and feel like existence is devoid of colors, one moment will come—it brings perfection from the Abyss, and that is called voidbloom.

Once.

I ate breakfast without contemplating the metaphysical properties of eggs. I existed without needing justification for existence. I will never forget this morning moment. Eggs silently avoiding their existence, like us. I stabbed; it bled yellow yolk. I bled. I shouted at the waiter. But what should he bring back? The waiter’s hand was chained by multifaceted societal algorithm; he was brainwashed by social-expectations-of-poached-eggs. He brought me poached eggs. And what did I do? I STABBED! I asked him. I implored upon him. I spoke. I don’t like poached eggs. But you know what he replied with cold indifference: “You can’t change the notion of human pre-established philosophy.” Was he right? Was my experiment with mind a relevant approach to my decadent bone? What was the purpose of all this existence at all? I never asked. ANYWAY! I ate with utmost satisfaction. Imagine my face having glorious infatuation of human ignorance! Ah! It is all manifested upon our inflicted skins!

Then I read too much.

I read the waiter’s face. I read the pedestrian’s gaze, girlfriend’s clitorises. Everything I read with the greatest enjoyment. But my core had a hole—slips everything away from me and vanishes in the court of ‘hearing’ and ‘seeing’.

And now I’m stuck in a mental labyrinth where time loops, objects vibrate when I look at them too long. The objects don’t reciprocate but they fear my existence; we both—‘existence’ and ‘existent’—tremble with rejections. Somewhere, David Hume was whispering, “Causality is a lie, and so is your sanity.”

If you are sane, stop reading.

If you are already insane, welcome home.

I don’t know when I lost my mind.

Maybe it was the night I stared at my own hands for three hours, trying to determine if they were actually my hands or if they were just a convenient illusion my brain had cooked up to stop me from screeching into the void. Hands are mysterious objects in our universe; they shake many filthy imaginations, puke over disgust, and scratch your most beloved arts of your brain. Do they not have a scratching thin line—in your skull? They speak, they call, but my mind’s eye is blind to the movements of ‘non-hands’.

Maybe it was the moment I asked my mirror, “Are you me, or am I you, sir?” and for a fraction of a second—it did not answer.

Or maybe—I never had a mind to begin with.

Let’s reveal the FIRST TASTE OF MADNESS.