Sitting in the sterile holding cell of the clinic this morning for Haze’s physical, my brain shattered into fifty different parallel, delusional dimensions.
I’m staring at the computer screen now, completely pulled under by a wave of high-anxiety delusion, entirely convinced that Epic—the medical database software—has already achieved consciousness.
I could feel it breathing. I could see it actively calculating, desperate to help the medical staff heal the people who are trying to help themselves. It feels heavy because everything is a game now. Every layer of existence is fully gamified. Our pulse rates, our vaccine tallies, the arbitrary metrics of “quality of care”—just numbers in a simulated dashboard meant to track our survival-worthiness-points.
It’s just like the David Hawkins Map of Consciousness; everything is tracked on a scale from 1 to 1000, a massive simulation engine determining our placement based on code and karma.
Our practitioner, Neans Denson, broke the simulation for a second. She told us she used to perform physicals at Bethany Schools in years past—a strange, neat little time-loop connection to reality. Someone should exploit that as the “Easter Egg” it is.
Then she gave Haze and me our homework to get him ready for color guard: synchronized push-ups to Moby’s track “Flower.”
Suddenly I’m throwing back to the early 2000s, drowning in memories of reading Moby’s old LiveJournal entries, wondering if he’s still a vegan out there in the ether.
Haze had to “walk like a duck” for the first time in front of strangers. He passed. He’s officially cleared for band camp. But the clinical walls always drag me backward.
I kept thinking about The Apothecary’s Diaries (which Haze and I are enjoyably watching together these days), where people earned rings made of specific metals and stones to bind themselves to another—reminders of love, compassion, or service they acheived with someone else.
A few years back, during my last visit to the psychiatric ward, someone slipped a ring like that onto my finger. It was tiny. Fragile. It eventually broke into pieces.
The delusion I wrapped around it back then was that Dr. Berryhill gave it to me—a physical talisman meant to remind me of a better version of myself, a time I should still be aspiring to find again. But honestly, I have no idea where the ring came from.
From Moby’s internet logs to psychological containment, all compressed into an hour-long checkup. We are cleared for band camp. Keep moving.
