Dear Ansgar,
My deepest apologies good sir, for how late this letter finds you. Many things have occurred, some of which may help shed light onto your situation in Europe. Sadly, I find this to be a rather faint light of hope however. Yet the probability, however slim, does remain.
My story unfolds as such:
It was several months ago, time has become distorted. Possibly two? Time spent on the fourth floor waxes and wanes. Allow a brief description of the fourth floor. I am not sure if I have mentioned that I reside in a retirement center. The center is five floors in total. The first is a series of recreation and congregation rooms, complete with a chapel. The second and third are small, one bedroom, residents. Some equipped with kitchens, others not, depending on the occupants abilities and financial situations. The fourth is reserved for far gone bygones. Its halls are filled with the tortured screams of those searching for their minds, as well as the ramblings or those who dont mind the mind absent. The fifth, which I have never seen, is for the staff.
I found myself on the fourth floor. This came to be through a very quick series of unfortunate mistakes on my part. Firstly, I opted to skip breakfast. I was not feeling well, I do recall, and the thought of oatmeal made my stomach twist. In a place where bowel movements are rigorously monitored, a meal not eaten is as big an event as King Kong. After several half hearted pleas to reconsider, I was granted a tea and left be, although notes were taken I am sure. Shortly after this, I entered into a heated debate with two other gentleman, one of which resides down the hall from myself, the other returns to another home before dinner. The specifics of our argument flees my memory yet I do recall spilling a glass of water, which the care nurse mistook for being thrown. I was asked, politely at first, to retire to my room. Caught up in the moment, I continued my argument with the day nurse. An orderly was summoned and I was taken to my room. Along the way, my flailing earned me a spot on the fourth floor.
The fourth floor is padded from floor to ceiling. It also has a terrible aroma. It stinks of bleach and vomit mingling together. Every door is locked and guarded. Cameras don every corridor and several rooms. It was a Hitchcock movie.
I met a motley assortment of characters during group therapy. One of which struck me as a possible answer to your conundrum. He carried on. His hair was matted and his nails were caked with blood. He barked more than spoke. His greatest flaw was that he lacked the power of conversation but had finely honed his powers of speech. It may to surprise you to find that a man such as this spat out the most thoughtful and poignant observations on life and philosophy with the regularity of Old Faithful. On one occasion where we were sitting in the common room together, he went on about an evolutionary change in human senses and how we perceive them. He deemed it to be only logical. His reasons for this were beyond my understanding, yet I vividly remember his statement "Our pharmaceutical culture has stunted evolution in all physical areas. All that remains with the ability to expand is the mind and the mind will expand. Evolution is only too natural."
Perhaps you, Dear Ansgar, are a new prototype for the human sense? Perhaps you are the next phase?
Do think on this.
Fondly,
Oscar Railey
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Letter of Origin #3: Calm Before the Storm?
Dearest Oscar,
My apologies for sending this in advance of receiving any response you may have sent. I just worry for yourself in America. I have been hearing increasingly strange news from lands abroad. I must keep this short. Godspeed.
Regards,
Ansgar
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Letter of Origin #2: Three weeks? Maybe four?
Oscar Railey,
#23 208 Fern Street
West Palm Beach, FL, United States
33401-5610
Dear Oscar,
May I call you Oscar? How pleased I am my letter has fallen in the hands of someone willing to reply. Before I find myself lost in rambling thought, Germany is beautiful. Or has been in the past. I'm not so sure anymore. People seem distant lately. Distracted. Something is definitely amiss and nobody seems to want to figure out what exactly it is. 'Hushed' would be something of an understatement.
A few weeks have passed since my last, and I have become increasingly unsure of myself in this situation. There seems to be a collective taboo surrounding the mention of many (or any) of the unsettling occurrences over the last month. I have begun to feel rather anxious in my waking hours, and I feel my behavior has become far from the sheltered, quiet man of the past quarter century; erratic one might say. I have grown powerless to these queries and contemplations and I fear I am more and more of a tenuous mind. Does nobody remember? Was I imagining the hushed whispers and timid inquisitions? I fear my mind. I fear I am the merchant of these phenomena. Has anything of abnormality been seen or heard across the seas, or are we alone, am I alone in this?
No, it was happening. I know it was. I saw it. Everyone saw it. I am fighting the urge to describe it simply as an animation of reality. As if some maker, some creator, had decided to thin the lines between imagination and reality. As though pictures, drawings, paintings, had all dripped from their pages into actuality. As if Walt Disney himself had been enlisted by the universe to redraw perception. But a macabre, twisted perception at times. Or perhaps it is just myself making it so.
Regardless of the urgency and fear here in my letter, I am overtly curious of this. It signifies, above all else, possibility. Do I welcome it? Perhaps. Please respond.
With regards,
Ansgar.
P.S. You mentioned a dog?
#23 208 Fern Street
West Palm Beach, FL, United States
33401-5610
Dear Oscar,
May I call you Oscar? How pleased I am my letter has fallen in the hands of someone willing to reply. Before I find myself lost in rambling thought, Germany is beautiful. Or has been in the past. I'm not so sure anymore. People seem distant lately. Distracted. Something is definitely amiss and nobody seems to want to figure out what exactly it is. 'Hushed' would be something of an understatement.
A few weeks have passed since my last, and I have become increasingly unsure of myself in this situation. There seems to be a collective taboo surrounding the mention of many (or any) of the unsettling occurrences over the last month. I have begun to feel rather anxious in my waking hours, and I feel my behavior has become far from the sheltered, quiet man of the past quarter century; erratic one might say. I have grown powerless to these queries and contemplations and I fear I am more and more of a tenuous mind. Does nobody remember? Was I imagining the hushed whispers and timid inquisitions? I fear my mind. I fear I am the merchant of these phenomena. Has anything of abnormality been seen or heard across the seas, or are we alone, am I alone in this?
No, it was happening. I know it was. I saw it. Everyone saw it. I am fighting the urge to describe it simply as an animation of reality. As if some maker, some creator, had decided to thin the lines between imagination and reality. As though pictures, drawings, paintings, had all dripped from their pages into actuality. As if Walt Disney himself had been enlisted by the universe to redraw perception. But a macabre, twisted perception at times. Or perhaps it is just myself making it so.
Regardless of the urgency and fear here in my letter, I am overtly curious of this. It signifies, above all else, possibility. Do I welcome it? Perhaps. Please respond.
With regards,
Ansgar.
P.S. You mentioned a dog?
Monday, April 18, 2011
Letter 1: A curious introduction.
Dearest Herr Ansgar Bach,
I am so very glad this letter has found my door step.
I am not sure if this is the solution to your visual problem but when I was a young man we would have assumed this was a side effect of the acid we were taking. If your drinking the kool aid, just put it away for a spell and you will find yourself right as rain in no time flat. Naturally, I realize this solution would have crossed your mind and it would be incredibly unlikely that you would send a letter willy nilly clear across the globe if you had digested narcotics. So, that being said, I am afraid I am unable to decipher what exactly is happening with you, sir.
Perhaps I should enlighten you as to just whose door this wound up on. My name is Oscar Railey. I am a seventy- four year old widower from Selkirk, Canada. Although now I reside in West Palm Beach, Florida, which is where this letter ended its long journey. Selkirk is a small town outside Winnipeg in Manitoba. The kind of place you spend seventeen years dreaming of leaving, twenty years trying to forget, then the rest of your life wishing you were back. Ah, the musings of a man past his prime.
What is Germany like? I never had a chance to visit. Please do write back. Im off to see a man about a dog.
Oscar Railey,
I am so very glad this letter has found my door step.
I am not sure if this is the solution to your visual problem but when I was a young man we would have assumed this was a side effect of the acid we were taking. If your drinking the kool aid, just put it away for a spell and you will find yourself right as rain in no time flat. Naturally, I realize this solution would have crossed your mind and it would be incredibly unlikely that you would send a letter willy nilly clear across the globe if you had digested narcotics. So, that being said, I am afraid I am unable to decipher what exactly is happening with you, sir.
Perhaps I should enlighten you as to just whose door this wound up on. My name is Oscar Railey. I am a seventy- four year old widower from Selkirk, Canada. Although now I reside in West Palm Beach, Florida, which is where this letter ended its long journey. Selkirk is a small town outside Winnipeg in Manitoba. The kind of place you spend seventeen years dreaming of leaving, twenty years trying to forget, then the rest of your life wishing you were back. Ah, the musings of a man past his prime.
What is Germany like? I never had a chance to visit. Please do write back. Im off to see a man about a dog.
Oscar Railey,
#23 208 Fern Street
West Palm Beach, FL, United States
33401-5610
Friday, April 8, 2011
Letter of Origin # 1: Fourth Day of Perceived Transition
To whom this may land,
I am mailing you this aimlessly now in the hopes you may be able to shed some light on my (our?) current situation. I have heard people say they've noticed it too; flashes of Technicolor and visible onomatopoeia. Others say they have heard rumours from distant lands of polygons and exaggerated facial expressions. Yet still others claim nothing has changed. Claim conspiracy? Mass insanity? I'm still not sure the steadiness of my mind. Have I embellished perception, or do they lack it? Clearly, something is happening, whether to myself or the world as a whole. Perhaps I should be rethinking my psychedelic intake. Perhaps they have begun to alter my sober world view?
This last is a large part of why I write you, whoever you might be. To find perspective in this potentially disconcerting circumstance. I have dubbed it day four. Four days since I first witnessed the impromptu shift of my (our?) reality. It started during a quick jaunt along a neighbouring hillside to shake off another sleepless night of double malt whiskey and a few shattered attempts at prose, most of which currently lies crumpled in the corner of my study. I had been standing at the edge of a bluff inhaling the beauty of my surroundings when, curiously unafraid, a rabbit sauntered up mere inches from me. I felt suddenly mesmerized by this rabbits bold character. It didn't seem quite as I felt a rabbit should. A little too round in its shaping, and a bit too vivid in colour. It's ears flopped comically to the ground and it gazed at me in a manner I can only describe to you as mischievous. I shook it off as a result of persistent sleep deprivation, closed my eyes, orientated myself in (what I believed to be) reality, and opened them again to meet the eyes of a simple garden variety rabbit who, startled, took off down the hill.
This was just the first of a few encounters over the past four days. If it weren't for the spreading openness surrounding the situation, I would surely be considering the pros and cons of self-admitted institutionalization instead of writing an unaddressed letter to ship off to the world. I must for now go, but please, if you could, reply to the address attached. The world needs a friend, and apparently so do I.
With regards,
Ansgar
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Attached
Return Address:
Herr Ansgar Bach
Ringstraße 14
D-67323 Saarbrücken
Germany
I am mailing you this aimlessly now in the hopes you may be able to shed some light on my (our?) current situation. I have heard people say they've noticed it too; flashes of Technicolor and visible onomatopoeia. Others say they have heard rumours from distant lands of polygons and exaggerated facial expressions. Yet still others claim nothing has changed. Claim conspiracy? Mass insanity? I'm still not sure the steadiness of my mind. Have I embellished perception, or do they lack it? Clearly, something is happening, whether to myself or the world as a whole. Perhaps I should be rethinking my psychedelic intake. Perhaps they have begun to alter my sober world view?
This last is a large part of why I write you, whoever you might be. To find perspective in this potentially disconcerting circumstance. I have dubbed it day four. Four days since I first witnessed the impromptu shift of my (our?) reality. It started during a quick jaunt along a neighbouring hillside to shake off another sleepless night of double malt whiskey and a few shattered attempts at prose, most of which currently lies crumpled in the corner of my study. I had been standing at the edge of a bluff inhaling the beauty of my surroundings when, curiously unafraid, a rabbit sauntered up mere inches from me. I felt suddenly mesmerized by this rabbits bold character. It didn't seem quite as I felt a rabbit should. A little too round in its shaping, and a bit too vivid in colour. It's ears flopped comically to the ground and it gazed at me in a manner I can only describe to you as mischievous. I shook it off as a result of persistent sleep deprivation, closed my eyes, orientated myself in (what I believed to be) reality, and opened them again to meet the eyes of a simple garden variety rabbit who, startled, took off down the hill.
This was just the first of a few encounters over the past four days. If it weren't for the spreading openness surrounding the situation, I would surely be considering the pros and cons of self-admitted institutionalization instead of writing an unaddressed letter to ship off to the world. I must for now go, but please, if you could, reply to the address attached. The world needs a friend, and apparently so do I.
With regards,
Ansgar
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Attached
Return Address:
Herr Ansgar Bach
Ringstraße 14
D-67323 Saarbrücken
Germany
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