A delusion of sense

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

(I tried to come up with a title that would cleverly match my previous thread on this topic. Judge for yourself my wit...)

For anyone who's interested, here's how things ended up going between that Dean guy from that park and me.

Roughly a year ago, I was really, really, really excited: the Journal of Experimental Fiction was running a contest, to which I had submitted my first novel, and I thought I was getting "signals" from the universe that I would win, or that I might win, or that even if I didn't win, trying to would lead me to where I really was "supposed" to go. So, I lost the contest and embarked upon a mission to finish a second novel instead, one that could be published as an e-book. Later, I realized I need a bank account to publish my books online, so I tried applying for one, and discovered (not to my surprise though!) that my credit score was 154. I hadn't even known it was possible for a credit score to be that low, much less had I ever seen such a thing. I've been making small payments on some of my debt but I don't think enough to move my score back up anywhere remotely near where it would have to be for me to think I could reapply for a bank account and get it.

So, unsettled but, again, unsurprised, I embarked upon yet another stupid mission. One day, I stumbled upon a slip of paper that had fallen from a roommate's fortune cookie (now that I'm saying this I almost can't believe how stupid it is) and it said something about a "new dimension of romance" or something, so I proceeded to go to the local park, hoping I'd been given a "sign" that Dean would be there. Well, no dice. However, I had a cell phone finally, after years of lacking one, and it has a video recorder on it, so I prayed to the Trinity (seriously) and this idea flashed into my mind right then:

I should make a movie of some kind, to see if my long-term goal of filmmaker is even remotely legit at this point.

I proceeded to film "City of Leaves," and I messaged Dean over and over again about working on the film with me, but he never replied. I thought of giving him my second book and all the Facebook access codes for the page for the book, to let the guy publish the book himself and then (seeing as I implicitly trusted him more than I had ever trusted anyone else in my entire life) hopefully sharing earnings with me, if he got any from all this. However, I abandoned that idea eventually and...

... and, well, I knew where in town he lived, as he'd posted his address on his Facebook. So I started wondering if I should just go walk to his house. Logistics-wise, it's about three hours from where I live, so I knew I had quite the adventure ahead of me.

Some of my friends were able to give me a ride from a grocery store to the park (which I used as the hub of the quest that day) which cut a half hour out of the walk, and when they dropped me off at the park a Lifehouse song, "Hanging by a Moment," was playing on the radio, which weirded me out, since I had been ransacking my mind for some set of songs that I knew I had once listened to, that I wanted to listen to before heading out on this trek... and then here it was, the very thing I'd forgotten but was trying to remember.

I walked very far and took a wrong turn, found a way to loop back, but was so far back I almost gave up, thinking it was absurd to do this---like, wouldn't he be upset or something?---but then I looked up while walking by a church and it said, "Have I not commanded thee? Take heart and do not be afraid; I am with you always," or w/e the passage from the Book of Joshua is. Crazy or no, I felt like God Himself had actually completely directly spoken to me at this instant, and I thought, there's no way I'd turn back now...

There was a massive, and I mean massive, gate in front of the road to Dean's house. I looked at it, shuffled around, wondering what to do. I was texting some friends, and one of them said something about how I shouldn't be afraid, the reason being that my "angle" was watching over me, she kept saying "angle" instead of "angel." I started crying incessantly for quite a while on the way back home, and once I'd gotten home, and went to post something about the ordeal on Facebook, when I saw the first post from Dean in a while:

Dean [...] is at angle's peak w/[...]

And his friends, replying, were all like, when'd you move back to Utah, dude? Why didn't you tell anyone?

I proceeded to get very stoned and message some sorrowful thing to the guy, not angry I mean, though, more apologetic, like, "I'm sorry I kept saying all these weird things to you, I promise I'll never talk to you again," and so on.

... But the thing of it is, months later, after this concert I went to (a story of its own: later I'll repost the Facebook post I made about it, maybe), and after failing to accomplish anything with "City of Leaves," it turns out that a long-time Mormon friend of mine, who lives in Utah, is now heading his own film production company. So part of me...

... just really wants to put as much of my life in my hometown behind me as possible, and leave, go to Utah, find Dean, work with my friend... I deleted Dean from my friends list on FB after my last message to him, again not out of anger but shame, but so he never even actually told me to stop talking to him, or tried pushing me away, he just didn't have regular access to the Internet and so only ever noticed a few of the things I tried to say to him. In fact I had posted all sorts of random stuff on FB about how important Utah is to the future of the moral universe or whatever, and part of me had felt like he might move back there, so I wonder if he thought I was suggesting he do so? (Much of what I said to him was packed into a very odd code I came up with, so he could have easily read what I said in that way, since I basically had said that I would have to go to Utah myself one day anyway.)

[peter]

I fell in love with a girl once - but she didn't fall in love with me. It was then I learned that love is a Tiger: that if it is not accepted by the person to whom it is offered, it turns on the giver and rends them apart with its velvet claws.

I read later by some mind delving psychologist that "Unrequited love is a selfish act" and thought "Haa! What do they know........"

[StevieG]

That's sad Mighara I'm sorry it turned out that way.

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

It might seem like a sad case of unrequited love, and there is this element in the equation, but...

You see, I then was reading the new book by Mark Z. Danielewski, which ends at a zoo, and in the zoo are two birds named "Angel" and "Angle." So, two options besides sheer randomness: Dean somehow was monitoring me and said he was at "angle's" peak (the real name of the mountain is Angel's Peak) in time with my coworker telling me that she's my "angle," intentionally; or, using His crazy outside-of-the-universe powers, God arranged these facts so that I would know, somehow, that Dean going back to Utah is "part of the plan."

But why? I don't think God is too concerned with helping me get laid or anything like that haha. No, I am fairly confident that if there is some deeper spiritual significance to all this, it is because Dean has the ability to become a very influential person in this country overall, maybe even the very world. I mean of all the people I've ever known, no one else gave off the "I'm going to be a successful public figure" vibe more than he did.

[peter]

Do such people just naturally draw others to them - a truly 'magnetic' personality? (Was this how Jesus was able to walk up to twelve people and say "Follow me" - and they did!)

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

I think so. I know this guy impressed me enough to get me to go back to that park for days on end to try to communicate to him in the most outlandish way I could think of--and it worked--so maybe I am supposed to be this guy's disciple haha!

[peter]

Could be Mig - good luck with it anyway!

[Avatar]

Yeah, but don't get too invested in some idealised outcome huh? Just take it as it comes.

--A