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or read his story below…
A few eons ago, I was a Mad Man in a three-piece suit, horn rimmed glasses, full head of hair and skinny as a rail. And I had to attend these conferences as part of my mad world. Here’s an entry from the Red Clay Diary…
LEMMINGS
I am sitting in this convention banquet room inside this convention banquet hotel within this convention banquet town, and I am listening or trying to listen, to the most boring speech ever conceived by humankind.
The words are beginning to float around the room like disembodied specters of things that no longer look like words because the life has been sucked right out of them by the passionless and precise and uncaring speaker who produces them with great pride and certainty, in the sure knowledge that, because he FEELS these words are important, they must be equally important to everyone else sitting in the lifeless room.
And so the words continue to meander in the air and overlap and bounce against one another in their pale green soulless journeys, and not one person in the room is even the least bit interested in these words. But each person, for a dozen different reasons, sits politely and dutifully and tries to look interested, and those who are not trying to look interested are not doing so because they are expending every ounce of energy simply trying to stay awake, or at least LOOK as if they are staying awake, each wishing that they had remembered to paint lifelike alert eyeballs on their eyelids so that when they closed their eyes those around them would believe they were still awake.
As I sit here in this acoustically alive but soul-deadened room I realize that the people sitting around the circular table I’m sitting at are beginning ever so slightly to rise up toward the ceiling, and then I realize that the table itself is beginning to rise ever so slightly. But upon blinking my drying eyes to refocus and assure myself that I am not dreaming, I notice that it is not the people rising, it is not the table rising, it is I who is descending.
I am, without even trying to, starting to slip slowly lower in my chair as if I’m wearing something smooth and polished, as if the chair seat is smooth and polished, as if I can’t keep myself from slowly slipping under the table.
I hope nobody’s watching my descent, for I have no desire to stop sliding under the table.
Soon, the table is above my head and the people are all invisible except for their waists and fidgeting legs that I can now clearly see under the table. I finally am sitting on the floor under the conference table and I am now leaning forward to get on my hands and knees, and I find myself crawling on my hands and knees toward the convention room exit, unable to stop myself.
And the speaker is oblivious to this because the speaker is conscious only of his own self-important words, and he is delivering them to the audience BECAUSE HE CAN, because he outranks everyone in the room, and they are as surely prisoners of his implied power as I am.
But I continue to crawl on my hands and knees toward the door, only to look back over my shoulder at the conference table where I was sitting moments ago, and I discover that I am still sitting at the conference table, or at least the nearly transparent husk of my body is still sitting there, but in reality my soul and my spirit and my pilgrim energy are crawling on their hands and knees toward the exit, wading through those ghostly meaningless words still issuing forth from the speaker.
I glance back to see if I’m still in two places at once and I see something remarkable and very logical happening—slowly but surely, each person at my table is slipping dreamlike to the floor and beginning to crawl on hands and knees, following me to the exit. Each face as a glow of expectancy, each is smiling hopefully, so happy that someone has lowered himself and started an exodus they moments ago could only dream about.
And, before you know it, everybody in the convention room at this hotel is crawling toward the exits, and after a while the speaker is the only person left in the room, oblivious to anything but his own gossamer words, and he continues to speak to the ether and, as far as I know, is still standing there speaking to this day
Jim Reed © 2018 A.D.
http://www.jimreedbooks.com/podcast