DAMN YOU IBOGA.
I’d been feeling the call for a few weeks now. A big chapter in my life had come to a close. I’d just turned 40. I’d left Darwin, my beloved home for the past three years, stability dissappearing in the rearview mirror as I drove aimlessly for thousands of kilometres around the country trying to work out my next move. The first adult relationship of my life had just ended in a flaming wreck, just like a real adult relationship. My heart felt like a concentration camp and not the fun kind. Not only that, but the elastic in my final remaining pair of underwear no longer had any stretch left.
I was pretty close to ending it all. Oh, I don’t mean killing myself, I’m talking about ending the whole sorry business of ever wearing underwear again — I mean what real purpose do undergarments honestly serve? They just seem to add another unnecessary layer of inteference when one engaged in any genital or bowel related activities, and yet somehow they became a standard norm that no one even questioned anymore. The only use underwear seemed to have, was to safeguard you against the unlikely incident of someone pulling your pants down in public and should there be any children around, preventing you from accidentally exposing yourself to minors in public. But unless you worked in a school or were a school child yourself (which legally wasn’t as much of a crime should a minor expose themselves to another minor), when would that ever be likely to happen?
These kinds of profound questions plagued my mind while I obsessively consulted the I Ching for further clues on my destiny. I’d planned to go to Peru in April, but that plan had gone to absolute shit as well. I felt like the reverse King Midas. Everything that I touched crumbled into dung. I was just glad I didn’t have children like King Midas had, otherwise I would probably would have turned them to dung whilst accidentally exposing myself to them.
I couldn’t understand what was going on. What the hell did the universe want from me? I’d bought the plane ticket. I was even contemplating on alienating all my anti-vax friends and getting the Novovax just to get into Peru. It would have been worth it. I’d gotten a position at a well-respected Ayahuasca centre and everything. It was the only job I was possibly qualified to do at this point in my ‘career’. It was the only job where telling my future employer during the interview that I’d drunk Ayahuasca…
