By the time I was ten I’d seen every street there was to see in the town I grew up in. I knew how to get everywhere and I knew every possible way to get there. I remember realizing this while my mom and I were checking out at CVS one afternoon. There was a big line. Ten people deep. I had enough time to look around and really see the place. I knew this place, I thought. I knew everything about it.
On the way home, I realized I’d felt the same way about my house. I’d seen every hallway, every crevice, every ceiling pop in the home.
I’d already mapped the entire world by the age of ten, but I also knew that just because I’d seen it, doesn’t mean I’d seen it completely. Something was missing. So I started looking at it differently.
I was playing on the stairs one day. I got myself upside down so that my heel would be somewhere on the third or fourth step and my head would be on the bottom floor. In American yoga circles you might call it a stair supported inversion, but I was just playing, and what I was really doing was trying to see the basement from a different perspective. I knew until I saw the whole thing upside-down, I hadn’t fully seen it.
Room by room I did this. I’d lie on the floor, crane my neck back and look at every little piece upside down. “There.” I’d say. “Seen it.”
I remember the day I’d completed the upside-down schematic of the whole house. I was flushed with a momentary sense of accomplishment, only for it to be drained nearly immediately when I realized that if I really wanted to see the whole world completely I’d have to do every street the same way.
As I went around the neighborhood scanning upside-down every driveway, every bush, every hiding spot I’d ever hid in, I remember thinking about how boring the world must be if in only ten years I was already needing to see it upside down for it to still be interesting.
Hello upside down basketball hoop.
Hello upside down car that’s always parked across the street.
Hello upside down Mrs. Schwartz.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m looking at everything upside down,” I said.
I imagine her going inside and finding Mr. Schwartz on the toilet reading the paper and telling him that that Diamond kid was doing that upside down thing again.
Unrelated, a few years later, I was messing around in his yard late at night and he came to my house the next day and told me if I was ever in his yard again he’d shoot me. True story. I may have been shitting my pants, but I thought it was funny, and actually I remember thinking something interesting finally happened.
I took a shit on his front door step the next weekend.
At any rate, once I finally mapped the entire world upside down, which I did around 1999, something about it still felt incomplete, and it dawned on me, only after finishing the project, that I’d been looking at it all wrong the whole time.
I hadn’t been looking at the world at all, in fact—been missing it attempting to see it.
Since then I’ve been trying different things to see the real world. Taking mushrooms, for example. It’s one thing to look at a tree upside down. It’s something else entirely to look at it upside down while trippin’ balls.
My friend’s would be huddled in the corner by the bush geeking out watching me turn myself upside down. “Dime’s doing that thing again!”
The entheogens help, sure, but after seeing the whole world filled with mushrooms et al, which I did in 2012, I realized it’s not much different from trying to see the world upside down regular.
It’s looking at Mrs. Schwartz with a moving face through an exploding holographic heart instead of with her head on the ground.
“What are you doing?” She asks.
“Seeing it different!” I tell her.
She goes inside and finds Mr. Schwartz loading his shotgun and tells him that that Diamond kid is doing that thing again!
Right side up is wrong. Upside down is no good. The sacrament’s like standing on a head you didn’t know you had, and I found myself in the same place I found myself when I was ten—like I’d seen the whole world and was still missing it.
At some point some years ago I started meditating, and while I got nothing bad to say about this beautiful practice, because it actually does do the trick, you can’t very well go around life sitting cross legged on a cushion talking to the Mrs. Schwartz’s of the world.
Or can you? I thought.
In meditation not only can you experience yourself sitting on the ceiling, which is cool and all, but you can experience experience experiencing you.
Not only could I see Mrs. Schwartz, I could be Mrs. Schwartz, seeing the brat from across the street inverted on her front lawn with blood rushing to his face.
It seems obvious that the world is happening out there and that we’re happening in here.
But, actually, I’m not so sure how true that is.
And that’s when I started doing inside out.
Inside out is the new upside down—the upside side down for adults—it’s pretty cool!
Basically, you take what you see outside and you see it as happening inside of you, and what’s inside, you see as happening outside.
It’s a bit like seeing a boat in one of those stereoscopic pictures, but instead of crossing your eyes to see something out there, you cross your inner eye, your third eye (which is actually your heart btw), and you flip the whole thing.
At first, like trying to see the boat, it’s frustrating and doesn’t make any sense, but eventually the barriers dissolve and what happens is you become Mrs. Schwartz and you go inside your house and Mr. Schwartz is standing on his head trying to make sense of his life, and with that the world finally does go upside down.
And yet even standing there as a bored housewife looking at your inverted shotgun wielding husband, something seems amiss.
Mrs. Schwartz asks him what he’s doing.
And Mr. Schwartz says, “The thing about perspective is that you can’t help but have one, it always seems right and it’s always missing something.”
And Mrs. Schwartz asks “What we’re supposed to do, then?”
And Mr. Schwartz, red faced and smiling cocks his shotgun and just says “There is no boat”.
Well, I didn’t know what to make of that, but I was back at CVS buying some batteries recently, which is what reminded me of this whole story. Another huge line. Classic CVS.
I didn’t care, of course, I was doing the inside out thing still trying to see the boat and finally I get to the front of the line and the clerk asks me what I’m doing.
I tell her I’m crossing my inner eye and seeing her as an expression of my own heart.
And she’s like that’s good and all, but next time don’t wait in line. If all you’re getting is batteries just use the self checkout.
Taking a shit on the front door step: priceless!
Man, this has all the layers. I love it.