FICTIONARIUM CHAPTER 9. Fibonacci Day

 "See how greedy nine is? It's even trying to eat it's own tail! Nine says 'MINE', all the time… watch when we add these nines, and then add those two new numbers… nine again! Nine is all me-- me-- me-- all the time."

A group of young children, each proudly holding their own pieces of colored chalk, watched the older girl expertly draw her equations onto a section of sidewalk. Walking past the playful math lesson in downtown Lakeland, Mel had just turned the corner , and now laughed at where she was; 'School Street.' Remembering her own elementary school, she wondered for a moment what it must be like to grow up on the sidewalks of Lakeland.
 

Mel didn't know it yet, but she felt it: this was going to be her day. But her day for what? She was supposed to be making a plan to go back to Hill Valley, and while the thought of it didn't seem nearly as uncomfortable as it had before, this day, Mel felt, was for her. Use the golden ratio to divide any year in two, and this day would fall on that sacred spot-- the great swirling eddies of consciousness would point to the day at hand-- this day. Mel's day.

The Lakeland air was clear as usual, but suddenly, so were a lot of other things. Having the contrast between the two towns of Lakeland and Hill Valley now glaring before her, some stark reality was stirring some grand thoughts in Mel's busy brain.

At the Bean House, a common theme in the frequent conversations about secretive malicious organizations and their wicked conspiracies would be the various versions of what these powerful groups were allegedly going to do to the population when the time was right.  

The stories seep into the minds of the subculture, who then look for signs and clues for proof that something terrible is due. Every day on edge, the population tries to laugh off the stories, but every day on edge will put the brain into a primitive 'fight-or-flight' mode, and all of the blood rushes to the extremities, leaving the brain with little oxygen-- leaving the world with a population of self-made numb skulls.

But it wasn't just the numbing effect. Mel realized that she had always somehow known what was now plainly and practically yelling at her from that periphery of awareness, the back of the mind; "We are creating it all."

Those conversations in the coffee house? Anything fearful that "they" were going to do to the population-- they don't have to do anything. WE already do it to ourselves!  

The people who theorize and speculate on upcoming horrible things, a future horrible world, are actually living in that horrible world, right now. Dwelling in that state of blind fear-- instead of actively making a decent world for themselves and everyone else-- they stumble over and trample such a decent world, the one that is naturally happening under their feet at the same time.  

People are living their whole lives in a terrible future-- and it's not a future that is necessarily going to happen-- it has already happened to them, every day.  

Was it really that simple though? Mel knew people who insisted that there was a time-- in the past-- when things weren't so bad, and they would lament out loud about how those days had been taken away, and were gone forever. They too, were missing it, though. They were denying themselves the chance to create an instant world now-- a tangible world of things that actually are, and instead they lived in a re-made world, and re-imagined the world that was. 

Mel didn't want to recognize those traits in her conspiracy-minded friends, because she didn't want to recognize the same traits within herself-- until today. Now, it was refreshing.

 
The loudest voice inside any given mind is usually that of the ego, selfishly clamoring for attention. That ego mind has no business in reality-- it's business is in the immediate past or imagined futures, and it will try to keep it's audience captivated in one of those theaters. It's the brain's little barker, the carny of the mind's carnival, always asking us to "step right this way", luring awareness away from the center, away from the lights of reality's solid midway.

The sidewalk widened, and Mel noticed that it was a solid slab of stone-- she was now in the cool grotto which the town of Lakeland seemed to be built around. She slowly sat on a bench, lost in electric thought, past and future.  

She didn't sit for long though, because it was her day, and she now knew what to do. She was going back to Hill Valley-- there was lots of work to do!  
Hill Valley, she had decided, was going to have it's very own parade. 

--------------------

Thanks for reading this chapter of FICTIONARIUM

Previous episode is HERE

all images by therealpaul

follow @therealpaul for more heavy entertainment