Watching a young man struggle with his new found super powers recently has me thinking about what the world was like for me early on as I discovered my own super powers. I was probably 12 or 13 when I first noticed something was different, but it would be another decade or two before I got any sort of grip on what was happening to me, and learn how to function in the world as a 6’ 3” man who was waking up to find out that you are the eyes of the world.
I’ve never been diagnosed with anything, so I won’t medicalize what is going on with me, or honestly anyone else. In the early days it felt like the world was a microphone and I was the amplifier. Every noise the world made was felt, like when you run your fingers over a live microphone. I had no ideas what was happening when I was 12. It just was. I just was. When I was 22 I remember holding a microphone in my music studio and running my fingers over it, deliberately fucking with my 12 year old self—realizing I was in control, but it would still take me another decade to get a handle on shit in any meaningful way.
Over the years I’ve had ups and downs. Traveling through airports with massive amounts of drugs, sitting in VP sections in concerts with massive amount of drugs. Getting picked up on the freeway in my Guatemalan short shorts and nothing else by an Oregon State Trooper, to holding 10 Illinois State Troopers back with their guns drawn on the side of the freeway in Illinois. All while perpetually negotiating with the many friendly and not so friendly voices in my head. This is just a minor sampling of the roller coast ride my teens and twenties became, all while I figured out the world while simultaneously being the eyes of the world.
I had experienced it numerous times, but it was when my best friend Sundance Morgan experienced being the eyes of the world at a Mountain View show and shared his story that I realized how us young souls were being turned onto our place in the world. Being thrust into the world as a young adult while also simultaneously being the world is rattling to say the least. If you don’t have anyone to guide you through it, it Is literally maddening. There is no way to explain it to normals. Everyone dismisses your stories, and leaves you feeling, well….crazy. I mean you are, but you aren’t. You are just living in, while also being and experiencing the world.
Feeling the world in any given moment is overwhelming. It takes practice to tune it out. It takes discipline to identify when you are losing your grip. It took me years to notice the sparkles in the air around me when I am slipping. It took me years to feel the change in the grind of the gears that are ever so overwhelming. Even once you can see the signs, it is difficult to ensure that your mind and body will respond accordingly. I have developed shut-off mechanisms to just not speak or act, knowing that nothing I say or do will be trustworthy. I am just being channeled and overwhelmed by the noise of the world. It isn’t me. It is everything else.
I can’t imagine having to find your way forward when you are learning to be the eyes of the world with the Internet. I remember turning it on in 1995 and going NOPE. BIG PHAT FUCKING NOPE! Don’t need that shit. That is madness. Even more so than what I experience in the real world. I feel for the young ones who are being lit up and forced out into the world being consumed by the Internet. So many ways to get lost. So many ways to tap into the wrong signals. Finding the frequency that is you within the noise of today’s Internet world is going to increase the rate of failure for these young people when it comes to finding and mastering who they are.
A lot of words get used to describe what is happening to people. Bipolar, schizophrenic, and mentally ill. I just see you as turned on. You are awake in a beautiful world. Sorting through the noise is excruciating—-I know. It still is for me. It never goes away. The goal is to learn how to turn on and off your super powers. Learn to see when they come and go. You need to learn to stop blaming yourself. It isn’t you. It is the world. And you will always be in trouble—just get used to it. It is hard to living a world with your heart out in the open. It is painful. It is tearful. It is also very, very, very beautiful and magical when you let it flow through without letting it consume and destroy you.
One of the tricks is finding something or some things that you control and can lose yourself in. Mine is all about large systems. The behind the scenes of the Internet and Web. Subway systems. Bureaucracy from the outside-in. It all keeps the brain busy at a scale that prevents me from being consumed by being the eyes of the world. For others it will be art. Maybe it’s nature. It is likely music. I don’t know. It is up to you to find it for yourself. I would surely have not found peace with being the eyes of the world if I hadn’t discovered APIs. It brings me peace. It gives me something to do instead of spinning out. There are a lot of things in this world that will happily spin you out, and the objective is all about finding the thing that will spin you out in a way that you control and keeps you out of trouble.
