Someone is going to find this entry through a search engine search for “soul retrieval” or something. Here’s your disclaimer: if you believe anything I say you get what you deserve. That said, I have been looking into soul retrieval and other shamanistic activities. Actually, I’ve long had an interest in this field of esoteric pursuits but recently having been told by a mental health professional that I appear to have lost bits of my soul somewhere and having discovered, through a search engine search that one of the symptoms of this condition is a general feeling of spacedoutedness among other things I had previously attributed to midlife crisis I have begun to take it more seriously.

But you have to be careful with this stuff. You can’t just get out the drum and drum for a while and then go into a trance, grab your spirit animal guide/protector/power animal and start picking up bits of soul here and there. I once went on an out of body trip and stuck my head into whatever you call the zone where all the spirit stuff goes on and whammo all these psychic parasites were on me like Scientology missionaries in the pedestrian shopping zone on a nice summer afternoon. Took me forever to get straightened out from that.

So I leave the drum on the shelf and don’t fuck around with that at all. I don’t hire a shaman somewhere, either, because how do you know who’s genuine and who’s a charlatan, for one thing, and for another I’m just too cheap and above all lazy to try to find one. Half those guys I figure are just in their line of work to get bored forty year old women on spiritual journeys into the sweat lodge, if you know what I mean.

So I do it through sleeping. I do this. Before going to sleep, I think for a while about how nice it would be to have a complete soul once again. If I ever had one. Then I tell my wife to turn off her lamp because she always tells me to turn off my lamp when I’m trying to read and she wants to sleep, and then I fall asleep.

In the morning I wake up and forget anything I might have dreamed, except for a dream about being covered with firebugs under my suit, which later change to orange mites. I run downstairs and write in my journal if there’s time. I make coffee and boil water for tea. I take a shower and go to work after getting dressed. Maybe I drive Beta to her train, maybe we chat a little on the way.

I talk to someone at work. I talk to someone else at the music school. I tell one guy how I’m in this trough. I notice I’m speaking to more people. I notice more people are noticing me.

At the conference, a beautiful woman my age stumbles right in front of where I’m sitting. It makes me feel good to see I’m not the only one who stumbles, and to realize that when you stumble, not everyone laughs and looks down on you for being a klutz, but could theoretically sympathize with you. Because I’m not uncharitable towards the woman, I realize the world isn’t necessarily uncharitable towards me, either. I notice more people noticing me. The distinguished delegate from somewhere (30, female, sort of hot). A platinum blonde 50 year old at the mall. Various people notice me in various ways.

Either more people are noticing me, or I’m noticing more people. It’s like having pieces of my soul back.