CHAPTER 1
I remember the first time I met Jack. I remember it well. It was as if the world lit up!
Although he was a small guy he filled the room with the exuberance of his soul. He possessed that thin, haunted face with that aura of electricity running through his bones, long blond hair to his waist, blue eyes and the mad laugh of a hyena on amphetamine sulphate; his whole being throbbed with life. As he talked his body and hands were animated with a super abundance of energy – jig-jig-jig, bob, dart and cackle. He was never still. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I’d never encountered anybody quite as alive, quite as crazy. You felt, with Jack, that there were no limits. What was inside him came out with no limiters, no inhibitions, pure and unrestricted.
Jack was high on living. Every second counted. You could see those glinty blue eyes were constantly peering into the depths of the universe and sucking meaning out of the mundane, living every second. It was never enough. Whatever he diod was never enough. And that showed. Meeting Jack was like watching a rocket roaring into the sky consuming itself in a rage of brightness. Too much for a lot of people; he made them feel uncomfortable, but for me, it lit me up too, it felt like I was peering into a mirror and seeing myself more sharply. For me Jack was pure, unadulterated essence.
To Jack everything had meaning; everything was alive, and Jack slurped that sense right out of it all, every nuance, every aspect, extracting the heart and filling himself with it. Life was for living and he wanted to fill every second with life.
I watched him from the side of the room with amazement. I had never witnessed anyone so vital. There was madness to it. I was drawn to that madness. He devoured the world and gorged on it. The energy shone out his eyes, exploding in his head until it seemed he would burst with it. Everything he said meant something, challenged, made you think. I listened in from afar, weighing him up.
Jack was so full of ideas and visions that he had trouble containing all the connections and ramifications. His whole being jerked with it in some animalistic intensity. Those ideas welled up in him, breeding a multitude of others and threatened to choke him with their sheer strength. He just had to let it out or it’d kill him. It burst out in a crazy torrent of words, gestures and maniacal laughter. He didn’t so much talk to you as spout forth out loud in some ecstasy as his mind raged.
Man, he thrilled to it. He grooved on life.
Yet people reeled from it. It was too big for them to handle. I could see that. He overwhelmed them. They had no answer to it. There was no room for them to get a word in. Jack’s visions cascaded over them like a tsunami of passion and they found themselves floundering in horror. It was too much they desperately tried to escape before they were buried by the sheer force of his passion.
All around him people retreated, sliding away to somewhere safer.
Yet Jack was oblivious. He didn’t care. They were empty vessels, echo chambers, mirrors, into which he allowed his thoughts to gush just so’s he could see them coming back at himself to understand them all the better. He was so intense. If they didn’t catch on then that was their loss. He was searching for the ones who did get it.
They had to be thrilled by it too. They had to see it. It was so wild. It was so real.
For Jack life was a great mystery that had to be wrestled into submission. He wanted to understand it. The universe was a mystical wonder to be delved into, explored and explained. Society was a web of lies and power. Life was a brief interlude to be experienced to the very maximum. There were no half measures. You could see it in Jack’s wild evangelical eyes. He wrestled with the entire universe and would grapple it into submission with the sheer energy of his intellect. He was so full of it. He wanted to find out what it was all about and wrest every last moment out of it. He had to know. He had to experience it. He wanted to get to the bottom of everything. He needed to tell you all about it and find out what he himself knew, what you knew, and how to solve the riddles of all time. Nothing was holy. Everything was holy. Nothing mattered. Everything mattered. Life was a paradox
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