I’ve been doing research into stress and the chemicals that stress pumps into your body and how some people get almost high on it.

I get edgy and my heart beats fast and I feel like I’ve had ten cups of coffee . . . my nasal passages open up so I can breathe fast, shallow breaths. Everything moves like sound that is sped up. But it’s the electricity firing off in my brain that really creates the buzz. Brain spins so fast, it’s like it’s doing jumping jacks, thoughts moving, flicking so fast that you aren’t conciously processing any of them anymore . . . it’s just like a steady stream of color or a cloth.

And you are focusing somewhere with your eyes at a tangible fixed point in front of you, but you aren’t seeing that fixed point - you are seeing that colored cloth pipeline that only exists in your sped-up spasming grey matter.

Somewhere up there in your noggin you know every single stitch and molecule of that rapidly moving, dazzling tapestry, but conciously, it’s just moving, flicking through your head like film at 24 frames per second, never seeing the gaps between the frames. You cannot hold a conversation or be present to another human.

It takes a long time to cool down and unwind. Sometimes it takes days or weeks. Sometimes months. Sometimes sleep patterns are disrupted; sometimes not. The managable peak, the worst I’ve ever experienced without cracking is the conversation point where when you are talking with someone, your end of the conversation is a hurried, broken, stuttered, “Um huh. um hm. uh huh.” You’re shaking your head uncontrollably like some kind of drug addict.

Because you are. That’s stress juice, baby.

Sometimes I get visions of a needle in my arm. That’s my inner voice, showing me that stress is my junk. And then . . . there’s the unmanagable kind of stress. ABQ has shown me mountains of it. I just want my regular stress level back!

I see an arrow, turning around in blackness inside my mind’s eye, as if twirling on an invisible lazy-susan display in the night time sky. I see the shaft of wood with grain and texture, oil and dirt. The feathers on the end have shape and definition and some are stuck together with grease. The point is sharp greying metal.

Suddenly, the arrow flies through the blackness, piercing it, entering another dimension, entering a forested world of green and strikes a tree with the force of a blast from a lightning bolt. The arrow has disappeared, leaving the wood of the medium-sized tree’s trunk chewed up and bright white. The timber is splinters in some places and bent with greenness in others against the smooth grey of the outer bark.

The arrow is focus, with the power to magnify nebulous energy into a lightning bolt and strike any target with intensity.