Just returned from the dentist. No big thing, apparently my teeth tend to get filthy pretty quickly, for whatever reason. The thing is.....well, at this point, I still feel a little like I'm floating. In the course of the cleaning, the hygienist had the kick the gas level up at least once. I was practically, as the Brits would say, insensible. Stoned. Cloud Nine. At this point, I still feel myself coming down. All of which, of course, begs the question, how sensitized am I, are we all, normally? If this woman has gotta get me that close to completely ripped to get any kind of work done in close proximity to my oral nerves, what the he*l is normal? It puts a new perspective on the idea of your sensibilities. Are we all riding so close to the rails, that we're perpetually within inches of complete emotional shutdown, or is the norm more what I was like when I was stoned? She did, after all, have to turn the gas up at least once from what was supposedly normal. If the norm is more like I was what I felt like on a mega-dose of Nitrous Oxide, this, to me, explains a helluva lot. And essentially makes it all the more frightening that people try to do stuff like texting while they're driving. If your consciousness is pretty low-level generally, well, I dunno. And I was still searching every conceivable crevice of my mind to convince myself I wasn't in pain, even though I really was. So.....what is normal? And is the idea of my "Attention Deficit Disorder" really a function of just trying to stay sane? Sort of a mental "rev limiter," if you will? (for those not so informed, a "rev limiter" on a car is the programming in the engine computer that keeps the engine from over-revving, and essentially destroying itself.) It's valid to my mind, but at this point I don't even feel like I know what real is. Is it mine, or everyone else's? If this is hard to understand, I suppose I really do "get it," sort of. But then again, I don't know. I've only ever experienced my own reality. And what, mayhaps, might an "unaided" reality have been like for someone like Jim Morrison, or Edgar Allen Poe? Theoretically, even L. Frank Baum and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Hyper-reality. Hyper-sensitivity. Where do you live?