The following is an excerpt from a journal I found in the future, after being struck by a lightning bolt while performing a mystic rain dance atop a grain silo filled with alarm clocks.

September 18, 2009

This night, perhaps more than any night before, I located the elusive JOY which I have long pursued, but, heretofore, have yet to savor a clutching thereof.

The reason, I must make it plain: a performance of improvisational comedy at the UCB Theatre, in Hollywood, California.

Indeed,  such a spectacle I had never yet seen—three groups, several members in each, performing for different durations of time. And yet… yet… what is time when one does not accept it, but rather allows oneself to be consumed—nay, engulfed—by the eternal flame of bliss? This I ask you! It is nothing!

My wife died of tuberculousis mere hours prior, and already I’ve moved past her memory, unceremoniously. But what is mortality when one feels one heart rush and leap and bound and celebrate living? It is nothing! It is distraction!

My humors are aroused! HA!

‘Tis a sanguine rapture! Ye!

This show, which featured groups touting the monikers: Not It! Shakedown, and Sanitary Snapkin… why, I cannot offer up thanks enough for proving my cynical mind wrong on everything I had ever conceived of. I wish only that the whole world could have seen it, and enjoyed the nirvana that the mystic fellows at the new age stores speak of, and which, until now, I had, as a rather banal Western man, never fully understood, but appreciated only in that I trusted their precious geode stones in the aesthetic sense.

A fine evening indeed!

- Colin Swinswibblesworth