“You know, most of the time I just entertain myself by reflecting … hopefully with increasing playfulness and creativity … on the abject absurdity of nearly every moment of my own existence.

And my mind.

Inside me it’s so weird, so transcendentally weird, that I’m fairly certain that what people call cartoons, and also ‘psychedelic drugs’, are really just ways for others to ‘crib’ some of my common daily experience into their minds.

Honestly, DMT is trivial compared to any sequence of moments in my actual mind and life.

My dad was a particle physicist. Many of you won’t believe this, and I’m not claiming you should, but bear in mind that if energy, frequency and matter are the foundations of that which exists, none of us can make such a statement and be entirely lying.

I remember when I was a kid, I was stirring some glop on the stove my mother had compromised into something resembling food, except, in my mind, this was all insane. How could it, for example, not be food prior to the completion of preparation, just be ‘mostly empty space’ as my dad said, and also become a tedious yet at the same time exciting ‘chore’ for the wreckage that my mind and life were to become?

My dad walked into the kitchen, leaned against the countertop, surveyed me closely for a moment, and said:

“You know, son, you’re intelligently curating heat distribution.”

It’s truly difficult to explain what happened in my child’s mind when my father quipped thus. Imagine that my mind is a little racoon being chased by a gigantic dog made of tiny cartoon monsters. It quickly climbs a tree to escape, but it turns out that the tree is a giant time-octopus made of heat curation events. Something like this happened in my mind.

But I digress.

The next thing my father said, which, let’s give him some credit— his intentions were good, he just didn’t realize what my mind is like and does in response to language. Or the existence of objects. Anything, really.

The next thing he said, was like putting plutonium-laced ayahuasca into the mouth of a kid who’s mind might as well be a UFO. Or a black hole. Or, you know, your cat.

“Well done! This is actually what everything in the universe is and is doing. Organisms are just magical heat curation intelligences!

Good job!”

This utterance fomented an apocalypse in my delicate young imagination.

It was as if someone had intentionally forged the perfectly-structured ignition key for the engines of my madness — that would liberate the potential, hidden deep within me, for … truly monumental … and permanent … departure from all that is sane.

Or even coherent. My little mind cracked like cheap plates caught in a shotgun blast.

He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of root beer, popped the top, and handed it to me. “Here son, enjoy this uniquely heat-curated beverage. The universe contrived us to intelligently curate heat distribution. And we contrived refrigerators… to give us »more time.”

In the midst of the disasters his previous statements were still actively staging in their hostile takeover of my imagination, my father managed cause me to momentarily conceive of temperature and time as intimately related; it dawned on me that »the refrigerator was a time-manipulation device, as were the stove, the lights, the family dog. A chair. My mind…

Prior to this realization, and still ruined entirely by his earlier soliloquies, my mind was like a mouse trapped in a burning box that was collapsing.

But this unsought and lethal insight rang inside me like the Sun, or a huge bell that just explodes if you look at it.

I began to understand ‘that which must not be understood’.

And that is the moment when … that helpless mouse that had previously been my mind …

became the fire.

Which is, in short, how I became a comedian.”

— Bobby Yingo in Confidential Recollections