Who needs soporifics when you're still (in spite of widespread ridicule) embarrassing yourself, like some hapless kid with a massive shit stain up the back of his windcheater?
Oh, heavens! I've forgotten that thing—embarrassment.
One time, about a few months ago, I was caught in a K-hole that seemed an anaesthetic abyss, falling ever deeper and circumscribed by walls of ghastly hallucinations and levitating ghoulish and disfigured humanoid-like sapient creatures, yet despite their horrendously malformed morphology were as congenial and consoling as every anybody I'd ever known. They seemed vaguely otherworldly, somehow preternatural and supermundane.
They sang, manifested material objects out of pure syntax, and playfully beckoning me to join them in their supernal, surreal, sublime magic act, as I fell deeper and yet deeper until an aphotic darkness enveloped me.
It was as if I'd fallen to the benthic zone of the Mariana Trench—slowly, as if floating, and growing colder and darker as I descended into this walled-in subterranean substratum of bromous blackness; a declination into a chimerical, Cimmerian wonderworld of adumbral nothingness; a steep Stygian crevasse of dissociation and profound detachment but without withdrawal from all that I was and all that I thought everything else was.
I felt like I had attained Moksha. That I was a figment of the incalculably incomprehensible mind of Brahma, itself.
After that, I kind of came to and realised the illusions and fictions we take as axioms and truisms. Embarrassment, or social consciousness I call it, was one of many things with which I became disillusioned, unencumbered, unfettered, and detached.
So, I no longer consider the feeling of embarrassment—I'll leave it up to those who do to vicariously suffer it in my absence from it. The entities sang songs and I remember some of its lyrical content, which went:
How remiss and negligent
must I possibly be?
Well, let's examine it—embarrassment
and surely we shall see.
Embarrass means to abash or render nonplus or thwart
one's endeavors, and grow confused
or even vicariously embarrass their consort
flustered, dismayed, a loss of with what to do
as one's social grace decays and loses its sinew
it may mean to cause shame
or consternation
like a pain, pang, or an acute social constipation
It may be brought out
as through a faux pas or
tort or public flout
But it always includes a stasis
and precludes one's true crasis,
dismayed and afraid
the embarrassed feel maimed
with insecurity and woe
And flashbacks to the moment
That made their embarrassment so
But embarrassment encumbers
one with an aversion to social blunders
And thus it stifles one's self-expression
as they worry over the spectators impression
and so they are ensnared
in their own fear of being scared
of doing that which the decorous wouldn't dare
But why and wherefore
does this fright matter more
than the thing they miss most
which is life lived how they wish it were so?