Sometimes you take a long flight, you fly until you're exhausted, over seas and mountains, across histories and dynasties.
Then you land, you go through the bureaucracy that gets you into a country and you step out into the new world. You grab a taxi to a hotel, any hotel, usually in the cheap quarter, every city has one.
And then the cabbie starts speaking a language, but not the one you expect. You think you were meant to land in Delhi, so why is the taxi-driver speaking Japanese? This kind of confusion after a long flight is rare. It takes such defined and specific inputs to generate it. It's not just exhaustion from travel, it's that in combination with uncertainty as to ones whereabouts - not a usual event in the stay-at-home type.
So for a moment you're detached from the world. You don't know where you are, and you don't know if you've been played upon or preyed upon.
I have learned to generate this kind of confusion ad hoc. In my flat, at a movie, whilst shopping. I can generate it in under five minutes.
It's a delicious confusion, it makes my head spin.
In a life of offices, reports, the dull edge of the blade, it's one of the few things that spark you. Scratches the itch.
Sonic Youth said that Confusion is Sex. Perhaps a constantly befuddled state, not unlike the one I've adopted these last decades, is my evolutionary goal, for my particular remix of DNA. If nirvana is a prolonged orgasm, perhaps perpetual confusion is such an unrealistic goal's mundane translation into this plane of the sadly possible.