For the past three years, I have been distilling visions into lyrical potions, a diversion that has taken me into some wildly abstract space and some startlingly concrete dreams. I have visited vistas of unintelligible synesthesia, scaled zeniths of fanatical optimism and nadirs of plunging despair. I have twisted my perspective in twenty-seven directions and have no idea which way is up anymore. I have written ballads and word salads, at considerable cost to my ability to think about anything else. I've come to believe that no notion is too demented to be aptly represented. This peculiar obse...