Cube Mode
Lately I’ve been doing this thing I’m calling “going cube mode.” It’s hard to explain what I even mean by that, without using that exact phrase. Basically, “cube mode” is when I start cubing everything. Everything I look at, everything I think about, I cube it. It’s not really something I can do anything about, but it doesn’t necessarily interfere with my life. I can cook myself dinner and go cube mode, send professional emails and go cube mode, fuck my girlfriend and go cube mode. I’ll just be cubing everything the whole time I’m doing it. I’m getting more used to it, but it can get pretty intense.
When the cubing comes on, it’s nebulous at first. It’s hard to know for sure I’m going cube mode until I’m fully gone. Then there’s a sort of plateau, and then pretty soon I’m in peak cube mode, and it’s hard to tell how long it’s going to last. Not knowing can be a little stressful, because cubing can get tiring after I do it enough. There’s a sort of fatigue that sets in, a cube mode malaise, and then in the aftermath it takes me a while to get back to the equilibrium I’m used to. I get cubed over, basically, for about a day.
What do I mean by “cubing”? Also hard to explain, but if you’ve ever cubed anything you’ll know. The easiest way to explain it would be with something visual. Like, if I’m looking at a clock, and I cube the clock, then it’s like I’m looking at a clock, but cubed. The clock will have, I guess, a kind of a cubic look to it. Cubic is different from cubist, but sometimes things also look cubist when they’re cubic. Like if you raise the clock to the third power, it will kind of look like a clock if Picasso or Braque painted it. Picasso is usually the example I use, although Braque is also accurate, it just sounds funnier because it rhymes with clock.
It’s not like the numbers on the clock themselves are cubed. Like if it’s 6:06 PM it won’t literally say 216:0216 PM. It’ll say 6:06 PM but the clock will be cubed.
What’s weirder and even harder to explain is that it's not just visual. Literally everything is cubed. I listen to music and I cube the music. I step outside and the weather is cubed; not just the clouds, but the air, the pressure. I’ll eat a snack and cube the snack, go to the bathroom and the whole time everything’s coming out cubed. Even time cubes. It doesn’t literally cube, like I explained with the numbers before. It passes at the same rate, but it’ll feel cubed, you know what I mean? Cubic seconds, cubic minutes, cubic days. It doesn’t usually last days, but it can go on for pretty long sometimes.
I’ve done a bit of research into the whole phenomenon since this started happening. Unsurprisingly, there’s not a lot of literature on it. Even though cubist paintings kind of look cubic, I am relatively sure that neither Picasso nor Braque ever actually went cube mode. There are some accounts from the fifties of people describing sensory distortions that make everything they encounter seem dramatically expanded. There are writings from the middle ages about monks hallucinating prisms. So far, though, I’ve never seen anyone describe in writing something exactly like what I’ve experienced. That’s part of the reason I’m trying to do so myself here. If cube mode is a phenomenon that exists outside my mind, then documenting it is the first step to figuring out what it actually is.
Have you ever gone cube mode? Do you understand what I mean? Please send me an email if so. I want to know there are others like me.
