It’s been a couple days now, and it keeps happening — and at the oddest times, too. Sometimes I can control it and sometimes I just let it happen, let the people on the subway stare. My breath hitches kinda funny, hiccups, and my throat and voicebox shake like a bus on a bumpy road. My eyes tear up every time and I’ve just sort of stopped wiping it away.

I can’t tell if I’m happy or sad when it happens, mostly I’m just swallowed up by the enormity of the feeling. It’s like being a particle of plankton and getting swallowed up by a gigantic, benevolent whale.

America elected Barack Obama to be the President of the United States on Tuesday night, and the emotional aftershocks just keep coming.

So along with the spontaneous, random sobs of joy and relief, I’m having this recurring hallucination. Or maybe it’s a daydream. But whatever.

Every time I see, hear, or imagine somebody doing something incredibly well, that person has Barack Obama’s head.

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Jeff sent me a link to an awesome, fun, faux-vintage sci-fi short film a while back, and I mean to share it with y’all, but it slipped my mind… until I was flipping through a sketchbook and found this hastily scrawled list of cultural references that I saw while watching it for the first time:

She-Ra, Princess of Power. Lord of the Rings. American Apparel advertisements. The Neverending Story. Mario Bros. Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. “The Clapper”. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Space Invaders. Silverhawks. Batman. Thundercats. Tron.

These things, in no particular order, sprung to mind immediately for me. Some of them are obviously intentional, others perhaps unintentional but likely to be seen by anyone who grew up when I did and watched the same stuff. Still others were triggered by a small detail or action in the video that other folks might not notice or associate in the same way. Anyway, here it is!

ELA in Love At First Byte by PepperMelon:

ELA in Love at First Byte from Fernando Sarmiento on Vimeo.

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I am writing to you from a command position approximately 1 mile above the Manhattan skyline. I am hovering upside down in the cool open sky, wearing only a tremendous pair of headphones pumping Rare Earth’s “I just Want to Celebrate” at a volume that will not only crack hardened Al-Qaeda operatives but convince them to climb aboard the P-Funk Mothership.

Occasionally, featherlike wisps of cloud will slip over me, caressing my body like cold, wet ferrets. When this happens, a perfectly tailored white linen suit with waterproof properties magically appears on me, protecting me from any dampness or discomfort.

This is what it’s like to have a minor manic episode — hovering high and naked and feeling music down to the DNA. Sort of. Music is mission critical to a proper manic mood. It’s got to be loud as it can get, preferably with a solid, somewhat corny groove. Lately I’ve been rocking the aforementioned Rare Earth song, but Lee Michaels’ “Do You Know What I Mean,” Sweet’s “Ballroom Blitz,” or any number of other cracker-funk jams will do. Soulwax’s entire “Nite Versions” album is choice mania music.

Imagine being a floppy hand puppet left in the corner of an abandoned office and feeling Rare Earth enter your body like a hand in a surgical glove, invisibly lifting you into the sky — then realizing that the guys in Rare Earth are the six-fingered hand of God who’s letting you dangle upside down in space and cruising you around the skyline for a while. The view is spectacular and the soul is invincible … temporarily.

Then comes the crash. I’m working on that part. I’ve enlisted a trained professional to teach some dismount techniques, and for right now, she’s doing a bang-up job. She seems to think that the high highs aren’t healthy either, but how can anything that feels that good be all bad?

Coming off the hand of God today wasn’t quite the triple-axel, point-and-stick landing I’d hoped for, but I’m back down to normal and I don’t feel like a dusty puppet in the corner again.

It’s all about the little victories, people.

The cops arrested an actual genie on the subway this morning. They knocked him right out his Adidas, face-down on pavement wet with rain from a million dirty feet. His skin was dark, black like an event horizon with bulging swirly yellow eyes like two eggs from another planet. He roared, rhyming:

Let me go, let me go!
Why SHOULD you?
‘Cause I said it was so!
I can grant you three wishes,
or I can eat your soul!

Everyone just sort of walked around him to get on the train, only staring a little bit. I stepped over him, wishing the train would stop being all slow on the way to Manhattan all the time.

Really, if you were undercaffeinated and a little late to work, what would you wish for if you were on the spot like that?