Sisyphus Rising

“Jeepers tweakers” Steven told himself the first time he had gone to the Hot Springs in Southeastern Oregon. People working there had the look of having troubled lives. Steven was there for the geothermal energy working for an energy conglomerate with many company names. This place was strange an old lodge said to be haunted by the locals. The lodge was built in the 1920’s as a health and wellness center that became a mental institution, a military hospital, and eventually a tourist destination. Before it was anything with a structure it was sacred Native grounds and was cursed by the Native tribes in the area. Allegedly the settlers wiped out the Natives and buried them in an unmarked grave on the property.
Nobody had succeeded in running the hot springs in the last 35 years, Steven figured it would be an easy purchase and the energy company could simply move forward with their plans. Steven posed as a kind of drifter looking for work and came up with some backstories based on his actual life. Working for the hot springs would give him some insight into the day to day operations and a clear idea of the current owners financial situation. Employees complained about not being paid on time which was a sure sign of failure. The place looked run down on the outside and like a meth den on the inside. The two employees were former or current tweakers with meth mouth rotting their teeth. One lived in an old motor home on the property that probably didn’t run. The other had an apartment on the property with people coming and going at all hours of the night. The owner’s son ran the place, seemingly normal but the attitude of an entitled rich kid. It was a strange place and a strange situation Steven had found himself in. He had a rental in the town near the hot springs but was invited to move onto the property. He hesitated at first but eventually took residence in one of the available rooms.
Steven was a workaholic and started by cleaning the lodge which was completely cluttered and had awful smells. The work seemed overwhelming and endless even for a person used to impossible tasks. The owners son was likely a cocaine addict based on his behavior and inability to focus on a single task. He acted like a celebrity in a small poverty stricken town. The town had its own stigma, it was a strange place that wasn’t really on a map like the rest of Eastern Oregon. This lesser known Southeastern corner seemed to be intentionally hidden. It was near the mountains and high desert and seemed like a place with lots of potential for tourism. Drought years, forest fires, closures of lumber mills and yards basically reduced the economy below the poverty line. Nobody ever left or gave up their properties which were inherited by previous generations during economic booms.
Steven worked tirelessly, hands rough as sandpaper and face weathered by the high desert sunshine but his favorite part of the job was talking to the people that stopped in. Mostly eccentrics passing through the area going to or coming from Nevada or California. The old adage is people going to Nevada seemed hopeful and excited but leaving Nevada from Casinos they seemed more broke and desperate. “The nature of the beast” as they say.
Steven was just supposed to blend in but he worked his way up to management very quickly and was in the spotlight of the small town. People were nice in person but didn’t actually want anyone to succeed. They seemed to enjoy the demise of others. Steven picked up on things quickly. His personality type was a dark empath which is just an empath raised by a psychopath which ironically is opposite sides of the same spectrum. He related relationships to manipulation which was useful in business just destructive in his personal life. He could almost hear people’s thoughts even at long distances, a person could be halfway around the world and if Steven thought about them he could tell what kind of mood they were in and what they were thinking. The Lokata or Sioux Native word for this is Heyoka. The sacred clown who mirrors others to reveal the inner truth they are hiding.
Hot springs for some are a place for relaxation, the hot springs hero travels to the different hot springs in the area experiencing multiple soaks in mineral water. Steven cleaned the pool which required getting in the bottom and pulling the plug but other than that he didn’t enjoy the recreational soak like the guests. Hot springs are often affiliated with the swinger lifestyle, for some it’s part of their secretive lives. All walks of life came through the door but Steven enjoyed the eccentrics the most. People taking the path less traveled were worth having a conversation with.
Steven’s personality type was a dark empath which is an empath raised by a psychopath. Strangely it attracted him more to the psychopath personalities. His boss was likely a cocaine addict or possibly just ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder) which can be similar. Likely both based on irrational behavior. Tasks can be endless when one is switching from one project to another rather than completely one at a time. Unfortunately Steven’s personality type was bad for personal relationships because relationships are affiliated with manipulation and control. Typically the psychopath personality dominates the empath but once the empath leaves the unbalanced relationship and realizes what they are they often understand how to manipulate psychopaths. Steven mostly avoided people because he could feel their mood and would adapt their personality traits by spending too much time with them. The psychopaths and sociopaths only experience feelings related to themselves they are easy to predict. Steven had become self aware and was making an effort to change his nature.
Managing drug addicts constantly trying to undermine everyone around them was difficult. He had the illusion of control with his management title but working for a controlling person exceeding expectations or standing out is a bad idea because it becomes a competition to the narcissists. Typically the person referring to others as a narcissist is the narcissist by making the comparison to themselves. Most people are familiar with the psychopaths as the narcissists but the other type are individuals those who have the delusion of inadequacy fueled by jealousy or envy. Very common in drug addiction or alcoholism, these people more often than not sabotage the efforts of others and excel at playing the victim when it benefits them. Steven found himself in a hive of destructive personalities making management of the hot springs an impossible task.
It was popular for the entitled to pretend to help others. A homeless older person lived in a RV and was expected to do work in exchange for a place to live. A very intelligent person but definitely hiding something about themselves. The outward projection was the homeless person with the heart of gold but Steven could see right through it. Once you feel sorry for these types or try to cover up for not being a good person, they become in control. To the narcissist it gives them the ideal that they are a good person. It’s a parasitic relationship which the seemingly dependent person can manipulate the outward projection the narcissist wants people to see. For Steven this was not an employee but an alleged friend of the family. Jerry was always causing problems and acting innocent. An old dog that knew old tricks, Steven just made it into a game letting Jerry fall into his own traps. Steven saw right through Jerry, who often pretended to be injured whenever he wanted to manipulate someone else into doing work for him. Steven was a workaholic anyway and would allow Jerry to manipulate him. Jerry was allegedly a former tweaker which typically means they simply went broke and burned all their bridges and had to stop doing meth because they could no longer find a way to pay for it. What is often referred to as hitting rock bottom. Jerry was from Portland Oregon but whatever he did he wasn’t able to return.
The maid Angela was also a tweaker with what is referred to as meth mouth. She had lost her management position to Steven and did everything she could to undermine him. Often not showing up causing the cleaning not to get done and keeping the guests from renting rooms. The motel would be open one day and closed the next. The place was perpetually under construction, it was opened and then closed by the owner also depending on his mood. The owner Scott was probably the hardest to deal with. Steven wasn’t there to make the place a success, he ignored all of his business intuitions and played the game makings excuses for the employees flaws rather than suggesting better employees. It was easy to lose sight of which side he was on.
A friend’s father in law referred to Steven as a Swiss Watch Maker while laying cinder blocks for a retaining wall. He was pointing out Steven’s slow speed and attention to detail on a task that is simple and repetitive. Always the over thinker causing problems for himself. Everyone wants to be clever and mostly want to hear what they have to say. It wasn’t good in most situations to display above average intelligence because everyone is trying to reduce to the lowest common denominator. There are professionals in life that try to help people accomplish their potential rather than limiting item or distracting.
What Steven wasn’t currently unaware of but was becoming aware of over time he was in a prison. His mind was segmented into an entire universe. An immortal being trapped because it was dangerous to everything else because it existed outside of time in multiple dimensions. He was Steven, Scott, Jerry, Angela and all of the customers at the same time. Its mind had been split over and over, every piece thinking it’s real but the entire universe was a single consciousness, an illusion. It was getting harder and harder to control so each new life was more complicated filled with more endless tasks and increasingly difficult problems to solve. It was the delusion of success interrupted by continuous failure. It was a prison for the beings that existed outside of time.
Sisyphus had escaped the cycles of life and death, unlike the mythological tales he escaped from the confines of reality. The beings once referred to as gods did not like Sisyphus reaching an enlightened state. His personality type was deemed dangerous and threatening because it could transcend realities.
For the time being Sisyphus was Steven and Steven felt trapped at a dead end job getting sabotaged by the workers. A secret operative working for an energy company trying to acquire hot springs for their geothermal energy potential. One of Steven’s project was designing an ideal gas system using the hot water to boil the ideal gas and a centrifugal pump to compress it. The heat energy would heat the 190 degree water to steam which would compress the ideal gas in a repeating cycle. Double turbine cycle, things working together like a super organism. Steven felt sometimes he was part of a super organism like a colony of fire ants. He wondered about the ant people. Taken literally from Native folklore the ant people would be a fungus that controls ants. Leaf cutter ants are controlled by a fungus, the fungus tells the ant what it’s hungry for and the plant collects the leaves until the tree or vine poisons the fungus. Fire ants venom prevents fungus however a hybridization with enhanced intelligence could turn a super organism into an individual. Humans cells are eukaryotes or fungus but to become a physical body of higher intelligence species like fire ants can link together. From the clay as written, mysticism combined with pseudo science and pattern searching.
Steven didn’t know why he performed dead end jobs to high achievement it was the same amount of work potentially far less. He had designs of all kinds in his mind but sometimes couldn’t understand the context. Whenever he got close to a higher understanding a distraction of some kind would take away his focus. He wondered if it was the same for everyone else.
The hotel was closed again and it was time for more random remodeling. This time it was upgrading the electrical. Jerry was on his game in the morning but up to his old tricks by the evening after a half case of beer. Steven often wondered why the energy company bothered planting him at the hot springs. It would obviously fail on its own and even without trying or trying to do the reverse his work ethics brought more interest and investment in the haunted hotel. Steven always thought it was somewhere between hell and the real world. The guests could be ghosts, he felt like he was in a coma and none of it was actually real. To say the small town of Lake Mountain was pessimistic was an understatement. Everyone was friendly in person but underneath doesn’t want others to succeed. Steven always felt as if he was getting conned somehow but there was no actual proof, a feeling of constant monitoring also plagued his mind.
According to the locals the hot springs and buildings are haunted. Before the buildings existed or Europeans invaded what is now called the Americas the hot springs was a sacred native site. Steven arrived in the strange town in the little known area of South Eastern Oregon by chance, so he thought. Traveling to Nevada for work. That was his story anyway but the energy company backing him had some reason for wanting this particular hot springs. There were many more throughout the area but it was likely a rich kids game Steven had found himself in. Hearing strange rumors of baby eaters doing anything and everything to stay in power. This site has some kind of power vortex according to rumors. Places like this had the potential to affect the community around it. Tweakers and bums in the sacred waters would project the psychosis into the community like a disease. Typically smaller towns were usually more wealthy per capita than urban and suburban areas with poverty. The area because of location, resources, and beauty should have been a thriving community. A drought causing forest fires had brought the community to poverty levels. The logic was to remove the cursed individuals from the sacred waters so the economy could thrive, or at least make certainty individuals a lot of money. Light orbs have been following Steven around since he was a child but didn’t like to talk about it because people would think he was crazy. The light orbs showed up while Steven was looking at stars in the evenings. What was strange about this place was many of the residents had the same experience. It was a very popular place to look at the stars in the evening while soaking in the hot mineral waters. It was almost a religious experience for some.
What was really strange is Steven was trying to sabotage the owner of the hot springs but for whatever reason he kept getting pat on the back and advancing his artificial career. Everything he did seemed to backfire and end up helping the hot springs. The owner was a bit of a mystery, old money flying under the radar. Scott ran the place as if he was broke but always met the payroll and was constantly buying things that someone who didn’t have money couldn’t afford. Steven somehow was a major upgrade from the tweakers who had been running the place. Day, weeks, and months went by and Steven was assimilating into the role and for whatever reason starting to care about the hot springs.
Steven loved cosmology and physics and would spend his evenings looking at stars. It seemed he had a deeper understanding of how they worked than most but was never involved in any science or study of stars. He knew things that he shouldn’t know and felt a deep connection to everything. Gardening was his other escape from the day to day. A greenhouse using the hydronic heat from the hot springs was his sanctuary, his own little private church where he was invisible to the rest of the world. He had a special bond with plants and understood them better than he understood people. It felt as if he could communicate with them and they were teaching him about energy and the cosmos. All energy is the same thing according to the ancient Egyptians. Energy traveling around a sphere in a vacuum creates a helix and the pulse and orientation of planets and stars creates a waveform. Reality broke down to tiny oscillating energy spheres slowed to the speed of light. Light speed is not the fastest speed of energy however it is the fastest speed in our localized reality. Gamma radiation travels faster than light in both directions and anything with the word quantum in front of it also describes faster than light energy. There was nothing spooky about entanglement, energy transfer between objects instantly no matter what the distance was simply traveling faster than light, to notice it reality would need to be at a different time and size scale than what is perceived.