The Diamond Island

As you once shined in my darkness with your goodness Molly, I shine in your darkness with my caring. My thoughts are prayers of light winging to you that you will find your way home.

With merry heart I pour libations upon the woken spring ground and down the hatch in your honor.  The inspired happiness of my innermost passion reflects a glow from the heavens no night may dim.

From the peak of my diamond island I flash a thunderous tumult for all to know that Molly Kleinman is my friend.  This humble candle brighter than any lighthouse I hold aloft and sing a song of returning to my lost friend.

Let her know peace!  Let her know home!  Let her know joy!  I ordain this under grace, thank you.

Out of time long past a signal, a last transmission waiting for me to acknowledge.  Almost past the point of receiving.  But my ears are like a lynx these days, letting in and picking up the smallest traces of fading time space particles.  The message flickered on my brain screen and was confirmed by a friend.

Molly ain’t comin’ back.

Denial

Spring has come; time to honor those who didn’t make it through the winter—even the harsh winters of the jungle where life is created by death, or so many ancient forms of inner belief conclude.

I’m not close enough for a full sensor sweep, but friends of mine who were there for the maximum allowable knowledge fill me in with as much scoop as they can muster after twelve years.  It is enough; I can respond now that I know as much as I’ll likely ever know.

I never thought I’d have any more time with her than I did.  I always held out hope that I would hear some word of how she ended up doing after college.  How right I was.

Before I found out, I’d just been thinking of her, working out imaginations of friendship in my writing.  Trying to make sense of past interactions.  It appears that now must have been the time to receive this transmission.  To look back and really transform what I have known; to move forward and let go of the ways of thinking and feeling that aren’t necessary any more.

So I start things off by opening my heart up to the hurt.  Everything soon turns to a dull haze as I go through my day with the knowledge that a part of me is gone forever.

More Denial

Come home, the damn pipe is leaking again.  I step into a freshly laid puddle of cat puke and don’t notice until I’ve tracked it all around the first floor.  The neighbors are watching television at a high level of volume again.  K needs to get outside for some fresh air.

But at least I can still have problems.

K cleans the puke while I figure the leak out.  Then we grab our walking sticks to go rouse the folks for a walk around the loch.

The rain that was supposed to have come this afternoon never showed.  Total rip off.  The folks, K and I talk clan business—the usual.  But I’m still swimming in a haze and distracted.

Then the rain comes suddenly, hard.  Thunder and lightning rousing the earth with the fury of the elements.  The trees haven’t grown any leaves yet, so there’s no cover.  We get soaked, talking about headhunters in Southeast Asia and how they wouldn’t last a minute against the loonies in the local grocery store.

A makeshift shelter presents itself and we stand under it, watching the empty streets splash with torrents of rainfall.  Then the storm passes and we complete our walk, wet and refreshed with new life.  The garden was planted just in time, so our seeds have gotten their first spring shower.

Still More Denial

Have to shop for groceries. K has jobs to do, so it’s time to do a solo mission for supplies.  I feel like a ghost—the crowds are unusually scant and hardly any of them appear to notice me.  It’s as if I’m in a dimension of nothingness in which the droids and zombies can’t touch me.  I gather up my groceries with ease.

The checkout girl shares stories with me about her favorite places to eat.  Yeah, be nice to have a Checkers, a White Castle, or a Sonic instead of like nine banks in the same mini-mall.  I hear it.

Back at the honeycomb hideout, I put away the groceries on auto-pilot.  The pipe isn’t leaking anymore—the handyman job I did actually worked.  The mermaid must have been reminding me I have work to do.  I do.

I point the ghetto blaster at my neighbor’s wall and put in License To Ill.  I play it loud so they know what time it is.  I’m not in the mood to put up with their high noise levels today.  While K continues her jobs I cook up the meat sauce and noodles for tonight’s dinner.  The cats are anxious, but I reassure them as best I can.  Daddy’s having a bad day.

But at least I can still have bad days.

Dang It

The neighbors suitably served notice, I ready the noise ordinance phone number for next time and magnet it to the fridge.  The ghetto blaster is turned around and a headphone is jacked in.  I go through my old college tapes looking for an appearance of Molly in any of them.

But while I hear many marvelous friends speak and remember numerous old nuances long past, she remains out of reach.  Dead end.  I’m just hoping for one last thing to remind me of her, to push the horrors of death away and keep them at bay one more minute.  No luck.

I already went over every memory I have of her twice since last night when I got only an hour of sleep, ghost lights hovering outside my window on their way to the next realm or phantom vehicles rushing past with loud roars.  I discovered many things I had forgotten, but in the end I have all I’m going to get of her.

It’s time to face facts.

Maybe I Can Do Something

I turn inwards and draw upon personal resources, long honed.  The Box tells me where one of the secret doors is and I open it, the smell of crayons rising out of a dark space.  Oh yeah, that Cup.  Midnight blue and black as pitch, completely formed, of two worlds waiting for me to use it this night.

Tonight the Cup is serving me up a dose of grief.  Before I can change my mind, I willingly sip that sour heartache tearing me asunder.  The Cup tells me where to find the next secret door.  I have to use a golden torch to find it, buried in the forgotten flotsam of a shipwrecked cargo I picked up a while back.

Oh yeah, the stationary box holding countless delights.  It’s so good to see it again.  The revelation that emerges strikes me gently and sharp: Remember yourself as you go through this.  You have a promise to keep.

There’s a key to imagination I haven’t used in seventeen years, a thought I haven’t had in almost as long, and a voice from the depths I am hearing now.

Out of nowhere, a forgotten memory comes forth of a date Molly and I had.  A Jazz concert at the Portland Zoo we attended. I’ve forgotten so much, but now this comes back to me clear as crystal.

Now I recognize what she was trying to do.  I was in a very bad place and she was trying to help me.  She was trying to get me to dance and forget my troubles.  But I hated Jazz!  And I was so very very dark in my own personal nightmare at the time.

The many other times we hung out now start to make sense.  She was trying to reach me and get me to laugh; which she finally succeeded in doing.  That’s the part I didn’t get before.  So many things, so many meetings where she would just be there and I didn’t know why.

I had no money, no car, and no future.  But she would drive me places, buy me dinner, and just talk to me.  What the Hek was this gorgeous, smart, easygoing, and kindhearted woman doing talking to a loser like me?

But now I know.  The things she gave me, trying to coax me out of my tomb.  From our first meeting to our last, she was planting seeds in me.  I never understood until now.

The Cup is empty.

Sadness

Like a flash, I take up the key and place it in the stationary box.  I send my messenger of the imagination through a billowing, windswept creamy series of clothes hanging on laundry lines in a vast meadow of sunlight I see only with my mind.  I’ve sent a message to Molly, telling her hey I get it now.  A part of my life is made whole and complete.

No expectations.  She tended my fire when I was lost.  I didn’t know her fate because the seeds she planted kept me safe—from the harm of knowing her death until they could flower and bear fruit now.  I’m much stronger now than I was then.

How many of us can say we’ve unselfishly helped a soul in their darkest trial through the night safely to the other side?

All of a sudden I’m ready to say goodbye and move on.

I feel myself falling into unconsciousness as the tremendous stresses of my grief flow again unhindered.  K tucks me into bed.  On the shelf beside me are my moleskinne notebook and a pencil taken from my compass, placed the night before in case I had a dream of Molly.

This time I know I’m going to hear from her.

Assent

My dreams are deeply unconscious—all I remember is a board game involving movement along tree branches and a dice roll.  Michael the cat wakes me up for feeding and I shamble in a trance downstairs to take care of what is an automated chore I half-sleepwalk through.

I stand at the base of stairs and realize Michael has disappeared, which is odd because he’s a greedy bum.  I’m alone, it’s dark, and I’m not asleep.  There’s nobody present, yet I imagine in my mind that Molly is sitting on the Marshmellow Couch in shadow, without mass—an apparition.

I have a conversation with her in my mind, trying to keep this unconscious fantasy within conscious direction without harming its contents.  It’s not real, but in order for me to work it through I must treat it as if it were.  Open, but cautious and careful.

I start the conversation by saying I miss her.  She says she misses herself too.  Tells me my efforts are a neat way to remember her.  She misses everyone.

I know there are questions I should ask, but I somehow know I can’t.  There are taboos I have to follow here—only things having to do with my need to grieve and work things out.

I resist the temptation to ask what happened, but she gives me subjective clues anyway.  She rolled the dice and lost.  Into the sea, lost her body, drowned.  Which could mean anything, it’s not concrete enough to test.

For a moment, I catch a glimpse of her in my mind’s eye as if a sliver of light reveals a tiny detail.  I think I see blood and get the impression of a head trauma.  A voice inside me says she wasn’t murdered.  But I keep that intuition at bay with a realistic viewpoint—my impressions and predictions have been wrong many times before.

I watch her put her face in her hands, sorrowful.  The emotional reaction I have makes it hard to stay focused and imagine her clearly.  She says she was sad and upset, she can’t find her way, light a candle with thoughts.

My instincts tell me it’s time to move on; I feel myself growing unable to hold this active dialogue stable much more. Whatever it is I needed to do, I’ve done and now I must acknowledge the inevitable.

I feel guilty at saying goodbye like this, both growing fully awake and losing the strength to keep going.  I tell her again that I miss her and that I always loved her.  I stop myself, realizing I meant to say like.  I consciously draw a line and the taboos require I flush the toilet—running water will make things right again.

I ascend the stairs and go back to bed.  As I let go, I imagine Molly sending me messages.  I drift, receive a message, write it down in the moleskinne in the dark, repeat.

She says to tell my friend Solikandi she’s sorry she missed her.  It was a bit of a shock and downer for her too.  She likes the musics she’s doing now.  She’ll find her way home.

She tells me to do a good job on my writing.

She thanks me for sending my messenger and for thinking of her.  She says that’s all there is.

I awake with a start.  I look outside the window and see a single star low in the sky flare once and disappear.  A breeze blows through the window.

She says she’s traveling.

She says something kind about me and says I can quote her.

She says my writing is a cool way to imagine her—not what she would have imagined.  It’s sweet.

The next time I wake up, Frankie the cat has opened the stationary box of delights and pulled out the key.  I understand it to mean my messenger has returned and my imaginary conversation with Molly is done.  I put the key and stationary box away, then feed Frankie.  I give thanks for my chance to say goodbye and rest my head on my pillow.

Then darkness.

I wake to the alarm clock playing Steppenwolf’s Magic Carpet Ride.  Time to go to work.

Spring, he approaches like a long lost friend. Life spreading out in an awakening dark whorl of crushed and frozen currents.

Blasts of frozen wind gusting through the streets and paths, numbing bones and finishing off stragglers. There’s a radiance behind their efforts, driving them out into the open spaces to escape what is coming to awareness.

Recognition and remembrance of Kore nature and Kali power loosening up the drawstrings holding eyes of elements closed in dreaming of balance. The Oroboros curls and twines inside the heads of survivors shambling through the echoes of winter beasts from the unknown.

Energy is shifting and transforming all around our cold-numbed ears.  Despite our sniffling noses dull with crisping, the hidden secrets buried like Easter eggs wait for us to catch their scent.  The blind and mindless turning inward of huddling over an electric current is passing on.  Soon, we’ll crack open like icy creeks and know we are streaming once more.

Can’t move or think much this last week. The rumbling hunger in the wild for the blossoms of winter’s close have seized hold of me.  I see it in the chatter of robins and finches; feel it in the easing of my blood.  All is noise and rattling rolling tumbling rushes of sparks bursting out of nothingness and calling the slumber back into the unknown.

Spring hears her call and comes running, fresh joy and unleavened sorrow both at the ready—as the year of the tiger sinks its claws into the ground and roars, “Here I am bitches!”

Out on the loch state of mind in the lifeboat, I pried open The Accumulator and rummaged around.  Seems like the memories of an old flame stirred the pot and brought a few things to the surface into clearer vision.

It appears I wrote a journal entry about the incredible day I had smoked oysters. That moment moved me so strongly I had to set it down on paper lest I forget the intensity of it.

From the meeting at the bus stop—she having first done a morning walk in the woods to think us over—I dodging a dear friend’s photo meeting so I could get up early (eleven AM is early for me) and be on time.

Together through a long day on the town worthy of a dozen dates.  On into a night of just two people talking and sharing a connection.  To the kiss goodnight keeping me from getting to sleep until five AM (thus having to write it all out of my system).

But even before that day, a journal entry about the kiss.  The first one, soft and wonderful beyond imagining.  Opening my heart and sending me straight to the bottom that would become a return to the surface. Then I realize I’m flooded with memories, reading a non-linear journal moving back and forth between moments in time and space to tell me what I have forgotten.

See, I built this inner space communications module, an interocitor if you will, out of cardboard and magic markers. But as my friend Xtine would say, the model kits we see in the store don’t quite make the grade. What we have inside is the real thing.

Back when I was on UFO Girl’s ship of the I-magination there was alien and earthling co-contamination. See, if I could build an advanced organic technology at eight years old then it stands to reason I might be able to develop and improve upon that model in some capacity. Completing the picture by sticking an antenna on the whole thing to get better reception.

So there’s that musical pattern playing on my viewscreen now in sound and sight, accessed by looking in an old memory constellation of love—what else are spaceships powered by?

CONTINUE?

Hek yeah, my music quest demands that I answer this one.  Yes.  Yes!

Good ol’ UFO Girl, crazy as she is, left musical messages for me during that time for me to find now. It’s like opening a time torpedo.  “This is how you put the antenna on,” followed by “This is how you look into your brain and extract materials for analysis.”

Because hidden within the nuances of my life, powered by the completed harmony of an array of musical meditations, she’s hidden the plans for me to build my own flying saucer.

That was some kiss my old flame and I shared.

My job stuff, along with romantic stuff, is off limits on this blog-a-roo.  But again I find exceptions creeping in.  Something Captain Picard in Star Trek: TNG said about laws being unjust as long as they are absolute.  That is, inhuman.

Inexplicably, a tale from my past keeps coming back to me this holiday season, and so I must reckon with it.  That is, after all, the purpose of this starship adventure I find myself traveling along.

There was this time I allowed love to enter into my house, and it tore my furnishings asunder as if it had been one terrible tumult of super-accelerated fireballs.  You see—I received as an Xmas gift a CD of an album I listened to in depth a great deal during this time.

I’d already been thinking of my past love in the crumbled corners of my mind, but to get those songs (and cheesy, adolescent songs they seem to me now—though still with great meaning) at this time, it’s as if I’m opening up a door I’d held long closed.  One I’d rather not revisit, as pleasant and as magical as some of the things I’d jammed behind it are.

But enough!  Wraiths of torment, I release you from your burdens of guarding these treasured memories.  Away with the tender keepsakes and wondrous insights of affection dwelling in a tightened tomb.  Let treasures sparkle in bright sun and with open offering to those who find them compelling.

Not into the dark, but into the light where this soft, glowing memory howls in vivid, windswept peaks and heat-soaked hills of elevated spaciousness.

I’m remembering a certain love I got to know during tennis class.  Our late night talks together, one of which led to our first passionate kiss.  The laser Van Halen show we watched together, and the smoked oysters we had one night in my room.  Walking alone in a field at night and collapsing with giddy delight so strong I had an out-of-body-experience.

Then the frustrations and misunderstandings with one another.  Each of us wanting different things and not having the wisdom to either recognize that or work it out.  Culminating in a break up in a hamburger diner that no longer exists, the two of us going our separate ways yet heartbroken and shaken by passions perhaps no human being knows how to make whole.

She married my rival and has a family now.

Me, I would wander many cold and empty paths to come.  Into darkness so terrible many never come back.  But I came back and I didn’t know why or how.

Now I know why.  I said, “yes.”

Yes to love no matter what the consequences.  It sent me straight to hell, but I held onto it fast as painful and disappointing as love turned before it tossed me aside face first into knowledge of my own death.

To those who have loved, that is how you answer evil.  You say yes.

Yes!  Yes, a wonderful word, a word of freedom and expanse, which releases all bonds and opens the door to the buried secrets you kept within.  Hoping beyond hope that an understanding would come.  That it would make sense before you die.

Could I ever have imagined I would share this now, in this time, with the whole universe of those who use computers?  To try and unburden my soul of even a smidgen of the choices I have made and bear the blame for?

Down the rabbit hole and up again, to witness the vast expanse of what love transforms before us.

Believe it!

There’s more to the maiden-mother-crone triumvirate of female experience.  There’s actually a fourth stage of existence, just as there are four phases of the moon.  You know, that new moon thing, the dark of the moon, the hidden moon, the unknown where all is night and nothingness.

I went on about Fear of Icky Girl Power a while back, which was an attempt to make sense of the senseless.  You know, trying to understand the unknowable.  I’m talking about not the conscious, or the subconscious or the unconscious—all matters that can be conceptualized and grasped on some level.  But then there’s not just the infinite, but as a friend of mine once remarked, “the infinitely infinite”.

In practical terms we’re discussing the mer-she.  That woman which is completely veiled by the shimmering scales of the unknown and unknowable.  The other three forms of woman are veiled to various degrees but show some human side or character (crescent waxing, full, crescent waning).  Not so the dark of the moon.

This is some serious bad girl stuff we’re talkin’.  Associated with just about every bad thing you might imagine a woman capable of, because that’s all you can do—try to make associations.  There’s good reason to be afraid; not saying you should be unafraid.  But easy to project onto this unknown part of half the population, remain in ignorance, run and hide or try to overcompensate by subjugating and demeaning.

But all you’ll be doing is working out complexes on the other three parts of experience—half fears and mirages of the unconscious acted out by your own shadow, tortured by the rumblings of your fantasies at the back of your mind, or making stupid mistakes because you don’t have the waking tools to focus on day to day external reality.  The unknown?  Who knows?

It’s a futile absurdity, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t obligated to try.  The bad girl pushes us into trouble, and that’s just what she’s a gunna do.  So what if you can only guess, get hoofin’ it, sucker.

Difficult, because the numinous will materialize the unexpected for you.  Hostile rip apart of face and scarred for life, nothing at all but your friends laughing at you and your story of it—whatever it was, or Hek you might just wake up in the living room missing your coccyx.  What you thought you saw is also likely to disappear at your approach or never be found as be encountered.

You see a lot of movies based on encounters with this inexplicable experience.  The Fog (mist full of vengeful zombies), The Thing (extra-terrestrial shapechanger), Prince of Darkness (hostile liquid with psychic powers), Killdozer (machine animating space energy), Nightmare at 37,000 feet (psychic, freezing slime), Bug (swarms of fiery mutant roaches), The Giant Spider Invasion (swarms of inter-dimensional spiders), Return Of The Living Dead (hazardous animating chemical), and so on.

The plots all tend to center around identifying and neutralizing hostile forces previously unknown to our experience.  Maintenance of order through heroic action.  There is something to be said about extraordinary agency for the preservation of the community.  Stories that reinforce ideals of survival are useful.  They do protect the collective psyche from possession by outside forces.

However, it can also serve to repress and stifle creative energies that might be better served towards adaptation.  If you want to tap into survival talk to a bad girl.  But if you want to see what’s been saving our collective butts seek out the biggest baddest girl of all.

I’m talking about the bad girl as supernal super-predator.

• Absorptive (Devouring)
  Whatever you’ve got, she can take it and you as well
• Controlling (Possessive)
  She assumes command of anything she touches
• Infectious (Unrestrained)
  She goes everywhere and anywhere
• Exponential (Overbearing)
  Her influence grows in size with time
• Tenacious (Stubborn)
  She never takes no as an answer
• Disruptive (Difficult)
  She inspires fear and confusion wherever she appears
• Collective (Conniving)
  She is many, she is one

With qualities like that, she doesn’t need much else, does she?  She knocks over tyrannosaurus rexes for lunch money and invalidates the insurance policies of entire communities on good days.  On bad hair days she threatens all life on the planet!

The typical story throws in a hero (usually male) who discovers another quality of the ultra-bad girl:  Invented Weakness (Labeling).  The plot very often revolves around identifying and exploiting the way of thinking that will diss-empower (I play with words) this ultra-bad girl.

In some cases this just brings everything to a draw until the next sequel (In The Blob she gets frozen until next time).  In others there is a defeat but the knowledge that it could happen again is in the background.  Sometimes the attempt to stop the spread of the ultra-bad girl’s power only delays the inevitable and she returns even stronger (Return of the Living Dead has this kind of doomsday ending).

It could be that nature requires physical laws be followed and thus game-balance be maintained, but I can’t help but feel this is a human conceit.  It’s in our interest to believe in ourselves as being special if it maintains survival.

I prefer to dispel that characteristic as illusion and suggest a possible other characteristic:  Enjoys The Hunt (Capricious).  We are never out of truth, and does not the bad girl hold a mirror up to ourselves? Girls just wanna have fun.

I wouldn’t consider the realities of these movies fun for the participants, but are they not shared imaginary spaces of a certain form, in which we invite the ultra-bad girl to come and play?  To demonstrate to us her amazing power and give us insights into some of our deepest, most terrifying curiousities?

Who wants to be one of her victims?  Would anyone possibly want to watch as she destroys all our feeble attempts at understanding, turning us into corpses at her command so that we might slay our loved ones?

Or rather, is there not something in all of us who finds that exciting and invigorating?  She knows about life, and will teach us if we listen.  Because remember, she lives out there beyond the unknown reaches of what can be conceived.  Coming into our field of experience to scare the Hek out of us and inspire new ways of consciousness.  Bad girl just wants us to come out and play—wanna get crushed, crumbled and chomped?

So hey!  All you women out there:  Become the bad girl you already are.

Even if it’s just throwing mushrooms in the soup because everyone but you hates them and pretending it was an accident if they even notice.

The supernal super-predator ultra-bad girl knows secrets.  She’ll tell you one if you let yourself listen.

The End?

Adjustments continue in the honeycomb hideout.  The fallout from the haunted house has passed away and healing continues.  K and I are doing decompression and decontamination procedures, putting furniture in place while we unpack the numerous storage units.  Cleaning and minor repairs are moving along, as we make sure the heater is working, has a fresh filter, and the vents are all vacuumed out.

As I was passing by the secondary landing from the crow’s nest, Blink was poised before one of the storage units.  She mewowed at me as if to say, “Hey whattabout this one?”

Oh yeah, that storage unit.  The one that holds The Box.  One of those things you just pick up on a perfectly unremarkable day, not unlike Edward Gorey’s The Doubtful Guest.  Since I became the caretaker of The Box, I regard the contents and make adjustments, additions and subtractions as needed.  Things appear and disappear, so I never quite know what to expect.

Well, crumbs.  I suppose I ought to take The Box out and see what’s going on.  So I clear my desk and unscrew the bolts.  All the things inside are in a state of disarray and flux.  The boxes are practically hopping up and down with the need for attention.  The creatures, tools, and knick-knacks (at least I think they are knick-knacks, I’m not always sure) are all over the place.

But once I begin my meditations and direct my active imagination to the task, a new form takes shape inside The Box.  The dimensions widen out, indicating the things don’t want to be stacked anymore.  They want a horizon, a diorama of vast view.  Take it all in instead of dig for layers.

A few things leave, some never to be seen again, others wanting to return to living in the honeycomb hideout after a long hypersleep into the future which is now.  One item, my Kokeshi doll, no longer wishes to reside in The Box.  Like a heroine going on an adventure, she won’t take no for an answer.  She wants to see the world now, get involved.  I’m a little taken aback, but what she says goes.  I know she’s going to take a few hits, but maybe that will make her all the more beautiful and herself.

Then I get a real shock.  The Kali-Yoni origami box I made (at Kali’s active-imagination request) has imploded open.  Shrunk in on itself until it popped open in two pieces, yellow and black.  I don’t know what was in that box, it was a secret so unknown it could only be conceived of in a void space of emptiness, never to be opened.  I made it fully expecting it would never be opened.

There’s a crack in the top of The Box, to allow a view of the outside world.  Sometimes I adjust The Box to accommodate these sorts of requests.  Sometimes The Box does them itself.  So whatever might have been in the origami box that is popped open could have gotten out.

Indeed, I find a trail of red cloth spilling out one end of the crack, as if whatever happened pulled along until it broke free.  Yeah, I get the birth reference.  I’m still stunned.  I have to take a breather and stare for a good ten minutes before I get my act together again.

It’s almost as if I am a caretaker, a janitor and director at the same time of otherworldly things beyond my comprehension.

The new configuration slowly takes shape as I handle items and attend to their requests.  Two slumbering monsters awaken with a loud roar, stirring the ocean of red cloths that form a kind of soft playing field for certain inhabitants.  A beached behemoth finally finds a swathe of red sea foam suitable for it’s dense, impenetrable frame.

As I finish up this session of adjustment, a small lockless chest and brass symbol merge together in a way I would never have expected.  They come from two different times and places, yet they fit together as if they were two pieces of a larger puzzle.  I don’t think I can ever see these things the same, contemplating how incomprehensible their fitting together is.  I mean, if the sun and moon became one for the first time, how transforming an event that would have been for life on this planet!

No order, and so there is pattern.  Ceaseless change, and so there is eternity.  I realize it has been so long…so distant a time when I attended to this responsibility on a regular basis.  I’ve just been shuffling The Box from one battleground to another, barely keeping up with what is required.  The Box used to be much larger than it is now.  I used to be somebody too, or so I heard.

I pick up Peter Pan’s knife, and examine it closely.  Hairline cracks in whatever it’s made of, a smell of fine myrrh coming from the claw on the pommel.  Dare I remember the time I used to carry this in costume–before I walked away from Never-Never Land?  Or was it Rima the Jungle Girl who gave this to me?  I’m not quite sure.  I couldn’t fight a codfish or smile at a crocodile to save my life now.  Those days are long faded, as Lorien, Imladris, and the Grey Havens have passed into the West.  Another century altogether.

I think of a dear friend, and the conversations we used to have before I discovered The Box.  He drew out of me so many things about the haunted horrors I would face, he had to have been a prophet back then.  Now he’s a doctor, struggling against the status quo, in a very lucky place to be.  I beam every time I speak with him these days, he’s so awesome.  Back then I pretended to take it in stride, but I missed nothing.  He was right, so right on I had to pretend he was off the mark.  But now I know better.

I close The Box, quite shaken.

Had a little bit of that dragon’s blood on my slapstick where his nose got stamped Cat In The Hat pink.  The folks took it and mixed it into the rum punch, baking and mixing our healing feast.

I celebrate community and survival, those things we are thankful for as we recognize the blessings of our life.

I mourn those who suffered savage brutality at the hands of settler colonialism, on the backs of whom many of us enjoy our privileges.

We hear the song of nature, and guided by the spirit of Sister Piscotti whose vase we must fill, sinners that we are, and go into the deep old woodland chaparral which refuses to let human beings push it around.

The old path that is normally there is overgrown, for the first time I can ever remember.  The unseasonably warm weather and rain have caused an almost spring like growth to emerge, lichens growing on tree trunks and moss in full bloom!

Rabbit escapes our sight through the roots and tangles of the path that is no more.

We roll with it, nomads that we are.  Many paths through the forest, but you have to pay.  Human remains.  Scratches of sharp spines on flesh, I am bloodied, roots trip us up, wet pine branches swipe us.  The forest doesn’t move, yet it has motion.

Fog swathed ways that come and go, lightning struck trees out of a dream, and all manner of growths.  We clip and gather a harvest for the vase cussing and swearing but somehow swerving both ways to the way out.

Explosions, the Grand Turkey Lord shooting off a series of cracks and pops in the deep to scare our pants off and make us laugh as we trudge out of the mud and back to the places where kids play, the first step back to home where a sacrifice awaits to feed us.

Celebrate, and mourn.

Singing ELO’s “Don’t Bring Me Down”, we brush off the brambles and retie shoelaces.  Back home, having paid our respects to the ancestors and the within, we toast and serve, candles lit.

I got the summons from an old wreckhouse stringer, none other than Boot-beggar Head-squeezer The Constrained.  I get them all the time, but after getting one laugh-a-lariat gumption vacuum in the nowhere land I gave up.  If the big cheese biter won’t even bother showing up in un-person, sending some never-was crumb kneeler to tell me how much I will never ever whatever, I may as well pretend I have sour grapes syndrome and gnash them toothies.

This time, I dropped my six shooters and walked into the nasteroo un-gourge without a backup.  Maybe Xtine’s sharpening of the cleavers through ultrasonic screaming, or Hexe’s turning the ovens up to eleven (extra crunchy!), or Alexi’s diving into the morass of slavering munchuloids with a fake lightsaber and exoskeleton are rubbing of on me.  K prepped the hyperspace tunnel and offered me any number of below the belt stone knives and bearskins disguised as digital watch greatness, but I decided this called for no technique.

Make no mistake, Boot-beggar will stamp your ticket with dog doo ink and slap you senseless upside the sensibility.  You will get the viceroy gripper treatment on anything but your skull.  That gets saved so your teeth can fly out with a bloody pop as you watch them eviscerate your soul food.  Yep, your single serving size of batsplat is in your eye and out your sock.  You’ll be lucky if a piece of you wins the souvenir sweepstakes.  Every member of the wreckhouse loves a keepsake.  As long as they get to squeeze and watch the primary cell awareness squirm.

They don’t mention The Constrained because the outhouse ain’t working, no siree.  Here comes the rolf-a-lore, with a leverage on your shoulder blades that will make you watch the unfolding stupidity of nonsense puppets dangle before your very irradiated nose hairs.  Man, how long have I been living this genuine faux dungheap and wishing I could crawl more instead of less?

The hidden victims hadn’t crawled out of their capsules yet, but the mongering ankle-gores were ready for me.  All spines in full effect, a poison take-out trough prepared for the thousandth and one millenium since beatdown was coded into the particle stream of molten galactoids from the bubbling pampers of hell.  The preliminary foray of anti-humanors began the moment I stepped over the line and knocked the batteries off the ultra-Euclidean shoulders of the giant Moloch and Mammon elementars.  From there I was coded, identified, and shoved into a face full of fully paid for murder-death-kill.

I started sweating, and a gnawing headache seized my frontal lobe, while fluid accumulated at the back of my reptile gland and cut me to half auxiliary power.  Boot-beggar pulled off the masks and the insincere bystanders started screaming in-between attempts to breathe the jellified air.  Oh yeah, the wreckhouse stringer booting me full of insecurity and inadequacy, in the ultra terrestrial flesh, with alkaloid allies, miserable mopey minions, and vicious vicarious victims all flapping their arms furiously to get a bite in of my live brains before the surprise-you’re-dead negative round.

So yeah, it’s on, the big green dragon and I got nothing.  No quick, no slow, just an eternity of beatdown that can never be undone and I’m about to get shoed.  All unfolding before me, sneak previews all the way to the bone of what’s coming down the hammer stem along my spine.

Except I came back.

I move without moving, dodge without dodging, strike without force, free and easy as a nobody.  Lucerna’s training proves to be enough, I twist and turn, sing quietly, openly, dance with eyes on every small detail, swimming the luck plane with grace, genuine and true.  I am myself, lowdown loser Paul, but this time I feel it!  I can see for miles and miles.

Suddenly Boot-beggar starts running out of mo’, the energy bar shows up at the rear of the Oh-Crikey Coral and it’s not so certain now that I’m going down without a doubt.

Cause man, I got doubts.  I’m shining with them and it’s okay.  Nobody’s home, but leave a message ’cause I care to the max.

Final battle, and Boot-beggar throws the top talent up close and person, literally moving objects in my face to block my poise.  I’m cool, been fighting so long at full power with half a cup of noodles on good days, it’s just more of the same.  An entire wing falls off Boot-beggar and then the leaking begins, seriously blowing hot air out the door of the sphincter as the entire blood-eating externally internalized edifice starts to crumble.  The plan has to change, ’cause the no groove is bein’ played!

The rout unravels like a squid tentacle shot out a cannon, pieces of minion rejects fall away even though that’s all that’s holding the mind trench flowing with broken glass, the force field corn husks are rallying for a final desperate move.  That’s when I reverse course and swing past the avalanche of heartless and humiliation, causing the formations of prickly poison death to crash into each other.  The whole thing is done like bad ham in a fridge, and last person standing is dead meat.

Boot-beggar takes the blow, and staggers.  But I’m already flowing easily out the door as the jaws of fakery snap shut to erase this defeat.  No dice, no roll, got it?  Though the final griddle-waddle punt-waggle is there to catch me in a pincer attack for a group hump from behind, I wave my hand and within seconds I foible myself free of the whole affair, smoke rumbling out of the litterbox for human beings in need of odor control.

It’s a long haul out of the sucker pit, but K is there with healing potion snacks and the cats purr me back to main power.  The folks are hootin’ and hollerin’, slapping their knees with laughter.  What a story!  I swam the crocodile river and didn’t get wet.

Then it dawns on me.  I gave Boot-beggar the braaaat!  Oh, that old dragon got plenty more toys to break. All I did was not fall down this time.  But I held my own and kept it real, which I never ever whatever would have thought I could do, because I had been jacked.  From now on, that big green dragon will have a stain of pink on it’s nose.

The energy is so intense, that for a long hour I can hardly bear it.  I almost come down with an illness.  Yeah, like I said this isn’t Zelda on the N64, this is Zelda-and-then-you-die.

Then I start doing a stupid dance!  I put on Taco’s “Puttin On the Ritz”, and turn that sucker up loud.

Got-ta dance!  GOT-TA…DANCE!

Whirlwind of changes to the new honeycomb hideout, while the ghosts and goblins run riot in the streets looking for juicy life forms to fill their empty gullets or just plain entertain them in boredom-town.  My psychic ovens can barely keep up with the new demands, even with the new transwarp drive.  Looks like I’ll have plenty of collops from timber-jack land for the pot.  Celtic New Year, here we come!

In preparation for my two parter halloweenie story of doom shortly to arrive, I’ve been contemplating the Buddha a little.  Bodhisatvas, to be precise, particularly the Jizo aspect of Ksitigarbha.  These are beings whose compassion for the suffering of others moves them to remain in the world and help all beings attain enlightenment.  The Jizo acts to empty the deepest hells of suffering souls, protecting and guiding those lost in ignorance and error.

So where did all this brain activity come from?  Well, I’ll tell yeh.  Been looking through my old GI Joe artifacts (as in Adventure Team, the seventies Kung Fu Grip version) and came across my old book-and-record of Search For The Stolen Idol.

The story goes like this:  A foreign country on the list of approved business partners has had it’s idol (a vaguely detailed Buddha) stolen by “not on our side” rebels.  Right before an important festival where the idol must be on display for the local tribes to accept the current leader.  Our illustrious “ordinary guy” secret agent type white-hat adventurer must recover the idol (and the leader’s authority) in time, or presumably those tribes will go on a rampage.

It’s a laughable story, with blunt edged stereotypes I’ll pass on deconstructing for now.  The important thing is that this is the first time I can remember seeing the image of Buddha.  Doubtless through a westernized lens, but seeds planted in the past bear fruit in the future.

My favorite part of the story is when the rebels dump the Buddha in the “poison pit”, and Joe has to enter this pit to retrieve the Buddha.  Guarding the Buddha is a giant cobra immune to bullets.  Joe has to use an electric rope to defeat the cobra.  It stood out because I don’t remember this rope being in the play-set I saw in the stores or mentioned in the story before—Joe pulls this deus ex machina out of nowhere.

Looking it up on the internet, I see the play-set did come with three ruby jewels.  I presume that treasure would have been kept by Joe as a reward for his heroism (the Buddha appears to be made of some kind of weathered bronze or similar material, if it’s not at least silver who cares right?).  But there’s a hidden meaning also in the three jewels, that perhaps there is a more subtle reward for bringing the Buddha out of the poison pit.

Cobras are considered divine manifestations in some cultures, and snakes can be associated with guardianship and the underworld.  The sacred serpent figure (known as an uraeus or ouraios) is an emblem of sovereignty.  Joe has to face a supernatural being (a cobra immune to bullets!) and defeat it with a crazy unexpected maneuver (electric rope!) to recover the goal.

It’s perfectly logical to find Buddha in the middle of places you would hardly expect to find such a being.  In skyscraper laden cityscapes, corporate boardrooms, in the midst of horrific crimes of immense scale, you name it.  Even a book for young readers loaded with disturbing portrayals and models of behavior.

I mean, if you buy the Buddha thing at all, then you start at a point of ignorance.  You’re going to be going on missions for hell with a jolly smile on your face, and everyone not on the Adventure Team is going to appear savage and get their well-deserved fist to the face.  A sacred image is going to be an object you have to move from point A to point B to keep the hell’s furnaces running.  That’s how I experienced it, I was projecting into the good guy, the hero for hell.  That’s what I learned.

Buddha knows!  He knows, and is silent.

Joe safely accomplishes his mission and goes onto the next job with a pat on the rump and a copy of the home game.  But that poison pit—that didn’t fit for me.  That’s where it’s just Joe, the (divine) cobra, and Buddha.  Where did Joe get that electric rope?  From Buddha, of course!  Joe doesn’t realize it, but because I’m the witness I register the missing panel.  Buddha has materialized into the illusion (Joe’s Adventure) to show me I’m in a fantasy world.  But I wouldn’t start to get that until much later.

Bullets don’t work against the supernatural.  You got to have vajra, man.  That Joe would be able to use this is a moment of enlightenment born, starting down the path.  For even if all he sees is some object he has to cart around, still it is Buddha!  He has seen even if he does not see, but he will.  Even in the propaganda toys rests the Buddha, waiting for the poison pit moment when ignorance, error and suffering run out of bullets.

One day we will find our light.  One day we will find out there was no rope, just three jewels.