Building a UFO can seem a little like a Noah’s Ark project at times like these.

Internally, all my life energies have gone into deep, sweeping currents rushing through the earth. I’ve had to get by on emergency life support and reserve warp only. Right at a time when I’ve been fighting a lot of battles on the home front. Lucerna’s kung fu lessons have basically kept me alive long enough to adapt to the transformational energies going on. The last year has essentially been panic and fear, dialed way up for sustained periods of time. The blinking and beeping lights on the emergency panel have been loud and overwhelming.

Thank goodness for the life support music from UFO girl!

In other news, it ain’t just me. Hek-sistah X is off on a retreat to re-visit places of great meaning to her, Hexe the Incorrigible is recovering from illness, and Alexi is busy fighting for his dream in a new land. The Quest Station is full of notes and doodles galore, all around adventure is ON THE GHOD-DAM AIR.

The garden is in shut down procedure, cats are in snuggle mode, and the honeycomb hideout and killer bees are settling in for the long winter. And it’s going to be a doozy—ran into a wooly bear and it had no orange stripes, which means you better be stocked in the larder and armed with plenty of anti-ice-weasel traps. Ol’ winter wolf has reared up dramatically and her howl is driving away the last of the summer lifeforce. Batten down the hatches and brace for impact at your stations of the cross, icy depth charges ahoy.

I made sure to give out lots of candy to the monsters dressed as humans and the kids dressed as monsters, while I still have candy to sacrifice.

There’s this DVD that came out, known by the illustrious title of Every Other Day Is Halloween. Basically, the changeable and fantastically talented core of which Count Gore is but one manifestation—near as I can tell an ordinary human being known as Dick Dyszel—is admitting the passage of time in order to let his story be told.

The movie on this disc tells the story of how Mr. Dyszel found himself a central figure in a local broadcast station, playing several inspired characters, before the forces of mediacrity moved in and demanded tribute in the form of the bottom line.

Along the way, you see how Mr. Dyszel inspired people with his individual and honest outlook, as personified by the characters he played and the shows he hosted—Bozo the Clown, Captain 20, and Count Gore De Vol.

Certainly, there are other folks behind the scenes who contributed to this outburst of creative depiction on local programming. And the spirit of the seventies no doubt played a part in what locals in the Washington DC area remember fondly as “better times”.

Peak times to be sure, and total respect to the unsung efforts of those who get things done, but it always starts with an individual carrying a vision, or a talent, or a way of existing in space-time that shows us what we have lost.  How to adjust our course and return to ourselves.  The true genius constellates those talents and circumstances necessary for raising our consciousness.

So what experience do you get when you buy into this examination of an inspired man’s exploration of himself for the betterment of the community?  Quite a lot, actually.  Though, with any localized phenomenon, there are going to be experiences that only those who lived through it will get.

However!  Keep in mind that the treasures waiting to be discovered are in and of themselves examples of the finest art and of inestimable value to those who seek insight.  Surprises and secrets await those who quest with an open heart, who can hear what has gone before and dare to recreate what may yet be again.

The cover itself is an enigma easily dismissed as an attempt to downplay the contents—Count Gore presenting a can of steaming offal and garbage, while caricatures of other horror hosts float around the vapors with comical expressions. Horror hosts have often hidden behind a veil of humor in order to make their performance less threatening and more acceptable to societal antibodies.  This is activism at the base—always speak in the terms familiar with the audience you find yourself before on any given show.

Look more closely though, past the sadness that is self-depreciation and see the truth behind the images. One has only to know that in many fairy tales it is the worthless thing—the junk—that one finds the most important things of all.

If the hosts are masked in humor, one has only to know that we the audience are always the biggest joke of all.  In that realization there is humanity and redemption—the host always throws us the viewer back upon ourselves to realize the awesome horror and painful glory of being alive.

Opening the case, one cracks open a casket of horrors, yet also proclaims that they live! Passing beyond the threshold, one finds a Channel 20 Club card amongst the expected insert and disc. Yes, there is something of the child in all of us who desire to belong to wonders great and beautiful.  In the local DC area programming of Channel 20, such cards were a visible sign of divine power and a reassurance that magic was abundant.

That the coprorate centers of power regularly co-op such toys of civilized play to encourage “loyalty” to mechanized food outlets is proof of their inherent inventiveness.  Artists, entertainers, and magicians all know the way to reclaim such treats, for is not the card part of the trickery that conceals the true magic in the mind? Beyond a doubt, Captain 20 knew the card trick to remind us how such small things matter.

The disc itself contains the movie, and a veritable infectious fungal colony of extras.  Most of these will be of easiest value to those who remember. Yet pay attention and you will see how improvisational television programs work. How character and setting contribute to situation even in a fluid dynamic such as a studio for viewers.

Variety acts thrive on this sort of transformation—commercials, contests and cartoon blocks are mere forms to be molded and rearranged at will.  Green muppet mutants, friendly adults dispensing worthy advice from the heart, or showing manga style programs way before the mainstream caught on—these are the stuff of which legends are made manifest.  Do we not save the world as audience when we remember ourselves, or as performer when we remind others with our smoke and mirrors of the human spirit?

The movie itself contains a story of an intrepid entertainer’s journey from rough ore to final realization.  What strikes me most is how grounded and ordinary Mr. Dyszel appears. One can almost see the grandiose and unstoppable force of his shadow as personified by Count Gore De Vol lurking in the background.

Is that not the supreme mystery and absurd irony of our times?  That only in the nicest and most unassuming of men could a creative force arise to spark the flames of a thousand and one hearts?

When one is confronted with the simplicity and utter banality of a sock puppet wearing a chef’s hat speaking kitchen wisdom to us with the utmost sincerity, do we not believe?  It speaks volumes for the depths of our own souls, whether we respond with kindness and smiles or turn away in revulsion.

Pity those who see only the surface and not the invention of a lone soul progressing his art beyond a mere tool.  They are the unfortunates consigned to make programming decisions from a vast distance.

Another key point worth noting is how the story progresses into the horror host phenomenon.  This is where Mr. Dyszel fumble-foots into a trove of glittering gemstones and becomes part of a signifier for a deeply relevant art form’s transmutation.

Exiled from mainstream television, only to return and finally be banished again, Mr. Dyszel would seem too nice to survive such a crushing blow as the loss of all he held dear—the beloved figurehead of a local television station yanked from the stage, how contemptable!   Nevertheless, Mr. Dyszel continued his exploration and found in himself the ability to manifest studio in a backpack.

As a result, Count Gore spread his creative power into the Internet, and now no longer needs the station to transmit.  Vanquish the shadow, and he returns again in a new form requiring that we reckon with him once more.  We cannot escape ourselves!

The Internet allows everyone and anyone to be both host and audience, without the coercion and repression one finds in the structure of an impersonal system of power.  Such an environment is a natural breeding ground and salon for a revivification of what can only be termed a capsule of catharsis through the ceremonial experience of violation.

Mr. Dyszel’s successful exploration of the ideas within his passionate being speaks for itself.  To invent his own show regardless of the trauma and set himself firmly at the next foundation of where all culture will be transmitted in the future?

It is nothing less than stunning.

The movie ends with the closing of a former door and the opening of a new portal to worlds undreamed of.  It’s a whole new shared creative space.  One might say the monster not only survived, but lived to help spread the horror of a profound mystery to those who will come after us.

The horror host movement seems poised at the edge of a vast unmarked frontier.  What the practitioner-audience hybrid will make of it is hard to say—anything goes now.  There’s enough history now to form an idea of how things work out of countless trailblazed innovations.  The reactions of those who are themselves following personal visions as hosts are worth studying.

For example, I see in the easygoing testimony of Jerry Moore—who manifests as the outrageous Karlos Borloff—an affection for what Mr. Dyszel has accomplished.  He gained strength from the things he learned by experiencing himself at play with Count Gore on the tell-a-vision.

It’s enough to make me believe that the medium of late night horror shows not only has returned in a renewed form, but in a sense is better than ever before.  One has only to see the de-atomization of the community and the rapid sharing of ideas to see a strange solidarity emerging.

An ancient form of performance taking shape before our very eyes. Watch the movie and learn how profound changes in the world transform the way we experience ourselves as people. That we should owe our very life and soul to a vampire as channeled by a wandering artist of great destiny is truly a miracle of the age.

The key question is: “Did he meant to do that?”  Was it part of the act, this death-defying leap into the future? Before you can stop thinking again, the Count is before you, telling a horrible joke to bring it all back around again.

She’s had an album for a while. If you’re really lucky you have a copy of one of her bootleg cassettes from back in the day before the internets made music a telepathic experience.  Now she’s got a new song available, and I hear tell there’s more in the hopper to come.

So what is she about and what do you, her listener, do?  Maria sings about relationships using her voice and an acoustic guitar.  She explores intimate and personal experiences, confessing and declaring more to you the listener than she might be willing to admit to herself or those she knows.  You are the privileged stranger, witness to the satisfaction and frustration of her proud, vital, vulnerable self.

The symbol of the nine, or 9, is a hovering circle (the zero) with a dangling tail (the one).  The divine zero is about to descend to join the one (the human being) and begin a new level of consciousness.

This can be imagined as the descent of the Holy Ghost or the bringing down of the Holy Grail to the consciousness of a human being, who will now experience a wider awareness.  So too, will the divine, the most high finding fulfillment in the lowly human being the plan that unfolds from infinite mystery.

This is the moment of transformation, of great danger, and unpredictability.  Often we can only use veil-names to hide the contents, lest they become institutionalized by earthly concerns or disappear back into the heights and depths of the unimaginable unknown.

Number nine.  Number Nine.  Number Nine.  The Beatles played with this formula, encompassing the vastness and complete bedlam of existence in a mantra of return.  The number always brings us back to the beginning even as we reach the end.

Nine is fine, nine is naughty.

So what is going on with all this, say you?  Think of it as a wandering in the midst of a great dried out cistern-like structure stretching out to all horizons. Blue skies and arid heat bearing down from a bright sun, while sharing snacks with a gigantasaurus of a sphinx, feet and paws roasting on the baked clay.

One tends to see things out here, hazes of steamy far-off imagery wafting unsteady in the oppressive daylight.  Strange lights reflecting and bending off currents of particles in the superheated air.  I swear, out in this desert of the mind I hear weird noises: dull roars of wind as though there were a tunnel far in the distance, occasionally the crackling titter of granules just beyond sight.

Is there anyone there?

Hard to tell, the brightness makes it hard to see through the visual trickery of an outdoors so spacious one mind isn’t enough to conceive it.  I perceive an increase in the glitter of the lights; they sparkle such that they leap in and out of the air as I move.  The noises might be that of my own body, magnified by the silence of nothingness.

Dang this heat is oppressive.

Summer empties us as surely as winter fills us.  I’m of the mind that there’s a jumping about, a joy to the burning up of emptiness.  The time it takes to wait for an inside spirit to come to our attention.  Most people I imagine grow despondent waiting for their souls to be filled.  Imagine one’s surprise when one is faced with cold rain in the hot desert?  Talk about bizarre, but living it is believing.

I pick up the psychic communicator.  Looks like my friend Alexi scored the job, defeated the robotozoids of torment, sent Crush-em No-thousand to the scrap heap with a fake lightsaber.  He’s at the threshold of his kingdom; it helps to have a horse to power the cart after all!

Also on the Good News sandwich line, Chopper Angel Le Wolf extracting an upgrade from her pesticide commanders for more gold and mead; Going to be able to survive to the next cookie round-up.  Busy training her daughters to fight in the living dead girl olympics on rationed Scooby snacks and a world where princesses get sold out for free.

Bonus round for Vampy Kimbers, expressing the lost dark side as best she can given that living in the sunlight takes it out of her.  Writing, exercising, raising youngsters, working, keeping husband recharged for the day-to-day work spin-cycle and still finding time to re-grow and re-learn psychic limbs held still by decades of invasive programming.

Getting kind of cool now, probably could have packed my rain gear, but who expects the Spanish Inquisition?  Even though that’s all we get.  Hardly expecting to see vaporous mists and gray clouds where a moment ago I was baking to the crisp?  Hey, you know, in this psychic terrain things turn on a dime, crumbs!

As Roseanne Roseannadanna said, “It’s always something.”

I approve.  Rain, shine, it’s a state of mind.  No trees, except I know this is the Valley of Trees.  Yeah, in a desert, which is raining.  Talk about a mystery oasis.

I’m working on book two.  Book one is in a final stage of transformative elation text-wise; I promise to have the Gimmie Stuff page updated as soon as that is complete. Also working on a cover for the souvenir physical version.  Once that’s done I’ll look into converting for e-book files. My brain stem is acquiring all manner of new knowledge during this feisty process of refinement!

Seems like the planetary forces have been all stirred up.  Meteor showers, solar flares, floods and earthquakes.  Hek even on the metaphysical plane we got Cardinal Climaxes lined up, not to mention a heavy dose of psychic interference from all manner of weirdzo dimensions and denizens.  I’m having to expend a lot of mental energy keeping my health and my attention up to snuff.

The summer is a scorcher over here in the central wastes of indecision land. The garden is taking a lot of supply runs to keep going. Those bio-nutrient counteractants come at a high price in mosquito bites, sunburn and poison ivy, let me tell you! Onions, potatoes, basil, and tomatoes are bringing in the reinforcements in small amounts; hey whatever margin of survival we can manage we will. Corn, sunflowers, and peppers bringing up the rear.

The cats are in hyper reorganization mode, which is good. No news is good news as they say. As long as they are able to keep the hydroid bombers at bay with lazors, hey that’s good pattern.  Michael has a new nickname though: Tarball.  He’s big, he’s fat, and he needs to protect you from yourself by laying on you until you get the picture. Is this what Mad Max survival has been reduced to? No cool car chases here, just scavenging eroded out gas tanks on hulking wrecks, hoping to score some ten year expired dog food.

The crummy spaghetti and stir fry recipes we’ve been working on have been refined to our tastes. It’s helpful to have new fall backs we can hit the automatic switch with and get something to eat without panic. Have to say its a success. Though we still need more do-fers in our bag of tricks to make it more complete a meal plan. Still, anything that is cheap and easy and healthy is good. Keeps us out of the McFood troughs.

Long drawn out patrol while repair and reprogram procedures are refined and worked on. Lots going on in the furnace, just no heat yet in the hallways. The trans warp warm up takes a while.

The echo of a thunderbolt a year ago resounds. I’m waving my slapstick and candle about as best I can. Looks like ol’ RahRam his/her self comes into view while I’m just shining for a friend.  Poop on a stick, what was the name and the name beyond the name again?

Have to rapid-search my old manuscript for that one.  But go figure, ol’ sphinx buddy isn’t here to guard the threshold.  The Devil’s due this time around is the scoundrel getting to bust a gut at my foolish face as I saw the holy monolith of all soul beatdowns rolling into my karma main street.

Soul beatdown as in Robot Carnival death explosion parade vehicle up close and personal, that sort of thing, only on permanent re-play.  Kali means business, you know.

Eegah!

What the Hek.  Many times we have to take at least one foolish step forward for the trap to spring.  Yet, if you don’t give Scratch his die to roll he’ll take it anyway.  All I got is a lucky penny I found on the floor to flip dude, it’ll have to do.

I spent so much time cowering like Cringer over sphinx beatdowns and dodging the riddle adventure I got no brains for, that I never imagined I’d just be using the cat bus version to get to Sesame Street.

It’s a wicket gate for many people, but for some it’s an open avenue out of mind. Whatever way, we need a formula, plot device, or token to allow ourselves permission to pass beyond to that which we imagine ourselves unable or unworthy to experience.

My candle ain’t the only light in the night, where firefly torches and gleaming facets line every inner space with drowsed and dreaming heat.  Nor is my slapstick the only advanced mechanism for recreating the center.  There exist many costumes, voices and other assorted props ready for a dedicated intent to wield with the insight of the most holy of lowly performances.

Not to mention random life encounters!

There are rains coming. A blockage to knock loose and drainage to restore. These images soak into my mind from some weird brain thought-age. Yeah sure, I’m like the Ghostbusters of psychic energy beings and that’s what I do—troubleshoot with my clown powers. Super-fool to the rescue, maybe!

Takes real world people imagining this stuff to make it happen. The heavy lifting has to be based in meatspace for it to impact what’s going down in the witching hour of the unknown.

POW!

Like smacking a tennis ball down the lane of a bowling alley.  Wow, that sucker sure was stuck for a long time.  Maybe now the sluice will operate properly and let the waters run free.

Oh wait, that’s where I’m standing! Better make haste and make my way down the rest of this walk down the strange way of inner space. Look in, Sphinx; here we go!

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.

The other day a friend asked about a mutual friend’s birthday and all I could remember was she was Pisces. That’s when he let me know she’s been missing since 1998 during a trip in Malaysia.

Holy smoke, wind out of my sails. I had to do some Google Fu to find out the details. Crumbs, what was I doing on June 28 of that year?  Developments three years later don’t do much to inspire hope.

Molly Kleinman.

We met my freshman year of college.  She let me borrow her audio cassette copy of U2′s Wide Awake In America, which was the first time I’d gotten to hear the whole thing—that was a meaningful day for me I still can see clearly in my mind.  She borrowed my copy of the Beastie Boys’ Licensed To Ill.  We both loved the song “Paul Revere”; one time we sang it together.  We really dug that damn song.  That was when we became friends.

The two of us had different interests, but our social circles overlapped so I ran into her every now and then.

Then my senior year we dated on and off; kind of one of those inexplicable things that just happens. We never became a couple; both of us were too busy searching for our identities to bridge the differences in interests we had.

But, damn, those strange dates we went on still linger in my mind. I think she tried to show me things about herself that maybe no one ever knew. Like an idiot, I didn’t pay enough attention to reckon with that.

The last time I saw her in person was an all-day date-but-not-date.  I had lunch with Molly and her house mates, then the two of us hung out in her room and talked, while proceeding to get bombed.  She was interested in this other guy and asked me what I thought of him.  I recited awful poetry to her.

We talked about life plans and then for some reason we laughed together—laughed a good damn long time.  We walked down the street to a Thai food place, then spent a while on her porch talking about things which sadly I’ve forgotten.

Next I heard of her she was hanging out with that guy.  Then she was in Florida for what might have been related to her field (she was a biology major, I think).  She dropped off my radar after that (Hek, a lot of folks dropped off my radar during that time).

But I always called up her memories from time to time.  Who can explain the strange currents of our lives, the reasons people make strong impressions on us?  I thought she was cool.  She was always nice to me.

It’s weird, her having been gone for so long, that I only now hear of it.  I’ve been working on listening a lot to the things I haven’t heard this last year and a half.  Time to break out “Paul Revere” and sing like a stupid fool.

Hey Molly, thanks for hanging out with me in these space time coordinates.

There is no intelligent life on this planet, only you reading this and me telling you these words with my keystrokes in the past coming to the present to be read by your eyeballs in the present which was my future at the time I typed this.

Hold on a minute, I’m receiving a transmission from my past self.  He tells me he really enjoyed the music I sent his way from the unknown.  Most perplexing, because I’m not entirely sure I had anything to do with hooking him up.  I just sort of sent my blessing back in time to what already happened with a fond remembrance of the unexpected discovery I’d made.

Getting back to the here in now, as contaminated as it is suddenly with the rich and deeply satisfying youth of days long past, oh never mind.  We just shifted gears even more in the past and are sitting in the chamber of the distant shadows of what we hardly remember because it touches us in the formative years.

You see, our thoughts are unbound by the limitations of time and space, even though they rely upon time-space constants of electro-chemical interactions to create consciousness.  Our brains think they are running the production, but it takes a village to have a bowel movement.  There’s more going on than the mere cooking of a hamburger.

It’s a little strange to enter these weird fugue states of otherworldly consciousness (without the help of any props, look Ma—no hands!).  But consider it normal operations as the whole bunch of us shamble about on our quest for solutions to the puzzles under our trees this holiday season of SciFi past.

Oh, this century is ON.  But we have to lose our minds in order to find them.

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!