The Diamond Island

I walk into my room, and a friend of Mother Mary’s is there.  She’s vacuuming my room and cleaning up, which I find really embarrassing.  Nobody should have to clean my room, that’s so improper!  She smiles and says she has full authority to do this, so I stand there and fume as she finishes up.  I ask her what on earth she’s doing here and she says, “Just passing through and making sure we were ready.”  She kisses me on the cheek and for a moment a flower grows there.

I wake up and ponder the significance of this strange dream.  I’m thinking this friend of Mother Mary’s must be a quality within myself that is clearing out the crud.  How many people must quest for the chance to meet their soul in dreams and receive a blessing!  I contemplate what we must be preparing for.  Ready for what?

Time to go searching under the baseboards.  A lyric from a song I’ve been listening to a lot lately has been running in my mind.  Listen for the things you haven’t heard. My friend Xtine has been calling me “listener”, which is a title I couldn’t claim for myself even if I recognized and understood it as being true.  You really do need other people to call you on your crap, both good and bad.

Pisces modesty holds me back sometimes.  Maybe that Aquarian scrutiny of my friends Hexe and Alexi, with a touch of that raw, firey spirit of my Aries friend Xtine will give me the strength and the wisdom to look in the mirror long enough to do something that matters.

“Do without doing, and the doing gets done.”  There’s that crazy rune message again.  I keep thinking I have to do something.  Twelve years ago, a wise person I knew said, “People don’t need to do anything Paul, they shouldn’t have to do anything.  They’re already together.”  I thought she was nuts, nuts, nuts at the time.  She said, “Your best friend will call and you know you’ll come back to him.”

I thought she was full of it at the time.  Except for that weird crawly feeling at the back of my spine that told me I didn’t know squatle-dee-doo.

I mean, one miracle’s enough, right?  If you lose the best part of you and it is restored to you, when you thought it was gone forever — well hey I don’t know squatle-dee-doo, but I’d say that’s a pretty good day.

Xtine always said there’s a bonus round.  Hell, she IS a bonus round.

Stuff happens without us knowing the how and the why.  Dogs and cats, living together without warning, that sort of thing.  I was super fortunate to meet and know a best friend forever in this life.  I might forget the fun of playtime that reaches the height of consciousness in this life, but can any of that be undone?

I dunno, but it can be made into a living hell while you’re still alive.  You can be ground into the dirt and lose everything, and know it as long as you’re alive.  The glory of living at a high level of existence can be taken away from you at any time.

I never accepted that.  If it was granted, and taken away I screamed and raged until I didn’t know my own name.  I just didn’t know the cycle of being lost and returning, of finding and losing.  Someone was trying to make a point, that I just didn’t get it.  It wasn’t one thing or the other, it was both.

Part of me the last few months had been saying the other thing, but I wasn’t hearing it.  “This is how it goes down.”  Yeah, but how could it go down like that?  It makes no sense!  “Because it will.  You don’t know squatle-dee-doo, remember?”  I couldn’t hear what my instincts were saying.  Yeah, I think they’re right, but I haven’t a clue how it could happen.  I know nothing.  I got beat down, remember?

“You aren’t beat down anymore.  Answer the call.”

The phone was ringing, so I picked up.  Somebody wanted to talk.  I never thought in a year and a day they would.  But my wise friend was right.  All of a sudden I realized I was okay, and I could see clearly now.  A piece of my soul restored, as mysteriously as it had been removed.  How does that happen?  A bonus miracle, just in case I missed the importance of the first.  Judgment Day dude, you are waking up.  As many miracles as you need.

While I’m waiting in the closet for the dumpling attack to subside (yeah, right), I come across a bunch of papers that need going through.  Most of which need to be tossed into the psychological void.  I’m not through with my mental dustbin by a long stretch.  Hexe witchie-poo text-messages me that I need to get on the stick and flame broil those puppies.  Which of course, makes total sense.  Have another popover froggie!

K is there for me.  She’s found the oven reactor, and fired up the converters.  It’s a hot smokin’ cook-a-roo just waiting for a bunch of sweet mineral dumplings to leap in and cook like a bee with an itch.  I telepathsize an ingredient list for her, figuring we might have to wing some of those ingredients a little, say cat pee instead of dog pee.

An’ I’m out of the closet and using my super-Mario powers of crazy imagination maneuverability to spring over that assembled high-density collage of crazy critters.  But whoa-ho-ho, they don’t waste time chasing after me with juice-drinkin’ intentions and physical happenstance collectivoids dancing all around my magnetosphere of doom-ness.

Thanks to my kung fu classes, I manage to stay one step ahead of the horde.  Sheesh, I guess being a little fit helps a little bit, eh?  I can understand Hexe’s desire to stay in top tennis destructor form, now.  The ability to fire tennis torpedoes is mighty after all!  K’s shoveling in the petrified wood as quick as the coal bin hatch will allow, and I lure those critters into the huge stone oven that must have been some crazy mass food feed-a-thon apparatus in olden days.  I dunno, Hexe’s the expert here.

I have no desire to end up cooked to a nice golden brown patina, so as K slams the door shut and bolts it, I leap up to the ceiling and grab a hold of a rope courtesy of Alexi’s thoughtful chimney rescue brigade.  Those Droll Dumplings try as they might, but I’m up and out of that chimney before you can say Jack Robinson!  I cut the rope in case a few more enterprising buggers decide they can evolve climbing skills.

Man, those dumplings are mad!  Hopping up and down in the oven like popcorn.  K pours on the fuel and pretty soon the haunted house heats up nicely.  Won’t be long before those critters are cooked to a crisp pop.

Meanwhile, more monsters out there!

No sooner have I got the Goob-a-loo settled in, when the next monster jumpdoggy surprise arrives. Causing no small amount of trouble is an infestation of anxiety-causing mineraloid entities from the depths of inner space and they want major amounts of psychic juice! And they’re willing to put down roots in your brainpan to get it.

For a while I have to fend these micronic high-density critters off with a couple of whacks from the slapstick. The next thing I know my car is about to blow a tire and I’m getting fleeced by the most charming mechanic this side of rip-offs town. Yeah, in this dire economy boo-hoo down in whosville it’s a laugh riot getting money vacuumed out of the ducat interface, but may as well laugh at my own lack of sleight of hand self-defense.

Speaking of which, I show up for my first kung fu lesson with Mother Mary and I get one of her short duration personal assistants. Said assistant proceeds to show me how sadly out of shape I’m in and how not in tune with fundamentals I am. No special maneuvers, awesome skillz, or fabulous finishing moves for me. Going to be all blue Mondays for a while.

Not that I’ve forgotten the music quest, but man does that new U2 song suck eggs. Depression +1 as the critters cackle at me on the other side of the barricaded door. Oh, what am I cryin’ about? Sooner or later that UFO Girl soundtrack clue will pay off. In the meantime, I have to deal with these critters or I’m going to find all sorts of lack in the mental cupboards.

Speaking of which, where did all my bath bombs, bath salts and luxury soaps go? Oh crumbs, everything’s turned upside down at the haunted house in real time. All that reorganization and now I’ve misplaced the usual bath meditation tools. Just when I need to escape the crazy doom knocking at my closet door while I hide. No worries – break out the hard-core incense that got dug out of the back rows and estate sale cheapo cool dude 50’s candles and I’m in my own little steam bath retreat. Maybe now I can think.

Frankie Day is today, Friday the 13th. That means trouble galore from the depths of mischievousness. I’m going to have to make sure Frankie gets a long walkies and tour of the folks house (she loves that), to celebrate her discovery and rescue from the dumpster by K and I. The next day is VD day, so K and I are going to have to do the Devil’s Children thing and be anti-romantic. Browsing for good manga at the comic store, followed by a hot date at Burger King. Maybe we’ll have an angry whopper and get down with our saucy selves.

What strikes me is that there’s physical stuff going on all over the place. Time to get grounded and find out what’s amping up the psychic electric juice to jittery whackaloon levels. I’m going to have to find a place to plant these droll dumplings, before they get to the meltdown level. The carpet’s got enough issues as it is. The next step must be to go through the haunted house and find a suitable place, lure the dang varmints over, and take care of business.

If only it were as easy as it sounds.

I follow that snapping, crackling, dancing Goob-a-loo all around the house and back to my folk’s home again.  Slowly, a large number of objects are considered and their fates decided.  Trash, donation or storage in brand new containers suitable for ease of access.  My folks and I exchange a few boxes of old keepsakes and papers that need going through.

I spend several exhausting days tossing 90% of my papers into the recycle bag as outdated, unimportant junk.  My schedule goes topsy-turvy, with odd hours of sleep until that Goob-a-loo feels like the King Mahar of all Goob-a-loos.

Then I have a dream.  There’s this lake out in the woods and I’m on a roofed pier on the edge.  I’m trying to write down important notes for people on the end of the pier’s wall with a Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph pen.  There’s something enormous and frightening in the lake.  I can feel it swimming towards the pier and I have to flee back to land before it sees me.  I run back to shore as turbulence starts rocking the pier.

I half wake up and this whole message goes off in my head (you know, of the Hek-mail kind).  Mother Mary dropped by and left me a note, saying that I’m not ready for the lake yet, that I have to get right with my body and learn how to know myself better.  She says she will train me in her style of Kung Fu.  I scribble this all down on the notepad before the Goob-a-loo notices I’m awake and starts up again.

Once it’s on paper, I feel like its all been turned into the physical.  Oh wait, the Goob-a-loo is right there next to me!  He’s been hanging out all this time, but he’s quiet like the vacuum after a loud pop.  Then he’s gone and I notice a scrap of paper calling to me in the papers pile.  I scramble over in a daze and see it has the words “haunted house – trainwreck?” written on it.

I remember now!  There was this vinyl record with haunted house sounds on it that I used to have and was trying to remember something of.  I didn’t have the power of the internets back then, but now I do!  A sensor sweep and five minutes later I have it:  Disney’s Chilling Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House.  The title wasn’t trainwreck, it was shipwreck (though now that I’ve heard it again through the magic of the internets it does sound like a train crashing).

I think I understand.  Now that I’ve cleared up a lot of psychic space, the Goob-a-loo is satisfied.  This is his way of showing me how things that were blocked can come through when you clear out the junk.  The dream and the message from Mother Mary must be letting me know new energy is available for use.  All these clues, I’m going to have to do some more work.

In the meantime, here come more monsters!