The Diamond Island

As I head into the apogee of my life, things become clear that were not clear before.  I’m thinking about how I’ve been trying to prepare for my life ahead of me.  Now I’m meditating on how to prepare for my death ahead of me.

Mind you, barring accidents or violence I ought to make it to the next round.  I might be acting premature considering how medical science and circumstance might conspire to extend my span.  But I think it’s a healthy pursuit to consider my mid-life transformation and what it means.

In other words, it is perfectly right and good to think about what I am going to leave behind and how I might best leave things for those who will come after me.  There is a tarot card from the Medieval Scapini deck, the Six of Cups I believe, where various versions of old age are considered for the viewer.

I always liked the figure that acted as a Santa Claus and gave presents to the community.  I think that would be a decent way to go out, dispensing presents.  I think a certain amount of the Krampus would be involved in that.  I’m not 100% good, nor do I think seeking to be perfectly good is a healthy goal.

Hexe tosses that all out the window for a moment and gives me a super duper deluxe present for my birthday.  She totally does a random and throws me for a loop.  Back when I was carrying a pass from my Mirage, I never figured I’d actually get to hold a physical manifestation.  But there you are, front and back.

This isn’t the first time something in my dreams or visions has appeared in real life.  But I have to say, this is the most intense version of events to date.  I hadn’t considered the pass having two sides, a light and a dark (moon) side.  The fact that it does makes this all the more meaningful.

Let me state for the record that Hexe knows the DEAL, and ain’t fooling around.  People might say yeah sure Paul, ha-ha ovens, and all that.  She does collage nonsense and weird artistic whatever, who cares?  I read a derailed train of thought from people making statements about what artists like Xtine do for a living.  It’s a familiar, if automated dodge to the need to construct meaning.  These people don’t know how serious this interplay is!

It is not a joke.  Unless the joke is on you!  Hope your insurance is paid up.

For me, wrapped as it is in an envelope of triple strength caring, I’m reeling from the transformational revealing.  I look at the genius clues in my hand and put a palm to my chin.  The great living spirit is shining behind someone’s work as a multi-faceted and unusual vision of what’s what.

I mean, that pass, which was just a fancy in the imagination.  Here it is, in physical form like the Imperial Seal of the Empress smack dab on the bloody forehead of a disbelieving retainer too late figuring out what time it is.

Hexe couldn’t have touched me in a kore personal place.  See the misspelling I made?  Right into me, where I hide my personal space.  If the shoe fits, I place it on my Pisces feet and walk the dancy ka-boom.

My Aquarian friend holds a mirror up to me.  See that face?  In the oven I’m cooked, silly walking in a coil of serpentine ways back and back, marking and re-marking walls until I put the shards together.

I still have Hexe’s picture of the numinous tree, which I am meditating on, and trying to form a clue inventory on.

Meanwhile, the pass has become real, and there are messages rising up from the depths towards me.  Hexe’s strange and unexpected knowledge from her magic microscope slime their way into my pond, my circle with the weird unexpectedness of a total surprise.

The other day she asked if she had surprised me, and like a dope I thought she meant just now.  So I said no.  But maybe I ought to have just said yes, because I’m still surprised!

My friends are so cool.

There’s still more monsters, and I’m on a mission to check these creatures out. But I have a feeling this next one is going to be a little difficult to track down. So in the meantime, I’m gathering my clues and taking care of ordinary starship relations.

I think about my Hek-sistah Xtine and her digging in the foundations analogy. How sometimes when you’re doing the work all you’re doing is digging. A shovel here, a pick chop there, a little brushing away of detritus, repeat. There are some clues I don’t mention here because they don’t add up or they are of a personal nature not easily shared. Not all of my meditations or investigations bear fruit.

There are long stretches of down time, which I save you the reader from having to bother with. However, this means I sometimes make this look easier than it actually is.

But I do have an image of this next monster. It’s a creature of acid, tentacles, and a big leering eye looking deep into my nasty innards.

Went to the grocery store with K.  We needed the usual supplies to keep things moving along at the Honeycomb Hideout.  She’s at the French Onion Dip picking out a brand, while I push the cart past an aisle, specifically the cleansers and detergents.

I look to my left, and there’s Birdman, in a mascot suit, strutting down right towards me.  We freeze for a moment and regard each other.  I scream like a betch and push my cart in a rush to escape this unexpected encounter.  Customers stare at me as if I’m the one who has lost their mind.  Don’t they realize Birdman has come for me?!

It useless to resist.  Birdman catches up to me ten feet from the orange juice and bips me on the genuine turtle fur hat I’m wearing.  He takes the bag of chips from my cart and makes gestures to the effect of “I’m eatin’ ur chips dood.”  Birdman doesn’t hesitate for a second; he just keeps walking and disappears down another aisle.

K looks at me with disgust, while some dude runs after birdman with a camera yelling, “Let me get a picture with you!”

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.  But that’s all I get!

Birdman continues to cause havoc in the grocery store.  At one point climbing into some poor overweight woman’s cart and making a scene.  I am not making this up!  He comes down the frozen food isle and I turn around trying to dodge him, but no use.  He returns my chips while K frowns at him with a real stinker look.

Birdman whistles at me and continues on his (her?  I dunno!) merry way.  It hits me.  The fool is everywhere at all times, free to go where he or she wishes.  What?  Did I think I was immune?  Ha!

As I’m standing in the checkout with K, a little kid is scared of Birdman and starts to scream bloody murder.  Birdman puts up his hand as if to say, “Not hearin’ this!”  He walks away.  K and I run the cart out of the store and that’s the last I see of Birdman.

I can’t help but feel that my squawking flight from Birdman was the right action.  How often does the weird happen and we pretend like it’s all okay?  Everyone looked at me screaming as if I was the crazy one!  I don’t regret running from Birdman one bit.  For one brief moment, I thought the Matrix had collapsed and it was everybody’s personal reality for themselves!

I hope he comes by again!

I’m wearing a pale orange sweatshirt my aunt Duke got me a while back.  It’s finally getting broken in and acquiring that soft, lived in sensation when you wear it.  Sewn into the chest are the words “The Fool”, along with a reproduction of the classic tarot fool and his dog from the Waite deck.

I’m feeling it.  Roaming too and fro among the halls and rooms of a strange and haunted house of many critters and creatures, all seeking shelter from the daylight, hoping for a room or creaky floorboard to call their own.

A cool, rainy breeze blows on my face as I stand at a window on the end of a crooked hallway.  Took some doing to lift that cracked windowpane and prop it up with a broken chair leg.  Earlier this morning it snowed a little, with snowflakes so fragile they splat into water as soon as they hit the windowpane or your face.  Now it’s a drifty, chilly mist and a cloudy day.

I like rainy days, they always cheer me up.  Not just because they remind me of my old stomping grounds in Portland, Oregon, but because they drive people indoors and quiet them down.  Even the spirits and the ani-mani-mals tend to be calmer and more reserved.  When the rain falls hard enough to make a sound, it’s a pleasant renewal I feel all throughout.

My old 1980 ghetto blaster, still working, plays me a steady tape of old eighties hits.  Right now, it’s blasting out When In Rome’s “The Promise”, which when combined with the airy, ethereal misty rain and cold air that smells so strongly of spring, I can hardly contain my excitement.

I’m thinking of two things.  The first, that if holes in my heart that I thought couldn’t be made well suddenly heal, one after the other, then what kind of person am I that this should happen to me?  How down was I in the depths that I needed several miracles to happen?  Mind you, it’s not a return to things as they were before; it’s a closure — a completion that makes one whole again.

The other thing is a continuation of seeing my friends and noticing a little more than I saw before.  Another friend of mine dropped by on the line to tell me she enjoys my writings on this blog.  My eyes couldn’t leave the huge wolf pup she was holding (she was doing wolf preserve stuff).  I thought that was her dog!

As we chatted, I was blown away how much I didn’t know about her, and how talented and intense she is.  A brilliant, polished gemstone of a woman surrounded by loveliness and living her own self-decided passionate interest.  She was just dropping by, but I was ready to stand on my head after my mind was blown.

Letting the ghost-wind blow it’s thoughts through me.

Today, March 17th, is my 40th birthday.  It is also the anniversary of my folks.  Check out these two.  Thanks for hooking them up, BK!

Talked to an old friend today and she showed me her spirit in a dream she has.  It was the way she talked, shining like a celestial revelation about her, and I saw beauty in her I’d never before seen.  Like a heavenly queen with super space explosions bearing witness to the violence of nature on an epic scale.  And she goes places so far out there in the depths of outer space that I don’t think anyone knows but her the glory of those spectacular conflagrations and ferocious energies at work in the forever-beyond of secret power nebulas.

She’s just like any other ordinary superhero living on this crazy planet, paying the dues, paying the bills, raising her kids.  And I wonder if her earthling human manifestation could handle the magnetic radiation of her lovely, adventurous side.  There’s that quiet, powerful message at the back of my mind about caring, and how long it takes to grow, find or build a facet of light.  I think, that magnificent part of her is showing me that hek-yeah dude look at this secret wonder going on at the same time as her life.

Imagine what will happen on the night she can look at the things she dreams and recognize herself?  My friend will peel that mask off her face and be able to see herself without doubt.  When I see a friend collecting things and meditating on them, owning their feelings and their thoughts and a ray of beauty appears through the cracks I always get nervous and excited.

Talked to another old friend today who I didn’t know was an old friend, but really was.  I opened my eyes and there she was, all along, doing her thing in an amazing way.  It’s like a present you missed in the odd corner, and then one day discover.  You open it, and it’s as if you are offered a bottle of very fine wine to savor beyond measure.

Been learning about her life in the years we’ve been apart since the old days.  I’m amazed and pleased by how she has gotten her troubles under control and shaped her life into a magnificent, noble calling.  Her work, family and interests are so rich, so varied as to stun me.  I hardly knew her at all!  Then one day I run into her on the street and see what a creative, skilled, hardened empress she has become.  Wow.

She’s boxes within boxes, each with some new surprise waiting to be found.  I’m so lucky to have found her again and be worthy of seeing her live her life with such sunshine warmth, like a nautical wonderwoman who’s been to the outrageous land of scalawags and dinosauruses, survived, and come back with an eye for delight and a heart of wholesomeness.

I hear that wind of Missus Mootymire a-blowin’, and I think about the people I might have kept at arms-length without even knowing it.  Time to open the windows and doors and let the spooky wail gust right through me.  Time to clear out the air and let new life breathe through the house.

K and I loaded up the chuck wagon full of yummy organic burgers and buns, homemade pickles, and a slab of onions and lettuces.  She grabbed the lager medicine and I seized on the cider muscle relaxant.  Then we rode on over to the folk’s ranch and got a charcoal grill going.  Hek-yeah, it’s burgerin’ time!

The day was in the high sixties, sunny, and no snow.  Perfect weather for an outdoors shindig and rap session with the clan.  The weekend had been a huge quest of doom which had made us a little unavailable on main and auxiliary power to the rest of the world.  I’ll write about that later.  For now, tasty food, delicious frosty beverages, and good company gossiping and chitchatting like a bunch of crows.  And crow does like a tasty snack with a little jibber-jabber.

While doing the burger meditation I had a chance to think about the change in the weather.  I smell spring, I feel it in my bones.  It just wants to burst forward like a spring coiled giant squid tentacle and seize the morsel of the now.  I can hardly contain myself at the excitement.  Spring within, spring without, all in balance.

Crazy dream time again.  Wandering through the streets of my haunted house existence and spending time with alter-ego manifestations of my friends.  In this case, the detached observer who wanders in and out of scenes like a fool with no ties to one thing or the other.

I wake up to the sound of those popping Droll Dumplings.  Just about ready to serve I imagine.  K and I are just about ready to watch Crocodile Dundee.  She hasn’t seen it yet.  What better tasty treat than a bowl of properly cooked droll dumpling popcorn?  Whoo and hoo, its movie time in the Honeycomb Hindout and there’s munchies galore!

The phone rings again, and I can tell this is going to be one of those random encounter calls.  Whoa, total surprise from the depths.  It’s my old time cousin from the way back machine days, trying to put the clues on his puzzle board together.  Can I lend him a hand?  Sure can!  The memory banks are loaded to the gills with relevant material.

I can’t help but think something significant has happened again.

If miracle #1 gets me back in touch with who I was, and miracle #2 gets me back in touch with the time before I was what I was, then what if a third miracle returns me to the feeling of the time before that?  My cousin and I walked in states of consciousness that belong to the deepest parts of my known being.

I’m going back in time and seeing things that I had never imagined I would witness.  All the way back to the beforelife?  The arrow is pointing in a direction I refuse to ignore now.  Just have to pull back on the bow.

My cousin talks about a time in a spooky haunted house I was living in with my folks at one time.  He came to visit.  I’d forgotten it, but when he describes it to me, the memory comes back to me like lightning.  An isolated farmhouse, wind blowing and trees scratching at the walls of the house.  The tingle of scary ghosts devouring all sense of space in the room you’re sleeping in.

There are all sorts of things I remember being scared to death about during that time as a young pouchling.  The Blue Meanies of Yellow Submarine, for example.  My cousin had a Blue Meanie jacket and he wasn’t scared at all.  Me, though, my folks’ cardboard cutout they got from a movie theater, well that kept me from sleep many a night.

BACK OFF BOOGALOO!

My cousin was scared of that house and its eerie inhabitants.  I got into the excitement of his fear as we stayed awake at night talking like crazy, but I also remember thinking cool, there’s ghosts out there and I like them.  The spooks and the specters, the ghosts and the goblins.  I’ve been walking this haunted house at least since the day I was born, and before that?  I can hardly fathom.

I hold the images of these memories in my mind and wait to see what happens.

Then, it occurs to me, what about the ghosts around me that scare people or make them nervous?  Have I been freaking people out or making them uncomfortable by not being responsible for my own specters?  I sense a windy monster at the window looking at me, rattling chains and blowing moans with perhaps a bit too much glee.  Now, needless to say not everyone is scared of this Missus Mooty Mire wind-breaking goblin thingee (Hexe would just blow her into the oven, and Xtine would sit her down for hard core tea and biscuits, for example).  But it’s a matter of being responsible for the sake of those who don’t have script immunity.