The Diamond Island

Luckily Captain Rowdy was able to restore the main laptop computer circuit and restore lost data.  It’s an EDR (Emergency Damage Repair), so I don’t know how long the jury-rig will hold.  Hopefully by remembering to hit the manual backup override regularly I’ll dodge more croaking of the circuit until I can reincarnate the module.

I’m working on redlines now, in readiness for the third set of revisions, so I don’t need the computer right now.  I’m handling hard copy and jumbling notes about, making a module interface not as critical at the moment.

The launch patrols didn’t sight any phantom dogs, and I haven’t seen any other Unbelievables on the sensor records, cloaked or uncloaked.  The neighborhood cats all seem out in force, however, so increased activity must be going on.  I just hope commander Smokey can handle it, even though Frankie and him just broke up.  I saw a volunteer cat stuck in a tree, either scouting for Clingon jackup cruisers or cowering from phantom pack intruders while waiting for backup.

I’m holding on to the last few mental torpedoes for now, in case I need a special delivery system.  I mean, talk about being stuck in Sector 2.2!  For those of you not in the know, the Star Trek arcade video game had a round where all you did was chase a crazy robotic drone based on Nomad, the super powerful probe from one of the TV episodes, as it dropped mines everywhere and set you up for blowing up real good.  The first time I had to fight that thing was in Sector 2.2 (every round was fought in a “sector”, where Mr. Spock’s voice would say, “Now entering sector…”), I was stunned.  Since then, it’s a euphemism for the suk-level.

And yeah, no starbase neither.  How’s a karmanaut supposed to recharge shields or reload on torpedoes, make repairs, have shore leave, etc. when you can’t get no dock-up?  See, right now I’m stuck at work with no backup, which means no vacation until I can hire a new console operator.  I’m literally like Kirk in “The Doomsday Weapon”, piloting a half-destroyed starship on near-automatic with only a super-engineer keeping the ship running (or as we say, my psychological automatic process).  Meanwhile, some nut is taking my real ship out for a joyride to pick up some Romulon ale and Twinkies.

Or rather, I’m stuck in the not-bonus round, getting jacked, and there’s no starbase recharge for a while.

What happened was my friend and co-worker, a British citizen, was taken into custody by immigration and detained.  Apparently some new law is roping in hundreds of regular people, even with their documentation in order, and forcing deportation hearings on them.  Meanwhile, they sit and rot in tent cities with no laundry or barber facilities waiting for a due process that never arrives (via the handy dirty trick of moving suspects from place to place at taxpayer expense without even telling the court).

His car was broken into and stripped right before this two-month ordeal began, so he wasn’t having a good time to start with.  I think the most surreal moment was when his dad told me he had been shipped to Brownsville Texas, near the border, right as Hurricane Dolly was slamming into the coast.

My friend finally accepted deportation (he’s a small guy and doesn’t speak Spanish, and living with mercenary guards and hardened Latinos was wearing him out), and in a twist of fate immigration dropped all charges and basically said, “never mind, come on back to the states anytime you want”.  He’s understandably reluctant to come back, and at least he’s gone to a country with family and friends where he won’t disappear.

Me and the co-workers have talked to him, and he’s in great spirits, trying to get his life in order after twenty years in the states.  His parents are probably going to sell their businesses and move back there in the next few years.  Tax dollars at work!  Cheap labor, come on in.  Skilled workers who play by the rules, get lost!  And they ask me why I drink.

But the net effect for me is no console operator, and work has entered a period where it’s the busiest time of the year.  I’ll make it through, but having to pilot the ship and hit the phraser button rapid-fire because you’ve got no recharge ability blows.  The crumbum volleys are a flying fast and furious I tell ya!

Even though I don’t have cable, it’s hard to avoid the backwater shadow cast over society by big business.  The ultra-rich are busy bidding for the candidates they think will be best short-term monarch for their interests.  The fleer patrol (false prophet flagships) is out in force in the mediapoly, making sure nobody talks about the issues or carries any news about what the public actually wants.  I swear, I have enough problems without having to hear about the shenanigans of McCuckoo and Ophony as they try to sell us their brand of toothpaste.

Around here where I live, it’s always a tender time during ratify-candidates-already-decided-for-you days.  It’s serious business, because depending on who is coming in or going out, many people’s jobs are at stake.  People seem to drive a little more hard-nosed, shop a little more with the jitters, and hop on pop a little harder in their domiciles.  TV and stereo systems always rise in volume during this time as folks try to drown out the stress with louder programming instructions.

Unfortunately, poor Blink our cat must have taken a hit to the life support.  She’s one of the more dedicated huntresses in our household, eliminating meeses and cave crickets wherever they may roam.  We noticed her urine was coming out wine colored (that’s fancy talk for bloody whizz).  We took her to the vet for a checkup and some kitty drugs, and it appeared to clear up.

Alas, the symptoms returned, and Blink was not a happy camper.  We took her back for a steroid injection to unclog the tubes and an x-ray, which showed no stones or other obvious problems.  We got more kitty drugs, and after a long while, she looks fine.  Hopefully it was a really nasty infection and we’ve taken it out, because the next step is bloodwork and an ultrasound, and that might get serious.

Having the cat patrol makes certain things nicer and easier, but you have to pay the upkeep costs.  Not just love, but also the physical chore of waste disposal, water and food refueling, toy playtime, and of course life support via vet specialist checkup.  Blink has been using me as her personal starbase to dock at and recharge, which I’m grateful for.  Her problems are typical of the edge-of-your seat crumbum storm it is out there right now.

Bob Dylan was right, “Look out kid / You’re gonna get hit” and “Better jump down a manhole / Light yourself a candle”  If I can just dodge those crumbum mines, maybe I can get a shot at the Nomad probe and get out of this sector.  Good thing I kept the reserve warp ready.

I finished reading the graphic novel/trade paperback Watchmen for the first time. I suppose it’s about time, seeing as the movie is coming out (which I won’t see until it comes out on Netflix). The comic people have only been talking about it for decades as one of the best comic series ever produced. Now that I’ve had the experience of reading it, I can finally comment and throw my two cents into the collective reaction. Spoilers follow, so beware, ahhrooo!

For those not in the know, Watchmen is a story about a group of super heroes under the premise, “what if super heroes were real?” It takes place in an authoritarian world, where America won the Vietnam war because of superheroes (well, one really), and Nixon is running for his third term. It’s America versus the Russians, with a nuclear confrontation approaching over Afghanistan. Super heroes who don’t work for the government are not allowed to practice as heroes, and the public more or less hates them.

Into this background comes the story of a number of heroes who have mostly retired or sold out (as it is often believed of the so-called “hippies”). They are getting fat, old, and nostalgic. Someone begins killing or neutralizing them one by one, and an investigation begins. At the center of this is a plot to change the world by a mysterious villain, who wishes to save the world by causing a disaster so horrible the world will have to unite in order to face it. The heroes fail to stop the plot, and become collaborators in a new world order based on fear of a manufactured enemy. Almost sounds prophetic, given this comic came out in the eighties.

I read this book, and I admit it’s done well considering it’s stance. Back then, the dark realism must have seemed really cool back then. I don’t know how well it holds up now, however. It’s too safe, ultimately, skirting the boundaries of super hero comic books but never really crossing over the safety line into where comics need to go now, to be relevant. Now that we’ve arrived at a time that evokes some of the background of the book, the book itself is no longer a warning of a nightmare world to come but a sign of how long things have been stagnant and flat.

I’ll say it again. Comic book heroes are obsolete. The premise being put forth shouldn’t be “what if super heroes were real?”, because that’s the same as “what if super villains were real?” The super villain in Watchmen is a former super hero himself, a reflection of the dark truth that super heroes are becoming power fantasies for the rich and powerful, instead of the weak and oppressed. “I have seen the face of the enemy and the enemy is us.” The premise should be “what if super heroes were real and were still super heroes?” Because super villains exist by default. Can any normal person fight a concentrated system of power by themselves? The super hero is an attempt to manifest the transcendent function in the psyche.

1. The super heroes in Watchmen are all without morals.
All of them have cracked under the strain of being super heroes and become disconnected from normal people, the people they are supposed to be serving.

Dr. Manhattan: Commits war crimes on a vast scale. Does research and development for the military. Manufactures raw materials for big business. Has no empathy with human beings. Never follows his own discoveries of the universe – showing wonder at the thermo-dynamic miracle when it suits him, never following up on his “puppet strings” observation to its logical conclusion, ignoring his one-channel omniscience so he can pursue his “work”. At the end of the story he abandons earth to pursue delusions of godhood. This guy is the biggest moral coward and one-sided nutcase in the story.

The Comedian: Wow, talk about a cynic who has totally cracked. Murders and rapes without remorse. Mocks anyone if they show a shred of moral qualms or decency. But his tough guy act is all a farce – when he finds out the big dude plot, instead of joining in he runs and waits to die.

Rorschach: Psychopath who terrorizes criminals, sometimes torturing them and sometimes killing them. Never once applying to himself the standards he applies to others, a victim of abuse who now abuses others, he dies abandoned by his only “friend”, with his journal presumably about to inspire someone to follow in his footsteps into insanity.

Night Owl: At first, he seems like the only genuine nice guy in the film. Rich dude with lots of cool gadgets, Rorschach’s only “friend”, and no vices or skeletons in his closet (that we know of). He caves in like a pack of cards when the chips are down, however, becoming Miss Jupiter’s next surrogate father, abandoning his “friend” like it was nothing, and agreeing not to reveal the doomsday plot of the villain.

Miss Jupiter: The only female character besides her mother. The military pays her to be Dr. Manhattan’s lover, so he will have a “human connection” and continue to work for the military instead of spacing out and leaving the solar system. After a while she can’t handle Dr. Manhattan’s lack of empathy and leaves him for Night Owl, who shows her at least some affection and a chance to be a co-partner. Unfortunately, she exists pretty much as a satellite character, having no impact on the story at all. Her dialogue with Dr. Manhattan to return and save the earth is wasted – he’s only acting out his watchmaker complex and having her mouth the lines he knows she will make.

Veidt: This disconnected, cuckoo guy is “the world’s smartest man”, taking as his role models Rameses the second and Aleksander the Great (ancient world monarchs, what wonderful role models). He ends up being the super villain, enacting yet another elitist plot to “destroy the world in order to save it”. His idea is that in order to stop the world from blowing itself up, it needs to be unified under a greater threat. He teleports a fake alien monster into Manhattan, causing a psychic shock wave that kills half the city and drives half the survivors insane from nightmares. Great guy. What’s even better is how everyone else but Rorschach buys into this. So Dr. Manhattan kills Rorschach and a new age of fascism begins.

Yes, these are “real” super heroes…who also happen to be “real” loonies. Where are the sane or moral “super heroes” as there would be in real life? It’s one-sided, and the audience is cheated of any chance to see what the whole big picture is. Most people don’t notice, because they are too busy fawning over how “realistic” and “cool” the messed up psychos and morally bankrupt characters placed before them are.

2. Normal people are ridiculed and demonized.
Every single normal person in the Watchmen world is a thug, punk, grimy street dweller, disinterested working stiff, cynical jerk, or clueless citizen in need of some educatin’ in the ways of the world. There’s some character development in the form of a newsstand operator and a young boy who reads comics, but the face of “the public” is an extremely negative one, as if they alone were to blame for all the horrors going on in the world.

It’s an elitist worldview, not uncommon of those who regurgitate the stock apologist support of power structures. The “great unwashed mass” cannot tell right from wrong, nor can it make decisions — look at the world, look at all the democracy the people have, and look how they squander it! Well, it’s obvious that an aristocratic super heroic elite must make the decisions for them by staging a catastrophe and shocking everyone into accepting absolute state rule.

All the popular movements of the sixties, which have grown and expanded since then are largely absent, except as scenes of riots and mentions of unrest throughout the country. Granted, it’s a “dark alternate world”, but the premise that people have become mindless rioters is one-sided. None of the heroes ever explains what people are upset about, except that “super heroes are taking over”, based around a police strike. That strikes me as an interesting statement – were super heroes becoming the new state police, and due to protest the power centers were forced to outlaw unsanctioned heroes to maintain power? Whenever the public protests a state act of violence that elites wish to propagate, they take it underground and “covert”. Iran-Contra, anyone?

That means people aren’t the mindless drones portrayed in the story. They have “realistic” self-interest and a desire for “the right thing”. It just isn’t what the “powerful” want. This reveals that the lens of the book is strongly on the side of the super heroes who are themselves privileged aristocrats. We are reading through the point of view of jerks and loonies, and expected to identify with them! How’s that for propaganda and indoctrination? The book you are reading is meant, by means of sleight of hand, to make you sympathetic to the people who own your country and make decisions for you.

3. Time for the Unforgiven of comic book heroes.
I’m not going to go into the convoluted logic of the ending, and how messed up Veidt’s infantile view of how the world works is going to make things worse for normal people. Nor am I going to comment much on Dr. Manhattan’s two-faced viewpoint on the world, collaborating with a plot he knows doesn’t mean anything and abandoning earth to go play god somewhere (or just go irrevocably crazy in the vast emptiness of space without anyone to point out his shadow).

If this is what super heroes really are, one could be tempted to lose faith in heroism or the struggle to better humanity by means of “super powers”, which really means collective powers moving to counteract damaged structures and build systems that actually work. I think the time has come for mainstream comic book writers to admit that what they are writing is meaningless escapism without fun that serves the interests of the rich and powerful, and either confess they are sons of bees whacks churning out industry, or walk away and do something more interesting with their talents. Like, you know, actually cross the line.

The story is over. Super heroes have been shown to be failed idealists like the “hippies”. They tried to change the world and failed. Just keep telling the same old story over and over again thinking you are cool and hip. Too late! The ship has sailed, and we’re all left holding the bag of an art form that has rotted into compost.

Time for a new beginning. The next generation of youngsters growing out of the compost to save us old losers from the dragon that slew us, and make comics count again. Because the truth is, the idealists of the past didn’t fail, they succeeded in softening up the belly of the beast so the next attack run could get set up. Watchmen gets one thing right, with Dr. Manhattan revealing to Veidt that “it never ends”, that Veidt’s “end of history” moment is temporary. The unwashed masses could come back at any time and finish the job, because it is they who hold the “ultimate weapon” of public opinion.

The geeky kid about to pick up the journal is wrong in an objective sense, but in a subjective moment, it’s the image of hope – that the story is not over. Now you get to write what happens next. And if what Dr. Manhattan said about thermo-dynamic miracles is true, then there is a probability that it will end, or begin anew.

Watchmen is a well crafted and enjoyable nightmare world. But if it’s on Time Magazine’s “100 best novels”, I know exactly who Watchmen is serving. Sorry dudes, but with Pluto entering Capricorn, we’re all about to find out just how crazy it can get. The “hippies” are getting their second wind, just like a WWE wrestler who’s been taking a beating for twenty minutes.

Hulkin’ up, fools!

I found the Lord of the Rings trilogy of films by Peter Jackson and company a let down. The first movie was good, the second okay, and the third awful. But as far as being anything approaching Tolkien well, better minds than I have already deconstructed the movie to the pain.

This is a (mostly) family show, so I won’t go into sordid detail about today’s rave. But I think the soft-core movie Lord of the G-Strings is a fine movie. When I think about the nine hours plus of sprawling dung that Hollywood dropped on my head, all I need for an antidote is to think about this little gem of a movie. Everything is transparent to something else, praise Bob.

Bildo Saggins (played by cult soft-core figure Misty Mundae) and her horny throbitt friends are charged by the drunkard wizard Smirnoff to destroy the mighty G-string. Anyone who wears the thing threatens to destroy the kingdom with the lust this item inspires. Therefore it must be destroyed to restore peace, or something.

Arrayed against our stalwart heroines are Smirnoff’s traitorous friend Sour-azz and the pervert Ballum. Yes, the awful names and images never cease.

Michael Thomas (which I’m not sure is a real name) plays an inspired performance as Smirnoff.  I would match his spoof performance of Gandalf any day against Sir Ian McKellan’s serious portrayal in Lord of the Rings.  Both are truth.

I’ve seen several of the other offerings by the company that gave us this weird movie. Playmate of the Apes, Spider Babe – all trash! It’s as if a rare combination of usually worthless materials combine to create a movie that is an instant classic. For me, it’s all about the discovery of the unusual and original.

Now, mind you, I’m not fond of this movie for the nakedness factor. That’s all part of the absurdity of the film. What I embrace is the way this movie takes a venerated icon of fandom and subverts it. The entire trilogy is condensed into one movie, with some extreme liberties taken with the eventual story for the sake of budget. That is, whatever little budget there could have been in a production like this.

The throbitt party has all manner of silly encounters as they walk through the same back yard forest over and over. They meet the cowardly lion and beat him up because he has no courage. The orcs pursuing them get lost and ambushed by hillbillies. At one point, they meet another party of women adventurers with a quest to destroy an artifact going in the opposite direction, and argue over who is really on a wild goose chase.

An effect similar to Monty Python and the Holy Grail is achieved; where through the use of comedy on sacred cows of adventure, certain truths emerge. Smirnoff’s bumbling, lecherous incompetence makes him human and believable. Bildo’s (naive?) acceptance of a ridiculous quest that is part of Smirnoff’s plot to get rid of a piece of junk reflects the way we operate in the real world.

How many movies does it take to tell a story where you are dumping a prop off with the studio crew, anyway? Let’s just get to that backyard renn faire at the end and have a party, complete with stupid cheap computer animation effects. The ending suggests Bildo is not as dumb as she seemed, and maybe the power objects have over us is all in our minds.

I was musing over the decline of fossil fuels the other day, and what it might mean for the future. Demand for oil is out pacing the available supply. China and India are reaching for the same mobility and prosperity enjoyed by the United States, and they are growing by a fantastic amount in both population and industry.

Meanwhile, the oil infrastructure is rusting away because of insufficient investment in the next generation of rigs and technicians. To top it off, the oil companies have picked all the low hanging fruit off the tree, so to speak. All the easy-to-find oil has been located, and all the light, sweet crude (the easiest to refine) is disappearing fast.

What we have left are declining field discoveries, aging wells going into production collapse, and a steadily shrinking supply of heavy, sour crude oil that is increasingly hard to extract and refine.

In layman’s terms, this means that the era of cheap, abundant energy, which fueled an unprecedented industrial age of manufacturing and transportation, is over. From here on out, cheap oil is replaced by expensive oil, and the price of everything this industrial age of cards was built on collapses.

This does not mean the end of oil. We will never run out of oil. It means energy prices go through the roof to reflect the increase in scarcity. A price of 100 dollars a barrel of oil is about eighteen cents a cup. Think about how far a cup of gasoline will get your automobile. Now, imagine paying a group of people in today’s market eighteen cents to push your vehicle the same distance. The commodity is cheap compared to how much it can accomplish.

Nothing can replace oil. Oil is used to make fertilizers, pesticides, and plastics. It can be turned into fuels that power farm machinery, aircraft, ships, factories, power plants, and most of all, trucks. Transportation is 75% of the use of modern energy. Food production and modern manufacturing as we know it couldn’t exist without oil. Cheap energy created the modern world.

The alternative energy sources we have now won’t keep things going the same way. Solar, wind, nuclear, biofuels, coal, tar sands, and so on all have problems that oil doesn’t have. None of them are as versatile as oil. You can’t turn sunlight or wind into plastics. Biofuels don’t scale to industrial levels and take over food producing land. Tar sands are too energy intensive and waste too much water. Nuclear takes too long to build to stave off the energy crunch. Coal won’t power airplanes. Technology isn’t going to save us in time because we’ve run out the clock.

Is this doomsday? No one can predict the future, though it seems like I am by reciting the litany of doom above. It’s a comforting illusion to hope for the end of days and a release from this crummy world we call Planet Earth. I don’t buy it. The decline of oil is real, and changes are coming to the industrialized world that technology won’t be able to save. But what comes after is anyone’s guess.

I speculate that we will continue to have electricity. That’s what I keep thinking about. I’m skeptical of batteries on any scale, since I’m not sure the resources exist to replace the fleet of vehicles we have now, with the kinds we have now. But I see a renaissance in rail and canal travel. Food, power, and components will have to be generated locally because the energy to transport them great distances will be too expensive.

I wonder about the resurgence of the laboring class, and of animal transport. The transition would have to include that in some great numbers because as fuel prices go up, it might become too costly to build a road with machinery, and cheaper to use laborers. The social implications of this blow me away, because it won’t be like the “good old days”. It’ll be a different context with different attitudes.

Corporations will have to change the way they do business. They won’t be able to easily relocate to a country where they can pay cheaper wages anymore, because the cost of shipping the parts is no longer cheap. If they decide to go with cheaper steamers or sailboats, the travel time increases.

There will be conflicts as the various owners of the countries fight for the remaining, poor quality oil fields. As food production plummets, there will be starvation. There will be less travel for the average person, and less goods. I shudder to think what people in the “prosperous” countries might do, with their sense of entitlement and shock at the end of the party.

Yet electricity will still be there. The focus will be the grid, the power lines, the telephone wires, the “line” itself. The level of energy will be smaller, and less instantaneous. We’ll all have to withdraw, pull back and reexamine the old ways of crafting, building and farming on smaller scales. Communities will be interconnected by the line, but physically constrained by lack of cheap energy. This is the age of lightning, of individual development through the development of ideas and an acknowledgement that you, the person reading this, are your own means of production.

The stroke of lightning illuminates, and sets you free. In the tarot card of The Tower, lightning (from the heavens) strikes the tower of Babel and throws the king and pope into the swirling waters and thorns below, along with the top of the tower. The current order of hierarchy and power has been struck down for its hubris. Yet the figures, robbed of their hats of authority, are human again. They seem to flail, yet if you turn the card upside down, they are dancing!

We will be humbled, and brought down to earth from our lofty heights. Our lives will come under scrutiny and require contemplation. The chances are good that humanity will come out of the fall with a new sense of purpose and a greater sense of community than before. Problems will emerge, of course, as the quest continues. Conflicts will be more personal than before, and of a more immediate kind. The danger is that individuals can emerge to infect the group with psychic contagions more easily. We might find new advances in individualized repression more terrifying than anything we’ve seen yet. And countering that, cooperative groups of democratic nodes more stable and humanizing than what we could possibly imagine.

No doubt, things are going to tilt on their axis in unpredictable ways.

K and I were living in a great townhouse a year ago, in a perfect neighborhood for our purposes. The cats were happy, and the parental units were just down the street. If either of us needed a cup of sugar, an onion, or a spare bottle of pinot cheep-io, it was a hat trick.

For various reasons beyond our control, the landlord was forced to move into their townhouse again and we were forced out. It was a month of total panic and stress as we needed to find an affordable new home, and move all our well-settled things.

It was traumatic. Michael, one of our kitties, developed bladder stones and had to have surgery. The window on my pa’s car got broken in the moving about. K nearly suffered a nervous breakdown at having to leave her well-tended front and back yard gardens behind.

We got along well with our landlord. It was in many respects a prefect arrangement for the both of us. He was not pleased at having to move and force us out. There was naught any of us could do but accept this blow as that sort of occurrence that life throws at you. You make the best of it.

Here we are, a year later, and we still haven’t recovered from the torture of the move. And we aren’t exactly ready to make the jump to another abode yet. It would be hard to find a better living arrangement than the one we had.

The house blows. Even though, logically, it’s as convenient as the old one, and had more space. There are a number of things wrong with it, such as doors that don’t lock or close properly, and we are stuck with neighbors who are for the most part inferior to the wonderful people who lived next to us before.

Our relationship with the new landlords leaves something to be desired.

Now mind you, not all is woe. There are many other avenues of our life that are getting on quite nicely. Thank goodness! Rather than call our situation a disaster, I would say it’s a trying time of the soul, where every day you make one more yard. The waiting is the hardest part.

So, back to the present. Sometimes the faucet turns itself on a little during the night. K and I hear little noises that make us nervous at times. The cats, save for Blink (who is neurotic and doesn’t stand for any nonsense when she’s resting in her current choice of pad), are unsettled by the apparitions.

My appearance for a while had indicated dementia. Thank goodness for my brand new electric razor blades. K was keeping my back on that one. Our front door has a slight dent in it, with boot scuff marks. And our door handle is barely staying in place (the screws pop out at inopportune times). I feel like someone tried to break in the place by kicking the door down in the past.

We have a flapping side board near the roof, that we finally got the landlords to have repaired. The handyman will be by on the afternoon of the full moon. The tap-tap-tapping when it gets windy has been keeping us awake at night.

The upstairs toilet makes a loud slamming noise when used, so we just haven’t used it. I’d forgotten about it because we put it on the back burner last year and added it to our list of problems. But I’m starting to think its one more indication that this haunted house is a reality.

Oh yes, last week, probably because of the warm weather, we had to set free several insects. A stinkbug, several mosquito eaters, and some earwigs. Even with the heat on, the cold seems to seep into the house. Yeah, you know where I’m going with this.

It’s only just now that K and I put all these pieces together. My problems with sleep, and the stirred up feelings I dealt with earlier were just the wave of the thing under the water swimming over to the boat, so to speak. I knew I’d have to deal with things again, and that my good night’s sleep was just a rest period between rounds.

Here we are, renewing our lease for an untenable situation, and all we haven’t gotten is the scary voice telling us to “get out”. I recall Eddie Murphy using the Amityville Horror as part of his comedy routine, saying if he ever got that voice, he’d be out the door immediately. Yeah, easy to say buddy.

I’m doing laundry in the basement. There’s a shelf that was here when we moved in. There’s a bunch of junk there that I took no notice of until now. I see that there is a doll on a stand on one of the shelves, and I feel my spine start to tingle. Clenching my teeth, I turn the doll’s face towards me to make sure there are no red eyes staring back at me. I turn to the right, and I realize the space between the wall and the downstairs bathroom almost qualifies as a “mysterious room”.

It’s game time.

When I was growing up, one of the news items that appeared was the invasion by killer bees. “Killer bees from Africa” had escaped from a lab in South America and were making their way up towards the American border. Apparently these bees were really aggressive and would attack at the slightest provocation. For a while, the headlines followed the progress of the migrating bees. The threat grabbed a hold of the popular culture and showed up in Saturday Night Live skits and as movies like The Swarm.

I remember being a little scared by the thought of murderous, deadly bees crossing the border and invading to spread havoc. When I think about it now, I laugh a little. What about all those countries in South America they were passing through in the meantime? Clouds of evil bees weren’t exactly clouding the sky from view and massacring entire towns in a riot of explosion and flame. Perhaps what struck me was that imaginative possibility of the unknown, that out of nowhere a fantastic threat could emerge and attack.

What would you do when the killer bees got here? Hopefully a way would be found to contain the threat and save us from machine-gun stings and nasty bees biting pieces of our flesh out to make poison honey. Why, the entire flower population of the country was at stake, because everyone knows killer bees destroy flowers after they’re done, doing whatever evil bees do.

Hey, this is sounding a little like anti-immigrant propaganda, isn’t it? Watch out for those “invaders” from another country. Foreigners are coming here to cause trouble, and because they are “killer”, you can’t reason with them. Since they swarm in large numbers, our army is helpless against them. The only solution is to nuke them (in The Swarm, the bees are wiped out when they attack a nuclear power plant and cause it to blow up). That’s right, preemptive nuclear strike against the killer bee foreigners before they cross the border and get you.

I’m not buying it. The killer bees escaped the lab because they wanted to rock and roll. And they’re coming to get you because they heard you know how to party. And they know how to make the killer honey that will knock your socks off. I was worried before, but now that I got past all the hype and rumor, I’m ready to receive those bees. When they show up, it’s going to be all buzz.

I’m not fond of the word “conspiracy”, because in today’s propaganda the word is synonymous with “believes in UFOs”, and is used by party harpies to label people as crackpots who can be ignored and/or ridiculed. Granted, there are indeed crackpots out there who can be ignored and/or ridiculed, but the age-old problem in life is always, in Monty Python terms, to spot the loony.

I admit I have a certain voyeuristic fascination with “conspiracy” websites, in the same way I enjoy the carnival or a midnight movie. There’s truth, and there’s life in the phenomenon, but also madness and just plain ridiculous farce. The fool as well as the prophet walks the edges of humanity, and as always, can you spot the loony? Are you talking to an inspired madman, a dunce member of the know it all club, or a quack cashing in on the ignorance racket?

Bob Dylan sings a song about World War III, where everybody’s having the same dream. Everyone’s the last person on earth after the “end of the world”, walking around with no one else. He offers to be in other people’s dreams if they’ll be in his, but everybody wants to be off by themselves. As always, read into that what you will, and even question my synopsis. It seems like there’s an innate wish for the apocalypse in many people, and I think it’s a selfish wish. I’ve indulged in it too, that desire to be free of responsibility and to experience the judgment day we think everyone else has coming. Who doesn’t want the peace of the hermit in this day and age, when everyone is clamoring for elbow room, and there’s no more frontier to explore? Or even to just be the Omega Man, last hero or heroine of the wasteland to embody the remaining humanity of the world, to kill the evil scum mutants and save the survivors to rebuild the world, give it a second chance.

Like every fantasy, there’s a grain of gold in the vast sludge. Each of us is, in effect, “the last human”. It all really does depend on us, the individual. Not any group or mass of people. But it’s a psychic calling, not necessarily a physical one. You want to save the world, save yourself first, get right with what’s going on in your own life. That’s hard work, and it’s easier to succumb to the temptation to look for outside forces to embody that struggle you must fight and win in your imagination to triumph over the night-blasters.

So I’m reading what I’ve often thought of as an “independent” news site, with good commentary and reporting on issues happening in the world that you just don’t ever see at all on the mainstream news, even though you’re paying for cable to indoctrinate you. And I come across a commentator promising to elaborate on one of those “oh so secret meetings” the super-rich and powerful hold to decide the fate of the world. Well, why not, I’m always curious to hear what the “men of best quality” are supposedly up to.

Before I know it, the text starts to read like one of those insane diatribes you expect to find on the False Prophet channel, and I’m reading yet another of those tiresome “United Nations Will Take Over The World” arguments, interspersed with jumbled information about what the “secret members” of the “super-secret meetings” may or may not have been up to. Very little in the way of facts, or even assertions. Not even a dang-blasted opinion! The general message is they’re out to get you, those rich people, and you can’t trust the UN! Ha-cha-cha-cha!

For goodness sake! I think we just spotted Wham-Bam-Biscuit-Barrel.

I was sad, because this sort of thing lowers the credibility of a news website, and I have to look at this link and wonder if the reliability (not to mention the entertainment value) is waning. Letting in false prophets is generally a sign that Imperial Troops Have Entered the Base, and you may as well blast off to the next waypoint.

But most of all it gets my goat. Nothing irritates me more than when “conspiracy” addicts stop reporting what they know, and start predicting the future. You can spot it a mile away. They stop showing you what they found and start telling you what’s going on. This guy sounded like he went to a hotel convention for some patricians who work for the super-rich he heard about on the internet, was shocked when nobody let him in, overheard a few elevator conversations, got kicked out by security, then had to make a bunch of stuff up while downing some cappuccinos in an internet cafe.

So, clue in “conspiracy” addicts:

1. No, the United Nations is not going to “take over the world”. The “men of best quality” could care less about their grandfather’s rubber stamp.
2. No, “the rich people” aren’t “out to get you”. You’re “the great unwashed masses” and don’t even show up on the viewscreen.

Now get back to talking about UFOs.

Oh boy, my favorite time of year has come around again.  I hate to admit it, but I’m a big Grinch when it comes to the holiday season.  The weather is finally becoming crummy on a regular basis, the mutants on the street have an extra kill factor on their difficulty level, and the general malaise of having to send out cards and accumulate gifts for the other planets in the Federation starts to set in.  It’s depressing.

I put on a merry face and pretend the gloom isn’t getting to me.  The only thing I like is the decoration of the Xmas tree, which has been denied to me for some years now.  The folks don’t have the room for even a small tree, and the cats mean K and I have gotten out of the habit of putting one up.  The destructive rampages of Frankie and chomping nom-nom insanity of Michael’s pine needle appetite make such a possibility ludicrous right now.  Just another reason to be sour about the “Season to be Jolly”.  Grrr!

The stores are filled to the brim with two-legged personifications of desperate panic, outright greed and smoldering resentment.  Come on, mutant robots of death, I just want to buy a carton of milk and go!  The parking lots become re-enactments of the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan.  And here I am in Micro Blue, my little go-cart, trying to avoid getting taken out by the Mammoth Car.  Sheesh!  Back at the homebase, the general ambient neighbor radiation goes up.  You can feel the jitters, usually right when you are undergoing decompression and decontamination procedures after work.

I don’t have any horrible childhood memories of Xmas.  I’ve had quite a few wonderful Xmas experiences over the years.  What I’m describing is a kind of background feeling that comes over me.  The doom is all around us at all times, I suppose I notice it more around this time.  Even during this time of greater awareness of so called “higher principles”, people are still acting like they’re on the Planet of the Apes.  I keep thinking about Sandwich Wagon Boy keeping the eatery treadmill open on Xmas Day while Toot Nugget and his screaming brats open their disposable auto-garbage plastic enviro-bot practice annihilators.  I want to jump on the top of the table with my Casio-rebellion keyboard and yell like a stupid fool!

Yup, that’s how I honor Xmas.  By being in the dumps.  I’ll celebrate when Santa Claus conquers the morons.

I pulled out a ten-dollar bill to pay for some last minute groceries, and I noticed it had been stamped on the edge with the information for an escort service, with a phone number and web address. For goodness sakes! The things people put on paper currency.

After I got over my amusement, I got to thinking, and I imagined it had to be a meaningful coincidence. A psychic message perhaps, but from whom?

The “Dark Goddess”, of course. That archetype that dwells within the unconscious of all humans on the planet. So I dug into some of my old collections of useless information to see what I could bring back to the conscious part of my ape’s brain. I figured she wanted me to remember some of my lessons from back in the day.

Then, for no reason at all, Britney Spears and her latest tune pops into my head. I get to thinking this must be part of the message. Then I realize little miss “gimmie more” is carrying the projections of people’s expectations of the Dark Goddess. This goes back to my Escapegoat theory, whereby certain people embody the community’s own repressed qualities so people can mock them and feel better about themselves.

What are the qualities of the Dark Goddess? Well, aside from the obvious (the naughty bits), she personifies instinctual behavior, music and dancing, drunkenness, the pursuit of pleasure, reckless abandon, procreation, madness, self-destruction, illusions over reality, and generic forms of darkness and chaos thrown in for good measure. Sound familiar?

The Dark Goddess is often symbolized by things like the moon and underground tunnels, or personified by supernatural figures like witches and mermaids. You can go all the way up to goddesses like Lilith or Tiamat, and all the way down to famous actresses or femme fatales. It just depends on what you are looking for. Hrm. Famous people. That could easily apply to miss “oops I did it again.”

The obvious interpretation is that the Dark Goddess was reminding me that she’s out there, in the shadows and darkness sometimes, but more than likely in broad daylight without anyone’s knowledge. Britney is out there too, suffering the scarlet letter of people with no guts and nothing going on (we’re all guilty, not just her). The Dark Goddess is out there doing her thing, what am I doing?

That question brings me back to a time when I was an ardent admirer of the Dark Goddess. I gave her a full access pass and a place to live. I drank from dark waters, ate from dark fruits, and lived in the wrong part of town like her. She’s a backdoor girl with a bad reputation, and she ain’t no man’s woman, but she would pay me a visit just the same. The Dark Goddess shares her gifts of regeneration and ecstasy with those who ask, and I asked every day. She would sing to me, you can call me anytime, on my hello-happy-line.

So that’s the message, give her a call. Maybe she misses me, or wonders if I’d forgotten about her. I heard tell once that the edges of the wrong side of town must seem like they plummet into the depths, because anyone who leaves never comes back. I dial the Dark Goddess’s hello-happy-line, and leave a message.

That night, I have one of those vivid and detailed dreams I sometimes get. I’m in a huge labyrinth of a building, a creativity warehouse as one occupant puts it to me. I see every conceivable kind of artist, engineer, architect, editor and student associated with creativity engaged in projects too numerous to mention. Writers working on stories for a magazine, paintings of every conceivable type being painted using experimental techniques or to develop a series for museums or shows. Lithographers, gardeners, graphic artists working on advertising, all in a setting of hallways and rooms littered with toys, decorations and tools of the trade. Whole acting companies work out elaborate blocking of scenery next to rooms where speeches are being given on the future of sculpture. I climb a wooden ladder out of a sauna where rock stars are meditating on new songs, and walk down an aisle of computer-automated typewriters working out a formula for theater performances. Everywhere, there are secret doors, concealed passageways, and understated niches like altars to the making of things for their own sake. Quiet places, loud places, lighted by fireplace or fluorescent bulbs, or sometimes nothing at all. It’s a Willy Wonka Factory of every artist’s dream.

I realize in the dream that I’m looking for my backpack. I’m carrying a sword and wearing a costume from some previous artistic pursuit that I’ve moved away from. I’m looking around, searching, and wandering the place. That’s when I run into the Dark Goddess herself, and I realize the creativity warehouse is hers, she runs it and makes sure that there’s always ideas and play to fertilize the minds and souls of people. She tells me that she called because I left my backpack at her place, and I ought to have it back again. I come out of my dream as if I’d only just closed my eyes, and I write down everything she told me.

The next day, K is at the new computer figuring things out, and I’m working on my book. We have the sliding back door open (with the screen closed) to freshen up the air a bit. Something appears at the top of the screen, and for a moment we both think Frankie has climbed the sliding door to get at a moth or something like that. But it’s a screech owl, trying to get in. It sinks its claws in the screen and stares at us for a moment, then tries to get in again. The owl flies off into the night, without ever having made a sound or damaged the screen, and K and I marvel at the critter visit we just experienced. Totally cool!

Owls are sacred to the Goddess Lakshimi, symbolizing prosperity. They are also animals associated with Athena, and wisdom. In some Native American traditions they are night hunters who see through deceptions and the sorcery of others. Owls often carry the spirits of the ancestors and their messages. But most of all, the screech owl is sacred to Lilith, another aspect of the Dark Goddess.

Yup, that’s the Dark Goddess all right. She’s in your fridge, eating your food.

As I mentioned earlier, I used to hate all cats with a passion. The time has come for me to tell the story of what made me hate cats so much. Why, why the hatred? Well, here it comes, and it ain’t pretty.

Back when I was living with my folks, post college graduation burnout, next door there is a house we came to call the Hell House, because the family that lived there were a psychological cesspool of dysfunctional, rancid energy. Fights, screaming, smashing things, littering. Name the drama, it happened there. One of the more unsavory mutations of that family lifeforce, while it inhabited the Hell House, was their chaos attribute of Infestation (Dumper Cats).

Specifically, they maintained a stable of cats in the general vicinity that ran loose at all hours. These cats bred with each other, attacked birds and squirrels, and invaded other people’s yards in large numbers. And, of course, they relieved themselves in other peoples’ yards as well, thus the nickname of “Dumper Cats”. Well, that’s not what they were really called, since the actual descriptive was a profanity. Use your imagination.

Since they were free to breed at will, plenty of yowling and mewing occurred at all hours. Yet the actual number of the cats didn’t seem to increase, although I always saw new arrivals with different shades. My guess is that the litters were sold off for extra income, with an occasional kitten kept over to replenish the stock when these cats inevitably fled or died from disease. Our only recourse was to have the super-soaker primed at all times, since the cats grew wise to the sound of the hose being turned on.

Perhaps it wasn’t so much the cats themselves, but what they represented. They were a visible sign of psychic contamination. The folks and I came to hate them with a passion, and reveled whenever we got a direct hit with the water. The family’s drama was bad enough, to have to suffer the invasion of your own personal space by numerous cats was a transgression. You’d be sitting in the backyard, enjoying the garden and the birds eating their seed or washing in the bath, when along comes a mottled white cat through the fence looking for a bird lunch. Peace and tranquility disrupted! You have to scare the birds while you scare off the cat, and your thoughts have been interrupted.

So all cats became known as Dumper Cats. Eventually, the family broke apart despite itself and the house was abandoned. For a long time it was a morass of psychological residue, and the cats wandered off in search of some other source of food. The house was bought by a nice handyman. He moved his family in, and fixed the place up so you would never guess it was once the Hell House. The Dumper Cats are ancient history. But it would be a long time before K would come along and show me the power of the non-Dumper Cats.