The Diamond Island

Much as the urgency of the monster puzzle in the haunted house is motivating me, this space needs variety.  There ought to be rest stops along the way where one can enjoy a Stuckey’s hot dog and coffee, ogle the souvenir vending machine for cool prizes, and use the facilities to restore zero storage.

The way in which our Property Party dominated system is throwing money at the socialized corporations of the anti-free market got me thinking about a certain toy I used to play with.  I still have this thing, and it still works!

The game is called Chutes Away!  It’s a contraption consisting of a wind-up mechanism base, a pretend-airplane control panel and view port, an overhang with a model rescue plane with a mechanism for carrying rescue chutes, and a wide rotating disc with holes representing the landscape and emergencies in need of help.

You turn on the mechanism, the disc rotates, and you look through the view port.  Using the controls, you move the plane back and forth along the path of the disc and drop chutes in holes.  When the mechanism winds down, you are presumably out of fuel and have to leave and land somewhere.  Score is kept by the number of chutes you land successfully in the holes.

The chutes are plastic, with a metal weight on the end, so they drop pretty quick.  The holes have raised edges and taper to a point downwards, so if you get a solid hit the chute may bounce a little but will be directed to a rest at the bottom.

The disc is nicely illustrated with various scenes of disaster in need of help.  A car lies stuck in a collapsed wooden bridge with people waving for help, a crashed helicopter crew signal for your attention, a sinking boat’s passengers wave at you, and so on.

I thought this was the coolest thing ever when I saw it in the store, so I pestered my folks into getting it.  But they got back at me.  My folks called the game “Bucks Away!” and would laugh at me while I played rescue pilot.  The idea was that it was a waste of money and the secret joke behind the game was I was really throwing money away with every chute released.  Just as buying the game had been a throw-away.

So I pulled out the game once more and pretended to be the TARP’s ace pilot.  I would be dropping public funds right into the waiting chimneys of insolvent banks throughout the land.  Kind of like Santa Claus.

Unfortunately there was a technical difficulty.  The chute drop was a bit stuck – I had to really use the lever hard to release them.  A lot of the bailout money went right into the drink or the woods, and I was only able to save three banks from having to paper over their losses until the magical day of recovery.

Bucks away!

There was a recurring dream I used to have.  In it, I was allowed to see what anyone and everyone is in this life.  Really.  I got to see what the DEAL was for anyone’s life.  All I had to do was think of someone I knew and look.

I could never remember what it was I saw when I woke up.  I just remember the feeling of seeing what people wanted to be and wanted to see.  It was not given to me to behold more than that.  I only knew that I awoke wishing I could call people up and say, “Hey, I know what you’re meant to do in this life.”

So I get up in this dream’s face.  Yo dream stuff, if you want to help people, then why the part about people having to find out about what they need to do?  It’s enough of a trouble to be born and not know anything.

The nothing does the total answer back at me and says people have to figure it out on their own.  Everyone had to eat dirt in the blackest tunnels no matter where and who they are.

I get so very angry.

Doesn’t this dream know what people are going through?  I feel so much for people I can’t explain it.  Weird dialog boxes show up in my mental word processor when I try to get real with it.

Caring is what is dangerous.  Empathy is a dissident act.

Because I care, I get to see there’s a Script.  It’s only now that I realize that’s a message.

No, it’s true.  You have a quest in this life.  I might have seen it.  Do you need me to tell you it’s real?

Then it dawns on me.  Why didn’t I ever think of myself and look?

Because that’s not what happens in the Script!

Well, looks like my attempts at hanging out with my own personal Bad Ronald didn’t go exactly as planned.  Judging by the spit-out bite of hot dog and the untouched milk, nitrate-based meat products in a bread sleeve with lactose liquids do not equal win.

The invitation to walk in the sunlight, breathe the wind, and look at the flowers was also a dud.  It never occured to me that this stuff is just maximum bummer for the kid.  Boy do I feel like a dummy.  Well, I gotta give the rascal points for trying.  I don’t know if I could try his brand of food or go on his kind of a walk.  Maybe I’ll have to, in order to find out what’s up.

That monster is still out there too.  I get the feeling I’m just going to have to wait until it drifts my way again.  The suspense is proving a little unnerving, brr.

Speaking of monsters, I rediscovered an old classic monster flick called Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957).  Pure hilarious goodness.  Scientists stranded on island inhabited by huge energy crabs that eat brains.  The crabs absorb the voices and memories of those they kill, so they are really good at luring victims away.  Meanwhile, the island is sinking into the ocean.  I love movies with crazy time limits before the locale is destroyed or sinks!  But the best part is the stupid crabs taunting the survivors with the voices of their dead comrades.  Pure B-movie gold.

The social media internet sinkholes have caught my interest.  So yeah, Facebook has got it’s talons into me.  For someone of my age, Facebook has been a goldmine of reconnection and personal enrichment.  It’s an event that won’t happen again, as the youngins will increasingly be unaware of life before texting each other with updates.  I wonder what my life might have been like if me and my friends in high school would have had that superpower.

And I’m on Twitter.  Looking up the few so-called celebrity type people I might be interested in has proved pretty uninteresting.  I just don’t worship my heroes enough anymore to want to follow their every effort.  Reading Bono’s tweets on twitter was an exercise in self-depression.  Looking for mundanes with something to say is just as difficult.  It’s like the Livejournal friends feed — lots of stuff that is mildly interesting, but not much I want to follow regularly.  Oh well, growing my dendrites will take time I suppose.

Meanwhile, on the book front I’m putting the finishing touches on the sixth draft.  Been taking in all the feedback I’ve gotten from folks and making decisions as to what to act upon.  Putting the last call on all that though, as I am ready to move forward.  What will probably happen is I’ll post the whole thing as a PDF here, and when I get the Lulu book all sorted out, make a link to that available for people who want a physical manifestation.  Cafe Press t-shirts and mugs are so far down the line it’s only a concept in the brainstem right now.

Back in 1974 there was this crazy movie of the week on TV called Bad Ronald.  It’s about a momma’s boy who asks the hot cheerleader out on a date.  She rejects him, and while walking home he runs into her sister.  The sister taunts him into a rage, Ronald pushes her backwards, and she fatally hits her head on a cement block.

His overprotective mother comes up with a crazy plan:  Hide her son in the spaces between the walls of her house, wait until the heat blows over, and then flee the country together.  She has plans for Ronald to become a doctor, and nothing is going to stand in the way of that!

While waiting for the heat to blow over, the mother dies during an emergency operation and the house is sold.  A new family with a very attractive daughter moves in, with Bad Ronald watching from peepholes and leaving his hiding place to grab a bite from the kitchen.  With no where to go, Bad Ronald loses his sanity and hilarious hijinks ensue in the house.  The movie culminates in a horrific ending that can only be called surreal.

I think there’s a Bad Ronald living in the crawlspaces and walled off bathroom of my brainstem.

In the movie, there’s an interval where the new family thinks the house is haunted.  Bad Ronald moves about in the walls at weird hours, bumping and scuffling.  He borrows objects, eats from their fridge, and peers in on them giving them the feeling they’re being watched.  It’s actually a nifty idea, if a little creepy.

The movie just sort of popped into my head from memory.  So of course I had to look it up and recall my feelings about it when I was five years old.  Then I was reading through my dream journal, and one entry (which I had forgotten about until now) struck me as relevant.  In the dream a voice told me that My Mirage was protecting my shadow, a scary child living underground.

I believe I’ll be leaving a hot dog and glass of milk out for my Bad Ronald.  A boy’s got to eat!  Then maybe, just maybe, we’ll go out for some exercise.  I’ll point out the birds and the flowers.  See what he thinks.

A couple of months ago, I went on about how I wanted to find the music.  Even though I had failed to find it in the heroes I had hoped would manifest it in real life.  I was free to break away and find what I was missing on my own.

It really crushed me to find out that I shouldn’t hold up regular people, even exemplary people, up to a standard of heroic coolness.  We need people to manifest the hero for us, even if it isn’t real or true.

There was a wound in me.  How to find the sound of the secret in my being, when I couldn’t even make music myself?  What to do when the only skill I have is the tendency to grope for what is personally healthy?  The beauty of what is deep for this blessing magic goes back and deeper than I can imagine.

I mean that.  You want me to testify, I can explain it back to the dinosaurs.

There is a sequential beauty and an intention to manifest truth behind the music of our lives that exists despite our experience.

It is with that faith that I went about searching.  If my role models couldn’t provide what I needed, then I needed to find it myself.  If you seek, you will find clues.  And so I found a few small signs and landmarks in the Internets.

Secrets and mysteries revealed themselves to me once my allegiance to music was undecided.  A little birdie sent me a message.  Check these groups out, she said.  And so I did.

• Comsat Angels – Before U2 was famous, they opened for this band once.  They have a dark sound that mixes well with what I like.
• Echo and the Bunnymen – Edgy and emotional.  This group has several albums that make me feel super dudely.
• Big Country – Perhaps a little too dramatic at times to be useful in my life experiences.  I like how they make me feel though.
• The Sound – Wordy and intentional.  Their intentions are worth listening to and making thoughts out of.  I realize I need to know more.

These bands and their past attempts to find the truth helped me through a dense quasar of my own personal seaweed tangles.

No.  Really.  I found alchemical formulas that would not have revealed themselves to me unless I had been serious.  These groups would not mean anything to me unless I had abandoned what I believed was real.

What was it I was seeking?  If only my friends back then could have made it all better!  Stand back, my dearest friends.  I was not well.  Let me be, and see if I get better.

Nature.  Instinct.  Intuition.

Music is the right way for me to figure stuff out.  Isn’t that weird?

The time has come to get real with the earth again.  My folks are already there, turning up the earth as they consider what will be necessary in order to plant this year’s crops.  They wheelbarrow huge amounts of weeds to the discard pile.

K and I shamble over to our plot and take in the landscape of this year’s post-winter, spring revelation.  A hawk screeches and chases after a group of four birds.  Hawks like to hang out at the massive public plots we partake in.  Birds love the plentiful seeds and insects of our cooperative.  The cycle is happenin’, man!

We rid ourselves of a bunch of extra tomato cages that serve no use for our plans.  We’ve re-fenced our plot well from last year, so we hand over our extra fencing to another person who is re-doing their own.  We dig up past plants that have gone dead, and take out the detritus of past failures.  I saw apart branches from someone else’s garden making an invasion.

K discovers an honest to goodness salamander of red and black, which we leave alone to dig its way back into the garden.  Despite the countless seeds of pest plants, we do the easy work and let the garden know we are back.  Even if it looks like we are not in shape for this year.  Last year the garden beat us into a bloody pulp.

But there is a bonus.  The onions and garlic we thought had been defeated are growing strong.  And the rosemary, even though it has croaked, the leaves are there for us.  Dried and ready to be picked.  K grabs ’em all and puts them into a packet.  There will be a chicken potpie tonight with a rosemary pump-up for sure.

K spots a dandelion.  I see robins looking for worms.  Yes, spring is here, and the cycle has begun again.  I send blessings out to the living spirit, those who have been before me, the monsters, those who love me, and the losers.  As life stirs back into my consciousness, I realize how hard core it always is.

The worms are getting busy; the fire of life is waking up.  My friends are living their lives.  A psychic apparition of Grace Jones is whupping Batman’s behind with a garden hose as she shouts attention to all the people who give a darn.

I know nothing; I’m just plucking away at the dead magnolias to make room for this year’s crop.

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.