The Diamond Island

Went on a walk with the parental units and K.  The last month and a half has been hard core beat-down, on the outside world stage as well as the personal stage.  There’s a lot of decompression and decontamination procedures to go through.  Our meditative walks together help massage out the bad brains.

I spot a robot at the top of this hill under someone’s raised porch.  “Hey check out that robot,” I say.  K says, “What robot?  That’s a mermaid.”  After a few minutes of everyone seeing different things and wondering whether reality has shifted underfoot, it dawns on me this is one of those weirdo random whackazoid encounters of doom.  I switch positions and see next to the robot is a red-haired waving mermaid.  The trees and the way the hill is situated combine to make it hard to see both at the same time.

We all laugh at the absurdity.  Who (or what) posts technological and magical beings along the meditative route people take?  That’s just how it is when all you get is the Spanish Inquisition.  Robots to the left of us, mermaids to the right.  Here we are, stuck on one side or the other, unable to pass between the guardians of the change in consciousness.  Except this time I figured it out and we saw both sides.  And laughter, the fool, comes along to take us back to the beginning, to our roots.

The haunted house closes it’s doors today sometime after 5 PM, and then that strange and terrifying ordeal will be gone forever.  My folks wanted to take pictures of the Chucky doll and us waving bye-bye to the house, but K was like, “No way.”  We flushed the evil toilet for posterity and laughs, but the monstrous apparatus was strangely subdued, it’s poltergeist-like slamming sounds hardly detectable.

A large spider has taken up residence in the sliding back door, spinning a long tunnel-like web, probably two and a half feet in length (the web, not the spider!).  We decided to leave it be.  Somehow, a yucky looking spider with dried insect husks gives this empty, smelly, and disorienting place character.  I tried to open the secret door, but the ghosts were having none of that.  The creaking noises and dust seemed to increase as if to say, “You’re done dude, just go.”  I understand.  Sometimes it’s better not to know.

I decided to strangle the spooky gift bag in the kitchen (sorry Hexe Witchiepoo!).  A gift bag that had alarmed so many people by playing at random times (including K).  Even though the battery should have died years ago.  It seemed appropriate.

We delivered a note to our neighbor on one side of the haunted house.  Her friend, with strangely diseased-looking hands accepted with politeness.  I was like, whoa, is this whole neighborhood full of halloween characters and we just didn’t know it because we didn’t see it?  Now that’s just darn creepy.  If I look at it, victims and skulkers living in the same deserted cul-de-sac.

I shoot off a firecracker.  Time to move on.

K and I moved a veritable buttload of George Carlin micronized “stuff” for the last ten days.  Detaching all cables, ectoplasmic ghost tentacles, and gravitational psychic suctoids has been a real pleasure I can tell you.  Tractor beaming it out of the haunted house while the ghosts gnash their teeth and scream and cry, Wild Thangs style, “oh please oh please don’t go we’ll eat you up we smash you so”, is an exercise in self-pyro-flagellation.

How many twisted ankles, auto-inject splinters, cloudy day sunburns, phantom mosquito bites, miniature cuts, blunt skin scratches, smooshed toe blister, achy-breaky muscles hit points you got?  Well, looks like K and I ain’t down and out yet, though wow what a slow ride, take it beastly.

But the alcohol saints have been keeping us in plenty of in-between meal snacks.  A little muscle relaxant goes a long way in keeping the insanity people and android soul creamulators away.  I’m using my soulsword on full power, banishing those demonoid phenomenons from Chucky doll’s foul orifice (which one?).  Maybe the alcohol saints are loving the spectacle.  Who will challenge McCoy in THIS day and age, eh?  Luck of the Irish I suppose, with a heap of K’s fatalistic viking plunge ahead with all-out Excalburt whammo.

The animals are all over the place right now.  Last night while driving home a load in the trans-dimensional hatchback Micro-blue, a deer with horns crossed the street.  During the day there’s tons of hawks everywhere, looking for munchy mouseguts or delicious bird nuggets.  If you can’t see them, you can sure hear them screeching like the cartoon in Hawk The Slayer!

Driving through traffic on the way to the store for the umpteenth time to get lightbulbs, or cleanser, or any number of post-haunted house tidy-up you can’t remember because your brain is on auto-pilot, I heard the baying of a goat.  It’s a freaking two road with two lanes each multi-hyperspace bypass full of droids in cars, for Goodness sake.  It must have been in somebody’s vehicle, but I didn’t see any vehicles but four doors and minivans.  Chaos!

On UFO Girl Hill, the rabbits were playing with each other, jumping and prancing about while munching on the rarified fairy grass that surrounds the hill.  Chippie was maneuvering about, collecting seeds.  And huge yellow damsel-fly like bug was waiting for us on the door handle.  Can you dig it?  BUG city.  As in bugging out and calling it even, bugging out and losing your marbles, bugging off because this house for dwarfs and dimensional shamblers just ain’t got it for us no more.

Still, K and I have gotten a few walkies in around the magic lake.  Bats everywhere eating the bugs buzzing our skulls.  We found their lair, and its a perfect spot.  Heating and cooling all in one, water, bugs, all the whole nine yards.  These bats are batty batty batty!  They are getting down, they are rocking the mike, they are eating their faces full of bugs!  Eat them all up yum, dudes and dudettes, we’ll keep walkin’ on and bring ya the summer BBQ livin’ is easy howlaroo.

The cats have been transfered, and are taking the new honeycomb hideout well.  The lack of haunted house doom agrees with them, and how!  New bed, new rest, deep sleep.  I dreamt K and I had climbed out of a sewer-cave, ancient forgotten waterway with a sack full of dimaonds.  Everyone was wanting to know how we did it, where we were.

I shamble down to the shower unit to get ready for patrol duty in web sector space.  Hey, what’s that sound of water dripping inside the house?  Is Bad Ronald up to something?

Nope, it’s the hard rain driving water up to the window and under to flow in a steady flow over the sill and onto the carpet.  Panic and fear!

K is out cold, recovering from a sudden bout of food poisoning.  Can’t wake her, and if she did get up, she’s got almost no maneuver points.  Why worry her.  I have to get moving furniture and boxes.  My Beta VCR is right in the path of the approaching onslaught.

Total physical activity in the moment, no time to think.  Water squishing underneith.  Carpet becoming soggy in an ever increasing amount.  Oh God I hope the fuse box to the right doesn’t start leaking.  Shine the flashlight and see drops of water beading in the switches.  This is madness.

Rain abates.  Water level slowly drops.  Stuff is moved to the far side of the basement room, or in stages up the stairs and into the living room.  All is chaos.  Cats are wondering what is going on.  Somehow I manage to email work that I’m having an emergency damage repair.

I sit down and have a 30 minute nervous breakdown as the shock washes over me.  I haven’t felt this out of it since I got hit by a car on my bike.

K regains auxiliary power and comes downstairs to see me cowering on the couch.  She sees the stuff everywhere and thinks I’ve gone on some crazy moving kick.  Then she sees the mess.

We get towels galore, rent a rug doctor and miracle of miracles we soak up all the water.  Email and phone the landlord but no response.  Maybe he’s on vacation I suppose.  Bring in fans and dry the carpet up pretty good.  This takes about a week of soaking, stomping, wringing, blowing and vacuuming.  Wow the rug doctor is awesome.

K and I sit down on the couch to watch a nice romantic movie, drink a few beers, all that good stuff.  Then the storm comes in again, hard and fast.  We look at each other in fear.  One of us has to go down and see if the towels are holding.

K goes down first.  The towels are not holding.  The water is pouring in ten times worse than before.  Panic and fear is ten times worse, just to keep up.  Someone pees their pants.  Bail and throw anything cloth-related in reach at the waterfall of water streaming into the house.

The nightmare really begins.

Rainfall this Tuesday was intense.  Ordinarily I’d be thrilled at the heavy rainfall and the loud thunder, but in a haunted house things can get weird.  Wouldn’t you know it, I wake up to take my shower and find the basement window starting to look like an aquarium.  Water is spilling through the cracks onto the carpet, and then red alert in my brain goes off.

Then it’s practical, practical, practical on emergency warp drive.  Save the stuff, the furniture and get some towels on the flow stat.  K is out of action recovering from food poisoning or a psychic attack, I can’t be sure.  But I can’t leave the sector for patrol duties until the situation is under control.  Breakfast, coffee, shower—out the window!

Got enough projects in the hopper, errands, chores, and all that ego-we-go-go stuff.  But man, here’s the unconscious reminding me that I got some serious mermaid work to do still.  Okay, okay and a lot more besides.  Monsters, monsters everywhere is still on the menu.  That was a heck of a tail thresh from the big critter out there in the depths.

It’s coming in, those sonar readings.  This is the boat I got, time to go deep sea diving again!

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.

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!

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.

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.

Unexpectedly, my folks have been activated. They are going through their museum of a townhouse and stirring things up. All my old toys, high school and college artifacts, and forgotten keepsakes. They are trying to identify objects, group together related items, and either toss/donate unwanted things or put them away in new containers.Needless to say, such a psychological task stirs up more than dust. The ghosts of Paulie past are not amused, nor are the secret monsters dwelling in the crevices. And the only person who can name the pieces is me.

My folks have adopted certain superstitious taboos while going through their motions of digging up and accommodation. Only during daylight. Only when both of them are together. Always have a drink in hand. I can emphasize. When I am with them, they are able to make substantial progress.

It is as if I can name the secret creatures that lurk under the depths of existence. I emphasize with their desire to clear the field, for I too wish the dark corners of my past to be cleansed. I want to move forward and let go of anything that holds me back from living life.

I’m nostalgic, sentimental, and romantic. K has been telling me I need to focus more on the here and now, not so much in the past. I agree. I want harmony and balance. How much can I hold onto my Star Wars figures or my Ocean Adventure sets without regressing to a childhood I no longer have a right to? A new perspective is required.

My folks begin to dig up all sorts of things. It feels good to throw away notebooks of Algebra and World History that I will never return to in that form. Also, the sense that I am putting away valuable toys for the future makes me happy. I haven’t played with my Navarone Gun set in so long it feels like I’m looking at an alien puzzle when I put away the accessories for the Allied forces.

And the countless comic books, both in the standard size and the magazine and supersize designation. My folks get their hands on plastic bags and cardboard backing galore so they can archive the finds, before putting them away for a suitable storage. I never knew I had so many Richie Rich comics, or Shazam specials. It totally blows me away.

Digging up the corpses of my life, that’s what it amounts to. Weirdness. But it feels good to excavate this long, large detritus pile up. I sense this is timely, and necessary. But what is responsible for this sudden digging up of my life? What has changed that I should go over my life and set things in order for a change of outlook?

Unfamiliar, or forgotten aspects of my being must be at work. Newly revealed parts of myself that I’m only now making sense of.

Wait, what is that gigantic shambling thing in my old room? How is it that this magnetic electric spirit of blazing titanic fire can be in two places at once? Why, it’s the Goob-a-loo throwing a fanatic fit over all the junk people carry around with them. It builds up nothing but dust bunnies, which charge up the capacitors and wreck havoc with the Goob-a-loo’s allergies!

The only solution is to diffuse the build-up of psychic debris by disconnecting the memorial junk accumulators from the items held in unconscious repose for storage. This means getting into the piles of objects and separating the wheat from the chaff. Anything not likely to be consciously considered and handled must be removed to a disposal array – clothes in a bag to AmVets for example.

We’re holding on to too much stuff that has served it’s purpose, and the Goob-a-loo will dance on our heads until we ease the psychic continuum down to a less radioactive level of possessiveness. Goob-a-loos only want to stand still and coast on the ambient energy of household operations. Don’t we know they’re being made miserable existing in human object dumping grounds?

Hek-yeah, I’m on it.

While mayhem in my psyche ensues, I hang the portrait of My Mirage on a nearby wall.  The first sign of life in the house.  I think about being zero for two in my attempts to be successful with My Mirage and UFO Girl.  Maybe I was really two for zero.  Numerologically, twenty is related to the Judgment card in the tarot deck.  Not unlike how I’m feeling with a strange and unexpected dawn.

My thoughts turn to K.  If I’m going to have to cowboy up and be the horror host, she’ll have to be the hostess.  We need to get this haunted house in order!  We decide it’s time to blast away all these beams and blocks cluttering up the place.  Hard work stirring up dust and moving debris out of the way to go out for the Hek-yeah Disposal Team on night-time pickup.  There’s stuff I have in mind for a giveaway too.  The time has come for clearing out the mental space.

I head into the attic of my mind and go through some things, taking inventory on what will be a good start on a new year’s clearing out.  Some things will be put away again in proper order, while others will be brought out and handled.  Such is the tyranny of objects.

What I find are a host of treasures left behind in a psychic space so visibly tiny you could hardly see it.  There’s a room in my haunted house that defies the model of physics, working by the principles of trans-dimensional engineering.  Can it be that My Mirage has been like a western dragon, collecting rare things of which he cannot use and hoarding them without understanding?

I take up an old audio tape, a promo copy given to me by a radio gal I knew named Kate from a while back.  A selection of songs by a heavy metal band named Kryst The Conqueror, taken from their Deliver Us From Evil album.  I pop it into my player and listen to a series of epic songs from the days of headbanging long hair.  One thing heavy metal was good at was metaphors for the ordeals of love and the struggle against darkness.  The lyrics from In God We Trust come back to me from the depths of time:

For we have seen the face of hell and still believe
That the sword to kill the beast he’s given me
So how many more must die that one may see

I’m listening this time.  My soul returns back to when I was living that dark confusion and raw enthusiasm for understanding through heavy metal questing.  I remember the trauma of being wounded by the forces of damnation, an injury that went as deep and fatal as I had ever experienced.  My enemy, myself lost and gone bad in ways I never would have imagined or wanted.

I notice a plain, hastily scribbled letter from a dear friend in 1995.  I remember reading this but not understanding the words.  I was hearing the words in the songs I enjoyed without listening.  I read words in letters by important people in my life without paying attention.  When you’ve lost your way in the sickness of your own unlighted ordeal, so much is wasted.

SNACK!

Words matter.  They give form to ideas in our thoughts which lead to tangible things.  Words can destroy and they can build.  A single word from a troubled soul can rob you worse than any thief.  A single question, spoken from a humble soul can heal the wasteland and restore an ailing king.

“You will always be the first person I fell in love with.”

Just like that, a self-inflicted wound I had resigned myself to bearing the rest of my life, a horrible black void of failure that had stolen the best parts of me – crippled me, is healed.

The very words I’d needed most to hear had been glossed over blindly.  Then, the day I’m in smolder-mode over doom and doing post-Mirage work, I see and hear the words that close up maybe the biggest hole in my life.  I never expected the caring I gave away without thought to return to me with such power.

The Hana Valley in my heart is restored and a huge, huge core part of me is made whole again.  I can move forward, alive once more.  Welcome to the next level.

Wounds can heal in the darkest nights and hauntingest of houses.

Thanks Yoshie Izumi & Little Yo, for the Okami hookup, and for the message about caring.