The Diamond Island

The other day I was in a conversation where the topic became the lazy boyfriend and his frustrated girlfriend.  You know—the middle-aged boy drifting about, unable to get their life together.  Talk about another one of the huge challenges of today’s un-modern, devolutionary society.

I don’t have my former teacher’s gift for words when addressing all possibilities.  So I’m going to trust those of you who don’t fall within the dominant cultural identities to queer the text if necessary.

Ambition isn’t whipping someone else’s fanny to achieve your goals; it’s whipping your own fanny to achieve your goals.  You can’t rely on someone else to hold the world up for you and manifest your dreams.  This is the road of dependency, of giving away your power to someone else.

People are always looking for someone else to show them how to get power or tell them they have power.  In comes the popular pastime of stealing it from others—there are plenty of people who will pretend to embody the qualities you imagine your partner in crime ought to have.  These people are looking to exploit your power for themselves, to live off your dependency for their own ends.

There are also a lot of people looking for dependent heaps they think they can mold into a programmable automaton who will do their bidding.  I see relationships that run on just this sort of weird symbiotic puppetry.

The thing is, no one can give you power.  That is, the ability to live your life as a human being, with the understanding of being alive.  It has to be seized from within by your own action.  People can help you along the way, give you the tools to work it out yourself, but the final step always has to be yours.

Getting down to the bum, the person who is unformed and dependent, the boy who refuses to “cowboy up” and get serious.  “Be a man,” “grow up” and “do something with your life” are common mantras from observers.  I think this sort of blame waving, while legitimate, tends to reinforce this kind of behavior.  Yes, ultimately we have to do the last important task ourselves.  We are responsible for our lives at the crossroads, wherever that is.

But too often what the person hears is “You’re not a cowboy.  You’re not a man.  You haven’t grown up.  You’re doing nothing with your life.”  Who’s stealing power from whom, I wonder.

A boy has to willingly and deliberately choose to “sacrifice the son”.  Meaning their dependence on their mother and insistence that every woman he will ever meet gratify his needs.  A willingness to relinquish that part of us we associate with boyish qualities—vitality, creativity, joy.  In effect, a psychological castration.  Who would ever want to do that?  That’s crazy talk.

Girls too.  Both must relinquish their need for a counterpart to embody the providing force of love and affection.  The other person is not the doctor.  Withdraw and reclaim your projections so you can see the other person as they really are.

Life spirals on.  So if you do not willingly accomplish this task you will find yourself dragged along.  Often painfully.

The question is, how does one find it in them to make the sacrifice?  Not from the admonitions of others who wish they’d “get it together”.

A person must be blessed.  They must be recognized for their weaknesses and limits, as well as their legitimate talents.

The first step is to acknowledge that you need an audience, to be seen and acknowledged.  There’s a royal force within us, an ordering principle that builds structure out of the dysfunction of our lives.  You don’t need to “cowboy up”, you only need to say “yes”.

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.

What will you do when you are faced with the big monster of your life? I recreate the encounter in my own mind several different ways, with various sub-plot devices until I gather enough understanding. A meditation that is a prayer, if you like.

I live in the star-dotted, dark world of that monster. I’m tempted to believe I know most, if not 90% of the weird and unfathomable wends and weaves that creature moves throughout. I chase that monster down any path around where I live, and forget to blink an eye.

The dangerous, deep nothingness that mysterious creature falls within, I follow to the utmost. Every album cover, every childhood memory, every messed up before-life strange way I can summon up with my weird life bubbles up from ancient currents.

I remind myself that I’m not Gandalf, with a huge power level, hit point allotment, and ring of elven history to back me up. I’m doing my real world walkies and hamburger-caboose bike pedal in the face of the wooden vision of unconscious non-vision re-creation. But part of me is still hoping the person in front of me in line falls on their bike before me.

That creature shows me the monsters who are my true puzzle of serious belief. The thing has me avert the psychic meltdown ghetto-blast from those in my future who know me from the true sprout that is before-sprout fireworks. I recognize this mysterious being wishes it no longer knew when it does know and is at a level of knowing.

I come to my senses in a place my true friends have never known, but it’s okay because they got the sneak preview before the coils swam about me. All those rants about heechoids and brains? Posing.

The bees know me. They wanted to know me. Because they’re dangerous and kind too, like me.

I’m breaking for the surface. Whatever I had on the psychic-line, I’ve let it go.

I remembered back to a strange land I used to haunt.  There was a time when I knew the people of that time.  I ran into front-runners who thought they were the cat’s meow but who reeked so much thud, I didn’t know who they were.

I walked up a series of stone steps within a tower that should be so Ivy League coolness.  But I grew up knowing this climb, before the de-evolutionoids who are trying to climb the external nowadays.  I don’t know why they are climbing the outside.  Could they really not know the buckeye timber tower that burns at night once a year at the foot of the tower’s hill?  You want hot and hard-core on the outside, then it has to be a sacrifice, man!

When I looked at them, with their class-conscious smiles, I see a mob of folks who haven’t walked the long art walk of the territory.  Folks who haven’t watched the bonfire burn from bottom to top without reservation.  Buckeyes cracklin’ as the wide open central meeting space acts as a means for non-aligned folk to make their choice as to what they wish to be in the great historical rat-king pre-post-60’s-wraparound.

I didn’t know how lucky I was, stepping in her mystery’s footsteps from within, to the top inside.  My folks made me walk the way to the top.  The climb scared me to death, but you can move through it on the way up.  The fear, I think, was that I was out of my depth.

The view at the top still is gorgeous and breathtaking.  For a time I could perceive the landscape of the tree tops, like a vast ocean with small islands of old buildings poking out of the waves of green, or autumn change.  Sometimes the occasional mist or rain shrouded everything in mystery.

Then the walk down.  The most paralyzing fear.  That was when I realized I was done, walking away.  I imagined a great dragon behind the locked door at the bottom.  But I always reached the bottom, despite a few times of great difficulty, and walked away without knowing the dragon.

That mysterious creature knew me then, and knows me now.  As I descend, grown up with a mate and not knowing anything still.  I honor this strange being and recognize my shame for not understanding.

The fear is not less.  I’m walkin’ the whole lake-walk and open-space youngin’ baseline understanding from the depths of weirdness dimensional shift otherworld planar bee-optional space.  I’m letting this world’s unknown conceptional wholeness make it’s own synopsis.  My folks have been one step ahead of me in every way, and the times have been one step behind them.

That’s okay, because this time, I understand where the bees are coming from.

In the forgotten depths are old, rich blue secrets and horrifying shocks at the base of the spine.  Swim in the depths holding breath with a magic sense of things that comes naturally.  There’s people who talk about the seaweed in ways that don’t scare them, and people convinced there’s nothing in the seaweed, who will tell you all about how there’s nothing there.

Yes, nothing, the unknown, mystery teeming with life day and night.

There’s something there.

Pull open the book you just happen to have, that you read in depth before wanting to know with sincerity.  But you let it slide.  Too much, not enough to just know, understanding eludes.

Is it enough to say the magic words in your head?  Should they be said aloud?  Or is the commitment, the decision enough to start the fire of the deep shining?  Magic as in that special, beautiful miracle that is living spirit?

The words are spoken, the night is passed, the doors are unlocked.

My mirage would say I can go, but I know already he said that.  I thought I would stay here and wrestle with all the mysteries, but now I see that I’ve done all that I’m going to do here.  Just as I say goodbye to UFO Girl and My Mirage, now the time has come to leave the haunted house.

And I’m sad, and joyous at the same time.  I have to go make my own haunt now.  No one else can do it for me, I have to sacrifice my expectations of anyone doing it for me.

Coming, going.  Departure, return.  A tide this mermaid understands.  I’m amazed at how easily and quickly I’m released from the depths to surface and start packing up.

Rumbles, savage lightning, downpours, steam rising from the sticky pavement.  Every step out the door is accompanied by thunder beings and the song of water.

Finally getting a handle on the mess from the wave of water. Sorting it out psychologically has been exhausting. The last week has been a crashing surf on my head as I head into June. It looks to be such a busy month as I meet obligations, run errands, and struggle to stay current on the chores that keep me somewhat sane.

Been looking over the things my Bad Ronald leaves on my nightstand to read. One day he leaves a rough sketch of a mermaid dwelling contentedly in the burned out ruins of a shipwreck, surrounded by treasure. And bones. She sleeps happily, colored in such a fashion as to be clearly supernatural.

My friend Xtine shared with me a dream about the magical Melusine many months back. I didn’t know what to make of her dream then, but now I find myself looking up anything I can find on the internets on this magical being. Sensor readings, come to me!

Many tales tell of the blessings bestowed upon human beings in their interactions with supernatural beings, and the loss of those blessings when the human breaks some taboo. Human weakness always puts a fly in the soup it seems, and you don’t get a second chance to make it right.

There are also tales of the “happily ever after” variety, where faith is kept and both live on in harmony. The tale of Melusine isn’t one of those. But I don’t think myths and legends are static things, they change as people change.

Perhaps the mermaid is a vehicle for the energies of the unconscious, a means for us to interact with the unknown. Vehicle seems too impersonal even though there’s an impersonal element to these beings.

See, there’s this huge loch in the backyard of this here haunted house. And on really rainy days the waves wash close to the foundations of the house. The beastie that lives in the loch (are they even separate elements?) has been known to do all sorts of mischief. And here I am with a handful of clues and a calling to investigate.

Okay mermaid, it’s on. Ready or not, here I come.

For a long while, I stare at the gaping hole in the wall.  My Bad Ronald has always been able to use his secret doors to come and go in my brain’s main corridors.  So the irrational fear in my gut that he will escape and attack me like the evil baby in It’s Alive is the fear I feel everyday about being alive.  Will Bad Ronald pull my strings?

In a strange way, I’ve busted out of the prison my Bad Ronald found himself in for him, sparing him the tragic and sad ending at the end of the Bad Ronald movie.  But in a sense that makes me a Bad Ronald.  I’ve willingly participated in the drama of a part I normally wouldn’t want to associate myself with.

I don’t think I can expect him to show himself just yet, even though I sense him lurking just out of sight like a black shirted, human sized leprechaun in black pants I once dreamt about.

Time to let myself be drawn back in.  Candle in one hand, slapstick in the other, its time to get busy.  I don’t think this is over yet.

There are these stony stairs in the between-brain hallways that weren’t there before.  I hear a repulsive, but beautiful voice singing in echoes through a deep, watery cavern below the halls.  I swear I can smell and hear the sea.

A peculiar rage comes over me, and an unbearable hunger, as if my stomach were running on empty for hours.  My ears begin to itch furiously.  For a moment I’m too out of my mind to take in the surroundings I find myself in.

I hear a deep, resounding noise out in the faraway ocean.  I realize something out there is answering the singing in the cavern.  My Bad Ronald sings in dark caves, and ocean creatures, maybe even sea serpents, talk back to him.

I listen, and lose myself in the mysterious between-brain below-hall cavern near the sea.  My Bad Ronald ain’t so bad.

A strange sensation envelops me.  For a moment, I think I’ve been bushwhacked by the Space Chiller.  My back slides against the wall as I shine the candle about, slapstick at the ready.  All I see is an old poster for the Jaws rip-off Tentacles, which features a giant octopus.

A memory at the back of my head stirs, but I can’t quite place it.  There’s another movie, before this one, which is important somehow.  For now, I visualize the poster for Tentacles, which is an image of a woman screaming as a gigantic octopus head creeps up behind her.

It dawns on me.  This monster, this Space Chiller, is really a gigantic space octopus captured by my Bad Ronald when she was smaller, the way he captured those people in the movie Bad Ronald.  He was keeping them in the basement because he didn’t know how to integrate the real people with his own disturbed fantasy life.  That realization was probably what caused him to burst his bonds in the movie, despite the cost.

That’s why I can’t find this darn monster; she’s trapped inside the between-brain hallways.  She’s grown too large to escape the way she was brought in.  I got to pry open some floorboards and smash down the weak wallpapered drywall junk.  This giant space octopus has got to go back into the wild.

And my Bad Ronald has bitten off more than he can chew.  This Space Chiller has gotten the better of him, chasing him about.  It’s a sick, twisted arrangement that needs me to settle up accounts.

I wander into the prison-like halls and look about.  That Space Chiller is hiding in there somewhere, having broken free but still trapped.  She’s a big girl now.  I get her to chase me—what giant space octopus doesn’t like eating a human being down to the skeleton?  I keep those whirling tentacles away with the slapstick and move quickly back towards the poster.

I start kicking at the wall, which gives way rather easily.  I hate to ruin the poster, but what the heck.  I ruined many a cool movie poster my folks got me back in the day.  You have to bust lose and take the blows sometimes.

It’s a weird dance, beating back tentacles trying to drag me into the beak from hell for tasty morsel goodness, while I kick aside rotten boards and moldy wallpaper.  I push my way through and back into the lighted (if still spooky) halls of the haunted house proper.  The space octopus, being flexible, squeezes through after me, its tough hide not taking a scratch from the still jutting splinters and rusty nails.

I run to the front door and open it up.  I suppose I could look for a giant vacuum particle aquarium in here, but I’m taking the guess that this strange gal wants to take off.  Sure enough, she changes into a whirling vortex of hypnotic psychological energy and flies through the front door.

Should I have let this thing loose into the world?  I think things will work out.  I’ve also got a big hole in the wall now.  I don’t know how my Bad Ronald will react.  This is a breach in the separation between us, which I don’t think can be undone.

Scrambling about in the between-ways of my brain.  Which incidentally resemble the long underground halls of school buildings built in the fifties, with fallout shelters and hidden caches of supplies.  Mostly way-past-their-date cans of beans and crackers.

In the flickering candlelight I see two themes.  The rusting and crumbling structures of a prison-like architecture, or the dark and echoing tiled halls of an underground hideout structure that while faded and dirty, still seems habitable.

That little demon child is still out there. Small, but fast and vicious.  Just being here scares the stuffing out of me.  My instincts are humming at me to get away, get out.  Panic and fear!

Then I come across a piece of paper with a drawing on it of a long, cylindrical spaceship.  On the back, written in magic marker is the phrase “into infinity”.

Whoa, flashback time.  I remember this spaceship from a TV show way back.  But I can’t remember anything about the show itself except a few brief images, and the crew of the ship being drawn into a black hole at the end or something.

So my science officer does the old internets search-a-roo and I find out the full title of the TV movie is The Day After Tomorrow—Into Infinity.  I find out lots after that.  That the captain of the vessel is played by the same actor who played Alan from Space 1999, one of my favorite shows as a kid!  The DVD of the movie is only available to people who join the Gerry Anderson fan club.

Gerry Anderson did a lot of science fiction shows, some of which I watched with the folks when I was a kid.  Shows like UFO and Space 1999.  I had no idea he’d made this movie that I hardly remember now, but which my Bad Ronald obviously hasn’t forgotten.

In the movie, the crew of the ship reaches their appointed destination (YouTube is our friend!) and have to make a decision.  Return to earth with all the data they’ve gathered on Alpha Centauri or continue on into the unknown and risk danger.  They decide to press on, and as a result they get into hot water, while their adventure begins.  The movie was meant to be the pilot for a new science fiction series; it just didn’t reach that goal.

I certainly don’t want to find myself on the other side of a black hole never to return to earth, but I’m thinking there’s a similar choice here.  Go back to the visible hallways of the haunted house in my brain or travel onwards.

It means a lot to me that this small piece of my past is returned to me.  And unlike the protagonists in the movie, I believe I’m equipped with the means to find out what happens afterward.  I see friends of mine making brave steps forward, reaching out into the darkness for a connection with their own lives and the lives of others.

I’m traveling onwards.