The Diamond Island

K and I get back from a grocery raid.  As I am opening the door, with Frankie’s Lazor-eyes recognizing me as friendly, we hear the sound of loud bongos being played somewhere down the street.  We’re both a little flummoxed.  I mean bagpipes are one thing, but now bongos?  What’s next on the phantom music soundtrack?

Still pondering that rascal sneaking about in the secret spaces of my brain.  Somebody’s been listening to old tapes of eighties tunes at night and eating our snacks.  The faucet being left on makes sense now.  When you’re thirsty you got to have a drink!  At least I know now there’s a kid in the psychic drywall.

There’s that darn monster that won’t show itself.  I’m thinking that I’m going to have to seek this thing’s lair out and confront the thing directly.  Maybe this thing is roaming the secret spaces also, and driving my Bad Ronald boy away.  In which case, I am duty bound to take care of business!

This monster has a certain psychic connection with me somehow.  It keeps popping up in daydreams, forcing me to consider it even as I find myself unable to come to any conclusions about it.  Premonitions of a struggle with a devouring force?  I’m wondering if I’m supposed to be the bait for this thing, or the ten-foot pole as you might fathom.

Okay, I’m going back to my fear of icky girl power series here.  I think this nasty monster might just want to have fun.  When I was growing up, there were these kissing-girls in the neighborhood that used to chase boys around.  What could be worse than girl cooties when you’re that age?  Yuck!  Pretty scary stuff.

Slapstick?  Check.  Candle?  Check.  Okay, time to enter the space between!

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BACK OFF BOOGALOO!

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

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

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

I walk into my room, and a friend of Mother Mary’s is there.  She’s vacuuming my room and cleaning up, which I find really embarrassing.  Nobody should have to clean my room, that’s so improper!  She smiles and says she has full authority to do this, so I stand there and fume as she finishes up.  I ask her what on earth she’s doing here and she says, “Just passing through and making sure we were ready.”  She kisses me on the cheek and for a moment a flower grows there.

I wake up and ponder the significance of this strange dream.  I’m thinking this friend of Mother Mary’s must be a quality within myself that is clearing out the crud.  How many people must quest for the chance to meet their soul in dreams and receive a blessing!  I contemplate what we must be preparing for.  Ready for what?

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.

While I’m waiting in the closet for the dumpling attack to subside (yeah, right), I come across a bunch of papers that need going through.  Most of which need to be tossed into the psychological void.  I’m not through with my mental dustbin by a long stretch.  Hexe witchie-poo text-messages me that I need to get on the stick and flame broil those puppies.  Which of course, makes total sense.  Have another popover froggie!

K is there for me.  She’s found the oven reactor, and fired up the converters.  It’s a hot smokin’ cook-a-roo just waiting for a bunch of sweet mineral dumplings to leap in and cook like a bee with an itch.  I telepathsize an ingredient list for her, figuring we might have to wing some of those ingredients a little, say cat pee instead of dog pee.

An’ I’m out of the closet and using my super-Mario powers of crazy imagination maneuverability to spring over that assembled high-density collage of crazy critters.  But whoa-ho-ho, they don’t waste time chasing after me with juice-drinkin’ intentions and physical happenstance collectivoids dancing all around my magnetosphere of doom-ness.

Thanks to my kung fu classes, I manage to stay one step ahead of the horde.  Sheesh, I guess being a little fit helps a little bit, eh?  I can understand Hexe’s desire to stay in top tennis destructor form, now.  The ability to fire tennis torpedoes is mighty after all!  K’s shoveling in the petrified wood as quick as the coal bin hatch will allow, and I lure those critters into the huge stone oven that must have been some crazy mass food feed-a-thon apparatus in olden days.  I dunno, Hexe’s the expert here.

I have no desire to end up cooked to a nice golden brown patina, so as K slams the door shut and bolts it, I leap up to the ceiling and grab a hold of a rope courtesy of Alexi’s thoughtful chimney rescue brigade.  Those Droll Dumplings try as they might, but I’m up and out of that chimney before you can say Jack Robinson!  I cut the rope in case a few more enterprising buggers decide they can evolve climbing skills.

Man, those dumplings are mad!  Hopping up and down in the oven like popcorn.  K pours on the fuel and pretty soon the haunted house heats up nicely.  Won’t be long before those critters are cooked to a crisp pop.

Meanwhile, more monsters out there!

No sooner have I got the Goob-a-loo settled in, when the next monster jumpdoggy surprise arrives. Causing no small amount of trouble is an infestation of anxiety-causing mineraloid entities from the depths of inner space and they want major amounts of psychic juice! And they’re willing to put down roots in your brainpan to get it.

For a while I have to fend these micronic high-density critters off with a couple of whacks from the slapstick. The next thing I know my car is about to blow a tire and I’m getting fleeced by the most charming mechanic this side of rip-offs town. Yeah, in this dire economy boo-hoo down in whosville it’s a laugh riot getting money vacuumed out of the ducat interface, but may as well laugh at my own lack of sleight of hand self-defense.

Speaking of which, I show up for my first kung fu lesson with Mother Mary and I get one of her short duration personal assistants. Said assistant proceeds to show me how sadly out of shape I’m in and how not in tune with fundamentals I am. No special maneuvers, awesome skillz, or fabulous finishing moves for me. Going to be all blue Mondays for a while.

Not that I’ve forgotten the music quest, but man does that new U2 song suck eggs. Depression +1 as the critters cackle at me on the other side of the barricaded door. Oh, what am I cryin’ about? Sooner or later that UFO Girl soundtrack clue will pay off. In the meantime, I have to deal with these critters or I’m going to find all sorts of lack in the mental cupboards.

Speaking of which, where did all my bath bombs, bath salts and luxury soaps go? Oh crumbs, everything’s turned upside down at the haunted house in real time. All that reorganization and now I’ve misplaced the usual bath meditation tools. Just when I need to escape the crazy doom knocking at my closet door while I hide. No worries – break out the hard-core incense that got dug out of the back rows and estate sale cheapo cool dude 50’s candles and I’m in my own little steam bath retreat. Maybe now I can think.

Frankie Day is today, Friday the 13th. That means trouble galore from the depths of mischievousness. I’m going to have to make sure Frankie gets a long walkies and tour of the folks house (she loves that), to celebrate her discovery and rescue from the dumpster by K and I. The next day is VD day, so K and I are going to have to do the Devil’s Children thing and be anti-romantic. Browsing for good manga at the comic store, followed by a hot date at Burger King. Maybe we’ll have an angry whopper and get down with our saucy selves.

What strikes me is that there’s physical stuff going on all over the place. Time to get grounded and find out what’s amping up the psychic electric juice to jittery whackaloon levels. I’m going to have to find a place to plant these droll dumplings, before they get to the meltdown level. The carpet’s got enough issues as it is. The next step must be to go through the haunted house and find a suitable place, lure the dang varmints over, and take care of business.

If only it were as easy as it sounds.