The Diamond Island

So, what’s going on in doomsville? Been a while since I took a seat and rapped on the corner side here. The menagerie is alive and well, if at times it seems to have sprouted wheels and is sighted all about town.

I’m working on book two.  Book one is in a final stage of transformative elation text-wise; I promise to have the Gimmie Stuff page updated as soon as that is complete. Also working on a cover for the souvenir physical version.  Once that’s done I’ll look into converting for e-book files. My brain stem is acquiring all manner of new knowledge during this feisty process of refinement!

Seems like the planetary forces have been all stirred up.  Meteor showers, solar flares, floods and earthquakes.  Hek even on the metaphysical plane we got Cardinal Climaxes lined up, not to mention a heavy dose of psychic interference from all manner of weirdzo dimensions and denizens.  I’m having to expend a lot of mental energy keeping my health and my attention up to snuff.

The summer is a scorcher over here in the central wastes of indecision land. The garden is taking a lot of supply runs to keep going. Those bio-nutrient counteractants come at a high price in mosquito bites, sunburn and poison ivy, let me tell you! Onions, potatoes, basil, and tomatoes are bringing in the reinforcements in small amounts; hey whatever margin of survival we can manage we will. Corn, sunflowers, and peppers bringing up the rear.

The cats are in hyper reorganization mode, which is good. No news is good news as they say. As long as they are able to keep the hydroid bombers at bay with lazors, hey that’s good pattern.  Michael has a new nickname though: Tarball.  He’s big, he’s fat, and he needs to protect you from yourself by laying on you until you get the picture. Is this what Mad Max survival has been reduced to? No cool car chases here, just scavenging eroded out gas tanks on hulking wrecks, hoping to score some ten year expired dog food.

The crummy spaghetti and stir fry recipes we’ve been working on have been refined to our tastes. It’s helpful to have new fall backs we can hit the automatic switch with and get something to eat without panic. Have to say its a success. Though we still need more do-fers in our bag of tricks to make it more complete a meal plan. Still, anything that is cheap and easy and healthy is good. Keeps us out of the McFood troughs.

Long drawn out patrol while repair and reprogram procedures are refined and worked on. Lots going on in the furnace, just no heat yet in the hallways. The trans warp warm up takes a while.

I certainly am not hip to seeking out sphinxes.  Like I would know what to do if I were faced with a riddle.  That scene in The Hobbit with Bilbo and Gollum dueling wits was way cool.  To watch, that is; I’m not so sure I’d be too excited to be in the no-takebacks gameshow live and on no-camera like that.

The echo of a thunderbolt a year ago resounds. I’m waving my slapstick and candle about as best I can. Looks like ol’ RahRam his/her self comes into view while I’m just shining for a friend.  Poop on a stick, what was the name and the name beyond the name again?

Have to rapid-search my old manuscript for that one.  But go figure, ol’ sphinx buddy isn’t here to guard the threshold.  The Devil’s due this time around is the scoundrel getting to bust a gut at my foolish face as I saw the holy monolith of all soul beatdowns rolling into my karma main street.

Soul beatdown as in Robot Carnival death explosion parade vehicle up close and personal, that sort of thing, only on permanent re-play.  Kali means business, you know.

Eegah!

What the Hek.  Many times we have to take at least one foolish step forward for the trap to spring.  Yet, if you don’t give Scratch his die to roll he’ll take it anyway.  All I got is a lucky penny I found on the floor to flip dude, it’ll have to do.

I spent so much time cowering like Cringer over sphinx beatdowns and dodging the riddle adventure I got no brains for, that I never imagined I’d just be using the cat bus version to get to Sesame Street.

It’s a wicket gate for many people, but for some it’s an open avenue out of mind. Whatever way, we need a formula, plot device, or token to allow ourselves permission to pass beyond to that which we imagine ourselves unable or unworthy to experience.

My candle ain’t the only light in the night, where firefly torches and gleaming facets line every inner space with drowsed and dreaming heat.  Nor is my slapstick the only advanced mechanism for recreating the center.  There exist many costumes, voices and other assorted props ready for a dedicated intent to wield with the insight of the most holy of lowly performances.

Not to mention random life encounters!

There are rains coming. A blockage to knock loose and drainage to restore. These images soak into my mind from some weird brain thought-age. Yeah sure, I’m like the Ghostbusters of psychic energy beings and that’s what I do—troubleshoot with my clown powers. Super-fool to the rescue, maybe!

Takes real world people imagining this stuff to make it happen. The heavy lifting has to be based in meatspace for it to impact what’s going down in the witching hour of the unknown.

POW!

Like smacking a tennis ball down the lane of a bowling alley.  Wow, that sucker sure was stuck for a long time.  Maybe now the sluice will operate properly and let the waters run free.

Oh wait, that’s where I’m standing! Better make haste and make my way down the rest of this walk down the strange way of inner space. Look in, Sphinx; here we go!

Out of time long past a signal, a last transmission waiting for me to acknowledge.  Almost past the point of receiving.  But my ears are like a lynx these days, letting in and picking up the smallest traces of fading time space particles.  The message flickered on my brain screen and was confirmed by a friend.

Molly ain’t comin’ back.

Denial

Spring has come; time to honor those who didn’t make it through the winter—even the harsh winters of the jungle where life is created by death, or so many ancient forms of inner belief conclude.

I’m not close enough for a full sensor sweep, but friends of mine who were there for the maximum allowable knowledge fill me in with as much scoop as they can muster after twelve years.  It is enough; I can respond now that I know as much as I’ll likely ever know.

I never thought I’d have any more time with her than I did.  I always held out hope that I would hear some word of how she ended up doing after college.  How right I was.

Before I found out, I’d just been thinking of her, working out imaginations of friendship in my writing.  Trying to make sense of past interactions.  It appears that now must have been the time to receive this transmission.  To look back and really transform what I have known; to move forward and let go of the ways of thinking and feeling that aren’t necessary any more.

So I start things off by opening my heart up to the hurt.  Everything soon turns to a dull haze as I go through my day with the knowledge that a part of me is gone forever.

More Denial

Come home, the damn pipe is leaking again.  I step into a freshly laid puddle of cat puke and don’t notice until I’ve tracked it all around the first floor.  The neighbors are watching television at a high level of volume again.  K needs to get outside for some fresh air.

But at least I can still have problems.

K cleans the puke while I figure the leak out.  Then we grab our walking sticks to go rouse the folks for a walk around the loch.

The rain that was supposed to have come this afternoon never showed.  Total rip off.  The folks, K and I talk clan business—the usual.  But I’m still swimming in a haze and distracted.

Then the rain comes suddenly, hard.  Thunder and lightning rousing the earth with the fury of the elements.  The trees haven’t grown any leaves yet, so there’s no cover.  We get soaked, talking about headhunters in Southeast Asia and how they wouldn’t last a minute against the loonies in the local grocery store.

A makeshift shelter presents itself and we stand under it, watching the empty streets splash with torrents of rainfall.  Then the storm passes and we complete our walk, wet and refreshed with new life.  The garden was planted just in time, so our seeds have gotten their first spring shower.

Still More Denial

Have to shop for groceries. K has jobs to do, so it’s time to do a solo mission for supplies.  I feel like a ghost—the crowds are unusually scant and hardly any of them appear to notice me.  It’s as if I’m in a dimension of nothingness in which the droids and zombies can’t touch me.  I gather up my groceries with ease.

The checkout girl shares stories with me about her favorite places to eat.  Yeah, be nice to have a Checkers, a White Castle, or a Sonic instead of like nine banks in the same mini-mall.  I hear it.

Back at the honeycomb hideout, I put away the groceries on auto-pilot.  The pipe isn’t leaking anymore—the handyman job I did actually worked.  The mermaid must have been reminding me I have work to do.  I do.

I point the ghetto blaster at my neighbor’s wall and put in License To Ill.  I play it loud so they know what time it is.  I’m not in the mood to put up with their high noise levels today.  While K continues her jobs I cook up the meat sauce and noodles for tonight’s dinner.  The cats are anxious, but I reassure them as best I can.  Daddy’s having a bad day.

But at least I can still have bad days.

Dang It

The neighbors suitably served notice, I ready the noise ordinance phone number for next time and magnet it to the fridge.  The ghetto blaster is turned around and a headphone is jacked in.  I go through my old college tapes looking for an appearance of Molly in any of them.

But while I hear many marvelous friends speak and remember numerous old nuances long past, she remains out of reach.  Dead end.  I’m just hoping for one last thing to remind me of her, to push the horrors of death away and keep them at bay one more minute.  No luck.

I already went over every memory I have of her twice since last night when I got only an hour of sleep, ghost lights hovering outside my window on their way to the next realm or phantom vehicles rushing past with loud roars.  I discovered many things I had forgotten, but in the end I have all I’m going to get of her.

It’s time to face facts.

Maybe I Can Do Something

I turn inwards and draw upon personal resources, long honed.  The Box tells me where one of the secret doors is and I open it, the smell of crayons rising out of a dark space.  Oh yeah, that Cup.  Midnight blue and black as pitch, completely formed, of two worlds waiting for me to use it this night.

Tonight the Cup is serving me up a dose of grief.  Before I can change my mind, I willingly sip that sour heartache tearing me asunder.  The Cup tells me where to find the next secret door.  I have to use a golden torch to find it, buried in the forgotten flotsam of a shipwrecked cargo I picked up a while back.

Oh yeah, the stationary box holding countless delights.  It’s so good to see it again.  The revelation that emerges strikes me gently and sharp: Remember yourself as you go through this.  You have a promise to keep.

There’s a key to imagination I haven’t used in seventeen years, a thought I haven’t had in almost as long, and a voice from the depths I am hearing now.

Out of nowhere, a forgotten memory comes forth of a date Molly and I had.  A Jazz concert at the Portland Zoo we attended. I’ve forgotten so much, but now this comes back to me clear as crystal.

Now I recognize what she was trying to do.  I was in a very bad place and she was trying to help me.  She was trying to get me to dance and forget my troubles.  But I hated Jazz!  And I was so very very dark in my own personal nightmare at the time.

The many other times we hung out now start to make sense.  She was trying to reach me and get me to laugh; which she finally succeeded in doing.  That’s the part I didn’t get before.  So many things, so many meetings where she would just be there and I didn’t know why.

I had no money, no car, and no future.  But she would drive me places, buy me dinner, and just talk to me.  What the Hek was this gorgeous, smart, easygoing, and kindhearted woman doing talking to a loser like me?

But now I know.  The things she gave me, trying to coax me out of my tomb.  From our first meeting to our last, she was planting seeds in me.  I never understood until now.

The Cup is empty.

Sadness

Like a flash, I take up the key and place it in the stationary box.  I send my messenger of the imagination through a billowing, windswept creamy series of clothes hanging on laundry lines in a vast meadow of sunlight I see only with my mind.  I’ve sent a message to Molly, telling her hey I get it now.  A part of my life is made whole and complete.

No expectations.  She tended my fire when I was lost.  I didn’t know her fate because the seeds she planted kept me safe—from the harm of knowing her death until they could flower and bear fruit now.  I’m much stronger now than I was then.

How many of us can say we’ve unselfishly helped a soul in their darkest trial through the night safely to the other side?

All of a sudden I’m ready to say goodbye and move on.

I feel myself falling into unconsciousness as the tremendous stresses of my grief flow again unhindered.  K tucks me into bed.  On the shelf beside me are my moleskinne notebook and a pencil taken from my compass, placed the night before in case I had a dream of Molly.

This time I know I’m going to hear from her.

Assent

My dreams are deeply unconscious—all I remember is a board game involving movement along tree branches and a dice roll.  Michael the cat wakes me up for feeding and I shamble in a trance downstairs to take care of what is an automated chore I half-sleepwalk through.

I stand at the base of stairs and realize Michael has disappeared, which is odd because he’s a greedy bum.  I’m alone, it’s dark, and I’m not asleep.  There’s nobody present, yet I imagine in my mind that Molly is sitting on the Marshmellow Couch in shadow, without mass—an apparition.

I have a conversation with her in my mind, trying to keep this unconscious fantasy within conscious direction without harming its contents.  It’s not real, but in order for me to work it through I must treat it as if it were.  Open, but cautious and careful.

I start the conversation by saying I miss her.  She says she misses herself too.  Tells me my efforts are a neat way to remember her.  She misses everyone.

I know there are questions I should ask, but I somehow know I can’t.  There are taboos I have to follow here—only things having to do with my need to grieve and work things out.

I resist the temptation to ask what happened, but she gives me subjective clues anyway.  She rolled the dice and lost.  Into the sea, lost her body, drowned.  Which could mean anything, it’s not concrete enough to test.

For a moment, I catch a glimpse of her in my mind’s eye as if a sliver of light reveals a tiny detail.  I think I see blood and get the impression of a head trauma.  A voice inside me says she wasn’t murdered.  But I keep that intuition at bay with a realistic viewpoint—my impressions and predictions have been wrong many times before.

I watch her put her face in her hands, sorrowful.  The emotional reaction I have makes it hard to stay focused and imagine her clearly.  She says she was sad and upset, she can’t find her way, light a candle with thoughts.

My instincts tell me it’s time to move on; I feel myself growing unable to hold this active dialogue stable much more. Whatever it is I needed to do, I’ve done and now I must acknowledge the inevitable.

I feel guilty at saying goodbye like this, both growing fully awake and losing the strength to keep going.  I tell her again that I miss her and that I always loved her.  I stop myself, realizing I meant to say like.  I consciously draw a line and the taboos require I flush the toilet—running water will make things right again.

I ascend the stairs and go back to bed.  As I let go, I imagine Molly sending me messages.  I drift, receive a message, write it down in the moleskinne in the dark, repeat.

She says to tell my friend Solikandi she’s sorry she missed her.  It was a bit of a shock and downer for her too.  She likes the musics she’s doing now.  She’ll find her way home.

She tells me to do a good job on my writing.

She thanks me for sending my messenger and for thinking of her.  She says that’s all there is.

I awake with a start.  I look outside the window and see a single star low in the sky flare once and disappear.  A breeze blows through the window.

She says she’s traveling.

She says something kind about me and says I can quote her.

She says my writing is a cool way to imagine her—not what she would have imagined.  It’s sweet.

The next time I wake up, Frankie the cat has opened the stationary box of delights and pulled out the key.  I understand it to mean my messenger has returned and my imaginary conversation with Molly is done.  I put the key and stationary box away, then feed Frankie.  I give thanks for my chance to say goodbye and rest my head on my pillow.

Then darkness.

I wake to the alarm clock playing Steppenwolf’s Magic Carpet Ride.  Time to go to work.

Getting on Facebook last year has been a real life-changer for me.  Getting back in touch with the people who matter has been a major part of that.

The other day a friend asked about a mutual friend’s birthday and all I could remember was she was Pisces. That’s when he let me know she’s been missing since 1998 during a trip in Malaysia.

Holy smoke, wind out of my sails. I had to do some Google Fu to find out the details. Crumbs, what was I doing on June 28 of that year?  Developments three years later don’t do much to inspire hope.

Molly Kleinman.

We met my freshman year of college.  She let me borrow her audio cassette copy of U2’s Wide Awake In America, which was the first time I’d gotten to hear the whole thing—that was a meaningful day for me I still can see clearly in my mind.  She borrowed my copy of the Beastie Boys’ Licensed To Ill.  We both loved the song “Paul Revere”; one time we sang it together.  We really dug that damn song.  That was when we became friends.

The two of us had different interests, but our social circles overlapped so I ran into her every now and then.

Then my senior year we dated on and off; kind of one of those inexplicable things that just happens. We never became a couple; both of us were too busy searching for our identities to bridge the differences in interests we had.

But, damn, those strange dates we went on still linger in my mind. I think she tried to show me things about herself that maybe no one ever knew. Like an idiot, I didn’t pay enough attention to reckon with that.

The last time I saw her in person was an all-day date-but-not-date.  I had lunch with Molly and her house mates, then the two of us hung out in her room and talked, while proceeding to get bombed.  She was interested in this other guy and asked me what I thought of him.  I recited awful poetry to her.

We talked about life plans and then for some reason we laughed together—laughed a good damn long time.  We walked down the street to a Thai food place, then spent a while on her porch talking about things which sadly I’ve forgotten.

Next I heard of her she was hanging out with that guy.  Then she was in Florida for what might have been related to her field (she was a biology major, I think).  She dropped off my radar after that (Hek, a lot of folks dropped off my radar during that time).

But I always called up her memories from time to time.  Who can explain the strange currents of our lives, the reasons people make strong impressions on us?  I thought she was cool.  She was always nice to me.

It’s weird, her having been gone for so long, that I only now hear of it.  I’ve been working on listening a lot to the things I haven’t heard this last year and a half.  Time to break out “Paul Revere” and sing like a stupid fool.

Hey Molly, thanks for hanging out with me in these space time coordinates.

Going over my horoscope for right about now (funk soul brutha!), and considering the numerological significance of what this year means (wouldn’t you like to know which system?).  I have come to the conclusion that this is the year in which our minds are gone.

There is no intelligent life on this planet, only you reading this and me telling you these words with my keystrokes in the past coming to the present to be read by your eyeballs in the present which was my future at the time I typed this.

Hold on a minute, I’m receiving a transmission from my past self.  He tells me he really enjoyed the music I sent his way from the unknown.  Most perplexing, because I’m not entirely sure I had anything to do with hooking him up.  I just sort of sent my blessing back in time to what already happened with a fond remembrance of the unexpected discovery I’d made.

Getting back to the here in now, as contaminated as it is suddenly with the rich and deeply satisfying youth of days long past, oh never mind.  We just shifted gears even more in the past and are sitting in the chamber of the distant shadows of what we hardly remember because it touches us in the formative years.

You see, our thoughts are unbound by the limitations of time and space, even though they rely upon time-space constants of electro-chemical interactions to create consciousness.  Our brains think they are running the production, but it takes a village to have a bowel movement.  There’s more going on than the mere cooking of a hamburger.

It’s a little strange to enter these weird fugue states of otherworldly consciousness (without the help of any props, look Ma—no hands!).  But consider it normal operations as the whole bunch of us shamble about on our quest for solutions to the puzzles under our trees this holiday season of SciFi past.

Oh, this century is ON.  But we have to lose our minds in order to find them.

My job stuff, along with romantic stuff, is off limits on this blog-a-roo.  But again I find exceptions creeping in.  Something Captain Picard in Star Trek: TNG said about laws being unjust as long as they are absolute.  That is, inhuman.

Inexplicably, a tale from my past keeps coming back to me this holiday season, and so I must reckon with it.  That is, after all, the purpose of this starship adventure I find myself traveling along.

There was this time I allowed love to enter into my house, and it tore my furnishings asunder as if it had been one terrible tumult of super-accelerated fireballs.  You see—I received as an Xmas gift a CD of an album I listened to in depth a great deal during this time.

I’d already been thinking of my past love in the crumbled corners of my mind, but to get those songs (and cheesy, adolescent songs they seem to me now—though still with great meaning) at this time, it’s as if I’m opening up a door I’d held long closed.  One I’d rather not revisit, as pleasant and as magical as some of the things I’d jammed behind it are.

But enough!  Wraiths of torment, I release you from your burdens of guarding these treasured memories.  Away with the tender keepsakes and wondrous insights of affection dwelling in a tightened tomb.  Let treasures sparkle in bright sun and with open offering to those who find them compelling.

Not into the dark, but into the light where this soft, glowing memory howls in vivid, windswept peaks and heat-soaked hills of elevated spaciousness.

I’m remembering a certain love I got to know during tennis class.  Our late night talks together, one of which led to our first passionate kiss.  The laser Van Halen show we watched together, and the smoked oysters we had one night in my room.  Walking alone in a field at night and collapsing with giddy delight so strong I had an out-of-body-experience.

Then the frustrations and misunderstandings with one another.  Each of us wanting different things and not having the wisdom to either recognize that or work it out.  Culminating in a break up in a hamburger diner that no longer exists, the two of us going our separate ways yet heartbroken and shaken by passions perhaps no human being knows how to make whole.

She married my rival and has a family now.

Me, I would wander many cold and empty paths to come.  Into darkness so terrible many never come back.  But I came back and I didn’t know why or how.

Now I know why.  I said, “yes.”

Yes to love no matter what the consequences.  It sent me straight to hell, but I held onto it fast as painful and disappointing as love turned before it tossed me aside face first into knowledge of my own death.

To those who have loved, that is how you answer evil.  You say yes.

Yes!  Yes, a wonderful word, a word of freedom and expanse, which releases all bonds and opens the door to the buried secrets you kept within.  Hoping beyond hope that an understanding would come.  That it would make sense before you die.

Could I ever have imagined I would share this now, in this time, with the whole universe of those who use computers?  To try and unburden my soul of even a smidgen of the choices I have made and bear the blame for?

Down the rabbit hole and up again, to witness the vast expanse of what love transforms before us.

Believe it!

I tend to meditate on issues of self-identify with my Irish ancestry. My aunt Dukey sent me a Christmas present the other day reminding me to do a little more contemplation on my Welsh ancestry.

She sent me a black tee shirt with a strangely familiar image and cryptic saying below it.  The image is of a figure draped in a white sheet with a horse skull and the saying is “Y Fari Lwyd”. Thank goodness for the Internets! The phrase is Welsh for “The Mari Lwyd”, or literally “Gray Mare”.

It’s a pagan tradition based around a contraption known as a Mari.  A horse skull is placed on a wooden pole, and then it is draped with a sheet (to hide the person carrying the pole, or symbolically I imagine the motive force behind the manifestation).

The eye sockets are often decorated with shiny objects like colored glass.  The skull is usually decorated with colored ribbons. Some skulls have spring-loaded lower jaws that can be used to snap at passers-by.

I’m reminded of the Hobby Horse from the original Wicker Man on that one, snapping at pretty girls. I also remember now that similar creatures were used by the ultimate darkness character of Evil in Time Bandits to chase the protagonists. Basically Mari with hooked, bony claws that shot fireballs out of their eyes.  Weird!

Back to the actual tradition.  A party gathers around the Mari and they go door to door, exchanging songs and in some cases rhyme contests (called Pwnco in Welsh) with the occupants of various houses. The battle of wits and song can get rather furious, with the party extorting gifts of libations (among other things) from the occupants. Or the occupants manage to drive the party off to the next house over with their superior skill.

This is what I call Christmas Caroling!

With the resurgence of interest in Celtic culture, the tradition has been revived in recent years. Perhaps this knowledge has galloped my way so that I might make use of it.  I do enjoy making up lyrics of a sing-songy nature to amuse my friends.  I’m thinking I might just build my own Mari for next year and see what comes up.

Thanks Duke.

Technically, it was short of the 35 MPH needed for the designation of blizzard. Heard official reports mentioning 17 inches, even though I was standing in snow up to my knees, measuring 23 inches. The communications console reported similar anecdotes across the local galactics.

The northern adventurers might as well scoff at us amateurs just below the mason-dixon line. I understand; got a few stories of wandering around at the snowblind levels fighting yetigers with a ski pole up in them thar latitudes. Everybody’s got it worse off somewhere. At least the snow up there forces the Kling-ons to use chains on their disruptors.

Spent long hours in the dark watching the snow fall, with Frankie perched beside me.  For the beings in the chill depths of nothingness, it’s like the rains coming in spring on the wild plains of Africa. The neurotic adaptations of the mindless and the artificial satisfactions of the consumed are swept away by a blinding flood, and the dazzling elemental currents of the unknown may dance in mystery–safe from unclean eyes and shriveled thinking.

The drifts rise high enough for strange things to paddle by, in direct proportion to the amount of effort needed by snivelized coat-and-boot astronauts to tread the snowfall. If two inches of water is dangerous, what might traverse two feet of accumulation? One must listen carefully, between the breaths of snowy quiet and the biting snap of winter wolf’s breath across your unprotected face.

I plunge forward into a drift, the dry crystals sticking to my face and blazing white hot. Brushing off the stinging nettles as they burn my face raw, the cold invades my cheap spacesuit like an inviting alien force. I lay back and let the flakes crackle against me like hundreds of tiny asteroids. A moment’s intention and I’m beamed aboard the honeycomb hideout, safe behind life support systems and hot cocoa immunizations.

Play until you’re tired and cold and dragging. This state of exhausted euphoria is one children are familiar with; Mine’s tempered with the seasoning of adaptation patterns. We forget the previous state, still living because we have a manual override.

A whispering cuts through the quiet cold, telling me I must be like a crocodile.  Silent, prowling, unseen, existing in the winter monsoon where another life force dwells. I see pictures and diagrams as if watching the unrolling from a long papyrus–see, it is like this; use internal strength like so, leap across hidden crevices and through dark corners untraveled like this.

Winter is here. I return to my human existence, welcomed by Frankie who insists on making the biscuits on my cold but warming form swathed in blankets. I’ll tell her all about it during my nap.  I watch the snow on my hanging clothes melt in the light of consciousness as K makes some cocoa.

The last lantern-bearer gone and passing into slumber to the sound of purring, the wintery wonders surge like a noiseless wave in the darkness of falling snow. The rains have come, the drought is ended.

There’s more to the maiden-mother-crone triumvirate of female experience.  There’s actually a fourth stage of existence, just as there are four phases of the moon.  You know, that new moon thing, the dark of the moon, the hidden moon, the unknown where all is night and nothingness.

I went on about Fear of Icky Girl Power a while back, which was an attempt to make sense of the senseless.  You know, trying to understand the unknowable.  I’m talking about not the conscious, or the subconscious or the unconscious—all matters that can be conceptualized and grasped on some level.  But then there’s not just the infinite, but as a friend of mine once remarked, “the infinitely infinite”.

In practical terms we’re discussing the mer-she.  That woman which is completely veiled by the shimmering scales of the unknown and unknowable.  The other three forms of woman are veiled to various degrees but show some human side or character (crescent waxing, full, crescent waning).  Not so the dark of the moon.

This is some serious bad girl stuff we’re talkin’.  Associated with just about every bad thing you might imagine a woman capable of, because that’s all you can do—try to make associations.  There’s good reason to be afraid; not saying you should be unafraid.  But easy to project onto this unknown part of half the population, remain in ignorance, run and hide or try to overcompensate by subjugating and demeaning.

But all you’ll be doing is working out complexes on the other three parts of experience—half fears and mirages of the unconscious acted out by your own shadow, tortured by the rumblings of your fantasies at the back of your mind, or making stupid mistakes because you don’t have the waking tools to focus on day to day external reality.  The unknown?  Who knows?

It’s a futile absurdity, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t obligated to try.  The bad girl pushes us into trouble, and that’s just what she’s a gunna do.  So what if you can only guess, get hoofin’ it, sucker.

Difficult, because the numinous will materialize the unexpected for you.  Hostile rip apart of face and scarred for life, nothing at all but your friends laughing at you and your story of it—whatever it was, or Hek you might just wake up in the living room missing your coccyx.  What you thought you saw is also likely to disappear at your approach or never be found as be encountered.

You see a lot of movies based on encounters with this inexplicable experience.  The Fog (mist full of vengeful zombies), The Thing (extra-terrestrial shapechanger), Prince of Darkness (hostile liquid with psychic powers), Killdozer (machine animating space energy), Nightmare at 37,000 feet (psychic, freezing slime), Bug (swarms of fiery mutant roaches), The Giant Spider Invasion (swarms of inter-dimensional spiders), Return Of The Living Dead (hazardous animating chemical), and so on.

The plots all tend to center around identifying and neutralizing hostile forces previously unknown to our experience.  Maintenance of order through heroic action.  There is something to be said about extraordinary agency for the preservation of the community.  Stories that reinforce ideals of survival are useful.  They do protect the collective psyche from possession by outside forces.

However, it can also serve to repress and stifle creative energies that might be better served towards adaptation.  If you want to tap into survival talk to a bad girl.  But if you want to see what’s been saving our collective butts seek out the biggest baddest girl of all.

I’m talking about the bad girl as supernal super-predator.

• Absorptive (Devouring)
  Whatever you’ve got, she can take it and you as well
• Controlling (Possessive)
  She assumes command of anything she touches
• Infectious (Unrestrained)
  She goes everywhere and anywhere
• Exponential (Overbearing)
  Her influence grows in size with time
• Tenacious (Stubborn)
  She never takes no as an answer
• Disruptive (Difficult)
  She inspires fear and confusion wherever she appears
• Collective (Conniving)
  She is many, she is one

With qualities like that, she doesn’t need much else, does she?  She knocks over tyrannosaurus rexes for lunch money and invalidates the insurance policies of entire communities on good days.  On bad hair days she threatens all life on the planet!

The typical story throws in a hero (usually male) who discovers another quality of the ultra-bad girl:  Invented Weakness (Labeling).  The plot very often revolves around identifying and exploiting the way of thinking that will diss-empower (I play with words) this ultra-bad girl.

In some cases this just brings everything to a draw until the next sequel (In The Blob she gets frozen until next time).  In others there is a defeat but the knowledge that it could happen again is in the background.  Sometimes the attempt to stop the spread of the ultra-bad girl’s power only delays the inevitable and she returns even stronger (Return of the Living Dead has this kind of doomsday ending).

It could be that nature requires physical laws be followed and thus game-balance be maintained, but I can’t help but feel this is a human conceit.  It’s in our interest to believe in ourselves as being special if it maintains survival.

I prefer to dispel that characteristic as illusion and suggest a possible other characteristic:  Enjoys The Hunt (Capricious).  We are never out of truth, and does not the bad girl hold a mirror up to ourselves? Girls just wanna have fun.

I wouldn’t consider the realities of these movies fun for the participants, but are they not shared imaginary spaces of a certain form, in which we invite the ultra-bad girl to come and play?  To demonstrate to us her amazing power and give us insights into some of our deepest, most terrifying curiousities?

Who wants to be one of her victims?  Would anyone possibly want to watch as she destroys all our feeble attempts at understanding, turning us into corpses at her command so that we might slay our loved ones?

Or rather, is there not something in all of us who finds that exciting and invigorating?  She knows about life, and will teach us if we listen.  Because remember, she lives out there beyond the unknown reaches of what can be conceived.  Coming into our field of experience to scare the Hek out of us and inspire new ways of consciousness.  Bad girl just wants us to come out and play—wanna get crushed, crumbled and chomped?

So hey!  All you women out there:  Become the bad girl you already are.

Even if it’s just throwing mushrooms in the soup because everyone but you hates them and pretending it was an accident if they even notice.

The supernal super-predator ultra-bad girl knows secrets.  She’ll tell you one if you let yourself listen.

The End?

Adjustments continue in the honeycomb hideout.  The fallout from the haunted house has passed away and healing continues.  K and I are doing decompression and decontamination procedures, putting furniture in place while we unpack the numerous storage units.  Cleaning and minor repairs are moving along, as we make sure the heater is working, has a fresh filter, and the vents are all vacuumed out.

As I was passing by the secondary landing from the crow’s nest, Blink was poised before one of the storage units.  She mewowed at me as if to say, “Hey whattabout this one?”

Oh yeah, that storage unit.  The one that holds The Box.  One of those things you just pick up on a perfectly unremarkable day, not unlike Edward Gorey’s The Doubtful Guest.  Since I became the caretaker of The Box, I regard the contents and make adjustments, additions and subtractions as needed.  Things appear and disappear, so I never quite know what to expect.

Well, crumbs.  I suppose I ought to take The Box out and see what’s going on.  So I clear my desk and unscrew the bolts.  All the things inside are in a state of disarray and flux.  The boxes are practically hopping up and down with the need for attention.  The creatures, tools, and knick-knacks (at least I think they are knick-knacks, I’m not always sure) are all over the place.

But once I begin my meditations and direct my active imagination to the task, a new form takes shape inside The Box.  The dimensions widen out, indicating the things don’t want to be stacked anymore.  They want a horizon, a diorama of vast view.  Take it all in instead of dig for layers.

A few things leave, some never to be seen again, others wanting to return to living in the honeycomb hideout after a long hypersleep into the future which is now.  One item, my Kokeshi doll, no longer wishes to reside in The Box.  Like a heroine going on an adventure, she won’t take no for an answer.  She wants to see the world now, get involved.  I’m a little taken aback, but what she says goes.  I know she’s going to take a few hits, but maybe that will make her all the more beautiful and herself.

Then I get a real shock.  The Kali-Yoni origami box I made (at Kali’s active-imagination request) has imploded open.  Shrunk in on itself until it popped open in two pieces, yellow and black.  I don’t know what was in that box, it was a secret so unknown it could only be conceived of in a void space of emptiness, never to be opened.  I made it fully expecting it would never be opened.

There’s a crack in the top of The Box, to allow a view of the outside world.  Sometimes I adjust The Box to accommodate these sorts of requests.  Sometimes The Box does them itself.  So whatever might have been in the origami box that is popped open could have gotten out.

Indeed, I find a trail of red cloth spilling out one end of the crack, as if whatever happened pulled along until it broke free.  Yeah, I get the birth reference.  I’m still stunned.  I have to take a breather and stare for a good ten minutes before I get my act together again.

It’s almost as if I am a caretaker, a janitor and director at the same time of otherworldly things beyond my comprehension.

The new configuration slowly takes shape as I handle items and attend to their requests.  Two slumbering monsters awaken with a loud roar, stirring the ocean of red cloths that form a kind of soft playing field for certain inhabitants.  A beached behemoth finally finds a swathe of red sea foam suitable for it’s dense, impenetrable frame.

As I finish up this session of adjustment, a small lockless chest and brass symbol merge together in a way I would never have expected.  They come from two different times and places, yet they fit together as if they were two pieces of a larger puzzle.  I don’t think I can ever see these things the same, contemplating how incomprehensible their fitting together is.  I mean, if the sun and moon became one for the first time, how transforming an event that would have been for life on this planet!

No order, and so there is pattern.  Ceaseless change, and so there is eternity.  I realize it has been so long…so distant a time when I attended to this responsibility on a regular basis.  I’ve just been shuffling The Box from one battleground to another, barely keeping up with what is required.  The Box used to be much larger than it is now.  I used to be somebody too, or so I heard.

I pick up Peter Pan’s knife, and examine it closely.  Hairline cracks in whatever it’s made of, a smell of fine myrrh coming from the claw on the pommel.  Dare I remember the time I used to carry this in costume–before I walked away from Never-Never Land?  Or was it Rima the Jungle Girl who gave this to me?  I’m not quite sure.  I couldn’t fight a codfish or smile at a crocodile to save my life now.  Those days are long faded, as Lorien, Imladris, and the Grey Havens have passed into the West.  Another century altogether.

I think of a dear friend, and the conversations we used to have before I discovered The Box.  He drew out of me so many things about the haunted horrors I would face, he had to have been a prophet back then.  Now he’s a doctor, struggling against the status quo, in a very lucky place to be.  I beam every time I speak with him these days, he’s so awesome.  Back then I pretended to take it in stride, but I missed nothing.  He was right, so right on I had to pretend he was off the mark.  But now I know better.

I close The Box, quite shaken.