The Diamond Island

Don’t think the current imbroglio involving the depths of scary unconscious contents stirred up by the In Search Of Doom affair have settled in for their long winter’s nap! I say thee nay. Rather, it’s been a truce of sorts, while each side figures out the other and comes to its conclusions, with the understanding that there would be further dialog.

Evil dolls, bigfoots and UFOs that scare people out of their skins are my friends now. We’ve been packing our bags to go see what the next thing to do is. See, all that stuff was inside of me, and I was frightened by it like nobody’s business. There are depths in me that give me the heebie jeebies. I’d much rather avoid all that and eat a doughnut, watch some TV.

But it ain’t my fate, nor my crime, to turn away from what’s going on in inner space. I had to take a break. Too many other chakras to attend to, on the mundane side of things if you know what I mean. There’s a history between me and the moon that goes way back, and some of the work I’ve been doing artistically, specifically research, has been in that area and percolating like a fine wine for oh, say ten or twelve years. It’s time to crack open the casks and see what sort of psychological brew I’ve come up with.

What’s the flavor? I’ll be lettin’ you know as soon as the expedition gets underway, whatever it is. Which should be soon, judging by the memories and recollections bubbling forth for my reflection. Just stay tuned, and you’ll be in the loop, I guarantee it.

When I was growing up, one of the news items that appeared was the invasion by killer bees. “Killer bees from Africa” had escaped from a lab in South America and were making their way up towards the American border. Apparently these bees were really aggressive and would attack at the slightest provocation. For a while, the headlines followed the progress of the migrating bees. The threat grabbed a hold of the popular culture and showed up in Saturday Night Live skits and as movies like The Swarm.

I remember being a little scared by the thought of murderous, deadly bees crossing the border and invading to spread havoc. When I think about it now, I laugh a little. What about all those countries in South America they were passing through in the meantime? Clouds of evil bees weren’t exactly clouding the sky from view and massacring entire towns in a riot of explosion and flame. Perhaps what struck me was that imaginative possibility of the unknown, that out of nowhere a fantastic threat could emerge and attack.

What would you do when the killer bees got here? Hopefully a way would be found to contain the threat and save us from machine-gun stings and nasty bees biting pieces of our flesh out to make poison honey. Why, the entire flower population of the country was at stake, because everyone knows killer bees destroy flowers after they’re done, doing whatever evil bees do.

Hey, this is sounding a little like anti-immigrant propaganda, isn’t it? Watch out for those “invaders” from another country. Foreigners are coming here to cause trouble, and because they are “killer”, you can’t reason with them. Since they swarm in large numbers, our army is helpless against them. The only solution is to nuke them (in The Swarm, the bees are wiped out when they attack a nuclear power plant and cause it to blow up). That’s right, preemptive nuclear strike against the killer bee foreigners before they cross the border and get you.

I’m not buying it. The killer bees escaped the lab because they wanted to rock and roll. And they’re coming to get you because they heard you know how to party. And they know how to make the killer honey that will knock your socks off. I was worried before, but now that I got past all the hype and rumor, I’m ready to receive those bees. When they show up, it’s going to be all buzz.

I’ve been out of sorts the last few days. The shock to my nervous system from finishing the revisions “shocked the monkey”, and I found myself entering near dementia with all the psychic ripples in my “Motorhead” pond. My personal hygiene took a nosedive, and while I managed to maintain the outward operations of business-as-usual, inside I felt as if my efforts had stirred up a lot of detritus from the depths of my own personal Mud Lake.

These kinds of stunned doldrum episodes can last for days, with all manner of images, memories and ideas coming to the surface. This time, I was ready with my glass-bottomed boat to catch a glimpse of whatever mudgulpers might wade past. Oh, wow, the things that I caught a glimpse of, I’m going to need an additional vacation to meditate on. The Icky Girl Power really made an impact on me. Which is okay, because I was voluntarily leading with my jaw this time. But crumbs, I really got it handed to me this time, and the tussle ain’t over yet! Thank goodness I got more skills and tools this time around.

One of this things that came to the surface was my old childhood fascination with the old television series In Search Of…, and some of the subject matter from that show. In case you never saw it, Leonard Nimoy (yes, Mr. Spock) hosted a half hour show program in which an attempt was made to explain some “mystery” from a list of “extraterrestrials”, “magic and witchcraft”, “missing persons”, “myths and monsters”, “lost civilizations” and “strange phenomena”. Leonard Nimoy would narrate as evidence was put forward, scenes were re-enacted, and highly dubious explanations were put forward. All of this was accompanied by a synthesizer soundtrack that can only be called “eerie”, “otherworldly”, and “scary as all hell”.

My memories from that time are a little dim, but I couldn’t get the soundtrack out of my mind, nor could I get over the episode about Bigfoot, which frightened the poop out of me as a youngster. Fears that Bigfoot would break into my house and attack stem from various sources during the seventies, but this program did nothing to help with that, and I would be very afraid at night, staying up late with the light on and wondering what I could do to protect myself.

So I hit the old Youtube pool and found a host of episodes from the show, including the Bigfoot episode. Many of the episodes I remember seeing. Crumbs, I’d forgotten how much I used to be a regular watcher. The music was even creepier than I remember, and even in the safety of my own home, I felt the clutch of fear from childhood return. Every unknown noise freaked my scene out! The music from the UFO episode caught a hold of my brainstem and started to replay in my head even after I’d stopped watching.

Then I found the scariest episode of all for me. The one about the Amityville Horror. That episode scared me so bad I had to sleep with the covers on and with a flashlight in my hand back then. There’s this scene where a doll’s eyes open and turn red with a satanic glow, and that scene gave me many sleepless nights. Actually watching the episode, with the spooky red room, the story behind the doll (an evil monster imaginary friend that would mess a kid up for life), and the scene with the girl singing “silent night” on and off as she went in and out of a room, well all that stuff brought back so many memories in a flood that I had trouble sleeping for several days.

At night, I tossed and turned so much K sent me to the couch downstairs. And even with three dedicated cat protectors, they all fled upstairs and left me alone to freak out about Bigfoot, UFOs, the voices of plants, Dracula, and of course the scary doll creature from the Amityville Horror. It didn’t help that I had to go into the basement to use the Jakes at night, to avoid waking up K (her own work situation has taken a rather weird turn, so she needed the sleep). I heard phantom cats using the catbox in the basement, I felt cold chills from sixth sense spooks, and images of horror flashed before my eyes before I could flip light switches on.

And meanwhile, my old fears of Icky Girl Power came back to me as well. Blob capable of coming through the sink as I wash my hands sends thrills down my spine. Green slime from the UFOs with Leonard Nimoy narration as spooky music plays in my head over and over. This goes on for two nights. I’m scared out of my wits with childhood memories and present day fright seizing a hold of me so bad I’m afraid to close my eyes and get off the couch. So I go back and watch the episodes again, and I wonder why on earth these things aren’t on DVD, because its a fabulous show.

I mentioned skills and tools. Well, I’m not a kid anymore, at the complete and total mercy of the unknown, although I’m not immune to it. Maybe the only difference is that I know how much I stink, both in terms of hygiene and ability to cope. I refuse to let the spectres of fear dancing on my head completely have their way. I engage them in dialogue, I demand they explain themselves. I interact with Bigfoot, I chase off the UFOs, yelling at them “HEY! YOU FORGOT YOUR BUTT PROBE!” like a stupid fool. I confront the scary red eyed doll as big as I am trying to choke the life out of me and I say “That all you got?” I can’t explain the impossible conflict between my pathetic little life and the vast unknown, because it makes no sense and there’s no solution.

Except that things start to happen. You can’t reach into the deep slime and not be affected, but neither can the unknown. The night terrors don’t fade when the sun comes up, nor does the immediacy of their demands, but then the music I’ve been listening to lately starts playing in my head. All the CDs I got for Xmas, The Verve, The Ocean Blue, and my new obsession, Neko Case, who has been a phenomenal find for me. It’s as if something else wells up inside of me and gives me a break. I step back and I get my head back on straight. My fears take on different shapes and forms, and I realize things are trying to talk to me and tell me important information. I’m not safe, but I’m not completely vulnerable either, and I write down stuff.

The psychic wave passes, and I start getting a hold of things again. I know I’m going to have to dive again into the waves, but its okay, there’s all sorts of scary, interesting, and lively material for me to tackle when I’m ready. I clean up my act, shave and shower, brush my teeth, all that good stuff, and I feel a little human again. I don’t smell so bad, nor does my breath make me want to gag anymore. Important stuff is happening. There are ghosts in my house, and I’m doing my best to relate to them. I didn’t even know how scared I was of Icky Girl Power until I went in search of it. I don’t know if I can come up with some of the outrageous explanations Leonard Nimoy posits in the show (some of them are really WTF moments of logical deduction), but when it comes to the irrational and the subjective, perhaps the way out really is in.

Some things are better left unknown. If you swim in the dark lake at night, you have to be ready to scrape your feet on the slimy skin of the creatures that might be resting on the lakebed. Maybe our explanations for the unknown are no better than the ridiculous assertions of the show. And sometimes you catch a glimpse of something wonderful, or you feel something slither under your feet as you tread water, and you get to tell a tale gathered around the warmth of a fire in the dead of winter.

Last night, the mysterious unknown did its thing, while I had a good night’s sleep.

Okay, so I’ve been digested and electrocuted. Now what? Time to get slimed, that’s what! This creative exercise isn’t through yet. Moving on from The Green Slime, the next thing that came to the front of my ape’s brain was an old board game I used to have. In terms of timelines, it does seem like I’m moving forward. I saw Beware! The Blob first, then I was exposed to The Green Slime. Now comes the moment when I had the Slime Monster boardgame!

This is getting into the late seventies. Around that time you could buy these small plastic trashcans of greenish slime. There was also a purple slime version with plastic worms inside of it. Don’t ask me what you were supposed go do with the stuff. If it got on the carpet it was very hard to get out. It tended to dry out over time and lose its “slimeness”. If you didn’t get it out of the carpet before it dried up, it turned into something resembling cement. And the slime always smelled gross.

Along comes this game complete with four plastic victims looking up and screaming in agony, four land mines with counter lever action, a spinner for movement, and best of all a plastic slime monster with tub of slime. The monster came in four pieces. There were the two legs, a body cavity with two drool funnels, and a top with the creature’s tiny forelegs and yellowy eyes. The creature was, of course, quite green.

The object of the game was to get from one part of the board to the armory at the end without getting “slimed”. At the start of the game you plopped the slime from the tub into the body cavity part of the monster and put the “top” on. The slime slowly began to ooze out the fangs and onto the game board. The monster moved around randomly, leaving a growing trail of goop. I’m not sure what happened to your game piece if it found itself under the slime monster by some twist of ill luck, but I’m sure it wasn’t good.

If you reached the armory, you would get a mine and start moving it around in anticipation of where the monster would move next. The monster’s feet were curled, with a space under them for the mine to be slid under. If it landed on a space that was mined, you slammed your fist down on the lever and ker-splat! The monster would flip over and fall apart, spewing slime everywhere. Hooray, the slime monster is defeated! Talk about an incentive to be first to blast the slime monster to kingdom come. Oh, yeah, usually this meant slime got on the carpet.

What might this have to do with the current round of psychological inquiry? This time we have the entire process put down to a friendly boardgame, rather than a cinematic re-enactment. The point, as before, is to survive long enough to reach the “solution”, or the “goal”, whereupon one receives the ability to deal with the “monster”. In this case, the “monster” has evolved from a formless jelly, to a charged physical entity, and now to a toy that incorporates both solid and semi-liquid characteristics. The monster’s hostility has been overcome and assimilated into a simple, but instructive play device for children.

Or is it perhaps that the game embodies a ritual experience of the actual re-enactments? The risk is that the carpet will be stained (or a mess made), so the actual “danger” of the original experience is still present to a degree. Unlike the stalemate of the movies, this suggests an actual beginning (slime monster comes to town) and an end (slime monster goes ker-blooey). Is this what the manifestation of the unconscious, this ultra feminine force ultimately wanted to arrive at? A figure in a kid’s game? The blob, the green slime, the slime monster, they just wanted to play and have fun (and devour, electrocute and stain the carpet) since they were in the neighborhood?

Don’t get caught by the yucky scary monster until someone turns the tables. Good real life survival advice. And learning to play with the unconscious and understand its contents is also good real life mental health advice. But the deeper message, I think, is that these movies and the boardgame not only reveal a process and a lesson, they also speak of the fear people have of female power. There’s a need to throw up taboos and superstitions in order to protect one’s identity from the invasion of this powerful force. A lot of the activity by the protagonists consists of running away, putting up barriers, and searching for ways to contain the threat. But the contamination of cooties is never defeated for long, just until the next outbreak. The next eruption into consciousness finds the problem needing to be dealt with again and again.

A certain amount of active participation is needed to move forward (even if the activity is still primarily reactionary and hostile), or else everyone would be gobbled up into unconsciousness. A relationship of any kind requires an interaction of back and forth to arrive at a conclusion of any consequence. The solution in this case seems clear to me. Female power wants to play and have fun! Okay, so that complicates things and makes for unpredictability. It’s a real problem though. A lot of the world is still stuck in the Blob mentality.

Where are you on the scale? Do you have a boardgame for your encounter with female power yet? Me, I’m going to need a break from all this playtime. Running away from the yucky scary monster until I can turn the tables is exhausting work, even for a dedicated weirdo like me. As the credits start to roll, I wonder what might be the next stage of development in this imagination.

The end?

Okay, so like I’m eaten alive by the Blob, right? Well, no. If only it were that easy. There’s another movie in the chain of gross girl germs that unsettled my young brain stem when it comes to female power archetypes. It’s an old movie known as The Green Slime. It’s a science fiction movie where an asteroid is hurtling towards Earth on a collision course. Of course, that means bad news, so the space men and women of the international space station of action and adventure send a rocket to the asteroid to set a bunch of atomic charges and blow the space rock sky high before it hits the Earth. The space people accomplish their task, but when they return to the space station, their boots are covered in a green slime they picked up on the asteroid.

The space suit cleaners blast the suits with “germ killing energy”, except this slime absorbs energy and grows into two-tentacled, one-eyed monsters that kill through electrocution by touching you. The more energy the creatures absorb, the more they multiply. Pretty soon, the creatures start to slowly take over the space station and the crew fights a losing battle against them.

The creatures can be killed (by laser blasts from the laser guns the crew carry), but there are so many of them, that the crew is unable to do more than give ground and think of ways to slow them down. Eventually, the crew blow up the space station and escape in a rocket back to earth. But is this really “The End?” The green slime might have managed to get on the rocket, which the way the movie ends you can’t help but wonder.

This is another one of those movies that scared the pants off me. There’s a scene where a maintenance worker is trying to repair a circuit room that has lost power, back when the green slime creatures are only just starting to infest the station in individual incidents. It’s dark, and the guy is bumbling about, when this glowing eye opens. You know the dude is doomed. That scene where the eyeball opens has scarred me for life!

How did I get to here from the Blob? I let the free association carry me to the next line of thought, and I remembered this old movie. You didn’t want to touch these creatures, because they’d electrocute you and you’d turn into a crispy critter. Like the Blob, their presence grows greater with every scene, and they take over what up until now has been a nice, orderly male-dominated space game. It’s another of those “escape the onset of evil icky goo power” movies. Again, we have the invasion from outer space of a “monster slime”, and once more it’s up to the hetero-normal couple to work together to fight against the evil menace of nasty alien contamination.

This time the fear is not so much of being “eaten” by the Ultra-Feminine Uber Goop, but of being touched and losing control. It’s a development in terms of the psychological outlook behind this adventure yarn. The danger is more individualized (by the numerous collective tentacled creatures) and easier to deal with (gun phallic symbols actually work now), but the problem is unchanged. The transport vehicle (a tiny rock in The Blob, a tiny canister in Beware! The Blob, now an asteroid you can land a rocket on in The Green Slime) has grown in size, suggesting a more immediate impact problem. Green is the color of putrification, and of rot. It is also the color of spring growth. Things are growing and at the same time rotting away. There is change and transformation going on.

The movie has to present the typical fear of a feminine force “moving in” and draining all your energy away for it’s own purposes, taking over by means of gradual increase of numbers. The only solution is to “break up” by “exploding” the residence the encounter takes place in, also known as the space station of “the relationship”. But that only works until the next asteroid shows up. There seems to me to be another puzzle here, where the issues of the Blob were not resolved. Instead of “the present”, we are in a sci-fi “future world”, indicating this happens later along the line. The issues are the same, contact and inter-relation. But how do you relate to crazy green aliens with tentacles, coming toward you to give you the electric embrace of crispy death?

Okay, so the Blob relationship didn’t work. Here comes a new relationship, and things are similar, if not quite the same as before. It’s another go, as it were, and now you have to deal with more mature concepts (moving in, cooperative adaptation, boundaries – how much are you willing to put up with before you bogue out and call it even). One could look at it as simple case of infection, like a skin rash or athlete’s foot, to be treated with medicine as one would any non-intelligent (as far as we know) life force intruding upon our territory. Or one could imagine it as a wake-up call to learn a new lesson in relating to something important.

Obviously the unconscious thinks this is important enough to keep sending rocks-as-spaceships to establish contact. The problem is, the slime takes over everything, as a psychic infection is likely to do. It destroys personal relationships and wrecks the rules by which a society lives by. The ego has no choice but to enter a reactive state and try to preserve its fragility by retreat, stalling and in this case, scorched earth.

I say thee nay! I’m going right up to these green slime monsters and I’m bringing rubber gloves and boots. Shock me Amadeus.

It’s a typical Satyrday night. I’m mixing up the medicine, a nice tangy rum punch designed to make me more receptive to the forces of the universe while I do my chores. One can easily learn the secrets of Kung Fu while scrubbing the bathtub of scrum, it’s all a matter of training. I’m also chopping up the ingredients for my yummy beef stew. K and are planning to watch some Grey’s Anatomy to a steaming bowl of stew and a glass of thick, rich milk to make a party in our tummys (so yummy, so yummy).

Cooking is an unpredictable venture. The formula of a recipe should ensure a consistent result every time, but the real world operates on a random adventure generator on a regular basis. You can’t always count on what kind of experience you are going to get out of life. So it is that as I’m mixing up the punch, it turns a brilliant red, and no matter how much I try to get it to behave, it remains red, instead of the off-orange and feathery brown it usually is. I examine my ingredients, and realize I bought a bunch of juices that have nothing to do with the original recipe. Well, it’s always dinosaur hunting when I have to go to the supermarket, and its likely that the robots in disguise had me so distracted that someone else pulled the strings when I made my juice selections. I do try to be open to outside messages, after all.

I start work on the stew, and for some reason it turns out a deep red color instead of the brown-brothy color it usually does. I look at my ingredients and I realize that instead of using my jar of home-jarred tomatoes, I used a can of Nature’s Promise tomatoes instead. I shake my head and realize I’m acting on some kind of puppet-master control field and try to get to the bottom of things. The stew and the rum punch taste excellent, it’s just they are, well this shade of red that I feel means something. You know, like in that scene from Close Encounters when the main character starts realizing there’s some meaning to what they are building with a mountain of mashed potatoes.

So I sit down and I visualize the color red in my mind, and decide to see what comes up. The image that flashes into my brain is the Blob, from the old 1972 movie Beware! The Blob, a sequel to the original movie in 1958. Whoa, that takes me back. The last thing I want to do is consume anything that reminds me of the Blob, because that thing was a deadly poison that killed and consumed you if you touched it! But here I am sucking down a ceramic cup of the good stuff and preparing a pot of stew that has a meaningful connection to that which scared the pants off me as a kid.

As a young pouchling, I watched a lot of movies on the TV. Back then independent stations were more common, and even the big networks had a creative side. The late night monster movies were a staple back then, and you could always be assured of picking up something weird past ten P.M. One movie I saw was, of course, Beware! The Blob. It made an impression on me as a kid.

At the end of the original The Blob movie, the creature known as the Blob is frozen and dumped somewhere in the north pole with the titles “The End?” showing. The intimation is that this is not the end of the matter. Beware! The Blob (also known as Son of the Blob, which I think is false, more like daughter of the Blob) picks up from that loose end.

An oil pipeline worker digs up a canister and brings it home. The canister contains, you guessed it, the Blob. It thaws out, and starts eating everything in sight. A pair of young love birds clue in to the danger while the authorities stall. The blob is a nasty, icky, bright red jelly creature that can move quickly and squeeze through any crack to reach it victims. It sticks to you like glue, and quickly engulfs you to digest your body. As it absorbs animals, insects and people (it apparently doesn’t like plants) it grows in size. The only thing that stops it is cold. If you freeze it, the blob can be stored and transported (as it was in the original movie).

In Beware! The Blob, the final showdown occurs in a skating rink, where the hero of the movie finally lures it onto the ice rink and turns on the cold, freezing the creature and saving the town. The sheriff poses in front of the creature, and the lights of the news media thaw a piece of the creature where it reaches out to grasp the guy’s boot. Again, the titles “The End?” appear as the movie ends.

This movie terrified me as a kid. The Blob could appear anywhere and strike quickly. Once it got a hold of you, there was no escape. You would live long enough to be absorbed into the creature and turned into liquid lunch. In one scene, a guy gets a haircut, and as he’s getting a shampoo from the barber, the blob squeezes out of the sink drain and snags the guy by the head. I absolutely refuse to get my hair shampooed at a hair cut establishment to this day because of that scene.

In the movie, the presence of the creature is always accompanied by a spooky sound tone. That musical tone has lodged itself in my brain, and I always jump when I hear that exact tone of music played somewhere. The Blob ain’t gunna get me! Although, where could you run? Your only hope would be to splash it with cold water or throw ice cubes at it.

The memory is not quite as fierce or terrifying as it used to be. I’ve had to go about my business despite the fear that at any time that sound might begin, and I find myself washing my hands while a red slime oozes out the drain and tries to get a hold of me. But I haven’t forgotten that primal terror, the fear that would keep me from going to sleep at night, because the light in the hall was making that same dull hum as the Blob.

As I’m stirring the pot, and mixing the punch bowl, I realize in a sense I’m consuming the Blob at this very moment! You can’t escape the Blob, only postpone the inevitable. The creature always thaws out and comes at humanity again and again. The test of survival never ends. Of course, in the movies, consuming the Blob is always fatal (the guy who drinks it from his beer can dies horribly as it consumes him from within). The Blob comes from outer space (the deep unconscious), and needs to eat everything in sight (to what end?). The idea of anyone consuming the Blob and surviving is as preposterous as the existence of the Blob itself.

The thought strikes me that the Blob is an archetype of feminine power, engulfing everything and devouring all in its path, growing larger and stronger. I’m cool with that, as long as I don’t lose my own individuality in the process. It’s the hero/heroine pair up in the movie that always defeats the Blob, or more accurately, puts it on hold until next time. So perhaps the individuation of certain characters is what moves the plot along. The Blob is too strong for any one person to take on, and yet, it’s the individual response to the reality of the growing Blob’s power that determines the outcome.

I’m thinking that the Blob represents nothing less than the fear of girl power. That nasty contamination by women that always wrecks things and makes life more difficult. What does the Blob want? It must be looking for a connection of some kind, and anyone who doesn’t measure up to the requirement gets eaten alive. The people who are smart enough to flee or avoid contact with the Blob might be the very people the Blob is trying to contact. The Blob comes from outer space (the heavens), maybe it’s trying to make contact, and the outer space girl power needs to hear a message from the right person to move things forward.

The Blob keeps getting put off, because we love the fear of running from the gross girl germs that might give us cooties. The movies keep coming. But maybe it is way past time the process moved to the next level. Humanity has to grow up eventually, or be stuck in a never-never land of childish dependence. I hear the message, I’m not a kid anymore, and I’m letting the Blob get inside of me!

As I mentioned earlier, I encountered an advent calendar with some issues I found disturbing. Well hey, the unpredictability continued and I recorded the results. I don’t know what to make of it other than a mistake in the printing process, which is the likely explanation. If I take it as a meaningful coincidence, then I chose it out of the large pile of calendars because it belonged to me. The calendar of mismatched pictures in need of a person capable of unlocking their secrets. And so I shall! The time has come to make sense of the senseless jumble before me!

Dec 11
Picture: Scary snowman smoking a pipe, with branches for arms
Candy: What look like a pair of boots from the eighties
Meaning: To stay ahead of the evil snowman, use the moonwalk boots

Dec 12
Picture: A pair of ice skates
Candy: A snare drum with drumsticks
Meaning: Use the skates to cross the frozen lake, then play the drum to crack the ice

Dec 13
Picture: A present tied with twine
Candy: A sleigh with three presents in the back
Meaning: The present is a trap! Steal the sleigh and the three wise men’s stuff instead

Dec 14
Picture: A field of stars
Candy: A glob with a halo and wings
Meaning: Don’t look at the night sky, or an alien will appear and kidnap you

Dec 15
Picture: Sleigh
Candy: Basket of daffodils
Meaning: Ditch the sleigh at the greenhouse and pick some flowers

Dec 16
Picture: Four lit candles of various sizes
Candy: Wreath of mistletoe with candle in center
Meaning: Put the smallest candle in the wreath to open the wise men’s presents safely

Dec 17
Picture: A child’s wooden sled
Candy: A toy choo-choo train engine
Meaning: The train is useless. Put the gold, frankincense, and myrrh on the sled and drag it behind you.

Dec 18
Picture: A house surrounded by snow
Candy: A boot with a buckle around the ankle
Meaning: Break into Santa’s house and steal one of his boots

Dec 19
Picture: Plate of food, maybe a loaf of bread
Candy: Teddy bear
Meaning: Feed the ravenous bear with the food Mrs. Santa left in the kitchen for her husband

Dec 20
Picture: Two dolls
Candy: Six pointed star
Meaning: Give the dolls the daffodils and they will give you the six pointed star

Dec 21
Picture: A roll of ribbon
Candy: A lantern
Meaning: The lantern is set to explode, take the ribbon in case you need to tie up somebody

Dec 22
Picture: A pile of candy, including lollipops and wrapped sweets
Candy: A mushroom (???)
Meaning: The candy is deadly poison. Eat the mushroom instead to gain an extra life

Dec 23
Picture: The eighties boots, confirming that my identification of Dec 11th’s candy was correct
Candy: A sleeping crescent moon with a nightcap on it
Meaning: Leave the moonwalk boots with the moon. When the moon wakes up, it’ll eat the evil snowman

Dec 24
Picture: A valentine heart with a lit candle sticking out the top (That is so lewd as far as symbols go, I’m taken aback)
Candy: Messed up gremlin looking Santa Claus (K’s own words, as I had no clue)
Meaning: Oh no, Santa Claws has come to get you! He’s a little slow if you took his boot, so use the valentine’s heart from Dec 7 and the second shortest candle to destroy him with the power of love!

So, if I have this right, Christmas is a time of overcoming life-threatening obstacles and gathering the right quest objects to defeat the monsters. I suppose that’s my Xmas experience in a nutshell. This advent calendar was pretty cool now that I think about it. It showed me some weird stuff relevant to my own inner process. I guess we get gifts relevant to our situation if we remain open to the possibility.

Which begs the question, what strange and wonderful things might you run into or pick up by “accident” or “design”? What does that reveal about yourself?

Whew!  Another Xmas survived.  Now that the wretched holiday of good cheer is finally past, I feel restored to my good-natured self.  With the solstice behind me, I can already feel the sunlight returning to the power-meter.  Woo and hoo!  K, as usual, made out like a bandit (as well she should).  Her swag bag was overflowing with goodies from the tribute wagon, and it’ll be some days until she has everything all sorted out.  I sense some material for the Menagerie soon to come!  Including the final tally on the advent calendar that refused to make any sense.  Chaos?  No Chaos here.

I got some more work in on the book over the holidaze, working on what is probably the most important revision.  Had to break in a new ceramic cup (thanks boss!) for the meditations.  I find that a little muscle relaxant, aka grog in a cup, helps the creative juices flow as I mold the text into new shapes and forms.  Hard to believe I’m just a week or two from the one year mark of when I started this work.  Still plenty of work to do, and its got me psyched up to the max.

One of the presents I got was the Secrets of Isis DVD I mentioned a while back.  Wow, totally corny, but I love it.  UFOs (that turn out to be faked Scooby Doo style), Bigfoot (who turns out to be just a really scary tall mountain man), and (my favorite so far) car thieves who steal the Trans-am of Isis’s mundane alter-ego.  The thieves repaint her car from red to yellow, and it remains that color for the rest of the show.  Hilarious!  Disturbing that the “morals” segment of the show was cut from the masters in the early nineties – but they show up in the special features thanks to diligent taping by considerate fans!  Awesome.  I always thought shows with morals at the end were eating with both hands.

Here comes 2008.  A “Chaldean ten”, also known as an Isis/Osiris beginning of great power and danger, where new transformations come forward.  I’ll be keeping those Isis morals in mind when the whip comes down, and that wheel of fortune gets a-spinnin’.  No telling what may come up.

I went on an outdoors weekend retreat with K a few months back, and had a bit of an accident. I was on the outside porch getting the charcoal fire ready to cook the delicious meal we had planned on. There’s this goofy contraption my pa has gotten me in the habit of using to light the charcoal, a kind of metal cup with a thick screen at the bottom. You jam some newspaper into the space at the bottom, place some charcoal on top, and light the newspaper. The charcoal gets a concentrated blast of heat and starts faster. I have my doubts about the overall effectiveness of this thing.

Take the current scenario I’ve just painted. It’s windy, and there’s no cover, so it’s impossible to light a match and get the newspaper going. So I decide to step off the porch and duck down behind the cabin to get a windbreak. This isn’t rocket science. Unfortunately, the two wooden steps are uneven, and constructed in such a way that they appear level. I step the wrong way, and tumble down like a pile of bricks. My immediate reaction is to toss the contraption and move that hand to steady myself into a controlled fall. My knee nearly bends at an unhealthy angle before I slow my fall and slide to the ground. Well, it does make a “crick” noise, and for a moment the pain is so intense I think I’ve broken something.

Luckily, it turns out to be a minor sprain. I can move about, but I have to spend most of our retreat with an ice pack and an elevated leg. Thank the maker for the rum punch we brought! They don’t call it “mixing up the medicine” for nothing. K and I have a blast at our secret little retreat zone, and get some good psychological recovery done. Around here in the nation’s capital (see also, “Doomsville”), you take mental fallout all the time from any number of different sources, and it can be hard to shake the accumulated stress.

As I’m sitting there, nursing a cup of medicine and putting the ice on while the steaks sizzle on the grill, I get to thinking. What happened to me bears a striking resemblance to a scene in my book! Rordan, the main character, is fetching his foster brother some tea when he has an accident. He sacrifices the tankard he’s holding to avoid a nasty fall and ends up mildly injured. Granted it’s not a perfect match – I’m holding a metal contraption that resembles a huge mug, not an actual tankard, and Rordan injures his foot while I injure my knee.

But it’s a meaningful coincidence that’s not lost on me. Rordan’s “accident” is no accident, and I’m not sure I want to be having the same kinds of experiences as a character in my book. On the other hand, it makes me feel closer to what I’m doing with my writing. I’m kayaking those turbulent waters of the unconscious again. Which means I have to watch out for the monsters lurking in the crawlspace beneath porches, waiting to take a swipe at people walking by.

For those not in the know, an advent calendar is a cardboard poster with a series of doors you can pry open, one for each day until Christmas. Behind each door is a colorful picture, saying, or candy chocolate associated with the Christmas season. The ones with candy in them are large and thick, while the picture kind tend to be flat, with only a backing to protect the hidden pictures. The candy kind shows up in the movie Bad Santa, if you’re interested in seeing one and having a good night’s laugh for entertainment.

Okay, even though I get glum at Xmas, I try to get an advent calendar because I love the idea of opening a door on something every day to get a new scene/fortune/candy. K and I each got one of those ones where you get a piece of chocolate behind the doors. She picked one with a bunch of animals being left hay, nuts, berries and the like by Santa. Now, I don’t see him leaving any steaks for the carnivores, so I’m a little dubious. I have to assume Santa is going off to visit them next, because the carnivores might decide a fresh rabbit is better than a fresh t-bone. I don’t know. Mine is the generic angel kids fluttering about decorating trees and delivering presents. But then I chose mine not for the scene but randomly – I wants the chocolates, not the pictures! I like K’s better though, because her scene is cute. Santa helps the ani-mani-mals!

So December 1st rolls around. K and I open our first door. She gets a nice picture of a choo choo train and a matching chocolate (a choo choo train in a toy, and toys are often an Xmas theme). I open mine up, and uh…huh? There’s a picture of a piece of wood. I suppose wood makes sense in that Xmas usually is celebrated when winter is on its way, and you want a nice roasting fire. But that’s pretty odd. The candy chocolate is a wrapped present, which is on base for the season. Except that it doesn’t match the picture! Here’s the rundown of the Advent Calendar of Doom so far:

Dec 1
Picture: A block of wood
Candy: A wrapped present

Dec 2
Picture: A doll
Candy: A church

Dec 3
Picture: Santa Claus
Candy: A snowman holding a broom

Dec 4
Picture: A pair of ornaments
Candy: A four leaf clover (???)

Dec 5
Picture: A snowflake
Candy: An evergreen tree

Dec 6
Picture: Three evergreen trees
Candy: A squirrel eating a nut

Dec 7
Picture: A fireplace (The block of wood makes sense now)
Candy: A Valentine’s Day Heart (?!?!)

Dec 8
Picture: A decorated Christmas Tree
Candy: A Christmas wreath

Dec 9
Picture: Two gnomes chit-chatting
Candy: A deer with a bow tie and no eyes (…)

Something ain’t right here.