The Diamond Island

I pulled out a ten-dollar bill to pay for some last minute groceries, and I noticed it had been stamped on the edge with the information for an escort service, with a phone number and web address. For goodness sakes! The things people put on paper currency.

After I got over my amusement, I got to thinking, and I imagined it had to be a meaningful coincidence. A psychic message perhaps, but from whom?

The “Dark Goddess”, of course. That archetype that dwells within the unconscious of all humans on the planet. So I dug into some of my old collections of useless information to see what I could bring back to the conscious part of my ape’s brain. I figured she wanted me to remember some of my lessons from back in the day.

Then, for no reason at all, Britney Spears and her latest tune pops into my head. I get to thinking this must be part of the message. Then I realize little miss “gimmie more” is carrying the projections of people’s expectations of the Dark Goddess. This goes back to my Escapegoat theory, whereby certain people embody the community’s own repressed qualities so people can mock them and feel better about themselves.

What are the qualities of the Dark Goddess? Well, aside from the obvious (the naughty bits), she personifies instinctual behavior, music and dancing, drunkenness, the pursuit of pleasure, reckless abandon, procreation, madness, self-destruction, illusions over reality, and generic forms of darkness and chaos thrown in for good measure. Sound familiar?

The Dark Goddess is often symbolized by things like the moon and underground tunnels, or personified by supernatural figures like witches and mermaids. You can go all the way up to goddesses like Lilith or Tiamat, and all the way down to famous actresses or femme fatales. It just depends on what you are looking for. Hrm. Famous people. That could easily apply to miss “oops I did it again.”

The obvious interpretation is that the Dark Goddess was reminding me that she’s out there, in the shadows and darkness sometimes, but more than likely in broad daylight without anyone’s knowledge. Britney is out there too, suffering the scarlet letter of people with no guts and nothing going on (we’re all guilty, not just her). The Dark Goddess is out there doing her thing, what am I doing?

That question brings me back to a time when I was an ardent admirer of the Dark Goddess. I gave her a full access pass and a place to live. I drank from dark waters, ate from dark fruits, and lived in the wrong part of town like her. She’s a backdoor girl with a bad reputation, and she ain’t no man’s woman, but she would pay me a visit just the same. The Dark Goddess shares her gifts of regeneration and ecstasy with those who ask, and I asked every day. She would sing to me, you can call me anytime, on my hello-happy-line.

So that’s the message, give her a call. Maybe she misses me, or wonders if I’d forgotten about her. I heard tell once that the edges of the wrong side of town must seem like they plummet into the depths, because anyone who leaves never comes back. I dial the Dark Goddess’s hello-happy-line, and leave a message.

That night, I have one of those vivid and detailed dreams I sometimes get. I’m in a huge labyrinth of a building, a creativity warehouse as one occupant puts it to me. I see every conceivable kind of artist, engineer, architect, editor and student associated with creativity engaged in projects too numerous to mention. Writers working on stories for a magazine, paintings of every conceivable type being painted using experimental techniques or to develop a series for museums or shows. Lithographers, gardeners, graphic artists working on advertising, all in a setting of hallways and rooms littered with toys, decorations and tools of the trade. Whole acting companies work out elaborate blocking of scenery next to rooms where speeches are being given on the future of sculpture. I climb a wooden ladder out of a sauna where rock stars are meditating on new songs, and walk down an aisle of computer-automated typewriters working out a formula for theater performances. Everywhere, there are secret doors, concealed passageways, and understated niches like altars to the making of things for their own sake. Quiet places, loud places, lighted by fireplace or fluorescent bulbs, or sometimes nothing at all. It’s a Willy Wonka Factory of every artist’s dream.

I realize in the dream that I’m looking for my backpack. I’m carrying a sword and wearing a costume from some previous artistic pursuit that I’ve moved away from. I’m looking around, searching, and wandering the place. That’s when I run into the Dark Goddess herself, and I realize the creativity warehouse is hers, she runs it and makes sure that there’s always ideas and play to fertilize the minds and souls of people. She tells me that she called because I left my backpack at her place, and I ought to have it back again. I come out of my dream as if I’d only just closed my eyes, and I write down everything she told me.

The next day, K is at the new computer figuring things out, and I’m working on my book. We have the sliding back door open (with the screen closed) to freshen up the air a bit. Something appears at the top of the screen, and for a moment we both think Frankie has climbed the sliding door to get at a moth or something like that. But it’s a screech owl, trying to get in. It sinks its claws in the screen and stares at us for a moment, then tries to get in again. The owl flies off into the night, without ever having made a sound or damaged the screen, and K and I marvel at the critter visit we just experienced. Totally cool!

Owls are sacred to the Goddess Lakshimi, symbolizing prosperity. They are also animals associated with Athena, and wisdom. In some Native American traditions they are night hunters who see through deceptions and the sorcery of others. Owls often carry the spirits of the ancestors and their messages. But most of all, the screech owl is sacred to Lilith, another aspect of the Dark Goddess.

Yup, that’s the Dark Goddess all right. She’s in your fridge, eating your food.

The folks have been going through piles of old photos for organization, and I spotted one that reminded me of my attempts to raise a genuine, honest-to-goodness “dinosaur”.  My folks took a picture that is better left to the imagination.  But first, we must travel into the Wayback Machine.

I’m nine years old, hanging out with Pa at the local Seven-Eleven to pick up a newspaper.  I spot a clear plastic container with a nest and a large candy jawbreaker “egg” labeled as a “Pterodactyl Egg”.  I recall a small folded instructions sheet on how to raise your very own Pterodactyl, but I may be mis-remembering.  I convince Pa to buy me the thing, and back at home I read the instructions and get excited about raising my very own live Pterodactyl.  This is many, many years before the arrival of Jurassic Park on the mainstream.  But I’m nine years old, I don’t have to understand how on earth someone managed to mass produce real Pterodactyl eggs for home use.  I have to get busy raising my new pet!

My folks know better than to get in the way of my creative projects when I’m on a roll, so they let me make a nest of pillows and blankets in front of the televsion set.  Yup, I have to sit on that egg to warm it up and get that little Pterodactyl going.  Unfortunately, the instructions don’t say how long you have to sit on the egg for it to hatch.  But it shouldn’t take long, right?  In the meantime, I make myself a pair of Pterodactyl wings and a pointed headpiece so that my new pet will feel more at ease with his or her new family.  I can hardly wait!

The last of the late night programs finish up and the television programming goes off for the rest of the night.  For all you younger people out there, before the advent of “Borg Cable Boredom”, the half dozen local channels would go off the air around the late AMs to the National Anthem.  You would get static until they resumed operations several hours later.  If you’ve ever seen the movie Poltergeist, that’s where the scene with Carol Anne looking at a static television would come in.  Now it’s all shows all the time.  Anyway, it’s bedtime and I have to keep the egg warm, so I pile on the blankets and go to sleep right there, with my arms around the mound to keep the warmth coming.

Inevitably, I have to accompany the parental units on a grocery run or some other errand, so I worry about keeping the warmth up on the egg.  My folks assure me all will be well, so I leave the blanket pile on and when I come back I resume my “sitting” on the egg.  After a few days of this, I start to get impatient.  Where’s that darn dinosaur?*  What’s taking it so long.  I re-read the instructions and talk about it with my folks, who suggest it might not be a “real” egg, but a gag gift and just a hunk of candy.  Brain cells start to calculate, and I start questioning whether it’s actually possible for a candy egg to hatch a real live baby “dinosaur”.  Denial sets in, but my hopes are crumbling.

I decide I have to check the egg out.  While warm, the jawbreaker shell is still nice and tough.  I shake it and nothing rattles.  Okay, even though I might be killing my new pet, I’ve got to see if this thing is for real because I’m getting tired of sitting on the darn thing.  So I take Pa’s hammer and smash it open.  I figure if I come across the mangled remains of a “dinosaur” I can always go back to the store and get another.  Sure enough, hollow center, but no Pterodactyl.  I’m crushed.  All that time wasted trying to raise a unique pet for a crummy piece of candy.  And I hate jawbreakers too, so I’m not even going to get much in the way of sweets from the pieces.  What a rip-off!

Yup, that picture is of me sitting on my nest wearing my construction paper outfit.  Back to the present, I’m thinking about what the effect might have been on my brain stem, and I think about my fondness for Pterodactyls.  From the Japanese monster movie Rodan, to Pee Wee Herman’s puppet buddy, there’s an attraction there that runs very deep.  I’ve heard it said our failures motivate us, and in this case I believe the phrase applies.  When I think about that time, the memory of my matter-of-fact, childlike belief that I was really going to hatch a real live Pterodactyl from a piece of candy is still fresh.  It’s scary, because I have that feeling and the feeling of disappointment that came after to compare with.  Both feelings stare me in the face.  It’s like that time I saw the Batmobile in an earlier post.  There are moments in your life where reality as you know it threatens to take off into the fantastical and it’s only the disillusionment that brings you back to objective life.  We really are sometimes just a step away from other worlds where who knows what might happen.

I start thinking about that movie The Illusionist, where the young Eisenheim’s failure to disappear with his childhood love motivates him to master his gift and create a masterful trick.  The magician is the person who plays with those two worlds and brings forward magic.  Not necessarily magic in the sense of a power, such as the ability to fly or make a rainstorm, but a reminder of the vast mystery of life.  The kind of performance that kindles the imagination and makes you whole.  I’m thinking my misadventure with the Pterodactyl egg, while foolish, was also spontaneous and imaginative.  Coyote the trickster was sending a message to the future that day.

* I realize Pterodactyls are not considered true “dinosaurs” these days, but I’m not digging into that can of worms today.

It’s early in the morning. I haven’t brought main power online yet, and the work patrol has yet to start. The coffee activator is only just manufacturing the reactor propellant that will kick-start my weary bones. Oh, crud! Trash day! That sound of machinery on the slow-monster march is the sanitation engineers tractor-beaming the week’s rubbish and conspicuous consumption for donation to the landfills for our future descendants to raid. I manage to do an emergency beam-out, flip flops in place of my shoes of doom, so maneuvers are at half impulse power. With seconds to spare, trash pick-up accomplished. I gather my handful of experience points and get back to business.

I’m closing the front door, when I see a fox casually walk out of the greenery across the street and head right for the place everyone puts their garbage. He sniffs the spot where the garbage was a minute ago, and I realize this scavenger does this as a regular circuit. The fox is just running late today, like me. The fox realizes someone is watching and looks up, spotting me. That fox kicks in the thrusters and walks on to the next waypoint, disappearing into the greenery ahead.

Now, I admit, I’m not exactly living in a concrete jungle here. The neighborhood is edged with trees and growth, so it’s perfectly feasible that animals can migrate from safe zone to safe zone, as long as they can navigate the occasional street crossing and don’t mind moving through the human neutral zone. But still, I’m a little surprised to see there’s a local fox. What else is moving about? Your pets roam at their own risk, sheesh!

So I’m on the couch, reading, with an afternoon view of my back porch. K and I have a number of cacti, moonflowers, cardinal creepers, wild mint, mosses, and ferns growing on the porch. More civilization training, you understand. All of a sudden, I see a hummingbird make a refueling run at what must be like a fully stocked, free gas station of flowers. I barely have time to let K know (she had never seen one before), when another hummingbird joins in the pit stop. Now that’s a first for me now, I’ve never seen more than one hummingbird, so it’s double bonus!

The two hummingbirds helicopter around from flower to flower until they’ve gone through each blossom, and then they head over to the neighbor’s yard. There are only some mundane houseplants without flowers, and I can almost hear them say “Rip-off!” They hit the warp drive and zoom out of sight. I tabulate up some experience points for keeping the hummingbird starbase open with my relentless watering and fertilizer efforts. Yeah, it’s all good.

Nighttime. I’m in the kitchen preparing a snack when I notice that it smells like skunk. Frankie freaks out and rushes up to the window. She meows the red alert and looks down at the bushes under our kitchen window. I stare in confusion for a moment, and then it dawns on me. Well, it must be skunk! I open the front door and whoosh! There’s some serious skunk smell coming from the bushes, and I hear a weird chirping noise. Whoa! Evasive maneuvers babykins! Door slams shut, and Frankie runs around like it’s a full-fledged invasion!

K asks me what that smell is and when I tell her she has to see for herself. Yo ho ho and a bottle of scum! Keep in mind the smell is so strong, you can smell it through a closed window! Must be a crack in the wall or something, phew! K thinks it’s hilarious. Luckily, the smell gradually fades and by morning only a lingering pee-yew smell remains. But every now and then I catch a whiff, so I know that culprit is in the neighborhood. I suppose the little rascal was just welcoming us to the neighborhood!

So I look up my tried and true copy of Medicine Cards, and according to this interpretation of Native American traditions, fox stands for camouflage (learn to observe from hiding), hummingbird stands for joy (embrace beauty and happiness), and skunk stands for reputation (project self-respect). Good lessons to keep in mind in this day and age!

It also occurs to me that the animals are all around us as we speak. The anipals and their daily rounds intersect with ours all the time, and we may not know it! Listen to what the anipals may be telling you. You can never have too many friends, either of the two-legged, four-legged, eight-legged, or winged variety. In the so-called “rational” territories, they need contact with us to stay whole, and we need their guidance to skirt the jackbots. They don’t need domestication (we have pets, special elite corps of human-contact volunteers for that), they need taming, which as you all know, means “to establish ties with”.

I hate it when main power goes down, and auxiliary power fails shortly after that. I can’t maneuver or shoot torpedoes for very long on emergency power. Shields? Forget it, I’m on reserves and goin’ down! I don’t know how it happened, but the Moavian Waoowl got loose, and every crew member on the ship started busting a move and getting jacked. Either that or the Councillor of Moppaplu snuck aboard and gave everyone some damn MeeGees. Either way, I change into one of my least favorite shtuper-heroes, El Sicko!

Have a linkdump! It all started when I ran into the butt-biting bug video on Boing Boing. Little did I know the Chaos that would ensue. My friend, The Liephus, sends me a countervideo, Human Tetris. Whoa, the sound you just heard was the sound of my synapses getting a charlie horse. Then my other friend, Doofball, sends me a video by the Squirrel Nut Zippers. The associations this has for me, not the best in my growing state of mind-mold. It’s about this time Cthulhu madness has set in, and I dare The Circuit to utube me more cowbell! Just a little softening up of the brainstem for the coup de grace, Miss South Carolina’s amazing escapegoat speech. I’m down for the count, Booji Boy style, and not even the New Mutants can pipe me in their smoke and put me!

In the words of the Riddler, bummmmmmerrrrrrrrr! It took some major hypersleep, followed by some tea and honey to even restore minimum temporary auxiliary power. The fevered dreams I had, whoo doggie, I don’t think I can relate. Cleaning up cat barf in the wrong house while the backwater mutants from Gummo invade your personal space sounds like a pretty exciting scene from a David Lynch movie. I still don’t know what to make of the extremely detailed grand tour of the Tower of Babel, where the representatives of the masters of the universe (not the He-Man kind, the plutocracy kind) were having their meeting. Time to bogue out on the millennium falcon! I sure hope that old man got the tractor beam out of commission or this cloud city’s chocolate sundae made by the damned is going to be one creepy desert.

Luckily, K was there with the proper antidote, a Wendy’s double cheeseburger and fries. Sometimes the way out is in! Warp core breech averted, ready to begin repair and reprogram procedures! Looks like the scene where the Moavian Waoowl is tamed by the Lieutenant of feline ancestry has occurred, and the episode is about over. It’s going to take some Slack points to repair all that engine and structural damage. Yes, I’m the Beavis who made the cheeseburger that saved The Enterprise, huh-huh, uh-huh-huh-huh, that was cool. I think I may understand why the cats want them. Fast food, fast times, fast relief. Chtulhu, you can’t handle the cheeseburger!

Hearkening back to the old days, when I was a wee lad. There were many toys of great inventiveness that passed by my small hands. I recalled a visit to the parental units and my old closet of “potent archaeological relevance” earlier this year, where I sighted the old Strange Change Machine from days of yore. Since I’ve been pondering the effects of exposure to “ancient artifacts of alien training” on my brain’s development, I figured I ought to consider this interesting tool.

The machine is this square piece of metal, basically a heating unit, with a thin wire grille over the dark recesses of heat that emanate from the depths of who-knows-where. A hard plastic capsule with a sliding door covers the grille area, and there are three vents at the top to allow heat to escape. To the side of the capsule/grille is a small metal compactor area, like the kind used to crush cars into squares of metal, with a sliding plastic panel to seal it off and a crank that screws the compactor wall in and out.

The machine’s design suggests an infernal time machine created by some mad scientist not eating with both hands. Accompanying the machine you get a set of plastic tweezers, a plastic play-mat illustrated with a gorgeous “dinosaur era” landscape, and a number of green, pink, red and yellow plastic squares, all blazoned with the Mattel brand logo on them.

You plug in the machine, it heats up, and you pop a square into the capsule. As the square heats up, it unfolds and changes before your eyes into a monster! Cool, huh? You then take him out with your tweezers, let him cool (as he is a bit soft and very hot), and set him aside to work on the next one! Pretty soon, you’ve got a whole slew of characters for use on your play-mat, and its time to have them battle for supremacy and your amusement!

Some of the monsters included, a scorpion, a snake, a spider, a mummy, a brontosaurus, a tyrannosaurus, a winged mothman demon of some outlandish sort, and a pterodactyl. When you were done, you put them in the capsule to heat them up, and then you jammed them into the compactor, which was also hot, and gradually squished them back into a square! You plucked them out, let them cool, and had a pile of squares again!

I’m not exactly sure such a toy would pass safety standards today, since it’s really easy to leave the machine on and go watch cable and forget about it. Hey, what’s that smell? Oops, left the mummy in the compactor too long! I looked the machine up on the internets, and learned that the secret to the magic of the monsters is that they are made of a special kind of plastic, that when passed through a special chamber and bombarded with radiation, the molecules of the plastic are set into their current shape, and thus they will always try to reconfigure themselves to that shape even when squished into a hard square!

That was I as a kid, handling irradiated super-plastics and playing with high heat to make characters for my latest play-set. Was it the toys that made the adult, or did the child summon toys suitable for their own development? I wonder if natural selection favors those children who are able to acquire the right toys for their training. Is the future creating the present by manipulating the past? I start to get flashes of that old horror classic, Children of the Damned. Parents have every right to be concerned over what their child is playing with, because those toys are the symptoms of their own destiny!

What does it mean then, that so many toys with lead in them are being recalled? On the surface, it could easily be explained as despicable carelessness and reckless endangerment of the young. Is there some collective unconscious fear of the new breed of little monsters? Is the greed and unconcern for our children symptomatic of a sick desire at self-preservation against the future? Is it a mere obstacle of natural selection to be dodged, like so many things in life? Is it an experience summoned by the unconscious to test a new generation of children? Lead is not conducive to good health in reality, but in the dreamworld, lead is turned into gold. Or it could be a vital element in some great task – used in the building of a new shielding against hostile radioactive mutants, for example.

I think about Black Sabbath’s old classic, Children of the Grave, where Ozzy Osbourne sings, “Children of tomorrow live in the tears that fall today” and “Can they win the fight for peace or will they disappear?” The kids are training; their story has only just begun.

Today, the Terminators, Destructoids, and jack-bots are really gunning for small fry. Crumbs! And my super-zapper recharge ain’t got that swing. Forgot to load up on torpedoes or re-energize the shields. I may as well leave the door open for the droids looking for live-brains! Thank goodness for cloaking devices. Sometimes you need to keep a low profile to avoid being seen. And you Monty Python freakazoidals know what I’m talking about! Do not stand up when your name is called!

On the sensor arrays, my science officer, Kool Kat, informs me that you can adopt a Nauga. I’m surprised, I thought the program had been shut down by the Empire a ways back. Not quite as ferocious a breed as those 60’s versions of the Nexus-6, I imagine. But there’s no telling what a plastic-harvested anipal might get as a random power during the transfer flight through the radiation barrier. You pick up these things when you’re running silent past the Gamalons.

In other news, stocked up on supplies for the cat colony. The high end food particles must be made from quadro-triticale grain to cost so much in the way of Ducats, but I guess its for a good cause. The catazoid power hour does sweep the neighborhood free of meeses and hostile organism globules. Maintenance costs if you want to live in the rebel base. It’s a way of life and it freaks me out! Yea, baby!

Programming the food banks to have me manufacture some chili, lasagna, and BLTs in the next few days. At times like these, the crew gets nervous when the food supplies have to be made to order during the actual increase in hunger levels, and I don’t want to risk getting fleeced out there in the communal food bank kiddie pools. You just don’t know whose DNA you’re ingesting these days when you get it to go. But its all in a days work for, Duck-and-Cover Man. I just need to decipher the name of that manga I overheard this morning on the internets. You never know what kind of goodies are out there! They might save your life/sanity/soul, or even reveal a powerup. Need the Mario double-up stat!

I’ve been a big fan of the bigfoot phenomenon since I was a wee little lad in the backseat, watching out the window to see if I could catch a glimpse of that elusive creature. Missing link? Friend of Elvis and the Loch Ness Monster? Scary monster that chases you through the woods screaming? Yes I’ve got my field guide to identifying and reporting bigfoot. Movies with bigfoot in them? Check. Eaten a bigfoot burger in a northwest restaurant with a seven foot tall scale model greeting the customers? Uh, okay now I’m getting embarrassed. I won’t mention the tee-shirt.

So yes, I’m a Level 1 bigfoot hunter. And you know what we noobs at the bottom of the bigfoot searcher chain do to keep our miserable skills in practice? Yup, we do the “hunt for bigfoot”, 101 classroom style. It’s simple, really. You pretend bigfoot makes occasional pit stops in the wooded areas of your local neighborhood, because everyone knows bigfoot is sneakier than a master ninja, and he has to be pretty crafty to avoid all those higher level hunters jonesin’ to get Da Photo. You get that picture, I tell you, you’ve arrived. But I have to remember to carry a camera, doh!

Personally, I think bigfoot has hyper-dimensional powers, and has to teleport into wooded areas to recharge his batteries. So your best bet is to get him while he’s reloading the hyperdrive in his thalamus gland. Of course, there’s always the danger that you’ll run into a rogue bigfoot, one who has had enough of us humans destroying his beautiful migration corridors. Like Charleton Heston in Planet of the Apes, sometimes bigfoot loses it, and starts screaming, “It’s a mad house! It’s a MAD house!!!” You don’t want to be there when bigfoots go wild.

So, it’s a risky job, but if you want to get some experience points and move up to Level 2, you got to do it. I slap on my fatigue pants and desert storm boots – very handy for protecting you against thorns, bugs and general injury in the rough terrain. Plus they let your feet and legs breathe too! You need a walking stick to look official. A small pack with some water and snacks might not be bad either. But this is the super-duper preparation version. Sometimes I say, “let’s do this”, and step into the wilderness on a hope and a prayer. It’s only a fifty feet from the mall, anyway.

It’s also a great way to keep the young cousins occupied, and wear them out if you’ve been stuck with that wonderful family volunteerism because “everyone loves your zany adventures”. Grumble, grumble. Well, if we run into a rogue bigfoot, I can run faster than the cousins. Off into the woods! You’re looking for signs of bigfoot, because you’re only Level 1 and Level 1 hunters never find things like lairs or have encounters with bigfoot. At least, they won’t admit it, because the one thing higher level hunters hate, it’s a lucky beginner.

Signs include, but are not limited to: pieces of unidentifiable fur stuck on tree bark, patches of crushed plants, eerie sounds such as a lack of animal or bird noises (you’re getting close!), and the half eaten remains of berries or nuts. You pick up the trail, and follow it until you think you’re red hot, and big foot is about to burst out at any moment and begin chasing you. It helps if you’ve built up the paranoia in your mind, easy to do when you’re by yourself, or you act scared in front of the kids. “I hope we make it out of here guys” kind of stuff.

When the fear is so thick, you can taste the hot dog you had for lunch trying to come up for air, that’s when you flee for your life! Rogue bigfoot! Rogue bigfoot gunna get you! Aieeee! So you scramble out of the woods, and hopefully live to tell the tale of your near-fatal encounter with bigfoot. Time to pop open a soda and tally up the experience points. Think about hitting the big time, next time, and congratulate yourself on your efforts to push forward the field of bigfoot exploration.