The Diamond Island

While the starship Snipe rests in dry dock, getting it’s superstructure and engine stress points repaired, I’m on some much needed psychic shore leave.  Still lots to do, in a generic survival kind of way.  K and I are moved  in to the new honeycomb hideout, and have physical object issues to work out with all of our stuff.  But the new place is welcoming us in and it’s as if we never left our beloved neighborhood before the haunted house jackup.

My mental brain calibrations return to a less terrified “all guns-blazing” mode.  And I go through the task of setting up my creative work center all over again.  I know I have chip-lights going off on projects all over the place.  The panic is part of the process, so it’s cool.  This is a good energy to have bugging me.  K and I go to a bookstore and buy some reading material.  At the end of the day, we just need to sit on the Puff Couch and read, with cats all together at peace loafing on the slack vibe.

Picked up this awesome huge volcano picture book for ten bucks.  I’ve been on a volcano kick for the last few weeks, imagining the explosive power and brilliant glow of molten earth.  I swear, bargain books have some of the best overlooked books ever.

I decide a good search on the internets would be to find out what happens when a person falls into lava.  I mean, what really happens?  As I type in “What happens when a” into the gooble-gobbler search box, it suggests “volcano erupts”, followed by “girl loses her virginity”.  Whoa, the things on people’s minds and the free form associations with nature shows.  What is going on in the collective unconscious that I’m picking up?

Turns out finding an answer to this person-in-lava question is harder than it looks.  I really have to search with the sensors to find a second hand story about a geologist who fell up to his waist in lava accidentally, and was pulled out quickly by a friend.  He suffered third degree burns and lived to walk again (with a hint that he’d lost the ability to have children, ouch).

Mind you, he was wearing one of those heat protection suits.  If I understand correctly, the difference in temperatures caused a thin layer of lava to cool around the body, absorbing heat from the outer layer of lava preventing the flesh from burning immediately.

I see a lot of speculation that a person would die almost immediately from the heat, probably float on top of the lava (density issues, like swimming in a salt-saturated body of water), and combust into huge amounts of smoke.  The flesh would shrivel up (the body’s liquids blasting out as steam) and probably explode (because of the fat), the bones charring straight to ash.

I learn about convection.  That’s when hot liquids or gases make currents that spread their heat into the environment.  Lava is so unbearably hot convection would burn you up before you reached it.  Never mind the poison gases and crippling ash emanating from it.  Wow, the force of nature contained within the molten earth is unbelievably sublime.

I’ve always been fond of volcanoes.  Part of me finds the vein of clues within Pele compelling.  But my current interest is spurred along the lines of some of the things my friends have been talking about.  Much as horses was a theme that was roaming the fields a few months ago, now it appears that volcanoes are the new symbol.

There’s the aspect of psychological force building up in the deep depths and erupting forth (violently, with tremendous force).  There’s also the part that relates to creative process, with the ejected contents providing new land to live upon and plants to grow in.  And there’s also the facet to personality, having a charisma that is intense and awesome in scope, much as a fountain of magma can draw attention.

In the external world it can stand for events that overwhelm us with their gigantic power.  The popular image of human sacrifice to volcanoes comes into play.  Human being marries deity in the literal sense, ka-fwoosh.  Taken down a notch it can be any personal tragedy or self-sacrifice that traumatizes the soul.

What happens when a person falls into lava psychologically?  Destruction of the ego, of the self-image.  The raw truth of one’s innermost interior being burns the consciousness to the crisp.  You might recover from a brief contact, but with a deep scar.  Total psychic immolation would mean you descend into darkness and only a greater, living spirit power can draw you back from the depths.  But this is getting into scary stuff, where the real possibility exists your pieces of the psyche (ashes) will remain at an elemental level.

Elemental as in, if you reduce all the biological processes to chemical processes, what you are left with at the foundation of all life is dirt.  That is, matter.

Out of matter come shapes, and one of the most fundamental is the stone.  When the lava has cooled you are left with rock, which chips, breaks and is worn into shapes.  The stone has been a symbol of the deepest self for a long time.  But we’re talking geologic time here when it comes to natural processes (even though lava itself can cool within a human being’s lifetime).  A person might have to endure a time of unconscious cooling and shaping before assuming a proper psychological shape.

Which is an emerging from the unknown.  Then, one day, a person finds you and goes, “Wow, what a cool stone.” and puts you in a pocket to take you home.  It’s as if the human image of ourselves is something that happens to us, appears to come from the outside, when that body has been formed from dirt itself in a much longer and mysterious process, moving up the chain from matter to chemical to biological to psychological once more.

I’m staring at the volcanoes and listening for the clues, just for the Hek of it.  Past the awesome force and cyclic transmutation, at the emptiness of nothing from which all that heat-matter and liquid-matter is spilling forth from.

What happens when a person falls into lava?  The unnecessary stuff burns away and you’re left with you.

Went on a walk with the parental units and K.  The last month and a half has been hard core beat-down, on the outside world stage as well as the personal stage.  There’s a lot of decompression and decontamination procedures to go through.  Our meditative walks together help massage out the bad brains.

I spot a robot at the top of this hill under someone’s raised porch.  “Hey check out that robot,” I say.  K says, “What robot?  That’s a mermaid.”  After a few minutes of everyone seeing different things and wondering whether reality has shifted underfoot, it dawns on me this is one of those weirdo random whackazoid encounters of doom.  I switch positions and see next to the robot is a red-haired waving mermaid.  The trees and the way the hill is situated combine to make it hard to see both at the same time.

We all laugh at the absurdity.  Who (or what) posts technological and magical beings along the meditative route people take?  That’s just how it is when all you get is the Spanish Inquisition.  Robots to the left of us, mermaids to the right.  Here we are, stuck on one side or the other, unable to pass between the guardians of the change in consciousness.  Except this time I figured it out and we saw both sides.  And laughter, the fool, comes along to take us back to the beginning, to our roots.

The haunted house closes it’s doors today sometime after 5 PM, and then that strange and terrifying ordeal will be gone forever.  My folks wanted to take pictures of the Chucky doll and us waving bye-bye to the house, but K was like, “No way.”  We flushed the evil toilet for posterity and laughs, but the monstrous apparatus was strangely subdued, it’s poltergeist-like slamming sounds hardly detectable.

A large spider has taken up residence in the sliding back door, spinning a long tunnel-like web, probably two and a half feet in length (the web, not the spider!).  We decided to leave it be.  Somehow, a yucky looking spider with dried insect husks gives this empty, smelly, and disorienting place character.  I tried to open the secret door, but the ghosts were having none of that.  The creaking noises and dust seemed to increase as if to say, “You’re done dude, just go.”  I understand.  Sometimes it’s better not to know.

I decided to strangle the spooky gift bag in the kitchen (sorry Hexe Witchiepoo!).  A gift bag that had alarmed so many people by playing at random times (including K).  Even though the battery should have died years ago.  It seemed appropriate.

We delivered a note to our neighbor on one side of the haunted house.  Her friend, with strangely diseased-looking hands accepted with politeness.  I was like, whoa, is this whole neighborhood full of halloween characters and we just didn’t know it because we didn’t see it?  Now that’s just darn creepy.  If I look at it, victims and skulkers living in the same deserted cul-de-sac.

I shoot off a firecracker.  Time to move on.

K and I moved a veritable buttload of George Carlin micronized “stuff” for the last ten days.  Detaching all cables, ectoplasmic ghost tentacles, and gravitational psychic suctoids has been a real pleasure I can tell you.  Tractor beaming it out of the haunted house while the ghosts gnash their teeth and scream and cry, Wild Thangs style, “oh please oh please don’t go we’ll eat you up we smash you so”, is an exercise in self-pyro-flagellation.

How many twisted ankles, auto-inject splinters, cloudy day sunburns, phantom mosquito bites, miniature cuts, blunt skin scratches, smooshed toe blister, achy-breaky muscles hit points you got?  Well, looks like K and I ain’t down and out yet, though wow what a slow ride, take it beastly.

But the alcohol saints have been keeping us in plenty of in-between meal snacks.  A little muscle relaxant goes a long way in keeping the insanity people and android soul creamulators away.  I’m using my soulsword on full power, banishing those demonoid phenomenons from Chucky doll’s foul orifice (which one?).  Maybe the alcohol saints are loving the spectacle.  Who will challenge McCoy in THIS day and age, eh?  Luck of the Irish I suppose, with a heap of K’s fatalistic viking plunge ahead with all-out Excalburt whammo.

The animals are all over the place right now.  Last night while driving home a load in the trans-dimensional hatchback Micro-blue, a deer with horns crossed the street.  During the day there’s tons of hawks everywhere, looking for munchy mouseguts or delicious bird nuggets.  If you can’t see them, you can sure hear them screeching like the cartoon in Hawk The Slayer!

Driving through traffic on the way to the store for the umpteenth time to get lightbulbs, or cleanser, or any number of post-haunted house tidy-up you can’t remember because your brain is on auto-pilot, I heard the baying of a goat.  It’s a freaking two road with two lanes each multi-hyperspace bypass full of droids in cars, for Goodness sake.  It must have been in somebody’s vehicle, but I didn’t see any vehicles but four doors and minivans.  Chaos!

On UFO Girl Hill, the rabbits were playing with each other, jumping and prancing about while munching on the rarified fairy grass that surrounds the hill.  Chippie was maneuvering about, collecting seeds.  And huge yellow damsel-fly like bug was waiting for us on the door handle.  Can you dig it?  BUG city.  As in bugging out and calling it even, bugging out and losing your marbles, bugging off because this house for dwarfs and dimensional shamblers just ain’t got it for us no more.

Still, K and I have gotten a few walkies in around the magic lake.  Bats everywhere eating the bugs buzzing our skulls.  We found their lair, and its a perfect spot.  Heating and cooling all in one, water, bugs, all the whole nine yards.  These bats are batty batty batty!  They are getting down, they are rocking the mike, they are eating their faces full of bugs!  Eat them all up yum, dudes and dudettes, we’ll keep walkin’ on and bring ya the summer BBQ livin’ is easy howlaroo.

The cats have been transfered, and are taking the new honeycomb hideout well.  The lack of haunted house doom agrees with them, and how!  New bed, new rest, deep sleep.  I dreamt K and I had climbed out of a sewer-cave, ancient forgotten waterway with a sack full of dimaonds.  Everyone was wanting to know how we did it, where we were.

The option to override vanishing procedure has now expired.

Occupants now have nine days to abandon the haunted house.

The haunted house will automatically vanish in T minus nine days.

All you folks in the DC area who are fans of Count Gore De Vol and looking for something to do this Saturday, here’s a pass-along-the-word for ya.

Yeah, I know this is sudden-death notice.  Get in line for the neck-bite.

What: Documentary Film “Every Other Day is Halloween” by C.W. Prather
When: Saturday, June 27 at 8:20 p.m.
Where: At the American Film Institute Silver Theater in Silver Spring, MD

The Count will be there, along with a bunch of other famous people (whom I don’t know).  There will be costumes and props to gawk at and a cash bar reception for getting tanked.  The Count will pose for pictures and sign autographs.  He’ll also be packing a limited supply of Captain 20 pictures!

Advance tickets should still be available at the AFI Box Office, so check it out yo.

Probably better information too, at the official website.  You know you have to click, The Count compels you!

Moving boxes after boxes out of the haunted house of real-world material.  Extracting this stuff from the compactoid dimensional squeeze of the grounds is an exercise in patience.  The place we’re moving into is welcoming us with new energy freed for use.  So much of our psychic reserves have been used in keeping the ghosts happy and the monsters at arm’s length.  The Chucky style doll stays.

My personal starship patrol skills were needed at a technology in music education event in DC this weekend.  There was a need to keep the photon accelerators running and that meant me tractor beaming people at the right moments to achieve idea fusion.  Bonus round ideas were assimilated by the sensor sweep, and one can’t underestimate the power of intergalactic relations by meeting knowledgeable and committed people in similar fields.  Rock the mike!

Relatives galore coming in to survey the scene.  Word travels fast when there’s a transformation in the ectoplasm of fright night.  Hopefully I can keep my mental field together long enough to accomplish remaining objectives before the haunted house deadline.  When that dimensional rift closes it’s going to be a brand new reality.  Beer and chicken wings for all!

All art projects are on hold, have been on hold for a while.  Those lucky few who have been recipients lucked out.  It’s all static as I haven’t had any time to break out the gear and do any recombinant work.  Fear not, book continues in drastically reduced baking speed, comics on the hopper, and pictures will be restored to this website soon as I can let the superstructure and engine stress points bleed off safely.  My audio show experiments will soon bear fruit, all will be coming up hot pockets of the soul!  Or at least a nice tasty sandwich on a summer meadow’s day.

July 4th will see me and the fergaloid clan shooting off fireworks to chase all the destructoids away and get the spirits poppin’ the fresh dough.  Pizza of Doom will be a happenin’ in, yo ho ho.  Rum punch and slackazoids will be a flowin’.

But for now, face to the floor eating dirt.  It’s still Terminatargh time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, okay.  I’ve not been particularly positive about very many movies, television shows, or music offerings lately.  Time I put myself out there and give an example of what I do like.

I like the Underworld trilogy of movies.  Yeah I said it.

On the surface, these movies are action fantasy junk.  That’s how I went into them.  Vampire: The Masquerade rip-offs with lots of gunfire and p-leather clothing over hot bodies.  Hard to take seriously.

But there’s a message underneath that I think shouldn’t be ignored.  That the old roads are passing away, along with their long standing feuds and grievances, while a new and vital perspective is taking root.  It’s dark realism, with all the horrific 85% death rate violence that implies.  But at the end you have a completely new way of life that demands consideration.

You can ignore all this deeper meaning stuff and enjoy it for what it is.  A lot of phony intrigue surrounded by combat between two sports teams.  Quite frankly, the story doesn’t hold up to a lot of literal and practical considerations.  And I don’t much like stories where the lucky few fight it out for the future of the normal, un-powered people.

You have Underworld, which begins the story, followed by Underworld: Evolution and Underworld: Rise of the Lycans.  The last is a prequel, which closes up loose ends raised in the first two movies.  We go back to the beginning for reflection on what has happened in the first two films.

Spoilers are a-cumin’ in, so ahroo!

In this dark world, unknown to most normal people, a war for supremacy rages between two factions of supernatural creatures in human form.  The vampires, sophisticated aristocrats, fight against werewolves known as Lycans.  The Lycans are street thug barbarians.  So we have a “rich versus poor”, “civilized versus uncivilized” conflict going on.

Selene, the main character, is part of an elite cadre of vampires who hunt the Lycans in the city streets.  She works for Kraven, an arrogant sub-lieutenant acting as the vampire leader while Victor (the big dude vampire leader) is away on sleep vacation in his coffin.

Against her stands Lucian, leader of the Lycans and his sub-lieutenant Raze.  Lucian is looking for a special human who is descended from the original father of the supernatural beings.  His plan is to expose this human to both werewolf and vampire bites, making the human the first hybrid of the two, a being supposedly of immense power.

The Lycans are painted as the bad guys at first (and to be truthful, they aren’t exactly great people), but as the story progresses we learn there is more going on than we presumed.  Victor’s daughter committed the unpardonable sin of falling in love with Lucian, so Victor had her killed.  Lucian is pursuing a grudge against the killer of his lover.  His attempt to locate the special human and create a hybrid is a means to get revenge on Victor and end the war between the two factions.

At first, Selene is the dutiful soldier and faithful surrogate daughter of Victor (who feels some regret at his murder of his daughter, but not enough).  As she discovers more about the feud and her part in it, she starts to side more with the special human and Lucian’s goals.

The special human turns out to be a good-hearted guy named Michael.  He rejects the world of the supernatural creatures, but has little choice but to be a pawn in their game.  I found it refreshing that a guy was the person who needed to be saved and passed around as a plot coupon for once, with Selene as the active agent in the struggle.

Selene and Michael fall in love, of course.  With Lucian’s bite and Selene’s bite, Michael becomes an “abomination”, a hybrid of the two factions with enormous power.  Basically he can whup rear end in a fight.  Together he and Selene kill Victor and send him to blazes.  Meanwhile Kraven flees back to the vampire base.

Next movie.  Selene and Michael are on the run, attempting to find out what is going on in the aftermath.  Presumably with the death of Viktor and maybe because of Lucian’s death there might be reprisals.  Michael is weak from the struggle of the previous movie, and unused to the feeding requirements of his new body.  So even though he is awesome, he’s at half strength for most of the movie–a nice touch to keep things interesting.

The big dude elder vampire with wings (the guy Viktor answered to) awakens from his coffin vacation and chases after them repeatedly, looking for a key that will unlock his brother the ultimate werewolf.  Selene meets up with the father of the supernatural creatures and receives from him his blood power, making her the new mother of all supernatural creatures.

The big dude elder vampire with wings kills father of the supernatural creatures, gets the key, and heads for the tomb of his brother.  With the vampires and Lycans in weakened confusion because of the previous movie, no one will be able to stop the ultimate werewolf from turning most humans into werewolves.

With the support of the father’s network, Michael and Selene take on the ultimate werewolf and the elder vampire in an epic combat.  The two lovers win the fight, and vow to begin a new world of supernatural beings together.  Master vampire and fully awakened hybrid together at last, in love.

Flash back with the final movie.  We learn how the vampires used the Lycans for slave labor as a result of Lucian’s special abilities.  We see how he fell in love with a vampire and how they were betrayed by her father.  The movie sets in motion the actions of Victor that define the past, and lead to the future.

Do I identify with these characters?  Not really.  They’re dark shadows of conscious existence, not something I’d like to be part of.  But I’d be lying if I didn’t feel a strong empathy for them.  Down in the depths of our “Underworld”, our unconscious, supernatural beings struggle for meaning and freedom just as surely as we do.

How did Lucian come about?  Hard to say, but he started the striving for a better world in the dark struggle.  We don’t really know what part the father played in attempting to reconcile the two sides before Selene and Michael came on the scene.  There’s a lot to unravel and unfortunately not all of the movies hold up to scrutiny.

Michael is dragged in and made a part of that world.  There’s something about the conscious world that needs to descend into the underworld to bring light to the depths.  In this world, it appears that once you’re made a supernatural creature you can’t go back to being just mortal.  So there’s no leaving the underworld once you enter.

Perhaps unraveling the vast labyrinth of the underworld isn’t the point exactly, as it’s portrayed in these movies.  What matters is making connections that heal old wounds, start new ways of thinking, and overthrow the closed minds holding back development of thinking.  Violence tends to be the solution here, and as this is dark realism the bodies pile up as the bullets fly.

But I think the definitive moments are when the characters make their choices as to what they will do.  Viktor kills his daughter.  Lucian sacrifices his special place to save the person he loves.  Selene follows her instinct about Michael.  Michael saves Selene from the car crash.

Will the new underworld be different?  Hard to say, but there’s a chance that this time, things will be different.  A change has occurred, something has stirred, and new light dawns in the underworld.

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

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

There’s something there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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