Maria WebsterI’ve known Maria since the day she wandered into my dorm room and hung out, chatting sagely about what I could look forward to as a newbie student.  She’s still that insightful, hard-working, outspoken and charming woman from those days.  Only now she’s more powerful.

She’s had an album for a while. If you’re really lucky you have a copy of one of her bootleg cassettes from back in the day before the internets made music a telepathic experience.  Now she’s got a new song available, and I hear tell there’s more in the hopper to come.

So what is she about and what do you, her listener, do?  Maria sings about relationships using her voice and an acoustic guitar.  She explores intimate and personal experiences, confessing and declaring more to you the listener than she might be willing to admit to herself or those she knows.  You are the privileged stranger, witness to the satisfaction and frustration of her proud, vital, vulnerable self.

Speaking of dragons, there’s another dragon worth mentioning.  The ruby dragon of alchemy, represented by the number nine.  Nine is the highest individual number and therefore representative of the highest degree to which a human being alone may attain.

The symbol of the nine, or 9, is a hovering circle (the zero) with a dangling tail (the one).  The divine zero is about to descend to join the one (the human being) and begin a new level of consciousness.

This can be imagined as the descent of the Holy Ghost or the bringing down of the Holy Grail to the consciousness of a human being, who will now experience a wider awareness.  So too, will the divine, the most high finding fulfillment in the lowly human being the plan that unfolds from infinite mystery.

This is the moment of transformation, of great danger, and unpredictability.  Often we can only use veil-names to hide the contents, lest they become institutionalized by earthly concerns or disappear back into the heights and depths of the unimaginable unknown.

Number nine.  Number Nine.  Number Nine.  The Beatles played with this formula, encompassing the vastness and complete bedlam of existence in a mantra of return.  The number always brings us back to the beginning even as we reach the end.

Nine is fine, nine is naughty.

So what is going on with all this, say you?  Think of it as a wandering in the midst of a great dried out cistern-like structure stretching out to all horizons. Blue skies and arid heat bearing down from a bright sun, while sharing snacks with a gigantasaurus of a sphinx, feet and paws roasting on the baked clay.

One tends to see things out here, hazes of steamy far-off imagery wafting unsteady in the oppressive daylight.  Strange lights reflecting and bending off currents of particles in the superheated air.  I swear, out in this desert of the mind I hear weird noises: dull roars of wind as though there were a tunnel far in the distance, occasionally the crackling titter of granules just beyond sight.

Is there anyone there?

Hard to tell, the brightness makes it hard to see through the visual trickery of an outdoors so spacious one mind isn’t enough to conceive it.  I perceive an increase in the glitter of the lights; they sparkle such that they leap in and out of the air as I move.  The noises might be that of my own body, magnified by the silence of nothingness.

Dang this heat is oppressive.

Summer empties us as surely as winter fills us.  I’m of the mind that there’s a jumping about, a joy to the burning up of emptiness.  The time it takes to wait for an inside spirit to come to our attention.  Most people I imagine grow despondent waiting for their souls to be filled.  Imagine one’s surprise when one is faced with cold rain in the hot desert?  Talk about bizarre, but living it is believing.

I pick up the psychic communicator.  Looks like my friend Alexi scored the job, defeated the robotozoids of torment, sent Crush-em No-thousand to the scrap heap with a fake lightsaber.  He’s at the threshold of his kingdom; it helps to have a horse to power the cart after all!

Also on the Good News sandwich line, Chopper Angel Le Wolf extracting an upgrade from her pesticide commanders for more gold and mead; Going to be able to survive to the next cookie round-up.  Busy training her daughters to fight in the living dead girl olympics on rationed Scooby snacks and a world where princesses get sold out for free.

Bonus round for Vampy Kimbers, expressing the lost dark side as best she can given that living in the sunlight takes it out of her.  Writing, exercising, raising youngsters, working, keeping husband recharged for the day-to-day work spin-cycle and still finding time to re-grow and re-learn psychic limbs held still by decades of invasive programming.

Getting kind of cool now, probably could have packed my rain gear, but who expects the Spanish Inquisition?  Even though that’s all we get.  Hardly expecting to see vaporous mists and gray clouds where a moment ago I was baking to the crisp?  Hey, you know, in this psychic terrain things turn on a dime, crumbs!

As Roseanne Roseannadanna said, “It’s always something.”

I approve.  Rain, shine, it’s a state of mind.  No trees, except I know this is the Valley of Trees.  Yeah, in a desert, which is raining.  Talk about a mystery oasis.

What is turning? This strange cyclical spiraling galaxy inside the barrens of my heart springing forth to leap with explosive lightning rumbles and buzzing, billowing clouds of expanding ruptures in the stale tranquility of nothingness?

Missing my friend and hek-sistah Xtine.  Alexi is off into the big dude final battle of ultra-mech lightsaber duel or die.  Hexe is softly treading inside her marvelous hut and making wondrous treasures which only those who recognize their own bones get to behold.

The other day another miracle swept over me from an unexpected corner.  Knowledge, understanding and healing in a triple powderkeg of true being and passion. Lion and maiden over creepers in balance.   Just like that, all is made clear, and flowering, fruitful release, birds in great number swooping over bridges of thought past the decrepit stumbling we call progress.

Feeding the sphinx from my hand, struggling hard to do this strange impossibility with the respect it takes, when all my dullest senses clutch at me to revert to the cruel and ugly, the default.  Ain’t misbehavin’, but not giving in to the temptation to reject beauty because it closely resembles the big come down.  Back and forth, slack hand on the reins, tight grasp on the reins. Not fully in the driver’s seat when it’s me myself and I.

Done my thing, kept my promise, barely. Now I am to do another thing. This time the task is on the unlived and unaccepted parts of me.  There’s work to do, and I am treading towards the wondrous majesty and fabulous revelation breaking out and bursting outwards from the inside uncounted depths I haven’t ever known until I would.

Yo! Yucky flounder kid! There’s water flowing, get ready for this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vinah’s last vestige of development faded from sight.  The landscape became an undulating terrain of cheap, one-story homes connected by borders of trees and scrub.  Traffic dispersed into wider intervals of encounter.

Wesa exhaled a sigh, tense.  She searched the roadside with brief glances in between the business of steering.

Stara blinked her eyes once, then three times in quick succession.  “Which way to the coast?”

“I’m not sure,” said Wesa. “There’s an intersection off to the side of this road. The map says it goes through some national park forest or something.  IC5 is on the other end.”

“Looks like that’s it.”  Stara gestured towards a side road running at an angle away from the main one.

Wesa put on her signal and slowed down to take the turn.  A dark gray sedan in the rear-view mirror loomed close, slowing as it swooped into a tailgate.  She turned onto the winding road, snapped a glare at the woman driver speeding by.

The trees and brush grew wilder and crowded closer to the side of the road.  The one-story homes disappeared in favor of small fields and old, worn farmhouses.  They passed a campaign sign encouraging participation in an approaching tribal election.

As her eyes drooped, a blank expression took over Stara.

With a sudden rush of gargantuan presence, a forest loomed up out of the hills and turned the light to soft shadows.  A hush absorbed the two girls in the car; their senses dulled and enveloped by a sleepy drowse.

The road wound in a twisting series of curves, rises and descents.  Wesa noted the lack of a rail between her car and a ten foot plummet into a stream gully on one side, and the overgrown sheer slope on the other.  She shifted down and took the turns carefully, fighting the drowse with firm nibbles on the tip of her tongue.

The speakers played a new track of slow and regretful drums.  Stara dozed off into a disassociated state of half-awake dreams.

As the heartfelt refrain began, Wesa turned the music off.  The quiet rhythm of the drive lulled at her; she imagined kicking Julio in the butt and out the door of her room.

The smile on her face turned into pursed lips.  She blinked once, then her eyes swelled with blushing tears.

Wesa opened her mouth and struggled with words.  “Stara, I just had a daydream.”

Her friend jerked awake with a start, “Wha?  What was that?”

“I had this daydream.  I watched this guy riding in a car with some girl.  They were driving to the coast like us.”

Stara rubbed her eyes and said, “You want me to drive?”

Wesa said, “You don’t have a license.  This guy.  He was so sad, I saw that he’d given up hope.  This girl really dug him, but he was like a total buttmunch.”

“Great, a hopeless road.”  Stara cleared her throat and blinked herself awake.

“No, it wasn’t this place.  It was like the trees were telling me something they’d known from way back.  I wanted to tell this guy it was okay, he would be okay.  But he wasn’t listening.”

Stara said, “All sorts of people are like that.  They never listen to anyone when they’re depressed.  Dudes like that draw nurses  from all over—drag them through the mud.”

Wesa said, “Why did I have that daydream?”

“I don’t know.  Maybe you picked up on something that was really strong.  People leave marks on places when their lives get messed up.”

“That must be it,” said Wesa.  “There was this deep, timeless ache to this guy’s feelings.  He kept going on and on through this moonlight darkness, along a never ending road with this girl.  It wasn’t extreme; it was vast and hollow like an endless horizon of sadness.  All that guy could do was fall into it forever.”

Stara hissed.  “Damn, Wesa.  That’s messed up.  You had this just now, wide awake?”

Wesa took a sharp curve slow and easy.  “Totally.”

“This like that stuff you told me about, how as a kid you used to go places in your head?  Talk to people in their minds?”

Wesa made a puzzled face.  “No, not like that.  But kind of.  I never got feelings like this.”

The road straightened out and passed between two waist-high walls of flat, piled rocks.  The trees trended sharply away from the side of the road and evening light returned, bathing the girls in reviving expanses of vision.  Through the trees on the right, a well-tended farmhouse nestled at the foot of a steep hillside.

Stara said, “You sure we’re on the right road?”

Wesa eyed her friend, then huffed.

I’ve heard tell that the force beneath the earth’s surface is like a dragon, and that if one doesn’t use their scientifically engineered tools of reason just right, there is a kick in the trousers.  What will people do when the sulfuric alchemical mistake goes up the drain and bathes the unconscious of the planet in hostile, un-adapted impulses of monstrosity?

Mentation-based living systems are tested to the point of migration or disintegration.  Specialist primates find their commerce-based systems of non-participation eroded to the core meltdown of mindless primitive operational procedure.

At the baseline, it really does come down to the food chakra.  Ingest and excrete, watch Mother Nature show us how it happens on a localized geologic scale.  Her sphincter is letting it blow and we get to watch the capacity push organism tolerance levels to the end of the indicator needle.

The baby-talk that “consumers” are to blame is boring, turn-of-the-century diaper scratch-and-sniff.  The alpha primates of the Hairless Ape chapter of Mammon Intergalactica didn’t give the beta and gamma primates a choice.  There was no town meeting, student gathering or community involvement in how the public would decide to use its resources, or even whether to use them at all. The public was never consulted.

There was no choice because there is no system of participation.  You push a lever every now and then to ratify choices already made for you, through a system that alpha primates dance a poop throw for themselves in the country club at your expense.

The idea that you can just say no to TV and automobiles is more baby-talk by delusional betas and gammas working on the alpha payroll.  The reward cycle of society doesn’t promote alternatives; in order to stop driving you have to exist: A) outside the system, and B) in places where legal ordinances permit you to have things like solar panels.

So while it may be fun and easy to turn one’s ire on fellow beta and gamma primates who “choose” to drive a faux tank and imagine themselves as powerful as their false-idolized weakling princes, it’s ultimately blaming the content and not the context.  It produces late-night comedians who can mock celebrities but not General Electric.

What is the “public” guilty of then?  Who said they were guilty at all?

The alpha primates, the ego-appointed weakling princes of our unconscious projections, are quick to dodge individual responsibility for their mistakes.  They project their own cowardice onto the imagined specter of an unruly mob of irrational public citizens who are really “at fault” for making them commit acts of irresponsibility, arrogance, and childishness.

Mother Nature has come down hard on them with a wallop.  Their relevant toys of in-duh-stry, all out of proportion from human dimensions, are about to have their allowance stripped.  Anyone with sense would do well to step well clear of this catastrophe of infantile dependency and meditate on what it means as a hero to encounter one’s limits.

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

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

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

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

Eegah!

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

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

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

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

Not to mention random life encounters!

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

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

POW!

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

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

Been listening to special instructions and watching interstellar phenomena within the soul.  Training under the patient and wise gaze of Lucerna, Mother Mary’s Personal Assistant.  She keeps nudging me further into the cold waters of trans-personal warrior training.  It’s a side of me I’ve only just now started experiencing and accessing with an inner eye.  There’s a large shadow cast by the cloud over parts of me I never recognized, but the weather has changed and colors are clearer and sharper than I ever would have believed.

Floating around my pillow are a number of texts I’m reading, grab and seek the new game of play.  Reasoning and meditation as making mud-pies in the brain.  Themes emerge along the dream like an ultraviolet glowing cellphone from the beyond giving me the ring-tone of my self in a new looking back.  Seeds are always sprouting just when you thought the land had given up on you.  I picked up the phone even though I was busy and flipped open the communicator to the starship everywhere.  I’m busy so I’m available.

Dreamtime might be overrun with plastic shamans, but they’re an outer characteristic of the inner journey.  We all have to do time with our imagination until it can grow to fill the form we can’t see with our little light.  I’d forgotten about a sizable chunk of my New Age explorations not too long after willingly suffering The Nightmare Maize Of Singular Violation to finally understand what I was missing.  Some things you leave behind in the guiding of the divine back to the outside world.  I do appreciate the Dark Goddess returning my backpack!

I read about the Sioux keeping and releasing of souls, and reflect.  Their ways and understandings are a sound in my being rich with clues, stimulating thoughts of what a dedicated clown might accomplish despite being dazed and befuddled.  The recognition of death as an opportunity for those alive to recognize their sacredness and experience purification beyond our experience.  That to move beyond bodies—created out of the nothingness of unfathomably unlikely chance in time and space—into a larger comprehension of being as a form of non-being is natural and joyous, even though there are tears and pain.

Our dullard senses stumbling with such vast experiences of awareness, perhaps some compassion is in order for our falling down and skinning our tender mental knees and scraping of heartstrings with a rough clasping.  Our helplessness and inadequacy are stunning to those outside time and space, and evoke mercy from the most mysterious of depths; do we not ourselves rush to the side of a stranger as if they were ourselves at unusual moments?  As above, so below, as within, so without.  A mote of fire in the gloaming of our chemical stew of a brain.

I’ve been grieving and mourning, welcoming inside and treasuring, coming to the place where there is the happiness of dawning and dusking inevitable.  In a sense, this long period of overwhelmed underwhelming has been a new idea breaking out of its shell and evoking my response.  Some ecstasies are vast and immeasurable, like the numbing flash of a dunk in cold water.  I can see Molly on a beach with an empty and dripping bucket, laughing.  Yoshie covers her mouth and makes a giggly face.

Hey!

Now for pizza…and margarita shooters!

Sometimes it doesn’t pay to order out.  You still lose a turn and get the beat down.  I’ve been trying to get back into the process of generating new and exciting adventures on the Paulie channel.  Alas, real life has been demanding tribute in the form of everyday banality in the name of mere existence.

Maybe it’s the crummy summer solstice.  The height of the light in which the darkness is reborn and winter begins to regain its strength.  People have just been down.  The gnats and mosquitoes are out in force now and vicious in their quest for eyes and blood.  The weeds are thick and virulent, wide-awake drunk with the power of full-fledged summer tangle.  The humidity and searing heat of the long days drags on and on, bearing down on us with the ripeness of life as surely as the bleakness of cold twilight at the other edge of the scales.

I’ve been trying to get the full PDF of Diamond of Darkness up in the Gimmie Stuff page, but failure seems to have been on an auto-repeat for me and it’s all I can do but stare in horror as my blog posts and other projects twist like tendrils of cat puke in my hands.  Stuff is totally resistant to conscious intentions; I am in a moment of pause.  Come back later KTHXBYE.

World keeps on turning though.  Anybody want a slice?

A gal over at one of my watering holes started talking about plot, mentioning it as a process. I keep seeing plot mentioned in and around the stellar chatter of the interweb system channels, so I figured I’d tackle this one.

Simply stated, plot is “what happens”.

Not to be confused with premise, which is “what it’s about.”

I wonder about the aversion some people have to formulaic plots.  I don’t believe that’s what people object to exactly.

For example, I think of the TV show House, which is the same plot every episode—cranky doctor solves medical mystery despite obstacles.  Even though it’s the same thing every episode and the premise is never actually addressed—it’s better to be an honest jerk than a well-meaning phony—I still see it as an interesting show because it is reliable.

I think what people object to is the use of writer force to override viewer authority.  In other words, bad technique.

Plot, like light, is actually both a wave and a particle. It can be both a thing and a process.  The question is whether we are dealing with prep or improvisation.

Plot emerges from the work through the resolution of situations (character plus setting equals situation).  When it’s a process it arises from the working out of the story.  When it’s a thing it is exerted upon the story as a planned phenomenon.

Both have an underlying structure, a platform in which they emerge on-stage.  Both require practice in order to put on a good show.  Both have strengths and weaknesses it pays to spend time understanding.  Both are legitimate courses of exploration that can be adjusted to fit the project.

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