THUNDERBIRD
There was a dream in 2013 that repeatedly tried to make itself heard. But for months, it would break off before you became conscious of its words. Until the night you stood lucid in this other world. Details merged and became too real. You heard a voice say, "This isn't a dream. This actually occured."
As the scene unfolded, you shrank down to the size you once were at the age of 4 and 3/4. Playing with your brother in a motel's swimming pool while your parents attended an Amway rally, all the other kids were slowly gathered up by their guardians as dinner time crept closer. Your brother said, "C'mon, let's go!" But you wanted to swim some more. So he went back to the motel room while you continued to pretend you were a dolphin or a guppy or a mermaid or a rock, totally submerged.
Finally climbing out of the pool, no one else was there, just you. Then you noticed an old man that looked like Santa Claus coming through the pool gate. He smiled and urged you to follow him into the changing room. You behaved. He lifted up your little body and placed you on a sink, slipping his fingers inbetween your skin and your wet bathing suit.
Pleased with what he saw he smiled some more. Turning you around, he whispered excitedly, "This won't hurt." He spread open your butt cheeks and stuck something inside your private parts that felt warm and squishy. But it did hurt. A lot.
You screamed and cried for him to stop, but he just covered your mouth with his rough hand and kept cramming it in and out.
Delighted with himself, he soon let your body go and it slid down off the sink onto the cold tiled floor. Trickles of blood were wiped away like inconvenient stains. As he calmly walked out the door, you scampered to your feet, ran outside and sat on the hot asphalt of the parking lot, screaming your fucking head off. Rubbing your ass against the blistering concrete, you wanted the heat to peel off all the skin from this place that now felt so gross and mangled and strange.
People walked by, looked down at you curiously but said nothing. You screamed and screamed ,"Mommy! Mommy!! Mommy!!!!" but no one came. A droning voice from somewhere unseen declared in a low monotonous tone, thundering, "Cry all you want, no one is ever gonna come save you."
Hoarse and silent, you sat staring up at the wind blowing through the trees as the sunset sank behind low generic buildings. Stood up eventually, you limped back to room 146 where the rest of your family was waiting.
Opening the door, your mother shrieked, "Where the bloody hell were you?!" and slapped your little reddened face. Numbness set in at that moment. And there it stayed.
Upon waking from this lucid dream, of course you did a fair amount of crying, but more importantly, a question that had always remained unanswered was no longer vague: Why was it that the first time your father sat you in his lap and began grinding against your 6 year old ass did you think, "oh no, not this again"? Your first rape stayed unretrievable behind a thick gray wall of fog, so you never knew how you already knew what sex was.
Clearly this memory had been repressed. Hidden from you so that in the coming years of further abuse, you would somehow not crumble under such tremendous born-to-be-deadened stress. Yes, if this had been known all those years ago, you definitely would not still be alive. And some weird level of gratitude was felt toward your minor saviour brain that it held this secret from you for as long as it did. And that it felt you were old enough now to deal with the truth.
It felt good to be complete, integrated, and happily unhinged. Free from the skepticism that all this shit happened because you deserved it. Nope. It was just a side effect of the disease of living, more or less.
*u can call me ph!*
Showing posts with label lucid dreams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lucid dreams. Show all posts
10.10.2017
7.25.2017
13% [chapter 23]
THE HUNGRY GHOSTS OF BLEAKHAUS
Built by Irish immigrants in 1853, two identical triple story victorian houses were situated at 2429 and next door at 2419 Mission Street near the corner of 20th. A treelined courtyard connected them with a series of smaller rowhouses set behind. A sign above the courtyard's iron gates proclaimed that this was "Catherine's Court".
Archived historical maps of San Francisco denoted the lot at 2429 Mission as "Anna's House" and 2419 as "Catherine's House", the twin O'Conner sisters and original inhabitants. Deeds of ownership never involved the exchange of money. Instead the properties remained gifted within the family, passed down from generation to generation.
The twin houses sat fairly weathered, having survived every natural and manmade disaster over the last 160 years. Constructed of low grade wood lathes and molded plaster, they had a distinctive 16" lean in toward one another. During each earthquake the walls would just wiggle and sway, their weakness being their greatest strength.
Far below modern housing codes, there was no heating, deep layers of paint were peeling, the plumbing was regularly unreliable and old cloth wiring sometimes arced inside the walls. Doorbells had long ago been disconnected. Roofs leaked. Pigeons pooed. Raccoons scuffled. Mice squeaked. Remnants of gaslighting poked out through holes in the walls that went uncapped. Curious ornate iron levers that no longer opened or closed anything rotated with uselessly intricate squeals. Innovative sliding pocket doors stood rusted shut. Hand wrought chandeliers dangled elegantly in disuse, only half lit. But when the late afternoon light shone through her sagging windows, she was still a beautiful beautiful slum.
A beautiful slum to you and to countless other tenants, some of whom had their lives briefly captured on census reports. Such as Theodore Reilly, a watchmaker in 1880 whose hand painted gold entrance sign was still barely visible on the stone front step. And Kate O'Leary, a divorced 43 year old woman who employed herself as a dressmaker in 1890 to some degree of self sufficient success. And the Hanley family who ran a curios and candle shop downstairs in 1900. And maybe even the police officer Thomas Kane who, in 1910, was often shitfaced drunk and terrorizing his wife Sarah and their epileptic teenage son, Thomas Jr. while their temporary lodger, Charles Graves, an unemployed tanner, tried not to get involved.
One day in the autumn of 1994, not long after moving into the front room at 2429, you came home from school resoundingly depressed. Opening your bedroom door with your head hung low, you were assualted by the thought, "i should just hang myself." But this struck you as odd since all of your usual suicidal impulses would shy away from that particular mode of death -- guns, jumping, pills, drowning, bleeding out: yes. Choking or burning: no.
Lifting your gaze you caught a glimpse of a man in haggard 1920s clothing hanging by his neck, the rope taught and swinging from the ceiling. He glared at you with a thick ragged mustache and a disgusted scowl, a dirty black bowler hat plastered to his unwashed disheveled head. In the shock of that moment, he disappeared. But his image would come to haunt you over the years, systematically hijacking every episode of depression with that same thought, "you should just hang yourself."
But you were not alone. Other people from every walk of life and every varying degree of verve would move in, soon become depressed and find themselves fashioning a noose . Mr. Burkhalter, the master tenant, later informed you that over the course of the next 15 years, he had cut down at least 7 of his former roommates to stop them from killing themselves. Their reasoning was always peppered with bouts of amnesia and complaints of an oppressive negative energy from which they could not escape. Until they moved out of that house.
Sadly, after much melodramatic art school agony and hosting many happily chaotic parties in which then unknown bands like the Dandy Warhols played shows in their underwear in your living room, you moved out of 2429 in the spring of 1998.
You went from your huge $260 rent controlled room to living alone in a $600 studio in the Tenderloin that felt too nice for you. Soon, you were living in a non live-in $165 basement cubicle on 16th and Mission. Then you moved into a warehouse around the corner filled with musicians and artists called Pubis Noir.
Litigation meant that you could all live rent-free for a couple years at least. In exchange, you had to walk around the huge hole in the common space where the couch had fallen through the rotting floorboards, ignore the black mold mushrooms sprouting up next to the bathtub, avoid the river of debri and fleas flooding the basement (a.k.a. Mission Creek) and prepare for the dead junkie's body that would be blocking the front door, the only feasible exit.
Every day, soapy bath water would rain down from the residential hotel above. Plastic garbage bags, pvc pipes and buckets would snake around the warehouse making the space look like a scene from the Terry Gilliam film, "Brazil". But life was bearable, marked by fabulously anarchic Noise & Pancakes shows every Sunday afternoon. And for 6 months at a time, a friend would collect your unemployment checks from your first big lay-off and send you these meager funds while you lived low in London, Berlin and Belgium. Good times.
Then eviction came. Another $400 warehouse room sprang up but it soon wilted and died too. So with all the ambitious pride of any aggro 33 year old artist, you moved to New York City and stayed in a room on 139th Street that was a third the size but triple the price.
Still not sure why, but call it what you will ~ destiny, fate, synchronicity, random coincidence, total bollocks ~ but 7 years after leaving 2429 Mission Street, having moved 11 times and going a distance of 32,000 miles, you ended up 6 feet from where you started. Catherine's Court had called you back.
In the spring of 2005, immediately after moving into your new $323 room at 2419 Mission Street, you started having intense lucid dreams. Unlike most lucid dreams that happen within an imaginary landscape, these Bleakhaus dreams always began and ended in exactly the spot where your physical body was sleeping. In them, you'd instantly know you were dreaming, get up out of bed and walk to your bedroom door. But it opened up to a portal that was not entirely pleasant, so turning the doorknob meant swallowing some trepidation and dread. The hallway was a swirling black mass of sadness and timeless resentment, flowing from east to west. It felt like walking under water.
And in the black water you could see so many people from the past whose traumatized emotions held them there, stuck in the riptide.
1984, a frustrated and berated housewife who longed to be with the women she loved overdosed in the kitchen. 1979, a tall blond man in a cowboy hat with a fatal gun shot wound stood in the bathroom. 1877, a starving 10 year old boy by the stairwell begged for some bread. 1816, before the house was built, a group of 6 native Muwekma Ohlone women escaped slavery and ran for their lives but were tracked down by members of their own tribe. Captured and forced to return to the mission, they fought back but were massacred on this hill. In black and white, like an old scratchy film loop, the scene repeated itself endlessly with the lost cries of an unspeakably unjust crime.
In waking life, every late April, the annual arrival of a dark foreboding presence would stalk the hallway, making it nearly impassible to anyone perceptive. You'd stay in your room and pee in a can rather than confront this huge looming shadow until it went away in early May. But in April of 2010 that dark presence became bolder and ventured into your room one day.
Focused on some domestic duty while sitting on your bed, you heard your door swing open and sensed someone skulking around the bend. The air got thick and sticky with ionized threat, then the ghost announced itself with a loud crumbling BOOM. The stereo which was not turned on suddenly sprang to life and began blaring that cd skipping sound. All the lights in the room instantly dimmed, and you heard a man's voice clearly say, "After what's coming, all of this will seem like such a luxury."
Scenes of screaming devastation and infernal fires flashed through your mind. You felt his helplessness as he watched everyone he loved die. And he blamed himself. If he hadn't gone to work that day, he might have been there to save them. It was his fault that his sister, his young wife and his wee child were dead. Towering above you but facing away, his hunched over frame wore dirty work overalls and was burdened by a huge canvas backpack, filled with all the heaviness of his guilt remorse and shame. Another loud BOOM and he was gone. Everything returned to normal.
It didn't take long to piece together that San Francisco's biggest natural disaster happened on April 18th, 1906 and that this man's spirit was still a victim to it.
Events like these prompted a continuous stream of roommates to move in, then quickly leave. Especially if they were sensitive types who could clearly see the ghosts surrounding them. You contacted one of these former roommates named Lucia and relayed this recent appearance to her. She validated that these details were identical to what she had witnessed the previous April.
Reaching out, you needed to find someone who could teach you how to help this greiving man leave the hallway because now you had felt his pain and that overrided any fear. A woman named Crystal Cobra came over one day and showed you the ropes of crossing spirits over.
In preparation for this ritual, you made sure this man knew that you wanted to help him. "It's not your fault. Forgive yourself and let go. Put down that bag and get ready to leave here because your family's waiting for you to join them." Then you played music to calm everything down and serenaded him on his way out.
There was no way to prove that this worked without waiting until the following spring. So you waited. In April of 2011, nothing weird happened. And it felt good, helping someone move on. You trusted this euphoric spiritual gratitude much moreso than the feelings that were conjured up by the unappreciative agendas of the undead.
Keep in mind that these events all occured at times when you were straight, not high, but they did sound crazy enough to drive you back into the arms of drugs where you could be safely numb. Until the next time. But now you had an Open For Business sign above your third eye, so empathy only increased -- regardless of your drug fueled attempts to feel nothing.
Knowing very well what it's like to be overlooked or ignored or belittled, a communal defeat draped over you. Ghosts are people, too. With all the same emotional needs that haunted their living days. Walking around the mission alone in the dark, you could sense the overwhelming pain of everyone in this city who had ever ended their own life. And that was a collective cry you could never hope to repair on that precariously fragile night.
But how would YOU like to be stuck for eternity with no body, screaming out for help? Then whenever anyone hears or sees you, they just run and hide? Or worse yet, use you for amusement to profit in a freak show that's regularly broadcast to self-agrandizing narrow minds?
So you decided to perform one giant Releasing Ritual for every spirit still trapped at Catherine's Court. Months in preparation, it went off quickly and without a hitch. Everyone filed on excitedly to the big caravan in the sky.
Except for those who stayed behind.
The 6 native women were still caught looping in their last tragic moments of struggling to survive. You felt lacking in your ability or rights to move them on from this land, so you sent all relevant information to the Muwekma Ohlone Tribal Council. Perhaps their souls would find peace in hearing prayers spoken in their own language by their own decendants of their own (still unrecognized by the federal government) tribe.
And the hanging man. He resolutely refused to leave. Angry and densely black as ever, his shadow paced up and down your hallway for ages after that. He had some specific need that had not been met yet. But you didn't know what it was. And now, you were tired.
During the last few noise shows at Bleakhaus, other people saw his ghost wandering around and yelped, "Did you see that!?! The shadow of a man just walked across your room!" You non-chalantly replied, "Yeah...he's waiting to be crossed over but...i tried...i dunno what he wants me to do..." People looked at you funny, changed the subject and quickly left the room.
Sinking deeper into depression during the next 2 years, you yelled at his ghost in desperation. "What the fuck do you want from me asshole?!" And after a while, you spent more time getting high and less time caring. Until you got to the point where you started looking up at your painted red glass chandelier, wondering if it would hold your dead body's weight.
"Wait. Hanging? What the Fuck! I'm not actually depressed at all, am I? This is that ghost fucking with me again, isn't it?" To which a chorus of disembodied voices sang out triumphantly, "YES!!!" And your anger at his impetuous invasion of your personal space gave you just enough impetus to get back to work on researching this unknown dickhead's demise.
Online, you found an archive of San Francisco obituaries that dated from the 1870's until the 1950's. Concentrating on the 1920's because of his dated clothing, you began reading through the thousands of entries posted. It was a daunting task. Emotionally taxed after reading the first 700 obituaries, you had to stop and try again tomorrow. It all seemed so pointless, randomly searching for a nameless man but something told you to just keep looking. Somehow, you'd KNOW when you dug up his obit. 3 days and 1200 listings laster, all your hairs stood up on end when you read about the suicide of a 26 year old Mission district resident, John Sinclair.
Deeply in love with his next door neighbor Maggie, she convinced John to murder her husband George so that she and John could be together. She claimed that George was abusive so John stabbed this innocent man to death. Maggie then turned John in. He was found guilty of murder and convicted. Maggie soon remarried someone else and left the city. Abandoned and betrayed, John hung himself in prison.
If you ever thought you knew what betrayal felt like, it was miniscule compared to his story. "I'm sorry... I am so sorry..." was all you said to the ghost of John Sinclair. And then he was gone.
A wave of gratitude, amazement and bewilderment came crashing over you. If emotions are strong enough to bend space and time so that this kind of communication could happen 100 years apart, then all of our emotions deserve respect. Even the dark ones need acknowledgement, just like the rest of us.
Bleakhaus was finally clear. Your job was done.
But it didn't take long for it to start collecting spirits again. 18 months later, your schizophrenic roommate went off his meds and quickly lost his shit. He stopped bathing,
had to urinate constantly and spent every waking moment alone in his little room smoking himself silly until his hallucinations and headbanging and screaming ramblings left everyone else tattered and witless. Kidneys failing, 2 days later, his twin brother went in to check on him, wondering why he was so quiet. He discovered his brother's dead body sitting upright. A rigor mortised fist still clutching his bong. Soft webs of discharge veiled his half open eyes.
3 days later, your dead roommate's face appeared within a whirlwind of confusion and stood hovering in your doorway in the middle of the afternoon. Good ideas and bad smells whipped around him like black sparrows and gray finches. You yelled, "You're dead! Go find your mother!" But the thought of his recently deceased mom just made him sad and lonely. He chose to stay with his living brother who was busy tossing all of his grief and loss and increasing drug binges back into the downward spiral. Carelessly unhinging with every month of nonpaid rent building, the living twin left all other non-lease holding tenants on tenderhooks and wincing.
In the pit of your gut, you knew that if you didn't leave this house, you'd be next. But with nowhere to go and no money to get there, you felt trapped and weak. Eclipses kept coming. And strange things continued happening.
*u can call me ph!*
Built by Irish immigrants in 1853, two identical triple story victorian houses were situated at 2429 and next door at 2419 Mission Street near the corner of 20th. A treelined courtyard connected them with a series of smaller rowhouses set behind. A sign above the courtyard's iron gates proclaimed that this was "Catherine's Court".
Archived historical maps of San Francisco denoted the lot at 2429 Mission as "Anna's House" and 2419 as "Catherine's House", the twin O'Conner sisters and original inhabitants. Deeds of ownership never involved the exchange of money. Instead the properties remained gifted within the family, passed down from generation to generation.
The twin houses sat fairly weathered, having survived every natural and manmade disaster over the last 160 years. Constructed of low grade wood lathes and molded plaster, they had a distinctive 16" lean in toward one another. During each earthquake the walls would just wiggle and sway, their weakness being their greatest strength.
Far below modern housing codes, there was no heating, deep layers of paint were peeling, the plumbing was regularly unreliable and old cloth wiring sometimes arced inside the walls. Doorbells had long ago been disconnected. Roofs leaked. Pigeons pooed. Raccoons scuffled. Mice squeaked. Remnants of gaslighting poked out through holes in the walls that went uncapped. Curious ornate iron levers that no longer opened or closed anything rotated with uselessly intricate squeals. Innovative sliding pocket doors stood rusted shut. Hand wrought chandeliers dangled elegantly in disuse, only half lit. But when the late afternoon light shone through her sagging windows, she was still a beautiful beautiful slum.
A beautiful slum to you and to countless other tenants, some of whom had their lives briefly captured on census reports. Such as Theodore Reilly, a watchmaker in 1880 whose hand painted gold entrance sign was still barely visible on the stone front step. And Kate O'Leary, a divorced 43 year old woman who employed herself as a dressmaker in 1890 to some degree of self sufficient success. And the Hanley family who ran a curios and candle shop downstairs in 1900. And maybe even the police officer Thomas Kane who, in 1910, was often shitfaced drunk and terrorizing his wife Sarah and their epileptic teenage son, Thomas Jr. while their temporary lodger, Charles Graves, an unemployed tanner, tried not to get involved.
One day in the autumn of 1994, not long after moving into the front room at 2429, you came home from school resoundingly depressed. Opening your bedroom door with your head hung low, you were assualted by the thought, "i should just hang myself." But this struck you as odd since all of your usual suicidal impulses would shy away from that particular mode of death -- guns, jumping, pills, drowning, bleeding out: yes. Choking or burning: no.
Lifting your gaze you caught a glimpse of a man in haggard 1920s clothing hanging by his neck, the rope taught and swinging from the ceiling. He glared at you with a thick ragged mustache and a disgusted scowl, a dirty black bowler hat plastered to his unwashed disheveled head. In the shock of that moment, he disappeared. But his image would come to haunt you over the years, systematically hijacking every episode of depression with that same thought, "you should just hang yourself."
But you were not alone. Other people from every walk of life and every varying degree of verve would move in, soon become depressed and find themselves fashioning a noose . Mr. Burkhalter, the master tenant, later informed you that over the course of the next 15 years, he had cut down at least 7 of his former roommates to stop them from killing themselves. Their reasoning was always peppered with bouts of amnesia and complaints of an oppressive negative energy from which they could not escape. Until they moved out of that house.
Sadly, after much melodramatic art school agony and hosting many happily chaotic parties in which then unknown bands like the Dandy Warhols played shows in their underwear in your living room, you moved out of 2429 in the spring of 1998.
You went from your huge $260 rent controlled room to living alone in a $600 studio in the Tenderloin that felt too nice for you. Soon, you were living in a non live-in $165 basement cubicle on 16th and Mission. Then you moved into a warehouse around the corner filled with musicians and artists called Pubis Noir.
Litigation meant that you could all live rent-free for a couple years at least. In exchange, you had to walk around the huge hole in the common space where the couch had fallen through the rotting floorboards, ignore the black mold mushrooms sprouting up next to the bathtub, avoid the river of debri and fleas flooding the basement (a.k.a. Mission Creek) and prepare for the dead junkie's body that would be blocking the front door, the only feasible exit.
Every day, soapy bath water would rain down from the residential hotel above. Plastic garbage bags, pvc pipes and buckets would snake around the warehouse making the space look like a scene from the Terry Gilliam film, "Brazil". But life was bearable, marked by fabulously anarchic Noise & Pancakes shows every Sunday afternoon. And for 6 months at a time, a friend would collect your unemployment checks from your first big lay-off and send you these meager funds while you lived low in London, Berlin and Belgium. Good times.
Then eviction came. Another $400 warehouse room sprang up but it soon wilted and died too. So with all the ambitious pride of any aggro 33 year old artist, you moved to New York City and stayed in a room on 139th Street that was a third the size but triple the price.
Still not sure why, but call it what you will ~ destiny, fate, synchronicity, random coincidence, total bollocks ~ but 7 years after leaving 2429 Mission Street, having moved 11 times and going a distance of 32,000 miles, you ended up 6 feet from where you started. Catherine's Court had called you back.
In the spring of 2005, immediately after moving into your new $323 room at 2419 Mission Street, you started having intense lucid dreams. Unlike most lucid dreams that happen within an imaginary landscape, these Bleakhaus dreams always began and ended in exactly the spot where your physical body was sleeping. In them, you'd instantly know you were dreaming, get up out of bed and walk to your bedroom door. But it opened up to a portal that was not entirely pleasant, so turning the doorknob meant swallowing some trepidation and dread. The hallway was a swirling black mass of sadness and timeless resentment, flowing from east to west. It felt like walking under water.
And in the black water you could see so many people from the past whose traumatized emotions held them there, stuck in the riptide.
1984, a frustrated and berated housewife who longed to be with the women she loved overdosed in the kitchen. 1979, a tall blond man in a cowboy hat with a fatal gun shot wound stood in the bathroom. 1877, a starving 10 year old boy by the stairwell begged for some bread. 1816, before the house was built, a group of 6 native Muwekma Ohlone women escaped slavery and ran for their lives but were tracked down by members of their own tribe. Captured and forced to return to the mission, they fought back but were massacred on this hill. In black and white, like an old scratchy film loop, the scene repeated itself endlessly with the lost cries of an unspeakably unjust crime.
In waking life, every late April, the annual arrival of a dark foreboding presence would stalk the hallway, making it nearly impassible to anyone perceptive. You'd stay in your room and pee in a can rather than confront this huge looming shadow until it went away in early May. But in April of 2010 that dark presence became bolder and ventured into your room one day.
Focused on some domestic duty while sitting on your bed, you heard your door swing open and sensed someone skulking around the bend. The air got thick and sticky with ionized threat, then the ghost announced itself with a loud crumbling BOOM. The stereo which was not turned on suddenly sprang to life and began blaring that cd skipping sound. All the lights in the room instantly dimmed, and you heard a man's voice clearly say, "After what's coming, all of this will seem like such a luxury."
Scenes of screaming devastation and infernal fires flashed through your mind. You felt his helplessness as he watched everyone he loved die. And he blamed himself. If he hadn't gone to work that day, he might have been there to save them. It was his fault that his sister, his young wife and his wee child were dead. Towering above you but facing away, his hunched over frame wore dirty work overalls and was burdened by a huge canvas backpack, filled with all the heaviness of his guilt remorse and shame. Another loud BOOM and he was gone. Everything returned to normal.
It didn't take long to piece together that San Francisco's biggest natural disaster happened on April 18th, 1906 and that this man's spirit was still a victim to it.
Events like these prompted a continuous stream of roommates to move in, then quickly leave. Especially if they were sensitive types who could clearly see the ghosts surrounding them. You contacted one of these former roommates named Lucia and relayed this recent appearance to her. She validated that these details were identical to what she had witnessed the previous April.
Reaching out, you needed to find someone who could teach you how to help this greiving man leave the hallway because now you had felt his pain and that overrided any fear. A woman named Crystal Cobra came over one day and showed you the ropes of crossing spirits over.
In preparation for this ritual, you made sure this man knew that you wanted to help him. "It's not your fault. Forgive yourself and let go. Put down that bag and get ready to leave here because your family's waiting for you to join them." Then you played music to calm everything down and serenaded him on his way out.
There was no way to prove that this worked without waiting until the following spring. So you waited. In April of 2011, nothing weird happened. And it felt good, helping someone move on. You trusted this euphoric spiritual gratitude much moreso than the feelings that were conjured up by the unappreciative agendas of the undead.
Keep in mind that these events all occured at times when you were straight, not high, but they did sound crazy enough to drive you back into the arms of drugs where you could be safely numb. Until the next time. But now you had an Open For Business sign above your third eye, so empathy only increased -- regardless of your drug fueled attempts to feel nothing.
Knowing very well what it's like to be overlooked or ignored or belittled, a communal defeat draped over you. Ghosts are people, too. With all the same emotional needs that haunted their living days. Walking around the mission alone in the dark, you could sense the overwhelming pain of everyone in this city who had ever ended their own life. And that was a collective cry you could never hope to repair on that precariously fragile night.
But how would YOU like to be stuck for eternity with no body, screaming out for help? Then whenever anyone hears or sees you, they just run and hide? Or worse yet, use you for amusement to profit in a freak show that's regularly broadcast to self-agrandizing narrow minds?
So you decided to perform one giant Releasing Ritual for every spirit still trapped at Catherine's Court. Months in preparation, it went off quickly and without a hitch. Everyone filed on excitedly to the big caravan in the sky.
Except for those who stayed behind.
The 6 native women were still caught looping in their last tragic moments of struggling to survive. You felt lacking in your ability or rights to move them on from this land, so you sent all relevant information to the Muwekma Ohlone Tribal Council. Perhaps their souls would find peace in hearing prayers spoken in their own language by their own decendants of their own (still unrecognized by the federal government) tribe.
And the hanging man. He resolutely refused to leave. Angry and densely black as ever, his shadow paced up and down your hallway for ages after that. He had some specific need that had not been met yet. But you didn't know what it was. And now, you were tired.
During the last few noise shows at Bleakhaus, other people saw his ghost wandering around and yelped, "Did you see that!?! The shadow of a man just walked across your room!" You non-chalantly replied, "Yeah...he's waiting to be crossed over but...i tried...i dunno what he wants me to do..." People looked at you funny, changed the subject and quickly left the room.
Sinking deeper into depression during the next 2 years, you yelled at his ghost in desperation. "What the fuck do you want from me asshole?!" And after a while, you spent more time getting high and less time caring. Until you got to the point where you started looking up at your painted red glass chandelier, wondering if it would hold your dead body's weight.
"Wait. Hanging? What the Fuck! I'm not actually depressed at all, am I? This is that ghost fucking with me again, isn't it?" To which a chorus of disembodied voices sang out triumphantly, "YES!!!" And your anger at his impetuous invasion of your personal space gave you just enough impetus to get back to work on researching this unknown dickhead's demise.
Online, you found an archive of San Francisco obituaries that dated from the 1870's until the 1950's. Concentrating on the 1920's because of his dated clothing, you began reading through the thousands of entries posted. It was a daunting task. Emotionally taxed after reading the first 700 obituaries, you had to stop and try again tomorrow. It all seemed so pointless, randomly searching for a nameless man but something told you to just keep looking. Somehow, you'd KNOW when you dug up his obit. 3 days and 1200 listings laster, all your hairs stood up on end when you read about the suicide of a 26 year old Mission district resident, John Sinclair.
Deeply in love with his next door neighbor Maggie, she convinced John to murder her husband George so that she and John could be together. She claimed that George was abusive so John stabbed this innocent man to death. Maggie then turned John in. He was found guilty of murder and convicted. Maggie soon remarried someone else and left the city. Abandoned and betrayed, John hung himself in prison.
If you ever thought you knew what betrayal felt like, it was miniscule compared to his story. "I'm sorry... I am so sorry..." was all you said to the ghost of John Sinclair. And then he was gone.
A wave of gratitude, amazement and bewilderment came crashing over you. If emotions are strong enough to bend space and time so that this kind of communication could happen 100 years apart, then all of our emotions deserve respect. Even the dark ones need acknowledgement, just like the rest of us.
Bleakhaus was finally clear. Your job was done.
But it didn't take long for it to start collecting spirits again. 18 months later, your schizophrenic roommate went off his meds and quickly lost his shit. He stopped bathing,
had to urinate constantly and spent every waking moment alone in his little room smoking himself silly until his hallucinations and headbanging and screaming ramblings left everyone else tattered and witless. Kidneys failing, 2 days later, his twin brother went in to check on him, wondering why he was so quiet. He discovered his brother's dead body sitting upright. A rigor mortised fist still clutching his bong. Soft webs of discharge veiled his half open eyes.
3 days later, your dead roommate's face appeared within a whirlwind of confusion and stood hovering in your doorway in the middle of the afternoon. Good ideas and bad smells whipped around him like black sparrows and gray finches. You yelled, "You're dead! Go find your mother!" But the thought of his recently deceased mom just made him sad and lonely. He chose to stay with his living brother who was busy tossing all of his grief and loss and increasing drug binges back into the downward spiral. Carelessly unhinging with every month of nonpaid rent building, the living twin left all other non-lease holding tenants on tenderhooks and wincing.
In the pit of your gut, you knew that if you didn't leave this house, you'd be next. But with nowhere to go and no money to get there, you felt trapped and weak. Eclipses kept coming. And strange things continued happening.
*u can call me ph!*
8.10.2016
13% [chapter 17]
HAUNTED CLOSETS
While you were still in college at the Art Institute, you flew from San Francisco to Utica, New York to visit your mom and dad during Christmas break. They lived in a beautiful old turn-of-the-century house with white plastered walls, all soft molded corners and black iron cornices. The windows were small and deep, some still retaining their original lead panes. The turreted two story cottage sat on a corner lot like a fairy castle in a Thomas Kincaid painting, embedded in a deep sloping wooded field, home to a raucous murder of crows.
Your parents were in the midst of trying to sell the house because your dad found a better job in Indianapolis and was moving there. But your mother was reluctant to go this time. She'd been teaching yoga classes in town and had developed a healthy sense of financial independence. She'd also grown close to a solid following of students that she didn't want to leave behind. One such student was her secret lover. So your mother stayed at the cottage in Utica while your father lived and worked in Indiana. Insisting that there were simply no offers on the property from any interested buyers, blaming the delay on the housing market, bad timing or whatever else --in this way, your parents' first real separation continued. And your mother finally seemed to come blossoming out of her shell.
Rather suddenly, she came out to you over the phone one day. Claiming she'd always been more attracted to women than to men ever since she was a teenager. You just said, "Okay..." She was so relieved to tell someone, "I knew YOU would understand." And for the first time, she seemed so happy and in love. "Life doesn't even BEGIN until you're 50!" she exclaimed gratuitously.
When you finally met your mom's girlfriend on another short trip to Utica, you definitely caught the spark. She was astonishing, overflowing with a quick wit and a bright eyed vitality. Part of you was truly happy for your mother's authentic joy. But another part of you was completely pissed off that she was, suddenly, so open and caring and warm toward you; sharing her untold stories, calling you all the time, asking your opinion about things, buying you plane tickets to come and visit her inbetween every semester, being there for you, all nonjudgementally -- just because she was now a lesbian. This kind of behavior never occurred before. Or since. And you really didn't give a fuck whether she was straight or gay. Sexual identities never shocked you.You just wanted to feel like your own mother genuinely loved and accepted you, too. But this point has always remained convincingly vague.
But for the short duration of this Christmas visit, your dad was also present, so you agreed to quietly avoid any and all discussions at the dinner table that might leak hints about your mom's newfound lesbianism. Ugh. The burden of secrets that are imposed upon us to keep. Add them to the scapegoat's unwanted heap. Then slap it's ass and hope that it takes away your wax doll guilts before running off the edge of something nonredeemably steep.
You were already bogged down with another secret you did not want; knowing that your father was beaten so severly as a child because his dad was sterile and knew this was not his kid. This secret, shared with you 15 years prior, wasn't revealed to your father by his own half-sister until after their
angry sterile dad was dead. When it was finally found out, he brought his shotgun to the cemetary and unloaded a round of shells into that plot of hallowed ground. Secrets cowards and shrouds, release the hellhounds.
The summer after graduation, after your last spring visit to Utica, a tumor had been found. Within 3 short months, your mom's girlfriend was dead. Brain cancer culled her, this fully functioning, highly intelligent older woman that had just taken you and your mom to a politically invigorating Edward Albee lecture was now instantly stuck bedridden. Losing her vision to a tunnelling darkness, her brain was quickly shutting down. She reached out her arms to everyone standing around her hospital bed and cried, "Why won't any of you help me?! Pull me out of this hole! Please, help me... I'm sinking!" Balking at the starkest futility.
More than a year passed before your mother told you about her girlfriend's death. She just stopped talking to you. As suddenly as she had begun. Soon after that, the cottage was sold and she moved to Indiana to rejoin her husband. Gone back to being the good ol' critical hetero milf. Mourning her lover and her lost self. Crammed back into the brutal closet. Shrinking. Forgetful. Unblest. You cannot even begin to imagine how sunken in run her regrets from doing all the things that were expected of her, being the "weaker" sex.
One stuffy night during that close to the chest stiff upper lip Christmas visit to Utica, you were trying to sleep in the tiny room upstairs while your parents were in their bedroom across the hall. It was freezing cold, yet under the covers you felt feverish and clouded. Burning in discomfort. Sick with unease. You kept slipping in and out of consciousness. Not into dreams but into a thick swampy nightmarish lucidity. The crushing weight on your chest would not stop torturing you and stealing your breath as you lay frozen in sleep paralysis. It felt as if someone was trying to strong arm you into doing their bidding. "GET UP!" it hollered inside your sweaty immobile head. "Go downstairs. Into the kitchen. Open the back door. Grab the axe. Come back up here. And GIVE YOUR PARENTS WHAT THEY REALLY FUCKING DESERVE!!!"
The whole massacre played out, over and over vividly in your mind, as if this horrific scene were trying to convince you of its justifiable rationality. "Just think of how happy you will be once they are gone," the voice coaxed. It took a ton of light innocent resistance and a touch of dispassionate detatched indifference to not give in to this bottomless well of rage and bloodlust. Growing more irritated than scared, you declared impishly at the overbearing manipulative presence, "no. i won't. i won't do it." Perhaps it is a good thing that you're such a stubborn selfish bitch, eh?
The next morning, your mother looked concerned when she saw your pale sleepless face emerge from across the hall. She was dutifully making their bed. As she slid the bedframe to one side to tuck in the sheets, you pointed down to a dark brownish mark on the hardwood floor that was peeking out from under the bed. "Yeah," she said, revealing the whole atrocious width and breadth of the massive pooled stain, "I've tried everything to get it out, but it's too old and too deeply soaked into the wood. I think it might be blood."
Ya think?
But you thought nothing else of that night back then, except to remind yourself that you need to drink more booze and smoke more weed in order to drown out any and all experiences of psychic shit like this cuz you were too busy
trying to be normal, which is really important to most people before they go turning 30.
One huge advantage to age is that the number of fucks you give annually gets peeled away, until you are who you really are the moment you reach your grave. Sometimes it seems as if all those lucid dreams about flying, or altering your space, or learning how to keep still and protect your egglike shell, or increasing your skill for riding those emotional horses is all just practice for leaving this plane and crossing the bridge to the north.
Until you have to come back again. And again, of course. Life is hard, then you die. Death is hard, then you're born.
*u can call me ph!*
While you were still in college at the Art Institute, you flew from San Francisco to Utica, New York to visit your mom and dad during Christmas break. They lived in a beautiful old turn-of-the-century house with white plastered walls, all soft molded corners and black iron cornices. The windows were small and deep, some still retaining their original lead panes. The turreted two story cottage sat on a corner lot like a fairy castle in a Thomas Kincaid painting, embedded in a deep sloping wooded field, home to a raucous murder of crows.
Your parents were in the midst of trying to sell the house because your dad found a better job in Indianapolis and was moving there. But your mother was reluctant to go this time. She'd been teaching yoga classes in town and had developed a healthy sense of financial independence. She'd also grown close to a solid following of students that she didn't want to leave behind. One such student was her secret lover. So your mother stayed at the cottage in Utica while your father lived and worked in Indiana. Insisting that there were simply no offers on the property from any interested buyers, blaming the delay on the housing market, bad timing or whatever else --in this way, your parents' first real separation continued. And your mother finally seemed to come blossoming out of her shell.
Rather suddenly, she came out to you over the phone one day. Claiming she'd always been more attracted to women than to men ever since she was a teenager. You just said, "Okay..." She was so relieved to tell someone, "I knew YOU would understand." And for the first time, she seemed so happy and in love. "Life doesn't even BEGIN until you're 50!" she exclaimed gratuitously.
When you finally met your mom's girlfriend on another short trip to Utica, you definitely caught the spark. She was astonishing, overflowing with a quick wit and a bright eyed vitality. Part of you was truly happy for your mother's authentic joy. But another part of you was completely pissed off that she was, suddenly, so open and caring and warm toward you; sharing her untold stories, calling you all the time, asking your opinion about things, buying you plane tickets to come and visit her inbetween every semester, being there for you, all nonjudgementally -- just because she was now a lesbian. This kind of behavior never occurred before. Or since. And you really didn't give a fuck whether she was straight or gay. Sexual identities never shocked you.You just wanted to feel like your own mother genuinely loved and accepted you, too. But this point has always remained convincingly vague.
But for the short duration of this Christmas visit, your dad was also present, so you agreed to quietly avoid any and all discussions at the dinner table that might leak hints about your mom's newfound lesbianism. Ugh. The burden of secrets that are imposed upon us to keep. Add them to the scapegoat's unwanted heap. Then slap it's ass and hope that it takes away your wax doll guilts before running off the edge of something nonredeemably steep.
You were already bogged down with another secret you did not want; knowing that your father was beaten so severly as a child because his dad was sterile and knew this was not his kid. This secret, shared with you 15 years prior, wasn't revealed to your father by his own half-sister until after their
angry sterile dad was dead. When it was finally found out, he brought his shotgun to the cemetary and unloaded a round of shells into that plot of hallowed ground. Secrets cowards and shrouds, release the hellhounds.
The summer after graduation, after your last spring visit to Utica, a tumor had been found. Within 3 short months, your mom's girlfriend was dead. Brain cancer culled her, this fully functioning, highly intelligent older woman that had just taken you and your mom to a politically invigorating Edward Albee lecture was now instantly stuck bedridden. Losing her vision to a tunnelling darkness, her brain was quickly shutting down. She reached out her arms to everyone standing around her hospital bed and cried, "Why won't any of you help me?! Pull me out of this hole! Please, help me... I'm sinking!" Balking at the starkest futility.
More than a year passed before your mother told you about her girlfriend's death. She just stopped talking to you. As suddenly as she had begun. Soon after that, the cottage was sold and she moved to Indiana to rejoin her husband. Gone back to being the good ol' critical hetero milf. Mourning her lover and her lost self. Crammed back into the brutal closet. Shrinking. Forgetful. Unblest. You cannot even begin to imagine how sunken in run her regrets from doing all the things that were expected of her, being the "weaker" sex.
One stuffy night during that close to the chest stiff upper lip Christmas visit to Utica, you were trying to sleep in the tiny room upstairs while your parents were in their bedroom across the hall. It was freezing cold, yet under the covers you felt feverish and clouded. Burning in discomfort. Sick with unease. You kept slipping in and out of consciousness. Not into dreams but into a thick swampy nightmarish lucidity. The crushing weight on your chest would not stop torturing you and stealing your breath as you lay frozen in sleep paralysis. It felt as if someone was trying to strong arm you into doing their bidding. "GET UP!" it hollered inside your sweaty immobile head. "Go downstairs. Into the kitchen. Open the back door. Grab the axe. Come back up here. And GIVE YOUR PARENTS WHAT THEY REALLY FUCKING DESERVE!!!"
The whole massacre played out, over and over vividly in your mind, as if this horrific scene were trying to convince you of its justifiable rationality. "Just think of how happy you will be once they are gone," the voice coaxed. It took a ton of light innocent resistance and a touch of dispassionate detatched indifference to not give in to this bottomless well of rage and bloodlust. Growing more irritated than scared, you declared impishly at the overbearing manipulative presence, "no. i won't. i won't do it." Perhaps it is a good thing that you're such a stubborn selfish bitch, eh?
The next morning, your mother looked concerned when she saw your pale sleepless face emerge from across the hall. She was dutifully making their bed. As she slid the bedframe to one side to tuck in the sheets, you pointed down to a dark brownish mark on the hardwood floor that was peeking out from under the bed. "Yeah," she said, revealing the whole atrocious width and breadth of the massive pooled stain, "I've tried everything to get it out, but it's too old and too deeply soaked into the wood. I think it might be blood."
Ya think?
But you thought nothing else of that night back then, except to remind yourself that you need to drink more booze and smoke more weed in order to drown out any and all experiences of psychic shit like this cuz you were too busy
trying to be normal, which is really important to most people before they go turning 30.
One huge advantage to age is that the number of fucks you give annually gets peeled away, until you are who you really are the moment you reach your grave. Sometimes it seems as if all those lucid dreams about flying, or altering your space, or learning how to keep still and protect your egglike shell, or increasing your skill for riding those emotional horses is all just practice for leaving this plane and crossing the bridge to the north.
Until you have to come back again. And again, of course. Life is hard, then you die. Death is hard, then you're born.
*u can call me ph!*
13% [chapter 7]
THE 3 FACES: IS THIS A DREAM?
Professional help never helped. Until one autumn day in 1990 when you felt compelled to seek the counsel of a Jungian psychotherapist in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts named Dr. John Huele. Initially, your parents agreed to pay for your weekly visits, relieved that at least you were finally out of their house and living "in squalor" in the big city. But once they received his bill for your first $90/hr session, they did not think your mental health was worth it. Dr. John did however, and asked you how much you could afford to pay without the help of your parents. So you continued seeing him for the next 18 months at the adjusted rate of $15/hr.
Long before the advent of hallucinogenic substances in your life, dreams had always been a place to receive guidance and insight, a place of both secret joys and enormous horrors. Often, it was easier to recall your childhood nightmares than to remember the actual events that took place.
The longest running reoccurring scene began at age 5. The whole family would sit in a small pink tiled bathtub inside a palatial space like a sound stage, always too brightly lit. One by one, they would pass around a plastic orange gun and point it at one of their own eyes. Pulling the trigger loudly sucked that eye out. Then they would all turn to you. Staring, one-eyed. The red hole of their newly exposed occular cavity dripping with bloody severed nerve endings. They'd hand you the gun and pressure you to do the same. Waking up screaming every time, your hands covered your face, guarding your precious double-eyed sight.
Together with Dr. John you moved through these quirky and cruel psychological imaginings, pieceing together an intricate and imposing map of your subconscious landscape. You began to uncover by emotional associations what certain colors, words, sounds, animals, people and places really meant. It was the only type of therapy you felt just as excited to engage in as did the Dr. himself. Whenever you would rattle on about the frustrating things happening in your regular life, he would patiently sit and listen. Inevitably, the words would come, "...and then, i had this dream," at which point, he would excitedly grab his yellow pad and pen and start scribbling down your dream's details like an inspired madman. The two of you would then set about working on the decoding process, slowly adding more elements to the expanding cartography of this emerging new found land.
It was fascinating and sometimes heartbreakingly illuminating. You would always have to take a step back in the presence of this other, higher mind. It would record and playback so many complex issues, effortlessly weaving together a song of solution, so delicate and so simple. You never felt quite qualified to take credit for coming up with these mechanisms for coping. They never seemed entirely yours.
Those sessions enabled you to first conceive of the viable possibility of self-healing through dreams. They birthed the connections your mind made to the infinite sources of healing energy out there in the unknown universe, inside the quantum omnipresent vibrating fields. You're forever indebted to the knowledge gained from Dr. John. You also thanked fuck that Jungian psychoanalysis existed at all. Otherwise, you might have succumbed to your parents wishes that you be committed to a mental institution for being depressed anti-social bipolar defective or whatever. It should come as no surprise then, that when you first heard the song "Institutionalized" by Suicidal Tendencies in 1986, you had found a long loyal friend in punk rock. And, incidently, the more involved you became with Jungian dream journeys into the collective world of ancient archetypes, mythological beasts, and other archaic symbols,the less involved you were with the outrageous consumption of drugs and alcohol in order to deal with the ongoing psychological and socioeconomic trials of anyone trying to stay alive below the poverty line.
Lucid dreams happened sporadically as far back as you can remember. But practicing "dream yoga" almost religiously, you were having sometimes 2 or 3 lucid dreams a night, most often in the form of nightmares. Gradually, you learned how to transform these repetitive haunted terrors. Becomming lucid, you could bolster the courage to take control of your own mind. The nightmares then began to diminish and nearly ceased. Getting to know those Black Dogs that chased you for so many years, you now took ownership of your imagination. You screamed at their snarling, "STOP!" No longer would you run from them. You stood still, commanding them with a pointed finger to "SIT." And they did. Their faces shifted to little grins with tongues dangling and tails began to wag. The Black Diamond Dogs became a crazy bitch's best subconscious friends.
However, for some reason, waking up from these exalted states of consciousness became more difficult. Equal amounts of curiosity and fear caused you to question the nature of reality itself in a much more intensely tactile way, having up to 8 or 9 "false awakenings" after each lucid dream. This was so exasperating that you worried if you would ever really wake up at all. And a part of you started to feel the distinction between real life and the lucid dream waning. Thinner and thinner. The difference was disappearing. It got to be a bit much.
This persistent fear of losing your mind, without the reliable excuse of being fucked up on drugs, induced a sober admiration for the practice and a larger sense of responsibility toward approaching this state of mind with sincerity, not aggression or greed. In return, you discovered many valuable truths within each dream's revealing riddle. It seemed these riddles were coming from, again, a source of higher intelligence you couldn't even begin to understand. Nor could you make any sense of why it would feel your damaged brain was worth receiving the wisdom embedded within these undazzling, but inspired insights.
Insights so hackneyed, yet they stood the test of time. Recalling these unvarnished mantras helped you regain a sense of internal calm while caught in the constant storms of stress and strife. All you had to do was take the time to look, feel and listen...because sometimes, it IS all too much. You get so tired of having to fight nonstop for every single little fucking scrap of some stupid bullshit basic need; like being heard, like being seen, like being treated with the barest thread of common human decency. Not being overlooked or ignored or cut off or pushed aside when waiting in line at the corner store or at a red light. Taking a timeout from society's infantile needs to go inward instead calmed you. It calmed the defeatism that would leak from feeling like the blank faced rusty little cog that amuses itself by squeaking in sync while it's trapped inside this massively malfunctioning male dominated earth raping kindness killing machine.
But this is life in the Natural World; even single-celled organisms have to defend themselves in order to survive. Every living thing is a sentient being, struggling just as hard as you to feel a momentary peace. Every single molecule is capable of reflecting intentions, of resounding vibrations of consciousness. Paying attention to those equally sentient cells involved alongside you in the act of living, breeds compassion and kinship. Insights are then bestowed upon us all when we open ourselves to the auras within empty spaces because they are Not Empty At All.
Put into the context of each individual's map of their own subconscious symbolism, any manner of things can take on new magical meanings, or renew a childlike curiosity with the mysteries of life. And despite society's attempts to carve, cut, shock, tranquilize and otherwise mute different kinds of creative thinking, as a species, we continue to be mystified with the ancient ancestral magic of dreams, with the connection we all have to the collective unconsciousness, with the innocent divinity we keep secret but secretly celebrate inside our sleeping minds as it delights us with it's absurd little insights on the nature of being.
Absurd little insights like "There is no such thing as Winning, there is only Spinning"- a phrase accompanied by an image of the cyclical rotation of the earth that occured while you were, once again, feeling like a total failure and considering suicide.
A song, whose humorous showtuney chorus,"Men are Minor, Waste of Eyeliner," was a response to your frustration with the misogynistic inequality you repeatedly confronted both in your intimate relationships and at work.
Your personal favorite, "If you take lots of small steps to hell, you will end up in hell. If you take lots of small steps toward heaven, you will end up in heaven."
After the more recent addition,"All there is is IS," you found some sense of ease in regard to making big life altering decisions, viewing the consequences of your choices as neither good nor evil, but knowing that no matter what you chose to do, all you would ever have to deal with is exactly what is in front of your face. Every decision therefore forces you to face simply THIS. And this 3rd face then revealed itself to you as a face that is All Faces, yet faceless.
*u can call me ph!*
Professional help never helped. Until one autumn day in 1990 when you felt compelled to seek the counsel of a Jungian psychotherapist in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts named Dr. John Huele. Initially, your parents agreed to pay for your weekly visits, relieved that at least you were finally out of their house and living "in squalor" in the big city. But once they received his bill for your first $90/hr session, they did not think your mental health was worth it. Dr. John did however, and asked you how much you could afford to pay without the help of your parents. So you continued seeing him for the next 18 months at the adjusted rate of $15/hr.
Long before the advent of hallucinogenic substances in your life, dreams had always been a place to receive guidance and insight, a place of both secret joys and enormous horrors. Often, it was easier to recall your childhood nightmares than to remember the actual events that took place.
The longest running reoccurring scene began at age 5. The whole family would sit in a small pink tiled bathtub inside a palatial space like a sound stage, always too brightly lit. One by one, they would pass around a plastic orange gun and point it at one of their own eyes. Pulling the trigger loudly sucked that eye out. Then they would all turn to you. Staring, one-eyed. The red hole of their newly exposed occular cavity dripping with bloody severed nerve endings. They'd hand you the gun and pressure you to do the same. Waking up screaming every time, your hands covered your face, guarding your precious double-eyed sight.
Together with Dr. John you moved through these quirky and cruel psychological imaginings, pieceing together an intricate and imposing map of your subconscious landscape. You began to uncover by emotional associations what certain colors, words, sounds, animals, people and places really meant. It was the only type of therapy you felt just as excited to engage in as did the Dr. himself. Whenever you would rattle on about the frustrating things happening in your regular life, he would patiently sit and listen. Inevitably, the words would come, "...and then, i had this dream," at which point, he would excitedly grab his yellow pad and pen and start scribbling down your dream's details like an inspired madman. The two of you would then set about working on the decoding process, slowly adding more elements to the expanding cartography of this emerging new found land.
It was fascinating and sometimes heartbreakingly illuminating. You would always have to take a step back in the presence of this other, higher mind. It would record and playback so many complex issues, effortlessly weaving together a song of solution, so delicate and so simple. You never felt quite qualified to take credit for coming up with these mechanisms for coping. They never seemed entirely yours.
Those sessions enabled you to first conceive of the viable possibility of self-healing through dreams. They birthed the connections your mind made to the infinite sources of healing energy out there in the unknown universe, inside the quantum omnipresent vibrating fields. You're forever indebted to the knowledge gained from Dr. John. You also thanked fuck that Jungian psychoanalysis existed at all. Otherwise, you might have succumbed to your parents wishes that you be committed to a mental institution for being depressed anti-social bipolar defective or whatever. It should come as no surprise then, that when you first heard the song "Institutionalized" by Suicidal Tendencies in 1986, you had found a long loyal friend in punk rock. And, incidently, the more involved you became with Jungian dream journeys into the collective world of ancient archetypes, mythological beasts, and other archaic symbols,the less involved you were with the outrageous consumption of drugs and alcohol in order to deal with the ongoing psychological and socioeconomic trials of anyone trying to stay alive below the poverty line.
Lucid dreams happened sporadically as far back as you can remember. But practicing "dream yoga" almost religiously, you were having sometimes 2 or 3 lucid dreams a night, most often in the form of nightmares. Gradually, you learned how to transform these repetitive haunted terrors. Becomming lucid, you could bolster the courage to take control of your own mind. The nightmares then began to diminish and nearly ceased. Getting to know those Black Dogs that chased you for so many years, you now took ownership of your imagination. You screamed at their snarling, "STOP!" No longer would you run from them. You stood still, commanding them with a pointed finger to "SIT." And they did. Their faces shifted to little grins with tongues dangling and tails began to wag. The Black Diamond Dogs became a crazy bitch's best subconscious friends.
However, for some reason, waking up from these exalted states of consciousness became more difficult. Equal amounts of curiosity and fear caused you to question the nature of reality itself in a much more intensely tactile way, having up to 8 or 9 "false awakenings" after each lucid dream. This was so exasperating that you worried if you would ever really wake up at all. And a part of you started to feel the distinction between real life and the lucid dream waning. Thinner and thinner. The difference was disappearing. It got to be a bit much.
This persistent fear of losing your mind, without the reliable excuse of being fucked up on drugs, induced a sober admiration for the practice and a larger sense of responsibility toward approaching this state of mind with sincerity, not aggression or greed. In return, you discovered many valuable truths within each dream's revealing riddle. It seemed these riddles were coming from, again, a source of higher intelligence you couldn't even begin to understand. Nor could you make any sense of why it would feel your damaged brain was worth receiving the wisdom embedded within these undazzling, but inspired insights.
Insights so hackneyed, yet they stood the test of time. Recalling these unvarnished mantras helped you regain a sense of internal calm while caught in the constant storms of stress and strife. All you had to do was take the time to look, feel and listen...because sometimes, it IS all too much. You get so tired of having to fight nonstop for every single little fucking scrap of some stupid bullshit basic need; like being heard, like being seen, like being treated with the barest thread of common human decency. Not being overlooked or ignored or cut off or pushed aside when waiting in line at the corner store or at a red light. Taking a timeout from society's infantile needs to go inward instead calmed you. It calmed the defeatism that would leak from feeling like the blank faced rusty little cog that amuses itself by squeaking in sync while it's trapped inside this massively malfunctioning male dominated earth raping kindness killing machine.
But this is life in the Natural World; even single-celled organisms have to defend themselves in order to survive. Every living thing is a sentient being, struggling just as hard as you to feel a momentary peace. Every single molecule is capable of reflecting intentions, of resounding vibrations of consciousness. Paying attention to those equally sentient cells involved alongside you in the act of living, breeds compassion and kinship. Insights are then bestowed upon us all when we open ourselves to the auras within empty spaces because they are Not Empty At All.
Put into the context of each individual's map of their own subconscious symbolism, any manner of things can take on new magical meanings, or renew a childlike curiosity with the mysteries of life. And despite society's attempts to carve, cut, shock, tranquilize and otherwise mute different kinds of creative thinking, as a species, we continue to be mystified with the ancient ancestral magic of dreams, with the connection we all have to the collective unconsciousness, with the innocent divinity we keep secret but secretly celebrate inside our sleeping minds as it delights us with it's absurd little insights on the nature of being.
Absurd little insights like "There is no such thing as Winning, there is only Spinning"- a phrase accompanied by an image of the cyclical rotation of the earth that occured while you were, once again, feeling like a total failure and considering suicide.
A song, whose humorous showtuney chorus,"Men are Minor, Waste of Eyeliner," was a response to your frustration with the misogynistic inequality you repeatedly confronted both in your intimate relationships and at work.
Your personal favorite, "If you take lots of small steps to hell, you will end up in hell. If you take lots of small steps toward heaven, you will end up in heaven."
After the more recent addition,"All there is is IS," you found some sense of ease in regard to making big life altering decisions, viewing the consequences of your choices as neither good nor evil, but knowing that no matter what you chose to do, all you would ever have to deal with is exactly what is in front of your face. Every decision therefore forces you to face simply THIS. And this 3rd face then revealed itself to you as a face that is All Faces, yet faceless.
*u can call me ph!*
7.05.2016
13% [chapter 16]
TRUKLIFE
In May 2007, as a last desperate attempt to revive your sputtering relationship, you and Evan stopped doing drugs and drove a rented 16 foot moving truck from San Francisco to Chicago, delivering his sister's furniture to where she now lived. Armed with 2 weeks free from work, an old school Nikon camera and rolls upon rolls of 35mm film, you went the long way around. Avoiding all major highways, it came as a complete surprise to stumble upon one static and decaying town after another. All those bustling hubs that once thrived from the railroad traffic that steadily flowed through til the 1930's, but got choked off by interstate highways, slowly subsided and died. You took hundreds of photos portraying the sad beautiful things life had left behind.
Fords with open suicide doors ditched in dry deer tick fields encrusted with snakes and rust. Dandelions and ivy sprouted up through bathtub drainplugs. Bedsprings clung to plastic bags blowing in the breeze. Windmills missing most blades still turned with a squeak. Schoolhouses buckled under warped belltowers that won't ring. Potbelly stoves stood more solidly than the homes they were once warming. Swifts and swallows nested in a hand painted nursery. Owls guarded proudly marked depots where trains no longer came. Rodents undermined an efficient bank office filing system. Pigeons cooed and pooped all over an empty factory lunchroom. Dark crooked barns, leaning at a frail 45 degrees, were propped up with feeble sticks to combat the inevitable sag of gravity.
Arriving in Portland, Oregon one rainy Monday night, being in an urban environment made both you and Evan want to get high. To quell the drug cravings, you instead got wicked drunk pretty quick at a little bar on the north side. Usually, this doesn't work and only makes the cravings worse. But for some reason, it distracted you from going out on the prowl just long enough this time. Staggering back to where you had parked, you both decided it would be easier to pass out in the back of the truck than to slovenly drive to some cheap motel that was nowhere near in booze-goggled sight.
It was freezing cold. Evan lit the propane gas stove and camping lanterns, turning up their hissing blue glows as high as they would go. You tugged out a long couch from under a pile of boxes. He rolled down the back door and yanked up a bunch of moving blankets. Collapsing there together, curled up for warmth, Evan commented, "We might die of asphyxiation if we leave the gas on all night." You slurred, "So what...at least I'll die happy." "Me too," he replied.
As grim as it might sound, that was one of the most intimate and romantic moments of your life -- facing such a silly demise together. After so much hard lined loss had dredged up all your disappointed desires, this gentle surrender to death was a sweet little delight. In the morning when you both woke, you collectively sighed, "Oh well, we're still alive," and smiled. Rolling up the back door invited the bird songs and dew drops and rising sun's light to come in. Full on. Hangover bright.
While pulled off onto a dirt road somewhere outside Missoula, Montana, Evan was putting another pot of coffee onto the stove. You sat on the couch, smoking a cigarette, looking out past the rolled up door to the lolling yellow ochre expanse of open prairie. Pale violet peaks teased it's distant edges. Endless and abrupt. Sustaining winds whispered and hummed. Pink clouds drifted down. Waist high grasses swayed and bent, swishing like a woman walking in a long tafetta dress. Taking a snapshot of Evan against this backdrop, you said, "I could live my whole life like this." He answered, "Yep." Then you took a long clean deep breath.
This idea of living in a housetruck was neither new nor novel.
You first considered it a future possibility when you were still a kid in the late 70's, during one of the many long drives your restless parents took across the country to attend Amway conventions. Another one of their attempts to succeed at building a pyramid scheme American Dream of materialistic prosperity. But you noticed that while on these road trips, there was a consistent absence of the violence and abuse that was so common during periods of housebound stagnation.
Maybe it was being in motion that made attitudes shift. Or the limitless light in the big round sky stretching over wide carved out canyons. Or the acerbic serenity of change itself that smoothed the behavioral snags into well-contained conduct. No one knows, but these motorhome memories were happy and golden-hued for everyone in your entirely damaged family.
While traveling through Europe in your early 30's, you befriended a photographer in Ghent named Wim. He lived in a converted 20 foot freezer truck he called Babu. He drove Babu all over the place. From his home town in Belgium to Ireland, Croatia, Russia, Mongolia, Morocco and back, always taking pictures of the people he'd met along the way.
One such image held your gaze, spellbound. It was a black and white portrait of a handsome middle-aged woman sitting on the wooden steps at the door of her vividly decorated caravan. Wearing a thick sweater, rain boots, and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, her long dark hair was pulled back into a loose bun, but riotous strands broke free and were blowing in the breeze. From a hook under the stairs hung an empty bucket. At her feet sat a muddy mutt, smiling up at the camera playfully. She did not smile but stared off to the left, deep in thought, a thousand kilometers beyond the lens. You could sense that the reality of her life was not easy. Yet this picture sang a song of raw liberation, a lament of redemption. Perhaps society had exiled her to the bitter margins, but she exuded a contented resilience, a defiant inner strength. Inspired, you could see yourself living well like this woman. Solitude, animals and nature are your most trustworthy all-weather companions, too.
More than a decade later, during the autumn of 2011, you got the chance to revisit Wim and his housetruck in Belgium. He was now married with a 4 year old daughter, a black cat and a large comfortable RV in tow. Babu functioned as the "guest house" in which you gratefully spent a week living simply. You took to it immediately. Like a fish inside a duck to water.
The housetruck's shower was in need of some plumbing repairs. Early one October morning, you could no longer bear your own ripe stench. You didn't want to wake up Wim and his family next door in the RV. So with a clean towel and a full gallon jug, you walked out into the woods beyond the industrial lot where you were all parked next to a friend's circus caravans restoration and repair shop.
Dumping water over your weary body, the invigorating icy coldness made you gasp for breath. Swabbing soap around in the roguest spots, rapidly rinsing, gasping again and dancing like a spaz, you quickly dried off. Clamouring back up into the warmth of Babu, you whipped on some clean clothes, that, by comparison, smelled almost heavenly.
Then you sat down and smoked a cigarrette on the stoop, checking out the updated status of the sunrise. With wet hair on your warm head, foggy wisps of vapor trailed off to join the haze of dawn's discreet ascent. You couldn't remember the last time you felt so alive. So quiet inside. Or so clean, emotionally. Although you were still hopelessly mired in the cross-continental smuggling embrace of an ether-soaked amphetamine addiction and global alcoholism, here, in this hidden back lot, you were cloaked with invisibility for at least a week. Free in the anonymity. Somewhere so much closer to safe.
9 days later, you were walking down a London street toward Victoria Station to ride the tube to Heathrow and board the plane back to San Francisco. You heard the startling sound of a pack of mad dogs barking orders behind you. "Dump the drugs!" your intuition distinctly heard them say. Weird, but ok.
So you took a quick detour into a local pub next to the Eurolines bus station and ordered a cup of coffee and a glass of cognac. Locking yourself in a toilet stall, one of the few places you ever felt unsurveilled, you methodically did line after countless line, devouring all of the substances you had left in your possession. So much so, you felt gluttonous and nauseated half way through. But waste not, want not. You couldn't bring yourself to throw away perfectly good drugs. Spread out over a cd cover of "The Fountain" soundtrack, each powdery pile that got injested slowly revealed more of the mesmerizing image on the cd cover beneath. The words that appeared there, "Death Is The Road To Awe" would be imprinted indelibly upon your memory for the rest of your at-risk life. You had no idea you were still capable of getting this stupidly Whoa Hey Goofy Magic Mountain high. Oh holy shit. Hold on tight.
Immediately upon arriving at the airport's security checkpoint, one of the uniformed guards pointed you out in line. As if to say, "She's mine!" Every square inch of your baggage was manhandled, scanned and rescanned, sniffed, rubbed down and rifled through for such a long time that you would now have to run impossibly fast in order to make it to your gate before departure time. They even confiscated your box of matches. You complained that you had a stop over in Chicago and would want to smoke a butt after the long flight. The officer snarled and threw down a single match. You bellowed, "I said, CHICAGO! It's called 'The Windy City' for a reason! Wanna gimme more matches, please?!" She acquiesced politely to your request. You were now allowed 2 matches but nothing on which to strike them. Dismissed. Next!
In the ensuing funnel of chaos and on the verge of a panic attack, 3 separate strangers empathized with your obvious plight and gently said reassuringly, "It's going to be alright," at each heaving pause while waiting for the next disasterously overcrowded shuttle car or at the bottom of every compressed escalator line. After being run through the vigorous gauntlet of official friskings, you took off without grabbing your wallet which held your passport inside. Somehow, it arrived before you did at your departure terminal. You didn't even realize you'd left it behind. "Oh, THANK FUCK!" you screamed as the smirking airline employee shoved it into your sweaty palms just as you were slipping through the swiftly closing gate.
Running onto the plane, you were so exasperated you thought you might vomit, have a heart attack or just faint. But none of these things happened. The stewardess held your shaky shoulders steady, gave you a glass of water and showed your toxin soaked body to it's assigned seat. As soon as you'd buckled yourself in, you threw the soft blue complimentary blanket over your head and began quietly sobbing like a little child. Not due to any invasive anger, but because you were too overwhelmed with gratitude.
Gratitude for the dogs that warned you to get rid of your stash. Gratitude for the completely unexpected kindness that came from those 3 strangers each time you nearly lost the plot during your mad dash. Gratitude for those who had returned your wallet and passport back to you in time. Gratitude for the airline staff who recognized but did not ridicule your messy distressing display of anti-ennui. Gratitude for all the choices you had made, even the ones
disguised as mistakes, which were now easier to define between the voluptuous bookends of a decade. Although those decisions had born hardships, they also lit the way to this self-sufficient life in which you were now wed to music and art, not breeding more resentful spite.
Saf, another old friend from Ghent, had commented on this devotion to creativity you were still engaged in when he said,"I can't keep up with you, crazy." Ten years ago, he was too self-conscious to stand up in front of people and sing the songs he was writing back then. You bombarded him with encouragement, saying, "Fuck Them, Saf! Do it anyway cuz one day, yer gonna be dead. And so will they. So who gives a fuck!?" He recorded his first album that summer and was now one of Belgium's most celebrated performers, "The Flemish Tom Waits". Gratitude that, even though Saf never acknowleded this or said thank you, here was real proof that one person's kind words could make an actual difference in another person's trajectory. Recompensed and respected, words now became something so much closer to sacred.
And gratitude for this melting pocketful of Belgian chocolates that you were now gobbling down and offering to the Indian man beside you. Because, when you removed the blanket from your swollen tear stained face, he looked worried about sitting so close to your highly charged emotional state. This was your way of telling him, "It's ok. I'm ok." He shook his head side to side, smiling, and relaxed back into his window seat.
And then came that shifting lift from asphalt to air, held again in Ariel's arms, on tenderhooks but holding it mostly together, swimming through space, peacefully sighing, "Everything's gonna be ok...everything's ok...it's all alright."
*u can call me ph!*
In May 2007, as a last desperate attempt to revive your sputtering relationship, you and Evan stopped doing drugs and drove a rented 16 foot moving truck from San Francisco to Chicago, delivering his sister's furniture to where she now lived. Armed with 2 weeks free from work, an old school Nikon camera and rolls upon rolls of 35mm film, you went the long way around. Avoiding all major highways, it came as a complete surprise to stumble upon one static and decaying town after another. All those bustling hubs that once thrived from the railroad traffic that steadily flowed through til the 1930's, but got choked off by interstate highways, slowly subsided and died. You took hundreds of photos portraying the sad beautiful things life had left behind.
Fords with open suicide doors ditched in dry deer tick fields encrusted with snakes and rust. Dandelions and ivy sprouted up through bathtub drainplugs. Bedsprings clung to plastic bags blowing in the breeze. Windmills missing most blades still turned with a squeak. Schoolhouses buckled under warped belltowers that won't ring. Potbelly stoves stood more solidly than the homes they were once warming. Swifts and swallows nested in a hand painted nursery. Owls guarded proudly marked depots where trains no longer came. Rodents undermined an efficient bank office filing system. Pigeons cooed and pooped all over an empty factory lunchroom. Dark crooked barns, leaning at a frail 45 degrees, were propped up with feeble sticks to combat the inevitable sag of gravity.
Arriving in Portland, Oregon one rainy Monday night, being in an urban environment made both you and Evan want to get high. To quell the drug cravings, you instead got wicked drunk pretty quick at a little bar on the north side. Usually, this doesn't work and only makes the cravings worse. But for some reason, it distracted you from going out on the prowl just long enough this time. Staggering back to where you had parked, you both decided it would be easier to pass out in the back of the truck than to slovenly drive to some cheap motel that was nowhere near in booze-goggled sight.
It was freezing cold. Evan lit the propane gas stove and camping lanterns, turning up their hissing blue glows as high as they would go. You tugged out a long couch from under a pile of boxes. He rolled down the back door and yanked up a bunch of moving blankets. Collapsing there together, curled up for warmth, Evan commented, "We might die of asphyxiation if we leave the gas on all night." You slurred, "So what...at least I'll die happy." "Me too," he replied.
As grim as it might sound, that was one of the most intimate and romantic moments of your life -- facing such a silly demise together. After so much hard lined loss had dredged up all your disappointed desires, this gentle surrender to death was a sweet little delight. In the morning when you both woke, you collectively sighed, "Oh well, we're still alive," and smiled. Rolling up the back door invited the bird songs and dew drops and rising sun's light to come in. Full on. Hangover bright.
While pulled off onto a dirt road somewhere outside Missoula, Montana, Evan was putting another pot of coffee onto the stove. You sat on the couch, smoking a cigarette, looking out past the rolled up door to the lolling yellow ochre expanse of open prairie. Pale violet peaks teased it's distant edges. Endless and abrupt. Sustaining winds whispered and hummed. Pink clouds drifted down. Waist high grasses swayed and bent, swishing like a woman walking in a long tafetta dress. Taking a snapshot of Evan against this backdrop, you said, "I could live my whole life like this." He answered, "Yep." Then you took a long clean deep breath.
This idea of living in a housetruck was neither new nor novel.
You first considered it a future possibility when you were still a kid in the late 70's, during one of the many long drives your restless parents took across the country to attend Amway conventions. Another one of their attempts to succeed at building a pyramid scheme American Dream of materialistic prosperity. But you noticed that while on these road trips, there was a consistent absence of the violence and abuse that was so common during periods of housebound stagnation.
Maybe it was being in motion that made attitudes shift. Or the limitless light in the big round sky stretching over wide carved out canyons. Or the acerbic serenity of change itself that smoothed the behavioral snags into well-contained conduct. No one knows, but these motorhome memories were happy and golden-hued for everyone in your entirely damaged family.
While traveling through Europe in your early 30's, you befriended a photographer in Ghent named Wim. He lived in a converted 20 foot freezer truck he called Babu. He drove Babu all over the place. From his home town in Belgium to Ireland, Croatia, Russia, Mongolia, Morocco and back, always taking pictures of the people he'd met along the way.
One such image held your gaze, spellbound. It was a black and white portrait of a handsome middle-aged woman sitting on the wooden steps at the door of her vividly decorated caravan. Wearing a thick sweater, rain boots, and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, her long dark hair was pulled back into a loose bun, but riotous strands broke free and were blowing in the breeze. From a hook under the stairs hung an empty bucket. At her feet sat a muddy mutt, smiling up at the camera playfully. She did not smile but stared off to the left, deep in thought, a thousand kilometers beyond the lens. You could sense that the reality of her life was not easy. Yet this picture sang a song of raw liberation, a lament of redemption. Perhaps society had exiled her to the bitter margins, but she exuded a contented resilience, a defiant inner strength. Inspired, you could see yourself living well like this woman. Solitude, animals and nature are your most trustworthy all-weather companions, too.
More than a decade later, during the autumn of 2011, you got the chance to revisit Wim and his housetruck in Belgium. He was now married with a 4 year old daughter, a black cat and a large comfortable RV in tow. Babu functioned as the "guest house" in which you gratefully spent a week living simply. You took to it immediately. Like a fish inside a duck to water.
The housetruck's shower was in need of some plumbing repairs. Early one October morning, you could no longer bear your own ripe stench. You didn't want to wake up Wim and his family next door in the RV. So with a clean towel and a full gallon jug, you walked out into the woods beyond the industrial lot where you were all parked next to a friend's circus caravans restoration and repair shop.
Dumping water over your weary body, the invigorating icy coldness made you gasp for breath. Swabbing soap around in the roguest spots, rapidly rinsing, gasping again and dancing like a spaz, you quickly dried off. Clamouring back up into the warmth of Babu, you whipped on some clean clothes, that, by comparison, smelled almost heavenly.
Then you sat down and smoked a cigarrette on the stoop, checking out the updated status of the sunrise. With wet hair on your warm head, foggy wisps of vapor trailed off to join the haze of dawn's discreet ascent. You couldn't remember the last time you felt so alive. So quiet inside. Or so clean, emotionally. Although you were still hopelessly mired in the cross-continental smuggling embrace of an ether-soaked amphetamine addiction and global alcoholism, here, in this hidden back lot, you were cloaked with invisibility for at least a week. Free in the anonymity. Somewhere so much closer to safe.
9 days later, you were walking down a London street toward Victoria Station to ride the tube to Heathrow and board the plane back to San Francisco. You heard the startling sound of a pack of mad dogs barking orders behind you. "Dump the drugs!" your intuition distinctly heard them say. Weird, but ok.
So you took a quick detour into a local pub next to the Eurolines bus station and ordered a cup of coffee and a glass of cognac. Locking yourself in a toilet stall, one of the few places you ever felt unsurveilled, you methodically did line after countless line, devouring all of the substances you had left in your possession. So much so, you felt gluttonous and nauseated half way through. But waste not, want not. You couldn't bring yourself to throw away perfectly good drugs. Spread out over a cd cover of "The Fountain" soundtrack, each powdery pile that got injested slowly revealed more of the mesmerizing image on the cd cover beneath. The words that appeared there, "Death Is The Road To Awe" would be imprinted indelibly upon your memory for the rest of your at-risk life. You had no idea you were still capable of getting this stupidly Whoa Hey Goofy Magic Mountain high. Oh holy shit. Hold on tight.
Immediately upon arriving at the airport's security checkpoint, one of the uniformed guards pointed you out in line. As if to say, "She's mine!" Every square inch of your baggage was manhandled, scanned and rescanned, sniffed, rubbed down and rifled through for such a long time that you would now have to run impossibly fast in order to make it to your gate before departure time. They even confiscated your box of matches. You complained that you had a stop over in Chicago and would want to smoke a butt after the long flight. The officer snarled and threw down a single match. You bellowed, "I said, CHICAGO! It's called 'The Windy City' for a reason! Wanna gimme more matches, please?!" She acquiesced politely to your request. You were now allowed 2 matches but nothing on which to strike them. Dismissed. Next!
In the ensuing funnel of chaos and on the verge of a panic attack, 3 separate strangers empathized with your obvious plight and gently said reassuringly, "It's going to be alright," at each heaving pause while waiting for the next disasterously overcrowded shuttle car or at the bottom of every compressed escalator line. After being run through the vigorous gauntlet of official friskings, you took off without grabbing your wallet which held your passport inside. Somehow, it arrived before you did at your departure terminal. You didn't even realize you'd left it behind. "Oh, THANK FUCK!" you screamed as the smirking airline employee shoved it into your sweaty palms just as you were slipping through the swiftly closing gate.
Running onto the plane, you were so exasperated you thought you might vomit, have a heart attack or just faint. But none of these things happened. The stewardess held your shaky shoulders steady, gave you a glass of water and showed your toxin soaked body to it's assigned seat. As soon as you'd buckled yourself in, you threw the soft blue complimentary blanket over your head and began quietly sobbing like a little child. Not due to any invasive anger, but because you were too overwhelmed with gratitude.
Gratitude for the dogs that warned you to get rid of your stash. Gratitude for the completely unexpected kindness that came from those 3 strangers each time you nearly lost the plot during your mad dash. Gratitude for those who had returned your wallet and passport back to you in time. Gratitude for the airline staff who recognized but did not ridicule your messy distressing display of anti-ennui. Gratitude for all the choices you had made, even the ones
disguised as mistakes, which were now easier to define between the voluptuous bookends of a decade. Although those decisions had born hardships, they also lit the way to this self-sufficient life in which you were now wed to music and art, not breeding more resentful spite.
Saf, another old friend from Ghent, had commented on this devotion to creativity you were still engaged in when he said,"I can't keep up with you, crazy." Ten years ago, he was too self-conscious to stand up in front of people and sing the songs he was writing back then. You bombarded him with encouragement, saying, "Fuck Them, Saf! Do it anyway cuz one day, yer gonna be dead. And so will they. So who gives a fuck!?" He recorded his first album that summer and was now one of Belgium's most celebrated performers, "The Flemish Tom Waits". Gratitude that, even though Saf never acknowleded this or said thank you, here was real proof that one person's kind words could make an actual difference in another person's trajectory. Recompensed and respected, words now became something so much closer to sacred.
And gratitude for this melting pocketful of Belgian chocolates that you were now gobbling down and offering to the Indian man beside you. Because, when you removed the blanket from your swollen tear stained face, he looked worried about sitting so close to your highly charged emotional state. This was your way of telling him, "It's ok. I'm ok." He shook his head side to side, smiling, and relaxed back into his window seat.
And then came that shifting lift from asphalt to air, held again in Ariel's arms, on tenderhooks but holding it mostly together, swimming through space, peacefully sighing, "Everything's gonna be ok...everything's ok...it's all alright."
*u can call me ph!*
11.08.2014
FASNACHT & THE BODY'S NEED FOR DARKNESS
i've been searching for the origin of why, for as long as i can remember, every february of every year, i would experience a severe deathwishism. a pattern i had not noticed until 3 years ago when it got so severe, that a month-long mantra began:
just hold on just breathe
do not hit yourself in the head with that hammer
this feeling will pass
just hold on
do nothing rash
on march 1st
remember february last
i had remained convinced that it was yet another childhood trauma that might never be discovered. i even asked my parents about chronological events, which of course, produced no results.
this morning, while watching a documentary about jung called "the wisdom of dreams", there was a scene of basel fasnacht, the yearly festival in switzerland, germany and some parts of the netherlands in which the city turns out all of it's street lights and for 3 days celebrates the end of winter and the coming of spring. predating christianity, it has been incorporated into the week before lent when all pantries are emptied of sweets and fats and consumed in feast - similar to fat tuesday, also called dirty thursday. most other festivals during the year are male-dominated, but fasnacht enters as the woman in black, she is allowed to kiss every man she sees and cuts the ties of all businessmen that cross her path as this is her celebration of the non-workday. it is also imbued with open mockery of political figures, and allows people to speak truths while wearing hilarious and grotesque masks and marching through a flurry of confetti to the cocaphany of drums and piccolos wailing.
it was a scene of the fantastically painted lanterns, spinning from out of the dark alleyways at the festival's start time of 4am that triggered this memory of The Something That Caused Deathwish February, for without an annual celebration of Truth, Liberation, Free Speech, Mockery Thru Art and The Small Beautiful Light In The Sea Of Total Darkness that Fasnacht represents during the first four years of my life, i sensed subconsciously that something was not getting expressed or released at this time, and would then, like clockwork, turn inward and attempt to self-destruct.
in the same way that the disneyland ride "it's a small world" seems boring to an adult, to a child in the darkness, trapped in a small boat, surrounded by strange faces singing funny and frightening songs, it is a nightmare...and nightmares are the key to awakening lucid dreams, those dreams then bring you to the doorway of the higher mind, whereupon the realm of collective consciousness is discovered.
*u can call me ph!*
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