Human Health Quiz

 Human Health Quiz
G7-31
Period 3

1. True or False: The slower the vibration the denser the matter, thus our physical bodies are seemingly solid compared to our subtler bodies due to slower vibration.

2. The second body is composed of three layers. List these layers.

3. It is at this level that we process life force energy for use at the physical level. 
A. the Etheric Double.
B. the Casual Body
C. LV37

4. The aspect of our energy field that contains the patterns which will determine who we essentially are.
A. the “seed body”
B. the casual body
C. none of the above
D. both A. and B.

5. True or False: “Sludge” is the slang for the nutritional paste administered to patients in the LV37 trials.

6. LV37 was administered to terminal test subjects with which of the following conditions;
A. Multiple Myeloma
B. Lymphoma
C. Aids
D. None of the above
E. All of the above
F. A. and B.

7. True or False: Chakras are energy passageways between layers of the Aura.

8. The agent responsible for initiating and maintaining the chemical processes that regulate growth, aging, and the body’s ability to heal, as well as metabolism, stamina, and mood is:

A. The endocrine system
B. Chakras
C. The Sludge
D. the LV37 synthetic
E. None of the above
F. All of the above

9. True or False: The escape of patients from the LV37 trails led to the Synthetic Pandemic of 2021.

10. The Synthetic Pandemic is also known as:

A. The Nano Plague
B. The Zombie Apocalypse
C. The Living Death
D. All of the above
E. None of the above.
F. Both A. and C only.
G. Both A. and B only.

11. In what year did Dr. Fredrick Mann initiate the LV37 trials?

12. True or false: Dr. Annie Hovus was the first human to be accidentally infected with LV37 when she was bitten by 5 year old patient Gita Nughali during the clinical trial.

13. Chakras connect to the functions of the physical body via the endocrine glands. What role did the introduction of LV37 play in opening the gateway to world 42?

14. List three ways one may become infected with LV37.

15. The remedy for LV37 is:

A. Dismemberment
B. Napalm
C. Auric Attunement
D. The Sludge
E. None of the above.
F. All of the above.
G. Both A and B.

16. Humans infected with LV37 perish within:
A. 48 hours
B. 2-4 weeks
C. Never
D. Those infected with LV37 are no longer human.
E. None of the above
F. A. C. and D only.

17. Name the etheric points that connect the various subtle layers of the human energy field.

Red Riding Hood

The fire. I watched them dance about the fire and feast at tables of stone. Another time I burned a wolf alive as it leapt to taste my flesh. The time I am thinking of is now, when I run through the darkness towards the fire's distant glimmer, hammer in hand.
There was a time before now when I was the mother, when I was the Grandmother, and each time I have also been a daughter and that comes before as well. When the world ended there was still life, still fire, still iron and steel, but time was no more.
I remember being daughter running through the ruins, my breath burning in my lungs as the wolf followed. Being hunted then, a girl no more than 9 or 10, as boney as the starving beast that followed.
Running, I flung a pail full of stinking petrol upon my snarling assailant. The bucket clattered upon the concrete as the wolf made an angry sound, slowed only a little.
Through the doorways whose doors had burned out at the end of time, into the kitchen, and climbing up the heavy wire shelving to the very top where I tuck my legs close to my body and fumble open the match box and strike. Teeth gnashing the air as the canine leaps towards me. That hiss as the match catches and I flick it at the dark body rising towards me, twisting airborne and suddenly igniting with a whoosh.
Is it really silent then in Grandmother's kitchen upon the top shelf of the rack watching a wolf burn alive? Or was it a noise too terrible to remember?
It was my mother who killed that first wolf with a bucket of petrol and a match. It was my daughter. It was myself. It was only a little wolf, but I was only a little girl. A girl who ran not away from, but towards wolves ever after.
I watched their fires from a distance. Who am I? Mother. Daughter. Grandmother. Their fires burn against the black and I see them dancing, casting long shadows against the wall. I watch them eat at stone tables built before the end of time. The heat can almost reach me, even from so far.
Just the sight of distant flame can be hearth to me for one moment as my soul reaches cold hands towards the light. It reminds me of civilization, Grandmother’s house, mother's heart beat, father's beard.
But I turn away from it eventually, as I must. Their halls are not mine, and people can be worse than wolves.
That was another time. Now I am thinking about now, the moment before the end of time, the fires that scorch the world and send people into holes like rabbits. The fire that burns in our bones and makes us sick even after the light is gone. The fire that will twist through generations of wolves making them taller and  mightier. It will run its fingers through our minds even when it seems to have forgotten our bodies, the fire that burns deep, kissing the center of creation.
Sometimes I remember being a star, great, great, Grandmother. Sometimes I stare at the alpha through crosshairs, holding my breath, squeezing the trigger. My footprints dot the snowy plains. I dye their white coats red and make a heavy hooded cloak. They know me among the ruins. Word has spread of the wolf killer.
Many of these people don’t remember the time before the end of time. This is the world as it has always been to them. Sometimes I wear the red cloak of fur made by my mother and track the wolf that killed her. Sometimes I am the fire at the end of the world swallowing itself.
The fire. I watched them dance about the fire and feast at tables of stone. Another time I burned a wolf alive as it leapt to taste my flesh. The time I am thinking of is now, when I run through the darkness towards the fire's distant glimmer, hammer in hand. This is the weapon that is left to me after I met with the wolves who were men.
I am running ahead, daughters, mothers, Grandmothers left behind me. I am running towards the fires that may be the end of the world. I am running towards the wolves.

Magick

It doesn’t hurt to see something new.
What about finding magic right here? In the woman in the white hoodie who seems to come up from out of the sea and hurries past the post office? In a little boy asking his father why there’s ham in his breakfast sandwich? In the hat that blew down the street, as if in the hands of phantoms, always just out of reach of the woman who chased it?
How about these scratches in the metal window frames? Looking through these windows reminds me of looking through the window of the train, the Pacific Coast Surfliner, seeing the waves through glass. Here the windows are covered in a film of dried salt spray.

What about the music? It’s  sultry rock, reminiscent of the Velvet Underground, probably something new, but slowly rocking, fuzzy, half dreamed music. Without it there is the whir of an espresso machine, the titanic hum of an old refrigeration unit.

The wind rattled all night, I was awake before I was ready, sinuses distressed by the pollen explosion called April. Rain, wind, sun, rain, sun; a conspiracy for the propagation of flowers.
In my dream the scientists lowered the lights and sang like dwarves about Terence McKenna and the deep dark expanse of space.
Then suddenly I’m here and it seems clear that this scene isn’t meant for me. I should be lighting candles and performing secret rituals behind black curtains. Whatever possessed me to attempt to balance a hot beverage and a netbook on a small round table, badly balanced on the tiles? Maybe the same thing that took the woman’s hat…

The wind! It blew me off course in the night and here I am in Pacifica, California.
Where did my train car go? I never was in one. It was a space ship and the OTHER was on the loose. I led my sister to the 24th deck were the scientists were working away on theoretical problems. I explained what was happening.
“There is an alien on the loose. It looks like…” I struggle to describe it, to remember it, “like a crayfish sort of. Well, it will lodge itself on your face and lay eggs inside of you and later the offspring will explode out of your stomach.” 
The scientists, at first disbelieving, now appear frightened. I indicate that they should cover their mouths with their hands, and under no circumstance hang their heads over the edge of the bed to look underneath. I have a pencil with which I intend to stab the thing if I see it.

“It could be anywhere at this point.”
Everyone looks anxiously around the room.
“But don’t worry,” I comfort them, “I have this.”
I indicate the pencil,
“I’ll protect you but you have to come up with a plan. You have to think of a way we can contain an area to keep it out, then a way for us to kill it.”

Earlier, I was fleeing its presence and was separated from my team. We were in the midst of taking action in accordance with our plan. I saw my team leader Cam go one way and I went another. The elevator doors opened and another Cam came towards me, I turned to see if Cam number one saw Cam number two coming.

“Cam!” “I called, “It’s you! It’s you from the future!”
But Cam from the future was in a hurry and couldn’t wait for Cam number one.
She grabbed my shoulders.
“Listen to me, it’s not going to work. You have to try something different!”
Then she had to rush away, into another glowing portal of light.
That was when I decided to consult the scientists.

“This scone isn’t as biscuity as I would like. Is the coffee cake the same price?” I ask.
“It’s less.” she tells me.
“Well, I don’t care, I’d rather have coffee cake.”
We make the trade and she gives me back seventy five cents. What am I doing here?
There’s a little boy playing Jenga at one of the round tables. An orange balloon is stuck to the window under the words pastries, cookies, cakes. Outside the waves look swollen, the sea is choppy.

What about the music? It’s  sultry rock, reminiscent of the Velvet Underground, probably something new, but slowly rocking, fuzzy, half dreamed music. Without it there is the whir of an espresso machine, the titanic hum of an old refrigeration unit.
What about finding magic right here? In the woman in the white hoodie who seems to come up from out of the sea and hurries past the post office? In a little boy asking his father why there’s ham in his breakfast sandwich? In the hat that blew down the street, as if in the hands of phantoms, always just out of reach of the woman who chased it?
It doesn’t hurt to see something new.

Object Petite A

These are the things I don’t want to know anymore, don’t want to say anymore, don’t want to write.  By then it was called the city of Lake Elsinore, but when I arrived in 1986 at the age of five, it was only a town. I’ve been trying to run away from the pain so that I’ll behave like a good citizen. Anything I can do now to pretend it wasn’t me, a little Holly Golightly, phantom without a past. Or, I could let the wound bleed the stories that I don’t want to belong to, like one of the cards that paints the roses red. Summer faded but we remained. We attempted to perform magic rituals using packets of salt and a plastic knife in the back room by the time clock. Even then I wished to be undone, to unravel like the fibers of a rope and become straw.

I recognize that those sweetest of dreams are not of people or events that truly were, but of those that never quite were and never will be. Along with some of my clothes and shoes the package contained an envelope filled with letters and mini cassettes. Recognizing this makes it no easier to say farewell to ghosts. They linger. The mini cassettes were of him talking as he wandered around the town alone. The hotel room was dark, the curtains were drawn and it must have been night outside. It was perhaps a place of perpetual night just as we were those who are ever young.Vampiric dreams to savage the frail reality of the waking world.

It was a weekday. Maybe a Friday. He was strumming his guitar while I poured over the loose pages of the manuscript, looking for gaps, figuring where to take up the telling. It felt good to be sitting next to Alan in the sun with naked legs, trees and ravines and dirt turnouts rushing by. A town with just four stop signs located at the intersection of Central and Lakeshore. Trying to run away from the pain so that I’ll behave. I wondered if he’d ever gotten my letter, but I didn’t ask. It was written on notebook paper with a blue pen and I was continuing it. I saw him then, but I didn‘t know him. I was careful not to touch him so as not to disturb him in any way lest he should vanish once more. He was here now, that was good enough.

Even then I wished to be undone, to unravel like the fibers of a rope and  become straw. I was taking up the text I had left behind, writing my manifesto. After reading one of these I sent him a note from the concession stand that read, “Michael John Sarver, you are so damned good I think I want to have your children.” We attempted to perform magic rituals using packets of salt and a plastic knife in the back room by the time clock. A wild empty place filled with mystery, mountains, and sun baked hills beyond which lakes lie hidden among spruce and yarrow. That was all that I wanted, everything I was reaching for. To be clean of the Born Again Christians and the anonymous alcoholics and the dusty shoeless prostitutes of Grand Ave.

He said,
“This is so surreal, it’s like an alternate reality, and this is my dog and we’re together.”
I laughed appreciatively,
“Yeah.”
The desert with its wide-open vistas, spider-like Manzanita, and unperturbed sky in faded blue.  Some things cannot last, very simply because they are not real. Mirages. Hallucinations. Some fevered madness. Harsh lights, bad smells, and I was injured on entry; the doctor gave me two black eyes when he reached in and twisted me around. I was almost there with the primordial man that is my companion in the dream world.

I was strong and eager and curious despite the circumstances. I couldn’t tell which answer it was, whether he wanted me to be like a sister, or a lover, but it didn’t matter. After all the other kids my age returned to school I was still there popping corn and sweeping floors, and tearing tickets because I had graduated early. Fluid got into my lungs. People handled me through rubber gloves and I was surrounded by Plexiglas or some such material. Furnishings were simple and sparse. The room had an art deco feel. There was a yellow orange quality to the light, and maroon carpet or drapes or bed covers. Some lands lay barren forever waiting for their fisher king.

You know snow globes? How there’s a little figure or a little town trapped inside and you can never touch it and it can never touch you? By then it was called the city of Lake Elsinore. Look there, see the widow sneaking out by the river, smuggling babies and guns and tobacco out of the wasteland? He was one of the cards. I worked in concessions. One night I had a terrifying experience of sleep paralysis. Like all bullies he was scared. Mostly he was scared for me. The carpet was warm and soft, the acoustics were likewise muted, it was dim, and my parents' garments hung around me like curtains or banners, a pleasant array of patterns and colors. High up on the shelves there were strange objects for me to examine in that moment of evacuation and quite contemplation.

Or let the wound bleed. I had the feeling that if they knew what I knew they’d agree, that eventually they’d come around and see that there was no use in doing things their way. If I ran across the stars, skipping from one to another like sparkling stones jutting from a black river, would you run with me? Would you view with wide-eyed wonderment the secret chambers beneath the current of life while I sing my body electric? I know you would. I have become a ghost, the silent center of the vortex. The stories whirl around me. I dart a hand out and grab them, plucking multicolored carp from the whirl pool, making their stories mine.

He also demanded that I read two books: "Dianetics" so that I could learn to control myself and Einstein’s "Theory of the Universe" so that I would see reality’s shabby skeleton. A cover up. A blind spot. I am the secret thing I can not even say to myself, that which motivates all of my existence. I am the unutterable thing externalized. Is this what it means to be a woman? To always sense your worth in the attention granted you by men? All that he was communicating to me was fear. I try to think of what the opposite of that would have been. The real story. At the center. The thing that never quite gets said. The door that can’t be opened. To simulate the force of a shot fired, he’d shove me backwards so I could practice bracing myself.

He was always saying that he wanted me to be free, but I had hardly ever been free. Unperturbed sky in faded blue.  Some things cannot last very simply because they are not real. Even then I wished to be undone, to unravel like the fibers of a rope and become straw.  He walked to his mother’s home on Case St. where he was living and shot himself in the head. And in the moments when I was, I came hurtling
towards other bodies, a brilliant flaming star that they quickly caught and held, determined to keep the heat for themselves. He had a way of laughing after mentioning things that hurt. Phrases like, “That dog was my best friend.’ or ‘It broke my heart, you know?’ would be punctuated with soft laughter that seemed to come rocking out of his body.

“He was a cocker spaniel too, he looked just like this one.”
The window was rolled down blowing my hair a little so that the dog could sniff the mountain air. It was an imaginary place in an imaginary time. Wild, empty, filled with mystery. Mountains, sun baked hills, lakes hidden among spruce and yarrow. That was all that I wanted, everything I was reaching for. When I arrived in 1986 at the age of five it was only a town. I recognize that those sweetest of dreams are not of people or events that truly were, but of those that never quite were and never will be. I am only a sound caught in the throat. I am no one. No longer a character in any story that can be told. Inexpressible. A mirage. Some fevered madness. It was written on notebook paper with a blue pen and I was continuing it. The real story, at the center. That thing that never quite gets said.

Walker on White

All the birdies sing for me because I am a golden child born of winter morning and an endless spring of the heart.
Do you see her long flowing robes of silver, the sterling furs, the crown of antlers? My mother the wild wood has come down to dance for my birthday and silver moons shiver off her undulating belly, rams frolic at her heels, foxes lick her finger tips and prance into the hollows of ancient trees.
They have music in their cars, I think, and I smile imagining all the lonely people listening to music while they drive. I imagine Oberon noticing their music and then I realize that they are music, that the highway, the sea, the trees, the entire globe and everything shimmering on its skin is music.
What God knows or cares that we call them cars and we believe we are hurrying to important things in them?
No God knows or cares, or no God that I would see worthy of admiration.
The Lingua? Let them take the words from my brain and scatter them like crumbs for the birds. Blue birds, black birds, doves, sparrows let them feed on the remains of a psychotic break as the language bleeds from the artifice formerly known as myself and the Ligua dies and I cease to exist.
Will this be my birthday mother, when you touch my face with long pale fingers and I go black eyed to the mulch and white worms? Will I dance and sing ecstatic as moon eyed coyotes tremble faun-like and drink the dew from your lashes? Will grasshoppers make of me a dress for their bodies and wear me wherever they go? Will I dream animal dreams under a velvety blanket of darkness, the sun setting orange and pink over my brow?
Music in the pulse, in the breath, in the teeth, music without words scattered across the universe in the pulsing of white stars.
I am pushing up delicate green tendrils of life, unnamed, daughter of unnamable. We are all united here in the kingdom of light and dark, dancing our dance.
Do you see her long hair flying like pale streamers to tangle with moths reaching for the moon's pale fire? Do you see her eyes glittering as dark pools where deer lower their heads to drink? Do you see her thus etched out in shapes loaned by the usurper demiurge? Or can you see what I see with eyes like burrows prying into the womb where silky rabbits dream?
I remember human and I laugh. I laugh at hands and eyes and shit, always at shit.
The Sabbath is then over, as my head comes back together and I know the meanings of the sounds that carve a world in my nervous system. Always forgetting what we were and are and will again be only to remember it again when Lingua is once more toppled from his throne.
Does the chick return to the egg? Of course. Capitulate. Fall away, I command it, fall away like leaves of gold and umber from the stark white bodies of trees, oh Lingua.
Come winter bleak, dear winter. I am a walker on the white, two faced, undying shape shifter. A golden child born of a winter morning and an eternal spring of the heart.
Cup my waters in your hand and touch them to your lips if you would join us in the kingdom forever. And on my right hand sits brother Michael and on the left Uriel, for about me flames the pentagram and in its center stands the six rayed star.
Etched in the lego of our entrapment, but building freely. Cracking the world's shell and building it again.
I will return. But which is the coming and which is the going is not mine to know.

Sixteen Below

He tells me of the first time he met Allen Ginsberg. He was a young man, an independent reporter from New York come to Boulder Co. to interview Ginsberg about a planned act of civil disobedience. There was a factory there where the triggers for the Atom bomb were being manufactured. Ginsberg planned to sit on the railroad tracks thus preventing the train from reaching the factory.

My friend follows Ginsberg into a house, his mind racing with thoughts about the other man's homosexuality, asking himself if he could really say no if Ginsberg wanted to have sex. The first thing he sees upon entering the house is a woman giving a man a blow job.
Ginsberg is oblivious. It takes him a moment to realize that something is going on. When he does, he merely says, “Oh, lets go upstairs.”
Upstairs my friend sits on Ginsberg's bed beside him. His heart is pounding. In addition to concerns over sexuality, his mind is embroiled in the matter of the first question and what his peers at the radio station back in New York will think.

“Mr. Ginsberg,” my friend begins.
“Call me Allen.”
“How do you reject nuclear madness?” my friend blurts the question out spasmodically.
“I don’t reject anything.” Ginsberg tells him. “I’ve come here to make love to plutonium, to sit on the railroad tracks and be connected to it, to be connected to everything.”
Ginsberg suggest that they do some free associative poetry spinning. Gazing out the window at an empty curbside he lays the moment on my friend. All of this, along with the rest of the conversation, changes my friend's life.

He tells me this, and he tells me that he has never told the story in quite this way to anyone before. He has mentioned interviewing Ginsberg, he has mentioned having the recording in a box somewhere.
He has never had this moment before. This moment is new, unique to us, we two who are reflections of one another, who create with words our identities from the fabric of fear, the fear of being.
We sit in silence and look into one another's eyes, dissolving for a moment our creation, our creation of the world and the other to inhabit it, the other to speak to, the other to wonder at, the other to fear and to love.

We don’t know why this is possible, this silence between us. It allows my friend to tell me his story in this particular way for the first time and the only time.
We could try to recreate it, but it will never be the same. We will never be the same two people on the same day in the same place, daring to press against the veil of fear. Daring to speak and be heard. Daring to listen and accept everything.

Barbarians Are Coming

The end of the world came and went and nothing perceptible changed. We stood around rubbing our eyes and blinking on a bright winter morning a week later asking each other how our end of the world was.
Josh, the honey guy as I thought of him, was wearing a pair of blue gloves with detachable mitten tips. These little caps were peeled back so he could work his digits and in each fist he held a jar of honey, a silent offer of trade. I told him how Lydia, who worked for the Bavarian Bakery, and I made music and danced with a church of ravers in a building like an old castle in Oakland. He nodded and told me that he attended three different solstice ceremonies in San Francisco, the last occurring at a beach in the Sunset district. My turn to nod.

We had all been here a week ago, a day after the twenty first, while a rainstorm raged all around us. As far as we could tell, that was the sum of the apocalypse, a cold heavy rain and a wind that threw canopies over backwards and tore their aluminum legs in half like a starving yeti mangling some black eyed Bhutanese doe.
We all huddled in our individual camps, by cars or trucks, and waved to each other through the tempest but couldn’t speak. Inside the back of a big white Cargo truck I was standing huddled with Sing and Backtaur by the portable tandori. We had hooked this and the steam table up to a propane tank  right inside the truck's cargo hold. Whenever some brave soul skittered across the parking lot under an umbrella I shouted:
“Samosas! One dollar!”
Often my shout drew them to us like a lighthouse beacon and they shivered below us, faces peering up over the mammoth truck's tail gate awaiting a cup of hot chai and some steaming curry.
In the moments when the storm was most violent we felt it battering the truck and fairly cringed looking at each other with wide eyes of amazement. Then Sing would laugh his pure, rich laughter and I would murmur:
“What a wind!”

Now and then the storm would tire itself out and be still. Then the birds came out and somehow found Sing, who always remembers to share the bounty of India Gourmet with the littlest market patrons. He threw his customary handfuls of basmati rice seasoned with cardamom pods to them. More birds than I had ever seen at the market came to the feast,  multicolored varieties; black with red wings, black with beady yellow eyes, tiny brown and black sparrows, larger brown speckled specimens with long yellow beaks,  lumbering midnight hued crows, side by side in a temporary truce, all gobbling up the offer with urgency.

“They are hungry.” Sing boomed with his deep musical voice, “They can’t get their breakfast in the storm.” He threw them more and more rice, a tall man with a jolly belly, a white beard, red turban, and big glittering brown eyes, a Sikh Santa of the birds.

So it rained, but the world was still there a few days later when the clouds blew away and we could come out and check.  We were disappointed, let's not dance around this point, we Americans born in America. We clearly wanted something to happen, probably different things depending upon each person's particular background. Flying saucers full of Mayans, or Jesus with laser eyes, or a spontaneous psychedelic awakening to free us from our petty and deeply artificial consumer culture.
We wanted to stare the grim reaper in the eyes in a way that was never possible in a society where children are told to close their eyes and step over the bodies of their massacred peers, where we are only permitted to see death once it has been washed and painted and put in a box lined with satin, where we are assured that our nation is the mightiest and will never fall so that what we really fear is an unbroken and monotonous horizon whereupon we will never see the outlines of approaching barbarians.

We hoped for a reprieve from the unending sameness and safety and guilt inducing comfort and might. We longed for something real.

I  think that secretly many of us held on to hope until New Year's Day. We let ourselves get excited again on the eve of December 30, fingers crossed for the twins, death and rebirth. Then we woke up and the sun was still shining. Is still shining.
But Americans will never give up. Even our elders were running like lemmings towards our artificially imposed fiscal cliff, seeking to plunge ourselves and the world into an economic down spiral, only turning back at the last possible moment.
Many others will no doubt arrive in public buildings with semiautomatic rifles in the coming months. We are a suicidal nation. It would be too difficult to admit that we are sick  and make changes. Much easier to set the world on fire so that we will never have to admit our shortcomings.

Or maybe change is here, fast and invisible, in the embracing of the artificial. Maybe we are saying goodbye to our earthy roots and our old social and moral codes as we somersault blindly into the heart of our techno creations without regret.
Our children will be the future, not our flesh and blood offspring, but our spawn  of micro chips and liquid crystal. The change may be here and we are simply blind to it as a mother is blind to the inch by inch growth of a tot she sees every day. Each morning it appears to be the same child and yet it is transforming right under mother's nose. In 20 years mother will be obsolete, all that the child needs of her it carries already within itself, in the software and hardware she provided. The child will spread its wings and fly and mother will be both a cast off shell and a voice within.

A death and a rebirth. All that we hoped for but dared not admit to ourselves. The other from within, the ultimate barbarian on the horizon.

Anything You Have Held

Ronnie was a gymnast. That’s how they met and that’s also the story of how music became a part of Dennis. 
He says that anything that you have held holds you.
They were in ninth grade when they met and had no social options at the time for expressing the depth of their love. It was a love affair nonetheless. Ronnie taught Dennis to sing and play drums and Dennis taught Ronnie to fight. He was like a perfectly chiseled Greek statue and would do a hand stand on a signal light on 42nd street in Manhattan if you asked him to. He was beautiful and that beauty drew attention, jealousy, and resentment. Boys who perhaps felt that same attraction to Ronnie that Dennis felt but wanted to stop it sought peace by punishing the beauty of that face with their fists. So Dennis taught Ronnie to fight.

Ronnie took Dennis to a club to listen to music. They were the only white kids in a black jazz club. Dennis worried a little but Ronnie said:
“Listen to the music.”
And he did. After a while Ronnie was invited up onto the stage to play. Sublime moment for the kid too young to get into the club to be on the stage.

In college Ronnie fell in love with a beautiful woman. Her face was severely deformed, she had three fingers on each hand, but like Ronnie she was a musician. This is a sad story. They tried to have children and after several miscarriages they at last had a son, Sean.

On Christmas Eve Dennis was on his way to a party being held in honor of his recent nomination for a Pulitzer. The phone rang. It was Ronnie’s wife. Ronnie had just been hit by a bus crossing the street.
For several days they all sat around the hospital bed reading to Ronnie from the yearbook, but Ronnie was gone. His beautiful wife gave his drum kit to Dennis. Dennis  brought it with him to the west coast where he continued to make music.

13 years later the telephone rang again. It was Sean. He wanted to know if he could have his Dad’s drum kit back. Dennis cried.
“I know that you were my Dad’s best friend. I know that you loved him.” Sean told him.

Anything that you have held holds you.
Ronnie was a Gymnast. He would do a hand stand anywhere anytime. If you were walking down 42nd street and asked him to, he would do a handstand right on the traffic light.

Umbrella

An ordered disorderliness; that’s what it makes me think of, that story. The umbrella, dark blue, an inexpensive model, curved plastic handle, had much history. I had left it once in a man’s car. Face white and soft like dough. Old, long silver braid, drowning in nostalgia for a time that almost was, his voice etching out from the perpetual grief of his people, transformed into a blade of flaccid hope. Correct. He trembled once before Alan Ginsberg. I left the umbrella in his car, leaping out against raindrops to tumble down my familiar rabbit hole. A train station, yes. He returned it on a rainy night a week later.
Degrees of separation? None. All of the characters are the same character. I am Alan Ginsberg. An ordered disorderliness.

It was not my umbrella. Like a cat, it lived a secret life before it came to me for comfort. If you feed them, umbrellas come back. They are practical, opportunistic, but not loyal. Yet, as mentioned, they sometimes come back. I was given a small maroon car. Clown car chugging up mountainous road, sea swelling to my right. Pop! Pop! Fizz, fizz. No, no relief, instead a sad play called “Death Of  A Clown Car.” But in her death throes I wrestled a delicate life from her womb, stick-like, melancholic in hue, but certainly the last and best she had to give the world.

What do they eat? Oh, tears, of course. Yours, or Gods, whoever breaks first.

The woman, a political refugee. Black hair, streaks of silver, crimson lips. Artist, professor, maimed architect, aristocrat, poet, latina, communista, intelligentsia, dilettante, withering well over her strange fruit. She held it in her gloved hand, hurrying through storms. From holy names to that car. That car.

What is it with you and doomed idealists? Don’t you like accountants? Postal workers? Security guards? No, no! Not you. You are a gourmand, feasting only on the finest tears! Who weeps more prettily, more passionately than idealists? Vampire, with your frail aluminum skeleton and delicate nylon wing stretched over my head, whispering of transience. Her name? Does it matter? She was friends with Pablo Neruda. Think of me as Pablo. It was her car I wrested the umbrella from, she left it there like an infant in a basket, or a sack of kittens destined for a river.

Why? Why did I do it? The responsibility was too much. It was a burden to carry that thing.

The truth? It crawled in there itself to find it’s way to me. Her tears had become… flat. Mellowed by age, reasonable comfort, and lack of expectation. She never married again, she maintained a healthy social life. Thus prospects for misery were poor. It was time for more tantalizing fare.

Foolishness. All people harbor secret woe twisted round their hearts like razor wire forcing them to wince thus, walk so, and flick their wrists laughing, “I never did mind the little things.” Clowns weep with the most intensity after the lights are dimmed and the grease paint is melting.
You have so much to say about the others. What about you? Stop, pushing on me that way! I’ll open up when I’m good and ready!
(Spoken by the author or the umbrella? Wait, is the author the umbrella?)
There, gently. As you said, inexpensive model, yet look how I’ve weathered (pun intended?) the years. Do you want to know why I like you so much?

No, I’d rather not. This is what makes rainy days gloomy.

Why did you get in that man’s car?

Because it was raining. But look at you now, dancing in the rain. You like it as much as I do.

Had you considered that I meant it metaphorically? It was raining inside of me.

Go on.

What more is there to say? I was, as the song says, crying inside and nobody knew it but me. Nobody could see. Nobody cared.

Just like when you were young.

Yes.

Tell me about that.

It rained a lot then, outside too. I walked home from school alone each day wearing my grandfather's long green coat. He had been in the airforce. I never knew him. The jacket made me feel a little safer. I could imagine that he was somebody who would have cared, that the jacket at least wanted to keep me warm and dry, wanted to protect me. Strangers hurt me every day and there was no one who noticed, no one who would help me.

How old were you?

12. It rained a lot that year. Record precipitation. I walked everyday. No one was home when I got there. There was never a hot dinner. Peanut butter and jelly or swiss cheese with mustard on bread that was mostly air. When they came home they vented their frustrations on me. We had lost our house, this one was a rental in a strange new neighborhood. It had maroon carpeting.

Well, is that all?

Isn’t that enough for now?

I don’t know. Is it? You brought all of this up.

It was Ginsberg, actually.

That’s a creative cop out. Lets be honest. You have projected all of this on to me. You began this dialog and you have disguised it as art, but you are using me (not the other way around as you would have the reader believe.) You are using me to get to the root of your own self.

Self is a transient thing, that is my point. There may be pain in this one life, the trick is not to mind it, not to identify with it, and to do something with it, to literally transform it.

Literally transform it. That was good. I like that. However, I don’t see how any of that supports your opening statement that self is transient.

Well take this text for example. I am the creator, but I keep changing perspectives. As above so below.

Are you really going to go there?

Why not? I knew a man who knew a man who knew Aliester Crowley. I am The Great Beast 666. Occultist, mystic, ceremonial magician, poet, mountaineer-

You copied that from wikipedia. You are a lonely frightened child.

Most of us are. An ordered disorderliness. Always raining. I had always wanted a car to get into, someone to protect me from the rain. A clown? Struggling, open, open, Ah! Here you are. My own blue nylon anathema pulled straight from a flaming blossom, exploding clown car. My heart. Prince charming? A thorn. A blue umbrella with abandonment issues. Degrees of separation? None. Who is practical, opportunistic, but not loyal? All of the characters are the same character. Skeptical? Because I am. In a world of sleepers, skeptical because I am, everyone is dreaming their own dream. Anonymous drops of precipitation. Participation? I am, a storm of organic lethargy, because skeptical. A vortex of desire.

Letters written, letters received, pleas for help, for love, acceptance, tossed from a wooden bridge into a rushing stream below. Young woman, head shaved, two black eyes, smoldering hole where a clown car should be, (Do you mean where a heart should beat?) her umbrella vibrating under the rain's incessant tap, tap, tap. Her journals too, poetry, there is no good in the world, “there let thy bleeding branch atone”, water under the bridge. Hairless, voiceless, always raining maiden. No one is coming to rescue her. Not ever. Not the painter, not the minstrel, not the poet, they will take their turns with her, cracking her bones and sucking the marrow in search of mother the abandoner. (All people harbor secret woe twisted round their hearts like razor wire. Smoldering hole, flaming clown car, vortex of desire.)
“I never did mind the little things.” But the umbrella? What color is it? And will it stay?
IT IS A BLUE UMBRELLA I SAY!
And it will stay, stay, stay.

Sorry

I’m sorry.
We hear these words often, whenever someone asks us about their father. I am so sorry.
And we never know how to respond. We can’t say yes, you should be, even if it’s possible that you should.
How could we face that? The fact that we are people whom others feel sorry for? How could we walk tall, smile, laugh, be intelligent or strong or cheerful knowing  that everyone feels sorry for us? We would have to fit in with their expectations and be lost, heartbroken, and hopeless if we agreed that we should be the subjects of sympathy. 
We don’t ever say, yes, you should be. What we say is: “It’s ok.”

But it is not ok. It makes us feel very uncomfortable saying that it is. As if we are cold and uncaring, as if we never miss him, as if remembering his death does nothing to impair our high spirits.
Sometimes I laugh when I say it. Not always. It doesn’t even matter that laughter is the worst answer, nothing that I have ever said in response to “I’m so sorry” erases the strangeness that enters the other person's eyes when I say it‘s ok.
What is it? That they actually feel sorry? That they are afraid? That they don’t believe that I’m ok? That they think it’s horrible that I am ok? Maybe they’re just uncomfortable like me?

Inevitably, the next question is: how did he die?
My oldest daughter answers enigmatically. Her top responses are as follows:
“From a head wound.”
“From a gun wound.”
“A bullet.”
I believe that this works for her because she is young and quiet. Though they don’t know what they really wanted to know they dare not press the issue. Those brief and incomplete explanations send people scurrying as if a grenade has just landed at their feet. The wideness of their eyes parallels the unblinking roundness of a full moon.

I tend to half whisper:
“It was a suicide.”
I feel ashamed every time I am forced to admit this. After the first answer there is just a certain amount of darkness hovering around us, the general gloom of death. We might have been a nice happy family that suffered a tragedy. People might picture him as a war veteran, or the victim of a sudden car accident, or  as someone that succumbed to a terminal illness.
Then they learn that he wanted to die. Another question springs to their minds of course, but it is not the kind of question one asks.
Why? Why? Why? It is a much greater darkness, a sin, this particular death. And it implies that we were never a nice happy family, there was always something about us which could have commanded sympathy.

Frequently I wish that I would have thought of something else to say. A complete fabrication. A lie, Huckleberry style.

“He was a lion tamer, like his father before him. It was their final act, the famous 'jaws of death', a real crowd pleaser, but sadly, Cuddles, the lion, sneezed at a most inopportune moment claiming my darling husband's life. Cuddles also  had to be put down. Once a man eater, even if by accident, always a man eater.”
“He was walking down California St. and somebody dropped a piano on his head.”
“He was a stunt aviator. A seagull hit his windshield during a loop de loop and he spun wildly out of control.”
“He was a Sherpa. Just before retiring he led one last group into the Himalayas but none of them were ever seen again.”
“He and his party were eaten by cannibals during an anthropological study of indigenous Amazonian peoples.”
“We were at the zoo. An escaped elephant trampled him to death near the penguin exhibit. He ran in front of it actually. To push a baby stroller out of the way.”

I wish I would have chosen one of these and stuck with it until it was as good as true. But I forget that we are shrouded in great darkness and only remember it once the line of questioning brings me back to a half whisper.
We would prefer to be casual acquaintances forever, people you recognize by the way we smile and laugh. People you know who are good at crocheting and singing and giving hugs. People that read a lot and wear funny hats and talk too loudly.
But never people you are sorry for. Never  people who lost someone. That is really never ok.
We say these words often, whenever someone asks us about their father. It’s ok. We say them just as often as we hear these words:  I’m sorry. 
And despite the fact that it never really is, whenever we are asked,  it is always ok.
It’s Ok.