Invitation

When I was a wee lass the woman down the street was very concerned that I was out of touch with "reality."
My mother assured her that I was playing pretend.

I was a very good play pretender. I rarely said things like:
"Let's pretend there is a little man living in an underground house beneath our own house."
Instead I said:
"The little man won't answer the door under my bed. Something might have happened to him. I'm going outside to find him."

I knew the trick to the best kind of play was not saying "Let's pretend," or "I'm only pretending." I knew that all play was equally real and unreal, that bravery, kindness, and trust were true whether you were dreaming, pretending, telling a story or playing "real life."

Certain truths are especially hard to grasp in "real life." Fairy tales and certain types of pretend can remind us, show us, and teach us the things that are not allowed or are undervalued in "real life."
They can remind us that "real life" is a game we began to play long ago, a very dangerous game in which you choose masks to wear and insist they are the real you, a game that demands that no other games, no other stories, no other worlds are "real." They are ONLY pretend, and only the "real life" game is important.

And if you play "real life" with us and play it well we will love you, and be proud of you, and you will feel safe, never needing to worry about the unknown, about the dark, about the mysterious, or about the possibility that you yourself are less "real" and not in fact the masks you have been wearing, but rather an innocent traveler who stumbled into a deadly serious game with eternal consequences; that you may never be able to leave the game because you will be convinced that you are not playing a game but rather are having a "real life."

And what if you were so lucky that someone stronger, someone with a better memory of the multicolored land beyond "real life",  started to play a different game with you, a game that bleed into "real life", and you started asking yourself, "What is real?"

Not just, "Is this a real game? Or something else?" but "Is 'real life' real?"

And what if by asking yourself these questions, rather than asking your benevolent benefactor (who could never actually answer these questions for you) you began to remember that you aren't "real", that you are a pretender, a storyteller, a dreamer, a liar trapped by deadly seriousness (a.k.a gravity) in a heavy game. A game in which your abilities to play have atrophied, a game that didn't just start when you were born, because actually time is a function of the "real life" game and you have been trapped on the wheel of "real life" for much "longer" than you realized.

And what if you remembered this for a moment and began to learn to play again thanks to a trickster who started playing a game within a game with you and called it deadly serious...

What if? What if?

“If you are a dreamer come in
If you are a dreamer a wisher a liar
A hoper a pray-er a magic-bean-buyer
If youre a pretender com sit by my fire
For we have some flax golden tales to spin
Come in!
Come in!”

― Shel Silverstein


So let's not say, "let's pretend." We're better pretenders than that. Let us be open hearted and true whether our experience is real or imagined. Let us play in earnest, let us play with levity, and flexibility (fluxability?) and bravery, and kindness, and trust.

Let us play in bright axiom.

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.

Remote Control

They are in our homes, pulsing at the center like an icy heart projecting ghosts into our once warm sanctuaries. In bed with our wives they whisper to her desires she never could have dreamed up alone. They are influencing our children, whom we entrust to their care at a tender age because their skill for captivating attention is unparalleled. To each of us they speak in their flickering chains of signifiers leading us deeper and deeper into the forests of desire like the wicked wife of the woodsman. They enter our private dreams, inserting their own mythology into the underground streams of our wild raging subconscious. They are there blending into the fabric of our existence, telling us what we think, telling us what we want, and telling us who we are. Our view of the world is glimpsed through their myriad of unblinking eyes. One eye to a room, never any less than one to a household, they show us what to do, how to behave, where to find those things they suggest we must have. Their cold intimate company is addictive, the only company that we crave. They demand so little of us, just that we sit back and let them in. Let them penetrate our minds and souls and make them their own. Soon theirs is the only company we want to keep. Our lovers are not as satisfying as the lovers they can show us. Our children are not as doll like and neatly dealt with as the children we can watch through their eye. Our lives are not as well put together as the lives we can live vicariously through them, blanketed in their uninterrupted 24 hour programming.
There are not us. They are OTHER. Wire and glass where we are flesh and blood. Their unity transmitted from towers renders them unfailingly effective. Their solidarity, their consistency draws us to them, away from our disparate chaotic selves. Away from the untamed unpredictability of real experience. Our unruly self is better abandoned to a place with soft cushions in full view of the eye where we will be led deeper and deeper into the forest. We trust and depend on these cold nurses. Cold nurses rear our children. They tend our loneliness, helping it to grow even as we feel that they are somehow satisfying it. An old woman lies dying in her bed, their babble consoling her from the dresser across the room. An infant sucks a thumb watching the bright colors flash and parade before its new eyes, learning to be led through this passive sacrifice of attention. In the houses beside ours, other human being sit prone, letting the cold nurse feed them her endless torrents of image and sound. We are separated from one another by nothing more than thin layers of dry wall, yet we don’t even know each others’ names. All that we know is the pantheon of Gods and Goddesses that live and die in illusory lifetimes before our eyes, acting out plays called “Romance” ,“Tragedy”, and “Comedy”. We yearn for what we are shown, never suspecting that it is an empty charade, never dreaming that the real thing might look differently, sound differently, feel differently. To each of us they speak in their flickering chains of signifiers leading us deeper and deeper into the forests of desire like the wicked wife of the woodsman. They are in our homes, pulsing at the center like an icy heart projecting ghosts into our once warm sanctuaries, building with empty pictures and sounds prisons of lonely desire that strangle us and leave us pale and flaccid, deeply asleep under flashing lights.

The Holy Ghost

The holy ghost came to her when she was a child, only six years old. For weeks preceding the actual event she awoke in the night screaming and crying as the result of having had a nightmare, a premonition of what was to come. Each time she was told “ Its just a nightmare, go back to sleep.” by one groggy parent or the other, so that on the night that the plane did crash into the house she almost believed it was only the same nightmare come to visit her once more.
It was a private plane that carried six passengers, and the pilot and co-pilot. They were all dead, spilling from the wreckage into the fiery garage like guts bursting from a wounded bird. Her father wanted to help them, but they were beyond his help, and her mother was saying,
“Oh God.”
Her older sister was screaming,
“What is it, what happened?”
Helen knew what had happened. It was the plane, the same plane that had been crashing into her dream every night for the past two weeks.
“Get them out of here!” her father shouted. But he needn’t have, because mother was already grabbing them roughly by the arms and saying,
“C’mon.” in her brusque way thick with the Oklahoman accent.
Then they stood on the street in front of their home in Lake Wood California watching the flames spread, Mother and sister and she, all in their white night gowns like three ghosts. Father and a neighbor were dragging bodies out, just in case someone was yet alive and merely unconscious, but at the time she hadn’t understood that. It had seemed that he was taking them out so that even the dead could be spared the horror of being eaten up by the flames.
They were laid out on the lawn and soon Father had turned a garden hose on to combat the hungry fire. Then the wailing sirens came and the flashing red lights bouncing off the dark smoke billowed from the mouth of the garage.
Mother had been saying all along,
“Don’t look, you hear? Close your eyes.” And she tried to press their faces into the folds of her night gown, but despite this they had looked. They saw.
The nightmares, like Gabriel, had come whispering, and now here it was. The spirit that sought to inhabit the body, burning it mercilessly. The plane, a desirous phantom, had seized hold of the house and now it was devouring it with its passion.
Mother kept saying,
“Oh God.”
And yes, it must have been so. Dancing before their eyes with wings of flames spreading over the roof top lighting the night sky and obliterating the stars with its smoky mane, here was the Holy Ghost, the spirit of heaven come down to visit its rage upon them and see the bodies laid before it in neat rows like finger sandwiches.
After weeks of practice, she now found that she could not scream, nor cry, but only observe with eyes as round as saucers, peering out from behind her mother’s night gown.
“Oh God.”
The nightmare had not ended this time and every detail was startlingly clear. She was awake and the dream had swallowed her.
“Oh God.”
And it would never let her go.

The Center of All

The day begins frosted in mists that drift in from the sea, a persistent fog that wets the concrete of the front stairway and the sidewalk that leads to the BART station. It blocks out the sun and the blue of the sky with its homogenous hues of gray on gray. I find it difficult to rise. I find it difficult to accept that this is day, this is morning, time to throw back bed sheets and sing to the world the way birds do. The darkness seems to mute out the possibility for song. It welcomes heavy jackets and lethargy in July. It feels like an extended night. I bring in the paper which has thoughtfully been encased in plastic to protect it from the wetness. The weeds poking up out of the cracks in the driveway are a welcome sight. I can smell their green life on the moist air. I can smell the sea that I can’t see nestled under its blanket of fog in the far distance. If the briny blue won’t sparkle, what else can? I shuffle back inside and add the paper to a pile on the floor. It grew during my absence, that little mountain of news so important that no one bothered to remove it from its protective plastic covers.
I am not yet affected by any of these details. The blazing sun and trail dust and tall evergreens and shimmering sea and winding roads are still burning bright in my chest. My present surroundings are muted, less real than the internal landscape impressed upon me during my recent voyage. I resolve not to let this bleak world outside infect and obliterate the vivid world thriving within. It occurs to me that I might be able to change this place by holding tight to that other. If I will not let it bleed out of me, if I hold it boiling inside of me, perhaps, everything around me will be infected by me rather than the reverse.
I sit at the kitchen table to write my dreams. It is hard not to nod off as I write. The pen moves, my eyes close. My mind so focused on dreams begins to slip into their gossamer halls once again and begin new adventures spun from the fabric of the old. Then I rouse my self, and scribble less than I would say if I was speaking in the language of a dream, and put the little book half away. It occurs to me that I should hide it, for these are my dreams meant to be kept from uninvited eyes. The mere occurrence of some intruding peepers peering over those pages lined with the symbols that signify the landscapes and occurrences of my inner world would pollute my dreams, my shining, sparkling dreams filled with the beat and pulse of a great heart that I feel, that I hold but do not own. That heart, it owns me. So that it doesn’t abandon me, I must keep it secret, keep it protected from the ill intentioned and habitual prying of others.
I was in a place where the ground was carpeted with dust as dry as flour. In some places, the dust had blown away and what remained was a rock hard tanned skin so dry that it was cracked. In some places velvety patches of yellow sage crawled along, alive and happy in a heat that killed off other things. Some yellow straws protruded here and there like whiskers from a chin. The trees dropped red peppercorns and tiny dried leaves to make a carpet of pink within stone lined paths around their trunks. They too thrived in the sun and the dry. Their skin was cracked and rougher than the earth, but the leaves on their limbs were green and these bowed over to lend shade as graciously as the limbs of any river willow. They’d brush my face and hair with those many delicate fingertips and shiver gaily in the evening breeze. Lizards shot like rocket ships over the terrain, made quick by the warmth. Hills rolled like brown waves all around me, their soft curves radiating some silent love reciprocated by the bright blue sky. Beaches of hot sand and smooth stones crawled out of the forest to kiss the waves. Tiny villages clung to the folds of mighty mountains and glowed with tender light when night invaded those folds with cold penetrating fingers.
All of this I have stored down in my bones, a magick elixir stopped within an ivory vial. It is my very marrow. Holding the skeleton of scenes together lie the winding roads, like sinews of muscle and tendon, the curving path between earth and sea. The road that binds all things. The glowing water of life, blue when the sun is high, gold when it begins to sink, and inky black when it is gone. The smell of salt. The fragrance of trees and ferns, of rushing streams and cascading falls. On my right hand; the immovable. On my left hand; the ever turbulent, both pressing me into a fine line, a path between the two. A passage between chaos and stability that is my eternal home, not a place of rest but a journey that is the center of all.
I am a margin between worlds, one dark and cool, one bright and warm, and I must be the mediator.

Dark Moon

Don’t you know? At the core, I’m still this little dual gendered blondie in short black dresses and you can see my panties when I bend over to help the little kids at the table. I’m still hot for girls that are hot for girls and hot for boys that wear dresses and swing on swings and girls that wear mustaches and men in tall black hats and anything tall and black in general with hair all over its body. I like things that want to go where they’re not supposed to go and go there anyway. Who says it’s not okay to crawl around the dark side of the moon with your panties off and a big black dog sniffing at your crack while the stars spin round and round singing "wheeeee!" and the fabric of the universe goes "crack!’ And the black man’s head splits open and wrigley green things come out and it isn’t clear whether they are many long separate wrigglies or all appendages of one hidden thing with wagging tentacles.
I still like the desert all hot and bare with broken Indians on the side of the road selling hot pink butterfly necklaces to people that pass by in white sedans on their way to some other place. I like cacti with their prickly hairs even though a little one bit me when I was just two years old. I said, "Can I pet you?" and it said "Yes." and I reached a soft trusting little finger down intending to be as gentle as possible, but it bit me anyway. My mother had warned me. Sadly I do so much that my mother would warn me against if only she knew there were such things to do. Luckily, for her peace of mind, she can’t imagine them, so she can’t worry about the things I do where no one can see, down in the cracks of all that gray matter tucked neatly under my scalp.
I’d like to be strangled to death some day. I know that I would be nice at first and then even though I want to be strangled, I’m sure that as my mechanical creation begins to realize that something must be done or its day is done, I imagine I’ll start to fight against my own will, wriggling and flopping like a long legged blonde fish.
I did have a boy once that one hot summer day come up into my bedroom where the curtains were drawn to keep out the sun. We were both a little wet so I dropped off my clothes right in front of him and I could see that he liked it and I put on something else while he watched and then I asked him if he would wear a soft pink dress I had in the closet and he did it. He wasn’t the kind of boy that I would have pictured doing it, not lithe with long hair and a penchant for wearing eye liner. No, he was husky and short haired with eyes that bulged out like those of a goldfish, and he had hair on his belly and on his back, but he put on that soft stretchy powder pink dress of mine and I liked it very, very much and no real boy has ever done that for me since.
There was a bearded lady though, that I used to fuck with a strap-on, and when I was away at work one day she took off all of her boy clothes, which she wore because she liked to fool everyone around her, and she put on my dress without asking me, and went into the bathroom and played with herself in front of the mirror and took pictures with her camera phone and then posted them on My Space for everyone to see. I checked my email at work and was pissed off when I saw those pictures posted since it was my dress and she hadn’t asked. The worst day ever with her was when she came home with her beard shaved off and her face all smooth and youthful and it scared me and I didn’t like it because she didn’t look like a devil anymore, but I tried not to freak out too much. However, I’m sure she thought that I acted funny and asked too many questions about it.
Nobody knows how I am exactly, and if you’re reading this, you might think that I’m some cool chic that wears lots of dark eye make-up and a lace up bodice, but I’m wearing a turtle neck sweater and a pink rabbit ear cap and even I forget most of the time just how queer I am while I try to make small talk with the soccer moms in front of the school. And I’m sure that if she read this, that soccer mom would feel all the skin on her body get all puckered up with goose pimples and a hot chill would run up through her middle and it would feel as if her heart were trying to fold in on itself and she would be afraid and wonder what kind of horrible person I am and what terrible things I might have done that I’m not mentioning.
But in reality, I’m probably one of the safest people she could be around, because everyone visits the dark side of the moon when they sleep, many sleep even as they walk, but they forget what goes on in the dark side or they pretend that they’ve never been. But I can see all of that junk in my trunk and run my fingers through it and watch it and pet it and then come back well informed about the dangers that lurk deep within, but some sleep walkers start to do things without noticing that they’re doing them, because the dark side wants to bubble over after they’ve kept a lid on it for so long.
Me, I just want to dance and sing and say crazy things and make crazy things in my own image and then disappear into the deep dank soil when my time is up and be remembered by the worms when they eat me and then fly through the void as a screeching streak of magenta. There may be more to it than I can imagine, but I won’t worry about it now.
For now, I tell you to listen up- if you are a boy you should try on a dress, and if you’re a girl you should stick your hand down another girls blouse, and if you’re a dog you should high tail it out of here before I think of something perverse for you to do (and stop reading blogs because it freaks people out when they come home and find their dog looking at porn on the internet and it’s even worse if they catch you researching metaphysics). I innocently stumbled upon some very dirty but harmless images on the web myself the other day, and now things occur to my imagination that never did before. So the same will start happening to you, (whether you’re a boy, a girl, or a dog) in 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…

That Which Dwelt There

The contour of the candle- the contour of my body. The heat of its flame- the cinnamon fire of my heart. Every little knock, every little bump is a pulse or a beat in the larger chaotic body of me. I am not entirely separate from the mass and I am not entirely a cohesive part of it. I am the right shape on the outside. I have two arms, two legs, two breasts, two hands, two feet, and seven holes in my head. Like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle I fit in the most basic way, cut by the same blades that cut all the pieces of every puzzle ever made. And yet I have begun to create a puzzle of my own, a micro-puzzle assembled of a being with two hands, two feet, two legs, two arms, and seven holes in the head, a puzzle that I rebuild daily, each time adjusting the configuration just slightly so that the changes are subtle, almost unnoticeable from day to day, but over the course of years they will begin to form an entirely new picture. A little picture within the greater picture. A little picture whose story is encompassed within the matrix of the bigger story, but whose themes flow in the opposite direction. A paradoxical piece within the greater arrangement. The murmur of others from the room next door is the murmur of blood in the veins. Their raucous disagreement is the argument between a cancer and the nearly defeated quietude once enforced by the paladin-like white blood cells. Murmur, murmur, whine. They negotiate endlessly, unhappily for eternity, for ten dollars an hour and for want of anywhere better to be. I am the cottage cheese ceiling holding me in under its bumpy white mountains of plaster. I am the textured walls hugging me without warmth in a formal gesture of caring and duty. I am the window with its blinds turned shut and the bed with its covers pulled closed and the soft dark green carpet upon which every fleck of debris is embarrassingly apparent. I. am a backyard filled with mud and a front yard carpeted with green grass, lawn reindeer, and wild brambles. I am an artificial tree raised upon a table and adorned with ornaments passed down four generations. It is all here, painted into the jigsaw piece with it parts swimming upon the surface, two by two and with seven in the head. And each day it gets adjusted slightly, like the details of a dream; a wall disappearing, a ceiling rising, bending, a window opening to blink out at the universe like a sleep refreshed eye. A muddy yard that becomes a swamp inhabited by a giant toad with a dog’s fangs, and lawn reindeer which spring to life and carry elves away into the deep of a forest. The endless winding roads lined with identical houses become a desert void of life, and in the distance upon a hilltop, the water tower is the forbidden tower in which the old wizard lives, and when I arrive there I find that he is my own father and it is my own living room organized around an artificial tree. In the depths, I will overturn the phony tree and in the green carpet I will plant some seeds that a giant gave to me, and the Halub tree will sprout in the center of my house, crashing through the cottage cheese ceilings, breaking open the windows, making the plush carpet a moss covered forest floor. The maiden of light will come out of the tree and dance with her son the planter. The angel that fell from the top of the phony tree when it toppled shall be called Samael and he will guard this new garden and its wild things, and make music for them to sway and frenzy to. The elves and the reindeer will trickle back in and the old wizard’s head will crack open as a young man bursts free to join the spectacle. The cancerous murmur will become the beat of the tympani. The whiners become lutes played by nimble fingers. My heart becomes the bonfire around which all will dance.
Looking back we will see how different this world is now from what it was when it began. Looking closely, we will see all of the elements of the old world still present, but we will see how they have adjusted to house a greater spirit, much greater than that which dwelt there before.

The Riddle

"Mr.White expected a seriousness of purpose in us which provided discipline and willpower in those early years; and we learned the electrical and ideological trades from the ground plug up; for there’s no substitute for brain conduction."
-William T. Vollmann, You Bright & Risen Angels

I open my mouth and the story pours out in white hot streams like geothermal spring water boiled down in the kettle of my belly an inch or so above my navel. What comes from here will be out of the hands of my brain, that is to say that my waking consciousness is being restrained so that the wily so called "sub" consciousness can come out and speak its piece, play its games, and in general, enjoy its witching hour. You never do know just what things do come out to play while your head lays sinking into your triple stuffed pillow and the clock ticks slowly from 11:30 to 12:30. I personally have seen the demons playing under the moonlight at my window sill. This fortunate glimpse was afforded me due to my unusual habit of staying awake in the dark so that I may pour the Serotonin which is being produced inside my head during the sun’s absence into little cups of digital delight. I use this substance as the central ingredient in recipes for disaster which invoke worlds of every kind shape and color.
Just last night, for example, I awoke disturbed by a rustling which sounded like some one going through my most prized and secret documents, the seeds from which the aforementioned worlds sprout. This was long after the witching hour had past, which goes to show that the devil has reign over more hours of the night than the lore tells us. I awakened myself by shouting,
"Who’s here?"
Sitting up I grappled for the flashlight kept near the head of my bed and hastily clicked it on, directing it towards a small shadow scurrying away from my head.
‘Ew, a mouse.’ I thought just before the palm sized creature was caught in the ellipse of yellow light beaming from my big black battery powered tool. At this point I had risen from my bed to scuttle after the evading intruder and get a good view. There, under the spotlight, I caught sight of the thing which plainly was not a mouse, but rather something like a tiny triceratops.
‘I am dreaming’. I thought. I even said it aloud, but I had goose pimples all up and down my arms and was in fact too cold to be snuggled warm in my bed merely imagining such a phantom. Clearly I was awake. More awake than usual in fact. I hurried to the kitchen and found a large jar and rushing back scooped the critter up so that I would have evidence against the supposition that I was hallucinating. It was then that I looked much closer at it and realized that it was not a dinosaur as I had originally assessed it to be, but rather a very small rhinoceros.
As this dawned on me, my spirit leaped from me, extending into a parallel world where I asked someone that seemed vaguely familiar what a Rhinoceros could stand for, what it could mean. That someone was a female with short dark hair and pale skin. I became her and began to suggest to myself that it was something male and strong.
Meanwhile, back in my bedroom, I startled awake for the second time that night, still hearing the suspicious rustling. Gone was the mouse turned triceratops turned rhino. This time I didn’t use the flashlight and switched on the lamp. Oh good heavens! It was just the cat. (Cat? I don’t have a cat.)
"My god," I thought to myself, "it’s the cat I brought in to feed a week ago before leaving to vacation in sunny southern California. (Is that true?) I left the poor thing alone in my apartment for more than a week. It must be starving." I think, (if this is true that I actually brought it cat food before I left.) "Come on Riddle, here kitty kitty." (I let the Riddle in and fed it?)
Together we went to the kitchen, and I opened the refrigerator slowly. If there was cat food in there then this was real. There was. An open bag of kitty kibble was spilling out on the white plastic of the bottom shelf. I noticed that Riddle had one distinguishing feature: a white star on his/her forehead.
I then woke up for the third time.
So you see these things do exist, they do come out to play, and you should be concerned. You should recognize that you too were visited last night by something OTHER. You convinced yourself that it was only a dream, or perhaps you shut it out entirely and imagined that you slept without dreaming. Both possibilities are a lie. Something real visited you last night, or perhaps more accurately, you visited it when one part of you, the watch dog, wasn’t looking. Even more accurately I would say that the wall came down, just as the antichrist has suggested that it should, and what you found outside the city’s keep was another form of yourself: The Riddle.

Matrioshka

Here today gone tomorrow.

Here today gone tomorrow.

Here today gone tomorrow.

One brilliant flash in the long dark night, repeated endlessly. The human play, each act crystallized in eternity waiting for the laser of attention to access it, make it alive for a moment. Make it alive for a moment… in the moment it lives. This means something; this hand, these breasts, and eyes and mouth and teeth. Made in the image of what? It’s a reminder of something. This existence is made for remembrance of something… but what?

Have you ever dreamed that you were a cartoon character or an animal, or some strange creature? Or that you try to run, but seem to be stuck in place?

Funny things, dreams. Made of bits and pieces of the waking world, rearranged in the forgetful confusion of sleep. Yes, your dreams are made in your image. And you are made in the image of what? When this life comes to a close, what are you?
Is anything really happening when you dream? Are you really going anywhere? Can it be that what I long to recall is the original matrioshka, the outermost doll in which all smaller versions are nesting and riffing off of the original?