He Died For Our Sins

“Oh my God, this thing is from the 90’s!”
It seems so close, so far away. Roller skates and corduroys and neon colors.
They are making weapons out of electric green Bendaroos, organizing complicated games in a home for deranged ex villains. My man is there, looking bad but meaning well, poet in black jeans.
The shadow of a black widow in a thicket of web nestled in a long forgotten Easter basket, still wrapped in plastic.

I can’t believe this passes for technology. It should have been replaced ten years ago. Give it a tweak. Flash of lights red and green.
They’re only games, but they look like violence, like evil schemes plotted by insecure misogynists. They know not what they do, and so they know not how to take responsibility for what they’ve done.
But it gnaws at them. Something feasts on their gut, making them feel dirty but they don’t know what they did. How did they get like this? Were they not innocent boys when it started?

Conversations in parks, in bathrooms, on Christina ct. Were we not being punished for something?
I hoped so, because if so then redemption was possible. If redemption was possible we could do the right things and escape this misery.
However, redemption philosophy required that we all began as sinners and he would say:
“I can’t believe that. What could I have done to deserve what I got? I was just a little boy. I didn‘t deserve that.”

I feared that going back down I might fall. I considered crawling the rest of the way up and breaking through a window.
By now, however, I had learned that crawling through a window would likely result in a rebirth, and then big sis and I would never finish fixing this thing.
I could see the shadowy form more clearly; definitely that creature that I feared. Should I attempt to stab it with the scissors? Should I trust that film of plastic to be a satisfactory barrier between us?
Those flashing lights seemed to be a bad sign. I might have to stay up here with it longer.

Existence is suffering. All beings suffer. I had read this.
I didn’t want to believe it, despite the fact that it seemed likely. If we could have understood that concept, perhaps we could have shed our guilt and shame, the hope that we could escape our unknown crime.
Despite the fact that his objections to it were strong, the ideology lived in both of us. Perhaps it was even better rooted in him.
He was an earthy sort, and in the act of fierce rejection he had become locked in an embrace with it, like a bull whose horns get lodged in the opposing structure. 
I was in a process of accepting it and synthesizing it. I would have dreams that something horrible was coming towards me, and instead of running, or fighting, I would try to hold it and transform it by making it a part of myself.
Sometimes it destroyed me.

In the end, he would sacrifice himself.
It would be hard to look at. It would be impossible to remember whether he had been a villain, an innocent boy, or a hero.
The flash created by the sacrifice would be so blinding, it would obscure the past. The power of it would send me hurtling into unknown terrains.
It was a gift.

There was nothing further that could be done. I slid down, dangled from the ledge and jumped. It was easier than I had anticipated.
Sis helped me stand and dust myself off. She checked for spiders. We were about to walk up the path back into the house when we heard it, a ghostly voice from above.
It was a tech agent responding to my prodding of the device. In his far off phone voice he issued instructions for troubleshooting.
At first it seemed like I might need to go back up, but after listening for a moment it became clear that, like the device, the instructions for its operation were obsolete.

The Mysterious Engulfs Us

The mysterious engulfs us. There are no answers, or just as true, any answer at all will do. There are no reasons but mind. I can stop myself from doing or speaking occasionally, but my thoughts run through me unbidden, like a horde of unruly children. They make reality in their image. The outside is ruled by that same incessant clamor that dominates and defiles the “would be” sanctuary under the dome of my skull. The shape of my mind calls things to me in secret, without my consent, making of me a sleeping witch, a conjurer of illusions which fool even, and especially, me. The unspoken things die away in the world of endless electronic babble. The things without name or face, lacking these qualities, borrow them from the storehouses of our mind, and when the borrowed guise no longer suits their purpose they vacate the shapes and sounds that once costumed them, and we are left with their empty shells, shells that refer not to their nature, but to our own, as it is from our nature that these shapes were borrowed. The mysterious is forgotten, denied, wrapped in linguistic structures, and when it dares show its face we who have been indoctrinated by THE WORD call that the exception to our rule. But it is the other way around. It is the bugs, the quarks, the exceptions that are in fact the rule. Our brittle fortresses of order will eventually crumble and the hot breathed broken faced real will lumber and slither and dance in, wreaking havoc over our bones and rambling thoughts, thoughts now bodiless, flowing out directionless as they always have, to be absorbed in the icy folds of the real. We are always grasping for answers and peddling them and buying them and clinging to them, but they are only words clung to in desperation. We are hiding from the true answer, the mysterious abyss that looms beyond the constructs of the tongue and the tongue mind wagging furiously as though it could fan off the eternal with its chatter. We have never been free of the mysterious, it was always clinging to us like a skin, but some part of the self recoiled from it and began to spin the great con to hold it at bay. The ones who claim to have answers are liars and artisans of the con. There are no answers. No words that can hold the real absolutely. All that I have experienced has been a play of consciousness. There are no reasons but mind.

The Elsinore Princess

I have lately made very good friends with a big green reptile with razor sharp teeth and a hefty appetite. What he hungers mostly for is watermelon, and purple cabbage, and green grapes, but now and again he pretends to want to eat from my hand just so he can get a taste of my fingers to determine whether or not he’d be better off just eating me and forgoing all social niceties. Here in this special place, he looks at me from behind alloyed bars and nods to his empty food dish while I try to press all of the stray voices out of my head…
I am the lake Elsinore princess, imported from Long Beach to be made a spectacle of in a mud hole imbued with mystical powers. From my glass bottom, the denizens of this fair town have enjoyed looking down past their sandals at the murky green water fed by over 300 hidden springs and the San Jacinto river. When it dried up before 1880, Charlie Sumner still lived in the old adobe Machado house, built by that late great Californio, Augustin Machado himself. Then it transgressed to the rank of puddle, lost at the center of a pestilent pit of mud laden with decaying fish, their eyes eaten out by the very gnats that they themselves had once supped upon. The cattle got stuck in the muck in search of water, and there they mooed mournfully until the heat did them in. Then the gnats could start on them too, joined by the turkey vultures and crows, who cleaned away the carcass until only the bones gleamed white under the glaring sun, before returning to their post in the big blue sky, circling and waiting for the next bovine to expire. At the heart of the puddle a small geyser erupted and a fount of sulfurous water the color of blood gushed wretchedly, flaunting itself before the thirsty herds.
The Mexicans and the Indians had the smarts to stay clear, they know the work of a demon when they see it, but old Sumner wasn’t fazed. With a bit of British tenacity and a fair helping of humor, he set to poking around the choking little valley with a walking stick striped from a water starved cotton wood. Determined to make the best of a curse, he engaged in an exploration of the dried up lake bed, taking care not to get swallowed up in the gunk like a common cow, and thus he discovered those more than 300 secretive springs.
Oh, he had known about one or two of these geothermal water holes before the lake up and evaporated. He’d even tried to fence one off to keep the cows from drinking the hot stinking water, but one of his Indian vaqueros kindly informed him that the water was good for the cows, and that they were drinking it because they were sick, so Sumner bottled it up and sent it off to Los Angeles to be analyzed by a bonefide chemist, and lo! The chemist verified officially what the native had known without the use of a test tube, (which just goes to show- there’s no better way to get good help than to beat and enslave an indigenous people with a little help from the Catholic church).
At any rate, no Mexican has ever set foot on my clean glass bottom, except for the woman that cleans it and her son, a clever handyman. Only clean white feet have had the honor of dancing around on me after a wedding. I am after all, a movie star. Well, I was in one movie anyway, and the stars delivered their lines to one another while standing on me, and that is probably more than you can say. They dragged me overland to set me down on this little pea soup lagoon, and here I’ve been moored ever since.
Once upon a time, I ferried folks around Santa Catalina Island and the briny sea lapped at my chops. They retired me though, and sent me to die where everything else dies, here at the bottom of this valley. Everyone, every creature, every thing that has come here and died, came for the water and got stuck in the mud. This is how we have all met our fate; in search of water. They come for the water, and the water comes up from the hot depths of the earth, smelling of sulfur. How is it that no one has put two and two together? Didn’t they think that the devil would ask a price for his warm life giving elixir?
They used to cart people down here in wheelchairs to dip them in the lake. The hot sulfur ran from the tap in every house in the valley until the 1960’s turning the children’s teeth yellow. At the bathhouse built in 1884 they built a swimming pool in the 1920’s. A little boy drowned in it though, (I’m told he was an idiot anyway) and after that they filled it up. But you see, he came for the water too.
And what is water, my precious? Tell me that. What is water in a dream? The water and the sun set to work on me long ago, eating away the paint, rotting my wood. I fell apart in the wetness. They had me dismantled, because the water had made me unstable, unsafe. Now, if you want to see me, you will have to look through ghost eyes. Pick any that you like, those of a cow, those of an idiot boy at the bottom of a pool, those of an old gambler that died alone in a trailer near the lakes shore, or those of a prostitute wandering away from the old rodeo grounds where her remains were hidden among many. Look through any pair of dead eyes that you choose and you may see me moored out on the Laguna Grande, a phantom on a liquid bed of diamonds, paddlewheel still and silent under the moon’s ivory glow.

Slippery Fish

Way is a slippery fish.
Squeezing tighter is not better, it will only cause the fish to slip in a descending or ascending direction.
Inner stillness keeps us in the Way.
When we make a sudden move we loose our grasp of the fish. Very easy to do. These moves, they extend in every possible direction, they cover an infinite array of possibilities ranging from obvious to subtle.
There is a first move, and a second, and a third… each one will present itself like a head of the hydra, if you vanquish over one yet another option takes its place.
The challenge is to remember that you are not waiting for a good choice, you are not waiting at all, you are staying.
Because every move is a move out of the Way. Way is remaining, holding, staying, keeping, containing, restraining.
When you feel that you must do something to end the agony of holding the wriggling fish, stop there. There is no good way to readjust your grip. Holding the fish is agony. You want the agony.
Existence is suffering.
There are no good options.
There is no point in changing directions, a point in every direction is like no point at all. Enslavement is hoping to end the suffering. Energy does not cease to exist, it merely changes shape.
Immortality is stillness.
Holding still is horrible until you stop minding the pain and acquire a taste for it.
Then you can help hold up the Eternal Burden of Atlas.