Pale Horse Rider

Pale horse rider, dripping font of pure overflowing knowledge of life.
You know what I mean friend? Real knowledge, the kind that awakens in the flesh, like when you hear the sound of a rattlesnake in the grass. That's what he carried in his saddlebags, liquid lightning to crack your skull, enough to open thousands of minds and set them free as jackrabbits under a wide blue sky. He had been an angel once and now he roared through the wasteland gathering up the dead and making them quick.
Some might tell you it was chance that led him to each particular individual, but it was something trickier than chance. One might call those meetings synchronistic events. I'll tell you this; he was looking for them, for each of them in particular. Just as a man with a vendetta will go from town to town finding his debtors and delivering them of debt by way of steel, fire, and hot lead, so the pale horse rider went in search of the men deserving of his liquid lightening. He administered his medicine, town by town, man by man, with unrelenting resolve.
And I'll tell you another thing, as important as the last; they were also looking for him. Even if they didn't know his name or face in this world, their hearts were calling to him loud as squawking crows. That's the real way of it. In any encounter of unearthly significance, you can be sure both parties were looking for action.
In his never-ending quest to make the dead lightning quick, he met many a man whose face and name you would recognize. Men of reputation. Dead men trapped in limbo crying out for liberation. The pale horse rider hunted them, patient and steady, a spider. He found them and cracked their skulls wide, tore their ribcages open and let those screaming birds fly.
Each time this was done, the new quick went forth into the world, his apostles. Born in the fire and light of knowledge, rising from the ash of what they had once been, they returned to the wasteland as phoenixes armed with liquid lightening. Hunting heads in the western lands.
Methods vary. Not all of the quick are nomads. Some make their webs and wait in shadowy places for the dead to seek them out. Others call loudly for the dead to gather around. Some hunt one by one by one like the angel of the wasteland that found them.
He is out there still, as he has always been, riding down dusty roads, quest unending, name unuttered, face unknown. He is legend. He is many and he is none. Seeking the seeker and making the dead quick, pale horse rider, angel of the wasteland, ride on.

Nothing Is True

Aren’t you so tired of all those voices from out there reaching into you like a murder of crows probing the cracks in a sidewalk, the recesses of your mind, with long sharp beaks? Don’t you feel the sickness growing in your gut as you are assaulted daily by the loud caterwauling of authoritarian voices demanding that you do this to be good or that to be smart or such to be healthy or wise or enlightened? Don’t you just want to tear all your clothes off and scream incoherently and run barefoot under the trees and stars?
This author, who states now her presence so that you will be aware of it as it comes into you so that you may either allow it access or deny it willfully, this author admits that she is and does.
Beware of those who wish to sell you THE TRUTH or give you THE TRUTH or explain THE TRUTH. Watch out for fools, for buffoons repeating words they believe to be endowed with wisdom, words from their parents, from their spiritual teachers, from learned books or mystical books, or fantastic television documentaries. Most of all, beware of the voices that came from outside but now live inside of you without your knowledge. The voices of all these loud insistent purveyors of so called TRUTH that now swirl around inside your head, triggered in response to various stimuli.
If you think you can speak the TRUTH, if you feel you should spread the TRUTH, or help others to awaken to the TRUTH, watch out, you’re running blindfolded with a sharp stick in your hand. Because the TRUTH, or that which this author sees as the signified experience indicated by that particular signifier, is indescribable, it doesn’t live here in the words, in this confusing scritch scratch of symbols.
The TRUTH doesn’t want to be spread. It’s the hyena-like cackle of words that wants to be spread. It’s the voice of your ancestors, the confusion of accidental associations between various stimuli and sounds and shapes that is shaping you, informing your decisions, building your version of TRUTH and REALITY.  And it wants to spread, needs to spread, will spread infecting every body it can infect.
There is no antidote against this infection of language except to know it is there, to see it forming your experience and do what you WILL as much as possible within these inherited constraints and work to free yourself of them when and where they interfere with this WILL, if that is something that interests you.
Or if that does not interest you, you can go on pretending that you are the infection, that you are in control, that you know THE ONE AND ONLY TRUTH. Or if you prefer to go willy nilly you might pacifically insist that you know YOUR TRUTH, which is just another way of saying “I won’t mention your nakedness if you won’t mention mine.”
You can take all your TRUTH, personal or universal as you may deem it to be, all your assumptions, all your apish babble and shove it directly up your ass, because this author is uninterested in THE TRUTH. This author is unwilling to offer up her own desperate attempts to make order out of chaos, meaning out of confusion, something out of nothing so that you or she may feel more comfortable. She will not promise you that everything will be okay, that heaven awaits the righteous, that good karma will carry you through, that positive thinking will align you with universal energies, or that Santa will be leaving you a gift this year.
Don’t misread this as an Atheistic or Nihilistic proclamation. This author has brushed up against something beyond the veil of words and acknowledges it. She simply wishes to exercise some restraint and abstains from birthing its shadow in the form of a word that the reader may misunderstand to be something they have heard or read of before.
You have never heard or read of this. The words you have heard and read, all of the words you will ever hear and read, are their own entity, maintaining a life independent of that of the signified. And this is why they can’t be trusted. It is of their nature to be separate. They can never be true. They can only be noisy, more babble to pierce the air and every corner of your mind with its deceptive and authoritarian assumption of power.

Vibration Incorporate

What are they doing with my mind?
You ask as they reach in with silky fingers to comb through the cobwebs behind your cranium. You recognize them from a long time ago, from when you were not even you but rather one of your ancestors, from when The Black Forrest was a place and not a prefix to the word “ham”.
Blue and white and fine as mists but strong like magnets. They have always made these sounds, or rather these sounds occur in synchronicity with their presence. These are sounds that you forget when you aren’t hearing them. Sounds that you can’t make with your throat, sounds that make your whole body vibrate, or perhaps make your whole vibration incorporate or discorporate depending on the situation and the point of view.
They do things with your mind.
You remember them from the distant future in which you as you previously thought of yourself do not exist but rather are a thing of the past. This you is the descendant of that you, having inherited some portion of the same genetic data that once ordered the structure of your matter. But this you is something else too, something more related to the smart phone you used to carry in your pocket when you were that you, and perhaps something else too.
What are they doing with my mind?
You ask as they reach in with silky fingers to comb through the cobwebs behind your cranium. But at this point you can’t recall that you ever had a cranium. Were you really once something monkey, walking, laughing, man, jabber? Smile, twitch, sticky, hot, death maker.
What were you? You don’t even want to remember. You are busy now, stretching out like gossamer streamers of blue cotton candy, like a cloud of dust, a nebula, soft and light, reaching your silky fingers into…what?
Into….what?
Into…what?

Crown

One day I finally decided to do it, to actually do it.
I created an altar on the east wall of my room, the one wall with the least amount of junk scattered on the floor in front of it. On this altar I placed photographs of myself, a sequence of images progressing slowly from infancy to adulthood. At the center of the altar I placed a photograph of my father. I made something like a throne for this picture to rest on, some thick books covered by a piece of red cloth and a couple of small figurines to guard it. It was enough like a throne that I could see it as a throne and that was enough for me.
When the altar was ready, I lit candles and incense. The room got thick with smoke and strong scents from distant lands I had never visited. Then I sat in front of my altar to stare at what I had created. It would have been easy to overlook that step. But I didn’t. This was the time when I would finally do it. I couldn’t jump over any step.

Drip drop went the secretions of certain glands that helped me to modify my view of reality.
Drip drop.
REALITY.
The Real.
That is what we were searching for, isn’t it? Some of us, not all of us. Sometimes, not all the time.
It was important then to understand that not everyone wanted to discover the Real. Some did seek it out, but when they found it they recoiled in terror and sincerely hoped that they would never have to see it again. Some said that they wanted it but they really wanted other things, private pleasures that would never be disclosed in public. I had to understand this. I had to remember it.

In those days I had come to understand that I was a robot. (It may seem obvious to you now, but it was a great shock to me when I first saw it. Don’t forget how different things were back then. None of what we know now was so clear, it was all kind of fuzzy, like looking at a vast landscape through piece of cellophane wrapped around your head.)
I was some kind of bio mechanical doll. I was made of meat and not metal but I was still a robot. A sophisticated meat doll. That was all I was. Nothing more, nothing less.
All that I liked, all that I disliked, all that I believed and disbelieved, all that I wanted and all that I feared, these things were not ME, even if they seemed like it. They might have seemed to come from me, but they didn’t. They had all come from somewhere else.
These things were programs that I ran, within my wet circuitry of coils of bloody guts. Or rather I should say that these were programs that ran me. I was merely a strange unconscious puppet in their hands, an empty receptacle for their various microscopic products.
I had no hand in creating or choosing all these programs. It was strange circuitous process that occurred long before I knew what was happening, or that anything was happening at all. Most of it was quite accidental. Accidental programming. It just happened. In my case, it happened to me. You understand? So it seemed natural, eminently natural, so it seemed real, so it seemed normal, so it seemed as the way things should be. What else could they be? This was me and everything around me fit perfectly with me. Almost everything, I should say. Almost everything.

Strawberries were good, black licorice was bad. Men with facial hair made me wet, so wet that the juice ran down my thighs and made it hard for me to sit still. When the sun was shining, I was happy and because I was happy, I twisted my face into a kind of frozen grimace that I called a smile. Cats were better than dogs. It was never okay to steal. It was okay to lie sometimes but only in particular situations. Killing was okay but only when you were threatened. Christians were good and Muslims were bad. I had to sleep in a bed or I wouldn’t feel right in the morning. The bed had to have sheets and blankets, all of certain colors. I had to make a certain amount of money a year. I had to have a car to drive so I could go places, places where there were other people like me.
All of these things were arbitrary. I didn’t know it then but it was still true. None of these programs represented anything that was objectively true. It was just things that were said and they got repeated. Linguistic viruses that came into me when someone spoke too loud too close to me, when my senses were wide open and vulnerable. They were a kind of sonic self reproductive demons that inhabited my shivering temple of wet and tender walls, strange non physical half living creatures that swayed me to do this or that, pushed me to do things in a way that complied with their secret directives.

So I made a crown. I knew it couldn’t be too simple, it shouldn’t be. Some effort had to go into its construction. But I also couldn’t make it too elaborate. If I made it too difficult I would never finish it and it was of utmost importance that I should finish.
I knew it had to fit upon my head. That was most crucial. I made it out of twine and placed some leaves and flowers all along the perimeter. I was very pleased with my work.
I placed the crown and a robe on the simple little altar I had made earlier. I placed it all before my father’s throne. It seemed as if he was looking down at it but it was really just a photograph. Still, it really did seem like he was looking. Looking down. At me.
The robe was an old terrycloth bathrobe, light green in color, nothing that special really. Not until I made it special. And then it was. It truly was.

Everyone around me was the same. This took some time for me to recognize. For so long I had assumed that everyone else was different, that they actually knew what they were doing and why they were doing it. It took me a while to accept that they knew as much as I did, maybe a little less since they couldn’t look directly into their own robotic nature, since they still believed they made decisions on their own, since they still believed they were unique and capable of deciding their own course in life.
The fact was that we simply collided our way through an accidental obstacle course that we called existence. We bounced off of each other like bumper cars. It became clear that they were all the same, Hebrews, Romans, or Barbarians. In fact, I had lost track of what had once distinguished them from each other. Suddenly they all seemed the same to me. Not in a good way, either.
One genetic trait was not better than another. Some things made a particular genetic line of robots live longer. That in itself was not “good”. The entire perpetuation of the species was neither good nor bad. It was simply a thing to watch happening, like the firecrackers on the fourth of July or black birds flying in a flock over a calm lake in summertime.
Survival was all that mattered to them, to us. The survival of the meat bots. All the meat bots like me. We thought we were superior to every other thing that bopped around on this planet. We thought we were the best.
Somehow, what we thought to explain our own presence here, was what made us better. One thought justified another in a circle that we were never inclined to unwind or examine closely.
We were somehow better than dogs because when we fucked, we would do it within the bounds of holy matrimony and we would then produce children to please GOD. GOD, which was itself a construct of our bewildered and imaginative minds which we molded into our own image. GOD, mad scientist, creator of broken robots out of old discarded parts.
We were better because we could see the difference between right and wrong. And we got to decide what was right and wrong based on what was best for us. And we were told what was best for us before we even knew what was being said to us. So we decided nothing. Nothing at all.
An accidental obstacle course and nothing else. It was hard to see it back then. But you have to understand, we didn’t know hardly anything.

When everything was prepared and the scene was set, I bowed to the four directions and crossed my heart, just as I had learned so long ago, back when I had thought I knew so much.
I approached the altar carefully, almost with weariness. In a loud and clear voice, I said:
"I have come to bear the burden"
I said it two more times slowly and carefully. The sound of my voice echoed through the room and came back to me thicker and stronger than I would have imagined it.

We were machines run by programs created by unnamed authors, long lost biological hackers who had maybe succumbed to their own devious traps.
We were ruled by Accident, Chaos, Chance. Our main directive, our only real wish was to survive at any cost. Everything else was secondary. No matter what we said, no matter what we believed.
That is all we were, all we were, all we were. But we didn’t know it. We didn’t want to know it.
Now you understand, just like you do. It wasn’t easy to see through it, through the great charade, the great game. It wasn’t easy for me, it wasn’t easy for anyone. Nobody starts out with a taste for silence. It’s an acquired taste. Something to be developed.

I removed my father’s photograph from the throne and placed it face down on the carpet. I then replaced it with one of my own. My photograph up there on the throne looking down at me just like my father had been doing before. I put on the robe that I had chosen and I placed the crown upon my head. I placed it slowly, suddenly aware of what I was doing, suddenly curious, suddenly afraid.
I extended my arms to both sides palms facing upward. Then I brought them together over my heart in a prayer position, palms together, fingers pointing upwards.
I looked at myself on the throne. I looked at myself and my self looked back. I recognized myself. I recognized my self. There. On the throne. I had come to bear the burden. It was time to take my rightful place. It was time to leave the charade behind. It was time to know.

Gnosis

Truly, my brethren and beloved, you who are closest to me, who eat with me and drink with me and rest where I rest, you who have abandoned the sky father and the earth mother because I have asked it, unto you will I give all mysteries and all gnosis. I will give you the mystery of the twelve æons of the rulers who dash across the sky like comets and their seals and their ciphers wrapped in brown paper and tied with cotton string and the manner of invocation for reaching their regions will all be in your inbox on Tuesday morning.
I will give you moreover, the mystery of the thirteenth æon . You will attain this just by being with me, and by limiting conflicting influences. I will teach you the manner of invocation for reaching their regions, leading by example. You must watch carefully, I can’t explain it because words are lies, but I can show you if you turn all of your attention to the moment. I will give you their ciphers and their seals, the symbols that are made in opposition to the symbols you were taught when the world was being built.
In music I will give you the mystery of the baptism of those of the Midst and the manner of invocation for reaching their regions. And in gestures I will announce unto you their ciphers and their seals. It will be a dance and the steps will change even as the music changes. You will never know what step comes next just as I never know what step comes next. The sequence will seep into your consciousness like water being absorbed by cardboard. I want your consciousness to become soggy , a formless pulp.
And I will give you the baptism of those of the Right, our region, by letting the sun scorch your skin and the eagles eat out your eyes. Its ciphers and its seals and the manner of invocation for reaching thither are available for immediate download at itunes. I will give you the great mystery of the Treasury of the Light where all my wealth is stored. It looks like an ordinary honey jar unless you have already received the baptism of those of the Right, in that case it will look like nothing at all. The manner of invocation for reaching thither is the subject of a PBS special that you can rent from the local public library. If you lack a membership therein I suggest that you obtain one. Never make the mistake made by Simon Magus and keep The Learning Annex Guide To Successful Alchemy out for over three months without renewing. You can renew online or with any touch tone telephone. There is no sense in over drafting from your account with the Treasury of the Light before you have learned to turn lead into gold.
I will give you all the mysteries and all the gnosis, for low monthly installments of just $29.99 or you can devote your life to following me and doing as I do. I will give you gnosis in order that ye may be called 'children of the fullness, perfected in all the gnosis and all the mysteries.' It can be the name written over your photo on your Facebook page.
Or I could award you a diploma. My new ink jet printer works like a charm and the have special certificate paper for sale in office supply stores. Blessed are ye beyond all men on earth, for with access to these spheres you will have room to breath. For the children of the Light are come in your time, you are they.
All that is required for an achievement of gnosis is everything, or just a monthly payment. You choose. Truly, my brethren and beloved, you who are closest to me, who eat with me and drink with me and rest where I rest, you who have abandoned the sky father and the earth mother because I have asked it, unto you will I give all mysteries and all gnosis. All others will get what they pay for.

Feast of Cannibals

With cannibal love we coddle them, keeping them locked within steely fences and walls of white plaster. Never will the wolves get their chance at these, our precious young. Never will the world have the chance to dash their bones into bits with terrible falls after great feats. We alone shall enjoy that privilege, the honor of eating our young alive.
Fattened as they are with the sloth of caged animals, darkened by their cheerless existence beneath our marvelous white wings, they know no joy. They watch the images of childhood from our flickering screens, see the green of grass and blue of sky without the knowledge of the wealth of feelings that such images evoke in the spirit of one whose bare feet have trod on grass and leaped towards the sky.
The sky shall not have them. The grass shall never touch them. We keep them safe, like pearly little maggots hidden away in a dark dumpster, suffocating them with cellophane wrappers and video games, and mp3 players, and cellular phones.
They may speak to one another, reach for one another through these devices, but harsh words will have to win their battles, smooth talk suffice for exchanges of affection. We will not let the bloody fisted brawls have them, nor the hand holding, tickling, chasing, and swinging. They are only for us.
We strip away their immortal souls and make machines of them, fat little high fructose corn syrup powered bots to cherish the ideals we hammered into the hole we tore in their hearts. They will hate terror and terrorists. They will love America and God. Their ears and belly buttons will be washed and their homework done.
We will make them want us, want us for the toys, the shoes, the clothes, the sweets we can buy. They will wail for these things, the fruits of our Empire, never knowing the taste of earth and air and sun and water. We will give them corn to eat in all of the colors of the rainbow forged in the shapes of cartoon characters and steroids to make their lungs pump even when there is no oxygen left to breathe and technology to cast its light over their pallor and more fucking liquid corn to leave them thirsty for more and more and more…
They belong to us and to no other, certainly not to themselves. Whatever they are, whatever they were or might have been, it will be smothered like the unwholesome flame that it is.
Death shall not have them, for we will never let them live. They will die before they can be born, to satisfy our hunger, to stave off the orgy of fear that is existence. They will never be here, will never know now, will always be spirited away by our incessant diversions, left as ghosts slumped on sofas with crumbs in their creases.
And the few who suspect that they have been denied the most precious gift we could give will be punished for their intelligence, for their pure heartedness and courage. The brave and the curious and the noble of our brood will suffer the worst tortures so that we may enjoy our cannibal feast, unperturbed by remorse or anxiety.
We will never need to atone if we nip truth in the bud, snuff out the first smoldering spark before a wild fire can grow and spread its crimson fingers over the hearts of our children, taking them forever from us . Never will the passion to live flower within and eat them alive and transform them from worms into butterflies. They are ours alone to devour.

Why Not?

Why not one more song in the cool midnight blue? While babies sleep and spiders hunt and worried fathers pace, I make one more strange shape, electric green in the night. Why not? Why not? While the black blood of the earth, that demon of civilization, bleeds into the briny seas and clock hands tick methodically round like waltzers twirling to the Blue Danube, I go bravely hop scotching into fields of beets, crimson purple veins throbbing in the green leaves.
I saw the face of my ancestor in a photograph that was taken today. A pale plump, round faced woman looked back at me from a photo that had been taken of me. How strange that she is me and we are meeting today for the first time. Why not? The last face I remember seeing was so much younger and leaner and tortured, a puffy red faced beauty, but I looked at her in a mirror and thought, “I hate you, I hate you! Nobody loves you!” and I saw her cut her blond hair off.
Such heavy lead filled thoughts to cart to the alchemist, laying them down on the work bench, smelling perfume of cinnamon and sulfur. The devil was here just before you. Can I make gold of this worthless lot? Why not? Why not!
Breezes from countries I never saw caress my face, leaping from leather binding and gold leafed pages to posses my fingers and send them to write fairytales and boil split peas. So many silly things pass through this window I call my self, why not one more? I almost loved the woman I glimpsed in the photograph today because she looked like a grandmother that once rocked me and like a cousin who I don’t know well at all. A cousin that shovels snow from her porch and eats black bread covered in butter and cheese.
I had once been a citizen of earth until I longed to learn to sing the songs of Saturn’s outer rings. Then I trained on the moon called Titan and gave water to a strange man and loved him through eternity, strangely familiar forever. Come with me deeper into the abyss!
While students memorize and serpents molt and gurus pretend, I wriggle, pale and slick in the underground wells like a Naiad, wailing an eerie tune to summon the strange. Up it comes, frightening me in dark hallways when I thought I was alone, drifting through the blue sky like paramecium under a microscope’s lens.
If you thought there would be a point in all of this, if you hoped for it and found it lacking and frowned, then you’ve never been to Titan. The locust make a noise like music in the evening and the swallows sing in the mornings and everything smells like licorice and coffee while the hands on the clock tick tick tick and fathers become grandfathers and die despite the lucky rabbits feet their granddaughters give them. Little Lagomorph paws dyed blue and dispensed from red machines after two quarters of a dollar have been placed on its long silver tongue just outside the air conditioned cool of a powder blue general store at the base of a mountain in the heat of a parking lot with a view of a lake. They come out in plastic bubbles, but nonetheless grandfathers die and their bodies are donated to universities.
Why not?
While grandmothers fan themselves and mice scurry through cupboards and river rocks soak up the heat of the sun to warm lizards’ bellies, I open doors into invisible worlds and listen to the thoughts of others.
A sympathetic ear is so rare that individuals are almost always startled when you respond to their innermost ramblings. When you hear them whispering to themselves, “I hate you, I hate you! Nobody loves you!” and you crumple up just like a frightened pill bug and cry inconsolably, they will find it hard to accept that one occurrence is connected to the next. Plausible deniability.
Why not? Why not?
Why not one more song in the cool midnight blue? While babies sleep and spiders hunt and worried fathers pace, I make one more strange shape, electric green in the night. Can I make gold of this worthless lot? In dark hallways when I think I am alone? At the base of a mountain in the heat of a parking lot? Come with me deeper into the abyss!
Why not?
Why not?

Creation and Property

Nobody can own music.
Nobody can own a sound.
You can make music, you can make a sound, but you can’t keep it in bondage.
It’s like a child. You may birth it, name it Rainbow and raise it on organic vegetable matter and Dalai Llama quotes excerpted from coffee table novelty books, but when it turns 18, if it wants to ride in red sports cars with gangstas and shake its ass in a skin tight mini skirts made of genuine baby white tiger skin, then that’s just what it will do.
The things which accumulated in you and resulted in "the song" were not unique to you, they came from elsewhere.
For example, your siblings also feel the angst that remains from your father’s drunken abuse, and your love of wild flowers is shared with scores of green peace enthusiast, hippies and botanist. That chord arrangement is only slightly different from others, and probably is identical to an arrangement featured in a polka song written by an accordion player that lives with his mother in Michigan and works as a used car salesman by day. The only thing distinguishing your arrangement from his is that the rhythm is different and yours is strummed on an acoustic guitar rather than keyed on an accordion and you have an audience and got a record deal while he suffers from loneliness due to his pig nosed face.
The very idea that creative material should be owned is an uncreative idea. It is an idea that says: “Now I have made this and no one else can make anything else like it or from it or I’ll sue their ass for copyright infringement”
Creativity is using anything and everything and making something new from it, something slightly different or unrecognizably different. Kudos to anyone that can take part of a song about love and peace and turn it into a song about hate and violence. That is called being creative. No one comes up with anything brand new and all their own.
We are all composites of the many different influences which converge within us and our ideas and creations stem from this composite creation that we call self. We do not know the nature of our self, and not knowing our self, how could we ever presume to possess it, let alone those composite spores that it spews into the ether in the form of poetry, song, or sculpture.
This self is on loan. We borrow it for a while, taking it for a spin before it evaporates. These impressions shaping our creative impulses, are viewed through the borrowed lens of self. They did not originate within us. The color of the sky was present long before we were and the birds were singing about it long before we started writing about them singing about it. The thing which made the song was not yours, the things that the song is made up of is not yours, those things that inspired its making are not yours, how could the song itself be yours?
Nothing is new under the sun. There are no original ideas. Your ideas come from others. From the sound of your mother’s voice when you were twelve, from your father’s old car, from the lake you nearly drowned in, from the song that played on the radio when you first kissed, from the way she screamed when she left, from the theme of that cartoon you watched when you were four, and the song your grandmother hummed when you were 13 months old.
There are things at work within you which you are not even aware of. That song you wrote may very well be an approximation of something you heard when you were a child or in the elevator three months ago. That you were unaware of its influence on you does not make the resulting song original. It came from somewhere.
To be creative is to see what there is to work with and work with it in any way possible. To steal, to borrow, to reuse and cause mutations, that is creative. To forge something new of what was is God-like, opening up infinite possibilities. To spend one’s life obsessed about protecting a small blot of intellectual material is limiting and can only lead to decay, to the end of possibilities.
Creativity is brave. To be a true creator is to scatter creations like droplets of water from the trembling wings of a heron. You do not take time to count the droplets, or to try to catch them before they can dance off of the wings of another.
If someone takes what you have made and does something new with it, that is a compliment. If you were focused on creation and not ownership, you would be unafraid to loose the drops of water that scatter from your wings, you would know that soon you will dip into the waters of life in search of the wriggling fish and new things will scatter from you as you part with the water again and ascend with your catch. This can happen again and again if you are active and not busy catching and adoring the product of dives into the deep that occurred once long ago.
When you create, you are in the present. What you created, that is already in the past. Dead and gone. If you are interested in ownership, sue the earth itself. For that is where you came from and that is where you’re going.

The Story Gets Worse

Ed wood said, "Just keep on writing. Even if your story gets worse, you'll get better."
This is God’s philosophy. The story keeps getting sorrier and sorrier, the same themes emerge again and again in an ever downward hellish bent spiral, and yet there will be no end. God wants no end. There may be an end to your personal happiness, an end to peace within a certain region, an end to the old neighborhood, an end to chivalry, but there will never be a final THE END. God doesn’t care what happens to you or to me or to Palestine or Israel or the blessed United States Of America, God just keeps on writing, using the elements to further the plot, to continue this operatic telling for the furtherance of its own perfection. What makes us think that God would be an author who spices a story up with pain and conflict and then resolves it by THE END, by proceeding those words with, AND THEY ALL LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER?
God is Phillip K Dick motherfuckers. Your story has a sad ending and so does the next one and the next one and the next one that God churns out of his rusty old typewriter and lonesome mind. Something worthwhile is transpiring through the unfolding of all the stories, but there is no rainbow crossing the sky and happy couple raising their goblets in a toast surrounded by their faithful companions to close the tale. That may happen somewhere in the middle, that one breathless moment of bliss. Then the faithful companions gang rape the bride and steal the booze and smash the cup and murder the groom while the rainbow fades, simply disappears like magick dissolved into the unblinking blue. That’s how the opera works. Then perhaps the bride births a bastard son having barely escaped with her life, and then he will seek his fortune and hope to avenge his father’s death and his mother’s honor (because his mother will swear that he is the groom’s son). He will find the fattened leader of traitors and end that life while the guilty old man squeals for mercy after the tortures wrought on him by our new young hero. Then on he goes to continue his own burning and raping and pillaging under the banner of revenge so that whole new heroes are made of the sons of the villains, and on and on into infinity.
The myth, the crude and basic outline of the story tells you about the shape of the mind of God. But his real presence is down in the sordid details, down in the single tear shed by the bride when they leave her for dead soiled and broken beside her one true love, down in the drop of blood that splashes onto her son’s cheek to replace that tear as he slits the last antagonists throat. It is down in the dirt under his fingernails and in his malformed heart aching with the longing for a peace that never comes. It is in the endless dusty trails lined with thieves ready to further the story with their unbrotherly exploits. It is in the clear blue eyes of maidens that believe that God made for them one true love, it is in the way that they wait and throw their arms around the first character that seems likely to be the one. It is in the trees that sway over tombstones where old widows drop roses. It is in the worms that eat the bodies of the heroic villains of passed chapters that lie beneath those blankets of roses. Look about you, it is there in the filth crusted upon the dirty dishes in your sink and in the air around your bathroom vent stained by the smoke of the hash you have smoked to ease the pain of existence and rejection and broken heartedness, lost youth and shattered innocence.
Existence is suffering. I read these words in Herman Hesse’s Sidhartha when I was 11 or 12 and couldn’t fully comprehend their meaning, couldn’t fathom the course that they highlighted. To be written is to be made a wretched hungry ghost, and the mystical schools along the way, the ones just off the dusty trails, behind the lines of thieves, are waiting to teach you how to un-write yourself. They are waiting to show you the way out of God’s opera. Not to new life, not to better places, not into heaven, but into the nothingness, into the abyss from which you were called by a fevered creator that hoped to know itself through the endless wriggling of your ancestral line. In the secret monastery there are Sherpas waiting to show some how to help God know itself and to show others the way to annihilation. Some will choose to pass through the door that says “Willing Servitude” and others through the door marked “Liberation” and the rest are left to have their bones and memories powdered into dust.
You were not written to praise the writer. You were written to serve. You were written to taste the wine and succumb to passions and resist temptations, and strive endlessly. Your story will get worse. And God will grow infinitely more complex through its telling.

Binary Man

Here we go loop de loo, here we go loop de lie. Around and around like the waters spinning down a toilet bowl, spin, spin, spin. We will be back where we started again. One step forward, two steps back. Oh you pudgy balding little binary man. My hero, Binary Man, coming to slash through reality with his machete made of ones and zeros. Give him a yes or a no. That is your only choice. This was my hero? I have to confess that I also like Rorschach. I side with the deviant losers. *Sigh* . We are all going to get our hearts broken over and over in this sticky bubble gum web. Why did I make my baby wait every day after school? Just a little baby waiting for her mamma who’s off crying and fighting and sometimes running down the street alone to rescue her baby when the bus is late, and arriving disheveled and puffy eyed. And baby asks, “How did you get here so early?” But I’m a half hour late. I don’t know why baby, I thought I had friends, but then I had none. How did this all get rolling? I was standing in line behind a pleasant black man at the DMV. He was getting his motorcycle license. I was sixteen. This was the last day before my driver’s permit would expire, my last chance to take the driving exam and get my license. Sink or swim time. In line for hours. The gentleman explained to me, “People are either for you or against you. Sometimes it’s people you love, people who love you who are against you. But you have look past it all and see that they are either for you or against you.” The first incarnation of binary man. I thought he was right. My parents for example were against me, although they’d swear they were for me. But they were really for themselves and for their version of me which was not the actual me, but a me that served them. So I’d need to break clean. But I couldn’t do it properly for a long time. Soon I was alone. There is nobody here that is for me. I am not even for me. Damn you Binary Man! I think you were my father whispering in one ear all of the time, extreme and righteous, bending me, bending me, bending me until I was tweaked. The data that comes in is always tweaked as I process it. They are all against me. There is a distinction, however, between everyone being for themselves and everybody being against you. They are not all automatically against you, they just aren’t for you. There is a subtle difference. It is not a one or a two yet, not a yes or a no. There is a big gray forest that we may abide in, a shadowy place from which many shapes and possibilities may be plucked, raised, lifted, conjured. Yes and No man is coming with his machete. His goal is deforestation. He wants us to join him or die, twisted and alone in the desert he makes for us. Fuck you Binary Man. You are no hero! You are a mediocre Villain. I’m not going to join you. And I’m not going to be alone. I’m gonna fill my pockets with seeds of ambiguity and Johnny Appleseed it across the globe. You can loop de loo all you please, but you won’t get me. I’m gonna run up, up, up the holy mountain planting these little seeds. Like Luke Skywalker, I can still see the good in you father, but you are mostly machine now. It you come any closer I’ll lop off your machete hand with this gardening spade and watch you twitch. You are not a magick man, you are just THE MAN, taking names and asking, “Are you with me?” *chalks an x on your skull and slowly guides the machete to the mark for practice* “Or not?”

Eaters of Death

Today is Easter, time to celebrate our undead god and eat his flesh and drink his blood. We run through open green fields or across well manicured little plots of grass in gaily colored frocks in search of the unborn offspring of birds, reverting for this one day to one of our earliest scavenger instincts. This is how our pretty little walnut shaped brains got so meaty. We ate all those omega threes and got super wise, wise enough to figure that if we could eat the eggs they left behind, we could also murder the foul that laid them, causing that pulsing twitching organ under our skull cap to burst with profound insight and new wisdom about the fine art of killing and eating. This gave us time to grow philosophical, mystical. We imposed sexual metaphor over everything around us, father sky coming down to make life with mother earth. Soon we grew even wiser and learned that if death is what makes us so strong and makes our brains so big we would need to forget about mother earth and build the cult of father sky. Angry, jealous, vengeful. His son a radical mischief maker. Ah, ah, ah, but I skip way ahead, can you see the whole progression in your mind? We kill, we learn to stand upright, we advance just a little from early Cro-Magnon to present day Christian cannibal. We eat life, sucking it up wherever we go. Today we make our own eggs out of hard plastic and fill them with chocolate made with cocoa harvested by 8 year olds in underdeveloped countries. Some little brown kid is sipping down his morning cup of Java, the big meal of the day before he goes to work so that pure white people can feed the fruits of his brown labor wrapped in multicolored foil wrappers to their own pasty larvae. Shall we talk about fertility on this day, the way rabbits do it and do it until they overrun the hillside? Imagine rabbits with no natural enemies left to hunt them, cannibal rabbits that eat death and have cunning bulging brains, tearing the country hillsides to shreds to build their little warrens. That’s us. Or more austere, imagine one more ape, the son of jealous Jehovah bleeding on a cross and getting dried out by the sun like that ugly bug covered fish I saw in my neighbor’s kitchen yesterday. He finally dies and we lay him in a cave, but then he rises, up, up back to father sky. Did I mention that he took a last meal before he was convicted for his crimes, whatever they were. Gulp, gulp, chew, chew, and he communicated to his followers what they should do. Be good cannibals, eat life, be eaters of the living flesh of god, father sky. Yum yum. So we whirl around in our sun drenched warrens playing games and then we sit down to eat the remains of a big pig adorned with little yellow ringlets of pineapple. If we are extra good, we stop off at the temple first to take the last sacrament, to reenact the last meal with our cannibal prophet, the son of father sky. Take this body my body, this blood my blood, and go look for eggs in the grass. The omega trees that I mentioned earlier come from the grass. Hens eat grass and worms and other crawlies and that’s what makes their eggs so good for us. We can’t digest grass ourselves, we need the chicken to do that for us. We feed on her life process. The holy trinity, the grass, the chicken, and the egg. This gives life. Today is a good day for the eaters of death. Today it is time to celebrate our undead god and eat his flesh and drink his blood.

Pride

Someone had been left on a porch in a basket as an infant; the classic fairytale beginning. He must have been the illegitimate son of a king, or otherwise noble born, and abandoned to anonymity to spare his life. Or perhaps a prince from another world hidden in ours from his enemies. So he always held his head high, remembering that he had something in common with Moses. His son likewise turned his nose up just slightly and remembered that he was different from those around him, and so his son’s son as well.
They were clever men, intelligent, makers of things. The son built a big house with his own hands on the corner of a popular street and two more generations were born in that house. Eventually the grandson of that first abandoned prince journeyed across the seas in search of opportunity, bringing with him his wife and their own little son. That son grew up in the distant land upon which they landed and eventually had a child of his own, not a son, but a daughter.
She only once heard the story of the basket but she never forgot it. Even without having heard it, she knew already that she was somehow different, better than everyone around her. This special pride born of nothing more substantial than white skin and wit was tempered by a Christian upbringing, so that even as she was arrogant, she felt a twinge of guilt that she should be fortunate to be so perfect while others were, by no fault of their own, born into vulgar families. She sympathized with those that she thought lowlier than herself and rarely met someone that she would see as better than herself.
Brought up in a large house in the country, she was lavished with every possible trinket, a fabulous play house, marvelous pets, her own room with a king sized bed. A golden plaque, with the Lord’s Prayer inscribed upon it, was hung on the wall beside her bed.
In her most vulnerable years, pride kept her from harms way, pride made her selective of her company and her occupations. She liked to read and could read and speak better than most of those from the country town where she lived.
It was not long however before her pride had turned to arrogance and it left her isolated. Her sympathy went to the devil who seemed to have suffered an affliction similar to her own. She lived up to the adage, “Pride cometh before the fall.” Once that pride had been a thing that allowed her to do as others dared not, to be as others dared not, but now it held her like a reign. If she imagined that she had been offended, pride commanded some action, even if affection dictated another course.
Her circle of associates grew smaller and smaller until there was only one left, a person that she held in great esteem. She seldom left her house or spoke to anyone outside of this one companion. And then, again and again, one thing or another that he said or did injured her precious pride and, more than once, she thought that she would have to forsake his company as well, in order to preserve some of this imaginatively produced regal bearing.
With difficulty, she observed that the gift of her forefathers, which had born her far into this strange and mysterious world, now threatened to throw her into a lower realm than she had previously imagined. But like the princess that refused all suitors and insulted them, she too found herself in the hands of the one that could not be insulted, a king thrush beard. Like that princess, she was put to tasks which challenged her pride and wore it away as the wind and sea erode the sandy cliffs.
Someone had been left on a porch in a basket in the distant past. The classic fairy tale end must come to pass eventually, but our prideful girl has not yet had all of her pots broken in the market place, and there can be no fair prince until then.

Here And There

Can I tell you how I came to be here, at the this time and this place, this point of convergence between dimensions that I imagine or experience or dream, this moment that I may not understand at all? If I tell you, swear to me by every hole in this cheese you hold so dear that you will accept every word I say as true and not press me on matters which seem questionable, for I fear that it will break my delicate grip with this reality if you prod it unnecessarily. These things are like fine webs made of spun sugar mounted one upon one another to form pink cloudy softness, webs that once touched with sweaty hands or a curious tongue merely melt into sticky sweetness, no more constant or fixed than human promises. I will tell you because you seem sincere and because you are here, an imaginary ear for my imaginary voice, so take an imaginary seat there by my imaginary hearth and I will tell you the story of the black man and the little bird.
First I will tell you about the black man. It does not matter which of these things I tell you about first as the events surrounding these two nouns; man and bird, occurred simultaneously, if they occurred at all. That is to say that sequence has everything to do with language in that the word is like a narrow doorway through which only one topic may pass at a time, like little drops of dewy spittle from my lip to your ear, a tiny packet of data about things which have been occurring in a world too vast to squeeze into dew drops or words or feathers that have been made into writing quills instead of the wings of flying birds. One comes before the other only because that is all that the doorway permits, all that that ungracious lord, THE WORD will allow, one at a time to visit the well of communion between souls.
So first the black man. Let me tell you this of him; he who is the cohort of countless witches condemned to burn as well as those that fly round secret fires in a whirlwind of ecstasy before they are discovered by the mob, he is not what you expect. He, as I have known him anyway, is always mild mannered, self composed and unassuming. He that knows so much will ask you what he well knows as though he never knew it and not to play a game with you, but just that the two of you shall partake of knowledge together in the renewed asking of a question. His hair flecked with grey, his posture stooped, he keeps trees that bear fruit, unusual trees and he will peel back the leathery skins of those fruits to reveal the strange delights held within and offer it to you as water to a parched man. He would withhold nothing, least of all that which grows from seed to meat. Should you wish to partake, he shares without reserve. What is his is yours while you are with him and again later if you choose. He is also a fisherman who draws great shy beast from the deep with lures unlike any used by ordinary men. He will draw up the arcatuthus for you and then you will see your greed for the catch dissolve into sympathy for the beast and you will see its children born and hope that it survives captivity and may return to the deep, but if not, then there are still the offspring in whom to invest this new found tenderness. He is a stranger, a lover, a father all in one, your oldest friend, a friend that you have forgotten. Never did he forget you. Never did he hold it against you that you would forget or swear that you are unacquainted with him. He has all the tenderness of an old grandfather, the wisdom of a priest of one of those true orders of mystic stewardship. That is the black man.
And then there is the bird. I met the bird in a parking lot looking for a crumb to nab. I was putting groceries into the back of the truck and I heard him say that he was hungry, so I broke off some bread and tossed it gently his way as I had been taught by the black man. The bird turned his head slightly to look me in the eye and thanked me very much for taking notice of him. I told him that it was my pleasure and I hoped he would enjoy the fare and as he went heartily to it I got into the truck and drove away. How did he look? Well he was small and sort of grayish brown, a sort of sparrow maybe. It is his little voice which was clearest to me both then and now. I heard his voice again this morning while I walked from school. He was singing gaily. You will tell me that sparrows don’t sing, but I must tell you that by today he was no longer a sparrow. His voice was very clear and bright and I listened to it as I walked, touched by its merriment. Then I noticed that he sang the song that cars sing when they are rubbed the wrong way by someone who cannot disarm the alarm. It was the song of that alarm which goes off in low class neighborhoods and runs through a series of different obnoxious tones and rhythms so that the offending car rubber will be dismayed by the shrill and clownish noises and depart in all due haste. Now my friend the bird repeated this same song in his lovely trill. I stopped beneath the tree laden with pink blossoms and listened to his heart bursting with joy through his rendering of this popular new song. The outward form mattered not at all. The lyric to the song, the tones, the rhythms, all were quite unimportant. What mattered so was the heart. That is what he administered liberally to that tired old alarm call. He made it a masterpiece.
“You should try it.” The black man said tasting a succulent gem from one of his trees. “That’s what we do. We take what they made and we remake it, we remake it with ourselves in it. It doesn’t matter at all what they meant for it to be in the first place. We make it alive.” He said this with a little flittering hand gesture that reminded me of the bird. His beard was short and sparse then, composed of short curled salt and pepper bristles. His skin looked like milk chocolate, soft and weathered with age. I say, sing on little bird, sing on and I will listen to you and to the black man too.
What about you friend? Are you listening to me now, telling you this story with gaps wide enough for us both to fall through? If you haven’t heard, then no matter and never mind, so long as you spare me your criticisms. I tell it to you the best way I can with this clumsy stuff, trying to wedge a leviathan through a hole made for a mouse. I could have just told you the story of Iron Hans, painting the forest in greens so deep they were almost black like the rotted underside of forgotten chard. I could have told you any story at all, an old, old story, one that you have heard a dozen times before and done as much if not more that I did here. It is not what I told you really that will profit you at all, but what I poured into every senseless syllable. It comes from the fount at the heart swelling over after the rains of winter, ready to feed all the spring grasses and from them, little lambs, and from them, hungry lions.
That is the story of how I came to be here, how we crossed here like roads running unknown courses, my imaginary voice and your imaginary ear, joined for a moment and now soon to part, for now I take my leave of you. I will never mind if you forget me. I will never mind if you claim that we never met.

Ruler Of The Kingdom

When first they gave me the poison I was told that I must be careful and do certain things so that it would take hold. I call it a poison for I can presently think of no better description, although it is more like semen than poison. But semen is after all a type of poison, a thing which comes in and causes change, causes the death of the young woman and the birth of the new babe and mother. This that they gave me was like semen, filled with new hidden life, a type of life which I, as I then was, could not even fully comprehend. Like a person asked to take a mysterious package to an unknown house, I cannot know whether the package delivered means life or death. Certainly it delivers both, but whether it is for the benefit or detriment of your cause all depends on which side you’re rooting for, mobsters or coppers, guerillas or soldiers. Some, like myself, agree to carry the package not because we are partial to one side or another, but rather because the dangerous opportunity has at last been either ferreted out or stumbled upon, and the chance that it could mean death for the courier is promising. I did not care to be what I had been anymore. I did not care if I lived or died. No, that is not true, I preferred to die if possible. Suicide would be the choice of a more reasonable person, but I have never been reasonable. I had decided that suicide was for the weak and I wanted to be strong, strong or dead, and there is only one way to meet one or the other of these two fates. One must jump into the fray. So that is what I did.
It was described to me in a variety of ways with the usage of a variety of terms. They called it a lineage, they called it a way. There was talk about the transfer and transformation of substances. At times I thought it was like being sprinkled with pixie dust, it was a mystical something which might effect a change upon me. Most other times I simply understood that IT, rather than I, was the most important part of the equation. Yes, there were times that I understood that, in theory, I was a host for something. A host just as the mother is host for the human embryo as it grows within her, for it is a fact that throughout a pregnancy the developing fetus functions as a parasite within the mother’s body and it is by a clever and necessary internal trick that our body is swayed into harboring this guest. I understood this theoretically, philosophically. I was comfortable with this "idea".
And then I changed handlers, went away to another master. At that time, the talking stopped. The idea was forgotten. I was given things to do and I did them. I stopped thinking about the transference of substances. I was kept busy doing things which would seem to an outside observer to be perfectly ordinary things to do. I walk, I snap my fingers, I scratch my head, I walk. I write silly nonsense stories. I make love to my handler. I cook and clean for my handler. I make love to my handler. I walk, I snap my fingers, I scratch my head, and I walk. Perfectly ordinary things to do. I did them, and I did them as instructed. Time passed. I felt differences in my appetite; in my appetite for company and music and movies and books and yes, even foods. I noticed these changes, and I even imagined that these were signs of success, but silly me, I didn’t think to make any predictions with regards to what such signs might foretell. Perhaps it is not so strange that I did not wonder or guess at what might lie ahead. Very few animals do truly posses the ability to foresee what effect they may be causing in the present moment. For example, many dogs will run into the street to bite a tire without expecting to die or cause an accident, and teenage girls fuck as they please and are shocked to find themselves impregnated.
I did as I was instructed to the best of my ability and shifted little by little into being something other than that which I had been. I did not understand that this difference in me was just the beginning, a preparatory phase.
One day I felt uncommonly sleepy. I lay down to nap and began to dream of mating with the Bistea Neptunis, which looked to me a bit like one imagines Poseidon, bearded and muscular with a beastly fin. It was not how it looked so much as how it felt that seemed monstrous. Its presence was alien. I was suspended in the water above this creature and my heart was wide open and golden love seeped from my heart into its own heart and with its tail, it fanned that same love back to me, it spewed from its genitals into the water which carried it into my tingling vagina. It all felt so good. Then I was abruptly awakened by some heated quarreling taking place in the room adjacent to mine. My head began to hurt very badly. It hurt for three days, and, by the third day, my stomach also hurt immensely.
In the afternoon of that third day, the pain was unbearable and I laid down upon my handlers bed with my hands folded upon my chest. I was alone in the room. I felt myself shifting and moving out of my body, reaching with many waving tentacles from my center. The pain in my body seemed to be a disturbance caused by the discord inherent in having this subtle many tentacled thing within me rubbing and moving about within a body that is the wrong shape. We were both very uncomfortable, myself and my alien occupant. I decided that it was a sort of growing pain shared between us. Something would eventually give, my invisible body would stretch to accommodate it or it might slowly devour that body and take its place. I could not, of course, be certain.
My handler was unconcerned by these developments. His only instruction to me was this: "Stay calm."
That was when I knew that the time had come for me to be careful and do what was necessary to ensure that this delicate bloom of the netherworld would take hold within me. This is what I had agreed to do, whether I had understood that in the beginning or not.
Somewhere along the way I became the whore of Babylon. Somewhere along the way I had picked up a package and now I walk with it, unsure of whether I will survive this little voyage, not knowing what impact its delivery might have. I look to the outside observer as if I am running an ordinary errand. I walk, I snap my fingers, I scratch my head, and I walk some more. Ripe with poison and rocked with shock, I do the little things I have learned to do in order to nurture the life hidden inside of me. They have become habit, so that as this new thing eats away at the old and eventually replaces it, it will already be accustomed to walking upright, to snapping its fingers, and scratching it’s head, to making love and writing silly stories, and no one will even know when it was that I died and it took my place as ruler of the kingdom.

I Dare Not Tell You

I dare not tell you the way that I travel, for if I do blood might start to run out of your ears as your eyes go black and the ceiling begins to melt and drip like hot wax splashing down on the linoleum. I dare not tell because it would surely be either the end of you or me. If you didn’t disintegrate entirely, you would be fiercely incensed against me and after rounding up your neighbors you’d all come rambling up the street, up that gently sloping stretch of road that we call hillside blvd., to the nests of mist shrouded graveyards and at last to my high tower, where I have barricaded myself within the living room with nothing but granola bars and bottled water and the three holy books and an endless supply of paper and pens to compensate for the loss of my computer, (for you and your horde will surely cut the power when you lay siege to my tower.)
You and your neighbors, good God fearing people will brandish torches and pitch forks and howl and shout. Perhaps the local preacher, an old Filipino man who’s brother of the same profession sells sulfur water in southern California, will try to calm you all with a sermon about peace and tolerance from where he stands on the hood of a red Honda. With a cry, you, now one with the mass, will impale him and roast him over the torches like a weenie on the tip of a fork at a summer camp fire. That will be the end of the resistance and you will eventually light fire to my tower, hoping to smoke me out. Unfortunately for your blood lust, I will not come running out of the front door, nor even come scrambling down the fire escape at the back. It will be assumed that I burned to death inside of the building. Sifting through the ashen remains of my abode will reveal no sign of me, and the horde will retire to their trailers, box houses, or houses out of a box to rest on the sofa and watch a little bit of reality TV while super cooks in the microwave. There’s nothing like a Diet Pepsi over a compartmentalized tray of turkey, mashed potatoes, peas, and cranberry sauce with gravy all over to wash the bitter aftertaste of mob mentality from the palette. Back in solitary cubicles the mass can dissolve into a multitude of tiny fragments, each one certain that it is quiet important and possibly even better than the rest, but most definitely better than all of the goddamn plants and animals that sustain their majestic human existence. Alone under the glow of the great cathode tube glow, the crown of creation sits in black socks and boxer shorts, hairy belly hanging out from under a white T-shirt, flakes of dandruff cascading down from the thinning forest of head hair like a spring blizzard. Driving along in a blue mini van listening to self help tapes and shouting at a pair of overly rambunctious tots in the back seat, his better half, wearing a powder blue valour sweat suit is checking her makeup in the rearview mirror and thinking of things to say to the other moms at the playground that will make them feel as bad about their lives as she feels about hers. All in all, humanity will go on crawling about the face of the earth like a big blind worm groping hungrily at its surroundings.
I dare not tell you how I survived the fire, because you will only hate me for it. Things that spend all of their time groping around in the dark and looking for holes to hide in will never love the heat and light of the blaze. They will even imagine it as a hell and home for demons, creatures unlike themselves. Creatures that do more than consume and wallow fearfully lack the appetites of their step siblings, God’s favorites. Perhaps as you have read this, you have sympathized more with that which I have called "me" than with that which I have called "you." In that case then you are now three teenagers, one with long greasy hair and a heavy metal band shirt on, another with short hair, spectacles and a vintage Dungeons and Dragons baseball shirt, the third, a short skinny Latino in a thread worn red hand me down T-shirt and frayed jeans. You three come to the charred ruins of my apartment building in the white haze of a Daly City afternoon (for the sun rarely breaks through the vaporous apparitions that drift through the air). Everyone else is at work or in school, so the street is very quiet and feels abandoned, as if no one had been there for a very long time. Looking around to be sure that no one is watching, you gather ash in zip lock baggies and then leave as inconspicuously as possible, walking two to the sidewalk and one kicking along in the gutter, (that would be the skinny Latino). I dare not say what it is that you will be doing with that. I dare not say how you learned to travel, for if I do, you might become obsessed with the outward form of it and try to emulate that which you have already done in accordance with this story. I will only remind you, that no one told you what to do exactly. The way was paved for you and by you through trial and error inspired by the etchings left in the cave walls by those that passed this way before you.

Performers

His father died in Auschwitz in 1944. The family name perished along with that old kosher butcher and another was born, a name that would rise in fame. To avoid a similar fate he adopted the name of a General and joined the French Resistance where he rescued his father in the guise of a multitude of frail Jewish children lifted from concentration camps. When that manifestation of the war ended he accepted the burden of the world and became the fool of god, mastering and then teaching the Art of Silence, the science of presence and posture. This teaching spread, trickling from those that surrounded him like invisible droplets of water from the many fingers of a spread hand to yet other hands, open and waiting. Out into the world, invisible drops found their way into the nervous systems of so many that could not understand what had passed into them, and some that could, and yet others who held it like a microcosmic well, waiting for the coin that would be tossed into its depths with a wish. What came to pass when the well at last met with the coin, an action, that tracked through the matrix of time, began in 1944 and waited 6 decades to blossom in a woman troubled by laundry burnt in the oven and dreams of a wise man once met, is the subject of this writing; the answer to the wish. As a rosy cheeked maiden the woman had been taught by a student of God’s fool. Here she was told to commit 100% to her performance on stage or before the camera lens…

In the dream, the wise man, a dancer and artist, told the woman not to be apathetic. Sitting in the cramped cab of a pick up truck feeling dazed from the many changes and choices she’d had to make that morning the woman thought back to her dream and suddenly understood the root of apathy. It lies in feeling that one cant keep up with the changes. It stems from a lack of decisiveness, it is the opposing force to commitment.

WE ARE ACTION, THE POSTURE, THE POSE.

We become the shape we take. We take shape by committing presence and attention to posture, and gesture. There can be no pussy footing around. Life is a tremendous piece of improv theater. Things change. When they do we must quickly choose and assume a new more suitable pose. There are no wrong choices in improv, the only mistake is to let the attention wander and let our performance be without presence. The great secret has been taught to actors and dancers and mimes and musicians, and yet not all of those within such vocations have the wish to use that secret. There are those outside of such professions that wish to encounter a great spiritual teaching, but do not even guess that it requires becoming a performer.

This, the stage of life, has been so used that we have forgotten its true nature. So distracted by the myriad of thoughts racing through our imaginary minds, we are lost on the set, submerged in identification with those thoughts, we have forgotten that we are performers. In such a state we are not even characters, but the ghosts of characters that would be or could have been. We are made of energy which might be used creatively, but instead it pours from us in chains of thought, chains that tangle and bind us to an imaginary existence. We have thought more of ourselves than we have ever been. To be, you must posses a vehicle to be in, an apparatus with the capacity to be filled with that wealth of energy. We have called this apparatus a human being, it has a nature which is physical, as well as emotional, and intellectual. It is an apparatus over which we have never tried to exercise any control, and therefore we do not posses any control.

It is by working from the bottom up that anything real can be done. It is within the physical human body that any real mystical transformation occurs. The first true step towards spiritual work is literally a step, a step taken with a physical foot moved deliberately and with presence.

Never Do As Others Do

We are all equal points of radiance, stars blanketing the endless sky. No one is more inherently magickal than any other, though some do more to cultivate their magickal nature. We do not move, do not go anywhere, but we do play games; that game that is played by one that can never move, the imagination game.
Sometimes I will be the teacher, sometimes you will be the teacher. Those stars that go about worshiping other stars grate on me. It is fine, a wonderful thing, to adore another star, but to grovel and imagine that another is higher than you is a cop out. It is denying your nature as a star, your ability to be a center of gravity.
And those that would let others get down on their knees and beg to be filled with purpose by them are a sickening breed, wolves in shepherds clothing gorging themselves on the disease of the meek. I would rather be surrounded by equals with whom I can engage and feel the force of their presence as they make their own way through the big game .
Self righteous, arrogant, snobby bitch, that is what play time emperors and their sniveling courtiers think I am. I will tell you all now- I march to a different tune. A tune that perhaps is too complex and noisome to please.
Take your tra la la and stuff it. I will have a roar. I can hear a roar, hear it and feel this human cranium change shapes to open special chambers for communing with the great noise from which we all emerge.
I embrace the cult of multiplicity. When your God is a many headed horror that will speak through any shape that comes alive with the knowledge of life, you can not fall prey to serving a mortal master. You serve only that many headed beast of which you are a part. You are immune to the con of the existence of the human primate and the relevance of its social hierarchies.
You may interact with your God through any of its heads. You may serve it through loyalty to one of these, but keep a wide inner eye on that shape, because old heads die and new heads rise up in unexpected places. Remember that while it is okay to give someone a shoe, you must keep one for yourself. Adore the other and make a sincere offering of your attention, but keep a little attention centered on the manifestation for which you are responsible.
Do not expect a guru to carry you. The one who would is going nowhere. A teacher is an awakener, not a pack mule designed to carry you up the mountain.

Who would want an ass for a master?

Do not make an ass of your master. Let the other ignite the eternal fire within you, but you must tend the flame thereafter. Reach out in unison with the many and step back from the "greater than/ less than" game of animal dominance.
The eternal night is the matrix in which we have our arising. It is the poison of immortality, which erodes the illusion of peace, safety, and singularity that we have wrought in the Big Game. The poison of life eternal interferes with the state of temporary death induced by participation in that game. We die when we throw both of our shoes into that game, when we hand the sum of our attention to something imaginary.
Avatars of the beast, the dark mother night, carry that pool of blackness which you hold in your core through the game but do not spill it. Remember your true nature, which those immersed in the big game have told you is "evil".
Find those others that carry liquid night in their forms, those other heads of the horror, and form an oasis, a temple to give sanctuary to the noise. Build your cults of multiplicity around these pools.
Never be deceived by the manipulators of the game. These include the "magicians" who know enough of the game to bend it for their benefit within the illusion. They are the ones who would feast upon your servitude, emptying your pools, rendering you a husk in the imaginary world.
One shoe is for you, the other is for Nuit, and her only. Tend her where ever you find her, keep her way in every step through the desert of the Maya. Walk beside your teacher on the way up the mountain and keep your fleece.

Makers

How will I dance the dances of the ages if I don’t dance?
We have stayed underground so long, our complexions have become pale like the flesh of mushrooms. We paint the cave walls, the tunnels, caverns and byways of the collective subconsciousness with the click clack of pressed buttons and alphanumeric keys.
Our cave paintings are digital, like the visions of dreams, they disappear when the machine harboring them changes states. Sometimes they are made physical, on fibers that may last for 100 years, displayed not in caves but in places of commerce, buildings with uncertain futures. Monkeys dreaming their own dreams and whispering into the ear of their digital demons with that click, clack, click, clack, pausing to sip the grinds of botanicals steeped in hot water, ignore what hangs behind their heads, waiting for that 100 years to surrender it to decay.
With our click, clack we exhibit our mastery over maya through words unuttered, rarely spared ink, strung along the cave walls where only those who click, clack, there way in with a search that unearths a matching key will find them.
Of those that find them, how many will pause to read them?
How many fewer will let them burrow deep so that they may tangle with their own roots, let the words speak directly with what dangles beneath associations, far below the intellectual surface?
Of those that seek, that find, and that commune freely, how many will perpetuate the experience; begin to paint caves themselves?
If I meet a woman of knowledge in the desert what will I do with her?
I will dance if she dances, sing if she sings, thread beads if she threads beads… I will let what she does penetrate to the core, let it graft on to what already sprouts from my own deep.
When I return I might dance, or I might click, clack, the click, clack, click, of ages.
One day all of the artifacts will be gone.
Will the thing that passed through the makers still live?
Only if there are some willing to leave the safety of consuming that they may become makers.

The Fisher King

My father, the Fisher King, waited for me to come and take his place.
Turning gray with age, within a stale chamber only dimly lit, he waited for me to come and dethrone him. He named me for a King of forgotten lore, but I am not his son.
He has no sons. I am his first born daughter.
By name and teaching he designed me to be both male and female. When I came to replace him, his death was gentler than any death ever brought to a father by a son. We beheaded him together, he and I, slowly examining the way he played the game designed to separate the wheat from the chaff.
His strategies, which were passed to me through mechanicality, these we examined together in an awakened state. Together we saw their limits, their weaknesses, prodded the blind spots that are part of my inheritance. Just as if he were handing down a used and slightly damaged car, honestly admitting that it can only make right turns, suggesting that it should be repaired, could be improved upon, gracefully he surrendered what he was.
His crown passed to me at the close of the 2007th year A.D., so gentle and subtle a passage that it will be undetectable.
I now am my father. I now bear the responsibility of raising my line from the enclosures of the Great American Zoo and becoming for all those who came before me, that which is more than animal; that which incubates and takes shape within and through the biological animal and its body of habits.
We call this the alchemical marriage, but the words grow weary with use by those who can only touch the words because they have not grasped or glimpsed the thing itself. But some do know the thing itself through some experience of it. They may refer to it in this way, or that, or not at all. What I refer to now is a transformation which may be unnamable.
I put the game that separates mortals from immortals on the hexagonal table of my dwelling place. Today I began to instruct my first born.
What we began today is to fertilize the soil. What we began today is to build a vehicle which someday she may learn to operate creatively, against its tendency to turn only right. We raised her to be as strong as a boy. When she grows she will become a woman.
Two parts of self, activated simultaneously to work in harmony, this is 33; two triangles oriented in opposing directions, unified to create a new form, 6, the star. Every man and woman is a star, within every man and woman it waits to be activated.
I have been able to tell secrets because the blood is coming and I am moving with it and through it, having been kept in the dark one week prior, forging the habit of a predator.
The predator is such because it eats that which may be herded, hunted, or fished.
My father, the Fisher King, waited for me to come and take his place. Turning gray with age within a stale chamber only dimly lit, he waited for me to come and hunt him.

Oceanus

The unnatural use of sexuality for purposes other than ordinary reproduction has troubling consequences.
If you are subverting the sexual energy and directing it towards a purpose other than the perpetuation of the present species, you are moving against life as it has thus far been expressed.
Why would one attempt to purposefully cause a mutation?
Can it be that Pasiphae chooses to be the mother of Asterion?
That the curse is an honor?
Can it be that both Jesus and Merovee are akin to Asterion, a part of the same line; a line that seeks to cross breed life and death?
From the Arcadians to the Merovingians the story lives, the line is preserved. From a white bull sent by Posideon to father the Minotaur to the Quinataur or Bistea Neptunis come to sire Merovee, we hear of a beast from the deep, with horns, a white bull, or a sea monster. Pasiphae is the grandaughter of Oceanus. Along with Prometheus and Themis, (who told Deucalion to throw the bones of his Mother over his shoulder to create a new race of mankind after the Deluge.)
Oceanus would not side with his brother Kronos, a ruler of the world in the Titanomachy. There have been, since the most primordial expression, forces that work in opposition to creativity and change and forces that are willing to steal fire, throw bones, conduct genealogical experiments, and resist authority.
We who are present now are derivatives of these forces, the sum of their strange division and multiplication.