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.

Electrical Impulses

The power of movement. A simple thing, taken for granted by those creatures that have long possessed the ability, but ask any cactus or man locked in a tiny cell and they will tell you that the power to move about freely is most precious of all. In the very beginning of your life, it was the first thing to be active in you, your movement center. You wriggled, you cried in hunger, and your body happily relieved itself of the wastes that were left in its system. You learned to crawl, and to walk and to grab and to hit. Viola! You had the most essential skills needed to maintain your existence on this planet. You had the power to translate electrical pulses sent from your brain via your nervous system into motion, activity, into an adequate response to some stimuli, such as music, or the sight of a hungry wolf, or the smell of a roasting pig.
The subtleties that could be added, the endowments of the intellectual and emotional centers, would do you little good in this plane of existence without the foundation of this first essential power, the fully functioning motor center. Now you have the ability to do, and with the addition of the other two powers, you have a heightened capacity for subtlety, a desire to find a purpose to put your fantastic abilities to the test. You’ve got the car, now baby drive it!
What are you going to do? What are you going to make of the multicolored world? How are you going to organize all that sensory impute? How does it make you feel? And what are you going to do with it all?
You can see an electrical pulse. See it in the way your limbs go wiggly when we hook them up to a loudspeaker. See how you groove and shake and twirl. That is the power of movement. It gives a shape to the unseen forces that are ever at work in the universe.
This truth is so obvious, so apparent that it seems to be hidden from us. We are blind to it. The ancient Greeks, however, were appreciative of this secret. They honored the human form, took great pleasure in athletic feats, not only as the triumph of the motor center, but as the culmination of all the aspects of the human being and even as a representation of those mysteries which are seen as originating elsewhere.
As above so below.
As within so without.

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.