 
### "The Preface"

to

The Fire:

### An Unexpected Story That Raged To Be Told

by

### Gregory

Copyright 2018

by:

### Gregory

Published by

### Muse & Man Press

### Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover designed by

Geoff Morton

www.geoffmorton.ca

This book is dedicated

to all

survivors

of all the kinds of

abuses

that this world's abusers

can perpetrate.

And who all have their stories

"that rage to be told,"

but too rarely get the chance

to tell them.

The most wonderful of all things in life, I believe, is the discovery of another human being with whom one's relationship has a glowing depth, beauty, and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvelous thing, it cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it. It is sort of a Divine accident.

Horace Walpole

Not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.

Jonathan Swift.

Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery.

Henry Miller

It is a rare qualification to be able to state a fact singly & adequately. To digest some experience cleanly. To say yes & no with authority. To make a square edge. To conceive and suffer the truth to pass through us live and intact.

Henry David Thoreau

### Chapter One

Call me Rachel.

Yeah, I know—that opening line has already been famously used. But hell, I'm not a novelist—or even a wannabe—and this isn't a novel, and who can't but love that succinct, three-word-doorway into Melville's magnificent and magical imagination uttered by that "ancient mariner," Ishmael, as he begins his tale of his mythical sea voyage aboard that doomed whaling ship captained by that deranged Ahab in his OCD quest to wreak revenge on that now mythical Great White Whale of Fate that was only in a position to injure Ahab because Ahab had intentionally put himself in its path in an attempt to kill it!

And as that mealy-mouthed old saw goes, imitation is the sincerest (laziest?) form of flattery, though unlike that genius Melville, who put those famous three words in the fictional Ishmael's mouth—and a hell of a lot of subsequent ones that went into his telling that whale of a classic tale everybody loves to make reference to, but few have actually bothered to read—I may not have written the poetic memoir, The Fire, which this turgid piece was supposed to have been a short preface to, (yeah, I know—that statement won't make sense unless I tell you that when, just an hour ago, I reached page one hundred of this preface that was supposed to be, at most, ten pages, I scrolled back to this page to re-write this beginning) but I sure have written—am writing!—this bloated goiter of a story that has way too much of my own grotesque and pathetic life in it.

And to give you an idea where this cancerous goiter of a "Preface" is going, I should tell you here that once I realized it was no longer just a normal, short preface but the long, unintended story, not just of Uncle John and my life with him, but of my pathetic and wretched life in details I did not start out intending to reveal, I wanted to title it, My Father's Handy Little Ho—An Unexpected Story That Raged To Be Told, but decided that title was too much all about me and my problems caused by my father using me, while I was a young girl, as his "handy little ho," when this work is supposed to be about so much more.

In fact, this "Preface" is supposed to be all about that aforementioned, The Fire, which was written by my great-uncle John, who will never be considered a Melville-type genius novelist because the tale he so laboriously and traumatically relates in The Fire is not a work of imaginative fiction, but just a badly remembered—and worse rendered—memoir. Though now that I think about it, I suspect there is enough outright, ego-enhancing fancy in it to qualify it being at least part fiction, not that the same thing can't be said about all the memoirs ever written by anybody, however factual these writers might have intend them to be. Or, like Uncle John himself once said, "Old memory is like a lollipop a child has dropped in the dirt—when he picks it up, he discovers it is covered in a lot of crap he doesn't exactly want on it . . . and can't get off."

So though I did not write The Fire, I am one hundred percent responsible for editing it into something that resembles a readable artifact. Alas, as the reading of this unintended story of my life will demonstrate—most particularly my life as it Callisto-revolved around the Jupiter of my uncle John—that I have, in my typically imagination-deficient manner titled, "The Preface" to The Fire: An Unexpected Story That Raged To Be Told, that point may certainly be debatable.

Though of course, in my "editing" of those memoirs and turning them into The Fire, I was infinitely more than just one of those nefarious, publishing necessities—I call them $tyle-Nazis—who have Editor printed on their office doors in large and intimidating gilt letters and whose exalted job it is to turn the crude ore of some wannabe writer's treasured and hard-mined creation into refined, publishable gold.

I mean, face it—every wannabe Stephen King, David Baldacci or J. K. Rowling, (there are no more Hemingways, Fitzgeralds, or Faulkners—can you just imagine the power-gloating field day a modern day $tyle-Nazi could have with his absolutely original and unorthodox prose style?—nor any more Prousts, Joyces, Conrads, Tolstoys, Dostoevskys or Turgenevs!) at the end of their Herculean labors on their precious manuscript believes they've written a publishing gold mine, but they are suckling, babes-in-the-cradle if they think any reputable publishing house is going to spend its money publishing their unknown creative opus exactly as they wrote it.

And no matter how good the writing is, it is going to have no saleable name behind it, and it is going to be too raw and very likely way too original to suit the prescribed, hallowed, and guaranteed money-making needs of any publishing house, and if by chance it does show a modicum of the potential necessary to become a publishing gold mine, then the publisher will accept it, but only on the condition it gets Procrusteanly refined into acceptable $hape by one of its mighty Editors, aka, $tyle-Nazis.

And if you are already a published AUTHOR, you too-well know that incredibly powerful cadre of "literary" Gestapo who, while goose-stepping to the conservative values and avaricious profit-margins of their publishing houses, have executed all the style and originality out of modern writing in order, foremost to mine as much money as possible out of it while first making it very easy for an attention-deficient, reading-averse public to read, disregarding as they do so, the fact that they are then making it minimally worth reading for that smallest, and thus most irrelevant, demographic of the reading public—those who value and demand originality and true style in what they read.

And to use a phrase monstrously over-used by just about every boring pup of a professor to chase the stick of tenure, (or any long-tenured old dog who lets his graduate students do all his work while he sits in the sun of his reputation and chews on that precious stick . . . and humps his prettier, female students with another stick) in other words they have excised almost all the art, originality and genius out of writing and reduced it to a generally bland, predictable and disposable cream-of-wheat exercise in journeyman wordsmanship. Well, to keep the metaphor copacetic, since no one but a bored toddler writes with cream of wheat, I won't call it cream-of-wheat writing, but Bic-writing, since Bic pens are the cheap, bland equivalent of a bowl of cream of wheat, and, for the most part, readers value modern, cream-of-wheat writing about as much as does anyone a Bic pen they see on a sidewalk or in a gutter. Actually, this quote by James Hillman I came across one day pretty much sums it up better than can I,

The deepest evil in the totalitarian system is precisely that which makes it work: its programmed, single-minded monotonous efficiency; bureaucratic formalism, the dulling daily service, standard, boring, letter-perfect, generalities, uniform. No thought and no responsiveness. . . . Forms without anima becomes formalism . . . forms without luster, without the presence of body.

I mean, think of it: if any modern $tyle-Nazi were to find the manuscript to Moby Dick cluttering up their in-box, they'd either deep-six the thing faster than a suckered-to-taste-it toddler will spit out a spoonful of Jamaican jerk, or like a U.S. Army barber in 1967 working over a hapless hippie-draftee's cherished locks, buzz-cut it down to the bland, 8000-word short story they would be certain that is all it rightfully is. And in keeping with that metaphor, they'd then ship it off to an early death in the Vietnam jungle that awaits all short stories which are not part of an assiduously promoted "army" of them sent to attack the "reading shore" by an already famous "General Westmoreland" of a novelist.

So, you should by now be asking: what the hell does all that preceding scriptorial diarrhea have to do with me, Rachel, being the "editor" of my uncle John's The Fire? Well, let me try to explain that in one certain sense, though I am the "editor" of The Fire, I am in no way fulfilling that role as a righteous, committed, goose-stepping $tyle-Nazi for any Third Reich of a reputable publishing house, but more just the caretaker and translator of it. Well, I say translator but I do so facetiously, for though John scribbled it out in English—with a whole lot of real cheap pens, a few of which might have been Bics—it was still scribble, and as any school teacher too damn well knows, scribble can be as similarly impossible to read as any Arabic script to someone who doesn't know the language.

Aw shit!—all this is just too complicated and confusing for my manic mind right now . . . and finding a decent point of departure is like untangling a clump of burrs in a long-haired dog's ruff . . . so . . . I'll try and get things sorted out by cutting the clump off and starting over . . . with . . . with . . ..

The writer of the memoirs that I turned into The Fire, was, as I have already said, my great-uncle John, a very private person who, as you will discover if you ever read The Fire, scribbled out his memoirs for reasons more occult than rational, and for damned sure did not write them for publication. But write them he did! And since they begin with revelations that are tantamount to an open sewer of the excremental and salacious events of his early family life, events that can only besmirch the memory of that extraordinarily large family, and though he and all his siblings are now deceased, they did leave behind a plethora of descendants, many of whom still live in this area and have reputations (such as they are) that I am certain they wish to keep sacrosanct (such as they perceive them to be), so just as John himself, in writing his memoirs, kept all references to here out of them, I will not negate his efforts by leaving clues to that here by revealing my last name. (Of course, nowadays, with that damn Internet being what it is, a person practically has to live on "That Planet Formerly Known as Pluto," to remain anonymous or retain any privacy!)

So you are stuck with knowing me as just Rachel—though for most people around here I am never known as just Rachel, but am best known as Crazy Rachel. Mmmmm . . . perhaps even that is revealing too much because if you lived around here you'd in all likelihood instantly know exactly who I am. Not that that really matters for it is very unlikely that the you who is one of the very few who is reading this will be living anywhere near this intellectual- and social-doldrums that is here anyway. So knowing me as Crazy Rachel is no different than as just Rachel. (Given that one of my all-time-favorite rock albums is Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon," you could say that the "lunatic in my head" is most appropriately writing this from the "dark side of the moon," so it is likely best—if you haven't already noticed—that if you are going to continue reading, prepare yourself for a whacky ride!)

And though I won't tell you where here is, I will, in the safety of my anonymity, tell you why I am known as Crazy Rachel, and I will do that because I feel that it was in my playing out of my fated?. . . destined? . . . cursed? . . . role of Crazy Rachel that I was put in the position to end up as the caretaker of my Uncle John's memoirs, which, after a labor that would have energetically beggared Heracles (Hercules if you only know him by his Roman name), I turned into the work that I have titled, The Fire. And no, the handle, Crazy Rachel that people around here know me by is no mere joking or affectionate sobriquet—I really am crazy! A bona-fide fucking loon!

Or so the noggin-mechanics (and most people who end up getting to know me just a little bit more than they quickly realize they want to) like to appropriately say. According to the erudite jargon of those esteemed brain-techs, I suffer from bi-polarity with a strong propensity for paranoia and occasional psychotic breaks, and, as long as I am on my meds—you'd not believe the bubble packs of pills I have to pack into my capacious gut three times a day—I can generally pass myself off—to strangers, though only for a short period of time!—as someone who is as sane as the next person. (That nasty American liar-extraordinaire, racist, bigot-magnet, supreme narcissist and self-proclaimed King of the Fascist Kingdom of America, Mad King Donald—and all ISIS jihadists—excepted!)

Unfortunately, much as all those pills—led by the stalwart old Thorazine, (for some reason most of the newer drugs either don't work for me or "fuck me up" so bad I can't use them) pretty colored as they are, keep me more or less functional and predictable in this questionably sane and ever boring old world, they do so at the minor cost of a host of irritating physical side effects—dry mouth, constipation and weight-gain being the worst of them for me—but as well, at the life-bankrupting cost of emotionally and intuitively disconnecting me from it. And worse, disconnecting me from my essential self! After awhile on those damn pills I end up feeling like a light bulb screwed into a dead duck's ass instead of a live electrical socket. (That's definitely not my simile! I must duly attribute it to "Sprocket," a fellow—and infinitely more imaginative—"loon" whom I long ago met in our local, "Worldview Readjustment Center," aka, the loony bin!)

Those old highs and lows—and of course the paranoia and the schizophrenic delusions—that cause so many problems and which my daily rainbow-cocktail of meds either cancel or level out, can really can make a person feel alive, so I go off that chemical rainbow at irregular intervals just so I can feel like I am a living human being—and me!—instead of a dope-addled zombie. And much as those infernal pills make me feel like an addled ghost that is passing through life like a whale-fart through a fishnet, they also make me feel about as creative as that that proverbial room full of monkeys trying to randomly type out the works of Shakespeare.

To be sure, that is a condition that I can live with as long as all I want out of a day is to get from dawn to dusk with predictable and acceptable enough behavior to keep me from being wrapped up in a white jacket that sure ain't no mink stole, and forthwith shipped off to the Head-Shop for a tune-up or a complete head-motor rebuild, but which, as the saying goes, "sucks a big one!" when it comes to feeling alive and creative enough for the writing something like this "Preface"—regardless that it was originally conceived to be no more than ten pages long.

I'm sure you've heard the stories of writers (both wannabes and famous ones) who experience bouts of writer's-block that leave them staring for hours at the infamous blank sheets of paper in their typewriters, utterly unable to tap one decent creative sentence onto them. (Flaubert used to say that a lot, but the bar he set for what constituted a decent sentence was high enough to give the moon a prostate exam! Oh, I forgot—Luna is a she and doesn't need one!) Well, when it came time to write this "Preface," that is the way I was with my Microsoft-generated, Word-page on my computer screen, which was not only making me uber-paranoid in the way it kept blank-faced and tongue-sticking-out staring back at me, but in the way, how after a while, it actually seemed to be not-so-silently laughing at me.

So in the interest of getting something—any damn thing!—written, I went, as the saying goes, "off my meds." (Or, as Sprocket used to so imaginatively call it, "off the Meds-Rez.") Truly a dangerous business for a loonar like me with serious consequences, to be sure, but what choice did I have—and considering I thought it would only be for a few days!—feeling as I did that Uncle John's memoir needed a Preface to clue any prospective readers in about just who the man was and how those memoirs came into existence, and a blank, mocking computer screen just wasn't going to cut it! (Especially if I followed through with my paranoia-powered urge to pick the thing up and fling it out the window!)

So it's been a week since I last opened one of those pill-bubbles and sloshed its rainbow assortment of chemicals into my hardly insignificant gut, and now I can finally look at this Word-page and hear these words in my head which are finding their way, first through my fingers, then onto the keyboard, then into the computer, then into a self-published eBook, and hopefully someday, if the net result (no pun intended) is even just a little bit remotely rational and readable (no guarantees), into a handful of pairs of eyes and half as many of the brains operating them.

But be forewarned—and as my hip friends from those great and now utterly misunderstood Sixties used to say—"This is gonna be a fuckin' trip, Man!" And like all those tripping hippies well knew, you dropped your precious tab(s) in a world that was intolerably boring for all of its drear stability, predictability and straightness, and got cannon-shot into another world that was—for good or bad—anything but any of those. Likewise will it be with this "Preface." I more or less know what I want to say in it, but I have no idea if I will be able to say that "what I want to say," or have much—or any!—control over how I say it.

So, now that the meds-brakes have been disconnected—or as Sprocket would say, "Rachie, you naughty girl: you've gone walkabout from the Meds-Rez!"—the big, V-8 powered muscle-car in my skull has been turbo-charged with unrestrained mania, and with the lead-footed, manic, and now maniacally fearless Crazy Rachel at the wheel, buckle your seatbelts, brace your hands against the dash, and let's see where this hot pink Cor-azy-vette takes us!

So now that my Cor-azy-vette is finally rumbling, rolling and racing to the "Promised Land" down Springsteen's . . . "rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert". . .of these words, I will finally begin my attempt at writing an interesting, informative and readable Preface for The Fire, thinking, as I do, that perhaps instead of the starting out this thing plagiarizing Melville's intro to Moby Dick, I should be giving the rare few of you who are going to be reading Uncle John's anything-but-modern memoir, the quaint, Victorian, and considerably more serious Dear Reader salutation.

And oh yeah, Dear Reader, much as I could have left my name out of this and saved you the reading of six or seven pages of explanation about it, I gave it to you because, if you get past this crazy road trip of "The Preface" and feel induced by it to purchase, The Fire, Uncle John's long, strange, weird, violent, abominable (at times), emotionally and sexually honest (I presume, but cannot know), and sexually explicit (that I can vouch for one hundred percent!) and in the end, utterly tragic poetic memoir, which he cheap-pen-scribbled into existence, you will discover that I am awarded a brief mentioned in the Prologue. I am the (unnamed) great-niece he is on his way to see when he encounters the initial, seemingly innocuous stage of the fire that ends up destroying the mall that served as my hometown's downtown, and which set aflame, first the tinder, and then the dry forest, of his long-suppressed memories of a life no sane person would want to do an initial living of, let alone a keen re-living of, in an extensive memoir. (When off the Meds-Rez I love reading the volumes of Greek tragedies that John bequeathed to me, and truly Sophocles, in Oedipus at Colonus, sums up that notion most succinctly when he has Ismene say, when asked by her father to tell the tale of her trek out of Thebes to meet him,

I do not want to suffer

twice over, in the doing and telling both.

I am also mentioned one or two other times in relation to heath problems he experienced during the writing of it, but no more than that because it is all written about the tumultuous life he lived before he came into mine. In truth, all of the really important stuff in his life happened long before I was even born, which, for the most part, is a really good thing since nothing good ever seemed to happen to most of the important people who so lucklessly were fated to be part of John's life during those years that he wrote about in his memoir.

So though I was but a late entrant into John's long, ninety-six-year life, I am a very important one, being blessed/cursed as I was to be the "memory-keeper" of his scribbled recording of those tumultuous and tragic—and thus interesting and important—years. Though I guess I should be saying memoirs-keeper, for that is what I ended up as, though not just a keeper of them, but a bringer-to-the-world of them. Without me, The Fire could not exist. Hell!—even that title is my doing!

Hilariously ironic it is that given the many hundreds of hours he spent scribbling it into its infernal existence, he never bothered to give that damn thing a title, thus forcing me to dig deep into the thimble of my imagination and with great difficulty drag out the dull, dust-mote of the title, The Fire, doing so because the whole thing, like many forest fires, got started with what appears to be a small and innocuous flame—or glowing cigarette coal—that finds the just-right conditions to grow into a major conflagration.

But Jesus!—what the hell am I saying? Of course John never gave it a title! Who on Earth gives a title to their memoirs when they are not writing them for publication. John was no "Admiral " Winston Churchill with a fleet of battleships of history-changing deeds just waiting to sail full-speed out of the sea of his memory, into the port of an instantly publishable book, and then into the minds of an adoring public.

John was the quintessential "Able Seaman Nobody" who, under the aegis of an inspirational and very forceful—and inconceivable to my rational mind, Muse—scribbled his memoirs into existence as a record—though more like a purgative—of what he considered the most important events of his dark, tragic and historically insignificant life. In truth, he describes the process himself with a metaphor most apt to his rough, Arcadian life: that of a dying wolf vomiting up a chunk of poisoned meat it has eaten, not to make a big deal out of the vomiting process, but just to get its painful—and lethal!—presence out of its gut.

And stunned and perplexed I was, on first encountering it—no less than I am sure you will , Dear Reader, if you chose to read it—by it being written in poetic form, for Uncle John, as I knew him, could no more have thought of himself as a Homer or a Virgil than could the now-aging but still-robust Arnold Schwarzenegger, think of himself as a Woody Allen! So much so, that when I first met Uncle John he fit to a T, the "plain/plains-speech" Laconian anti-orators Robert Pirsig orated so eloquently about in his famous book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, ironically, a favorite book of John's not for its dissertations on Zen and the motorcycle maintenance tips—two subjects, which he used to laughing say, were as scarce in it as snake shoes and rabbit condoms—but for its story of a man "who thinks himself into a rational thought-blender of insanity and, after a few high voltage shock treatments in a mental institution, walks out of the joint a fundamentally different man."

Though I must, on thinking of it, add here that I did notice that as John grew older, much as one would have naturally expected his speech to get even more laconic, in truth it got more and more complex and metaphoric, both attributes of which surprised and perplexed me—especially the metaphors, many of which were not only startlingly original, and for him, uncharacteristically imaginative, but brilliantly apt. (Though of course, since he did develop a passion for Ancient Greek literature, and not just the three genius-giant tragedians of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, but—and probably most-so—Homer and his two enduring classics, it is no surprise he discovered the world of metaphor, which was to those great Greek writers, like spin to modern politicians. . . . and of course, like lies to Mad King Donald . . . and to bi-polar "loonars" like me who, when they are off their meds and being asked if they have gone off them!)

While on that subject, I remember several of John's comments on The Iliad, the first one being that the story is only very shallowly about a war between the Greeks and Trojans while infinitely more deeply, it was about the "cruel, ruthless and arbitrary shenanigans of a bunch of bored-stupid gods whose favorite form of amusement was inciting human beings to needlessly slaughter each other . . . and with that same bunch of psychopathic demons seeming to manifest their presence, power, cruelty and ruthlessness thousands of years later during the two World Wars, particularly the first, which seemed to have no purpose beyond a needless and catastrophic slaughter."

And his second comment went something like: "And on the shallow level, that ancient war was beyond humanly absurd, fought as it was, by the two of the dumbest warring factions ever to take up arms: the Greeks for traveling all that way and wasting ten years of their probably-never-very-long lives to besiege Troy over a wayward wench; and the Trojans for believing that after those ten bloody years of trying to sack their city, but failing, the Greek decamped, but not before taking the time and great trouble to most expertly build, and leave for them, the gift of a giant wooden horse to commemorate their great failure! . . . And little different with the Odyssey, for if you remove the results of Poseidon's curses and the helping efforts of Athena, that story would have been as short as it was dull and pointless."

Though now that I really think about that, Euripides has the luckless Cassandra saying pretty much the same thing—about going to war for over a silly slut!—in The Trojan Women, so maybe a bit of "unconscious plagiarism" there, which was excusable since he wasn't publishing, and quite appropriate, for if nothing else, John was always as brutally iconoclastic—about pretty much everything!—as had been Euripides!

But let's keep this Cor-azy-vette a-rumbling and a-rollin'!. . . As I worked my way through John's memoirs and came face-to-face with a constant display of metaphors and true poetry that I could no more connect with the Uncle John when I first met him than one could connect the famous statue of Marcus Aurelius on Capitoline Hill with a fresh pile of horseshit that pranksters had dumped under its bronze arse, (that's just the type of crude but effective metaphor John, in his extreme old age, regularly came up with, and which has—a little bit!—rubbed off on me!) and it wasn't until reading Frank McLynn's 1996 biography of Carl Jung (purchased at a flea market for a well-spent nickel) when he sketched Jung's theory of the two basic personalities that make us up: the Number One personality, called by Jung "the schoolboy" which is our basic social, conditioned, coping, survivor-of-the-exigencies-of-childhood personality; and the Number Two, the bigger, wiser personality which "lives in the ages."

It would seem that John's Number Two personality was a wise and ancient poet/philosopher who was literally smoked out of the shadows by the mall fire he witnessed, and which then took over the latter years of his life and induced him to write about the folly and tragedy created over the early years of it by his Number One personality. (Or, maybe it's really no more complicated than, as Flip Wilson liked to so humorously say about our compulsively performed and always instantly regrettable misdeeds, "The devil made me do it!")

### Chapter Two

But before I get too far into this "thing," which I can see is already taking on a life of its own (and which I can equally sense, Poor Reader, isn't always totally coherent!) and propelling me into the turbine vortex of a serious enough manic—edging on psychotic—episode to eventually induce one of the cashiers at the grocery or liquor store—I always think I'm acting normal, but they sure know I'm not!—to very soon call my son and have him pay a visit and get me back on the "Meds-Rez." It's all because, as I think I explained a few pages back, I can't feel like I am alive when I am on my meds, and I can't control my dark, chaotic impulses when I'm off them, which is what forced my daughter, Terry, in order to preserve her sanity, to long ago buy the machete of a plane ticket to Australia and use it to permanently hack me out of her life.

The last thing she said to me before that life-saving (for her) flight was, "Mom, I do try to love you, but it's practically impossible! Even when you are on your medications, sometimes you're okay and lovable and then suddenly you can be like a scorpion with your tail raised so you can sting me with your paranoid fits for just about every damn little thing I do. Hell, if you are in one of your 'moods' and if I have a menstrual pain while talking to you and it makes me grimace, you take it as a slight, go all goddamn scorpion-defensive on me, and sting me with your paranoid attacks. I've had all of that crazy, paranoid shit that I can take for one goddamn lifetime!"

I've never seen a better metaphor to describe my automatic—especially when off the Meds-Rez, but not only—paranoid, defensive, and always attacking moods like that of being a stinging scorpion, and I can sure understand why that poor young woman fled so far away from me—and my scorpion attacks! (Fuck, I would too—if I fuckin' could!) So it falls on my son Jonathan's strong but wearying shoulders—who is wise enough to also have moved out of my sphere of influence, but not as far away as Australia!—whom, I am sure I have subjected him to as many scorpion-stings as Terry, but he has somehow been able to cope with/deflect them—or just see them as a symptom of my illness and not them personally. Which of course, would require the patience and compassion of a true saint!

Though on his last visit, which was instigated by his need to get me back on the Meds-Rez after a too-long walkabout from it landed me in the hospital, I got the sense that both his patience and compassion were wearing real thin, like an over-driven tire, and that a blow-out on his part was a lot closer than I would like it to be.

And as a total non sequitur to that last sentence, I wish to declare that I've always found Prefaces to be so overly pompous and intentionally, impressively erudite that usually they are as appetizing to the mind as that bowl of eyeball soup—or chilled monkey brains!—to that uber-annoying Willie Scott character in the Indiana Jones' movie, Temple of Doom, so it is my intention to make this as candy-floss light as I manically feel inclined to on the assumption too few are going to read it for it to matter!

With the added proviso that I believe Prefaces, for the most part, to be as unnecessary as those grotesque tail-fins on late-fifties cars. (My father almost bankrupted our frail, household budget one day by strolling into the local dealership to scope out the price of a Chevrolet sedan and drove out an hour later in a brand spankin' new, '59 Coupe de Ville, and I still shudder when I remember the ludicrous, Buck Roger's sight of that bright red monstrosity and his ridiculous adolescent pride in it. . . . And I shudder even more violently as I remember other, nastier things, that happened to me—under the aegis of his hands and prick!—on its expensive leather seats. Fuck!—I promised myself I wasn't going to talk about that incestuous, pedophilic shit—and now I've gone and unintentionally scooped the stinking stuff out of the Porta Potty of my fucked up life and smeared it all over this poor fuckin' "Preface!")

And though, Dear (Poor?) Reader, I get several incidental mentions in the whole vast narrative, I must here re-assert (please bear with me on this as the more manic I get, the more addled, egotistical and repetitive I become, thus feeling compelled to make sure I get, not only my due, but a double dose of it) that I am not only responsible for its utterly unimaginative title (as John used to smiling say about such things, "Like every craftsman knows, you can't do first-rate work with second-rate tools."), but I am, as I am sure I've said a few times already, as instrumental in the whole thing existing in a readable—more or less—format as he was in scribbling it out.

Vrooom! Vrooom! Red-lined in second gear and we are on our way in this Cor-azy-vette!—My relationship with Uncle John was, for me, a delightful, not-near-long-enough, too often strange, sometimes turbulent and always complicated one that Fate—or Destiny, or Chance, or spirits, or whatever-the-hell always seems to be so mysteriously fiddling and fucking about with our lives—seemed to have willed into existence for both of us.

For me, to save me from my wild, depressed, rebellious, schizophrenic, drug-addled, sex-addicted, self-destructive self, and for John, who was the most emotionally balanced and self-contained human being I've ever met, to do little more than eventually provide him with a memory-keeper, a caretaker and incompetent $tyle-Nazi ( this Preface, if it is ever going to be even remotely readable, is itself sure going to need a ruthless Himmler of a $tyle-Nazi to send three quarters of its words to the gas chambers—but that ain't gonna happen!) for his long and tumultuous poetic narrative about the tumultuous and tragic years of his life—however historically insignificant they were!—that he lived prior to his appearance in my life, and which I am supposed to be putting before your eyes but which is being supplanted by this manic, self-indulgent ego-fest of a too-fucking-much-about-ME "Preface."

Putting "before your eyes" and hopefully, into your minds. Though probably, most importantly, your likely utterly somnambulant, technology-anesthetized souls, which surely will wake up—even if just for an eye-blink—under the onslaught of it. That is, of course, if you ever slog your way through this crazy—literally!—"Preface," and go on to purchase and read The Fire, and in doing so, allow it to "wake you up," for if it is nothing else, it is a Gnostic tale and as every true Gnostic knows, real gnosis does not come easy, nor, on arriving, make life any easier to live—or tolerate the absurdities of! (Hey, if you want to watch a popular, modern Gnostic tale, watch that Jason Bourne trilogy with that uber-hunk Matt Damon as star, which, if it is not a classic tale of a struggle out of the debilitating and suffocating darkness of a terrible and murderous not-knowing to a necessary—and sometimes compassionate—knowing, or Gnosis, it is nothing at all!)

So shifting into third gear and letting my manic engine of this Cor-azy-vette drop down a few thousand rpm's: I first met John when I was a acid-addled, hash-hobbled, bubble-brained, orgasm-obsessed, daddy-diddled and severely suicidal "co-ed" and wild, "hippie-chick" back in August of 1969. And though that was a damn long time ago, I know it was August of '69 because I was less than a week back into the dull-as-a-philosophy-lecture summer vacation-hell of my huge, stifling clan-family and small town life after a week south of what John always strangely called the Medicine Line, attending the muddy but magical heaven of that Glorious-Three-Days-Of-Peace-And-Music-And-Love-And-Lust-And-Drugs-And-Enough-Debauchery-To-Make-Nero-Blush Woodstock, when he made his official return to our "neck of the woods" (literally, since never more than the pitch of a pinecone away is the vast, dark, dense, bug-swarming and ever-intimidating Boreal forest) after being out of the area and incommunicado with "the Clan" for over fifty years. (For me, then having lived almost a mere score of years which, at the time, had made me feel so old, those fifty years represented, as I then would have said in my cool, hippie argot, "Like...for...fuckin'...ever, Man!") Needless to say, his return was, for my grandmother—my Mimi—and all my aging great-aunts and great-uncles, both a shock and an unwanted blast-into-the-past irritation, mostly because when he was yet ridiculously young—as you will discover him scribbling in his poetic narrative:

When,

But a handful of weeks shy of my fourteenth birthday,

I was frog-marched by Fate into the slavering maw

Of an insatiable monster of an army so

Desperate for the cannon-fodder to feed its

Gluttonous appetite for human blood, souls and misery

That it was as blind as a graveyard-angel

To the fresh-off-the-farm, peach-fuzzed

Sight of me....

John had run away from the family farm (as his tale will tell, it was more a moral and emotional abattoir than a farm) to fight in the "Great War," (he often liked to call it what a Brit friend had called it during the event, quoting his words and mimicking his accent: "The BASS!—not a bloody fish, not a bloody beer, and certainly not a bloody war—just a Bloody Awful Stupid Slaughter!) had survived it, had returned home for a very brief visit and, like the first time, had disappeared in the middle of a snowy winter night without saying goodbye to anyone, and was never seen or heard from again for fifty years. ( I still remember how "far out" it seemed to my nineteen-year-old mind that at that time I'd I felt my almost-twenty years of life to have been a long and admirable achievement while he could vanish for fifty of them and think it no big deal!)

It had become generally assumed—by most, though not my Mimi, who with her psychic canniness always knew he was alive—that like their oldest sister Lisette, who'd left the farm but months after John had done his first "runner," and had entered a distant nunnery where she died nursing the sick in the Spanish Flu epidemic, that he too had died in some untoward manner, perhaps even in that terrible, global plague that had swept around the world and killed a good deal more human beings than did the war that had just preceded it.

Though about that plague John once had said, "At least that flu killed its victims infinitely more humanely and without malice than had that war, and while doing so it at least had the decency to leave the corpses in states of wholeness that could be grieved over and then buried, and not in states of instant and utter vanishment, grotesque dismemberment, or just heaps and blobs of bloody, unrecognizable gore—and those who luckily managed to survive it, did so without having multiple body parts mangled, missing, or seared, and with souls so horrifically terror-tortured, shell-shocked, and gore-galled that no number of subsequent years could heal them!" (John actually said lifetimes could heal them, but I refuse to believe in that tooth fairy's tale about reincarnation, so I substituted years.)

In truth, long before John had made his unexpected, golden jubilee return, and before (after too many years of "daddy-diddling," ) I'd dived headfirst and eyes-wide-open in the counter-culture carnival (carnalival?) of sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, tarot cards, sex, drugs, patchouli oil, rock'n'roll, sex, drugs, yoga (friends, not me!), incense, Zen Buddhism (friends, not me!) sex, drugs, Kabbalah, (friends, not me!) homemade and tie-dyed clothes, I-Ching (friends, not me!) sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, and fluid, inguinal communal living—did I mention sex and drugs yet?—I'd developed a sort of relationship with him.

Well, not with him directly, obviously, but with the myth that I'd built up about him in my imagination from the scraps of comments my Mimi and the older of my great many aging aunts and uncles parents had sotto voce let slip about him. All told, there had been eighteen in that family—that number, Dear Modern Readers of the Pill Age, is not a misprint or an exaggeration!—so the "younger" ones, many born after John had fled the farm, had, like me, never set eyes on him.

For some reason I felt sure that he'd left the second time because he could not feel any connection with the drab, small-minded and smaller-souled bunch of semi-ghosts that had been his siblings, had changed his name and gone on to travel the world and do many great and wonderful things. After all, any boy who can run off to "the Great War" at the age that he did, fight in it and survive must surely be a most extraordinary person. (Boy, was I ever wrong about what sent him fleeing the farm the second time, but that grim tale I'll leave to John to relate in all its debauched incestuousness.)

Unfortunately, my first meeting with my great uncle John, at my Mimi's place that hot, windless, sopping dishrag of a tropical imitation of an August afternoon, was as strange and discombobulating as it had been unexpected. About noon that day I was awakened from my post-Woodstock exhaustion and my hash-addled dreams by my wonder-struck mother who, much against my standing orders, charged into my black-painted, psychedelic-postered sepulcher that I used as both a lair and a bedroom, zapped open the heavy black curtains to an acid-bath—vitriolic, not lysergic!—of eye-raping sunshine, and, far outside the comfort zone of her usual cow-placid character, fog-horned into my still sleep-sensitive ears that her "long-lost Uncle John" had returned "from the dead!"

Ha!—he'd actually been living in the area for almost two years and it was only through an offhand comment by the local bank manager to one of my great uncles that there was a John with the same name as him living on a nearby farm and he wondered if he was a relative, and after hearing that puzzling comment, the uncle told my Mimi who immediately paid a visit to that farm and to her chagrin and delight, discovered that the John _____, who was living there, was indeed a relative—her long-lost-and-thought-dead older brother. And after, I am sure, giving him a sharp and shrill "piece of her mind" that would have sheared the head off a normal man, she shanghaied him into attending that fateful Clanboree at her place to belatedly celebrate both the astounding fact of his living existence and the equally astounding fact of his return to the area.

(Clanboree is the name I invented to describe the too-frequent, always boring and borderline—though not always totally borderline!—incestuous clan get-togethers held at my various aunts and uncles residences—though mostly at Mimi's—and is an amalgam of the words clan and jamboree, and I back-then hated those events as much as I now hate my equally too-frequent bouts of raging, bleeding hemorrhoids!)

So, after a good number of minutes of trying to get my hash-addled brain to process what my usually cow-placid mother was raving about, I figured out that she was informing me that my mythical Uncle John was not only not dead, but had returned to live in the area, and that he was spending the afternoon at Mimi's rural house visiting with "The Family," and that I might want to make an exception to my aversion to attending such events, get out of bed before three, and show up—wearing something decently big enough to at least partly cover my derriere!—in order to meet him. ("The Family" was my mother's name for that monstrous conglomeration of relatives that all still lived within fart-sniffing distance of each other even after all those years, but my name for it was The Goddamn Fucking Clan—The Clan, for short!)

She stressed the word exception because about a couple of years earlier I'd shown up at one of those Clanborees tripping on some stronger-than-expected acid and that event had turned into one of the worst trips of my life. In truth, it was literally a tour of hell that I'd have to have been Hieronymus Bosch to have painted an accurate picture of, for even as a little girl I'd never been comfortable in the dark and life-sucking "vibe" that seemed to hover around that aging clan of anything-but-great, great- uncles and aunts, those too-numerous-to-keep-track-of brothers and sisters of Mimi's, when they got together.

All the brothers—excluding Uncle Matthew, who, as a bishop in a distant diocese, was quite above, and unavailable to attend most of those familial scrums—coming across as wouldn't-say-shit-with-their-mouths-full-of-it holes in the room married to—if they got married at all—loud, aggressive, brainless, gravel-voiced and barbed-tongued viragos who couldn't breathe air unless it was at least eighty percent cigarette smoke, and believed the soap operas they lived to watch were either high art or the Sixties version of reality TV. And then there were the sisters, all now wilted, shrinking-violets—if you can imagine three hundred pound violets!—married to controlling, heavy-drinking bullies who were all eighteen-wheelers full of bullshit and bluster driven by thimble-sized brains.

In all truth, never was Tolstoy's famous first line to Anna Karenina, "All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." (I just love great first lines!) Though I don't know how a man that smart and insightful of human nature could come up with the misguided notion there were any happy families anywhere! And never was that line ever more appropriate than when applied to my dark and unique-in-its-own-banal-way clan-family, though I never quite understood the genesis and true nature of that clan's profound, endemic and generally caustic unhappiness until encountering John's poetic memoir that all too vividly—way too fucking vividly!—brought alive—way too fucking alive!—for me the violent, malicious and psychopathic paterfamilias of that family, and the dark, incestuous, degenerate, debauched, demented, violent and grossly hypocritical "home" he created for his hapless, lifelong-barefoot-and-pregnant-and-chained-to-the-stove wife, and the pathetic rabbit-colony of even more hapless—and usually barefoot and too-often pregnant (by him!)—children. (Believe me, Dear Brave Reader, The Fire is not an Anne of Green Gables read!)

Though here I must digress (Ha, what a joke—so far all this has been is a blooming canola field of bright yellow digressions, so what's one more big yellow plant!) and say that my decidedly lively, imaginative, very fey and never-weighing-more-than-a-hundred-pounds Mimi produced, from the loins of my Grand- pére Pierre (whom I never met because he got flattened by ten-ton slab of granite during a mine cave-in when I was an infant,) as her third of four daughters, her polar-opposite in my mother, a plain-faced, squat, robust—"4x4!"—tank of a woman with a placid personality, a keen intelligence, and absolutely no imagination, taking after, my Mimi often proudly told me, both physically and personality-wise, my long-dead Grand-pére Pierre, who, to make the most of her keen intelligence and magnificently deficient imagination, became a nurse. She first worked in the hospital in the city twenty miles away from her hometown, then, after marrying "that man unfortunately known as my father," and after she tired of the high cost of living in that city, and also convincing "that man" to move back to her hometown twenty miles away where housing was cheap, quit that hospital job when she obtained what to her was a better one—less pay but less stress and no long drive to work and back every day—in the small clinic that had opened our small town.

And just in case you give a desiccated pile of mouse turds, it was at that hospital in the city that she met her future husband when he was there daily and assiduously—and tearfully—visiting his dying mother.(Alligator tears, I am sure!) He was almost ten years older than her and they had as much in common as moon rocks and cheese mold. Actually, I am sure all they had in common was they were both French-Canadian Catholics!—but Fate being the perverse and fickle thing it often is, they ended up hitting it off and getting married. Alas, "that man" she chose as her husband—and cursed me with being my father—just happened to be a teacher in the third-rate high school of the small city ten miles east of here—her hometown. And what she saw in him—besides that he was a French-Canadian (more or less) Catholic like her (more or less)—is beyond me, because he was a manipulative, manic-depressive, passive-aggressive, dipsomaniacal weasel who had he lived in England at the time of Dickens's writing of David Copperfield, would have been the model for Uriah Heep. And I am sure he was a teacher at that pathetic excuse for a school—populated as it was by disinterested boys who were the sons of miners, mill workers, smelter workers, lumberjacks and truck drivers, and only there killing time till they grew old enough to get jobs with the major mining company as miners, or mill workers, or smelter workers, or with other companies as lumberjacks or truck drivers; and by disinterested, crotch-steaming daughters of the stay-at-home-wives of miners . . . etc., veritable cohorts of French-Canadian Arabella Donns straight out of Thomas Hardy's Jude, only there until they could attract—or entrap—and marry a miner, . . . etc. and become stay-at-home-wives—because it was the only job he could get after he'd washed out of his attempt to become a Jesuit priest. (Fuck!—I practically get physically sick as I write about that limited, claustrophobic—suffocating!—world that's way too much like something out of most of Hardy's rustic novels!)

Now for those who care (LOL), but don't know, it would seem it is as hard to become a Jesuit priest as it is an astronaut, with more stages to the process than possessed by a moon rocket. As far as I've been able to glean about that asshole of a failed-priest, he was in what the Jesuit "Army" calls the Regency stage—fuck, you'd think those assholes were training to become kings, not fuckin' priests!—when he either chose to leave the program or was given "the sandal!" I suspect the latter. So though he was no longer, Mr. or Br. ______, S.J.,—Society of Jesus—he became Mr.______, S.J.—Supreme Jerk! Or Supreme Jack-ass, take your pick!

When the newly minted, likely "sandal-kicked," Mr. _______, S.J.—Supreme Jerk/Jack-ass—departed from Field Marshal de Loyola's Jesuit Army, he was possessed with grandiose dream of becoming a great novelist, but too soon discovered that his manic-depressive disposition and his weak character never allowed him to properly finish anything he started writing, which is we he defaulted into becoming a third-rate teacher at that third-rate high school in that very small, very boring, very French-Canadian city at the center of a large valley—created, the geologists say, by a massive meteor-strike a few billion years ago!—at the center of large nickel mining district, a high school, as I've already said, where mediocrity in its teachers was not only an asset, but a pre-requisite—but at least that job provided an infinitely bigger paycheck than all the writing he couldn't finish, so, on top of being a failed priest, a failed writer, and owner of a Cadillac he couldn't afford, he added to his CV, indifferent teacher—and even more indifferent husband and father—that oppressive list of non-accomplishments inducing—driving?—him to refine his personality-numbing, day-long bibulation, darken even more his depressive phases, distance him even further from his wife and children, and send—drive!—him to sneak off and assuage his existential angst, scriptorial inadequacies and sexual frustrations—my mother being the staunch Catholic that she still is possessing, I am sure, a dutiful, once-a-week, missionary-position-with-the-lights-off attitude towards sex—on his eldest, but still not very damned old, daughter, who just happened to be...moi! (Christ!—what a stupidly long, convoluted and utterly unreadable fucking sentence! Who do I fucking think I am—Henry fucking James...on acid!)(Call me Henrietta—LOL!)

But back to that earlier—not the John-attending!—decisive, acid-stoned Clanboree. Up until that day I been able to tune-out that "vibe" and endure those Clanborees by spending time with my cousins, both female and male, in their bedrooms (usually doing things we sure didn't want our parents to know about!), but this day, "stoned immaculate" as I was—as the great rock-star poet, Jim Morrison, would have described it—there was no tuning it out. Within minutes of walking through the door I'd felt like I was being psychically water-boarded in an overflowing Porta-Potty. The gathering felt like it had more demons and hungry-ghosts—which I don't believe in!—attending it than relatives, with all of those seeming to look more like giant gargoyles than anything remotely human.

It would appear this particular Clanboree had been called to celebrate—in a kind of left-handed way—the elevation of their most illustrious brother, Father Matthew, to his much-coveted bishopric. I suppose the bad vibe was caused by the fact that many of my aunts and uncles had feelings toward this legendary and ambitious brother that were either out rightly hostile or decidedly ambivalent, something I'd not found surprising, for when I'd first met him years before—when I was about ten I think—I'd found him way too similar to, and every bit as creepy to be around, as my father. (I came across him in a corner of the living room talking to my eight-year-old cousin, Luke, with a tone of voice, a look on his face, and a glint in his eyes way too similar to the ones always possessing my father when deep in the demonic thrall of his incestuous, pedophilic lusts, and I didn't hesitate to grab poor little deer-in-the-headlights Luke and drag him off somewhere considerably safer, engendering from that "good priest" a look that would have melted the spikes holding Christ to the cross!)

Needless to say, with the vibe that was there that day, coupled with the news that that unctuous, lecherous and sinister priest was now going to be an fuckin' bishop, and while my mother, who was more Catholic than the fuckin' Pope, was waxing eloquent about what a great man, and Catholic, and priest, and proud asset to "the Family" Uncle Matthew has proven himself to be, and as her saintly panegyric of that lecherous devil droned on, I was suddenly overwhelmed with a vision of him as an enormous, dog-collared crow with gleaming red eyes hopping about on a vast, neon-green lawn studded with giant, leering dandelions and gobbling up, with his giant, black, and prick-shaped beak, writhing, screaming worms that all looked like terrified little altar boys, and in the argot of the day, I freaked! And then I shrieked and forthwith fled. And never again did I have even the fleetingest of desires to stick my head in the business end of the Porta-Potty of another Clanboree, stoned or straight.

But now, with that news about my great-uncle John's return, that my mother had cow-barged into my bedroom to bellow into my poor ears, how could I not go meet the mythical "Prodigal Brother," Clanboree or no Clanboree? So strong was the desire to meet my long-lost mythical hero that I broke my rule about preserving my sanity and staying away from another gathering of gargoyles, and much as I was wise enough to not smoke or drop anything, I still had a severe enough hash-hangover to push things a little bit more sideways than I would have liked.

Thinking straight enough not to want to go to—and get trapped at!—that questionably sane event with my mother and younger sister, Joanna, I sweet-talked (more like pussy-persuaded, as I liked to call it in those days) one of my many "boyfriends," a rich-parented American draft-dodger who'd spent a year studying art at the only art college that would have him, given his very limited talent for art (he did a few nude-and-naughty charcoal sketches of me, but even to my untrained eye, they were shit) had a self-painted, Day-Glo purple VW van covered with huge white peace signs and zillions of small, psychedelic flowers interspersed with multi-colored, balls-attached, phalluses, to drive me there. (It was just the three of us at home that day, my older brother Daniel having not only left home, but the area, and my father, blessedly, was, spending his summer in Montreal, supposedly for the inspiration to get some writing done on the Fitzgeraldean novel he'd been yakking about writing for as long as I could remember, though more likely he was there just to get away from my mother's constant criticisms, drink flagons of cheap wine, and of course, to de rigueur get regularly sucked, fucked and ass-licked by what I am sure was no shortage of very under-aged, big-city putains—though better them than me!)

Groucho's proverbial "Shagginwaggen" had a great 8-track stereo and a back-space lined, floor and walls, with a half dozen mattresses covered with psychedelic tapestries, and he wanted me to join him in dropping "a Hofmann" (his name for LSD, after its discoverer—for those not-in-the-know) share a stogy of a joint with him, and give those mattresses a work-out, but I said I'd have save all that for after the event in order to stay sane during it—and so I could make a quick and timely escape from it should things get too freaky. As I knew they certainly would!

In those crazy, delightful, free-love days—it wasn't free as it always came with a cost, save I was hardly uptight about paying it—I collected "boyfriends" as casually as I smoked joints, collected hash pipes, took my birth control pills, or dispensed blow-jobs, so I have no idea what his name was. (In deference to his big, black, pussy-tickling and thigh-abrading mustache, which I do remember, and my love of the Marx brothers, I will call him Groucho! And should probably add that he called me Wild Thing, from that great Troggs' song of that name, and whenever I'd climb into his van and greet him with a kiss to his instantly-swelling crotch, he'd softly sing—he had a great voice and was an accomplished singer—a slightly modified first verse of that song,

Wild thing, you make my hard sing

You make everything turgid, Wild Thing

Wild Thing, I think I lust you

But I wanna know for sure

Come on and suck me right

I lust you.

And though I cringe at the memory of it, whenever he called me "Wild Thing," it had the effect of making me feel proud of my Wild Thing identity and reputation and never failed to "turn up the gas" in my groin, wet my lips—upper and nether!—and make me want to live up to that moniker.

### Chapter Three

It didn't take more than a few seconds to pick Uncle John out of the yammering throng of relatives in my Mimi's living room, for he was not only the tallest and straightest man there—with a set of shoulders like an NFL quarterback—but the only one dressed like a cowboy. Totally and incongruously—for that area—dressed like a cowboy: from his "Sunday-shone" cowboy boots up through his massive belt buckle bearing an Indian design made of turquoise and silver and way too intricate to describe here, that was holding up his faded, stove-pipe jeans hugging his slim hips to his plain, new-looking denim shirt snugged at the collar with an impressive bolo tie, the large and attractive clasp made out of a circle of turquoise with a silver rim and the intricately cast silver head of a wolf inlaid into, while the cords were of fine braided leather ending in long, silver tips with small balls on their ends. And on his head was a very large, white, and clean Stetson. He was about as fucking "cowboy" as a man could get!

I'd fantasized my mythical Uncle John looking like many things, but a bona fide cowboy sure wasn't one of my fantasies, and I experienced a hash-aided moment of total cognitive dissonance during those first few seconds that I initially laid my semi-stoned eyes on him. At the moment of my arrival he was turned away from the door and was listening to my Mimi, who, in her usual soft, smiling, eye-twinkling but well-honed, ever-effective, guilt-insinuating fashion, was giving him her version of unholy hell for vanishing as he had for over fifty years. When she drew his attention to me, who had been standing in the middle of the room and open-mouthed staring at this strange, cowboy-costumed apparition, he turned his lined, tanned, ruggedly handsome, character-sculpted and experience-etched face my way, and when our eyes met, the experience shook the foundations of my world as I knew it. And myself as I knew me.

Strangely, and to be sure, totally unexpectedly, my first reaction to the meeting of our eyes was in the core of my soul, for I felt that I not only knew that man and knew him very well, but had known him for a very, very long time. And then, as was the case with any good looking and virile man in those days, I reacted in my cunt. KAZAAM! Or, as Carol Pope over a decade later sang a crude but apropos slang-term into her "High School Confidential" song , "I creamed my jeans!" Or would have, had I been wearing jeans and not the short, tasseled, and peace-sign-and-flower-beaded buckskin dress that I'd sewn and beaded for myself out of a huge old buckskin jacket I'd found at the Sally Ann Thrift Shop. And I can't really even say I creamed my panties, because I wasn't wearing any. I just creamed! (Pardonez moi for being so honest, direct and crude about these things, but after having been introduced to the world of sex before I learned the first thing about algebra, and having spent as much time with John's poem as I have, which is full of such sexual honesty and un-hypocritical directness, I guess anything less would just not feel honest enough to seem real and valid.)

The long and short of it was, I'd spent too much time around my other, holes-in-the-room uncles and my many boyfriends who were just that—boys—that meeting such a true man as John had felt like to me that day, was the modern equivalent of getting zapped with a Taser. And zapped where it really counted—up through my cunt and into the core of my soul!

In all my life up to meeting John—and in truth, ever after—I have never met a man that exuded such an overwhelming sense of utter aliveness, of unmistakable and un-ignorable presence. I have read that both Hemmingway and Brando—and as I am learning in McLynn's biography of him, Carl Jung—had the same effect on people, particularly women, with, in Jung's case, it was his many vulnerable and fucked-up female patients whom he reduced to mere moons circling the big, Jupiter-sized gas-giant of his charismatic and psychoanalytic greatness.

And I know from personal sexperience that one can include Jimi Hendrix in that group! But much as my easily-riled cunt (funny, isn't it?—when I'm on the Meds-Rez I wouldn't think of using that disgusting and deprecatory word to describe my vagina—my privates, as I was taught by my mother to call them!—but when I've gone walkabout from that chemical Rez, it feels as natural as calling Mad King Donald a liar!) responded to him with its instant, mini-monsoon, the more rational part of me reacted with caution, even outright fear. The kind of fear one has of a high-voltage electrical transformer thrumming away behind a not-quite-high-enough fence, or a massive Siberian tiger staring at you from behind a way-too-flimsy fence in a zoo.

Another of my boyfriends, who was into all kinds of "way-out" things, had once given me his favorite book to read by someone called Carlos Castaneda, which was about Castaneda's so-called apprenticeship with a mysterious and powerful—so-called!—Mexican sorcerer named Don Juan. I found the very premise of the thing utterly archaic, irrational and ridiculous, but wanting to please that boyfriend and in response to his overwhelming enthusiasm for it, I tried reading it one night when lightly tripping.

I am still not sure if it was the acid, or the book, or a combination of both, but while skimming through it as fast as I could—to glean enough salient points from it to talk about it with at least a bit of credence—I felt a strange power, like the proverbial genie out of the accidentally rubbed lamp, blast out of that book and give me the distinct and terrifying sense that my bedroom was filling up with a teaming horde of invisible—but very noticeable!—entities of questionable provenance and even more questionable intent.

Needless to say, I indulged in the freakiest of freak-outs that sent me fleeing down to the "rec" room to the worn, filthy, popcorn-and-lost-change hoarding—but familiar and comfortable—old couch carrying my favorite-when-freaked, Winnie-the-Pooh blanket and huge, stuffed Tigger and turning on the radio, listened to the hideously maudlin but strangely soothing, "music" of a late-night country radio station, daring not to fall asleep until almost dawn. (When Hank Williams came on singing his "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," I was overwhelmed with a vivid vision of a giant, leafless oak tree standing tall and alone on a vast, beak, winter-desolated plain, and had no choice but weep along with it!)

My rational (left-brain) mind's reaction to that damn book by that strange-named fellow was to dismiss the stories and ideas in it as bizarre, archaic and utterly irrational, but it somehow had the power to manifest the unwanted effect of bringing to life my hitherto securely locked-up irrational (right-brain) mind that found quite natural the totally disturbing ideas of an unquestioning acceptance of the absurd reality that invisible, unknowable powers controlled our fate, that desert winds could be alive and attack us, that plants—like that lonesome tree in my vision!—were every bit as sentient and conscious as human beings . . . and often, more so!—and should be talked to respectfully, that multitudes of nature spirits were everywhere, and that mescaline, which I had taken on several occasions, could be possessed by a capricious spirit called Mescalito who could turn into a dog and interact with us, not only while we were stoned on it, but later when we were not. Hell, I was more than a little familiar with acid flashbacks, but the idea that a mescaline flashback could be a doorway to another world and an invitation to "Mescalito," in the guise of a dog, to come traipsing in for a visit and a bit of play, was way outside the gerbil-cage of my imagination, my worldview, and mostly, my courage.

The literary world, during Castaneda's life and even since his death twenty years ago, was, and still is, up in the air about the veracity of his outrageous tales, but since I have no interest in including fuckin' sorcerers in my worldview, I have no problem with him being a big labeled a big humbug—but I still can't believe he had a Ph.D. in anthropology from UCLA! Though of course, when I was in California I learned that it is as much an altered state as it is the most populous of "the Fascist Fifty" (as my Groucho, not the original one, called his country), and where anything—the more outrageous the better!—is not only possible, but utterly probable, but to me, that night, in that mind-blown state, those outrageous tales and assertions seemed absolutely true and real and were not only terrifying beyond all notions of the word, but had had both the capacity to shatter into shards both the frail vase of my conception of this world, and equally shatter all my notions of who I essentially thought I was in it. Jung described what I was going through perfectly in his Memories, Dreams, Reflections, with:

Whenever there is a reaching down into innermost experience, into the nucleus of the personality, most people are overcome by fear and many run away. . . . The risk of inner experience, the adventure of the spirit, is in any case alien to most human beings. The possibility that such experience might have psychic reality is anathema to them.

Yeah, no fuckin' shit! Ya got that one right, Jupiter Jung! Fortunately for my precious and flighty, ant-in-a-leaf-blower sanity, when I tried reading more of it when I was more-or-less straight (I was, in those great and wonderful days, at best, only ever more-or-less straight.) and had put that old familiar worldview-vase back together, it eighty percent seemed to my rational (left-brain) mind like a collection of utterly harmless and nonsensical fictions, but there was still that twenty percent of something occult and scary in it that, which, like some Cosmic bass player's big thumb, kept strumming some very deep, low and very disturbing notes—like in the "Time" song on Dark Side of the Moon—on the over-amped bass guitar of my irrational (right-brain) mind, notes that kept intimating a deep, dark and terrifying labyrinth of demon-haunted tunnels underneath the sunlight castle of our normal and rational lives, and that there was some terrible, timeless, and primordial truth to the tales Castaneda had written.

And even though, when more-or-less straight, I was still so fuckin disturbed by that twenty percent that I felt I had no choice, like Jimi had done with his guitar at the Monterey Pop Festival, but to one day finally take that book out to the patio, throw it in the barbeque, douse it with starter fluid, and burn it to ashes just to feel safe about it. And being not quite straight enough at the time, I was a little too eager to see that horrifying thing burn that I stood a little too close and paid for my eagerness with a severe singeing of my eyebrows and eyelashes. (Luckily I didn't end up doing a "Richard Pryor" to my then slim and pretty face, though today, a good singeing could only improve the look of the thick, pasty mask of blubber that now so grotesquely hangs off the front of my skull!)

And there is a point to this lengthy and absurd digression, (other than the fact that my manic mind is like a hummingbird in a hurricane and cannot fly straight for any more than ten word-inches!) in that there was something about John that almost instantly, and most disturbingly, made me think (the ridiculous, irrational, right-brained part of me that believed that shit) of Castaneda's strange, powerful, sorcerer-teacher Don Juan, for the only word I can come up with to describe John was that he was imbued with the personal power that Don Juan had blathered on about with Castaneda. (For those who love Star Wars, George Lucas has admitted that Castaneda's frightening Don Juan was the modified-to-milquetoast model for his avuncular Obi Wan! . . . Don Juan . . . Obi Wan . . . not too subtle, George!)

Anyways, that look from his bright, intense, totally alive black eyes that unflinchingly stared into mine from beneath the wide brim of his white cowboy hat which he'd had no interest in taking off, not only made me "cream my jeans," but, as mentioned, gave me the potent and disturbing sense that we already knew each other. And had known each other, not only for a very long time, but very, very well—and not just from my dreams, even though I instantly realized I'd been dreaming about him for as long as I could remember, though of course, without any idea of who that dream-stalker was.

And when he smiled a friendly smile at me and shook my hand, I not only smelled the strong scent of tobacco smoke mixed with a faint whiff of Old Spice aftershave wafting off his towering-over-me form, but I felt a surge of something like electricity leap from his massive, rough, tanned hand to that de-boned fish that in those days dangled from my wrist, (not the lump of lard with five knobs on it, like now) which instantly, and most miraculously, made me feel stronger, and more me, (alas, only for a short while) than I'd ever felt in my life.

I'd heard about, and thought about, the idea of love at first sight—of lust at first sight I'd experienced more than my delightfully lubricious share—from various friends and "lovers," but had never experienced what I'd thought to be an over-rated, probably unlikely phenomenon until meeting that man—and then it happened! I felt like a candle being lit by the flames of a blasting-off moon rocket! And though I was immediately overwhelmed with a desire remain around that astounding man that day—something like the diminutive nymph of a moon Callisto around the mighty and massive Jupiter—even if it was just to stare at him and bask in the overwhelming gravitas and confidence of his presence, he was very quickly whisked away by my great aunt Monique—who seemed to have the same moon-planet relationship with him that I had instantly felt—who wanted to drag him off and introduce him her abusive asshole of an alcoholic husband (Whom I wouldn't have wasted the time introducing to a squirt of shit squashed out of a road-kill skunk!)

Before he gave in to Monique's insistent tugging on his arm, John nodded at me and with a sudden, strange, and incongruously faraway look in his eyes and an unusual tone to his voice, said, "I never thought I would see you again, Lise."

First of all, strange as those words were, they were not half as strange as his voice, a deep, resonating baritone, but with an added element to it in that I didn't seem to be hearing it with my ears, but deep within my whole body—or maybe it was my soul! Either way, it was as though I was one big ear drum vibrating to the sound of his voice, and it was as stirring as it was strange and disturbing. (I can't help but think about that Biblical phrase admonishing the person "with ears," to use the damn things and hear, which at one time went, proverbially, and no humor intended, "in one ear and out the other," but which I suddenly realized meant that when someone of spiritual power spoke, only a hearer with a resonant, spiritual sympathy to those spoken words could truly hear them, and that for some reason, my psyche very powerfully resonated to John's voice and words.)

And distracted though I was by my total bodily—and spiritual—response to his voice, I still heard his words, which on one level were basically incomprehensible, yet on another—even if just for a fleeting instant—were completely, though intuitively understandable, and in my intuitive comprehension of them, I felt a distinct prickling sensation scamper down my spine that ended up right in my cunt, arriving there at the same time as my Mimi exploded with the instant and incredulous, "Lise?—John, this is your great-niece Rachel!...and I'm very sure you've never seen her before! Although I dare say you've already seen way too much of her!"

Of course, you'll have to read, in his memoirs, all about John's older sister Lisette, and the always close and eventually incestuous relationship—oops, spoiler-alert!—he had with her, to catch the full implication of that slip of the tongue and memory! Mimi's shrill words and harsh disapproving look at all the nubile flesh I was displaying instantly dispersed the tiny cloud of the intuitive meaning of what he'd just said even as it just as quickly snapped him back from wherever he'd gone to when he'd said it. A frown appeared on his rugged, handsome face for a thoughtful moment, after which our eyes met as he said, "Rachel. Yes, yes—of course it is." Then tapping his forehead, he smiled the ghost of a very knowing smile as he said, "This old grey porridge is getting a little too mushy after cooking for so many years in the pot of this thick old skull." And then Monique dragged him away to meet her squirt-of-skunk-shit of a husband, leaving me with the potent sense that he did not want to leave my company any more than I wanted to leave his.

Of course, now that I have read John's memoirs, I am sure it was the long-dead Lisette (whom, as a child, he must have called Lise) he sensed I was, and not the living, insignificant, silly, somewhat stoned and ludicrously under-dressed hippy-chick me, that he was reluctant to leave the company of. Ironically, and apropos, under circumstances that were too Jungian and synchronistically weird to want to think about enough to relate to here, I recently came into possession of a very long and strange movie from a couple years back called Cloud Atlas, starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry. I've watched it twice and still haven't completely figured it all out yet because it about a bunch of characters living in, and shifting in and out of, six different past, present and future time periods—and planets!—with all of them connected by reincarnation and karma.

I don't like believing in the Eastern, reincarnating soul-shit, but it did stir up a few unwanted Wordsworthean "Intimations of Immortality" deep within my psyche that I had a hard time quelling. Needless to say, John would have loved that plate-of-spaghetti movie, but he missed it by about sixteen years and he was very much on my mind during both of my viewings of it. (Christ!—this "Preface" is getting like Cloud Atlas with all its sinuously entwining plots and uber-confusing time-shifts!)

After that brief meeting with the no-longer-mythical but now infinitely more mysterious Uncle John, I had no desire to remain at that impromptu Clanboree, so I went looking for Groucho. And an easy job that was, for hash-and-acid stoned as he'd been, he'd gravitated to the dining room table that all my aunts had been able to over-load with an incredible amount of food in an equally incredible short amount of time after deciding to put on that Clanboree, where he'd been imitating an industrial vacuum cleaner in his efforts to cure a bad case of the munchies.

It didn't take long after I'd snuck up behind him, stuck my tongue in his ear and not-as-surreptitiously-as-I-should-have fondled his groin while whispering in that tongued-ear that it was time to go do more interesting and fun things than eat, for him to willingly agree with me. But he was not horny enough to leave without first carefully stacking a mountain of Nanaimo bars onto a stack of three or four paper plates, covering them with a napkin and carrying it, like a mass-officiating priest his precious gold chalice, as he accompanied me—grinning like a cat in a cage full of canaries—through the chattering throng of my "village" of relatives.

While navigating that yammering, drinking, eating human labyrinth, Gary, a randy hunk of a hockey-playing cousin whose whistle—well, more like a flute it had been—I'd blown a Clanboree several years before, made it fun by sticking his hand up the back of my buckskin dress and giving my naked left bum cheek as long a caress as he could manage, which I responded to by turning, smiling, winking and rapidly sticking my tongue in and out at him through the circle I'd made of my mouth. (It was fun to watch his groin instantly mushroom to life as I did so!)

When we finally reached the door I was filled with a desire to say goodbye to John, but he was on the couch on the far side of the living room, sitting there like a downed moose being devoured by the pack of wolves of his sisters, so I quickly gave up on that idea. As we walked out to Groucho's outrageously painted van through a throng of staring, giggling, young—but old-enough-to-know—cousins, he somberly said that it was all he could do to keep from succumbing to a total freak-out in that strange place, where he'd felt "like an itty-bitty fly at a convention of mutant frogs."

Our first order of business on escaping that that Clanboree was for Groucho to most appropriately slip the Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow tape into 8-track stereo as we drove out of sight of the house and subscribing to the hip, Sixties proverb that reality is for those who can't handle their drugs, stopped to toke ourselves "immaculate" on one of his famously thick, hash-oil soaked joints. (They more than made up for some minor inadequacies in his other "joint" that I nonetheless liked to make grow to its maximum, if limited, size with the magic of my mouth.)

We then, on my suggestion and directions, headed off down the road running past my Mimi's marina and house for a ways then turned off onto a narrow, rutted (no pun intended) trail that led to my favorite, usually deserted "sparking-spot" in a clearing on the bank of the river Mimi's marina was on, and while Grace Slick rode in her Airplane as she took the magical pills that no responsible mother ever gave to her children and which made her whatever size she wanted to be as she chased the White Rabbit down the magical hole of a great trip, Groucho hung onto the van's bucking steering wheel with one hand as the other operated its stick shift while I amused myself playing with his. (God, I can't believe I am writing this—especially as I may have to do some red-faced reckoning over it on the fortunately unlikely chance either of my two children, and however many of my grandchildren they may have, ever bother to read it!—with nothing about me or my behavior then being copasetic with who I am now, an obese, sexless sexagenarian and crazy grandmother with a heavy—no pun intended!—accent on the word obese, for though I remained delightfully and sexily slim—and sexual—until John's death, that dark and traumatic event left me feeling as black and empty as an abandoned garbage truck, which I have ever since been vainly trying to fill with junk food—the junkier the better! . . . And then, of course, there's those fucking meds.)

When we reached the propitiously deserted clearing of that river that after a hot, dry summer was now only a trickling creek, Groucho rolled another joint while he made raucous fun of Uncle John's cowboy look, saying, "Wow, what a totally far-out dude, Wild Thing! Like outta a TV western! Adam from Bonanza maybe.... No...no...more like that Eastman guy who plays Rowdy in Rawhide. Except a hundred years older! And did ya see that belt buckle? And that . . bolo tie he was wearing! Man, they were as far-out as you can get! And crafted! Like by some fucking wizard, man! Fuck!—I'd swear off sex for a week and Doobie-Scoo (I'm sure he had as many names for marijuana as he did peace signs on his van!) just for a month just to own that....Well, at least a day for sex and a wee...two days...for Doobie-Scoo!"

As I was holding my breath to keep my lungs full of the acrid but magical smoke I'd toked off that joint, I could not voice any objections to him mocking Uncle John, not that I would have objected even if I'd been breathing, for John truly had resembled a movie cowboy, reminding me of Gary Cooper, a favorite actor of my mother's that I'd only ever heard about until the previous month when, while watching television while uber-stoned on some super-acid one Saturday night, I'd seat-edge and freaking-out (but not enough to stop watching) viewed him stoically and ineffectually trying to find the human help needed to stave off his dire and seemingly inevitable fate in High Noon.

And never having watched Rawhide, I'd been unfamiliar with that Eastman fellow, though over the years I have certainly come to hear about, and, as a passionate, latter-day DVD movie buyer and equally passionate lover of all his movies—acted-in and directed—by a guy called Eastwood, who played Rowdy in Rawhide and a whole lot of other uber-macho, gun-happy cowboys and cops and who I am sure is now more famous than Christ—after the Beatles, of course!—but to me, back then, John looked a lot less like Eastwood or Cooper and a lot more like a taller, older, cowboy-hatted version of that granite-jawed, microphone-swinging, pussy-inflaming, bar-brawling, rebel-with-a-voice Roger Daltrey who, as the tabloid stories never failed to point out, liked to "get his back into his living" while making his name and his millions singing Pete Townsend's great songs with The Who, and filling his leisure time "getting his dick into" as many groupies as there were words in all of those songs. (Alas, me not being one of those lucky gals!)

The joint finally gone and my consciousness expanded out to somewhere beyond the Andromeda galaxy, I felt the need to play the grateful Andromeda to the rescuing Perseus, undid Groucho's belt in order to have easier access to his stick shift, which he gently but expertly pressed my not unwilling mouth onto, with that delightfully familiar activity serving to partially distract my addled mind from the disturbing, soul-expanding, groin-heating memories I was having about my great uncle, John.

And in order to completely get my mind off him, I thought about that belt buckle that Groucho had mentioned. (I thought I'd seen the buckle-of-all-buckles at Woodstock, one worn by a hip dude of an electrician working at the concert with whom I spent the first rainy night in his work-van, that buckle having been a nifty silver affair with a tiny gold-plated hash pipe that popped out of its center and which, after I'd smoked his big pipe, he loaded with high-grade hash that both of us smoked enough times that I remember little else of that night besides the fact that it was orally busy—as we used to say back in those days, while paraphrasing that famous WWII warning about loose lips and sinking ships: "tight lips shrink swollen pricks."—and inguinally electrifying!)

But John's buckle truly is remarkable—John bequeathed both that buckle and bolo tie to me, so I still have them, and since I keep them on top my big black IKEA entertainment center, I get to gaze at them every day—being made of an oval of silver with an intricate border of turquoise rope, while at its center was the intricately cast, gold head of a fierce eagle staring out from it with two startlingly large eyes made from circles of turquoise with protruding rubies in-laid in their centers. I couldn't help but wonder who could have done such fine work on that buckle, and that it must have cost John a fortune. (In working on John's memoirs, I discovered that it had been so expertly crafted by an Aboriginal named Adam, who'd been John's hired-hand/best friend during his ranching days, and it hadn't cost him a nickel because it has been a gift.)

Stupendous as my memory of that buckle had been, it did not hold my attention for long and it ended up drifting back to that man himself and the strangeness of our meeting, all thoughts of which set that normally ever-warm, furry creature that lives at the apex of my legs so totally ablaze that I dragged Groucho into the back of his van and to the sound of Hendrix's Are You Experienced tape, and when its acid-anthem, "Purple Haze" came on, I sang along to the traditional "Excuse me while I kiss this guy" dis-lyric with the version popular amongst the goddesses at Woodstock, "Excuse me while I fuck this guy," though to be sure, I was never very good at that when Hendrix was on and I was stoned—when wasn't I!—because those damned ethereal guitar licks of his used to erupt like massive, multi-colored, iridescent coronal discharges that picked me up and took me soaring out beyond Pluto and back.(That, and the memories of having been blessed with the chance to do a wild, multi-girl groupie-thing with him after seeing him light his guitar on fire at the Monterey Pop Festival then Who-smash it to matchsticks. Ohhhhhhh . . . the stories I could tell!)

### Chapter Four

I finally made a swooping trip back to earth, that van, and the business-at-groin when, on his realizing I was tripping a little too much—who says acid flashbacks are bad?—on Hendrix, Groucho took off that tape and put on that ultimate Earth-mother Janis, with her "Big Brothers," screaming out her "Piece of My Heart," with me taking Groucho's prick out of my mouth so I could sing along with her, but change "heart" to "cunt," and her repetitive "come on" lyrics meaning truly what she was probably thinking about as she sang them. And to not allow Groucho a moment of discomfort over my having removed my upper mouth from his stick-shift, I deftly and agilely swung my leg over his lap and replaced it with my sopping wet nether one to give him the ride of his life, after which it was time for a toke-and-let-the-sweat-dry break—that van sure needed air conditioning!—which Groucho kept real mellow by putting on the group, It's A Beautiful Day's It's a Beautiful Day tape with its dreamy and disturbing, "White Bird."

Much as I loved that song, it was always disturbing because the first time I heard it's line, "white bird must fly or she will die," I thought about how I felt the first time my father laid his weight atop me while my face, in trying to keep it away from his booze-and-tobacco-rank breath, was stuck in his odiferous armpit as he rammed his "rampant" into my nine-year-old cunt, making me feel, not only like I was being ripped in two, but like a helpless, defiled bird who only wanted to escape the cage of her literally, fucked-up childhood and its daddy-dominated helplessness.

After the white bird had flown away, I got into the groove of my second favorite song on that tape, the real freaky-when-you-are-stoned-and-time-is-all-fucked-up, song, "Time Is,"(with its line, "time is too short for those who laugh," modified to the more logical and true, "time is too short for those who fuck," which is probably what the writer wanted to say in the first place)—during which I tormented Groucho with tales of my adventures at the Dionysus-and-Aphrodite-dominated, long-overdue Carnival—the Yasgur's Farm Mardi Gras—of Woodstock, where Pussy Riot was infinitely more related to Aphrodite's rampant presence than to any future—power to ya, gals!—state-oppressed Russian rock band, which he'd been unable to attend because of his beat-feet-across-the-border thwarting of Uncle Sam's iron-fisted, protect-the-Fascist-Capitalist-Empire-from-the-evil-Socialist-Commie-Empire, desire to send him half way around the world, to kill, as he put it, "harmless ox-driving peasants who were as much of a threat to the safety, wealth and lifestyle of the 'Fascist States of America' as are the seagulls that shit on the Statue of Liberty."

When he got bored with having sex with me, he used to yak a lot of American political diarrhea that proverbially squirted in one ear and out the other. He was obsessed with the notion that the United States was fundamentally a fascist state and not the free and democratic republic that it "Hollywooded" itself to be. As far as he was concerned, at a deep level, where life really took place, the term "free Americans" was a contradiction and that the United States was one huge concentration camp where the inmates were kept mindlessly numb with wealth, comforts, commodities, and the constant propaganda-indoctrination of shallow, mindless TV shows and extraordinarily manipulative and coercive commercials—which viewers watched like they were religious fanatics being fed Biblical truths.

He more than once said—and even showed me a black-inked sketch—of his vision that his country's flag should look like, it having 13 black and grey stripes instead of the red and white ones, and 50 black, reversed swastikas (he said reversed swastikas, which are called sauwastikas, are the symbol of a Hindu god of ultimate destruction) in a grey box instead of the 50 white stars in a blue box, because, his country " . . . was continuing Hitler's dream of world domination while pulling off history's greatest Hollywood-con of convincing it's somnambulant, stoned-on-TV-commercials-and-status-and-new-things, citizens it was Father Christmas handing out peace, love and the American Dream around the world while doing it."

When I contrasted my memory of the cheerful, red-white-and-blue "Stars and Stripes" with this black and grey, swastika'd—sauwastika'd!—creation of his, it had such a powerful presentiment of a deep, dark and profound truth to it that it sent a shiver down my spine and such a sharp stab of fear into my gut that I asked him to put it away. (Unlike so many of my compatriots-in-Stonedville, I was so politically unaware back then that I hadn't an fuckin' clue about what the fuckin' hell a fascist was—regardless that I had one for a father!)

And Groucho backed that statement up—to his satisfaction, anyway—by going off on a rant along the lines of, "And the proof of the dark, paranoid, and essentially fascist foundation of our country lies the fact that that US government brought over a thousand Nazi rocket scientists—more than a few, I am sure, who were war criminals!—to the United States to start its rocket program. Fuck—it wasn't the US that put those astronauts on the moon last month, it was Hitler's Nazis! Then there's all the evidence now surfacing that the US government has been involved in elaborate program of turning American citizens into hapless guinea pigs by subjecting them to secret medical and other tests, many none too beneficial to the unsuspecting victims and all no different from the secret, evil tests the Nazis used to perform on concentration camp victims!

"And then there was the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr., all secretly orchestrated—I am 99% sure—by extreme fascist elements in our 'democratic' government. . . . And shit!—is our crazy fuckin' invasion of Vietnam any different than Hitler's invasion of Poland and Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia—both perfect examples of gratuitous fascist aggression. . . . Though I guess since that war criminal Johnson is touting that 'non-war' merely as a necessary measure to help South Vietnam resist an 'evil Commie-takeover' by North Vietnam, it is no different than Hitler helping Generalissimo Franco win that civil war in Spain!

"At least the fascists-thugs that took over Germany and Italy were overt fascist thugs, and people knew exactly what they were getting with them, while our fascists are so cleverly covert—and their mind-numbing propaganda so clever and pervasive—that most Americans, if asked, will tell you—and they will truly believe!—they live in this world's greatest democracy and are the most free people on the face of this Earth. Ha!—as free as well-fed, pot-bound rabbits in a farmer's fancy fuckin' hutch!

"But if that is not enough hypocrisy-flavored, rabbit-turd thickened pudding to choke down to prove that the United States of America is really the Fascist States of America, then that Democratic National Convention in Chicago last year sealed the deal for me. I was in Grant Park with a few thousand other peaceful demonstrators when the monstrous horde of pigs Daley had called out went totally berserk and started tear-gassing and billy-clubbing the shit out of us! I mean, those assholes weren't even pigs anymore but wild fucking boars! Boars with long, hardwood clubs they figured were designed solely for caving in the heads of fellow citizens! As far as they were concerned they were saving the city from a horde of 'commie infiltrators' flown in straight from Russia!

"I wasn't doing anything but standing my ground and trying to continue holding up a 'Stop the War' sign while choking on that fucking tear gas and trying to see through my watering eyes, when I catch a glimpse of a snarling boar rushing at me with his upraised billy-club and the next thing I know I am waking up, puking my guts out in a dark van full of other beaten up 'commie infiltrators' that was on its way to the county lock-up. I ended up with a concussion, a broken nose, two black eyes and bruises all over my body, so that wild boar—and likely a horde of his fellow wild boars!—must have beat the living shit out of me while I lay unconscious on the ground!

" Walter Cronkite summed the situation up totally right-on when on the national news he summed up the situation in Chicago with something like, 'What we have here is a democratic convention taking place in a police state!'

"It was when I later learned that a majority of American citizens, after watching TV coverage of all those Daley boars go completely feral, agreed with Daley and his feral boars' use of excessive force against unarmed and defenseless citizens exercising their democratic right to peaceful protest, that I knew I was living in a fascist country no different from the Nazi Germany that so many American soldiers died to rid the world of. With the fall of the Nazis, that virulent contagion rode an evil wind out of Germany, across the Atlantic, and straight into the United States! Which, already leaning in that direction, fell into its 'arms' with passionate abandon! It was then that I decided to burn my draft card and head north to the true, democratic sanity of your country.

"And my parents, who had been avid, flag-waving patriots no different than too many other propaganda-sedated Americans before that event, were horrified enough by the TV coverage of it—and the sight of me beaten half to death for exercising my supposed right to peacefully protest against my government—they agreed with me that going half-way around the world to kill people who posed no threat to our country, was not only absurd and fascist, but evil, and they gave me the money to come up here and live with my father's sister, Aunt Patricia. She's real cool! And totally hip to what is going on south of the border! She's a nurse who married Uncle William, a Canadian doctor she met in an English refugee camp they were both working in after the war.

"But how can I fail to mention that great big stinking dog-turd that lays right atop that fascist pudding—the totally fascist McCarthy era! (I'd heard about the "McCarthy era" during a social studies class at school, but all I could remember about it was some "black list" containing the names of a lot of very famous people who were such traitorous and dangerous "Commies" that they were considered a threat to the United States, only two of which I could remember being on it, one being Albert Einstein, whom I only knew as a wild-haired old fellow with a kindly smile and who was considered the smartest person in the world, and the other was Lucille Ball, who I'd loved watching on her I Love Lucy TV shows when I was a kid, and the idea of either of them being traitorous and dangerous "Commies" and a threat to the United States seemed as absurd as the notion that Smokey the Bear's real job was to go around starting forest fires.)

"Only a fundamentally fascist country," Groucho had ranted on. "Could have produced and allowed to run as rampant and unchecked as that asshole, the malicious and paranoid Nazi-wannabe, Reichsleiter McCarthy, did! As one of my college profs put it to a group of us in a coffee house one night, 'McCarthyism was the pus-filled head of the raging boil of fascism that has been festering for years on the nose of America.' He also said, that if he'd said that during the McCarthy era some snitch would have done his or her patriotic duty and he'd have wound up in jail. And then he added, 'And if one of you were to snitch on me to the Dean about saying this to you I could very well lose my job!'

"And how can I forget to mention another totally fascist event from that time period, revolving around that brilliant psychologist, Wilhelm Reich, a Jew who fled to the US from Germany to escape the persecution of the Nazis, not realizing he was jumping out of the fire of Nazi fascism and into a fat-sizzling frying pan of American fascism. Being a 'pinko' Jew with ideas about the naturalness and importance of sex and the orgasm that are still likely a few centuries ahead of their times—for fucking America!—the fascist American justice system eventually coped with him by throwing him in jail! . . . Oh sure, they claimed they were prosecuting him it was for being a flimflam artist for selling his orgone boxes, which they claimed to be nothing but humbug powered by psychobabble, but American history is full of very successful flimflam artists who never came near being prosecuted and jailed. (He had that right—that bankruptcy-artist and flimflam-man-extraordinaire, Mad King Donald coming instantly to mind!)

"Fuck!—I'm sure the real truth is he was prosecuted and jailed because he was a 'pinko' Jew who dared claim that sexual energy was a bright, divine energy and not some dark demonic one that had to be relegated to darkened bedrooms and back alleys—and the backseats of sinners cars! As far as I am concerned, his book, The Function of the Orgasm, is the most brilliant book I have ever read and should be required reading for every teenager going through puberty! . . . And though they say he died of a heart attack while in jail, I'd not be surprised if he was nudged into oblivion with the addition of a 'little something' into his jailhouse gruel!" (Ahhhh, now I finally see where my love of reading all those conspiracy theories on the Web comes from—it's all Groucho's fault!)

And a double ahhhhh!—for what a timely occurrence it is for CSN&Y's "Ohio," (written by my compatriot—born just a few years before me in a small town like my own just a couple hundred miles southeast of here—the "Y" in CSN&Y!) to just now come on my scrambled iPod for my scrambled head, reminding me about that massacre of four defenseless students at Kent State by National Guard troops, an event that hadn't yet happened when I knew Groucho but I am sure he would have had lots of fascist comments about it. Especially when 60% of the American people polled about the massacre believed the students deserved what they got. "Say what!" I can hear him roar. "Sixty percent of my country believes that unarmed students on their campus protesting that evil war deserve to be shot by soldiers for daring to have the "pinko" temerity to exercise their democratic right to congregate and demonstrate? That doesn't bespeak just a fascist country, but a goddamn evil one! Jesus Christ, just think of it—defenseless American kids protesting the senseless murder of defenseless Vietnamese civilians by American soldiers are themselves murdered by American soldiers for daring to protest! If that doesn't sound like Nazi Germany all over again, I don't know what it sounds like!"

But back to what I was writing about Wilhelm Reich: I am not so sure I can agree with him on his take on Reich's The Function of the Orgasm—it's a damn deep book! He gave me a copy of it to read but my drug-addled, undisciplined, teenage head couldn't get past the first chapter. Give great "teenage head," I sure could, but use my teenage head for thinking—that was a whole other kettle of frozen fish fillets!)

At that time, Groucho's sound political analysis of "the real" America (read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States if you want a dark peek at "the real" United States that Groucho was so aware of back then!), was as interesting to me as a scientific monograph on the sex-life of fruit flies, especially since my only real interest at that time was my own sex-life. But thinking about it today, in light of the obviously paranoid, racist, and malicious Mad King Donald surfing to power on an utterly mindless wave of populist popularity—and with a little help from Vladimir!—created by 65 million equally paranoid, racist, and malicious—and likely in Groucho's view—fascist American citizens, I can now easily see that Groucho was a lot smarter, and politically savvy, than I gave him credit for being at the time. (His obsessions with sex and drugs blinded me to the fact he had other things going on in his head when he wasn't stoned—actually, obviously even while he was, because he was almost always stoned!—and during those very short hiatuses between when he "got his rocks off" and started getting horny again!)

And of course, it now occurs to me that his willingness to take the risk to flee his country and become a permanent exile to escape being bayonet-prodded into the evil insanity of the Vietnam war, was sufficient proof that he was every bit as intelligent as he was constantly horny. And you, Dear Bored Reader, might be interested to know that Groucho is still in this country, and I know this because a few years back—probably more than ten, now that I think about it—while flipping through a national news magazine at the dentist's office, I discovered a op-ed piece in it comparing the debacle of a war in Iraq—oops, I guess that was more than fifteen years ago! Fuck, tempus doesn't fugit for me anymore, it warp-speeds!—to the debacle of the Vietnam war, with both of them being started by a corrupt and mendacious president and directed by clueless—to the type of warfare!—and hide-bound generals.

Something about the ranting tone and the presentation of the ideas in it rang enough of a dim memory-bell that I checked out the author and discovered it to be none other than Groucho! He had become a political science professor at a major university who occasionally published op-ed pieces in that magazine. It even carried a short biography—which made no mention of him being a draft-dodger!—and pic of him at the top of the article, and though I'd never have recognized that full-bearded, over-weight, self-importance-filled version of the slim, horny, mustachioed, draft-dodging hippie I'd gotten stoned with and given so many blow-jobs while getting off on so much great music in his glorious, Shagginwaggen, the fellow in that pic still had the look of a perpetually horny devil, and I could but smiling—and crotch-tingling!—wonder how many sexy young "co-eds" he was banging in motels—or getting his "whistle" blown by in his office—every semester!)

And keeping on this same topic—I can't believe I am capable of doing so!—Groucho also once showed me a large, startlingly skillfully rendered sketch that he'd done on a piece of Bristol board, of what he'd titled, The Statue of Hypocrisy, which was basically the Statue of Liberty resting atop a pedestal made out of human skulls, with a sauwastika formed by the letters of the words GENOCIDE and SLAVERY neatly inked into individual skulls. On that tablet held in Liberty's left hand was neatly printed, Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing. E. Burke.

Her—Liberty's/Hypocrisy's—eyes were crudely gouged-out caves in which rested crouching, malevolent-looking gargoyle demons, and she was standing on a pile of chained and manacled Afro-Americans who were either dead or with their faces contorted with pain and anguish as they stretched their thin, manacled arms out towards the viewer, while impaled on her torch was a blood-dripping pile of dead Indian males, one bearing a startlingly good resemblance to Sitting Bull.

And most grotesquely—and again, very skillfully drawn—there hung on those spikes sticking out from her crown the blood-dripping heads of Indian men, women and children. And while I was stomach-churning taking in this totally gross rendition of that famous icon in New York's harbor welcoming the "tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to be breathe free," he said, "You know, there wasn't anything that Hitler did to the Jews—and all the people they enslaved in their concentration camps and worked to death in their work camps designed to aid their war industries!—that he didn't learn from what we Americans did to the Blacks and Indians! Of course, Hitler didn't have to waste money importing his slaves from Africa, which made things a lot more efficient for him . . . and because he had a lot more Jews to kill than we did Indians, he had to do it on an efficient, industrial scale with gas chambers and crematoriums . . . while we did it with swords, guns, small pox, starvation—and even bounties!

"Fuck!—just reading about that brutal and genocidal Trail of Tears, the forced removal of the Cherokee from Georgia in the 1830s—though that was just one small part of massive and grotesque forced-removal almost all the Indians living east of the Mississippi to lands west of it . . . . to what is today Oklahoma!—and the almost as brutal and genocidal Long Walk of the Navajos in the 1860s, is enough to make one weep—and be embarrassed to be an American! Though those atrocities can't hold a candle to what went on in California! Well, I guess not!—California, by nature, always strives to out-fascist all the rest of the fascist states at whatever it puts its vile collective mind to doing!

"Did you know that when that 'State of Fascist and Golden Iniquity' joined the 'Sacred Union,' there were about 150,000 Indians living in it. That was considered way too damn many for the Whites so one of the first statutory acts of its new legislature was to put a bounty on Indian scalps . . . and heads! A bounty!—like they were verminous rats, not human beings!"

"And with Californians being as endemically greedy as they always have been, they took full advantage of this opportunity to line their pockets. Various towns had different prices for scalps and heads, but there are reports of Indian hunters riding into towns with a dozen or more Indian heads hanging off their mules. The article I read didn't specify if they were father or mother or child or infant heads, but I guess it didn't matter—the price was likely the same! It was a great program—for the fucking Whites! Not only did many intrepid, greedy California psychopaths get to make a lot of easy money, but that very fascist state got rid of its 'Indian Problem.' By 1870 there was only 30,000 Indians left within its borders. Though given the limitless nature of California greed, I'm surprised there were even 30! . . . Some of those poor Indians must have had the temerity to fight back against that slaughter, I guess. And we call ourselves a fucking Christian nation! . . . Shit, I wish Steinbeck would have written a novel about that totally unchristian and absolutely fascist California debacle that makes the plight of the 'Okies' look like a pleasant summer Sunday on the Santa Monica Pier!

"And reading about those famous—infamous and genocidal, more like it!—"Indian Wars" out on the prairies makes you want to rip your own heart out so you don't have to empathize with those one proud and independent peoples reduced helpless, homeless, starving remnants. All righteously and "In God We Trust-sanctioned" under the self-serving rubric of Manifest Destiny! . . . Though I often think that the Vietnam war is just a continuation of the Indian Wars—we, as a paranoid, bigoted, racist, fascist nation, just aren't content unless we are following the 'California Indian Solution' and exterminating the brown races, which we view the same way Hitler and the Nazis viewed the Jews—as some kind of pernicious pollution. As vermin!

"And that's a fact amply attested to by those two psychopathically racist phrases concerning Indians popular in my country in 19th century, General Sheridan's: 'The only good Indian is a dead Indian!' and "Nits make lice!" which is the short form of that quote by 'hero' of the Sand Creek Massacre, Colonel—squaw-killer—Chivington: 'Kill and scalp all; big and little; nits make lice.'" (As I write his words all these years later, I can't help but think that infamous, My Lai Massacre in Vietnam was just a lot of that same old, same old, American-as-apple-pie white-supremacy "natural gas" that Mad King Donald is tapping into and setting aflame today!)

Needless to say, most of that diatribe by Groucho went zipping over my head—except for that too-horrible-to-believe shit about the legislated bounty on Indians in California!—like some thrown-too-high Frisbee, but I wasn't completely clueless—though damn close!—about that sort of stuff, and I tried to pretend I had a brain in my head and could think about other things besides sucking and fucking, and pointed out to him that he might be a little off-base with all the fascism stuff when applied to America, because as far as I remembered from school, the fascist states . . . Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini . . .were totalitarian states where people had practically no freedoms And especially not the freedoms to free speech and a free press!

He just laughed and said, "Yeah, but it's all relative, isn't it? And too often the true nature of any institutional system is hidden real good—like a lethal poison mixed into a delicious martini. Or a bomb wired into an innocuous object, like a child's toy . . . or a book. Or like a thug in an expensive suit carrying a machine gun in a violin case!

"The totalitarian fascism in Germany and Italy was extreme and obvious because once Hitler and Mussolini gained their dictatorial powers, they didn't care that the world saw their countries as savage dictatorships. In fact—they were proud of the fact! But in my country, because of its built-in foundation of hypocrisy, of always projecting its 'Good Guy, God-Is-Always-On-Our-Side' image to the world while downplaying and smoke-screening its dark genesis in slavery, genocide and empire building—hell, fifty percent of the founding fathers owned slaves, as did nine fucking presidents!—it is now both well hidden and totally woven into the tapestry of our culture. But however well hidden, it is not only still there, but it deleteriously affects every American, however little they are aware of the fact!"

And here I could but interject my pathetic, two-cents worth, and say, "But you can't deny that in your country people can say what they please without going to jail for it. And the press—and TV and radio—is free to say what it pleases. There's no censorship of that! Even I can see that!"

And that objection too, got a derisive laugh out of him. "Sure thing, Wild Thing!—it does look like Americans are free to say what they please . . . and the news media are free to report and editorialize about things to their hearts' content, but only within limited parameters. Of course, the control of our speech and our press and TV isn't done through "disappearances-in-the-night," through secret jailings and midnight executions, but through the just-as-effective censorship powers of ridicule and derision and social ostracization—and systematic cover-ups and outright lies.

"Even our press isn't nearly as free as we—as it—believes it is. Take that business with Wilhelm Reich. The government jails—and likely subtly executes him for being a 'Commie-Jew' intent on spreading sexual discontent in the usually sheep-content, consumption-obsessed masses, especially with the Fifties status quo-notions of sex being as filthy and abhorrent as that bogeyman, Communism, by him claiming, as an expert psychoanalyst, that sex is not only natural and good, but absolutely necessary to a healthy, happy life.

"Pure fuckin' heresy back then! . . . And still so for many today! Especially those southern Fundamentalists! So they fling him into jail claiming it was for him selling his 'orgone boxes,' which they claimed were absolutely and scientifically proven to be a hoaxes and a waste of money—not that Science then—and still today!—has the instruments to measure a subtle energy like 'orgone.' So it was quite acceptable for the 'god of all American corporations,' General Motors to sell—for a good goddamn lot of bucks!—its badly designed and deadly-to-drive Corvair with nobody going to jail for it, but it was necessary to jail Reich to protect Americans from his harmless orgone boxes!

"And maybe they did and maybe they didn't intentionally kill him—or at least give him a little nudge out of this world!—but if that wasn't the case, just for a brilliant Jew like that to have escaped Nazi Germany and the murderous Gestapo in order to flee to what he thought was the 'free and democratic' America, and then wind up jailed by the American Gestapo on trumped up and ridiculous charges, likely broke his heart and his will to live. The grotesque hypocrisy of it would have been devastating to him—with the saddest part being that the "free press" didn't dig into this travesty deep enough to expose it for the anti-Jewish, fascist bigotry that it was!

"And then there's the real strange story I read about in a magazine a couple of years ago—about one of those UFOs crashing in some place called . . . Rossville . . . I think. . . in Arizona . . . or New Mexico . . . one of those desert—deserted!—states . . . back in the 40s. Some rancher found real strange debris from it and took it into the sheriff, who agreed it was real strange, and called the military about it. The military sent some expert out to the site who examined the debris that was spread all over a field and came to the conclusion it was a crashed UFO. He was allowed by his superior to tell that to newspaper reporters and it was a big news story. Not only in the US, but all over the world, I think. Then the real powerful powers-that-be decided they couldn't have UFOs flying over—and crashing on!—American ranches and scaring the hell out of Americans by proving the military was impotent to stop them, so suddenly that story changed so that it wasn't a UFO that crashed, filling a field with real strange debris, but the landing of a common-as-a-beer-bottle-in-a-ditch, aluminum foil and balsa wood weather balloon.

"I mean, wow! Some Americans—actually lots!—sure can be total cretins! But there's cretinous stupidity and there's cretinous stupidity, and the beyond-cynical and manipulative assertion that some greybeard rancher was too cretinous not to know a downed weather balloon—a clump of aluminum foil and balsa wood!—when he came across it, is beyond the pale. And even beyond that is the de facto reality that some top army expert didn't know the difference either. I mean, that's like some teenager telling his friends that he is sure babies are brought into this world by storks—just like his parents taught him when he was three!

"And the press, that was so quick to print a story about a crashed UFO one day, then the next was just as quick to accept the Army's word that some of their fellow Americans—even Army experts—are so stupid they couldn't recognize aluminum foil and balsa wood when they saw it, and mistook a weather balloon for a crashed UFO. And from what I read in that article, any civilian who tried to say otherwise—starting with that rancher who was too 'stupid' to recognize a bunch of aluminum foil and balsa wood when he saw it!—were threatened, not just with jail, but death, while all military personnel were made to sign statements to the effect they'd keep their mouths shut for the rest of their lives—or a real heavy-duty else! All because a common-as-a-beer-bottle-in-a-ditch, aluminum foil and balsa wood weather balloon, had landed on a ranch!

"There was a time when UFO sightings were regularly reported in my country and often made the newspapers, but then the government decided it couldn't have American citizens believing that its government didn't have total control of the skies—and their safety!—so suddenly there's no UFO sightings anymore. If somebody says—and believes—they saw something strange and inexplicable in the sky, the government sends out its experts to investigate and those strange sightings get conveniently explained away as lies, illusions, delusions, air plane lights, satellites, the mis-identification of Venus, swamp gas, you name it! Sometimes the explanations are a lot more irrational than the notion that there might be aliens visiting this planet—not that I can fathom why any creatures smart enough to zip around in such craft would have any interest in us pathetic, human beings! And the press goes along with this and those poor sods who are claiming such sightings get ridiculed and mocked and everyone with half a brain soon learns to keep their mouth shut. Even if one of those things lands in their backyard!

"So with shit like that going on—and that's just the tip of a big, black iceberg that is ripping a gash in the side of the Titanic of our so-called democracy—you don't need any uniformed Gestapo knocking on your door at midnight and making you disappear forever in some hidden concentration camp if you are brave—or foolish—enough not to toe the party line. Which makes it, as far as I am concerned, a form of fascism—and a form of it made all the more nefarious and deadly by its subtlety! And unchecked pervasiveness! Shit, everyone talks about the great and wonderful 'American Dream' like it is the greatest human 'invention' since perforated toilet paper and canned pop, but in essence it is really just Deified Greed, and should be called the 'American Nightmare!" And I say that because it pretty much puts people into a state of somnambulation where they mindlessly indulge in their beloved conspicuous over-consumption until they have turned their lives into utterly dispirited nightmares! And in the process are turning this poor planet into a raped wasteland. . . . Hell, we should 'face the cacophony' of the hypocrisy of our 'American Nightmare' and accept what a lot of people around the world are saying: that the 'God' in our motto, 'In God We Trust' is really Mammon!"

(While writing that I have a most vivid memory suddenly emerge of another, Bristol board drawing he'd shown me—though this was much cruder and haphazard than his Statue of Hypocrisy. It depicted a giant set of stairs with a bunch of gazing-up-at-it people—well-dressed but real moronic looking people with their mouths hanging open and small x's for eyes—hands-clasped kneeling at its base. It was titled, The American Nightmare, and on each ascending tread rested a Coke can that, with each upward step, got progressively crushed, until on the top step, it was crushed so flat it was unrecognizable as a can! And on the risers behind each of those cans was the dollar symbol, which was invisible when the can was whole, and got progressively more visible as the can was crushed, until by the top step, it was as fully visible as the can was not. My imagination-deficient reaction to it was the equivalent of Homer Simpson's not-yet-invented, "D'oh!" and I had to get him to explain it to me, which, after a dramatic eye-roll and a loud sigh, he did with, "The very American Coke can is a symbol for our soul, while the dollar sign is a symbol for our ego. It's pure Buddhism, really—we feed our ego . . . and our greed for money and possessions! . . . at the expense of our soul! And that's the essence of the American Dream—the total exaltation of our individual—and collective!—ego and its insatiable greeds and needs, at the total expense of our individual—and collective!—soul. Which is why we, as a nation, are so busy 'getting and spending,'—as Wordsworth long ago described the essence of the American Dream before it even came into existence!—that we, as a nation, could care less what our fascist government is doing in our name and the very fascist and imperial crimes and atrocities it has been committing for decades—but most especially the ones we are currently committing in Vietnam! We are an utterly egomaniacal and soul-bereft nation! And our leaders' utterly dominant—and very American!—egomania won't allow them to acknowledge that evil, Vietnam-folly, for what it truly and obviously is—and forthwith pull out!)(And wow!—as I think back to that American Dream picture, I am certain it would work as a perfect, '1000-word' biography of Mad King Donald, that paragon of the American Dream!)

And much as I had practically a below-zero interest in all that political—and UFO!—shit he was laying on my poor, drug-addled head, it did tweak enough of my interest to provoke me to ask, "Christ!—from what you are saying, everybody is a fascist! To some degree. That doesn't make any sense! Only real evil people like Hitler and the Nazis are fascists. Normal people are just . . . normal . . . and good!"

That made him think for a few minutes and then give me an answer that John was to reiterate years later. "Yes!" he said. "That is exactly what I am saying! Everyone—deep down—is a fascist, everyone has a dark core of fascism inside them. It's one of those archetype things Jung talked about. It has an independent existence that resides deep inside every human being, except most people recognize the evil inherent in themselves and struggle real hard to keep it under control. Like some dog owner with a vicious Doberman that he never lets off its chain!

"But there are other people who are only too willing to let that vicious Doberman loose when given the chance—and when they can socially get away with it. Like Hitler, with his demonic rhetoric, unleashing a lot of very vicious Dobermans in the German populace in the 20s and 30s—then siccing them on the world in the 40s! And like our own totally fascist and totally evil, Ku Klux Klan, and its love of inciting bigoted gangs of hateful white people to lynch innocent Black people. 'Strange Fruit,' as Billie Holiday so sadly sang about in her famous song! We all, deep down, are potential fascists, potential KKK-bigots, who have vicious Dobermans inside us!—and if we don't recognize that fact and keep those Dobermans on a short leash, they get loose and wreak havoc. On our lives and the world! (Ignorant, small-town naïf that that I was back then, I refused to believe Groucho when he said that thousands of Black men—and women and child!—had been lynched—and worse!—in his country, sometimes, as he put it, "For black men even thinking about thinking about 'looking sideways' at a white woman!' He also really grossed me out when he said there was once a big trade in post cards being made out of lynching scenes and mailed by white people to friends and relatives! A recent look-up on the Web of the practice has informed me the whole problem was a lot worse than he told me! And now that that Tweeting Racist and Bigot, Mad King Donald, has his Cult of Personality going with sixty five million crazed and mindless MAGA-hatters, I'm sure it is going to become popular again. Though now it won't be celebrated on post cards, but YouTube!)

'But shit!—you don't have to look any farther than family relationships to see this fascist-archetype manifesting. I mean, how many families are run by fathers—and sometimes mothers!—who behave just like little Hitlers in the Reichs of their families. They control, and they bully and they beat and they abuse—all to their hearts content! Because their victims can rarely stand up to them. Though standing up and rebelling is a lot easier when that fascist-archetype manifests overtly in the loud, violent, belt-wielding bully-father, but not so much when it is subtle . . . like the general fascism that pervades and poisons in my country!

"Fuck!—I have an aunt . . . my father's sister, Judith—whose husband, Mark, controls her as much as any Hitler, yet he never raises his voice or hand to her. His power and control is manifested totally through quiet criticism and belittling. Everything she does, he finds something to criticize about it. Or just plain belittle her about it. And through these means, his control over her is absolute. She's about three times smarter than he is but he has her convinced she is as dumb as a door knob. And she was probably once ten times more vital than he, but now all that vitality has been sapped out of her by his constant criticisms and belittlings! And this has been going on so long both her self-esteem and self-confidence is way below zero. Everyone can see what he is doing to her, but her! Or if she does sometimes catch a glimpse of it, she sure doesn't want to face it. Or the implications of it! And she will never leave him because he has her convinced that she is too useless to survive on her own! If that's not a form of fascism, I don't know what else to call it!"

Fuck-a-truck!—but Groucho sure was right-on with all that heavy-as-a-Mack shit! Not that I was self-aware enough back then to see that I had grown up pretty much drowning in that type of fascist crap. My mother, with her pinch-every-penny-till-it-screamed-DOLLAR control of the household finances—except when it came to my father's rebellious buying of his Cadillacs! And his summer escapes to Montreal! (When we became a two-car family, she drove a Volkswagen "Bug") Hell, I still remember when he bought that first, big-finned monstrosity—my mother got laughed out of the dealership when she stormed into it demanded they take it back and return his down payment! And then there's her more-Catholic-than-the-pope, more-intractable-than-an-Inquisitor religious fanaticism, which we all hated but likely no one more so than my father, which may partly explain his rebelling against it with his subconscious—or not!—"fuck-that-bitch" sexual defilement and very fascist control of me. And his "fuck-you, Bitch!" buying of those Cadillacs!

A couple years ago I read a book—I can't remember which one right now—in which the author tells a personal anecdote about a lecture he attended by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. Kubler-Ross is still world famous for her compassion for, and work with, the terminally ill, and for her ground-breaking book, On Death and Dying, with its Five Stages of Grief, which I practically memorized after I regained as much of my sanity as I was able after John's death.

In this anecdote, the author relates an story Kubler-Ross told at the lecture, about visiting a Nazi death-camp in Poland shortly after the war and being exposed first-hand to the evil horrors of that gratuitous and hateful genocide that had taken place there. Her description of the sight of an old railway car full of thousands of pairs of moldy children's shoes really drives home the evil of it!

What's apropos here though, is the young Jewish woman she met at the rusty gate to the camp, recording the names of visitors. While Kubler-Ross is touring the camp and searing her soul on the cumulative horrors of it, that young woman joins her and they get talking. It turns out that this woman had been shipped—like fucking cattle!—to that camp with her mother and two siblings, a brother and a sister, I think. They were all forthwith herded into a gas chamber but this girl was one-too-many for the door of that death-chamber to close properly, and a guard yanked her out. And thus, for reasons she said she couldn't understand, she survived that day—and the rest of the war in that malevolent camp. (John talked a lot about "Fate/destiny" playing such weird games during the war, where soldiers would defy astronomical odds surviving situations that should have killed them. In fact, in Part Two of The Fire, he writes about his time fighting in World War Two, when he was known as "Lucky John" because he walked away—unscathed—from numerous situations that should have killed him. Except he doesn't present that as a good thing, because the only reason he joined the army at an age when he sure didn't have to, was to commit a passive form of suicide over his guilt about the nefarious things he'd done in Part One!)

Anyways, when Kubler-Ross, on discovering that the young woman she was talking to in that horrible camp, was a survivor of it, and that her family had been massacred there, she asked her how she could be so at peace with such a hideous and malevolent reality. The young woman's reply was that her experiences in the camp, and the Nazis who ran it, had taught her that that there is a Hitler, a Nazi, in every human being, and that until every human being learns to acknowledge the existence of that inner Hitler and positively deal with it, this world will never know peace. Or something like that. (Both John and Groucho would have found that story both intriguing and reflective of their basic philosophies, which Groucho expressed with, "Every human being is a fascist until they decide they don't want to be one—and constantly fight against it!" And it sure ties into today's climate in Groucho's erstwhile country where Mad King Donald got himself elected Fuehrer-of-the-Fascist-States-of-America by stoking to white-hot flames the coals of fascism, racism, and bigotry smoldering in the cinder-hard hearts—and empty fucking heads!—of 65 million, MAGA-hat wearing American voters.)

But back to our post-Clanboree antics in Groucho's van that late-August day of 1969!

And when we'd worked at stoning ourselves even more immaculate, and while I worked at my long-perfected "mouth-to-organ" techniques for "Eastering" a dead "crotch-god," he slipped in, just before something else somewhere more important, the monsoon-in-the-crotch Doors' tape, The Doors, with its cover showing a scrumptious picture of Jim in a down-gazing pose that looked amazingly and arousingly like Praxiteles' statue of Eros, that album, containing as it did, two of the most amazing head-and-groin trips ever recorded, "Light My Fire" and "The End."

It goes without saying that all of that great music and Jim's uber-sexy voice served to throw gasoline on my crotch-fire. And while my cunt performed its oxymoronic magic of being both on fire and sopping wet at the same time, I whispered to Groucho to put in "the tape," and most deftly did he reach up, remove the Doors tape and slip the Iron Butterfly tape with their perfect-length-for-a-long-slow-fuck-when-stoned-immaculate, "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" on it, and while the keyboard-intro set the stage, we dived into the back of his Shagginwaggen and played Adam and Eve "after-the-fall" spending more than the 17-minute extended, rambling jam of that psychedelic classic having some primal, Edenic fun making true the large, Day-Glo bumper-sticker on the back door,

IF THIS VANS A-R-O-C-K-I-N'!

DON'T BE A-K-N-O-C-K-I-N'!

as my oxymoronic, hot-at-a-blowtorch/wet-as-a-whale cunt wore out poor Groucho, paying him five-times-over for his taxi services.

And no, I did not find it strange—and Groucho, not knowing, certainly did not mind—that I could end up being so erotically aroused, not by the boy-man I was with, but by a real man who was both old and my uncle, for if there was one thing I'd learned since having my second chakra blasted wide open by my debauched goat of a father at an age when I should have been sucking on popsicles and playing with Barbies and not sucking on his filthy stinking dick and playing with his hairy balls—or sticking my fingers or tongue up his shit-stinking ass!—was that there was no rhyme or reason to when that delightful bitch, Aphrodite, was going to take up her liquid-fire residence in my nether temple, and in never having met John when I was a child, I could not relate to him as an uncle—or a relative of any sort, for that matter! (I don't believe in that Hindu mumbo-jumbo chakra shit, but it sure does make a lot of sense and explains a lot of human behavior that otherwise makes no sense!)

And as for his age—the potent, masculine energy that emanated from him was anything but that of an old man. Castaneda more than a few times in his many books—which yes, I finally, though many years later, did force myself to read!—said the same thing about Don Juan, and at the time I did not know that John was heavily into both yoga and that Tai Chi and Chi Gung shit (you know, that float-around-like-a-stoned-butterfly type stuff) about which I have read that if one really gets into it for a period of time, can do wonders for one's health and vitality—and libido!

You'll have to read Book Two of The Fire—if I live long enough to get it into print—to find out how a macho cowboy-hunk like John got into that esoteric, New Age shit long before the term "New Age" even came into existence. And of course, why would it not, given that, as John years later explained, Freud's libido, Bergson's élan vital, the energy the Chinese called chi, and the Hindus, prana, and Wilhelm Reich, orgone, were the selfsame, very conscious and willful energy, and while all Freud could do with libido was view it as something necessarily repressed and thus the source of a lot of problems in his sexually uptight patients, the Chinese and Hindus, not cursed with the lunatic Judeo-Christian notion that our libido was the breath of Satan and that sex was some kind of heinous transgression against the whole fucking Cosmos and the God that created it, had, thousands of years earlier, developed practices to enhance it under the respective names, chi and prana . . . so it's no fucking wonder both China and India today have a billion-plus inhabitants . . . and if they haven't converted to the Christian lunacy, still believe that the chi, the prana, is not only a powerful, but an essential energy-force of life, and that sex can, and should be, a fun expression of it. (Like John once said, "Sex is to human life like music to dancing while dancing is to sex what the notes are to the music."...Yeah, ya gotta think about that one a bit, don't ya!)

Though that esoteric "New Age shit" notwithstanding, I was perplexed by him going into what looked like an acid-flashback trance and confusing me with a "Lise," who at the time I surmised to have been his sister Lisette, but Lisette had become a nun and surely there would have been very little about the overtly sluttish me that day that in any way could have resembled the ever-revered "Saint Lisette" who'd fled the farm to become a nun and had died nursing victims of the Spanish flu. (So typically sluttish did I look that day, that after introducing me to John, Mimi, true to her character, had flint-eyed and attack-dog strode up to me and pinching the skin on the back of my naked, overly-exposed thigh where it met my nice round little ass—which I sure wish I still had—"Rachel, you are dressed worse than a street-corner floozy! Shame on you!")

But as to "Saint Lisette," wait till to read John's version of what she was really like because of what her father had done to her—worse even than mine to me!—and the lubricious naughty-naughty she and John did together, (not that I can talk, given that I drove my older brother, Daniel, to leave home earlier than he wanted to because . . . I'll leave the rest up to your imagination!) and why Lisette fled their moral-abattoir of a farm to become a nun almost immediately after John fled it to march into the slavering maw of that corpse-creating monster, "the Army"—that fortunately hadn't succeeded in ingesting and digesting him—as it did so many—during that vast and infamous slaughter panegyrized with the blatant misnomer, The Great War, but which, as I'm sure I've already, John always called, the BASS.)

Ironically, though, as I've said, over the years I developed a close relationship with John, in the reading of the manuscript of The Fire that he cursed upon me, it dawned on me that I really never knew the real John at all. Though I guess I shouldn't complain as I did end up knowing him better than anyone else in the Clan got to, all of whom he avoided like they had Ebola. (My redoubtable Mimi excepted, and that only because she made regular visits out to his farm, whether John wanted to see her or not—though I expect usually not!)

That obvious antipathy of his to his family once provoked me to ask him, that since he wanted nothing to do with his family, why he'd even bothered coming back to the area after all these years. It was an out-of-the-blue questions that got from him a long pause and the soft and mysterious "Why, to meet you, of course."

And when I countered with, "But you had no idea I existed!" he grinned and said, "But the spirits did, and after them ordering me, five or six times—in both dreams and visions—to come back here . . . when I sure didn't want to . . . because I had karmic—and other issues—to work out, and because my life didn't feel right after ignoring those repeated orders, I finally gave in and did just that. . . . And the instant I saw you at that infernal family. . . circus . . . I instantly knew who you really were and what the karmic issues were that had to be worked out with you."

In John's mind, I was the reincarnation of his sister, Lisette, and though I refuse to believe in that silly Eastern shit, over these last many years I have seen enough "evidence" to confirm (kind of) the truth of his belief—especially given Lisette's and my own relationships with our fathers, and now my own nun-like existence!—to almost make me believe. Almost! (On that account I will always have to play my "wise," Skeptical-Scully role to John's "childish," Believing-Mulder.)

And though I need not—but I will!—say that I had as much use for both talk about spirits and all that Eastern mumbo-jumbo about reincarnation, as I did for gargling with mosquito repellant or snorting powdered drain cleaner, I responded to that statement of John's by rolling my eyes and biting my lips so no words could escape them and dig us any deeper into the mire of that disturbing subject.

Because of his adamantine reticence to reveal anything about his past to me beyond the cryptic: "My past is like a big hunk of baloney—the more you know about what's gone into the making of it, the less you want to eat it!" This left what I knew about him to nothing more than what I'd been told before I met him, thus forcing me to create a new myth about him. This one I based on another boyfriend's observations about John—I'll call him Harpo, a tall, thin, bespectacled know-it-all with really long hair he didn't know how to wash, (and a long something else that might have been a problem had I not constantly "kept it licked!") who fantasized himself, in dress and mannerisms, as a George Harrison-clone, and who, like George, had gone heavily into the Eastern mysticism shit, especially Tantric yoga—who claimed that he'd seen around John a huge, bright aura (I'd obviously filled my life and my cunt with a lot of very strange boys in those flower-power days) and that he possessed some strange kind of spiritual power, like that Russian Gnostic guru named Gurdjieff, someone I'd never heard of who he was really into at that time.

I shouldn't allow myself to get sidetracked by this Gurdjieff shit, but since I have the attention span of a toddler on her first visit to Gramma's knickknack-filled living room, this whole Preface likely going to end up being nothing but a chaotic collection of broken treasures, and as long as they even a little bit pertain to John, then I'm still in the same "living room" . . . while poor gasping Gramma is at the hospital being treated for her stroke. (Yeah, I know—it's a pretty damn big, sprawling, and over-cluttered living room, ain't it?)

"Harpo" had given me Ouspensky's book about Gurdjieff, In Search of the Miraculous, and Gurdjieff's own book, Meetings with Remarkable Men as a birthday presents, and though I only got a few chapters into Ouspensky boring panegyric, I did find Gurdjieff's Meetings With Remarkable Men to read about half of it before losing it somewhere. Or getting it stolen . . . by some light-fingered "zipless fuck" (thanks for that great term, Erica!) that I'd too often dragged up to my black-painted, psychedelic-postered, more-colorful-than-most-of-the-sex-I-had-in-it bedroom. (I always think of that great old "shaggin'-room" whenever I listen to "Candy's Room" on Springsteen's great Darkness On The Edge of Town album. And now that I think about it, it sure is a great for a horny teenager when both her parents work!)

That book chronicled either some of Gurdjieff's travels to meet gurus and yogis in some truly out-of-way places when he was young, or, as I kept intuiting, fantasized about taking, and probably what made it interesting enough even to get half way through was its utter outrageousness of his behavior. Harpo told me that in his travels, Gurdjieff acquired some pretty amazing occult powers, which, he said—with a glint in his eye—he'd subsequently had too often been only too willing to most disturbingly demonstrate. The power that seemed to interest Harpo most was Gurdjieff's alleged ability to give a woman an orgasm just by willing it to happen—and not while he was fucking her either —or even physically touching her! (That, I truly I suspect, is one of the many ridiculous and apocryphal tales that seem to follow all famous dead people around like the tail of a kite that got dragged across a cesspool!)

Harpo has said—with a real lascivious grin on his face!—that he'd read an anecdote about Gurdjieff doing that to a woman—it was her story he was relating—while he was sitting near her in a restaurant. She didn't then know who he was and they weren't interacting. If you can believe that kind of shit—which I can't, because how would he be able to do that with no physical connection, which, as far as I am concerned, is all that sex is! Or as the famous saying goes, it's all just a little bit of friction and a whole lot of fun!

Needless to say, if something like that happened to a woman with a normal, culturally-acceptable worldview, it would be a real disturbing worldview-buster of the first order. But fuck!—just imagine the great phone sex you could have with a guy that could do that! (Hmmmmmm—now that I think of it, I surely do wish Gurdjieff was still alive and that I could get his number so I could find out first-hand (pun intended) the truth of that statement, for alas, it has been waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too damn lonnnnnnnnnnnng!)

Years later I noticed Ouspensky's book on John's bookshelf and asked him if he'd read it, and when he said, "Most of it," I asked him what he thought about Gurdjieff. His response to that was a loud, deprecatory grunt, followed by, "He is the most perverse trickster I have even encountered in print! When I first tried reading about him in that book by Ouspensky's, I not only perceived him to be an annoying trickster, but so damn smart he made me feel as dumb as a donkey turd! He was also so much of a bullying guru with all his fawning disciples that he reminded me too much of my father. (It was one of the very few times he mentioned his father in my presence!) and I kept wishing he was still alive so I could go visit him with my stockwhip and give him a good, sound thrashing with it!

"It got so frustrating I gave up reading it for a few years, but when I finally did get back to it for another short attempt at getting through it, I was able to see that what he was teaching—the waking up of people who'd been lifelong living out their mindless, stupid lives in kind of sleep that reduced them to little more than robots! Robots totally lost in their mechanized and utterly predictable—and thus Fate-dominated!—existences! Existences so mindless and robotic that people could not be snapped out of them by words and ideas alone, but through his personal presence—which I take it, was very charismatic—and a whole lot of intentional bullying!

"In a way I guess it was a lot like the predicament Castaneda was in when he met Don Juan. He was so deeply lost in his comfortable, rational, academic sleep that he was as immune to Don Juan's presence as his words, and had to be woken up with a whole bunch of dangerous drugs."

Then giving out a sardonic chuckle added, "So, since that Russian trickster was dead by the time I discovered he'd even existed, and since I thus couldn't go grovel at his feet like Ouspensky did, I pretty much gave up on understanding him—and I don't feel like I have missed a hell of a lot in doing so because I am way too stupid to really understand him anyway."

I've since read a bit about Gurdjieff and it is said he intentionally made what he taught—and wrote—extremely obtuse and difficult to understand in order to force his disciples to have to work extra hard, both mentally and spiritually, in order that they make some real Gnostic progress, so John's initial judgment of him as a trickster was as right-on! As right-on as was way-off his judgment of himself as too stupid to understand him! (John was, to me, the smartest person I knew—in his own quirky way—and I could never figure out why he always thought himself so dumb until I read his memoirs and discovered that he only made it to about grade three before he had to quit school—which he hated anyway—and help out on the farm, and since I am sure he always equated intelligence with formal schooling, he was absolutely certain he had very little of it!) He wasn't a Gurdjieff disciple, just a curious investigator of him and his ideas, so he had no incentive to try to get past all of that trickster's intentional obfuscations.

So, with the drab duck of that diversion shot down, plucked, cooked and choked down, I will now say how boring it was to have had Harpo compare John to the well-travelled spiritual seeker/teacher Gurdjieff, and how interesting, much later, to discover in my subsequent conversations with John, that he was, to some degree, familiar with Gurdjieff's works. And more interesting and astounding yet, to learn, in reading John's memoirs, (in what will be Book Two The Fire, if I—doubtfully—live long enough to publish it) that he, like Gurdjieff, had travelled the world meeting people, many of them quite remarkable, though if he learned any strange powers (beyond his incredible willpower that fueled his self-control and his ability to unrelentingly push on through any adversity—which is probably the most important power anyone can have!) he sure kept them hidden, for as far as he was concerned, those travels, however interesting and remarkable, had always been secondary to the horrific events that had preceded and precipitated them. (John, out of it all, with his character that was infinitely more grizzly bear than coyote, more the straight-shooting Eastwood character than the sleazy Van Cleef type—in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly—definitely possessed no desire to play the role of the trickster.)

And while on that subject, I was at first more than a little perplexed by John's cowboy persona, which to him was no persona at all but just him, (I think he would have felt more naked without his Stetson than Mad King Donald Trump without his orange crown of hair and regal robes of gratuitous lies!) and which he simply explained ,with and edge of obsidian in his voice, "I was once a real cowboy who was so enamored with riding on a horse and working with cattle that I got obsessed with owning my own ranch to the extent that I would stop at nothing in my efforts to obtaining one, which alas, led to a horrific catastrophe and my eternal damnation! I wear these clothes and this hat to daily remind myself of my folly and damnation!"

It was a startling statement that made me wonder how being a simple cowboy or owning a ranch could be in any way be catastrophic and damning—unless he had murdered a whole family to get it then stocked it with rustled cattle, like in some B-grade "horse-opera," and was somehow still on the run from "the noose" for doing so—something I thought highly unlikely.

Though to put things (re-put them, for I'm sure I've already covered this!) in a clichéd nutshell, the story of why he wound up an all-hat/no-ranch cowboy no longer obsessed with herding cattle on a ranch but in reading wagonloads of books and thinking herds of thoughts while developing his strange, no-bullshit philosophy with definite occult overtones, is the essence of Book One The Fire. Of course, my exposure to that sad and tragic tale was still many years in the future, and at that time, I was just overwhelmed with relief that his grand passion in life had been to be a cowboy and own a ranch, and not a clown and work in a circus!

### Chapter Five

Much as when I started out on writing what is obviously turning out to be a very long, butterfly-flight-across-the-continent-of-obvious-lunacy that I still continue to call of a Preface, I intended to save the particulars of my relationship with John for the Preface of Book Two of The Fire, and it sure looks like I am not going to be able to stick to that intention any better than a band-aid to a cut tongue. So in the vein of letting loose the herd of cats of revelations I can't seem to keep in the bag, I feel the need to say that around the time of that actual fire that inspired the writing those memoirs that became The Fire, I was an emotionally and financially strapped single mother—my abusive, drunken, philandering asshole of a husband and total failure as a father, (you could call him, in the idiom of today, a "stay-at-bar-Dad") having fled, after one too many of our cop-attracting fights, to a convenient anonymity amongst the oil rigs, bars and whore houses out west—doing my best, with John's generous help, to go back to university to finish getting the B.A. (Bachelor of Arts) that I'd years before abandoned in favor of my B.D. (Bachelor of Debauchery), and then another year at "Teacher's College"so I could put my supposedly excellent mind and pathologically moribund imagination to good use as a school teacher, "like my father before me." (As John once succinctly put it, "Modern teachers don't need imaginations because they are not real educators of the young, just cultural indoctrinators—glorified seal-trainers really—for whom imaginations would just get in the way and cause no end of troubles." As a novice teacher I found that statement horribly insulting until, after a few years of teaching, I had my face ground into the reeking, daily-fresh, seal-shit truth of it.)

When I was a young girl who liked to read, (and when I still had dreams,) I dreamed of becoming a great novelist, not realizing that an even more essential attribute of a wannabe novelist—other than the ability to sew quilts of words into meaningful patterns—was the ability to imaginatively channel and portray believable characters in interesting, realistic, dramatic or comedic situations. Note that word, imaginatively. Most depressing it was for me to discover that going into the writing of a novel without an active imagination was like going to the gunfight at the OK corral with a knife. And how I found that out is an interesting, if somewhat humiliating, story that I definitely should not tell here because it has nothing to do with John, but I will tell it anyway—because it has to do with me, and since I've gone walkabout from the Meds-Rez and in very definitely in a manic—accelerating by the day!—state, ME is God!

Though maybe it does have a wee bit to do with John. As I mentioned while describing my first meeting with John, I was a "co-ed" on my summer break (why are the females who go to a coeducational school called "co-eds" but not the males?), being there as much for easy access to all the horny hunks as for the whatever higher education (cultural indoctrination) was also being offered. (Alas, there were no degrees being granted for fucking and sucking half the male student-and-professor body or I'd have walked away with a PhD and you'd have to call me Doctor Crazy Rachel!)

As I was trying to say, like "my father before me" I'd long had a dream of being a novelist, but, just like his dream, it wasn't faring very well on a diet of too little imagination and way too many sexual shenanigans. While I was just taking basic English Lit courses that involved a lot of reading and the answering of easy, formulaic questions on exams, I did more than okay. (Reading came as natural and easy to me as fucking and sucking!) It was only when I got into a creative writing course that the mud got thick and sticky and ripped the tires right off my four-wheel-drive dream of becoming a writer.

Much as while reading the likes of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Twain, or even that major head-fuck, Joyce, it all looked so simple and easy, but once I sat down with a pad of blank paper and a pen and the grand desire to emulate, and maybe even surpass (LOL) them in my own Rachel-original way, my grandiose, sand-castle dream got whacked by a really big rogue wave with lots of critical, mocking surfers riding it. And the dominant surfer on that rogue wave was the professor teaching that creative writing class, the illustrious and tenured Dr. Gerald Weirs, PhD, who told me, while we were in his bed and he was indulging in sharing with me a post-coital joint—and I can still remember his exact, X-Acto knife words: "Rachel, my sweet, cuddly little kitten—with some training and practice you could become a journalist, even a writer of somewhat good, non-fiction books, but as to the writing of creative fiction, your imagination is as empty as a piggy bank being silently shaken by a hot, dreaming-of-an-ice-cream-cone kid on the approach of the ice cream truck.

"I think you could spend the rest of your life shaking that piggy bank, but you'll never be able to lick that ice cream cone. (And for sure not the way I could lick something else he was gently pushing my head down to!).Your characters are pathetically two-dimensional. Actually, not just pathetically, but laughably! They are like those stick-people young children like to draw. You seem to just think them into existence, but you don't fully imagine them as flesh-and-soul people. You don't feel their existence, and you know how much we've talked that famous saying: "No feelings in the writer, no feeling in the character—and thus no feelings in the reader." It's almost as though there's a Berlin Wall between you and your feelings that forces you to write totally with your rational mind. That's okay in newspaper articles and philosophy text books but it turns a novel into the equivalent of a joint rolled out of nothing but stems and seeds!"

And yeah—ouch! Of course there was an ulterior motive to his incisive (but right-on) cruelty and criticism and that was that he was tired of fucking me and had already started the seduction of his next starry-eyed, damp-crotched, and only-too-willing-to-spread-her-legs-and-open-her-mouth-for-the-great-Prof " Co-ed." (He may have been a more than decent professor, but he was a terrible lay with a small pistol and a tendency to fire that derringer too quickly just so he could roll off and start talking about himself and the great novel he was working on. Yeah—just a little bit like my father. Ya think?)

Ha!—that reminds me of hearing on the radio yesterday Paul Simon's great song, "Kodachrome," which is exactly all about that oh-so-important-to-the-artist imagination that all kids are born with and so few manage to arrive at adulthood in possession of. His lyrics, if you care to Google them, are just too right on—especially the one about his imaginary lovers being better than his real ones.

I mean, how many are there out there like I then was, culturally programmed to believe that a good education opened every door that we wanted it to, and that if we wanted to be a writer, all we had to do was enroll in the right university, take the right classes, read all the right great works of literature, and pass all the tests, and voila, writers we would instantly be.

NOT! We can rationally study and rationally discuss and rationally write about the craft of the likes of a Shakespeare, a Tolstoy, a Dickens, a Melville, a Twain or even a Tolkien until we are pissing and shitting PhDs, but we cannot explain the imaginative power and process, the genius of a Shakespeare that induces a Hamlet . . . or a Leer, a Macbeth, a Romeo, a Juliet, an Othello, an Iago, a Prospero . . . to stroll—or charge!—out of the pages of a book and take up residence in our head.

Fuck-a-goose-quill!—but "Will the Quill" had a whole goddamn village of great characters living in his head! Or Tolstoy inducing an Anna Karenina to do the same. Or Dickens a David Copperfield . . .or a Uriah Heep, a Scrooge, a Pip, a Micawber, a Sydney Carton, a Tiny Tim, an Oliver Twist, an Artful Dodger, a Little Nell. Fuck-a-page-flying-nib!—but there's another guy with a whole fuckin' virtual village of memorable characters living in his head, two for sure of which I know are now nouns in English language dictionaries: Scrooge and Micawber!

Or you've got Melville giving us a Captain Ahab and his nemesis, that eponymous hero of that "novel," Moby Dick, "who" swallowed up the whole story, and of course, you've got Tolkien letting loose from his head the wise and benevolent wizard named Gandalf and his intrepid hobbit friends, Bilbo, Frodo, Samwise, Merry and Pip, and giving them the power to take over our imaginations in a really big way! And of course, I guess if I am going to keep my one or two youngish readers happy, I have to mention Harry Potter and his likeable—and not so!—cohort of friends and enemies who have so captured the imaginations of modern readers—young and old—in books that however poorly written—from a literary perspective—are so powerfully imagined that they have taken up a most dominant place in our modern collective unconscious!

Though shit!—how can I not mention that incredible cohort of imaginative characters forming a whole new (well, recycled) mythology channeled into this world by George Lucas: Ben, Luke, Leia, Han, Chewbacca, Lando, Vader, Palpatine, Padme, R2-D2, C-3PO, et al, whose galaxy is so close and internal and imaginatively alive and vibrant for us that I doubt Star Wars movies will ever quit being made or that the words Force and Jedi will ever be devoid of powerful, associative meaning.

Though fuck-a-Roman-cross!—I am leaving out what was always to John the most famous and powerful fictional character in the history of this fuckin' world: Jesus Christ. As far as John was concerned, if any sort of definitive proof is need that this character is imaginary—and thus so imaginatively powerful!—it has to be the incredible, imaginative power that character has. Hell, only Santa Claus outstrips that imaginative creation for imaginative power. And if you say, "Well, Santa Claus is only powerful to children!" I'll counter that with two observations, that John often made, one, that if all those millions of parents are willing to spend all those billions of Christmas dollars on presents for their children in the name of Santa Claus, then he has a great deal of imaginative power over them too. And two, only pathologically childish adults can believe there is any sort of historicity to that Christ character and the stories about him! He and his life-tales are every bit as irrational and outlandish as the Santa Claus story.

Though to be sure, those "childish adults" are even more childish and credulous than the Santa-believing children, because every Christmas, millions upon millions of children who are expecting presents from Santa Claus, actually get them, while all the peace and brotherly love promised by Christ in that "greatest story ever told" have been, and still are, scarce as snake slippers—especially with regards to that Abomination of Constantine's (John's favorite name for the Catholic Church) that has been peddling the snake oil of the historicity of that myth for 1700 years! (More times than I can count, John reiterated that famous quote of Pope Leo X: It has served us well, this myth of Christ.)

And while on this dark and species-damning and species-limiting subject, John once off-handedly mused that the power inherent in all religious faiths came from the fact that they are fundamentally imaginary. As far as he saw it, each religion "Starts with some ordinary Joe stumbling into a profound and mind-and-ego-annihilating mystical experience that is as far beyond the world of words as atom bombs are beyond firecrackers, which he makes the mistake of trying to describe with words. Of course, his inevitable, incipient group of followers don't understand that totally-beyond-the-power-of-words mystical experience at all, and they can only make sense of it by dumbing the nuclear-blast nature of it down to the firecracker of a totally imaginary—but believable—omniscient, omnipotent, omni-present, anthropomorphically-conceived , king-like, Supreme Deity—basically a super, super, super Superking!—who after creating the whole of our conceivable universe—including us billions of human beings on one very tiny and insignificant planet orbiting one of billions of trillions of stars in that universe—not only most tyrannically rules it, but takes the time to focus his attention and harsh moral judgments on each and every one of his subjects.

"And in creating and living in that incredible—and utterly insane!—fiction, people have derived no end of solace—which is harmless—for their cosmically insignificant lives, a modicum of moral directives—which too few follow to any significant degree!—but as well, no end of temporal power, which though cosmically insignificant, is very much humanly important because it instigates no end of controlling and malicious actions through the passionate—and too often lethal!—carrying out of what these religious lunatics very powerfully imagine to be the divine will of that vividly and anthropomorphically imagined Superking, their Supreme Deity. From beginning to end, religious faith is never anything more than very childish credulity concerning an absolutely imaginary construct, which is what makes it so powerful, so pervasive, so irrational, and so utterly intractable—like Santa Claus in the mind of a four-year-old!"

And John ended that musing with a low, sardonic laugh as he said, "Nothing is more insanely absurd than any human being who believes himself superior to other human beings because he is childishly credulous enough to believe in his personal, anthropomorphically imagined, Supreme Deity, and that he believes he absolutely must carry out the perceived will of that Supreme Deity through the torturing or killing—though usually both!—of some fellow human being—or hordes of them!—because that fellow human being did not child-credulous share his belief in the existence, and exact, anthropomorphically-imagined version of that Supreme Deity!

"Especially when it must be obvious to even a young child, that if that Supreme Deity is as all-powerful as people imagine 'him' to be, and truly was upset that some insignificant human creature in 'his' vast, created Cosmos either did not believe in 'him' at all, or just as importantly, properly and exactly believe in "his" imaginatively defined attributes, then that Supreme Deity, could surely, and without significant effort, deal with that misguided miscreant directly! You know—heart attack, choking, stroke, cancer, bolt of lightning, fire, flood, earthquake, tornado, hurricane, a convenient car crash even.

"I've never, in all my life, seen a more sanctified and evil insanity than that of one human being harming another under the claim of doing it for, and in the name of, their imaginatively conceived, anthropomorphically defined, Supreme Deity! And most especially so, if they have conceived that Supreme Deity to be a deity of love!"

Yeah, that's a real fucking head-full of John's no-bullshit philosophy, isn't it! I am cursed with an eidetic memory and still, even after all these years and my bouts of head-lightening (electro-shock treatments) am able to exactly remember his words and now type them out pretty much as he spoke them (or so I believe!), but right now they are too deep for me to ponder and too upsetting for me to sit here and not only see him here in the room with me, but hear his deep, soothing and enchanting voice, so I am going to back away from that a bit and just paraphrase what (I think) he said back then.

In his no-bullshit philosophy (he never burdened his no-bullshit thinking with the highfalutin word, philosophy, he just called it plain old practical thinking) he considered all religious characters—God and Christ most importantly!—to be totally imaginary (when I challenged him on the Buddha being a historical person, he just laughed and said, "Yeah—but not as we so mythically know him through the institutional religion of Buddhism, that's for sure!") but because of the nature of imagination, (as Blake surely knew and defined it!) they have, in some magical sense, become more real to us than are the seemingly real, flesh-and-blood people in our lives.

And shit, while we are back in the distant Blakean days, there's that poetic contemporary of his, Coleridge, who in his famous poem, "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," gave us two enduring metaphors still in use two hundred years later, the most famous being that of any great burden or guilt being "an albatross around our neck," referring to the albatross corpse hung around the neck of the Mariner after he impulsively shot it, except Coleridge had never even got close to seeing an albatross and obviously knew nothing about their size—6-to-12 foot wingspans!—or their natures—which is to spend most of their lives in flight and surely have no interest in human beings aboard a tiny wooden ship—or the always bad human food (desiccated, weevil-infested biscuits!)—carried aboard those ships that the narrator claims they were feeding it.

Fuck-an-Ancient Mariner!—Coleridge has that creature perching in the rigging of that ill-fated ship, a notion that—with their size and webbed feet—is absurd as the notion of the three-hundred-pound me perching on the old clothesline behind my house. Then of course, there's that still famous, though somewhat always wrongly quoted line, "Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink." (I would suspect that there are few today who even have the slightest clue where those two sayings came from, but they come from a one hundred percent imagined creation that was imagined by a poet who'd not only never sailed to the antipodes, but had never set his eyes on an albatross, but he gave us images—the Ancient Mariner himself, being one of them!—with thus have the power to endure in our culture even after two hundred years!)

Christ!—the list of imaginative creations capable of entrancing our own imaginations is almost fuckin' endless, and though I should cease and desist with it right here, how can I eschew mentioning that there's flesh-and-paranoia detectives in this world by the thousands solving real crimes by the millions, but none stand out like that Everest of fictional detectives whose first name can be used as an instantly recognizable nickname for detective!

And to prove my point: how long did it take you to deductively sherlock whom I was referring to? ("Elementary, my Dear Reader!") (Yeah, I know—groaaannnnnn!)

And to further prove my point I only have to point out that in the last few years, two separate Holmes mega-production movies starring Cumberbatch/ Freeman and Downey Jr./Law have raked in the millions. And I sure wouldn't want to waste my—or your (LOL)—time cataloguing all the other movies and TV shows created around this imaginary sleuth in that deerstalker cap, one of which is—in a very imaginatively modified but easily recognizable form—that ridiculously popular, seven-season slog about the sometimes imaginatively portray but usually strained and predictable misanthropic shenanigans of Doctor/Detective Gregory House and his literal side-kick, Wilson. (Named, I am sure, after Tom Hanks' famous, volleyball-friend in Cast Away! And done so just to enable House to shout "WILSON!" at Wilson exactly the way Hanks' shouted "WILSON!" at his anthropomorphized volleyball whenever it got out of his lonesome sight.)

Though while on the subject of powerful novel/movie characters—like Hanks' Wilson!—I recently watched a DVD of John Ford's classic movie, The Grapes of Wrath—it sure takes a lot of willpower for a person with even a modicum of empathy to watch that gut-wrencher!—and listened to a couple of movie critics discussing it in the Extras section, and one, in commenting on the power of the Tom Joad character that Steinbeck created, that both Woody Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen wrote songs about Tom Joad. So there you have a fictional character so powerfully and imaginatively conceived that was able to walk out of John Steinbeck's head—his imagination!—and first, dominate the novel, then the movie about that novel—with no small amount of empathic, thespian help, of course, from Henry Fonda—and then become inspiration for songs by famous songwriters. No small achievement for a mere "figment" of Steinbeck's imagination! (Hey, I –Crazy Rachel!—am very flesh-and-fart real and nobody sure ain't gonna write no goddamn famous novel or songs about me! And sure as fuck not make no goddamn movies!)

But I think nothing drives home the power, the uber-reality and the endurance of vividly-imagined, empathized-with, and well-written characters like this story I once read somewhere concerning the serialization of Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop. It would seem that one of the serial episodes ended—quite Hollywood-dramatically!—with poor little Nell on the cusp of death, and that left a lot of readers on tenterhooks awaiting the next episode to discover her fate. Such painful tenterhooks that when a ship was sailing into an American colonial harbor with the next installment of the book in its hold, people actually rowed out to the ship eagerly demanding to know if Nell lived or died in the new episode. Now, at this time, there were likely thousands of very real, suffering, flesh-and-blood "little Nells" in British slums dying horrible deaths every year, but they held no interest to these people—just the Dickens'-imagined Nell and her Dickens'-imagined death, has that power.

Ha! Egomaniacal as I am, I am of course, never very far from my mind, and just as rarely not in a state of feeling sorry for myself, [one big reason I am insane!] and thus just had the insane thought that if I was a fictional Rachel—even a fictional Crazy Rachel!— I might be someone that real people could like. (Just a little bit!) Maybe even love! (Just a wee, tiny little bit!) I mean, fictional crazy people can be given a sympathetic mien by their writer/creators—Ken Kesey did that with his cast of crazies in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest—that allows them to be liked by their readers, but very few people like, let alone find in themselves the compassion to actually love, (or at least love being around) real, flesh-and-blood crazy people.

Unless, of course, those loons are either presidents of the "Fascist States of America," or catatonic and thus institutionalized and totally harmless, for I will be the first to admit, we are, by nature, self-obsessed and often as scorpion-paranoid as we are out of touch with reality. And as our illness progresses, a good part of that progression is accelerated by that Charybdis we fall into where our self-obsessed, paranoid, often acting-out behavior turns people off and causes them to reject and keep their distance from us,(like my daughter, Terry!) an intolerable reality that compels us to become more self-obsessed, (why does everybody hate poor me?) paranoid, (everybody hates poor me!) and act-out in outrageous and offensive ways just so we can passive-aggressively get back at people and make them pay for their rejection of us.

That's a mythical monster of a down-sucking whirlpool few of us ever escape once we fall into it, for the more self-obsessed, paranoid, and acting-out we get, the more people have little choice but to reject us. Not that I can blame them—we can be frighteningly and disturbingly "irrational" and usually quite unpredictable, depending on our levels of paranoia and lack of self-control. And we tend to demand a lot more attention than most busy denizens of consensus reality have the interest, time or energy to give us!

Though sometimes I get brief flashes of rational lucidity and inspiration that that is what being insane is really all about—getting the inordinate amounts of attention our self-absorbed egos demand but which our lack of talent and/or drive and self-discipline won't provide to us through those normal, consensus reality channels that lead to fame! Of course, if we are in the throes of a complete psychotic break, that's a different story, but most of the time we are not that "totally out of it."—take my word for it. (Like Will the Quill has Polonius say about the intentionally crazy-acting Hamlet: "Though this be madness yet there is method in it.")

And not only do we often act-out very outrageously and irrationally to get that heroin-fix of attention, we just as often don't take proper care of ourselves. (That includes taking our very necessary meds!) Like me right now—so far you only know me through what I have very selectively been writing about myself in this "Preface" but it's truly a very limited and one-dimensional picture. You know I am, as I like to humorously put it, on "walkabout from the Meds-Rez," and as manic as Mickey Mouse in a cartoon run at triple speed, but that is a very incomplete and deceiving picture.

I mean, I haven't had a shower or a bath in over two weeks, and I can't remember the last time I brushed my teeth. And you should see my hair! I haven't washed or brushed it for so long I doubt I could get a brush through it right now! And if I did try, for all I'd be disturbing the nest of mice that have taken up residence there!

And since I have been wearing the same unwashed clothes for two weeks, I don't even want to imagine what I must smell like to some other nose but my own, which obviously is used to the stench of me. So though through my writing of this "Preface" you know I am fat and theoretically insane, you obviously can't get the full sensual picture! Can't get the real sight and stench of me. And if you did walk into my house right now the mess and stench in here would have you doing an about-turn halfway across the threshold! Or if you met me in the liquor or grocery store, the sight and smell of me would put a look of disgust on your face that my ever-paranoid and vigilant Scorpion-eyes would instantly spot and react to with enough of an escalation of my Scorpion-paranoia that I'd instantly be enraged enough that I just might start verbally attacking you. And though hopefully I'd have the modicum of self-control necessary to keep from physically attacking you for that well deserved look of disgust, it is not always a guaranteed thing!

I am very much on that proverbial "razor's edge" when I am off the Med-Rez and make my rare forays into public, ever constantly having to use the limited will-power I possess to present a kinda-sane and kinda-predictable face to the world while doing my best to keep the scorpion-paranoid and unpredictable Rachel in check so I don't get hauled off to the Shrink-Klink to be frog-marched back to the Meds-Rez—and subsequently be unable to finish this "Preface."

Fuck-my-fast-flying fingers!—just listen to crazy me! I'm going on and on here like the slimy little streak of rat snot, Gollum, in Lord Of The Rings, when he does his good-Gollum/bad-Gollum routine, while trying to manipulate you into feeling sorry for me and my crazy predicament, except, alas, unlike the fictional, Ring-corrupted, schizophrenic Gollum, I am a flesh-and-fart, off-the-Meds-Rez lunatic who no one would find even remotely likable—or smellable!—right now, which is why, in being devoured by the Scylla of my mania and drowning as I am in the Charybdis of my self-pity, I wish I was like that equally pathetic Gollum and just a fictional shit of a character and not a real, totally whacko person.

Fuck-a-figment-of-the-imagination!—that just made me think up a deep philosophical question for you: if at any particular moment, no one is reading about a fictional character, does that character still exist? . . . And of course, its corollary, if millions of people at any particular moment are reading about a fictional character, is it millions of times more real than are any of us real people, most of whom not only is no one reading about, but very few even know—or know exist? (Unless they've YouTube'd themselves into their allotted "fifteen minutes of fame!")

And much as I am trying to steer the moth of my mind away from the flame of this subject, it just won't fly straight at all as there comes into my head the thought that the reason we treat celebrities the way we do—like they are fuckin' gods and goddesses, for fuck's sake!—is because we kite-fly them out of flesh-and-fart reality and get them to soar into our imaginations where they take on that strange, unreal and humanity-unhindered uber-reality that imaginary characters from books do. I mean, face it—we don't know these celebrities personally, but when one dies, millions of us nobodies grieve for them like they were our relatives or our best fuckin' friends, for Christ's sake! (I wept a river for poor Diana . . . and I still get tears in my eyes whenever I hear Elton John sing his recycled, treaclely and clichéd, candle-in-the-wind panegyric to her!)

Of course, since they are basically as unreal, as removed from us, and thoroughly imagined—by us and the media both!—as fictional characters, that means we never get the chance to walk into their bathroom after they've just taken a reeking, toilet-plugging dump . . . or witnessed them hanging over that same "throne" puking their guts out while stoned and drunk . . . or having a scorpion-paranoid hissy-fit over some trivial, misperceived slighting of their regal egos. This means we only experience them through rose-scented and media-colored visions of them, and they thus always have an idealized, rarefied and imagined—Jesus Christ/Santa Claus!—reality for us.

And if, by chance, after elevating them to this imaginary and divine status, we did happen to walk into a bathroom they've just finished shit-stinking the paint right off its walls, we'd preserve our rose-scented delusions about them by assuming they must have some special shit-scented spray they use when in there to leave behind for us the illusion they are shit-stinking human.

Shit!—I'm starting to wish I truly was just an imaginary character and not this flesh-and-fart, Rachel, especially at the thought of having to go back to the Meds-Rez soon, and once back there, then not even feeling remotely very flesh-and-fart real. And if I truly was imaginary, then maybe I could get who-the-fuck-ever is imaging me, to imagine me as slim, fit, sane, normal Rachel who'd never been fucked—and fucked over!—by her father as a young girl, and who was leading a normal enough life that she'd never had the time to "translate" her great uncle's crazy, poetic memoirs, and thus wouldn't be writing this crazy, FUBAR "Preface!"

That would sure be a lot better than being this mountain of way too-fuckin'-real flesh and blubber that I am, and I wouldn't have to feel the too-real effects of its full three hundred-plus pounds when I wheeze-groan-curse-climb the stairs to where I most stupidly have this computer, or have to put so much effort into prying myself out of this poor groaning chair and launching myself to my aching feet after every damn hour of pounding the hell out of this keyboard just so I can strain the poor floor boards as I waddle to the bathroom to take a piss—or yeah, since I am a human nobody and not an idealized celebrity who is eating way to many ordered-in, meat-lovers' pizzas and other, high-trans-fat junk food, a paint-peeling, breath-choking shit! Or waddle-stomp back down those stairs to the kitchen to make another coffee and eat a couple of donuts and a bowl of chocolate ice cream to keep me fueled up—and pissin' and shittin'! (And yeah, I fuckin' know that peeing and pooing would sound a lot less crude and repulsive, but the longer I am walkabout from the Meds-Rez, the faster my mania-turbine spins and the cruder and more repulsive I get.)

But back to the topic of imaginative fiction! How those great authors with their powerful imaginations (that damn thing I so do lack that meant—try as hard as I may have—I couldn't be one!) pull this off is probably one of the most important of human mysteries, a mystery so powerful that I have to agree with John—and lots of other imaginative thinkers!—that our imagination is probably the ne plus ultra factor of the human condition and our collective human destiny, but we—most of us!—haven't the imaginative power or scope to fathom it.

Thus we can't rationally know exactly what the hell those ever-so-captivating characters—the Lears, the Hamlets, the Anna Kareninas, the little Nells, the Gandalfs—are, that first manifest their existence in the author's imagination, then make their way into this world of our consensus reality through the medium of print in the pages of a book—or frames of a movie—where they reside in some kind of suspended animation until one—or millions!—of human beings, read that book, or watch the movie, and in the reading/watching of it, not only allow those characters to snap out of their suspended animation and come to life, but also provide then with a bridge into our individual imaginations that they eagerly swarm across so they can gladly act out their destinies—as written, but not necessarily dictated by, the author (many are the authors who claim a loss of control over "their" characters when trying to write them)—in a state of colorful, realistic and permanent lodgment, not only in our imaginations, but in our souls, and if the book is popular enough, in the collective imagination of our whole culture. Though fuck!—Will the Quill himself said much the same as that much more poetically and succinctly almost five-hundred years ago,

"And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name."

So truly those words, "And as imagination bodies forth," pretty much sums up the "what" that is in charge of all manifestations in the human imagination, which, if you can imagine it, (I can't!) is Imagination Itself, and if anyone had the authority to write about the nature of the human imagination, it was Will the Quill! (I am way too endemically unimaginative to make a worthwhile personal judgment on the matter!) And John once threw an apropos quote at me by Paracelsus on the subject: " Imagination is like the sun; the sun has a light that is not tangible but what may nevertheless set a house on fire. Imagination leads man's life."

I would guess Paracelsus also had a magnifying glass in mind when he made that statement about setting a house on fire, but it drives home the point of why tyrants and tyrannical religious institutions need, for their survival, to control books and newspapers because the words in them, intangible though they may be when lodged in the sun of a dictionary, can, once imaginatively arranged, then directed through the magnifying glass of inflammatory prose and onto the tinder-dry house of an imagination, start those dangerous fires of revolution. (Wow, that whole metaphor was my own—I can't believe the sun-ray of imaginative inspiration actually made it through—from wherethefuckever!—the thick black smog of marijuana smoke and dull, desperate rationality usually filling my head!)

And that quote of Paracelsus' in a way somewhat disagrees with that one by Will the Quill, because if you truly examine the power of these "forms of things unknown" that the "poet's pen turns . . . to shapes . . ." you can but conclude that those imagination-haunting "things unknown" are, as John, in the spirit of Blake, always asserted, are more real than we are and anything but "airy nothings!"

They may be "airy" in not having physical mass, but they, as I guess I've already said, like the rays of the sun, are definitely not "nothings" for they are something so very real and powerful that, when shone through the magnifying glass of the "poet's pen" can get focused hot enough to start any number of very hot and dangerous mental fires. (Just think about what the romantic novels of her day did to the bored and restless, Emma Bovary, who though a fictional character in Flaubert's novel, probably had thousands of flesh-and-fart counterparts!) Or, of course, in the case of pornography, some very hot and enjoyable inguinal fires! (If you want to read a very popular, reasonably recent novel that captures this notion of the vital, living—sun-like—world of the imagination manifesting itself, quite literally, in our consensus reality, give Clive Barker's brilliant and very readable, 1987, Weaveworld a go! It is the most imaginative modern book about the realm of the imagination I have yet to read!)

But notice how this whole incredible process always takes place in our imaginations, that so-called (by modern academics and scientists) secondary—or tertiary!—function of the human brain that our modern world with its uber-rational, materialistic, reductive, black-and-white reality. And which Paul Simon was trying to make a point about in his already mentioned, almost too-deep-to-be-one, pop song," Kodachrome, where he laments that his imaginative remembrances of his many girlfriends far surpasses their physical realities—a reality I am sure few in our black-and-white rationality-obsessed world can even begin to understand.

Hell, even the obviously very imaginative Coppola covers that subject very dramatically—and very sadly—in his Director's Cut of Apocalypse Now, where he has the soldier-characters aboard that river boat spend time with a couple of very stoned, hapless, and pathetic Playboy Bunnies and those soldiers can't get past the sad reality that those poor girls were infinitely more erotic in their posed and air-brushed magazine pictures than in real life. (This drove home the off-hand comment that John once made, that the power of pornography lay in the fact that it instantly by-passed the reality-functioning part of our brain and went straight to our imagination.)

Yeah, fuckin' Kodachrome—ya either got it or ya don't! An' if ya don't, ya don't, and yer not only too unimaginative to know ya don't got it, but ya sure don't write no great literature no matter how many PhDs ya get in tryin' ta fake it because that black'n'white world of the rational mind is just too small and dull and limited to even understand what it's missin'!

But hell!—I think the most pertinent modern expression of the power of our "Kodachrome" faculty is Walt Disney with his idealized-to-absurdity-and-billions, Mickey Mou$e! I mean, fuck!—every goddamn fall a tribe or two of those utterly verminous "wee little beasties"(that sure as fuck didn't deserve being made so famous by Burns in his poem!) decide they want to over-winter in my warm little house and they wreck a lot of my food and shit and piss the place up foully before I finally exterminate them all. Hell, I laugh at that expression about "building a better mousetrap," because that spring-loaded "old faithful" works just fine! So fine that one evening after baiting the triggers of two of the things with dabs of peanut butter and setting them in my kitchen cupboard, when I turned out the light, as fast as the light switch went click, the traps went snap-snap. And two more "Mickey" (or "Minnie") corpses went down the toilet! And when I told that story to my Kodachrome-minded, pun-compulsive son, Jonathan, during a phone call, he laughed and said, "Instant death by peanut butter snapwich!"

That was so right on that he must have got his "Kodachrome" mind from his asshole of a father because he sure didn't get it from me!

And though it is not as common up here as in the southern states of the U.S., the dried shit and piss those "wee little beasties" leave behind during their nightly raids on the larder, once airborne can afflict you with the often fatal hantavirus. So there you have the case of Disney "Kodachroming" a veritable platinum mine of a beloved cartoon creature out of one of the nastiest species of vermin to afflict humanity since we started growing grain for our sustenance! (The grain-growing ancient Egyptians deified felines, surely because they had the power to turn lots of the grain-defiling Mickies and Minnies into dirt-buried cat-turds!)

And yes, I did try having a cat around to keep those little bastards in check, but it's hard for two supremely self-centered creatures to occupy the same space, especially when one of them shits and pisses in a box that the other one is neither very disciplined at, nor interested in, cleaning out regularly enough to please the fussy-assed user of it!

So needless to say, an imagination is a very powerful faculty to have—if it survives the BASS of any child's formal education/indoctrination under the aegis of necessarily Kodachrome-deficient school boards and equally Kodachrome-deficient teachers/indoctrinators!

Ironically, as I write this, that world of Kodachrome film is now pretty much gone the way of the 8-Track, the Walkman, CDs and snail-mail, replaced by a tiny computer, and I wonder just how much of a modern and tragic metaphor there is in that for the fate of our imaginations, our essential Kodachromes, in this modern world!

### Chapter Five

Fuck! Just when I thought I could leave this most difficult—for my deficient imagination!—subject of the imagination behind, after finishing the above I had to head for the "dumpster" to "peel some more paint off its walls" with a very uncelebrity-smelling dump, and on my waddling way back to this computer, I felt drawn over to my bookshelves where Arthur Koestler's "library angel" very quickly drew my attention to two very worn, old paperback books that were written in the early 70s by that uber smarty-pants with the thousand-dollar name, Joseph Chilton Pierce, and were obviously favorites of John's, not just because they were so worn, but because they were so annotated and marked-up: The Crack in the Cosmic Egg: Challenging Constructs of Mind & Reality, and its follow-up, Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg: Split Minds & Meta-Realities.

Yeah, the fuckin' mind-fuckin' titles say it all, don't they! John encouraged me to read them but they were way too much of a head-and-reality-fuck for my over-rational and very fragile worldview, my very limited imagination, and even more limited courage, and I only got half way through the first one.

That word Challenging in the subtitle of the first one can have two meanings: to confront or attack something, and to find something very difficult, and though in that subtitle it was meant in the first sense, I could only take it in the second. And probably the most mind-challenging thing about those two fuckin' books started with the title of the first one: The Crack in the Cosmic Egg! I mean, what the fuckin' hell can that mean?!? Well, on my rational own I'd still not have the remotest of ideas, but John patiently explained its meaning to me with all kinds of references to Castaneda, of whom Pierce was a fan. He said (as I so limitedly understood him) that what Pierce was calling our "Cosmic Egg" was really just our worldview, which served the purpose of being the shell of a big ontological egg that contained all our ideas and beliefs of both what existed in our consensus reality and what was possible to exist in it.

A statement that of course, really fucked with my poor, imagination-challenged head! (The reason I became a teacher!) Because, as far as I was concerned—as I vehemently told John—reality was just what it was, and our beliefs concerning it could not change anything about it. John just laughed at that frantic and adamant assertion of mine, and said that we are not animals with a four-dimensional reality dictated by our nature, our instincts, and our basic survival needs, but were human beings who, though we had basic survival needs and a smattering of weak instincts to serve the four-dimensional matrix we existed in, we were also something infinitely more than animals living in a five-dimensional (the fifth dimension being the world of Spirit, of spirit-influences, and of Eternity, which of course, has a whole set of rules of its own that are independent of our four-dimensional reality rules) and as such our reality wasn't solely and totally dictated to us by the rules of that four-dimensional reality, as it is for machines and animals, but because of the nature of Spirit, of Eternity—and the fact that it was not a realm of definite things, but one of both infinite potentiality and active, energetic fields—was something we participated in through the agency of our worldview, which meant that our participation in our "reality" was constantly changing and shaping that very "reality!"

OH MAN-OH-FUCKING-MAN! This fuckin' shit is way too damn fuckin' deep for my poor grass-addled mind and my shallow soul—I gotta stop! Well, fuck, maybe I wanna stop, but I don't feel like I can stop! I feel like I'm in a Volkswagen "Bug" being pushed down a steep mountain road by a transport truck with no brakes! Being driven by a blind man!

So, here this poor thing goes into a certain smash-up in that fuckin' intersection: as I imperfectly—fuckin' very imperfectly!—remember John's take on all this mind-fucking shit—which he more than once said sure wasn't his own but the product of much better minds than his!—which was that what we believe to be our out-there, objectively defined-and-stable "reality" is nothing of the sort!

Our reality is being created—and perceived and shaped!—by us and by our ideas about it, by our worldview, even as we are living it, but not always and totally by us alone, because sometimes Spirit, that fifth dimension, uses us as a channel for its energetic fields to flow into our very malleable "reality" in order to shape it to its own ends. And that flow of Spirit into our reality is what we perceive as the creations of our imaginations!

John said Blake understood this implicitly when he said, Eternity is in love with the productions of time. And as an example of that—he claimed it was a bad one but the best he could come up with—he used a phonograph record, saying that, all on its own—he actually went and got one from his collection and pulled it out of its sleeve—was both a very strange and worthless object. It had no practical uses he could think of, besides the burning of it for a bit of heat, which you wouldn't want to do because of the foul fumes such a fire would produce, but once put on a phonograph, set spinning, and then having the stylus set into the strange grooves on it, suddenly out would roar a Beethoven symphony! (The one in his hand was . . . da! da! da! daaaw!—Ludwig's Fifth!) But until that record was properly put on a functioning phonograph, that Beethoven symphony only existed on that otherwise useless disk as pure potentiality. It took the putting of it on, and the playing of it on a phonograph—at the right speed if you wanted music and not noise!—to turn that potentiality to an actuality."

Then he got real thoughtful for a bit, and finally went on to say, "You know, we can back this metaphor up a bit to make it a bit more pertinent by having that phonograph playing this Beethoven symphony in a broadcasting radio station so that it is then being sent out for hundreds of miles on a radio broadcasting signal that can be then picked up by thousands of radios and being listened to by thousands of people." (I felt like stopping him here and informing him that if that was a Police or Dire Straits album—this was the Eighties—it would surely then be being listened to by thousands of people, while a Beethoven album wouldn't even be broadcast, but I didn't want to interrupt his train of thought, or have him ask me how the hell the police could be in dire straits, and if they were, what the hell that had to do with what he was talking about.)

Then he laughed and said, "So if Billy Blake was here with us now in this kitchen, he could paraphrase his gold nugget and say, 'Music lovers are in love with the productions of radio!' . . . Except it's not a production of radio, but of phonograph! . . . Oops, it's not a production of phonograph at all, is it—but of the record being played on it! And oops again, it's not a production of the record at all, but of the master tape it was pressed from . . . and oops, not that either, but of the orchestra that was playing it! . . . And you can now see where this is backing up to next: to the score of it written out on paper by Beethoven's hand, for if that hand hadn't written it down, the score—and thus the music—could not exist!

"But before that music could find its physical existence through Beethoven writing it down with his physical hand on a physical piece of paper, it had to first manifest itself very unphysically in Beethoven's very unphysical imagination! Now, thousands of died-to-their-imaginations, rational, materialist scientists would claim that that symphony did have a physical existence in Beethoven's physical brain through the physical firing of physical synapses, but if was the case, those scientists could train anyone to fire those physical synapses in a similar way and this world would have thousands of Beethovens—and hundreds of thousands of similarly great works. Something this world most definitely does not have!

"But in my worldview, Beethoven was an inspired creative genius so this symphony was created, not from an intriguing and unusually original firing pattern of physical synapses in his physical brain controlled and directed by his rational thoughts—which those scientists would say is nothing more than a pattern of physically-firing synapses!—but from that realm of that fifth dimension, from Spirit, from Eternity, where it never did exist as an actual symphony, but only as the potential for a symphony that had the need, then saw the chance, to manifest itself through Beethoven's imagination . . . then his firing synapses . . . then his hand . . . then an orchestra . . . then master tape . . . then record . . . then phonograph . . . then any listener's ears . . . then their firing synapses . . . then the minds of their spirit-beings—where it turned back into the music Beethoven was hearing in his head all those processes—and years!—ago.

"And from that, if you can believe in that Hindu realm of the Akasha as it was redefined by the Theosophists, which made it a bit like Jung's collective unconscious except infinitely bigger, and if you can then accept that this Akasha is part of Spirit, of Eternity . . . some conceive it as the library of Spirit, of Eternity! . . . then with Beethoven "creating" that symphony, and with, over the last two hundred years, hundreds of orchestras have played and recorded it so that thousands—even millions!—of our ears and minds have been able to listen to it, then that potential symphony that Spirit, that Eternity, manifested into Beethoven's imagination so he could use his brain—and hand—to physically actualize it, has now gone back to that library of the Akasha in that actualized form, adding something to it that before had only existed as a potential, all of which then helps make sense out of that saying of Blake's that Eternity is in love with the productions of time!

"And of course, Eternity is 'in love with the productions of time' for the same reason a brick-layer with a lucrative contract to construct a building is 'in love' with the brick factory that those very necessary bricks he's going to make that wall and his money, came from. And if you say you completely understood everything I've just said, I'll know your bullshitting me because I sure as hell don't understand it all that well myself!"

(And though John didn't use that already presented quote of Shakespeare's that sums up what he'd babbling about,

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name,

he would surely approve of its use here!)

Well, needless to say, much as I can, for reasons unfathomable to my rational mind but likely due to the powers of this hot pink, over-revving, turbo-charged Cor-azy-vette I'm driving—and to the curse of my eidetic memory!—I'm more or less remembering those words and typing them out here in what I hope is a reasonable sensible fashion, regardless that I sure as fuck don't completely understand them. Didn't understand them then and don't understand them now! Not rationally understand them, anyway—which is all that counts for me, which truly is a joke because when I'm off the Meds-Rez and thus my "rocker," I am about as far from being rational as is a hammer from being a hummingbird!

I guess you could say I suffer from a very unimaginative form of mental illness—though I have read more than once that most mentally ill people manifest their illness in archetypically unimaginative fashions and behaviors—their illness, by its nature, forcing them into a very limited range of archetypal responses to reality. You can easily—and distantly!—observe this by—distantly—studying the behaviors of grocery cart-pushing street people, while I have first-hand—and way too closely!—observed this when in the Shrink-Klink, though since I was always on drugs while observing it, it didn't register as anything worth paying much attention to. (Of course, since the defining hallmark of the mentally ill is their self-absorption, I wasn't into noticing—and paying attention to!—much of anything going on around me that didn't directly concern me anyway!)

Though in now thinking about it while off that infernal Meds-Rez—and perhaps even using a wee bit of my moribund imagination!—I wonder if the real genesis of mental illness lies in a compulsive suppression of—or a disconnection from—a person's unique, individual imagination, their soul—their spirit-being, as John liked to call it!—which the possession of, and connection to, makes us the unique and healthy individuals we are born to be. With that suppression of it, that disconnection from it, being the dark process that leaves us stranded in an intolerable vacuum that gets filled with our trite—and anything-but-fucking-unique—illness!

Though of course, that may hardly be an original observation but something I seem to have read some place or other. Oh FUCK THIS INTELLECTUAL SHIT!—but that's too big a fuckin' question for this FUBAR mind of mine! So I'm dropping it!

And though, back then, whenever that Eternity is in love with the productions of time mind-fuck of a subject came up, it always did so while I was sitting at John's kitchen table in that comfortable and very tidy old kitchen of that comfortable and very tidy old farm house of his (that is now mine and neither the kitchen nor the rest of it is even remotely tidy right now!) getting my mouth scalded and guts wrecked raw by his great, hot and strong coffee—and my poor mind mangled by his always far-out ideas, was one of the greatest pleasures of my life, so I always wanted to keep the conversation moving along—but on a less lofty level—so I'd asked him to explain what he meant by our worldview as it applied to our daily lives and not all that weird, Akasha shit that was just making my head feel like a grenade on which the pin had just been pulled.

His response to that was to silently stare out the window for so long, then get up and let the dog out. The poor creature been patiently sitting at the door for a good long bit while John had been making what to him must have sounded like a lot of unnecessary barking, before he finally let out a soft, plaintive, "Pleeeeezzzzzzzz!" whine that caught both of our attentions. And I thought my expressed attitude to that Akasha crap had pissed him off, but finally, after going to the stove then returning to the table to top up our coffees, he set the pot down and in his normal tone of voice, said, "You know, there's somewhere in those books of Castaneda's where Castaneda asks Don Juan to go to the beginning in his explanation of some deep subject, and Don Juan just laughs and says there's no real beginning to anything. Everything about our so-called 'reality' is so complex, entangled and inter-woven and basically timeless, that the notion of there being a beginning to any one thing was absurd. Same with your concern and questions.

"I mean, sure as a bowl of beans will get your nether horn atootin', I can tell you that no one thing is more important than any other. Yeah, that idea of the Akashic is real hard to chew down to something small enough to be swallowed, but it can't be ignored or dismissed. Though it can be set aside in our minds for a bit as I back up to that notion of us living, not in four-dimensions, like animals do, but in five dimensions . . .With that fifth dimension, and our living in it, being the most important and least understood part of our lives."

At that point I interrupted him and with a loud, exasperated, "Fuck, Uncle John—I don't even understand the notion of a fourth fuckin' dimension, let alone a fifth one!" Which got a belly laugh out of him at the end of which he said, "You're swearing like a miner, Rachel, so that means I'm stretching your worldview out of its comfort zone. That's good!" And then laughing even louder he said, "And it's a good thing the poor dog is outside! After all, he's still a young dog and I wouldn't want to be exposing him to such language!" Though my response to that was to laugh and say, "I dunno, Uncle John—most of the time when he's barking it sounds like he's shouting "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!"

His response to that was to say, "Yeah, I've talked to him more than once about that but he seems to like that . . . bark . . .which he could only have picked up from you!. . . But back to that fifth dimension which is as a concept is like an ornery old "mossy-horn" cow that I can't seem to keep the lariat of this old mind wrapped around for long before it slips away on me. . . . And yes, understanding the notion of a fourth dimension, which is time, is hard for some people but I read a perfect explanation for that once that basically reduced it to this: let's say that today, which is Sunday, I'm planning on heading into the city on Wednesday to go to The Wolf Den to hunt up a book I want and have a cup of that great cuppa Joe they serve at The Java Stop underneath it, and that I want to meet you there in order to buy you a cup of that Mocha Java you like so much, and have a visit with you. Well, since you know where The Wolf Den is located in our three-dimensional world, I don't have to specify its Cartesian map coordinates for it you to find it, but I sure do have to specify where in the fourth dimension I will be in order for us to meet, with that location being, within our standardized time system, 4 pm on this upcoming Wednesday.

"Without that fourth dimensional information . . . I mean, if all I said was, "I'll meet you at The Wolf Den sometime this upcoming week," the only way we could meet there is either by chance—or telepathy, which I know you refuse to believe exists—or if you hung around there 24-7 until I showed up. Which of course, would not work at all, would it?"

And on my easily understanding that and nodding, he went on, "Ironically, though that part is easy to understand I am afraid I am going to have to muddy things a bit for you by saying that there was time when people were so tuned into their awareness of the nature and powers of that fifth dimension, and were not so totally ruled by the fourth dimension, that they could quite easily circumvent the fourth in their daily lives almost completely. Tribal peoples—particularly in Australia—none of which had calendars as we know them or wrist or pocket watches, could make agreements to meet at a specific place at a specific 'time' and inevitably and unerringly be there. But . . . "

Fuck!—nothing John talked about irritated me quite as much as his affinity for, and love of, talking about Aboriginal and tribal peoples with their telepathic and spiritual sensitivities, and so to derail that topic, I groaned, stood up and said, "Well, speaking of mud, that 'mud' you've been pouring into my cup is making my bladder work a lot better than my mind, so it'll have to wait till I get back." Words that got a chuckle out of John as he got up himself to open the door to let the scratching-at-it dog back in.

Alas, pee-breaks can only last so long and I was soon enough back at the table, my fingers crossed that I'd effectively distracted him from that Aboriginal shit—which I indeed had. Though not from the topic that had engendered it—that fuckin fourth dimension we call time.

So when I settled back into my chair, that dog gratefully at my feet and a fresh cup of "mud" on the table in front of me, John climbed back aboard tireless "talky-horse" and rode off into another philosophical (pardon me, thinking) sunset. "What's ironic about our modern interaction with that fourth dimension, time, is that we have put it on such a pedestal that it rules out lives. I mean, Big Ben doesn't just chime out his tones over London, but around this whole damn modern world and we march to his ticking minutes—which seem to be getting faster and faster!—like mindless soldiers to a big bass drum that keeps speeding up the beat! . . . Or worse, we are like that silent film scene where the main character ends up hanging over a street off the hands of a giant clock. (It looked that 'hung up on time'/'running out of time' reference up for you, Dear Reader: it was Harold Lloyd in Safety Last. You can YouTube it.)

"We think we live in this democracy as free peoples, but we are pretty much abject slaves to the Tyrant Time, and such a powerful tyrant he is! If Hitler, Duce, and Stalin were alive today, they'd be envious as hell. (I could but think of my too-often-way-too-damn-hectic, time-tyrannized life and only nod in agreement.)

"Now I'm going to leave that easily understood tyrant of that fourth dimension alone, reminding you as I do, that it—like all tyrants and popes!—'he' has no power we don't willingly and mindlessly give it! And I will move on to what I call the fifth dimension . . .which, in my worldview—for what it is worth!—is the dimension of Spirit which we live in as totally as we live in the other four, but which we have dismissed and denigrated in inverse proportion to how much we have learned to worship and kow-tow to Tyrant Time . . . and its major domo, rationality.

"Unfortunately, it is not difficult for us to sense and grasp the notion of living in that fourth dimension of Time because Time is a process made fundamentally and inescapably obvious in the two most basic facts of our human lives: day and night—that obvious, inescapable and very necessary daily passage of the sun across our sky. No night-frightened person lost in a dark and terrifying wood and desperately counting off the minutes of an anxiously awaited dawn can ever say they have no sense of the existence of the fourth dimension and that process we call Time.

"Now, at one time—ha, ha—that fifth dimension of Spirit was as easily knowable by humankind as was the fourth one of time is to us today . . . in fact, more easily knowable and paid a lot more attention to! Though of course, there still exists tribal peoples today who are not nearly so tyrannized by Tyrant Time and who still elevate Spirit to a much higher level of value in their worldview than we do, but I'll stick with us right now. All human beings have always lived in the fifth dimension of Spirit just as certainly as all have equally lived, and live, in the fourth dimension of Time, and we live in it the way fish live in water—so totally that it can be hard to notice its existence. . . . Perhaps much the way people living on a planet that did not rotate on its axis . . . if it was even possible to live on it . . . would have little notion of that four dimension—the process of time.

"So try an imagine you are a big tuna fish swimming in the ocean and somehow reaching a level of consciousness where you started to question the nature of variables in your watery environment, which remember, you cannot know as water, cannot know as 'the ocean,' because you have never been outside of it. You wonder why, when you move into some certain places you suddenly feel sluggish and slow while in others you feel vitalized and quick. Remember, you are cold-blooded so you can't feel heat and cold and can't attribute them to those varied states of energy and nimbleness you feel. And in some places you find lots of little fish to eat and in others big sharks and whales that want to eat you. And even sometimes you find you can, in some places, swim real easy and fast compared to other fish distant from you, and in other cases, real difficult and slow. So you can catalogue all these effects—and maybe watch out for areas that manifest them—but you can't explain and understand them because you can't escape the matrix that contains not only them, but you as well. . . . Nor can you understand the existence and nature of the sun that makes some areas of your matrix warmer than others and sets in motion the giant, temperature currents that flow through it, currents you are sometimes swimming with, and sometimes against.

"Now just imagine if you chomp down on a delicious looking fish that somehow 'bites' back and hooks itself in the roof of your mouth such that, resist though you might for as long as you can, you are finally pulled towards a huge sea monster you have never seen the likes of before, and hauled by the hook in your mouth, onto the deck of that monster.' And for the few minutes that you are out of the water and hanging—and flopping and squirming like crazy!—at the side of the 'monster,' you see this vast blue expanse of some strange substance lying not only below you, but in all directions around you, and just as some really weird, four-limbed creature leans over the side with a big net to put around you, your flopping and squirming causes that hook to rip out of your mouth and you fall back into that vast blue expanse of 'something' that is below and around you, and just as you are splashing back into it, you have this instant flash of a realization that all that blue stuff below and around you was what you'd been existing in, and moving through, all your life without ever realizing it. Kazaam!—Tuna Enlightenment!

"So, because we live outside—and can enter and leave at will—that ocean that this tuna had mindlessly lived its whole life in, and which it was so suddenly hauled out of, we can know lots—though not everything!—about it. About the fact that it is a monstrous body of the familiar substance we call water, with its great depths and varieties of temperature and currents and all kinds of other fish and sharks and whales swimming about in it. Lots of them in some areas, few in others. But there is no way any tuna—or any other denizens of that ocean except flying fish and whales!—can understand it the way we can because they cannot spend time outside it the way we do.

"And it is the same with us and that fifth dimension, with Spirit. We live in it the way that tuna lived in the ocean: so totally that we can but take it for granted and have very little awareness of it. But human beings in relation to Spirit are not like tuna in the ocean where survival and procreation are our only concerns . . . at least we are not supposed to be that limited . . .because there are highly evolved denizens of the upper echelons of that fifth dimension, of that 'Ocean of Spirit'—which the wise tribal Indians of this continent call the Great Spirit—that make it their business to try to contact certain human beings in order to 'wake them up' to both the reality and nature of that 'Ocean of Spirit' that all we human being live in—even skeptical you and all those super-skeptical rational Priests of the Religion of Materialist Science!

"During totally 'primitive' and tribal times, certain people selected and contacted by those higher, more evolved denizens—not all of which are good denizens, by the way . . . or at least, good by our definition of that word, nor either, necessarily good for us—were, and still are, called shamans and witch doctors and seers and whatnot! Those shamans and witch doctors and seers were contacted by those more evolved denizen of the fifth dimension for reasons that cannot ever be rationally understood—Don Juan tells Castaneda exactly the same thing more than once!—so they could learn to become intermediaries between our time-space realm and the realm of the fifth dimension—a foot in each realm, as wise and experienced shamans have put it.

"Now, first in our Christian monotheism and its demented clone, our modern, rational, so called evolved Scientific culture, all possibility of the existence of the fifth dimension, of the 'Ocean of Spirit' that we lifelong live in—and of the existence of those evolved beings that try to interact with us!—is denied by our Priests of the Religion of Materialist Science. Though of course, those beings still exist and manifest their existence and intentions through the diminished number of tribal shamans who then continue to manifest various arrays of shamanic powers. And of course, then there are our modern shamans that we know as poets and artists . . . and too often, if the shamanic processes isn't understood and properly woven into their lives—like with poor Nietzsche—as madmen!

"The important thing about all this is that this fifth dimension, this 'Ocean of Spirit' is as important to our lives as is that more discernible—to modern times—fourth dimension of Time. Actually even more so, because it, like the physical ocean that soon-to-be-enlightened tuna was hauled out of, it is a realm with areas of hot and cold, with powerful currents, and hot springs, and lava eruptions, with schools of little, energetic 'fishes' that we devour, and no end of 'sharks' and 'white whales' that devour us. As well as, of course, as the benevolent 'dolphins and porpoises' that want to 'swim' with us, to help us. And believe me, we cannot make any sense out of our lives without factoring into it the very powerful influences of the many aspects of that fifth dimension, that 'Ocean of Spirit'—and its countless denizens of all sizes, natures, and intentions.

"One of the darkest and most damaging aspects of that terrible repressive and tyrannical power of that damn Imperial Abomination of Constantine's is its transcendental monotheism that gives to its too-many gullible, child-credulous believers but one, male-anthropomorphized Supreme Deity that exists totally out of, and way beyond, this world we daily live in, which is about as wrong a conception of the reality of things as was that bizarre concept that this Earth was flat!

"The Greeks, and then the Romans—and of course, other polytheistic religions—are much closer to the truth with their many gods and goddesses that quite freely interact with this so-called material world, with all us human beings in it, and with the unfolding history we so deludedly believe we are the sole creators of. And though those many gods and goddesses are limited and limiting anthropomorphizations of the many powerful and conscious currents and energies—both positive and negative for us—flowing and intermingling in that 'Ocean of Spirit,' and the many 'sharks and whales' and 'dolphins and porpoises' inhabiting it and interacting with us, creates an infinitely truer and more useful picture of the nature of, and what all is going on in, that 'Ocean of Spirit' that we lifelong 'swim' in, than that simplistic, childish notion of a single, male, father-anthropomorphized and transcendent Supreme Deity!

"Two of the more powerful of those many currents that flow through that 'Ocean of Spirit' and readily affect us and our history are war and sex, Ares and Aphrodite. And our enthrallment with them, and the damage they can cause, are very incomprehensible to us, especially when we try to rationally explain and reduce them to mere aspects of our human nature, or worse, our physical brains. I doubt that anyone who has been swept up in a hurricane of war-fever or the tornado of lust can gainsay that something much bigger than their small, insignificant person has swooped down on them and taken over their life. The Ancient Greeks had a pretty damn good take on those powerful forces by attributing them to the powerful outside influences of the fierce Ares, the god of war, and to the ever-lascivious Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual passion. And the Hindus have an equally good take on them with their gods and goddesses—but I won't bore the hell out of you with that 'Eastern shit,' as you put it, right now.

"So, if we can see those 'gods' and 'goddesses'—Hindu, Greek, Roman, whatever!—as powerful currents of conscious and intentional energy in that 'Ocean of Spirit,' that fifth dimension that we spiritually exist in, powerful currents that we can get involuntarily swept up by, and which we swim with, or against, depending on our character, wisdom and choices, then everything about human life makes a little more sense. And perhaps if we glean from that perspective even a flea-fart of an understanding of the way things truly work, then we can deal with their powers and vagaries with at least a pine pollen of understanding.

"And of course, there exists that harsh reality that, too often once we have experienced these currents—particularly the darker ones which suck energy out of us while delusively making us feel good as they do so!—we develop a liking—an addiction!—for them, and then quite naturally, voluntarily and avidly seek them out and try to spend our wholes lives swimming in them. That is, until they end up doing to us what their dark natures—by nature!—demands they do to us: suck all the energy out of our psyches and destroy us! Though usually that only happens after we, while in their dark thrall, have caused no end of heinous of damage to those around us."

(I didn't know it at the time of hearing that last sentence, but it pretty much sums up the main theme of the first part of John's memoirs, or Book One of The Fire.)

### Chapter Seven

At this point, after John's unusually manic ride on his favorite, philosophical—pardon me, thinking!—"pontification-pony," my poor brain was pretty much a smoldering, atomic-bombed ruin as I tried to take this all in, so I attempted to catch my mental breath and cool my "lobes" by interrupting John and saying, "Christ, John—are you saying we'd be better off going back to believing in those Greek gods and goddesses and throwing rationality and science out the window? That sounds totally absurd! I mean, even the Greeks themselves, during the heyday of Athens, didn't have much use for those old gods and goddesses. They are as irrational and as absurd as that Judeo-Christian 'Nobodaddy' you hate so much! Shit, that's even too far 'off the wall' even for you!"

He laughed real loud at that and said, "Yeah, but you have to admit that Zeus, in his lust for sex with young human women, nymphs, nubile goddesses—and whatever else caught his fancy!—behaved in ways that were a lot more interesting and imaginative and understandable, than anything that miserable old sin-obsessed Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy ever did!"

Then he put on his Clint Eastwood, make-my-day face and after a moment of thought, went on, "But to be serious—you know, in some ways, I'd say yes! But not for everything. Our Religion of Materialist Science rationally explains a lot about, and of course, gives us a fair bit of power over, many of the material aspects of our world and its workings that is very handy for the limited needs of our physical existence and our ego-lives—especially in the realm farm and food production, medicine and disease control, and cars, TVs, stereos, microwaves, no end of luxury don't-needs, and of course, no end also of weapons of species-annihilation—but it has no clue at all about the bigger issues that beset, drive, control and coerce the spiritual side of humanity, both light and dark! . . . And drive us to keep making of ever-more-and-more lethal—and larger!—wars with those science-created weapons!

"And as to our philosophers . . . our 'lovers of wisdom' . . .who are supposed to be dealing with such stuff—well, that's just one of the most ironic jokes going right now. I mean, how can they even begin to truly understand the true nature and depth of human nature and human inner-reality when pretty much all of them are compulsive rationalists, compulsive 'head-men'—like that pointy-eared alien in that space show you used to watch all the time."

And here I could but laugh and just interject, "Spock—the Vulcan!" into his monologue.

"Spock . . . from the planet Vulcan . . . named after the Roman god of fire . . . and based on the Greek god-of-the-forge, Hephaistos—right! So these round-eared 'Spocks' who are very much from this planet, Earth, compulsively think-think-think that all that is really important in our human condition is our thinking-thinking-thinking. Christ, if you read too much of that so-called rational Western philosophy, you end up feeling like you've gone totally insane and are being devoured by the delusion of a black-and-white, one-dimensional monster-world! Or that you have been transported to some alien, black-and-white, one-dimensional world. And on top of that, a one-dimensional world where the dominant form of 'thinking' guarantees that everyone knows absolutely nothing for sure!

"As far as I am concerned, reading Western philosophy is like going out to a fancy restaurant for a sizzling steak dinner (John, having been a rancher, was of course, a beef-freak!) and being served, on a fancy plate, a plain looking pill on a leaf of lettuce that the smiling, fancy-dressed waiter informs contains all the nutrition and calories of a steak-and-potato meal.

"So you have a lot of these round-eared 'Spocks' taking up space, and wasting taxpayers' money at the universities in order to write unreadable books and teach kids a whole lot of over-mentated ideas that for the most part amount to nothing more spiritually nutritious to us than the plastic grass that they now cover sports fields would be to cattle! Most of these . . . 'Spocks' . . . define our humanity as an obvious duality of body and mind but dismiss our body as something beneath their interest and inquiry and relegate it to the biologists, who reduce it to a machine run by hormones, while elevating our rational mind to the level of a god, which they worship as abjectly as any simple Mexican peasant woman her beloved Hey-zeus!

"And as to Spirit—well, as far as they are concerned, the notion of Spirit—which tends to come up a lot more often than they want it to!—is a wish-figment of the imaginations of credulous simpletons and not worth even an eye-blink of their time thinking about. And after thus denigrating it, they then sneeringly relegate it to the purview of our institutional religions, which they very rightfully regard as purveyors of irrational nonsense. And as you have surely heard me say too many times, putting Spirit in the hands of our institutional religions is like hiring pimps to chaperone teenage girls at a dance!

"Since I wasn't born with a 600 horsepower head-engine running on high-test 'rationality-gas' like those round-eared 'Spocks,' I always feel I'm on a racetrack in a go-cart when thinking and yakety-yaking about this level of stuff—which you should never quote me on, by the way, because likely everything I say is likely all a lot of bovine excrement! . . .And it always exhausts me quicker than just about anything I've ever done, and I'm going to have to stop soon, but I get the sense that if I abandon the subject now, it will fly away and I'll never get back to it . . . and though I know you'd love that, for some reason I feel a great compulsion to keep abusing you . . . and your worldview . . . with it."

(John was right about this subject unduly tiring him—though I certainly didn't for a second think he was driving a mere go-cart while "yakety-yaking" it all at me—because he was, by this point, looking obviously tired, and it was so equally exhausting for me to follow him on it—not that I really was following him. Or at least I was not following him very well!—that I just wanted to get up and go home and let him go off for that nap he obviously needed, but some powerful force seemed to keep me riveted to my chair and listening to him. And right also he was, in sensing, as did I, that this was not a subject we'd ever take up again. . . . It was kinda like we were surfing a monstrous "Ocean of Spirit" wave that we both knew we'd never catch again.)

"So...where was I?...Well, no matter—suffice it to say...again...this 'Ocean of Spirit' we swim our lives in is...I guess...what scientist-priests call a continuum . . ."

And here I had to interrupt and say, "You know, I've never quite understood what the hell kind of creature that thousand-dollar word, continuum is, Uncle John!"

Which got a laugh out of him as he said, "Don't feel bad! I had to gnaw on the bone of that word for a good bit before I got to the marrow of it! . . . It's kind of what gradiently connects the two extremes of some fundamental thing . . . or process. . ."

And when I did my typical Homer Simpson imitation of smacking my head and saying, "D'oh!" when confronted with something of his that was way too high over my Homer-head, he laughed again and went on, "Well, the best example of a continuum I ever read was by some unusually down-to-earth priest-scientist who defined it using as an example a pot of ice that you put on the stove and heat until it is boiling off into steam. Ice and water and steam, he said, are extremely different in form and nature, but what is in the pot is always water and as that water slowly heats up and goes from ice to water to steam, it can be said to be going through both a continuum of temperatures and a continuum of states of being. Capice?"

And surprisingly, I did! But John always seemed to be good at coming up—or remembering—great, down-to-earth—or in this case, down-to-water—metaphors when he needed them, though I was still Homer-dumb about how that applied to this so-called "Ocean of Spirit" that we supposedly lived our lives in, and when I said that, he nodded and said that is what he was trying to get to.

"So, this 'Ocean of Spirit' . . . well, I guess we should call it a Continuum of Spirit, shouldn't we? . . . is a lot, I guess, like another continuum we are all familiar with . . . which is but a small segment of the larger continuum of the electromagnetic spectrum: our two sets of radio frequencies, the AM and FM, and since I know you have no use for AM radio, I'll use the FM as an example, which runs in a continuum from . . ."

And here he got up and went to the pantry shelf and picked up his battery operated emergency radio and brought it to the table, where he examined the face of it carefully before going on, ". . . the continuum from 88 to 108 megahertz. Now of course, since any kind of radio station can broadcast from any assigned frequency in that continuum, it's not a perfect example, but for argument's sake let's say the system was set up so station-types played at frequencies according to your like or dislike of them, with the ones you dislike most, starting at 88 megahertz. So around 88 you'd have those moronic religious programs . . . you know—the ones where the credulous rubes truly believe in the ever-lovely and ever-loving Jesus that the snake-oil barker is peddling in order to move lots of money from their wallets and purses into his own! Then going up from there, you'd have that rap music you hate so much, and then country-and-western you hate almost as much, then classical music, which you say you hate—but I know you sometimes secretly like!—then the stuff you call 'the Blues'—some of which is actually not too unlistenable—then to that colored folks stuff you call . . . Motown?—some of which is actually quite listenable—and right at the top of the dial, your beloved rock-and-roll stations.

"Of course, in my continuum, the classical stations would be right at the top while your rock-and-roll would be somewhere near the bottom, just a little above those other two abominations that pass themselves off as music. And of course, I'd rather those religious snake-oil Jesus-peddlers weren't allowed to broadcast at all. But this is all hypothetical nonsense and I think you get the picture." (John may have dressed and been a cowboy at one time, but he sure had no use for country-and-western music! Though of course, the story of how he learned to eventually love classical music comes in Book Two of The Fire—and no, according to his memoirs, he didn't like country-and-western music when he was on his ranch, because back during that dark and driven time, he had no use for any music at all. He thought it was all just effete, noisy nonsense, which, given that his wife, Catherine, was a passionate and accomplished classical pianist, created some big problems—for her! And their marriage!)

"Thus, at the top, at the high range of the Continuum of Spirit, you'd find flowing what your spirit-being would perceive as positive currents. Bright, shining currents that it would perceive a as light—destiny . . . which is just a fancy word for spirit-duty . . . and love and compassion and tolerance and artistic and poetic creativity—just to name a few—and at the bottom of it, negative currents . . . currents of darkness—fate . . . which is the word we use for the control dark forces have over our lives . . . and lust and greed and bigotry and racism and war and malice and violence , et cetera.

"Of course, all of these currents flowing in that continuum are both way outside the purview of our hypocritical, moralist-monotheisms—though the clergy of them all have a vested and pecuniary interest in convincing you otherwise!—and no less are they outside the purview our Religion of Materialist Science and its 'rational' and materially-reductive explanations of things. Though to be sure, many priests of that religion do try to fob off what they believe to be very rational explanations for them, but only a fool would seriously consider them because a rational look at them would reveal their fundamental . . . and basically desperate!—irrationality!

"Except the things they call irrational are just mysteries their rationality is impotent to fathom and explain. So naturally, as mentioned, this continuum is totally outside that utterly mindless purview of Constantine's Imperial Abomination that got—and still gets!—most of its power by reducing all explanations of spiritual reality to something that people with the intelligence of that stupid cartoon character . . . what's his name? . . . you know that yellow moron with the bald head . . . that does that head-slapping 'D'oh!' shtick you just did . . ."

"Ha, ha—Homer Simpson!" I said. "Yeah, that pretty much covers it—though I think even he'd have a hard time buying some of the nonsense . . . that snake-oil Jesus-crap, as you like to call it." (Sometimes, when John came over for a visit in the winter, Jonathan and Terry would induce him to watch an episode of The Simpsons with them, and though he would indulge them, he hated the show, and once, when I asked him why he hated it so much, since it was just a harmless—and very funny and accurately satirical—cartoon, he said, "I don't really know . . . it just makes me really uncomfortable . . . perhaps because there are way too many Homer Simpsons in this world . . . and too many of them have too much power!" A statement that puzzled me until I encountered his memoirs in which he—inconceivably to me!—saw himself as being as "dumb as a pile of manure" and thus likely saw way too much of himself in Homer. But you have to read The Fire to understand that!)

"I mean, can you just imaging reducing the whole complex continuum of human behavior to basically two influences: the positive influence of Sonny Boy Jesus, who induces us to do all good and 'pure' things—meaning always, of course, non-sexual things!—that are possible for us to do so he can get us an admission ticket to Heaven so we can live in eternal, sexless bliss in that amusement-park-in-the-sky with him, with his Nasty ol' Nobodaddy daddy, with his sexless and totally unwomanly, shadow-of-Isis mother, that silly Pet Pigeon of Sonny Boy's . . . and not forgetting that celestial flock of sinless angels.

"All of that, of course, being opposed by the negative influence of "evil Satan" who makes us do all those evil—impure, and thus sexual—things we tend to like to do and which guarantees us a quick and slippery slide down the coal-chute into eternal hellfire and damnation that Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy created for us to punish us for 'giving in' to the grievous faults that he created into our beings!"

At this point the serrated-knife sarcasm in John voice was so sharp it could have cut ingots of titanium like they were bricks of butter, "Hell—the logistics of such a notion are utterly mind-boggling! . . . I mean, given the population of this Earth right now, can you imagine those two 'adversaries,' those two 'bidders for our soul-fates' being in five billion places at once for their relentless struggles to affect our individual behaviors? . . .Though of course, I never have gotten straight whether the two of them give a crap about the souls of human beings who aren't Christians . . . and whom Constantine's Imperial Abomination claims are automatically damned to that hell for not having yet come under the influence of its missionizing priests who save their damned souls by baptizing them and turning them into Christians . . . or maybe it's not quite that many—but still damned lots! What utter infantile and . . . Homerish . . . lunacy!"

And given all my years of indoctrination (indogtrination?) into the dog-brained and dogshit dogma of the Catholic Church—or Constantine's Imperial Abomination, as he always called it—I could but let out a loud laugh at that silly, utterly brainless notion that had already had me questioning my 'faith' when I was but six years old and was in the process of jamming the dead twigs of Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy into the fairy tale-chipper of rational thought, of thinking like a real adult instead of magically, like a pre-schooler. And of course later—though not much!—when I was wondering why my personal, "good Lord Jesus" had so completely abandoned my supposedly holy and church-going father—and me!—and left us both so totally and disastrously in the control of that evil, lust-driven "Satan."

"Then," went on John. "There is the equivalent in human life and history of that massive Gulf Stream current, which—for us, at least!—is the most powerful current running through that 'Ocean' . . . that Continuum of Spirit, and that is power, which of course is the current that Constantine's Imperial Abomination has been sailing along with so gloriously while carrying on the very raison d'être of Imperial Rome for the last seventeen hundred years: conquer, control and tax so you can keep conquering, controlling and taxing! And what makes that current so deadly and hard for us to deal with, is that it is so delusive as well as sticky and corruptive!

"Actually, just the other night I was watching the TV news and caught some footage of a bad oil spill somewhere over in Greece. Really ugly and depressing footage showing the once blue ocean and white beaches now coated in an ugly, fume-reeking brown sludge! But worse, showing all kinds of seabirds either dead or dying as they helplessly floundered around on those beaches covered in that brown sticky oil. (John lived to see the Exxon Valdez disaster but missed the Deepwater Horizon debacle in the Gulf, which would have really horrified him!)

"Once we catch a ride on it . . . on that big, dark, sticky crude oil-current of power . . . or I think, once it, like a rip-tide, reaches out and catches hold of us and drags us along with it—we are instantly deluded into thinking that that foul, reeking, poisonous stuff is both normal and good, and that its power is our power, while the truth, of course, it never is. Power always serves only itself and we are always only ever its swept-along victims . . . or more like, slaves!

"Actually, now that I think of it, this crude oil metaphor is more perfect than I first realized—I mean, that heavy, sticky crude oil erupts—or is pumped out of—the dark depths of this planet while birds belong in the light, upper airs of it, and when they get caught in that sticky, deadly stuff from the depths, they not only cannot fly, but usually die. And then there is the fact that in our modern world, that dark, sticky, poisonous sludge is the power that drives almost all our machines!

"But now to get beyond the literalness of that common and ubiquitous metaphor and into the spiritual reality it represents: that dark, sticky current of power manifests its terrible influence right up the full scale of human life, from our most basic, male-female relationships where one person dominates and controls another, then on to family relationships where far too often a father . . . though sometimes a mother—as you too well know!—utterly tyrannizes their family, though siblings too often and just as nastily get just as caught up in that power current. And then on to the work world where too many bosses become Hitlers of their private little Third Reichs!

Then of course into those two realms that are about nothing but power, those worlds we call politics and institutional religion . . . which is just politics under a very deceiving rubric! Which of course, is why power—in all its manifestations, but mostly so in religions and politics!—is so deadly and why the very wise—like Socrates, on the advice of his daimon—avoided it like it was a plague that he knew it was, and why those who don't treat it like the plague it is, get corrupted by it in proportion to the square of their character deficiencies.

Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin were all so character-deficient and so pope-emulating they drowned in the current of power that enveloped them, while Churchill—corrupted as he inevitably and humanly was by it—was able to at least stay afloat on it and maintain a semblance of his humanity. (Boy, I wish—for more than just this reason!—that John was alive today so I could get his thoughts on that totally morally-bankrupt, power-corrupted, lunatic-clown, Mad King Donald who is hell-bent—literally—on turning the "Fascist States of America" into the Fascist Kingdom of Donald!)

"Now I think you can see that if you think that power is always your own, always think of it as something that grows out of you, like it's a talent or skill that belongs to you, and is yours to exploit, then certainly Lord Acton's aphorism will be absolutely and inevitably right and you will be absolutely and inevitably corrupted by it. But if you can accept that we are not just physical beings trying to survive and thrive in the physical matrix of this planet, but also—and more so!—are spirit-beings living simultaneously in this physical world and in the Ocean of Spirit, in the fifth dimension, and that power is a dark and powerful current—of the nastiest, stickiest crude oil in existence!—that courses its way through that Ocean of Spirit, not only under its own . . . power . . . but its own direction and for its own ends, then when you feel the irresistible, fateful pull to take a ride on that current of power, you will do so with circumspection and restraint . . . and with a conscious need to always fight against that ancient Greek pitfall of hubris! . . .The way Churchill more or less managed to do. And as did, so famously in ancient Greek history, the wise law-giver Solon, who went walkabout from Athens at the height of his power and influence . . . probably as much so he could escape the imprisoning thrall of that power as to go to Egypt to learn about, then pass on to Plato, that tale of Atlantis that has enthralled and bedeviled the world for twenty three hundred years!

"Though of course, it helps, as it did in Churchill's case, to be part of a democratic system that was created by those wise enough to understand, from too many harshly learned regal lessons, the inevitably dark, sticky, enthralling, corruptive and fascist nature of that Gulf Stream of power running through that Ocean of Spirit. I mean, face it, democracies have always been created less to give power to 'the people' than to keep it from the tyrants, a lesson Germany and Italy and Soviet Russia recently had to learn the hard way . . . though I guess Russia had a good excuse because all that the Russian people have ever known is tyranny and most of them seem to be quite comfortable with the sense of security, stability and predictability it provides . . . and don't mind paying the cost of the commensurate loss of freedom that they obviously aren't at all familiar—or comfortable—with anyway!

" And of course, the inevitable ruthless destruction of the lives of those who do value their freedom and are willing to fight such a tyrannical system for it." (Ha! John must be having a good belly laugh in Where-ever-he-is observing how the "Fascist States of America" went from being a colony fighting a bloody rebellion against the mad and oppressive, King George III, in order to achieve their freedom and create their republic, and now, less than two hundred and fifty years later, have thrown all that freedom away by so willingly and stupidly allowing themselves to be ruled by Mad King Donald! Or, King Me, as Time magazine has recently so insightfully depicted him on the cover of one of its editions!)

And though I really didn't want to because I was feeling every bit as tired as poor John looked, I felt the compulsion to say, "You know, I don't know where you got the idea of this . . . this Ocean . . . this Continuum . . . of Spirit thing, but it makes more sense than anything else about the spiritual world I've ever encountered. . . . And sure makes a lot more sense than any religion I've ever studied, especially Roman Catholicism! Though I can't believe . . . or I guess don't want to believe, that I am living in—swimming in!—an ocean of . . .of something . . . that can have that much . . . so much . . . influence over me!

"Though I do have to admit I can see what you were saying about the power of . . . of war and lust . . . of Ares and Aphrodite, given the most important time of my life was "the Sixties" which seemed to erupt out of the United States and sweep around the world like a big . . . tsunami! And it sure was dominated by those two: Ares and Aphrodite! . . . Though it was a real creative time as well. And enlightened, too!—given the struggle those poor Blacks down there had to go through just for the right to get treated a little bit like human beings instead of a whole lot like rabid dogs!

"And though I can easily dismiss the 'Aphrodite' part as just plain, basic human nature—that I sure could understand—the 'Ares' part does stand out because that war in Vietnam was not only so brutal and destructive but made so little sense on the stage of world politics. No sense, actually! None at all! I had a . . .'friend'. . . who came up here from the States to escape going off to fight in it, and he said that not only did the Viet Cong pose no threat to his country, most of them, until the 'Fascist States of America' started 'plowing their rice paddies with bombs, fertilizing them with their relatives, and planting seedlings of undying hated,' didn't even know the United States existed. Or cared, if they did know!

"So yeah, I can see some very powerful . . . and really insane and irrational . . . though mostly evil . . .'current"...at work there. . . . But I still don't understand how it explains why there is so much evil in this world . . . and why it has so much power to dominate our lives . . .which, in our so-called Western Civilization, are supposed to be Christian lives dominated by Jesus' ideas about compassion and . . . love!"

And though tired as he was, John seemed to want to push this discussion to some kind of conclusion both of us could sense, so he chuckled and said, "Yes, and I am sure there are many fish who would not want their lives complicated by some teacher-fish trying to explain to them that they are living in a vast matrix of something called water, in an ocean full of currents and temperature variations that very much affects, and often controls, their lives, but that wouldn't change the situation, would it?

"And sure, those so-called 'Sixties' of yours were a special time because I think they were a time when lots of young people were real tired of swimming in a real boring current of conformity and predictability—and blatant hypocrisy!—and went swimming off looking for an interesting, creative and honest current. Or more like, from what I've read, got 'shot off' looking for it because of all LSD and other such consciousness-expanding drugs they took like they were . . . candy! And they found it and swam in it for as long as they were able. Actually, they found lots of different and exciting and creative higher-consciousness currents to ride, but those higher-consciousness currents are hard to swim with for very long without that proper shamanic and spiritual trainings—not like the lower ones, which we so naturally just slip into—like a roofer off an icy roof!—and have to struggle like hell to keep our heads above their sticky waters!"

"And why would there be a difference?" I felt compelled to ask, though by then I was too tired to even care.

And though John was obviously too tired to want to answer, he did with, "Well, the answer to that ties in with your question about how this Continuum of Spirit theory of mine explains all the evil that besets this damn world. From the picture I can get of this thing—and believe me, it sure isn't totally clear and complete . . . and likely not even close to accurate!—it would seem that the lower currents are denser and more . . . sticky . . . and enthralling . . . to our psyches than the upper currents, and they can behave like dangerous rip-tides with the power and inclination . . . perhaps even the very conscious need! . . . to reach out, grab hold of us, and very stickily drag us along with them! While the higher currents have no such need. Or power. They are just . . .'up' there . . . on the spectrum . . . kind of like an interwoven series of those jet streams that have such a profound effect on our winter weather . . . or something very ethereal we have to first strive to get up to, and into, and then strive even harder to keep swimming along with.

"I mean think about how easy it is to get and stay angry and hateful, to become righteously and 'rationally' paranoid over some perceived slight or imagined threat, to be mean-spirited and racist and bigoted and intolerant, and how hard it is to be loving and calm, to be generous and tolerant. It's obvious how those dense and sticky . . . emotions . . . those states of being . . . just so easily manifest and grab hold of us and sweep us along in their dark, destructive and always sticky currents, while the light , the bright ones are something we have to strive to fly up to, and struggle like hell to continue flying in once we do get up to them.

"This of course, is what all the great spiritual teachers and mystics of history have always intuited—or outright known!—and have strived—usually vainly!—to teach us, and though they never explained it quite this way, some have come close. I think the ancient Chinese Taoists had the best take on it with their notions of yin and yang . . . you know, those forces represented by that famous symbol of the circle divided into what look like two waves, a white one with a black dot in it, and a black one with a white dot in it."

And here I could but interject. "Oh yeah, I know all about that shit . . . well, kinda! I had a boyfriend once so in love with that weird . . . stuff . . . he had that symbol tattooed on the back of his neck! He used to see everything that happened . . . and everything that he did! . . . in terms of yin and yang. Shit, he was always trying to figure out ways to balance the two in himself . . . and worse—in me! In fact, he once told me I was way out of balance because I was way too yin and that was attracting a lot of aggressive yang shit into my life and that if I didn't learn to be a little more yang I'd never have any decent control of my life . . .but I never really understood what the hell it was all about. Didn't then and still don't!"

John's response to that was a soft, eyes-raised chuckle as he said, "You should have hung onto that boyfriend—he sounds like he was smarter and wiser than most of those young men you hung around with back in those days! . . . But of course, your being so out of balance would have thrown him just as out of balance so I can't imagine him having hung around with you for too long. Not if he was serious about maintaining his yin-yang balance."

And on that account, John was dead right, because when that fellow—it wasn't the previously mentioned George-Harrison wannabe, Harpo, but a fellow who was eerily similar—bailed out of my life, he explicitly said it was because my sexuality was too out of control and not healthy for him. Which really stunned me at the time because I really loved 'slupping his schlong'—which had he been interested, would have provided him an instant ticket into porn films! And he was the first guy I'd ever met who didn't think that my out-of-control sexuality was the 'coolest' thing about me. So I wasn't too upset to see him go because he'd always been more interested in thinking and talking about that yin-yang shit—and balancing it in me—than in fucking me. Or at least let me get my fair share of slupping, and I'd long before learned to not like being around boys who weren't interested in putting my self-defining sexuality at the center of their lusty universes.

But John knew that this was rocketing to close to the dark and terrible why of my father's molestations of me, so he quickly hauled the conversation up to a safer, more philosophical level by saying, "That Taoist notion of the fundamental energies of this whole universe being represented in that incredibly clever yin-yang symbol is pure genius! Absolute genius!—because instead of showing the light and dark energies opposing each other like clashing armies—or like always-and-only-good Sonny Boy Jesus and always-and-only-evil Satan—one whole side of the circle black and the other whole side white, it shows them as waves rolling endlessly around in that circle. And with some black in the white and some white in the black! So instead of a giant and catastrophic cosmic clash—an Armageddon!—of black and white, of good and evil, where one side has to dominate and destroy the other in order to come out victorious, you get this cosmic dance, this cosmic tango, where the dance is everything and each dancer needs the other in order to enjoy the . . . process!

"I mean, it wouldn't be a very interesting evening of dance if the man killed his partner at the beginning of it and just carried her around like a pretty doll! And so it is with the Universe as it manifests its light and dark energies in that Ocean of Spirit, which we, as spirit-beings partake in . . . as in a dance and not a battle . . . with our access to that 'dance floor' of that Ocean being through the doorway of our human incarnation and for the admission ticket of our complex and confusing human natures, a 'dance floor' where we are given access to both the 'light' upper currents and the 'dark' lower currents, with the sum total of our lives being in how we 'dance the dance.'

"But the Hindu's have a great philosophical system that is essentially similar, and which I have talked about before, that being their system of the seven chakras, with the first three giving us easy access to those lower currents of the Ocean of Spirit, and in the upper four, access to the higher currents of it. Our natural human state seems to be to automatically live in the lower three chakras . . . you know, security, sex, and power . . . each in turn giving us easy access very powerful currents in that Ocean that are obviously very dense and sticky . . . and very controlling of our behavior. We don't have to do anything to enter and stay in the powerful and sticky rip-tides of those lower currents, but we have to—through spiritual teachings—be taught to be aware of those higher current, and the fact that if we are to enter and swim in them, we must do so effortfully and willfully! With the first of those upper 'currents' being the fourth chakra, the heart chakra, that gives us access to the light and bright currents of love and compassion . . . and a mode for a true connection to our fellow human beings!

"We not only have to relentlessly and effortfully struggle to rise out of our very sticky and enthralling lower three chakras—of security, sex, and power—to get up to, and get into those upper four chakras. And we certainly cannot get into them until, first—we know about them; second—make the effort to struggle out of our lower three and get into them; and third—make the effort to stay in. . . . But I think the hardest part of that process is our being willing to let go of, to fight free of, those lower three—and very dark and sticky—chakras and the powerful and sticky currents that flow through them! Especially that third chakra of power!

"And from the first of those four upper chakras—the heart chakra—rises the ladder up to the top three chakras—a ladder the lower three chakras and their dark and powerful currents are most 'stickily' striving to keep us from climbing! . . . But!—if we succeed in struggling up to them, they expand our world—or worldview!—and allow us to live in this world as loving and charitable and enlightened beings. Beings who have struggled towards, and achieved, a great deal of spiritual freedom! . . . I mean, just think of the enslaving power of the need for total security . . . with its insatiable lust for wealth that enthralls us with the illusion of security! . . . And then lust . . . which no post-pubescent human being can escape until death or old age! And then power, which no human being can escape the compulsive quest for since it is inevitably bound up with the first two—a binding up that often masks for us the true nature of what is going on . . . especially in our sexual relationships where security, sexual attraction and power get all tangled up in a giant Gordian knot that the Alexander of our rational mind is utterly impotent to cut open and ravel. (Fuck-a-MAGA-hat!—it sounds like he was talking about Mad King Donald there!)

"And few indeed, as history has shown—and all the truly wise spiritual teachers have tried so vainly to teach us— are those human beings who can break free of the sticky influences of those lower three chakras once we have sunk too deep into their dark, sticky rip-tide depths. I mean sure, everyone, to some degree, at some point in their lives, can feel love—true compassion and enlightenment, even!—for brief, fleeting moments, but so damn easy it is turn away from them, to fall out of those difficult-to-swim-in-currents-of-light and fall into the powerful and very sticky rip-tides of rage, and envy, and paranoia, and lust, and greed . . . and the cruel excesses of power!

"And as a perfect example of how hard it is to reach and stay in, those upper currents—those upper chakras!—one only has to encounter the too plentiful stories of various famous gurus who attract a lot of young beautiful women followers with their upper-chakra enlightenment, then dive head first down into the third and second chakras by sleeping with, and being controlled by those lower chakras like they are no more enlightened than Billy goats and these women but their personal herd of nannies . . . female goats, not female child-minders!

"But I know how much you hate that notion of the chakra system so I won't dwell on it. Though I feel compelled to comment on another aspect of the Ocean of Spirit that you hate as much as that chakra system, and that has to do with the many strange "occult" manifestations of it, that our Priests of the Religion of Science deal with by ignoring or outright denying. And by that I mean, among a lot of other things, all those strange events Jung called synchronicities. But there is a plethora of others. Charles Fort filled three books with a collection of strange facts and occurrences that make very little sense at all to our modern, rational, scientific paradigm, but can be easily explained when seen as manifestations of strange-to-us 'creatures' swimming in that Ocean of Spirit that we daily, second-by-second, live in—and have to be reminded of by those 'creatures' and the 'strange events' they occasionally manifest to get out attention and expand our worldviews—even if just a little bit . . . and for a short while.

"Which is likely their sole purpose for manifesting—to remind us we are nothing but fish swimming in an immense and mostly mysterious Ocean of Spirit. Plus there are no end of other effects of this Ocean and its . . .'creatures' . . . has on our beings and our lives that cannot be explained rationally, and certainly cannot be accepted by the powerful Priests of the Religion of Materialist Science, but which make lots of intuitive sense. . . . And of course, it makes intuitive sense, because it is really only with intuition, with our so-called "sixth sense" that we consciously interact with that Ocean of Spirit . . . and its many powerful currents . . . and myriads of . . .'creatures'!"

And then letting out a loud but very exhausted chuckle, he went on, "All of which brings me back to what I was saying about earlier cultures living so deep and comfortably in the that Ocean of Spirit, in that Fifth Dimension, that they could pretty much do so quite comfortably and proficiently without calendars or clocks . . . in fact, while paying very little attention to, or having much interaction with, the fourth dimension at all."

My response to that was to give my eyes an exhausted roll and say, "Let me guess—you're going to bring up that 'Indian Time' business again?" And I said that because we'd often talked about his notion—and other thinkers, too, of course—that primitive peoples lived totally without their lives being dominated—and controlled!—by the strong sense of time that we live with and that their lives, in that sense, were what we today would call one long, mystical experience that started with birth, ended with death, with however many years they lived—most not knowing or caring—seeming like no time at all. Something I truly could not grasp at all!

His response was a tired smile and a chuckling, "Well . . . kinda . . . I guess. If you read about the Australian Aborigines and their interactions with what they call Dreamtime . . . which of course, is their name for a powerful current in that Ocean of Spirit, you will discover they didn't need telephones or letters to transmit information and news. When important events—especially deaths—happened, those to whom those events personally mattered, just instantly and totally knew all about them. Telepathy, clairvoyance and lucid dreams—and what Don Juan called silent knowledge . . . or tacit knowing—were as much a part of their world as telephones, televisions and radios are of ours. And if one of them really wanted to arrange a meeting with another one, they'd just intently 'think' about the time and place for that meeting, and the other would sense it and show up at the right place at the right time. And neither would be the least bit surprised when they both showed up at that place at the same time for that meeting . . . that both already knew was all about."

But of course, by this time my energy level had dropped well below the zero of being able to process that information—which I wouldn't have wanted to think about even when not exhausted—and so at that point I got up and said, "I'm too damn tired to think about this at all right now, Uncle John—I'm exhausted from trying to follow all this deep . . . stuff . . .about that . . . damned fifth dimension, so I've gotta get on home and take a nap before I have to make dinner for my always-starving . . . teen-kids . . . and while I've still got the energy to drive!"

And though John usually always seemed a little bit sad when I'd have to terminate my always too-rare visits, this time I could see he was so tired he seemed relieved that I was leaving. And maybe even a little glad, for when I rose to my feet he more "creakily" than usual rose to his feet to give me his goodbye hug, and as he did, he said, "All this 'deep stuff,' as you all it, seems to tire me out more than usual . . . and more than my coffee-crutch can keep up with, so I'm heading straight off for a nap myself—but make sure you get home before you take your nap! And don't forget about our . . . four-dimensional meeting in the Little Shitty, at The Wolf Den on Wednesday at 4 pm." (John loathed all cities, and to him they were all very shitty places, some Big Shitties and some Small Shitties, with the one I lived in twenty miles away being a Small Shitty.)

And after laughingly assuring him I would not—not take my nap till I got home and not forget our rendezvous on Wednesday (which I requested he change to 5 pm to give me time for a bit of rest after work)—I kind of zombie-walked to my car and headed back to my home in the Little Shitty, hoping that my two teenage "children" were out of the apartment doing their typical gotta-be-anywhere-but-home teenage "things" and that I could have a good long nap before I had to make supper.

Though before making that twenty mile drive, I took out some insurance that I would take my nap comfortably after I got home and not disastrously along the way, by first taking a short detour into town to grab an extra-large, "triple-triple" (three sugars + three creams + caffeine=pure rocket-fuel) coffee and two banana cream donuts from the Tim Hortons to add to all the caffeinated "mud" that John had been pumping into me and which had been quite ineffectual at staving off the exhaustion of talking about all that strange, Ocean of Spirit shit that I so did not understand.

And obviously, I made it home okay that day, and even though "buzzing like a bee on cocaine" when I got there and having to "piss like a racehorse," I still managed to have a nap, of sorts, (too many weird dreams for it to be restful) once I got there. And true to what seemed to be both our intuitions about that "Ocean/Continuum of Spirit" subject, we never directly talked about it again, though I did encounter it very deep in his memoirs (in Book Two of The Fire, which I am sure I will not remain in this "mortal coil" long enough to get it out to the e-publishing world) where I was able to read into his ideas about it at a little more depth than we were able to discuss that strange, exhausting Sunday.

The long-and-short of it all—though definitely the short, I guess—is that as John saw the "essential us," as spirit-beings who incarnate out of some special frequency—frequencies, he was sure!—of the Continuum of Spirit (he wrote that it has many discrete frequencies not unlike the discrete frequencies that various radio stations on the FM radio spectrum use) and incarnate into this strange human realm so we can then have access the whole of the Continuum of Spirit. It would seem that from our "home realm," our "home frequency,"—whatever frequency that might be—we normally cannot have any access to the rest of the Continuum, much, he explained, as would be the case where, should any one FM broadcasting station become self-conscious, it would have no idea that all the other many stations on the FM dial existed. And though sometimes it might experience instances where another station would "bleed into" its own, when that happened it would have no idea what the hell was going on.

And that brought back a memory of him talking about that aspect of the Continuum that day, when he had chuckling said, "Sometimes, late at night, when I am listening to my classical station, a country-and-western one bleeds into it for awhile . . . Just imagine what that glorious, 'Ode to Joy' choral movement of Beethoven's Ninth symphony would think was happening to it when some of that over-simplified and moronically maudlin, country-and-western crap was intruding into its profound glory!"

And we—he wrote in his memoirs—as spirit-beings, incarnate into this "Gulag Earth"—as he often called it—out of our "home frequency," so we can experience the gamut of those "Ocean currents," those spiritual experiences that are denied us when isolated in that "home frequency," that gamut running from the freedom to express active love and compassion and enlightened actions at the upper levels of that Continuum, to the experiencing of the dense and stickily enslaving levels of a passive indulgence in fear, lust, power, anger , hate, murder, war, genocide at the bottom of it, with of course, a whole continuum of currents, of experiences, in between and intermixed with those ones.

And, as he wrote, one of the more important currents that we incarnate to experience is the powerful, transformative current of falling in love with a fellow, incarnate being, with the attendant higher level of sex, which he said he sensed was the absolutely highest current in the Continuum, a current that does even exist—except in pure potentiality—until those two spirit-beings, as lovers, first create it with their love for each other, then swim in it for as long as they can sustain it. Which is why it is, on the one hand, so wonderful, enthralling and transformative, and why, on the other, it can vanish so easily, which it does as soon as one or the other of the spirit-beings allows its ego to dominate its consciousness and thus sets in motion a severing of that intimate, spiritual connection with their spirit-lover. And the instant that happens, that ultimate current, that absolutely paradisiacal current, ceases to exist, and each now-isolated and individual spirit-being suddenly plummets down to whatever lower level they were at before "falling" into that ultimate and paradisiacal in-love current. He also wrote that he felt we would do that state more justice if we called it soaring into love, rather than falling into it, though he added the caveat that since the two lovers who end up in that state always do so quite unintentionally, perhaps falling was the perfect word to describe the process. In order to soar, one has to make an intentional effort to do so, but no one ever intends to fall! Especially "in love!"

Though I guess I should mention something I truly cannot follow but which I will pass on anyway in case some way-wiser-than-me reader can, and that is that he was certain that great poets and other truly genius artists are "created" when a such a "falling in love" business first creates, then boosts them up into that newly created and really high current, but does so in an "unrequited love" situation that changes that poet that artist—moves their "assemblage point," he writes, in Castaneda-speak!—in such a profound fashion that, as they quickly "fall" as equally "in love" with their creativity as they are with their distant and unavailable "beloved," they are able, with their willpower and enduring desire/passion, to maintain the existence of that newly created and very high current, and while in it, create voluminous amounts of astounding works.

To be sure, I can't say I even remotely understand what the hell he was writing about, but the best I can make of it—for you, Dear Reader!—is that he wrote that when the spirit-being of the potential genius falls "in love" with another incarnate spirit-being (usually an unavailable woman!) he is really being tricked by a powerful entity swimming in those upper currents of the Ocean of Spirit into ''falling in love" with it, with that powerful entity, and in his "union" with that entity, that rare and powerful current is instantly created and he and that entity swim together in it, that process inducing in him a very high level of creativity that really is the creativity of that entity.

So this poet, this creative genius, continues to believe he is "in love with" that unavailable woman, when really he is "in love with" that entity—think of being "in love" as being "in the created-current"—which, while believing it to be his "unattainable beloved," he calls his Muse. And because this relationship involves an intimate interaction between a human male and this non-human entity—this dolphin/porpoise that has "swam out of" a current in the Ocean of Spirit to unite with him—with his spirit-being!—to create a yet higher-level current, it doesn't break down as easily as such a current created between two human beings because, not only is that higher current enthralling to the poet, the genius, but it induces levels of creativity in him that are equally enthralling and which he does not want to lose contact with. And of course, since this entity, this Muse, is the one who has initiated the process, it usually has no interest in breaking off the relationship—as long as it remains productive. A relationship in which it inspires in the poet, the genius, the creativity is initiated the relationship to inspire in the first place. (From this perspective, a writer experiencing "writer's block" could be said to have pissed off his Muse and it has abandoned him or her!)

John wrote that the process is a true shamanic one, and that any such poet, any such genius experiences their creative processes as the ecstasy that many shamans have spoken about. He used the examples of Dante and "Beatrice," and Beethoven's consistently unrequited love-life—to drive home that thesis, and from my own readings I'd say that if you read Flaubert's novel, Sentimental Education, you will see that same process going on with him. The entity, the "Muse," it would seem, projects itself into an "unavailable woman," and when the potential poet, the genius, has "fallen in love" with her—thus creating that higher-current!—that entity then takes over their life and viola—you have a "driven" and often seemingly "demented" genius who then just lives to commune with his Muse and create, create, create—often until they die of exhaustion. John used Mozart as a perfect example of that, an astounding genius who died at a very young age, and after creating a stupendously large body of work, even to the point where he was writing a masterwork of a Requiem Mass for a client named Count Walsegg, but which, in a sense, ended up being for himself.

And believe me, it is very interesting and enlightening to look at the lives of creative geniuses from that perspective of John's. Though of course, doing that involves leaping over that moon-high hurdle of believing in that Ocean of Spirit and the powerful entities—the "dolphins and porpoises"—that swim in it. A way too-damn-high hurdle for me!

Another interesting point that John made—in his memoirs—was that true poetry and music were Muse-manifestations erupting out of the Ocean of Spirit and were pretty much different sides of the same coin—that a music was the absolutely highest form of creative expression and that a great poem was a song with the music built into it—which, of course, is why music is called muse-ic, a word from the Greek, that means, "of the Muses!" He also wrote that it is a rare, truly great, poet or musician who does not claim that his—or her!—poetry or music, to be something that came to them from a Muse, though of course, nowadays, unlike the wiser Greeks and Romans, modern poets do not necessary think of their Muses as the real spiritual entities—the dolphins and porpoises swimming in the Ocean of Spirit—that the ancient Greeks seemed to know them to be, but more like to think of them as mere parts of themselves. Truly a POV that one would expect in a culture as egomaniacal as ours!

But if one thing has definitely not changed over the millennia, is that music and poetry have a direct and powerful effect on us—either as the exalted spirit-beings John claimed we essentially are, or as the human being I am certain we just are—which also then draws us into a discussion of the important and complex nature and role of creativity itself, which of course harkens back to that already-covered, head-fucking (for me, anyway!) subject of Eternity being in love with the productions of time, which, as said, I have never been able to understand. Another powerful current in the Ocean of Spirit, John wrote, is that which we access through intoxicating liquors and the Greeks had it right with seeing that current as a god, as Dionysus, but that concept is way beyond my capacity to "compute" so I will leave it at that.

He even goes into some detail about how what we call morality fits into this fifth dimension, this Ocean of Spirit, this Continuum. He said that when our institutional religions get hold of any mystical insights into the nature of this Ocean of Spirit, this Continuum, their corruptive need for power—and to create that power-pyramid we call an institution—compels them to pull out of their sleeve the ace of the morality card which they then use to create that deadly Royal Flush of defining life as a simplistic, internal "arm wrestle" between the forces of good and evil in which, if our "good arm" wins the contest, it pleases whatever god they are worshipping and getting their temporal power from, and if our "evil arm" wins, it mightily displease that god.

The truth, he explicated, according to this Ocean of Spirit, this Continuum theory of his, is that the only "good" and "bad" involved in this process, is the effects the varying levels of currents have on the health of our spirit-beings, which, from his perspective, are as real in their own dimension of existence as we physically and psychically are in this one.

It would seem that those lower level-currents have the same effect on our spirit-beings as hot water does on a rawhide rope, softening, weakening and degrading it, while the upper levels allow it to stay dry and tough and strong enough for it to work on refining itself. In effect, he wrote, the so called vices and immoral behaviors that all wise societies—with or without sin-condemning/god displeasing church influences—condemn and try to push/pull their citizens away from, have the exact spiritual effects on the totality of every human being—including their spirit-beings—that is obvious in groups of people whose lifestyles are built around over-indulging in them.

Spend some time, he wrote, around some real "trailer-trash" and it won't take long to see his point, for in that demographic there exists a relentless devolution to the inevitable and deadly "Six-D" reality that dominates such human trash heaps: Drink, Drugs, Debauchery, Dissolution and Depression, which of course sinks its indulgers into levels of degrading sex, vice and violence—and a depressing and ever-devolving mixture of the three—that is Demonic. (Just writing that brings to mind Johnny Cash singing Kris Kristofferson's dark and haunting "Sunday Morning Comin' Down," and never a once have I listened to that song with an over-identification with it that liquefies my capacious guts and brings tears to my eyes.)

It is so serious, he wrote, that he had the disturbing sense that incarnating into this realm was actually quite dangerous for spirit-beings and if, over too many lifetimes they got rip-tide sucked into too many of those lower level currents, their beings would end up so degraded and dissolved they'd never make it back to their "home" level and eventually their consciousnesses would disintegrate into some kind of oblivion. Not a very pleasant thought for anyone who believes that have—they are!—a spirit-being incarnating into this Gulag Earth solely to experience—and grow on!—the necessary swim up to, and with, the higher currents of that Ocean of Spirit, that Continuum.

And for that he provided the frighteningly apt—though changed!—metaphor of the young bird who attempts to fly out of the nest before it is adequately fledged and, instead of soaring in the sky as it hoped, it plummets to the ground and ends up as compact little cat-turd buried in a box of clay—or in someone's garden.

He then went on to write that as far as he was concerned, Constantine's Imperial Abomination, with its vast and oppressive tornado of temporal power obtained through a manipulative obsession with sin and sinning, particularly sins of "the flesh," has effectively sent more spirit-beings plummeting out of the nest and down to their spiritual dissolution in a great big cat-gullet of guilt, shame, passivity and stupidity than he can contemplate without driving his blood pressure into the stroke range.

He wrote that Constantine's Imperial Abomination is actually the most prolific creator and purveyor of evil in the history of this human race. By so cynically and manipulatively defining so much of human nature—and thus natural human behaviors—as sinful and Nasty ol' Nobodaddy-displeasing!—it has befouled and darkened those natural behaviors and thus befouled and darkened those who, in being human, naturally indulge in them. To John, this cynical and power-mongering process instituted by that vile, pernicious and absolutely abominable institution, creates in people the very darkness and evil it is purportedly the cure of! He wrote that in a "normal" culture—one not dominated by Constantine's Imperial Abomination and Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy's absurd, hell-damning morality!—socially unacceptable behaviors would be just that—unacceptable behaviors that any wise society would try to induce/coerce its members to desist in doing—and for which they may be labeled rule-breakers and punished for their behaviors, but they are never thought of as endemically evil sinners who are a blight in the eyes of any Supreme Cosmic Deity!

And a good point that John tried to get across in his writings about the subject, was that once a wrong-doing person gets labeled—and starts thinking of themselves as—a sinner, as endemically evil, that becomes their dominant identity and they then feel free to behave as evilly as they chose. (And I could—and still can!—agree with him on that, because that is the state of mind—and soul!—that I was in when I got back from Woodstock in late August of '69 and first met him. I thought of myself as a debauched and evil slut and was more than proud of the fact—and motivated to play the role to the hilt!) So according to John's take on this stuff, Constantine's Imperial Abomination, it being so ever-ready to label so many natural human activities—mostly the sexual ones—as evil, in effect has been History's most prolific creator of evil—the exact opposite of the "Hollywooded" spiritual image it loves to so hypocritically project to the world about itself.

In fact, I remember this subject coming up in one of our "discussions" in which he said, "This whole business of Constantine's Imperial Abomination so maliciously—and lucratively!—conning people into believing they are born, and lifelong doomed to be sinners because of their very natural, human natures, is no different than that malicious—and very lucrative!—extortion scheme perfected by the Sicilian Mafia—and the Chinese Triads!—where they coerce shopkeepers into buying the 'fire insurance' that ensures they won't burn down their shops. They first create the threat, then sell the protection from it. . . . And as far as I am concerned, Constantine's Imperial Abomination—and its ravening hordes of ecclesiastical thugs—has been doing the same thing for seventeen hundred years! First it convinces credulous sheep into believing they are not only born as hell-damned sinners, but doomed to live out their lives as hell-damned sinners, then they very expensively sell them the salvation from that damnation. Very clever! Very cynical! Very lucrative! Very Mafia-ish! And hellishly goddamned evil!"

But just typing all that "deep shit" out and being forced to think about it again, not only over-strains my poor, addled, manic brain—and is so caustic and disturbing to my off the Meds-Rez psyche—that I am going to spare myself further anguish by dropping this disturbing subject like it's a red-hot rivet caught in a bare hand, and leaving it to some lone, rare reader of this thing with the courage and intelligence to make more sense out of it than I can.

And oh yeah, now that I think of it—for what it's worth!—he also once told me that most formal meditative practices were not intrinsically spiritual at all, but just exercises for the mind and will—and that once one got proper control of their mind and enhanced their will, they could more easily access spiritual realms. And as far as he was concerned, creativity was a lot more spiritual an activity than most meditation practices that were undertaken by people who didn't understand their real purpose. (I totally can't buy that because it would mean that the Beatles were already more spiritual than was the Maharishi Yogi when they went to India to visit him. And hands-down more spiritual than any of Constantine's Imperial Abomination's popes, though who am I—passionate Beatles' fan that I am—to judge?)

His claim that creativity in human beings was a lot more spiritual than meditation practices—and infinitely more spiritual than credulous sheep flocking into one of the churches of Constantine's Imperial Abomination to bended-knees worship the concept of Nasty ol' Nobodaddy!—because it served to enhance the totality of the Ocean of Spirit, the Continuum, (Eternity is in love...blah . . .blah . . .) while those meditative practices just strengthen the concentrative mind and when pushed to the extreme, take the practitioner deep into the now-isolated frequency of mind that exists in the Continuum, which in some ways was a waste of time because one's spirit-being then ended up just as disconnected from the broad spectrum of the currents of the Ocean of Spirit, of the Continuum, as it was before it incarnated out of its "home" realm in order to experience and spiritually grow on.

It would seem, in this system of John's, that the perceived spiritual benefits of meditative practices are gleaned from a practiced suppression of, and disconnection from, the ego, while also—and most importantly—developing a person's willpower to a level of strength where one can then willfully enter—and keep swimming in!—in those difficult-to-enter-and-swim-in higher levels of the Ocean of Spirit, the Continuum: love, compassion, conscience, charity, tolerance, etc.

Which I guess makes sense—or at least it did to John, who I think meditated a lot more than he admitted to—and no less, I must confess, made even more sense to one of my shrinks who has advised me many times to use meditative practices to help control my bi-polarity and reduce my need for so many meds. And yeah, I've tried those meditative practices but they are a damn lot of work and I am no damn good at them. I think that old joke about something being "as difficult as trying to herd cats,"—though in my case it is more like, " As difficult as a headless chicken trying to herd scalded cats."

Though part of the problem with the whole meditation thing, I guess, is that to me, it is all must more of that "esoteric Eastern shit"—like chakras and reincarnation!—that I just can't, as expressed in that old hippie-word, "dig!" But lots of people today are into—"digging"—all kinds of meditation practices and are getting good results—or so they say!—so there's likely lots more to it than I am willing to accept. Or have the gumption and discipline to explore.

And with that being said, it is obvious I am in no position to judge anything I have passed on here about what John said about meditation practices, so you will have to do what you had to do about all that other Ocean of Spirit, and Continuum stuff—which just may be all stuff-and-fuckin'-nonsense—and make your own judgment about it. Good fuckin' luck with that!

(Actually, Dear Put-upon Reader, now is as good a time as any to pass on something John said to me after more than one of his wild rides on his Pontification Pony, that being something along the line of, "These . . . things . . . we talk about aren't absolute truths—not by any stretch! But are just ideas. And not new ideas, either! They've all been recycled from better heads than mine! And as 'just ideas,' it is incumbent upon you to examine and test and weigh them for their gravitas and validity or their fluff and nonsense! No human mind can discern and know what we'd like to think of as the Absolute Truth! It just isn't possible—either because the 'Absolute Truth' is too damn big for our little minds to truly encompass and know, or, more like, it does not exist. Or at least, does not exist in the hard, absolute and discrete sense we usually so desperately—and rationally!—want it to. I get the sense that 'Absolute Truth' it is too fluid—and always evolving—for some notion as simplistic as that. So if any fool comes along claiming to peddle the Absolute Truth, you can but suspect they are scam artists! And if they are claiming their Absolute Truth is a divine revelation from some god, then you know they are scam artists. Or themselves catastrophically delusional! Unfortunately, those usually delusional scam artists are the one that turn their far-from-Truth revelations into institutional religions and wreak havoc on this world—and humanity—with them! So don't ever fall into that trap of thinking any idea—especially these one's I am mud-slinging at you!—is a divine revelation that contains any definitive, take-to-the-bank answers!")

And I hope the reading this Ocean of Spirit, Fifth Dimension, Continuum digression hasn't been as exhausting—or irritating!—for you, Dear Reader, as this writing of it has been for me. I mean, what a truly weird subject! It exhausted John and I both when he talked about it with me that time, and it has exhausted me just as much all these years later writing about it! In fact, so much I need a nap real bad, which is too weird, because usually a stint working on this damn "Preface" leaves me so manic I'm hopping around for hours afterwards like a hare with a sparkler up its ass. . . . Time for a few head-numbing tokes, a bit of Pink Floyd—Dark Side Of The Moon, of course!—then a nice long nap!

### Chapter Eight

Well, by the Tuesday after that exhausting Sunday visit with John, I was pretty much back to my normal levels of energy—if such a thing as a "normal" level of energy exists for a teacher who is a single mother with two moody teenagers putting their endless demands on her—and keeping in the back of my mind my four-dimensional meeting with John at The Wolf Den at 4—no, 5 pm!—the next day. And yeah, if you are thinking that Wolf Den is a strange name for a book store, that is because it was originally—forty years ago—started and run by some guy with the last name of Wolfe and was—back then—still owned by his family.

Actually, not just the name was strange, but the store was too, it being located in the "prow" of a triangle-shaped building—like the famous Flatiron building in NYC!—built on a triangular lot formed when a major downtown street angled off from the street that ran along the railway tracks.(John describes walking along those railway tracks as a fourteen-year-old—and surely past that building—on his first night in the "Little Shitty" after fleeing the farm!) And if you were in there browsing in a "book-browsers trance" you had to be careful, as you drifted along the bookshelves of one side of the store towards the apex, not to bump into a fellow entranced browser doing the same on the other side, because the shelves that are twenty or so feet apart at the center of the store, merge at that apex. (The Wolf Den, alas, is now long gone, driven into oblivion by the big-box Chapters chain (just like Meg Ryan's little book store was by Hanks' big-box affair in You've Got Mail), replaced by a high-end graphic design studio that ironically, Terry apprenticed at for a couple years on graduating from college and before beat-feeting it to Australia to get as far away as she possibly could from her toxic loon of a mother—me.)

On leaving school that Tuesday, I drove to the grocery store, stocked up on what I hope would please "the brats" and as I was pushing the cart over to the cart-station after loading my car, I was abruptly overwhelmed with very powerful thoughts about John and with the strangest of desires to go to "the Den" (as it was affectionately known to most who habituated the place). I went there often so often that it wasn't that strange an urge, except I'd never felt the urge so strongly before, and what was strangest was even after reminding myself that going there today—tired as I was from work and shopping—would be ridiculous because I was going tomorrow anyway, I couldn't shake off that urge.

But shake it off I did and drove home to get the fridge and freezer foods put safely away, though barely had I got the ice cream and frozen veggies jammed into the freezer, and the milk and yogurt into the fridge, than that urge to go to "the Den," came swarming over me again, now stronger than ever. But still I resisted and put on Springsteen's great, Darkness on the Edge of Town album, and I was barely half way through "Badlands" before that urge to go to that damned Wolf Den got so strong I felt like I was going to explode if I didn't give into it. But given how tired I suddenly felt and how good it felt to have my feet up listening to that great music, I kept resisting—until about half way through "Something in the Night" I suddenly just got up, turned off the music, and walked out the door to my car like it was the most logical thing in the world to do.

While driving there I had a hard time keeping thoughts about John out of my head, though I did manage to temporarily push them aside as I forced my mind, first to thoughts of the delicious and invigorating extra-large mocha java—specialty of The Java Stop, the also-V-shaped coffee shop below "the Den" (today replaced by one of those criminally legal, very voracious "Great White Loan-Shark" check-cashing/instant-loan outfits that chomps away half your check as the price of you being moronic, or desperate, enough to cash it there—or one of your legs if you have been lobotomized and take out one of those instant loans!) that I would get to kick-start me out of my after work-and-shopping doldrums, then prime me for the excitement of browsing "the Den's" great collection of books and maybe even buying one on my ever-lengthening wanna-read list.

Fortunately I didn't live far from downtown and was going against the home-bound traffic so my drive there was uneventful and quick, and I found a parking spot along the fence beside the railways tracks, within spitting distance of passing trains on my right and the door of The Java Stop on my left, so after locking the car, I dashed into its aromatic interior—if our nose could have an orgasm, the smell of that place would easily induce one!—and bee-lined for the counter, my whole being, being "foreplayed" as it was by that smell, overwhelmed with a need for the oral orgasm of a cup of that fresh-brewed ambrosia, when I heard a soft, familiar whistle—the whistle John always used to call his dog—and looking in the direction it came from, saw John, sitting at a table. Sitting there and smiling like the proverbial Cheshire Cat while pointing at the pushed-out chair on the opposite side of the table, before which sat a fresh and steaming extra-large cup of coffee.

On first seeing him I felt both surprised and somewhat dizzy with confusion and shame, thinking that I'd somehow lost a day of the week and that it actually was Wednesday, and it sure was a good thing I followed my urge to go there, but he must have read my mind, because he laughing said, "No Rache—it is Tuesday, not Wednesday . . . but please—sit down before you keel over like a felled tree! . . . And drink your . . . mocha java before it gets cold. Maybe it'll put some color back into your cheeks!"

And sit down I did, pretty much so I wouldn't "keel over," and after starring at John's smiling, beaming face for a full half minute before finally picking up that cup of coffee in my trembling hand and taking a much needed gulp, I looked at my watch, saw it was almost 5 pm and almost screeched, "What are you doing here, John—I thought our meeting was for tomorrow!" And then holding up that cup, I practically spilled half of it wagging it back and forth in my palsied hand as I said, "And how did you know I'd be coming here . . . so you could buy this! . . . and have it ready for me? . . . And thank you, by the way."

"I knew you were coming here because I intended you to come here," he said, with a serious laugh. If that makes any sense.

And all I could do with that statement was stare at him and again almost screech, "You. Did Not!"

Though on making that reply, his face, his eyes and his voice were laughing as he went on to say, "Oh yes I did! Remember on Sunday when you were so skeptical about the Aboriginal peoples being able to know things, and set up meetings without telephones or letters? Well, I just wanted to prove to you that I wasn't shoveling the contents of my stable into your ears!"

"But . . . but . . . how?" was all I could say.

To which he replied, "It was easy. A few hours ago I imagined the two of us sitting at this particular table in here—I wanted you to be able to see me when you came through the door—at about this time and I sent out to into . . .the Fifth Dimension . . . into the Ocean of Spirit, the intention that just such a scenario should came to pass. Then about an hour ago I got here, went up to The Wolf Den and browsed around until a book caught my eye . . ."

And with that he picked up the book he'd bought and showed it to me. And if I was feeling discombobulated by his being—and perhaps intentionally drawing me there—that book practically threw me over the edge, because it was a totally freaky, and current, best-seller titled Communion: A True Story by some uber-weirdo called Whitley Strieber, that I'd both read reviews about and seen it—and it's too-freaky cover!—on my previous visits to "the Den." Seen but avoided like it was covered with anthrax because on its cover was a painting of one of those freaky, huge black-eyed "aliens" that I was both sure didn't exist . . . yet was equally sure I'd met in some of my worst, drug-addled nightmares!

But before I could comment on that hideous book, he went on, "Then about ten minutes ago I got the strong sense you were responding to my 'call' and were on your way here, and that you would be here soon, so I came down here, bought our coffees, and I just barely sat down at this 'fortunately' empty table (the place was crowded) when you came walking in. Right on time!"

And all I could say to that was, "Jesus. H. Christ! John—don't ever do that again! It's too... too... goddamned...freaky!"

But that just made him laugh as he said, "But you've done this to me many times over the years!"

And when I just dumbfounded stared at him for a good long while before adamantly saying, "I have not!", he just chuckled and said, "Sure you have—remember all those times a few years back when you were struggling at school and with the kids and feeling depressed and at your wits' end and I would suddenly show up for a cuppa Joe and a chat?"

And to that I could but furrow my brow for a few seconds before nodding my head, for there had been many such instances and they were all easy to remember, the gesture encouraging him to go on, "Well, you were transmitting into the Fifth Dimension, into the Ocean of Spirit, your desperate need for some company, and I'd pick it up and instantly know you needed a visit and some support and I'd come see you. No big deal in that . . . at least not if you have—like I do—the worldview of an Australian Aborigine or a North American tribal Indian—or any of the so-called "primitive" peoples who constantly use the "jungle telegraph" for just such very practical and personal purposes.

This of course launched us into a discussion, first about the telepathic and clairvoyant basis (which I refused to accept) of those peoples' very handy "Jungle Telegraph," then about the role various worldviews played in either making it work or making it impossible to work. And to get my mind off that damned irritating—and worldview shattering!—notion of "jungle telegraphy" and telepathy and clairvoyance and all such occult nonsense, after first begging him to promise never do this freaking, Aboriginal, Fifth Dimension-meeting-thing to me again (a promise he made and kept—until the day he died, at which time he did it again, though likely not intentionally!) I asked him to explain again to me just what the hell a worldview was and how it could make any damn difference, because even though he'd explained it before, I still had a damned hard time understanding it.

So he patiently told me—for the umpteenth time!—that our worldview, on a practical level, was in some ways a lot like one of those spray-nozzles used on the end of hoses to water flowers and grass. The way you twisted and set the nozzle very much determined the kind of spray that erupted out of that nozzle—the more closed you twisted it, the finer, shorter and more diffused the spray got until it eventually shut off, and the more you opened it, the more it turned into a hard, far-shooting stream. Until you opened it too far and the water just gushed out for a few feet like there was no nozzle at all. So just as the setting on the nozzle dictated the nature of the spray that came out of it, so too does the "setting" of our worldview-nozzle dictate the reality we experience.

And when my response to that was—I guess—to scrunch up my face as I over-worked my brain trying to fit that metaphor to my experience of reality, he gave me another metaphor that finally helped get the idea—more or less—across. The next metaphor was about the two very different attitudes of an illiterate farmer and his literate wife towards the new library in the town they regularly went to for supplies. (You will learn in The Fire that this example is very personal for John!) To the illiterate farmer, if he notices the existence of the library at all on his trips into town, he'll think of it as a total waste of space, brick, labor and his precious tax money, while to his literate, book-loving wife, isolated and lonely and bored to tears as she would be on that distant farm, that library would be seen, not only as a spiritual life-saver but a veritable free ticket to travel around the world, to travel through space and time in order to "talk to," and "keep the company of" some of the greatest minds in history of our civilization, and to enter into the stories—lives and characters and adventures!—of the best novelists.

And if one of the books she is reading is by Jules Verne, she can travel to the moon or the bottom of the sea or even the center of this planet. So that same dull brick building in the town of Nowhereburg at the intersection of Dull Street and Dusty Avenue with its same contents, can be two very different buildings—two different realities!—to those two people beholding it.(Given my educational background and my love of reading, he'd definitely picked an excellent metaphor!)

He then went on to say that our worldview pretty much dictated to us the size and nature of our reality, and the major problem with our modern, rationalistic, material-scientific worldview was that it most tyrannically gave us a cosmic egg, a reality egg, that was just way too small to deal with all the facts and strange, inexplicable manifestations of life, ranging from pure genius—pure creativity—on the one hand, and on the other, stretching out from there to nature spirits and shamanic powers, and . . ."

And here he held up and waved Strieber's book in my paling-at-the-sight-of-it face as he went on, " . . . UFOs and aliens, even! Subjects that because they can't be easily explained within the paradigm of that little, rational, scientific, worldview 'egg,' the Priests of the Religion of Materialist Science—on a rare, good day—just ignores them, but on most days, adamantly denies they exist—or even can exist!—and too often denounces and ridicules as raving lunatics anyone who thinks otherwise to the point where they learn to shut up about it. . . . And even, I have heard, to commit suicide to escape the shame so gratuitously and bigotedly heaped on them for it!"

My only response to that was to try, in a limited and gentle way, to do what he'd just described the Priests of the Religion of Materialist Science doing, by saying, "Jeez, John—why do you waste your time reading weird and irrelevant books like that all the time? What good can reading such . . . nonsense, do you? You could be spending your time reading great authors and their great literature." (Needless to say, I instantly regretted saying that because I knew he read a great deal of great literature and great authors—more than did I—or ever would!—in fact.)

But he didn't take affront at my impertinent question because he knew it just an expression of my endemic cowardice, and said, "Well, they may be weird, but as anyone who lives with their eyes even half-open and a modicum of courage knows this world is even weirder! . . . I mean, we don't know one millionth of its true weirdness . . . which also means that such books are anything but irrelevant, because they serve to expand our worldview, or cosmic egg, so it can include a little more of that weirdness and help us understand the true nature of life better. Understand this truly bizarre and mysterious Universe—and our place in it.

"We've talked about this before: if we don't constantly strive to expand our worldview—our cosmic egg—it constantly shrinks on us. Like a drying-out piece of rawhide! Don't ask me why, but it is like fields cleared out of bush farms—if a farmer leaves a field fallow for even a couple of years, the forest starts encroaching and shrinking the field. So he has to keep plowing it! Same with our worldview—left on its own it, our cowardice and laziness induces it to relentlessly shrink, so that by the time we reach middle age, if we aren't consciously expanding it, it has become so small our life is no longer a human life, but has been reduced to the life of some kind of two-legged mole that doesn't want to have to deal with a reality any bigger or more scary—or more challenging—than its limited and safely familiar set of tunnels.

"And if you buy into the 'rational' limited reality that the Religion of Materialist Science and its arrogant and myopic priests have been dictating to us, you end up living in a very small 'cosmic egg' indeed! In fact, you end up living in a hummingbird egg lined on the inside with mirrors so your whole reality is reduced to nothing more than a reflection of your already very limited worldview. . . . A reflection of your already too-familiar ideas about life?! And it is books like this one—by this very brave Strieber fellow!—that forces us to expand our ideas about what is possible and push back a bit against that relentlessly shrinking eggshell of that worldview the Religion of Materialist Science is so Procrusteanly forcing us into "

My reaction to that was to slam my coffee cup down and vehemently say, "Now you are being absurd, Uncle John! If Science has been doing nothing else, it has been expanding our vision and understanding of the world. Christ!—every frickin' day (I made a point of curbing my "miner-language" when in public) there's something in the news about some new discovery some scientist has made—sometimes in physics, sometimes in biology . . . astronomy . . . medicine! In just about every field! Are you ignoring that?"

His response was to imitate one of my patented, "this is too crazy to even think about" eye-rolls, then laugh and say, "We've talked about this so much before, Rachel—all that stuff they are daily discovering is just the discovering and cataloguing of previously undiscovered trees and shrubs and ferns and animals and insects in the rainforest of their materialist paradigm, their very limited, materialist worldview. They are not doing anything to expand the limits of that rainforest, or their understanding of its subtler, spiritual aspects! . . . I mean, face it—no one can live very long without encountering strange phenomena of a telepathic, psychic, clairvoyant, or even a synchronistic nature, yet most of those Priests of our modern, worldwide Religion of Materialist Science wear some very big and close-fitting horse-blinders that blocks their ability to see all that 'spiritual nonsense,' as they so dismiss it."

And flicking my fingers at Strieber's book that John was still holding up, I said, "But Uncle John!—you can't really for even one second believe there is any truth to the . . . nonsense . . . that is in that crazy book!"

With that he gave smirked and gave me a mock-surprise look as he said, "Oh, so you've read it then? And know for certain that everything in it is all . . . nonsense."

I instantly knew the trap I'd blundered myself into and rolling my eyes said, "Of course not—you know I'd never read a book like that! But one look at the cover and I just know it is going to be full of nonsense! I don't have to waste my time reading it to know that! Besides, I've read a review about it and the reviewer said it was the most ridiculous book she had ever had to read for her job!"

This got a loud laugh—for him when in public—out of him as he said, "Yes, that's a very safe . . . and lazy . . . way of judging a book, isn't it?. . . Either 'judging it by its cover,' which a wise proverb tells us is the 'wrongest' way to judge a book! . . . Or by letting someone else read it and make your judgment about of it for you. And I think it is a perfect example of that deadly process I just mentioned where our worldview, our cosmic egg, keeps shrinking in on us.

"Is that what you teach your students at school—don't read any books that expand your world and challenge what you believe you already know about it? Do you teach them to avoid reading all books that might expand their young, small, and yearning-to-expand reality—their cosmic egg? Do you teach them to just read safe, shallow, reality-and-assumption-affirming newspaper and magazine articles about books. Newspaper and magazine articles that always 'toe the party line' and will guarantee to keep their worldview small and safe and predictable while saving time . . . and energy . . . and money, since they then won't have to buy the books—or traipse off to the library to borrow them! And it sure saves them a lot of effort in not having to read the books . . . and then being provoked into doing some real hard-work thinking about what's in them. And judging them for themselves—thus not only honing and refining their critical faculties, but expanding their limited worldview—which is what I thought getting an education was supposed to be all about."

And then with a twinkle in his eye and a triumphant tone in his voice, he said, "And hey—haven't you more than once commented on the absurdity—of the fascism inherent in!—the Imperial Abomination of Constantine's book-banning department, it's Index Librorum Prohibitorum expressly designed to keep the worldviews, the reality-eggs, of every member of its flocks of sheep small enough for them to continue to credulously believe all its absurd dogma! Isn't what you are saying a subtle form of that same kind of book-banning, of nefarious, fascist control of disturbing and worldview-expanding knowledge?"

He'd hit me with a well-aimed bean-ball with that assertion, and all I could do was roll my eyes and Homer-thump my head as I laughing said, "D'oh!" Followed by "Mea culpa, mea culpa! . . . Father John!"

His reaction to my calling him "Father John" was to feign, first an aghast, then an insulted, look on his face, followed by a mock-whining, "Father John!—Lady, you sure know how to hurt an old man, don't you! That was a nasty, below-the-belt, blow!"

At that point he got up to get both our coffee mugs refilled—which I insisted on paying for!—and when he returned with them steaming with fresh, delightfully smelling "Joe," he sat down and went on with, "While I was up getting this 'Joe,' I had come to mind a story I once read somewhere that could have been about me at one time. It went something like this: a traveler going through a small village in the foothills of a range of mountains stopped to talk to one of the aging villagers to ask him about those mountains and what lay beyond them, and the villager said, 'I don't know—I've never traveled to those mountains.' And when the traveler most incredulously asked, 'Why ever not?' the villager replied, 'Only fools go traveling and looking for trouble! I'm no fool so I don't travel! In fact, I've never been out of sight of this village—and I'm damn proud of that fact!'"

Then smiling a big smile and letting loose a low, mocking chuckle, he said, "But what does stupid and ignorant old me know on that subject of education—I'm not educated!"

That earned him a hard kick in his cowboy-boot protected shins as I said, after taking a tentative sip of my fresh, steaming cup of coffee, "You know . . . what I mean . . .Uncle John! . . . I read lots of books . . . even lots you've recommended that I don't agree with, but that . . . book . . . is so . . . so . . . "

And on my saying that he smiled a knowing smile as he patted my trembling hand and softly said, "So frightening, isn't it? . . . The cover of this book really caught my attention because it instantly brought back vivid memories of long ago . . . dreams . . . about such . . . creatures . . . such beings . . . doing strange . . . things . . . to me. And when I read a bit of it upstairs, what the author was writing about brought back many memories of those dreams . . . that as I remembered them . . . sure seemed more like . . . real and vivid encounters . . . than dreams! (He describes those "encounters" in The Fire) So as far as I am concerned, whatever these creatures . . . these . . . beings are, they are . . . in some way . . . real . . . and part of our . . . reality . . . and I am looking forward to reading this book and getting the author's take on them . . . And I bet the reason you find that book so disturbing is because you've met those . . . beings . . . somewhere . . . before. Likely in your dreams! . . . Am I right?"

Needless to say, the only response I could give to that was a vehement, "I don't want to talk about . . . that . . . Uncle John!" as I reached across the table and grabbed the book out of his hand and slammed it face down on the table so I wouldn't have to look any longer at the freaky, too-familiar face on its freaky cover.

And as I was putting the book down, he again gently patted my hand and said, "That's okay, Rachel. (He only ever called me Rachel, and not Rache, when he was mocking me!) You are at least very consistent about what scares the hell out of you—which is just about anything that threatens to crack open and expand your cosmic egg! Anything that threatens to provoke and prod back to life your moribund imagination, like my drawing you here to prove a point about the powers of the human mind and spirit when it connects with the Fifth Dimension, the Ocean of Spirit."

Then he keyed on that word imagination and said that was the first and most important thing shoved outside the thin shell of our modern, rational, materialist "Reality Egg." Or at least its true nature—as it is known by history's poets and geniuses, particularly Blake! Adding, "For humanity in general, and human beings in particular, to intentionally suppress—and even outright kill and embalm!—their imaginations . . . and concomitantly, of course, their intuition, the sixth sense, which is an intrinsic part of the imagination, is akin to some sailor, on commencing a journey around this vast Earth, pitching overboard his compass, charts and sextant as soon as he is out of sight of land, claiming he doesn't need such childish nonsense. Just imagine—ha, ha!"

But back to the present—this subject not only threatens to make my fragile, manic, walkabout-from-the-Meds-Rez brain spontaneously combust—if that's not what it is already doing when I am in a manic state!—but also really upsets me at a really deep and disturbing level, so I'll say little more about that damn cosmic egg subject broached so head-fucking enigmatically in those books by Joseph Pierce where he, like John, propounds his passionate need to have all of us make the effort to learn to intentionally—and insanely, as far as I am concerned!—crack open our "Reality Egg" and expand our worldview by exploring and accepting as real, what we find outside of it.

Most strangely, that is all I can right now remember about our conversation that strange day in The Java Stop, but while on the subject of cracking-open-our-cosmic-egg shit . . . Fuck!—why would any sane, rational person want to do that!?! I mean shit, you crack open the thin, protective shell of that precious, rational "egg" and you can have anything coming through that crack! ANY FUCKING THING! Those fuckin' aliens Strieber writes about in Communion . . . fuckin' nature spirits—satyrs and fauns and fairies . . . Pan even, for God's sake! And who-knows-what-the-fuck-else!—ghosts, all kinds of invisible, Castanedean powers—which could be benevolent or demonic . . . though likely fucking both! UFOs even! And whateverthefuck makes those crazy crop circles. Then you got the whateverthefuck that is causing all that weird shit to happen in the Bermuda Triangle.

It would be like living in a real-life episode of the fuckin' X-Files, for fuck's sake! Not to fail to mention ancient gods, goddesses . . . and those fuckin' monsters so many kids just know are under their bed at night and terrifying them and keeping them awake! And sorcery, witchcraft, curses, hexes, superstitions, and . . . hell, all that weird, mind-fucking shit Colin Wilson wrote about in his books The Occult and Mysteries, which means just about ANY FUCKING FAR-OUT THING AT ALL! FUCK—WE'D BE BACK IN THE DARK FUCKIN' AGES, FOR CHRISSAKE! HOW THE FUCK WE GONNA LIVE IN A WORLD LIKE THAT?!? (As far as I'm concerned, we couldn't, because it would be too goddamn scary! And chaotic! )

And oh sure, when, in some conversation or other, I inevitably voiced that same objection to John, and pretty much in those words, he said, "Yeah, but it is still the reality we are living in. Or as much of it that we, as the limited beings we are, can fathom—which believe me, is but a miniscule part of the totality of it! And of course, there are going to be aspects of it we don't like and don't want to be there, but denying the existence of what we don't like and cope with is . . . I would think, extremely childish!

"We end up becoming like those children who don't like the texture of some foods and refuse to eat them, no matter how necessary they might be to our diet and health. I think reality—real reality not just what we are selectively comfortable with!—can be a lot like that . . . Force . . . in those Star Wars movies you like so much: light and dark, both! Two sides of a very powerful reality-coin. And oh sure, if you are going to be one of those . . . Jedi knights . . . it sure would be nice if there was only a good, a light aspect to that Force so that we didn't have to worry about getting seduced by the dark side of it, but it isn't defined that way. If one of those apprentice Jedi knights is going to learn to use that Force, then he or she has to deal with both aspects of it. Wishing away the dark side doesn't make it—or its effects!—non-existent.

"In all truth, the Fifth Dimension, the Ocean of Spirit we talked about is a lot like the Force, except we all swim in it and are all forced to be Jedi knights of sorts as we deal with it. We are all exposed to, and have to deal with, all aspects of it—light and dark both . . . and the shades of grey that inevitably exists between those two extremes. And like that Force, neither side . . . neither aspect of it . . . of this Ocean of Spirit—that those anciently wise Taoists represent with that yin-yang symbol!—is something you can repress totally out of existence . . . like the fact that the cooling water of the lake you go for an enjoyable swim in on a hot July day doesn't also possess the power to drown you.

"And while on the subject of the Ocean of Spirit, it is very much like physical water—we can't live without it and there's nothing nicer than having enough of it to drink, or cook with, or shower with, or swim in, or spend our days most enjoyably living on a river . . . or lake . . . or ocean shore, which people are willing to spend tons of money to do! Until we get too much of it: too much rain and the river floods! Or a tsunami and the ocean blitzkriegs inland, destroying everything in its path then washing all the debris—and lots of dead people—back out to sea! Both events inevitably happening from time-to-time and place-to-place, both capable of washing our house away and killing us and our families. And lots of other people! Thousands, sometimes!

"So are you going to ban water from your reality? Just because aspects of it can be 'dark' . . . can be . . . dangerous and unpredictable and frightening? Or do you learn to enjoy its good aspects while coping with the negative side of it—respect it, dam it, channel it, 'get the hell out of Dodge' when the tsunami warning sounds! Whatever!

"Same with this 'outside-your-reality-egg-stuff ' that frightens you so much you can't even allow yourself to think about it, let alone read a book about it! The 'dark' currents" of the Ocean of Spirit exist for reasons way too big for our puny minds and imaginations to even remotely fathom, so they must have an intrinsic purpose—whether we, in our very tiny and very human cosmic egg, can fathom it or not.

"Hell, in a lot of ways, I think of humanity right now as a group of toddlers playing in a sandbox in the backyard of a suburban home located near a freeway. They can hear the roar of that very dangerous freeway, but the nature of that freeway and what is making all that noise is way outside of their safe little minds and safe little toddler-world, and they tune out the noise to the point where they no longer hear it.

"But safe as they are from the danger of that freeway, and as thoroughly as they tune out the roar of it, certainly doesn't make not exist! Just as there are many other mysterious and dangerous things going on around their safe little sandbox in their safe little suburban back yard. Things like predatory pedophiles on the prowl to molest or kill them . . . or speeding cars capable of running them over should they escape that safe little back yard and wander out into the street . . . or even the roars and slam-bang-crashing rackets of a recycling truck making its way up their street, those noises being frightening mysteries to any toddler so noticing them.

"So we, under the guidance and control of our adult lives 'parents,' those Priests of the Religion of Materialist Science, end up being just like those toddlers in their sandbox, safely believing we can lifelong live our lives in a safe, little suburban-backyard sandbox, isolated and protected from the 'neighborhood's' many mysterious and frightening facets and realities.

"And where would this tiny little Cosmos-swamped sandbox of a world be without all that incredible genius-level creativity that most mysteriously—and often just as disturbingly!—comes into this world through those cracks in our cosmic egg? From likes of Homer and Sophocles and Shakespeare; from Bach and Mozart and Beethoven? Or from Socrates and Plato and Nietzsche; from Newton and Einstein and Hawking; Da Vinci and Tesla and Edison; and from a whole big long and impressive list of others? In all fields of creativity.

"Nothing of what those geniuses I just mentioned—and the lot more that I didn't!—did with their extremely creative lives fits within the tiny little shell of our so-called rational, scientific 'egg!' And believe me, if you read the stories of many genius scientists' creative insights and breakthroughs, there's nothing 'rational' and 'scientific' about them at all! Most of them describe their essential, creative, insightful breakthroughs coming in vivid dreams and visions—and unexpected, serendipitous and synchronistic insights and inspirations! Some even arriving when they are getting on a bus!

"Hell, if there was a rational explanation to what went on with all the great creative geniuses of history, we could rationally analyze those processes and duplicate them in our universities and colleges and then churn out Homers and Shakespeares and Mozarts and Einsteins and Edisons by the truckloads. But you have spent enough time around universities to know that that sure doesn't happen, does it? Genius can't be taught by professors—even genius professors!—any more than can milk be created by steers. Genius is as rare and erratic as it is mysterious!

"You've spent a lot of time in those so-called higher educational institutions, and I bet you know for a fact that there's no curriculum in any of them called, Creative Genius! There's no How To Write Plays Like Shakespeare courses, or How To Compose Like Mozart And Beethoven classes. And how many of those fellows in the rock band, the Beatles, whose music you keep calling 'pure genius,' went to university?"

And to that question I could only laugh and say, "Not a one!" with the thought entering my head as I said those words, that if any single one of them had gone to university, there would have been no Beatles and this world would surely be the lesser for it.

And after raising his left eyebrow in a familiar, Spock-like gesture, he chuckled and went on, "Hell, if universities could produce geniuses on demand, the most popular, best-funded course today at all universities would be, How To Invent Like Edison, and the line-ups for them would miles long because every one of those well-trained Edison-graduates would not only be bona fide geniuses, but instant millionaires for all the great gizmos and gimcracks they would be creating to suck the money out of millions of suckers' wallets.

"And maybe even, by 'accident,' solve a few of the problems this world has right now. And doing it easily! But it's not happening, is it? Because there's a profound and inexplicable mystery behind creative genius! And behind all those truly creative ideas and insights that genius so unexpectedly, mysteriously, copiously and profoundly manifest, and which very often very dramatically change our world on being manifested. And change it in ways that no amount of rational, scientific knowledge can explain or duplicate! "

As John said those words I could not help but think about the Beatles and the effect their collective creative genius had, not only on the world of rock and pop music, but the world in general. Hell, as far as I was concerned, the Beatles were every bit as important to the creation of that famous "Spirit of the Sixties," as was the gallons of LSD that mind-fucking flowed through it. (Yeah, okay—I grudgingly acknowledge that LSD wasn't totally a "mind-fuck" but I call it that because its role during its Sixties heyday was to crack wide open a lot of personal cosmic eggs, which in turn cracked open the cosmic egg of our Sixties social reality—but you, Dear Reader, already know my attitude towards keeping my cosmic egg small and manageable, and truly a mystery it is that I dropped so much of that stuff and still managed to keep my cosmic egg small and manageable . . . Mmmmm . . . as I write those words a powerful intuition bleeds into my off-the-Meds-Rez informing me that my insanity is nothing more than a great big crack in my cosmic egg that I haven't been able to integrate into my life and everyday reality—BUT I SURE AS FUCK AIN'T GONNA THINK ABOUT THAT FOR VERY LONG!!!!!!!)

"And it is that mystery and those mysterious processes of genius, that Joseph Chilton Pierce is trying to explore—and maybe use—in those two cosmic egg-cracking books of his . . . that I have been trying to get you to read . . .Though I do think he missed the real point of his insight about all that powerful and inexplicable life-changing creative stuff coming through the 'cracks' in the cosmic egg of our worldview, the most important point being that what is outside that 'crack' is in control of what comes through it, and that the only real influence we can have on what comes through is to not interfere with it when it wants to manifest and come through. And to make some limited . . .very limited! . . . sense of it once it does!

"We have to be humble enough to acknowledge that we are—as I've already said—in our day-to-day, Materialist Science-dictated reality, like toddlers in a suburban backyard sandbox, and that the world is a lot bigger, more mysterious, and more dangerous than the one we are familiar with in that safe little box, and that sometimes very mysterious, powerful and unpredictable things and events intrude into our sandbox-reality—like a recycling truck suddenly taking a shortcut through it!—and that we have to be willing to get the hell out of the way of it and let it manifest unhindered."

Than after stopping speaking for a thoughtful moment, he went on, "This reminds me of a quote . . . by some Jewish rabbi . . . ha!—is there any other kind! . . . that I read once, and which so struck home to me, that I more or less memorized it. It went like . . . Reality is more complex than we would like. If we insist on it making sense, we will find ourselves despairing. Reality cannot be neatly packaged, for it is all that is, and this is often at odds with what we imagine it should be.

(The only reason, Dear Reader, that I have that quote at my fat, pudgy, potato-chip greasy fingertips, is because John kept—and bequeathed to me—a black, hard-bound notebook—it had JOURNAL embossed in white letters on the front—which he used for recording—printing, more fortunately, acknowledging even to himself the illegibility of his scribbling!—various quotes that caught his attention in the books he read over the years. And quite a sight any page of that thing can be, with each quote printed with pens of various colors of ink and pencils of various hardness and sharpness. I found that quote in it years ago and I referred back to it in order to type it out here. Just for you, Dear Reader!)

"I like that part . . . often at odds with what we imagine it should be. Nothing makes our lives more limited and meaningless than having a small, safe worldview that we label ULTIMATE REALITY, and then frantically, obsessively, compulsively refusing to acknowledge the existence of any manifesting thing or event that doesn't fit what we imagine it should contain. I mean, isn't our growth from infanthood to adulthood a necessary and continuous process of having our worldview expanded. Expanded from the warm, safe and very small reality of our mother's loving arms and warm breast full of delicious milk to the somewhat bigger reality of our playroom and our siblings . . . to the rest of our house . . . to our sandbox in the backyard . . . then on to school . . . you get the ever-expanding picture!

"So as an infant and child our world and worldview is constantly expanding as new, unfamiliar things enter it that once we discover—or are told by our parents—are safe and acceptable, we incorporate them into our worldview. But then at some point—likely puberty—our understanding of the nature and scope of the world, for some reason, freezes . . . solidifies . . . like a mixture of resin and hardener in a fiberglass installation that one minute can be liquid and sticky and malleable, and the next, hard as glass and utterly immutable—except to cracking and shattering. Those two common phrases, 'open-minded' and 'close-minded' to describe people's characters are essentially just describing the worldview that their courage, or lack of it, allows them to have. For the courageously 'open-minded,' their worldview is a fiberglass resin mix that refuses to harden to brittle glass, while for the cowardly 'close-minded,' it has hardened—to very brittle glass.

"Obviously then, 'open-minded' people can experience and process no end of strange experiences and learn and expand their worldview . . . expand the soft shell of their 'cosmic egg' as it were . . . to accommodate them, and thus in the process get a true education! While on the other hand, a close-minded person has a worldview, a 'cosmic egg' with a shell of hardened fiberglass that is incapable of expanding and thus that person cannot really be educated at all. And if some really powerful, inexplicable events—or ideas, even!—happen to enter into their minds and life, they either outright and passionately deny they ever happened, or if they are too intense and dramatic to deny, those events—or ideas!—shatter the brittle fiberglass of their 'cosmic egg' and they have a nervous breakdown—or suffer a psychotic break!

"So when some utterly unexpected—and to our limited, toddler-worldview—totally strange event occurs while we are playing in our safe little sandbox, like a giant, noisy and out-of-control garbage truck comes crashing through our yard, we have to be like toddlers, first scrambling into a safe corner of the yard when that happens, and then looking at that huge truck and maybe being terrified and maybe not . . . and maybe running to Mommy or Daddy, howling our heads off . . . or maybe just standing there saying to ourselves—'Oh wow—I wonder what that big noisy thing is? I'll have to ask Mommy or Daddy!' And when all the excitement is over and that police have arrived and a tow truck called and the errant thing hauled away—and everything explained by Mommy and Daddy, our toddler-worldview has expanded and we now know what garbage trucks and tow trucks and police cars and police are. And though we may carry a lingering fear of another garbage truck crashing through our yard, we have no fears about garbage trucks . . . or tow trucks and police cars in themselves. They have become integral parts of our expanded worldview. . . . And of course, that is a perfect metaphor for the event of . . . creatures . . . like on the cover of this book by Strieber . . . 'crashing' into our reality and scaring the hell out of us while discombobulating—and expanding!—our worldview!

"Which is why, as adults, if we want to be healthy adults with an understanding of a reality that can't always—or ever!—be completely controlled or understood, we have to be like children with flexible and expansive worldviews! That way, when we are confronted by mysterious events—creatures-in-the-night, even—and even by powerful and mysterious insightful, inspirational, or creative mysteries and urges that well up from some deep, mysterious well within us and 'birth' their presence and reality into our small, sandbox-reality, we aren't so hardened-fiberglass brittle! We don't have such a rigid, glass-hard and easily shattered worldview!

(As John was saying that, for some reason I had "pop" into my head the apropos memory of the big hissy-fit and uproar that Dylan's fans expressed at the '65 Newport Folk Festival when he so famously/infamously 'went electric' and started playing rock-and-roll half way through his set. His world and worldview were creatively expanding, but the worlds and worldviews of many of his "acoustic audience" were not so flexible!)(And in case ya give a fleet, flyin' fuck—my favorite album of his is Nashville Skyline and my favorite song on it is—quite naturally!—"Girl from the North Country," a great duet he does with Johnny Cash.)

"In truth, in the face of such mysteries, either manifesting outside of us or up-welling from within us stuff, we should be more like midwives helping a baby get born. Born into our world and worldview, thus changing and expanding it—as a baby always changes and expands the household it is born into—even as he himself is also changing.

(That last bit about a baby changing and expanding a household represented a very personal insight for John, for as he very painfully records in his memoirs, when his son, Johnny was born, he was in a very rigid and fragile, PTSD-state of being and had a hard time accepting the little fellows presence in his life—or all the attention he demanded from his mother, attention no longer available to John. And nothing new there for the typical, frail and needy male ego—my asshole hubby had the same problem when Jonathan was born. He went into a into a big sulk the day I brought Jonathan home from the hospital—a sulk that launched him into a lot of rock-and-roll in beds that weren't our own and which lasted till he fucked off out west years later!)

"And if what gushes up from deep within our mysterious psyches is some highly inspired and completely unexpected—maybe even unwanted—creative manifestation, then it is incumbent upon us to acknowledge the mysterious process at work within us and be humble enough to also acknowledge that we—as the ego we know ourselves as—had nothing to do with its creation, that it is in no way our own, and that once we 'midwife' it into this world, we can have no control over its subsequent fate.

"So important it is to accept that our only role in the process is to help it manifest—as wholly as it can—into this world. To, as humbly as we can, get the hell out of the way of the process, which is—in its own right!—very conscious, has a will of its own, and very much knows what it wants to do. (Yeah, just like me being a midwife to John's memoirs . . . well, not exactly true, I guess, since by the time I got hold of them they had already been birthed into this world and just patiently awaiting a foster-parent to "raise" them to adulthood—so I guess in being their translator/transcriber you could call me their stepmom. And no genius required for that, that's for sure!)

"Ironically, that situation is no different than the reality for flesh-and-blood parents and their flesh-and-blood children—we can, at their birth, and when they are little, indulge in the delusion that we created them and that they belong to us—like they are living chattel!—but ultimately comes the day when they go through puberty and suddenly we have to face the harsh truth that they are unique individuals that belong, first to themselves, and second, to this Universe—and no longer at all to us! And since perhaps the best way for parents to raise a child is to do their best to give them the strength, self-esteem and freedom, to self-manifest, at puberty, who they truly are, as the unique, spirit-being individuals possessing a unique and personal fate and/or destiny that they incarnated to manifest and develop.

"And it would seem that any culture should do the same with highly creative individuals and their manifestations of creative genius—encourage its manifestation in whatever form it shows up by not expecting too much 'normalcy' from that genius or anything predictable and socially acceptable from what they produce. If you read the biographies of most geniuses, they are anything but your average, predictable, middle class, social stalwarts . . . with the likes of Oscar Wilde and Richard Wagner coming instantly to mind! Most, in fact, are downright weird, and some—like poor Nietzsche and Van Gogh—even deranged.

"And if not outright deranged, then often anti-social, and of course, pretty much always iconoclastic. Like Beethoven! He smashed to smithereens most of the icons of the stiff-collared, buttoned-down, very 'rational' Classical era perfected by Haydn and Mozart and out of their debris, gave us the free-wheeling, very ego- and emotion-driven Romantic era. And as to his personality—believe me, you'd not have wanted to spend a lot of time with him! Especially once he started going deaf and getting damn testy about it! But spending time with his music is nothing short of heavenly!

"Or poor mad Nietzsche! So many great ideas and insights but such a wretched end to his otherwise genius life! I can't remember who said it, but the aphorism, Talent does what it can; genius does what it must, really insightfully sums up the fact that one doesn't sign up to become a genius, but gets pretty much picked—more like cursed—by higher spiritual powers to be used, abused, then discarded like a tool in their too-big-to-be-fathomed construction project designed to channel creative change into this world. Which of course, is why they must, by nature, be iconoclasts! (I have just Googled that aphorism for you, Dear Reader: Edward Bulwer-Lytton more or less said that.)

"Actually, now that I think of it, this cosmic egg stuff was explained really well to Castaneda by Don Juan in Castaneda's book, Tales of Power, and explained, in of all the mundane of places, in a restaurant. It's that tonal (weirdly pronounced: toh-na'hl) and nagual (ditto: naw-wa'hl) stuff that is almost impossible for a rational person to understand because it is an attempt to reduce to rational explanations what by its nature is both extremely big and irrational!

"In short, according to Don Juan—as I very limitedly understand it—the tonal is basically an island of everything in our world that we already have rationally understood and can rationally explain, while the nagual is a monstrous ocean of pure, unadulterated mystery on which our familiar and explainable 'island of the tonal' kind of floats. And like ocean waves crashing onto an island beach, this nagual-mystery sometimes intrudes into this island of the tonal that is usually so familiar and predictable and thus usually makes us feel so safe and in total control of our lives, with manifestations of itself that are utterly inexplicable—and usually frightening as hell, to the tonal.

"And I guess what makes this all the weirder and disturbing is this tonal/nagual distinction applies not only to our consensus reality—ordinary reality, as Castaneda called it!—but to ourselves as well. We have a very small, tonal-part of ourselves that we can, to some limited extent, define and understand . . . which I guess is akin to our ego . . . while there as great big nagual part of ourselves—our spirit-being and its reality!—that when it manifests its presence and its needs to our everyday consciousness, our ego, it can be both mysterious and extremely frightening! In fact, it pretty much always is mysterious and damned frightening! It would seem that it is through this nagual-part of ourselves that the great big Ocean of Spirit manifests what we call genius. And madness, too!—for when the ego is too fragile to cope with the power and mystery of the manifestations of that nagual, of our spirit-being which swims like a dolphin in that Ocean of Spirit, it collapses like a pricked balloon!

"Or something like that—it's been awhile since I read Tales of Power and I can't say I understood it all that well when I was reading it. . . . Though I do take Don Juan's assertion that it is from that realm of the nagual that all shamanic/sorcerous powers manifest as axiomatic. It is out of the nagual that the strange and mysterious powers that each individual shaman/sorcerer learns to invoke and control manifest, though in the case of tribal shamans, they are quite small and typically tribal-oriented manifestations designed solely to aid, heal, and enlighten any particular shaman's tribe and thus of little consequence to the rest of the world, or even other tribes.

"While in the case of the great geniuses who have pretty much shaped and very much enriched our modern culture . . . and from that, our whole modern world . . . we are talking about big intrusions, big manifestations of the nagual, of the Ocean of Spirit, that few individual genius have little real control over . . . and less understanding of what is going on. Especially in our modern secular culture in which the nagual, the Ocean of Spirit, by definition, cannot exist!

"I mean, if you study the life of Beethoven, you can get the powerful sense from it that even if he'd wanted, at the beginning of his career, to just keep creating the refined, restrained and predictable "Classical" music of Haydn and Mozart, that just wasn't going to happen. Once he opened his private door to the nagual, to that Ocean of Spirit, what creatively manifested through him was likely very much out of his control. And way beyond his desires! The nagual wanted music to evolve with the historical times, which were in a state of violent rebellion that it likely instigated in the first place, so it used Beethoven to initiate and carry that change in his powerful music. So in a sense, with their interactions with the nagual, the Ocean of Spirit, geniuses like Beethoven are really shamans, but not tribal shamans manipulating what little they can grasp of the nagual for small personal or tribal ends, but global shamans being manipulated and used by the nagual for its own mysterious ends.

"And remember well, I do, a quote of Beethoven's that really struck home to me and which tends to prove this point. It had to do with a famous violinist who'd complained to a friend of Beethoven's that a violin piece that Beethoven had written for him was too technically difficult to be played on the violin, and when that comment was passed on to Beethoven, he is reported to have responded with, 'Does he believe that I think of a wretched fiddle when the spirit speaks to me?' This, I think, pretty much shows the nature of the relationship Beethoven had with his Muse, with the nagual!"

Back again to this crazy present. If I remember correctly, I think that conversation ended pretty much at that point because John was freaking me out with all that shamanic and Castanedaean tonal/nagual talk, especially once he started applying it to a famous historical figure like Beethoven. I mean, dismissing Castaneda and his tonal and nagual as a lot of fantastical bullshit was easy, but dismissing Beethoven's creative spirit that he talked about like it actually existed, and dictated his music to him, was a whole other kettle of stinking sardines!

Ironically, I've just felt a great—library-angel inspired?—compulsion to pick up Pierce's, Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg, in order to glance through it to see if there were any pertinent passages for this section of the "Preface" which John had marked off, and it—library-angel?—opened to a page with the following underlined twice—in different colored pens, indicating he'd underlined it on two separate readings:

Moving from the known to the unknown is the basis of learning for monkey as well as human, and anxiety and fear block the ability to risk the unknown in both.

Yeah, no fucking kidding! That was both too apropos and spooky for me so those two books are going back on their shelf!(Anxiety, fear and fuckin' cowardice win again!) I've read Tales of Power three times and I still don't understand that tonal/nagual stuff as well John explained it in the above, probably badly-remembered , dialogue. (Don't fuckin' ask me why I read it even once, let alone three times: it's just something I felt a powerful compulsion to do. And though on beginning each reading of it, I had almost no interest in the subject matter and even not much more understanding of it, that book did have the power to compel me to keep reading it each time that I felt compelled to pick it up—which leads me to very reluctantly state that all of that is enough to make me believe there was some very real power—or powers!—behind all that shit Castaneda was doing with Don Juan and writing about—but to quote John, "Don't go quoting me on that!")

And like I just said, even having read it three times, it still won't "compute" for me! I truly cannot grasp—or allow myself to grasp, I guess!—the notion that this reality that I call "home" is just a tiny, ego-defined and ego-delimited "island of the tonal" floating in the great big ocean of the nagual, which is an infinitely larger and more powerful and mysterious reality!

And fucking worse!—a powerful and mysterious reality that can impinge, whenever it felt like, on my little "home" reality and when it felt inclined to do that, there was nothing I—or anyone!—could do about it! Just like those theoretical bug-eyed aliens Strieber wrote about in Communion—yeah, I eventually fucking read most of the fucking godforsaken thing!—which could manifest in his life and do outrageous things to him whenever they felt so inclined and he could do absolutely sweet-fuck-all about it.

(Yeah!—responding to pressure from a potent, inner compulsion after John died, I finally—while safely on the Meds-Rez, read most of that total freak-out of a fuckin' book! And I sure wish I hadn't because for three nights after finishing it, I had vivid flash-back dreams of just such diabolical creatures doing things to me when I was still a teenager. I'd wake up from those damn, nightmarish dreams almost certain that what I'd just experienced was only one quarter dream and three quarters distant memories. And totally certain I'd been, on waking up, that those bug-eyed imps were in my room and bouncing around on my bed, trying to get my attention Or doing nefarious fucking things to me! And what makes me certain they were probably re-surfacing memories and not mere dreams, was during the first, most frightening episode, I had a lucid enough sense of myself and my reality to keep thinking to myself, I've gotta tell Mom about this! I've gotta tell Mom about this! I mean, shit—at the time of those—possible—events, I so absolutely hated and was so not-talking to my mother about any damn thing at all, that even if it had been a fact, I would not have told her that I was suffering from a form of cancer that was days away from killing me—yet in the throes of that . . . whateverthefuckwashappening, I wanted to turn to her, like I was three years old again!)

### Chapter Nine

But back to the "narrative"—Jesus Christ, is there no fuckin' end to this damn horror-ride down memory lane? No sooner did I generate within myself the intent to get past—and well away!—from all this confounding imagination shit, I feel both a vivid vision and a powerful prodding to go into John's inexplicable fascination with Ancient Greece. He was interested in it when I first met him and that interest never abated for all of the (way-too-few) years that I was blessed to know him.

Hell, I don't think he ever stopped reading his Lattimore editions of The Iliad and The Odyssey. When he'd finish The Iliad he go straight to The Odyssey, and when finished that, right back to The Iliad again. Said they were such powerful power-objects that reading them was a constant joy to his spirit-being—like booze to an alkie! And rarely would any talk about the nature and power of "the imagination" come up in our conversations without him bringing up those damn Greeks. To him those ancient peoples seemed to be one giant, collective manifestation of creative genius. He often said the nagual, the Ocean of Spirit, had big plans for the creation of our Western society, and it started, and then shaped, the process with a massive manifestation of its creative nature and powers through those incredible peoples.

Of course, by the time we were talking about this stuff I'd gotten my B.A. with my major in Literature, so I knew all about Homer's great works, as well as the works of the three great tragedians, and others, but I'd never taken any courses studying them in great depth. In fact, I'd intentionally avoided such courses, probably because even in high school my teachers were extolling those damn Greeks to the skies and I just found them tiresome as hell. As far as I was concerned, no one group of people could be that great and that influential. It just didn't seem possible!

Of course that reminds me of a most apropos story concerning my daughter Terry and her passionate hatred of shrimp. After Hubby decamped west and whenever we could (rarely) afford it, I liked to take Jonathan and her out "for Chinese" and she would eat just about anything on the menu but a dish with shrimp in it. For years it was like that and I accepted it without thought, having my own share of culinary dislikes. Then one time, when Jonathan was working his way through a shrimp plate, Terry, on some incomprehensible impulse, reached across the table and grabbed one of Jonathan's shrimps and popped it in her mouth. Both of us instantly looked over at her in shock for her having done that , but what we saw even more of a shock. Christ, she looked like she was having an orgasm for fuck's sake!—and after giving it a long, sensuous, eyes-closed chew, she opened her now bright and sparkling eyes wide and said, "Wow, that was beyond delicious!"

And after Jonathan had laughing said, "Well, no kiddin'!—Why do you think that's all I ever order?" I said, "You mean to tell me you've never tasted shrimp before?" Her response to that was to look more than a little sheepish as she said, "No, I just never liked the look of them . . . they're so . . .gross! So I assumed they tasted as bad as they looked."

And that's me in a nutshell concerning those Greeks. It was one thing to have high school teachers and university professors constantly waxing eloquent about those "amazing Greeks" and their influence on our Western culture, (to the point where you just had to tune it out) and quite another to have John unexpectedly and just as passionately tout their imaginative greatness. Especially knowing he didn't possess enough formal schooling to have encountered them there!

So I started the beginning of my real education about those Greeks (and hell, perhaps my real education, period!) by reading The Odyssey—I mean, face it, you can't even slog through grade school without having heard about the great journey of the wily Odysseus and all his fantastical adventures, especially the one all the boys in class had loved most: his driving a stake into the Cyclops eye! (But that was still pre-pubescent grade school, which meant that violent act was more attractive to their imaginations than what would have electrified their imaginations in high school—his spending all those lubricious years being held "captive" and constantly getting his balls fucked dry by the lusty nymph, Calypso! Though given the lascivious imaginations of even pre-pubescent boys, that likely had a lot to do with the way the teachers glossed over that part!

Though shit!—while on the subject of The Odyssey and its lasting impact on our culture, I drive a mini-van made by the Japanese company, Honda, that is called Odyssey. And no, I didn't buy it because of its name, but because a few years ago, as my burgeoning obesity was making it ever more difficult for me to get in and out of cars, I decided I needed one of those vans, so I asked Jonathan to scope them out for me and find out the best one on the market. He came up with the Odyssey and so I bought it. And like the Odyssey of Odysseus, it looks like it might just last me twenty years—or till my death, whichever comes first.

But my point is, three thousand fuckin' years—or more!—after that great Greek poem was orally created, a modern company from Japan—which is about as far from Greece as you can get!—is manufacturing and naming mundane fucking, haul-the-brats-to-soccer, suburban van after it in order to tap into the long-lasting, archetypal power of that poem and its very familiar, powerful, and very archetypal name! Like the hippies loved to say: "Totally fuckin' . . . far out, Man!")

So after reading The Odyssey I went to its predecessor, The Iliad, and I was well and truly "blown away" by the incredible stories both of them told, the great characters that walked out of the page, and the power of the poetry. Especially Achilles and the big male-ego-tantrum he indulged in when Agamemnon stole his captive girlfriend and offended his precious honor. Though of course, I couldn't read them without John's comments in mind about both being, first most, stories about the interfering gods and goddesses, with the human characters most definitely playing secondary roles. And as to his belief that the situation still hasn't changed—well, as the trite saying goes, I don't fucking want to go there!

But of course, I will go into the fact that scholars have determined that those two masterpieces were most likely first written 800 years before our Gregorian calendar flipped from BC flipped to AC, and surely existed in oral form for at least 200 years prior to that. I mean, to really fathom how fuckin' mind blowing that was, there was me, living in my affluent, mechanized, post-nuclear, man-on-the-moon culture getting enthralled by a story that was at least 3000 years old, ninety five percent of which was probably pure, imaginative creation!

So needless to say, Homer was the hook that caught this little minnow, me, and dragged me into the whale boat of that whole amazing world of those ancient Greeks, a world that the deeper you got into it, the more you began to fathom their broad and incredible effect on our Western culture. And of course, my conversations with John about them became infinitely more interesting and deeper—especially when after I'd plowed my way through Will Durant's massive and insightful historical tome, The Life of Greece.(I still can't wrap my head around the fact that he wrote eleven of those fact-and-opinion filled monsters in his The Story of Civilization series,, even if his wife, Ariel, helped him with the last five!) And much as John was a big, big fan of the three great tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, his first and most passionate love was all those incredible and enduring Greek myths.

Fuck!—did I say all those Greek myths? Christ, that barely describes the situation at all. He gave me Robert Graves' two volume set, The Greek Myths to read, and in reading it realized those Greeks had myths coming out of the pores of their skin! Myths and multiple versions of those myths. Those people seemed to live for, and in, a world of imaginative, mythical stories! (A bit, I guess, the way today we live for, and in, our TV shows and movies—except those myths are considerably more imaginative!)

But the amazing thing about those myths was not just how fantastical there were, but how profound and enduring so many of them still are. And influential. (Hey, know any girls named Helen? Or Cassandra? Or a Penny, most often the short form of Penelope? How about Hermione?—you know: that too-cute-by-half little witch in the Harry Potter movies, named after the only daughter of Helen and Menelaus of Sparta . . .ya—that hot-crotched Mama Helen who was the ostensible cause of the whole crazy fuckin' Trojan war! Fuck, just imagine being the only daughter of that Helen and trying to live up to her beauty. And live down her hot-crotch infamy. Fuck!—just imagining it makes my very ample guts churn! )

I mean, face it—Hollywood and television both, have in the past, and are still, constantly mining Greek myths for material. When that early 80s film, Clash of the Titans came out, I had to take Jonathan to see it three times. Terry, of course, had to come along, and though she enjoyed the first viewing, she wasn't so excited about the next two and she gave Jonathan no small amount of grief over that. And a few years ago it was remade at a big-budget level—with Liam Neeson, of all actors, as Zeus, for fuck's sake! (I mean, wouldn't Mad King Donald have been the natural, life-practiced choice for that role!) And from a quick Wiki-ing of it, it looks like it had a more adult and "Hollywooded" take on those great old Perseus and Pegasus myths than the 80s, kids' version that the critics panned but the public turned into a blockbuster.

And, about ten years ago the movie Troy came out with pretty-boy Brad Pitt as Achilles. And Eric Bana as Hector. Fuck—had the morons in charge of casting even read The Iliad? Or some background to it? That story took place in the mythical Age of Heroes, for Christ's sake! And those very heroic heroes weren't ordinary men by any stretch of the imagination—they were super-sized, super-strong concentrations of pure testosterone who when they ran out of giant spears to throw—or lost their giant swords—they picked up huge boulders to fling at each other! Christ, to truly cast for those two archaic warriors—I mean, those guys would have made Klingons look like limp-wristed computer-geeks! They should at least have gone into the UFC—or WWF or NFL lineman—smash-face pool and found some over-steroided modern warriors with a modicum of acting ability, not those pitiful, Hollywood pretty boys!

And even Orlando Bloom as Paris was a joke because Paris was as big and competent and Klingonish a hero-warrior as any of them, he just happened to value pussy over honor and thought fucking the most beautiful woman in the world a lot more fun than fighting. (A thousand years later, a Greek queen named Cleopatra had the same effect on the real Roman warrior Mark Anthony as the mythical Helen did on the mythical Paris!) And though Sean Bean as Odysseus would have kinda worked, Bean still isn't "Klingon" enough to do Odysseus justice, for though Odysseus was smart and wily, he was still a mighty, uber-macho, Age of Heroes warrior, albeit one with a ten-to-one ratio of muscle-to-brain instead of the fifty-to-one in the other great warriors! Especially Achillies!)

But hey, that's Hollywood, and that is what you get when an industry like that panders to a jaded, Disney-corrupted American audience (99.99% of which likely had never read The Iliad) instead of honoring history, or in this case, the greatest of mythical renditions of history.

Ironically, in my very belated readings about those Greeks, and particularly in my reading those works of Homer, I came face-to-face with a glaring inadequacy in our modern schooling system. Had I been born into a middle class family in Victorian England, Dear Reader, (I just couldn't resist that!) I'd likely have read both of Homer's works—in Greek!—before even reaching puberty. The Victorians were crazy about those ancient Greeks and I recently came across a quote by John Stuart Mill on the importance of the battle of Marathon, where the Greeks, (this is real history here, not mythical history) against overwhelming odds, thwarted an invasion attempt by the Persian armies under Darius in 490 that had it succeeded, would have seen the whole of the Greece and its great, creative civilization absorbed into that vast swamp-of-blah that was the fate of vassal states (satrapies) in that Persian empire, with the result that the incredible influence it subsequently had on our Western culture would have been lost. As Mill said,

"...the Battle of Marathon, even as an event in British history, is more important than the Battle of Hastings."

I guess the trouble with all this Greek stuff is it happened so long ago and is so incredibly complex and chaotic—I mean, Greece was not a single country but a hodge-podge of individual—and very individualistic—city-states that were more often at war with each other than with any outside empires—that you have to study to great depth before the true picture of it even begins to jell in the mind. And until you put in the time and effort to really study and understand not just what made up the totality of that incredible civilization, but its individual city-states and their various great individuals populating them, it is almost impossible to get "the big picture" of their vast influence on our modern culture.

Actually, and quite importantly, I think, now that it comes to my manic and very much addled mind, the essence of the greatness of Greece not only lies in the fact of all those individual and individualistic city-states, but of all of the incredible individualistic individuals in those city-states. In fact, learning the history of ancient Greece is all about learning about the personalities, deeds, and fates of those incredible individuals, (mostly men, of course!) of which it seems there was no end! And they all seem to stand out like big red pimples on pubescent Helen's face. In fact, it has been said that one defining feature of that great Greek civilization, was that it's system of city-states fostered human individualism like it had never been fostered in any previous civilization, though that begs the asking of the question: which came first, the chickens of the city-states or the eggs of those highly individualized Greeks?

But the answer to that unanswerable question notwithstanding, it looks to me like one legacy most definitely passed down to our modern world was an obsession with our existences as individuals, and of course, with our egos, which naturally and inevitably is something that we today have pushed way past whatever level (or depth) those ancient Greeks did. I mean, fuck—those guys, even the most individual of them, had a sense of civic duty we can't even imagine today, while today, every Joe—or Jane—Nobody, wants his or her "fifteen minutes of fame", wants to be a big, blazing pimple on Helen's face—or Paris's ass!—whether they've got the talent and drive, or have even done anything important or society-serving, for it or not!

But all of that important historical, and likely not well know today stuff, on a more basic level, it was pretty much impossible to get through grade school without some exposure to ancient Greece and its incredible culture, if in no other way than hearing about Odysseus and his fantastical journey home to Ithaca from Troy. And it's just as impossible to get through high school without bumping into, and learning about, the fact that the democracy we take so for granted today pretty much started with the Athenian Greeks.

And of course, that some of the greatest creative and philosophical efforts in the history of this world—Herodotus, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle—came out of that ancient time and that ancient culture, though I suspect most don't know it well enough to understand that the only city-state that had both that democratic system and that incredible creative explosion, was Athens. (Just as—as John pointed out—that infamous, two-part, generation-spanning and devastating-to-all-combatants Peloponnesian War eerily prefigured our own, two-part, generations-spanning World War.)

But that as a stand-alone fact is pretty barren and incomplete, so then you've got to get off your ass and do some in-depth reading about Athens and its relationship to the other city-states, particularly Sparta, and most particularly that disastrous and just mentioned, Peloponnesian War that Athens and her allies had with Sparta and its allies. A war that Athens, ultimately, through democratic greed and stupidity, lost in a big and disastrous way.

And of course, in studying that war you learn that though those Athenian Greeks created democracy, they were anything but historical good guys to anybody but themselves, (kinda like those "Fascist States of America" which is always congratulating itself for being such a paragon of democratic principles and personal freedom, but which the citizens of Vietnam and Iraq—and Islamic terrorists!—see in a very different way!) for during that Peloponnesian War their empire (which paid for all those great, still-attracting-tourists-today buildings on the Acropolis that the great Spartan general Lysander chose not to destroy when he conquered Athens, but which modern pollution is!) was every bit as nasty, controlling, and repressive as has been the "American Empire," which not only dominated and "won" our not-so-distant "Cold War"—and still, very imperially dominates world politics today. (If you are reluctant to believe me, Google Athens' invasion of the neutral island of Melos during that war and its treatment of the citizens of that island—and compare that with the "Fascist States of America" invasions of Vietnam and Iraq—and even poor little Hawaii, for that matter!)

Though of course, we know from our high school days those Athenians weren't always the most benevolent of democrats because of that famous, nasty, paranoid clique of ancient "Joe McCarthys" who infamously tried and executed Socrates for the crime of being a bit too vociferous an iconoclast, a bit too much of an gadfly, who was constantly biting at the ankles of their powers, limitations, hypocrisies and corruptions. And likely their stupidity, but as Friedrich Schiller (he wrote the words to Beethoven's famous "Ode to Joy" movement in the Ninth Symphony!) famously said: Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain, and never more so than when coupled with that old truism, Might is always right. (I wonder what Schiller would have to say about the mass movement—sixty-five-million-voters-strong—of abysmal American stupidity that elected Mad King Donald as king of their former republic! Or what Plato would have to say about it, given that it was just such a Debacle of Stupidity that turned him off the idea of democracy as a valid political system and provoked him to write his authoritarian manifesto, The Republic.)

So even when you think, as did I, after getting a normal, third-grade, modern liberal arts education, (it sure as fuck wasn't Harvard, or even McGill, that I went to!) that you know about as much as you need to about those ancient Greeks, once you really start to study them, you discover that you know pretty much sweet fuck all! (John, on that account, had the advantage over me because he had so little formal education—as I've said, Grade 3, if that!—that he knew as soon as he encountered those ancient Greeks (through his wife, Catherine) that he knew absolutely nothing about them, but he found them intriguing (and likely took Catherine at her word that they were important) so after he became the Uncle John that I was blessed to know, he set about to learn all he could right from the ground up.

As I've just said, John was a Greek-freak, but he was also a knowledge-freak (Christ, I never met a guy so insatiably curious—he was buying and reading books pretty much up to the day he died!) and one set of books he acquired from a book club soon after I met him was that already-mentioned set of very popular history books by Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization, which were written, not to be the dull-as-dogfood tomes that only impresses university professors and are only read by their captive-audience students, but as informative and insightful and damned interesting books for the general public. (I seem to remember that if you joined the club, you got about eight or nine of those books for next to nothing, then "paid" for them buy buying a handful of subsequent books, and though I think lemming-hordes of people signed up for that great deal, and still have The Story of Civilization proudly displayed on their bookshelves, I am sure John was one of the few who actually read all of them all.)

Anyways, Book II in that series was The Life of Greece, and since I just re-read it last year I have no trouble remembering Durant's very apropos-to-this-discussion Preface (he wrote a real Preface for it that was only two pages long—you, Dear Over-burdened Reader, should be so fuckin' lucky!) an apropos portion of which I've looked up and typed out here for you,

Excepting machinery, there is hardly anything secular in our culture that does not come from Greece. Schools, gymnasiums, arithmetic, geometry, history , rhetoric, physics, biology, anatomy, hygiene, therapy, cosmetics, poetry, music, tragedy, comedy, philosophy, theology, agnosticism, skepticism, stoicism, epicureanism, ethics, politics, idealism , philanthropy, cynicism tyranny, plutocracy, democracy . . .

Pretty damn hard, after reading that, to gainsay the notion that those Greeks had a monstrous and lasting influence on our modern culture, and it sure makes that quote of Mill's all the more accurate. And since this "Preface" (oh, do I ever wish—as must you, Dear Reader—it was only two pages long!) is supposed to be about John, it fits in very nicely with John's assertion that the Greek civilization was one giant manifestation of creative genius, that the nagual, or the Whatthefuckever, had used it as a kind of Nile river meant, first to flood the tonal of those times with the gushing, rich, silt-laden waters of a formerly incomprehensible level and variety of creativity, then induce that incredible river, through those Greeks love of sending out colonies in all directions, to flow through the upcoming centuries, depositing all that creative silt along its river-course as it went, a Nile that is still flowing and still depositing that amazing silt. (Another thing I loved about Will Durant's book on Greece—besides its fundamental readability—was the fact that when he indexed all those Greek individuals, he included a pronunciation guide to their very difficult to pronounce—according to how they are spelled—names, which John took the trouble to neatly print into a very handy notebook that he kept with the book!)

And strange though it is that John's imagination was expansive—and millennia spanning!—enough to conflate the incredible and lasting eruption of Greek genius into human history with that notion of the nagual brought to our modern minds by that fraud Castaneda, and though I very desperately want to butterfly-flutter off that disturbing "flower" of Castaneda's nagual, it seems to have a powerful magnetic hold on me that makes me want to blabber on about the nature of individuality and genius.

And I guess one final note on those incredible Greeks must come from the fact that while I was at university, Ancient Rome had always tickled my fancy—I think it was the salacious stories about those famous orgies they used to have . . . and a few imitative and very lubricious "toga parties" I attended during my first year . . . that did it!—and I took a few courses on that subject, with one irritating, and at the time, confusing aspect of it being that the Roman culture, great though it was at war and bureaucratic organization, was a pretty much a chunk of sodden driftwood when it came to being creative and "cultural," so, as one of my professors put it, "After being conquered by the Romans militarily, the Greeks turned around and conquered the Romans culturally. And though Roman's military conquest of Greece didn't last that long, the Greeks' cultural conquest of the Romans is still going on and is the foundation of our modern culture—thanks to the Renaissance!"

A hard assertion to gainsay, given that cultural "conquest" was so profound that much of the Roman pantheon of gods ended up Greek: Jupiter/Zeus, Juno/Hera, Venus/Aphrodite, Mars/Ares, etc. And it is said there reached a point where no Roman could consider himself truly educated unless he could speak Greek. And hell, even Virgil's famous Aeneid was just a Roman sequel to Homer's Iliad—and not one tenth as powerful. Then there's all the other slavish imitations, not only literary matters, but in sculpture and the architecture, and of course, during the Empire, the decadence. (Anyone with their eyes even half-open today can easily see just how decadently Roman Mad King Donald is—truly a "reincarnation" of Caligula he is, and one can wonder if his ultimate fate will be any different than Caligula's!)

But back to what I was trying to get at about that damned nagual—I mean, fantastical and unbelievable as all that incomprehensible stuff that John was so "into" about that fraud Castaneda's nagual, and its power to "invade" and alter and expand our little "island of the tonal," when you look at the powerful and long lasting influence of Greece, you can start to tilt a bit in the direction of believing that something very powerful and equally as mysterious was bent on making its way into this world in order to change it. To force it to grow and evolve. To wake it up to its potentials!

### Chapter Ten

BUT ENOUGH ALREADY WITH ALL THAT GREEK SHIT! And on with the narrative. And once again I've got to scroll back to see what flower of a thought the butterfly of that distraction lifted off from . . .oh yeah, I was on my way back from abusing the paint and the pictures on the walls of my poor, groaning, nose-pinching bathroom when I got drawn to my bookshelves where Arthur Koestler's "library angel" (Yeah, fuckin' right!—another mind-fucking concept straight out of the nagual, from too far outside the frail hummingbird shell of my cosmic egg!) pointed out Joe Pierce's Crack in the Cosmic Egg to me and prompted me to pick it up where its aging and cracking binding allowed it to automatically open at the page and passage that created the long, preceding digression, and picking it up again and leafing through it, I find my attention being drawn to a page where John had used a red marker to make a bright square around this following passage,

William Blake considered our capacity for imagination to be our "divine genius." Jesus was Blake's most imaginative man, since he could bridge the logical gaps.

(John had used a pen to draw a line from the word Jesus, to the nearby margin where he'd printed in large, capital letters: A MOST IMAGINATIVE AND IMAGINARY MAN!)

In his marginalia to Reynolds, Blake claimed that our truest self was in our innate ideas with which we are born. He did not mean this in the Platonic sense, but as the capacity for creative and original thinking, independent of mechanical information from a world. Biological and economic necessities as formative devices were denied by Blake. "The eternal body of man is the Imagination, that is, God himself . . . It manifests itself in the works of art (in Eternity all is Vision). Man is all Imagination; God is Man and exists in us and we in Him."

At the end of that passage, John had scribbled: See page 150, so I leafed ahead for a look-see and found these two paragraphs just as brightly squared off and asterisked with a red marker,

In this book I have used the metaphors forest and clearing for our reality and its potential, or for reality-adjusted thinking and that continuum of possible synthesis triggered by passionate desire. I have claimed that the correspondences and boundaries between the functions are, and always will be, obscure. Obscure because conscious looking is a search for verification of the notions that impel the search, and always has a circular, mirroring element to it.

Imagination nevertheless opens to syntheses, larger than the sum total of reason. Something from the dark forest seems to be added to or encompassed by the creative vision from our clearing. The new structures "found" in the forest always reflect the expanding light from the clearing, but are always more than logical synthesis can produce. There is a form of radical discontinuity, to every truly creative idea or discovery.

So there you have Blake—very blasphemously, for his day!—saying,

The eternal body of man is the Imagination, that is, God himself . . . It manifests itself in the works of art (in Eternity all is Vision). Man is all Imagination; God is Man and exists in us and we in Him.

which as much as I can limitedly figure it out, brings us back to that tonal/nagual crap of Castaneda's, so in Castanedean sorcerer-speak, that quote could go,

The eternal body of man is the nagual, is the Nagual itself . . .It manifests itself in the works of art (in the Nagual, all is Vision). Man is all Nagual; Nagual is Man and exists in us and we in It.

(One thing I did like about reading Castaneda is Don Juan's world is a very "godless" world, which pretty much means someone could adopt the collected works of Castaneda as their Bible—or their Koran—yet, unlike Christians and Muslims, feel no compulsion to go out and torture and murder people who don't understand—and believe in it—exactly the way they do!)

And you also have Joe Pierce aptly calling Don Juan's tonal "the clearing" and his nagual, "the dark forest," and then trying to come up with some kind of understandable explanation for the processes of true genius. A process created when something from "the dark forest" seems to be added to or encompassed by the creative vision from our clearing. And in trying to see this from John's POV, I get the insight that Joe Pierce doesn't seem to quite grasp, or want to grasp, or have the humility to grasp, which is that that this creative process/vision—genius—is never initiated or controlled from within "the clearing," the tonal, but always from outside of it, from "the dark forest," from the very conscious and intentional nagual itself, and that is why genius is not only as utterly unpredictable as it is life-and-reality-changing for humanity and our cosmic egg, but why genius, as Bulwer-Lytton seems to have so insightfully commented, "does what it must." This little tonal, this little "clearing," this little worldview, which is both outside and within us, that we call our cosmic egg is basically an intentional creation of the nagual, the "great big dark forest," the Mystery, the Ocean of Spirit, and we, as mere tonals, as mere egos, have no control whatsoever over the totality what is being created by it! And not only no control over that totality, but no real rational understanding of it, either. Or even the capacity to rationally understand it!

FUCK!—I think from that you can see why that fuckin' book fucked with my head just a little too violently for me to read much of it. Christ, just thinking about that tonal/nagual-"clearing/dark forest" shit makes my poor head feel like a stubbed gout-toe! Then on top of that you get that totally abstract and esoteric jargon, that gotta-impress-the-intellectuals verbiage, which can only obfuscate the totally obscure even worse! I mean, shit—what the fuckin' hell does that phrase, "for reality-adjusted thinking and that continuum of possible synthesis" fuckin' mean?

I've got a pretty good university education—or at least I thought it was pretty good when I first got to wear the cap-and-gown and was handed my precious scroll!—and there are countless passages like that in that fuckin' damn head-fuck of a book that I would read over three or four times and still make no fuckin' sense out of them at all! Couldn't then, and still can't now! And just typing out those two paragraphs from that book—and feeling so humiliatingly stupid by my lack of understanding of just that little bit of it—has brought on an incipient migraine so I am heading to the bathroom for a handful of Tylenol and my dark bedroom, where I am going to flop down onto my filthy, stinking bed and try and take a fuckin' nap that hopefully will head it off. (No fuckin' pun intended!!!!!!)

(Late the next day and back at the keyboard!)

Nope! It fucking didn't! That nasty, malicious sucker lasted for almost a day and a fucking half! And now I'm probably going to induce another one of those fuckers just trying to get this narrative back on track. Though why I am even working on it tonight is totally fucking beyond my present very limited comprehension. Fuck!—you'd think I am some kind of genius and in accordance with Bulwer-Lytton's aphorism, just must, just have to, work on this fucking discombobulated mess, that the nagual is force-manifesting something real important through me and this fuckin' "Preface!".(Boy, when I finally get hauled off to the head-shop to get my broken-down head worked on by the noggin-mechanics, he or she is going to have to hide a big grin on hearing me describe that incredibly grandiose delusion!)

Though in a sense my feeling of having to write this seems both natural and true because this "Preface" has developed some kind of weird momentum all of its own that seems to be both dragging me along with it and pushing me to write it at the same time—like I am a pathetic little boxcar sandwiched between two big, roaring, smoke-spewing locomotives . . .And fuck again but it's a long scroll back . . . to . . fuck . . .(pardon all my "French" here but migraines really put me in a bad fuckin' mood!) . . . scroll . . . scroll . . . scroll . . .all the way back to—Jeez, I can't eff'n believe this!—back to being a nubile, Daddy-diddled and thus pathologically-over-sexed co-ed with delusions of writing grandeur in a romp-rumpled bed with Professor Gerald Weirs, PhD (Yeah, like the old, farmer/manure-joke goes: Piled Higher & Deeper!) and pretty much being told by him that I was as close to being a creative genius as Hitler ever was to getting the Nobel Peace Prize, so my long cherished dream of becoming a great, modern female Tolstoy or Flaubert or Dickens—or more accurately, a George Sand or George Elliot—hell, even a fuckin' female Hemingway—ended right there in that sweaty, cum-sticky bed, and if it was not in the Tarot for me to become a novelist, I was going to burn the deck, drop out of university and make some decent money from my out-of-control sexuality.

Or at least I planned to, but I made the mistake of revealing my plan to my sister Joanna, who immediately told my mother, who immediately told my father, and the two of them—with this bordering on being my second abandonment of my sacred, middle class duty of going to university—invaded the sanctum sanctorum of my black-painted, psychedelic-postered, black-light lit, rock-rockin' bedroom, and after turning on the blinding, over-head incandescent and lifting the stylus off the acid-enhanced kaleidoscope of Jimi's Axis, Bold as Love album, which was most synchronistically playing (not that I got it, then), "Castles Made of Sand," then proceeded to do their best, and very good, imitations of Spanish Inquisitors as they convinced the very stoned and now totally freaking me that being burned at the stake would seem like a visit to a tanning salon compared with what they planned to do to me if I dared drop out—and catastrophically—disappoint them again.

Needless to say, me being utterly gutless me, once my head straightened out enough for me to think three rational thoughts in a row, I gave in to their Inquisitorial pressures and stayed in university where I allowed my soul to be Titanic-anchored with the diminished and depressing dream of becoming something I could get trained to do—become a school teacher. ("Like my father before me." LOL!) That is, until other events, starting with my meeting my Uncle John during that summer vacation of "Woodstock '69," then three quarters of the way through the following year, meeting Jonathan Sr., "falling in lust," (more inguinally extreme than usual) getting pregnant with Jonathan Jr., and, to save myself from my Inquisition instigated, faggot-piled, gasoline-soaked, charred-to-ashes fate, married the aforementioned Jonathan Sr., thus delaying my Inquisitors' sacred dream of "doing them proud" by me becoming an educated and respectable teacher—"like my father before me." (There was no way I was going to become a nurse like "my mother before me" because I couldn't stand the sight of blood or being around sick people.)

Yeah, you got that right!—it makes me wanna puke too! Fuckin' all of it—but most especially the getting married to Jonathan Sr. part! Like has been too oft said by pontificating head-mechanics: young women marry their fathers! Though given what a sweet dear Jonathan Jr. has all his life been to me—and the loveable "little hooligan" Terry had been when little—I can't say I have any complaints about the getting pregnant part—and dropping out of university to become a fulltime mother part!)

So now that manically imperative, all-about me side-flight is over, back to Uncle John (remember him?) and the purposive "narrative" of this purposive "Preface!" (Remember it?)

On that crucial Saturday afternoon in February of 1980, when that ill-fated mall in my hometown caught fire while John was on his way in to visit me and "the kids" in the "Little Shitty" twenty miles away, I was an impoverished single mother with two kids who was also back at university in order to become the soul-betraying teacher my parents had so long dreamed I become. (Actually, just so I could get a decent, easy-to-get job and support my two kids!)

Ironically, as I was only much later to learn when reading John's memoirs, that due to my single-mother poverty, I was living in the ground-floor apartment of a huge, ancient fire-trap of a once "up-scale" mansion full of drunks, addicts, prostitutes and other single mothers which was but two blocks away from the massive, crumbling, erstwhile concrete grain silos left from the long-gone flour mill (the area was called "the Flour Mill") to which John had hauled a wagonload of wheat—and at the base of which he slept during his first night of freedom—to sell in order to get the money he needed to flee both the family farm and his beloved sister, Lisette, a fact that he never commented on but which must have seemed to him incredibly Jungian-synchronistic—even Castanedean omen-ous.)

John would make bi-monthly visits to my unit in that old pile of kindling (it did end up burning down, with the fire killing three people, but that event, fortunately, occurred five years after I escaped it) where, after surreptitiously sticking a hundred dollar bill in the old, round, blue Danish cookie tin I kept my "mad-money" in, he paid particularly assiduous attention to my young son, Jonathan (named, as mentioned, after his father but most blessedly—then and now—in no way resembling that dyed-in-the-wool, macho-asshole!).

He was always bringing him drawing and painting supplies that Jonathan loved getting but displayed no real aptitude for using, but which, to John's surprise, and delight, my daughter Terry, two years younger than Jonathan, put to talented use and which spurred her on to become the agency-owning graphic designer she so successfully is today. (Or at least that is what Jonathan told me she was doing, for as I may or may not have mentioned, Terry lives in Australia and will have nothing at all to do with me, which is often the case for the children of mentally ill parents who regularly go off the Meds-Rez and turn into tormenting fiends ever too-willing to manipulate their unfortunate offspring into emotional tornadoes that blow them to bits for weeks at a time and incite powerful feelings of justifiable parenticide.)

John's affection for Jonathan led me to think that John had been a life-long bachelor—like three of his brothers, not counting that pedophilic priest-creep, Matthew—and that it was a shame he'd never married and had a family because he sure would have been a great father. Boy, as the reading of The Fire will reveal, my usually moderately deficient female intuition—the reason I likely could never have become a creative writer—had gone totally walkabout on that count. I was so utterly off the mark that you'd think I was a fuckin' man!

That is not to say that John did not have a powerful effect on Jonathan, for when Jonathan, in his young, testosterone-driven, get-away-from-mother manhood-manifestation, had some problems finding his bearings in life and had partied himself out of his first year of college, (being paid for by John, who just laughed off the event as the typical high-jinks most young stallions get up to when they first leap out of the home corral and go racing across the fields of life-and-lust looking for freedom and mares in heat) he went west to follow in his father's footsteps on the oil rigs but instead spent a year as a cowhand on a foothills ranch. He said, when he quit it and went sprinting back to college, that he loved the life but "the work was too damn hard for the too damn little it paid!"

John's response to that had been a long chuckle and, "Yeah, if ya don't own your own spread, you're just a horse-ridin' nigger . . . and if ya do own it, you're two!" (John was never even remotely PC, and though when I once upbraided him on the use of that nefarious "n" word, he just laughed and said, "When I say nigger, I just mean a worked-to-death slave—I've got nothing against colored folks."

Another John, this one with the famous last name of Lennon, and through Yoko's influence, expressed the same attitude in his "Woman is the Nigger of the World" song, and as a reading of The Fire will show, John not only had nothing against "colored folks" (as he always called Blacks), but had a distinct fondness for them—as did they for him.

Yikes! When I said this was going to be an unpredictable trip, I guess I wasn't kidding! And though I knew it was going to evolve in an unpredictable fashion, I didn't think it would get this damn self-anecdotal! Though of course, why wouldn't it—mania is always, if nothing else, a state of utter, cat-like, self-absorption. So, with a mighty effort of my flea-feeble will, I am going to re-rail my thoroughly ditch-plowing train of thought and get it back on the mainline of talking about my Uncle John and his memoirs, The Fire, which is what you paid your money for—not this fuckin' monologue about me!

John and The Fire! . . John and The Fire! . . . John and The Fire! . . . I've got to use that as my mantra to keep reminding myself that that is the subject I am sitting my grotesquely fat ass at this computer terminal to write about. Yes, The Fire—that tumultuous and emotional roller-coaster of a poetic memoir of John's that, as I've already said, John was provoked into writing the initial words of by a fire that wiped out the mall that was essentially the downtown of my small home, on a frigid day in February, 1980. (John died while out riding his horse, on July 3, 1996, only a month or so after finishing the—obviously!—interminably process of writing the infernal thing.)

Since he was quite secretive about it, I believe—but am not totally sure about the fact—that he spent most of that sixteen years scribbling out this ridiculously long project. It was obvious from the change in his handwriting over those years that he wrote—scribbled!—a great deal each day at first, but as the months and years wore on, wrote less and less. Not that that was surprising as he was not only getting very old in those last years, but much of the latter part of Book Two is pure, deep, philosophical speculation that would have taxed even a younger mind and body to write. (Not that any younger minds could have written it, given that it was a distillation of a very powerful "hooch" of backwoods wisdom fermented over a long life of horrendous experiences, the reading of hundreds of books, and lots and lots of strenuous hours thinking about them!)

Shit! Fuck! Dammit-all-to-hell!—I wish I wouldn't have mentioned John's death, because that dark and tumultuous event has suddenly exploded in my mind like a nefariously placed roadside bomb and blown my equanimity-legs right off. Now I know that in the interest of literary brevity

(Ha, ha!—no $tyle-Nazi is ever going to holocaust this Preface, so brevity is not even in the gas chamber, let alone in the oven. Shit, that's not very PC, is it? Well—fuck it! Ya can't please everybody! Though of course, when you are a "loonar" who has gone walkabout from the Meds-Rez, ya can't fuckin' please no-fuckin'-body!)

I should just leave it at that: that John died on July 3rd, 1996, while out riding his horse, but I feel a great inner pressure—Fuck-a-Brahma-bull! Maybe that's the nagual head-buttin' my gargantuan ass to force me to write it and I thusly am a bona fide fucking genius [LOL]) to elaborate on that momentous event, especially as it is full of synchronistic components that would have caught even Jupiter Jung's attention. It is a day I still remember like it was the day Kennedy was shot, or the Twin Towers became a single pile of rubble, or worse—for me!—the first time my father fucked me, not just because it was one of those real dark and traumatic days you only ever want to forget but never can, but also because it began with me waking from a troubled night's sleep swimming in the cesspool of the sense that something real bad was going to happen that day.

And that particular day was already endemically bad because it was the third day of crushingly oppressive heat wave dominated by tropical levels of humidity only one percent down from rain, and that uber-humid air mass that had invaded from the Gulf of Mexico, also brought with it an unendurable miasma of pollution from the industrial heartland of the "Fascist States of America.(Wasteland, is more like it!)

The weather report for the day was predicting violent afternoon thunderstorms followed by an invasion by a cold front sweeping down from the north. I, and surely the rest of the city's sweating, suffering population, couldn't wait! And sure enough, those weather-liars were right for once and soon after lunch, the three-day, cloudless, grey-smog sky pretty much turned into a black-hole, distant thunder boomed, and the that hot-and-damp-as-an-unchanged-diaper calm air did its imitation of a snow machine by accelerating, in a deafening roar, from zero to sixty miles an hour in about two seconds, and by the time I'd made it to the front window to close it, the sight before my eyes was something to behold.

It just happened to be garbage and recycling day, and along with the trees bending sideways and losing branches and leaves to this near-tornado onslaught, all manner of brightly colored garbage and recycling material, along with tumbling garbage cans and blue boxes, was flying, in a horizontal, multi-colored, jetstream-blizzard along the street. A neighbor's big red canoe, which he usually kept on a wooden stand and chained to a tree in his yard, decided it wanted to bust its chain and take a cruise on this wild stream, except it did so in a violent, end-over-end tumbling motion that only terminated with its prow-first (or stern—hard to tell) docking into the windshield and front seat of another neighbor's brand new Jeep Cherokee. (Yeah, I know—compared to what F5 tornadoes do in Oklahoma and Kansas—and what Katrina did to New Orleans—it was a non-event, but to me it was pretty—far out!)

Now I hardly expect anyone to believe this, but at the time the storm struck, I'd been listening to our local FM classic rock station, and The Doors' "Riders on the Storm" was playing. (It was the 25th anniversary of Jim's untimely death, so they were playing a lot of Doors music that day.) I'd just barely noticed the connection between the storm and the song when, as often happens during such storms, the power went out at the exact instant that Jim had just finished singing, "...an actor out alone." Now normally, at that time of day, when the power fails, you are not left in the dark, but those storm clouds were so low, dense and black-hole black it was as dark as night in that suddenly powerless room.

Needless to say, all of this "happenin'-shit," was no small adrenalin-rush, especially with blinding flashes of lightning strobing through the room from right outside the window and the instant Zeus-claps of thunder that made me feel like a microbe caught in the hollow between two clapping hands, (Actually, more like Robbie Burns' "wee little beastie" trapped inside Keith Moon's bass drum during a Who concert!) but it got way weirder when, in the middle of all this, I had a vivid vision of John out riding his horse in that storm. As fast as I focused on him in that vision, and realized it was him, he turned, like he knew I was staring at him, looked at me, took off his hat, held it high above his head, and with a big smile on his face, shouted, "They are finally here for me, Rache—time for me to go through my final membrane of destiny!" And with that, he slapped the horse's rump with his hat, yelled "HeeYAHHH!" and the two of them—he and his horse!—leapt into the black, roiling, lightning-riven clouds and disappeared.

### Chapter Eleven

At the instant that vision faded I was overwhelmed with the potent sense that something bad had happened, and that bad thing was that John had died. As fast as I could get to it, I ran to the phone and though, as was often the case, it had not gone out with the power, when I called John's number, there was no answer, even after twenty—I counted 'em!—rings. (He had as much use for an answering machine as a nipple-ring, and when I suggested he get one—an answering machine, Dummy!—he just laughed and said, "If I don't answer the phone it is either because I am not home, not in the mood to talk . . . or dead. If the former two, call back later. If you can't reach me after two days, it's likely the latter, so call the undertaker! Then come out and feed the poor dog and horse!")

Now he just as well could have been in town shopping as out riding his horse in that storm and dropping dead while doing it, but I was somehow was filled with the hundred percent certainty that the latter—and that latter turned out to be the harsh, bitter truth.

Much as it was a quick-passing storm and within half an hour the sun was getting into a shoving match with the scattering clouds for its place in the startlingly blue sky, trying to make my way out to the highway to drive the twenty miles—through the dramatically cooler, cleaner air—to John's farm was no small undertaking! Many of the streets were blocked by downed trees and power poles and the ones that weren't, were plugged with all the traffic created by those downed trees, power poles, and of course, the non-functioning street lights. (Electricity has become like air—like water to a tuna!—we never notice its value till it's gone, or just not available—like someone having a lethal asthma attack!)

But finally I made it to the highway, only then really taking notice of the dramatic change in the weather, the system out of the north that caused the storm (truly a meteorological Star Wars battle: the good, clean, cool Ben Kenobi system sweeping out of the north to do battle with the bad, dirty, muggy Darth Vader crap from the south!) being obviously cooler, fresher and drier and for the first time in three days, my skin actually felt both cool and dry.

As the cliché goes, my heart was in my throat as I drove along the road to John's farm, my fingers-crossed that his truck would not be parked in front of his house. Alas, it was, and, again, fingers crossed, I opened the door and shouted his name, hoping to hear his deep and hearty voice—still, at 96, or thereabouts!—shouting for me to come in as his dog raced up to do its sniffing routine up my legs and, as usual, ending in my crotch. But the house was silent and empty and my suddenly cavernously-empty heart plummeted straight down to hell at the reality of it.

The next thing to do was check the barn, fingers-crossed that his horse was in its stall, but the barn, like the house, was silent and empty—save for the ubiquitous flies swarming over the shit!—and I knew there was nothing left to do but head out and start tromping the soggy trails, looking for him. I had the passing thought of calling the police, but I doubted—busy as they were with the problems created by that storm—that they would take seriously fears that something bad had happened to John based solely on a vision and my intuition.(That damn thing actually could work sometimes—or maybe it was always trying to intrude into my consciousness, but in my so persistently ignoring it for so long, it learned to give up after only one "ring.")

While standing outside the barn trying to decide which of the several trails into the woods to take, I was startled by a hawk swooping low over my head and almost deafening me with a series of loud, harsh cries. Keee!...keee!...keee!...it screamed as it climbed back into the sky and flew to the northwest. Knowing hawks to be John's favorite bird—he'd always be pointing them out to me in the sky, or woods, on a telephone wire or pole, though it was always a mystery how he so consistently noticed them!—I could then but start off down the trail in that direction, trudging its dripping, steaming length until it met up with, and followed the river.

And equal to the emotionally unpleasant aspects of that sopping trek down that sodden trail—I was 98.8% certain about what I was going to find—was the physical discomfort of it, for along with getting totally soaked by the dripping foliage, I was under relentless attack by what John had always called "the bush Luftwaffe," swarms of mosquitoes that were bigger and more voracious than any I'd remembered in years. I truly felt like the south coast of England during the Battle of Britain, though all I had to fight back against that relentlessly attacking horde was a steady barrage of useless curses and my two frantically flapping hands.

At one point, when I stopped for a frantic, hand-slapping breather on a large slab of lichen-covered granite, that hawk re-appeared overhead. Keee! . . . Keee!...Keee! . . . it loud and harsh again screamed at me until I got back on my sodden-shoed feet and resumed my trudge down the trail, at which point it flew on ahead of me, keeeing incessantly and loudly. (When you read well into The Fire, you will discover that hawks play no small role in important events in John's life.)

Finally, not far ahead of me, it began circling and keeeing even louder, forcing my heart into my throat as I sensed I was getting near to what I was positive I did not want to find. And sure enough, when I reached a very familiar clearing on the bank of the river where a massive boulder rose out of a giant blueberry patch and which was one of John's favorite spots to visit (for reasons I don't want to get into right now!) over which the hawk had been circling, I first spied John's saddled horse, its head down and looking, not only wet, but obviously distressed and dispirited.

It whickered and snorted and stomped a front hoof as I approached, and only on drawing close to her did I finally hear a strange sound that at first I could not identify, then immediately saw the dark, wet form on the ground, which was John, wearing his blue jeans and jean jacket. He fallen down in a patch of tall blueberry bushes covered with large blue berries. Beside his hatless, white-haired head, lay the dog, his head on his outstretched front paws. Coming from the poor, disconsolate beast's barely open lips, was the sound I'd previously been unable to identify, a low, piteous, heart-wringing whine. He didn't move as I approached but just looked up at me with his sad, brown eyes and whined even louder.

I knew John was dead, and I knew he had been dead for several hours, but I still shrieked out his name and leapt the last few yards to his wet, prone body, where I knelt down in the wet bushes and, with great difficulty—rigor was setting in—and to the sound of the whining dog, the whickering horse, and that keeeing, circling hawk, turned him over and rested his heavy torso in my trembling lap that suddenly got very warm and wet as I pissed my pants.

Never in my life, before or since, have I felt so goddamn utterly bad, nor had my senses been so keenly attuned—Castaneda would have said I was in a state of extreme heightened awareness—to everything around me, so much so that I will swear that, much as I rationally refuse to believe in spirits, I felt like I was surrounded by a horde of them, most of them the nature spirits John had always taken for granted and talked to constantly when he was out on his rides.

(I once asked him how he could be so comfortable living so alone for so many years as he did, but he just laughed and said, "I'm constantly surrounded by spirits that are the best friends any man can have, and as long as I am out in nature and not in a "Shitty" surrounded by crowds of noisy, mindless human beings, I am no more alone than is any single note in a Beethoven symphony.")

But I could sense the very unambiguous presence of a group of spirits that were of a definitely higher, and more powerful order, with one in particular, as I stared in its direction, suddenly glowing just enough for me to notice it, and when I did, I'd swear I first smelled the scent of fresh lilacs very strongly (lilacs never bloom in July!) then heard "it" speak to me—right inside my head—in a sweet, soft, feminine voice that sounded just like a wind-chime, "We are glad you followed our directions and found John, Rachel. This traumatic moment marks for you a stepping through a . . . membrane . . . a membrane of destiny. As of now, your old life is over and your new one begins—your destiny is now to be our memory-keeper. We know you won't let us down."

And with that final word, "down," that hawk swooped down until its wing almost—or maybe even did!—touched the top of John's head where it rested in my lap—the whoosh of its wing-noise startling the hell out of me!—then with three extra loud keees as it ascended, flew off up the river, resuming its keeeing after some distance, a sound that trapped my attention and dragged it up the river, like a helium balloon that has escaped a child's hand and soars away, trailing its string. On and on that keeeing hawk flew, dragging some essential part of me along with it, its keeeing growing fainter and fainter, only letting me go and allowing me to return to John when the sudden snapping of a tree branch behind me broke that entrancing spell.

When that loud, and inexplicable, snap of the tree branch finally yanked my attention back from being towed up the river by the sound of that keeeing hawk, I looked back to where that glowing shape had been, but it was not only visually gone, I had no sense of its, or its companions, presence. I could still feel the lesser spirits, the nature spirits, mingling around John and I, but the others were gone and within minutes I began to doubt they'd ever been there, or that one of them, with a voice like a wind-chime, had spoken to me.

All that helped me hang onto any sense of reality for that brief episode was two phrases, one being memory-keeper, and the other, membrane of destiny, the former phrase being utterly strange to me, while the latter was one John had used many times in our conversations and which I then never really understood at all, but which I have since come to somewhat understand. And hey!—how I came to finally understand that very spiritually important notion of a membrane of destiny, is a story worth telling. (Well, worth telling for me, as its manic teller, though maybe not so much worth reading for you, as its likely very bored reader!)

My Aha! breakthrough on that membrane of destiny concept overwhelmed me one day months after John's death when I was in a really depressed and going through my collection of rock 'n' roll vinyl and came across an old gem I hadn't played in years. It was Kansas's Point of Know Return, with its splendid and still-famous cover of an old wooden sailing ship tipping over a waterfall, to what at first looks like its doom, but which on closer inspection, proves to be a whole new, and very different world. And as fast as my eyes focused on that great cover (If you are not familiar with it, or have forgotten it, it's worth Googling!) the words, membrane of destiny popped into my head, along with the sudden and over-powering compulsion to go to one of my book shelves and stare at the books.

I'd had similar compulsions before and knew that at some point, Koestler's "library angel" would focus my attention so powerfully that the book it intended me to see would literally seem to "pop out" at me, and if I pulled it out, it would open at some important passage. (I've read enough about this phenomenon to know it is hardly unique to me, though, since I don't believe in spirits or "library angels," I can but conveniently, Scully-reduce the phenomena to just my own sub-conscious mind being aware of what I needed to know, and pointing out the appropriate book to me.)

And sure enough, my attention got powerfully drawn to Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which, even in the depths of the tar pit of that depression, buoyed up my soul and put a smile on my face because if ever there existed a soul-mate for John as I knew him, it was that old iconoclast Whitman, whom John had read intently and often quoted, and after pulling it out and letting it fall open where it wanted, (where my sub-conscious opened it to) I found my eyes drawn to,

This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look's at the crowded heaven,

And I said to my spirit, When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the

pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them, shall we be fill'd and

satisfied then?

And my spirit said, No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond.

And KAZAAM!—I got it! Got it because I'm a total shit at thinking for myself and my respect for Whitman meant I could eschew that so-impossible-for-me task, and take it as gospel! And got it also because I was suddenly overwhelmed with a vivid vision of our spiritual growth being a complex and varied process. A process that sometimes is a violent event like Kansas's Point of Know Return and sometimes like Whitman's lock-lifts in a canal. A perfect metaphor if ever there was one and no surprise that a great poet like Whitman, living in the time he did when canals and lift-locks were common, used it.

Whitman's metaphor is even better than Kansas's Point of Know Return—though not by a lot! I mean, if you've ever gone up a lock-lift in a canal, you would know what I'm talking about—you are in a boat motoring along at your lower level until you come to the lock, and after motoring into it, you sit in the boat whiling away the time as the water slowly, and imperceptibly floats you up . . . up . . . up . . . until suddenly, the lift is complete and off you motor at that new level that quickly becomes the "new normal" as that old and lower level is now left behind and quickly forgotten.

Though even as I felt the satisfaction of Whitman's understanding of the process, I realized that it wasn't the whole truth and that for some people it wasn't always so controlled and placid and that sometimes the picture on the Kansas album was the dominant truth, and instead of uneventfully floating to a new level, we get storm-driven, like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner,

With sloping masts and dipping prow,

as who pursued with yell and blow

Still treads the shadow of his foe,

And forward bends his head,

The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,

And southward aye we fled.

And now there came both mist and snow,

And it grew wondrous cold:

And ice, mast-high, came floating by,

As green as emerald.

across a raging sea—of knowledge and of spiritual growth—and end up—like the Mariner and his crew-mates—in a whole new world that on first entering it could well feel like those ancient mammoths who one minute were eating the sub-tropical wildflowers and the next were caught up in a catastrophe so rapid and violent they were freezing to death—and doing so, so fast those wildflowers were still found intact in their mouths and stomachs millennia later.

And as fast as that insight settled, like a giant eagle on a cliff-top in my brain, I thought of The Doors' first single, "Break on Through (To the Other Side)" and wondered if it represented an actual or intuited passage through a membrane of destiny, though as fast as that eagle could get its footing, another came swooping in and knocked it off, that being Bob Seger's great line in his hit, "Against the Wind," where he wishes he was presently still swimming in the warm pool of ignorance, of not-knowing that he'd been blessed to swim in years before.

And what could that word wind do but pull me back to the Kansas album in hand with its great and anomalous-for-that-album song, "Dust in the Wind," which I put on the turn-table and as I listened to it was zapped into a memory of one time listening to that album before going to visit Uncle John and having "Dust in the Wind" ear-worming around in my head all the way there, so asked him, basically on my arrival, "Is that all we really are, Uncle John—just dust in the wind? Just a tiny speck of dust being blown around by a great big cosmic wind—nothing of any importance at all?"

He didn't immediately answer me, but just stared at me, obviously not really seeing me, his attention captivated by whatever was going on in his head, then finally he said, "Well Rache,, that's not like you to ask such a deep question . . . apropos to nothing at all and before I've even made you a cup of my 'famous' Joe, but . . . as far as I am concerned . . . the answer is . . . yes and . . . no! You see, we are only ever as big as our awareness. If all we ever are aware of is our ego-self and the safe and predictable little world—the cosmic hummingbird egg—that our ego-self tends to like to make for itself and in which it can feel safe, then truly we are never anything bigger than a tiny speck of dust in that great big cosmic wind many call Fate.

"But if we encourage—or more like, force—ourselves to become aware of our spirit-being, and thus also force our awareness to grow and expand outside of the tiny confining speck of pollen of our ego, then we can become as big as that cosmic wind that is blowing us. Actually, we become that wind . . . that wind really being the ultimate Awareness . . .or Consciousness . . . that is the Universe! Many mystics think of Consciousness as that which some call God, but that pretty much delimits it into a projected and ego-personified absurdity, for that Wind—Consciousness—is anything but that nasty, dirty-minded, shit-souled, lice-bearded, old Blakean Nobodaddy sitting eternally on his golden throne while constantly obsessed with watching and cataloguing the trivial foibles and failings of the billions of 'bits of human dust' on this planet and damning them to eternal hellfire for indulging in those foibles and failings. Foibles and failings, which he, in his cosmic ineptitude, created into us!"

John shared Gurdjieff's believe that most people on this planet were asleep and lived at levels of awareness that barely even qualified them to be bits of dust, and much as I strive to keep my awareness expanded and knowing—a level of knowing that the ancient Gnostics had labeled gnosis—strive to keep myself awake enough to escape the hummingbird-egg of my ego and thus become the wind instead of the speck of dust that I usually feel like I am, it is no easy thing to do!

Though I make sure I don't shit on myself too much on that account, as I am starting to internalize what John often told me, and what books on Zen—and the like—teach: that given that it is our natural condition to exist in a kind of sleep, and how deliciously comfortable we are when we are in that state of sleep, it is first, a big step to even become aware that we are asleep, then it is a giant stride to want to wake up from that comfortable sleep. And after that, it's a lifelong struggle, after our first "wake up," our first, "point of know return" (gnosis), our first transition through a really important "membrane of destiny, to then stay awake, so there is nothing "unnatural" or "wrong" with falling back to sleep—just something too humanly pathetic in giving up the struggle to keep on trying to stay awake.

Which I guess brings this back full circle to that cover and title of Kansas's Point of Know Return album, which is an accurate portrayal of the process of gnosis, of waking up, of going through a membrane of destiny, and about the subsequent harsh fact of not being able to go back to your old, small, familiar, and comfortable world once you have sailed over your personal Niagara and on into a new one, of not being able to be comfortable with not-knowing, with being constantly asleep, once you have, even for a moment, woken up! Once you have gone past that point of know return!

Ha!—that expensive education I once invested in suddenly pokes its prairie dog head out of its hole and gives me a sharp whistle, reminding me of studying Shakespeare's The Tempest in one of my Lit classes and coming across that term, sea-change, which meant pretty much squat to me at the time—regardless of whatever pompous explanation the unremembered professor gave it!—but which I now suddenly and clearly can metaphorically connect with John's membrane of destiny. (And of course, Kansas' Point of Know Return, and Whitman's lock-lift!)

Full fathom five thy father lies,

Of his bones are coral made,

Those are pearls that were his eyes,

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change,

Into something rich and strange

And you can bet your front teeth—or all your expensive implants!—that if there was anyone who knew a lot about spiritual change, about membranes of destiny, it would have been that genius-of-geniuses, that Master of the Metaphor, "Will the Quill," for no one could have written/channeled into existence so many great characters as intricately, profoundly, completely and powerfully as he so consistently did, without having first-hand knowledge of, and insight into, life and character, fate and destiny—and what it means for a human being to be tangled up in all four.

But even as I was doing my instant hero-worship that I do every time I think about Shakespeare, the word metanoia popped into my head, which my no-name professor had said was the ancient Greek word for that sea-change Shakespeare appears to have been metaphoring about. (Yup, another great word and concept passed through the ages to us by those incredible know-it-all Greeks who didn't leave much for us moderns to discover about human nature except the fact that without the influence and wisdom of those Greeks, we would truly be nothing but barbarians, "bar-bar-bar-ring" amongst ourselves about trivialities!)

And on Wiki-ing metanoia, I discover that to the Greeks it meant, "changing one's mind," though since a word was created to describe the process of "changing one's mind" you can bet they were talking about something a lot more profound than going out for dinner with a plan to have Kokkinisto and deciding instead on the Kokoresti. Something profoundly spiritual and life-altering akin to a sea change, to a membrane of destiny, to a point of know return, to a lift-leveling. (The head-mechanics use the word to refer to the more positive life discovered by a patient after a psychotic breakdown, and Christians theologians (hubristic and delusional god-babblers, as John called them) use it as a word for repentance, but I am sure both of those are big misses of the mark of what the Greeks meant, and which is much better covered with the above sea change, et al, notions.)

### Chapter Twelve

And true is surely it, that once we have gone through a sea change, a metanoia, a membrane of destiny, sailed over a point of know return, or floated up a lock-lift, we may not physically look any different, (no bones of coral, no eyes of pearls) but spiritually, as the sea-change metaphor shows, we will have been dramatically (or maybe just minutely) transformed, and our life, whatever it had been up to that point, no longer fits or suits us. John compared this process to our spirit-being's quantum leap from a lower to a higher level of awareness, of consciousness, of spiritual existence, and I feel the need here to explain he never used the word soul, because of the severely dumbed-down—and usually damned-to-hell!—connotations given to it by Constantine's Imperial Abomination, but preferred the term spirit-being.

Like he liked to say, "What we think of as our flimsy, diaphanous, hard-to-believe-in soul that Constantine's Imperial Abomination has been hell-bent on telling us is a seriously flawed, 'original-sinned' entity on its way—from its moment of birth!—to hell . . . unless it is saved from the terrible and inevitable fate by the intervention of its power-corrupted, money-mongering clergy, is in truth a distinct and potent being whose real home is in another realm, and it sure as hell didn't have to wait until our body dies for it to go to hell, because its incarnation into this realm, into Gulag Earth, is an instant descent into what could only feel to It like a natural hell! Especially if It incarnated into a family 'cell-block' belonging to Constantine's evil, always-political, essentially spirit-bereft, life-negating Imperial Abomination and its sex-hating/sex-obsessed, KGB-clergy!"

Embarrassingly, he had to explain quantum leap to me, a term, he explained, was from that insanely bizarre, Alice-in-Wonderland-world of quantum physics where an electron can supposedly jump from one "orbit" around the nucleus of an atom to another level with no discernible, intermediate process involved. (Given the size of an atom, don't fuckin' ask me how anyone can know that!) He'd also said, that with any spirit-being's journey through this physical, Gulag Earth-life, one moment it could be living within one set of life-parameters, and the next—usually after some great trauma—suddenly be a somewhat different and bigger being living in a bigger life with a new set of life-parameters.

He said the best analogy for describing the process was actually our first primal human experience: that of being a baby in the process of getting born, a process that for that infant is catastrophically traumatic and after which its life is infinitely different and infinitely more challenging than it had been in that warm, comfortable and familiar womb it had spent nine delightful months floating around in, and which it can never get back into no matter how badly it might want to.

Then of course there is the next major membrane of destiny, or truly more accurately, point of know return, that we all—if we live long enough—have to go through, and that of course is our tumultuous-as-it-is-inevitable membrane of puberty. And none who have gone through it, or endured their teenage kids as they go through it, can gainsay that some really big transition, some really dramatic quantum leap, has taken place. To be sure there's the obvious opening up to the world of physical sex (unless of course, your father or some other pedophilic creep-shit asshole priest hasn't already long before done that for you!) made possible by all those hormones kicking in and tornado-stirring the havoc they do until they more-or-less settle down, or one's body gets used to them, but there is also a very dramatic spiritual—spirit-being!—transformation where whatever lesser being was inhabiting—caretaking?—the child gets the boot and the adult spirit-being takes over.

Interestingly, when you go through your own puberty, because it is gradual and it feels like it is always you changing from one you to another you, the you-you that you are, doesn't notice it so much, but when you are a parent dealing with those changes in your children, you can't help but notice that it is less a process of the child turning into an adult, than it is a new and strange adult being—very suddenly!—taking over that child's now hormone-raging body.

I've experienced this, I've read about this, and I've talked to other parents about it, and there is no doubt that there is but a very tenuous connection between the pre- and the post-pubescent being that you think of as your off-spring. And so dramatic is that change that if you want to maintain a relationship with your post-pubescent "children" you have to make an effort to make a totally new relationship with these totally new beings. And none-too-few are the parents who have said they could not relate to, or even remotely like, their post-pubescent offspring. Which of course, makes sense, because we soon learn as we go out into the world as adults, we can't relate to—or just plain don't like—many of the adults we meet. And often too, those "new adult" beings that once were our children, find they don't like us, their parents, either. It would seem that process is a bit of a crap-shoot—a real dramatic and serious one!

But John summed up the process of that most dramatic of membranes of destiny very succinctly with his comment that "Pre-pubescent children are dependence-oriented, trusting creatures that belong to the parents, while post-pubescent ones are independence-oriented, hostile-to-parents creatures who belong to the Universe—and woe to any parents that can't understand and accept that. And allow the Universe to have its fateful way with what it already now owns!"

Ironically, he mentioned—but only in passing—that we seem to go through another membrane of destiny that in many ways is as big as the puberty-membrane but because it doesn't have the dramatic physical changes attached to it that puberty does, tends to go unnoticed. Or if noticed, not paid any serious attention to, probably because it only affects a small minority strongly enough to be important. And this membrane-passage usually occurs when one is twenty seven or so, and can sometimes be quite life-disturbing and depressing because it tends to make what were formerly, if not perfect, than reasonably well-functioning and love-based marriages that were made in the late teens or early twenties, into utterly irrelevant, meaningless and loveless ordeals!

And too often only one of the marriage partners is affected, such that the marital relationship on one side of this membrane was satisfying—or reasonable so!—for both spouses, then suddenly after one of them goes through this membrane passage, they suddenly discover that everything about their relationship is not only all wrong, but has become something that is extremely small, confining and tedious. The spouse that one day was much loved and valued by this membrane-passing partner, suddenly becomes like a millstone around their neck and all they want to do is get out from under the dead weight of it.

John and I ended up having quite a long deep conversation about that particular membrane because I'd heard about that astrological phenomenon known as the Saturn Return, which was considered the threshold crossing into full adulthood, but what John had seen, and was describing, seemed more dramatic and life (and destiny?) altering than that. And what made me believe that John was onto something about that membrane, was the fact that three of my favorite rock artists—Janis, Jim, and Jimi—all self-destructed at twenty seven, and all about the same time, thus becoming the three most famous members of that infamously eerie, Twenty Seven Club! And what really got me thinking was two dramatic things about them and their deaths: all three were as rich and famous as anyone could want to be, and all three self-destructed.

From the perspective of John's assertion there is a dramatic membrane of destiny some seem to go through at twenty seven, you can see how this would affect artists like Jim, Jimi and Janis who spent their late teens and early twenties during which their egos—likely in conjunction with their then spirit-beings!—mastered their talent that opened doors and allowed them to rocket to that high level of very time\- and energy\- and spirit-consuming, world fame. And then suddenly, around their twenty seventh year, their spirit-being got pushed—by whatever forces or powers control such things!—through a membrane of destiny that changed "It" so fundamentally and dramatically that suddenly, all that fame and fortune—and the very attention-demanding and likely debauched lifestyle!—that is consuming and totally controlling their ego-life, seems vain and worthless.

It's like overnight, while they are sleeping, the lock on the door to the temple all their inner satisfactions gets changed and the key—of their fame!—that they have been using to access it, doesn't fit it anymore. They are abruptly denied access to it. Suddenly they need to find a new, and different and more evolved and satisfying life, but they are not only so rich and so famous that essentially, the music business and their fans are now in control of their lives, and they are not allowed to change. In short, they can't live their lives with any sense of meaning and satisfaction—with any authenticity!—anymore, and they can't walk away from it, so they escape by self-destructing on drugs and alcohol and totally crazy living! Two other uber-big stars who joined that Twenty Seven club are Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain, with Cobain outright shooting himself.

John, in our discussion about the Saturn Return and the fates of Jim, Jimi, and Janis, said he wasn't much into the astrology business so couldn't comment on the Saturn thing, but he wouldn't have been to surprised if the death of those famous rock stars had been due to their passage through a membrane of destiny that suddenly drained all the meaning out of their fame and fortune. He also said that their deaths at the height of so much personal fame and fortune really drove home the fragility of a totally ego-oriented value system, where if one had all their "meaning eggs" in one such a fragile basket, when the anvil of destiny—or fate—fell and crushed that basket, one was left with nothing but a worthless mess. A life-omelet with no frying pan to put it in or stove to cook it on!

He added that he knew only too well the devastating effects such a membrane passage could have because though his major adult membrane passage occurred much later than twenty seven, when it occurred he was a wealthy and powerful rancher in ownership of several successful ranches and a farm, and it suddenly all turned to a big pile of horseshit on him and he had to walk away from it all to save his sanity. And likely his life. (And that, Dear Reader, is the denouement of Book One of The Fire.)

So all that being said, from a certain point of view, after a spirit-being has been abruptly and traumatically propelled—by whatever agency is behind it—through a membrane of destiny where it has been, by the very nature of the process, forcibly birthed out of its old, small, warm, familiar, and safe womb-world and into a new, bigger, unfamiliar and more demanding womb-reality that it could only embrace and cope with by growing into a larger, stronger, wiser, and more aware spirit-being. A being for whom the old world that it been pushed—or quantum leaped—out of, on nostalgically looking back at it, would instantly appear way too small and confining for it.

Ha!—I finally get to add something Rachel-original to this bucket of dog-barf: there has just zapped into my head that famous poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Chambered Nautilus" which I encountered at university and quickly learned to hate because my Prof for the course was a fanatical Christian and she sank the poor nautilus for me with a Titanic-anchor of Christian, going-to-heaven-to-sit-beside-God-and-Jesus crap that Holmes didn't seem to mean at all.

Now I can read it a little more dispassionately and I find I like it—and am sure John would have too!—with that metaphor of the nautilus building, as it grows and ages, ever bigger and bigger "digs" to live in. As Holmes writes about its physical nature in a middle stanza,

Year after year beheld the silent toil

That spread his lustrous coil,

Still, as the spiral grew,

He left the past year's dwelling for the new,

Stole with soft step its shining archway through,

Built up its idle door,

Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.

While in the last stanza, he makes the spiritual leap,

Build thee stately mansions, O my soul,

As the swift seasons roll!

Leave thy low-vaulted past!

Let each new temple, nobler than the last,

Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast.

Of course, in not being any sort of metaphor-meister by any stretch, I surprised even myself by recognizing—for this membrane of destiny topic—another metaphor for this membrane of destiny topic, that though hardly as poetic and profound a Holmes' "The Chambered Nautilus," came to me out of nowhere—out of that spooky and incomprehensible nagual?—and allowed me to better understand that graduated process of spiritual growth in terms of our anything-but-spiritual, graduated schooling system, which, in enduring it as both a student and a teacher, I understand a lot better than I want to!

It's a system we first enter after spending a handful of years being a Big Shit in our familiar Mommy-world where the demands on us aren't too stressful (unless our parents are ego-obsessed professionals who expect their children to be make-them-look-superior-with-their-friends-relatives-and-neighbors, attention-getting, precocious prodigies by the time they are 3!) and suddenly find we are a Little Turd reluctantly being shoved into the seemingly vast, and somewhat demanding toilet of kindergarten, which quickly gets familiar and small and very comfortable and we start feeling like a Big Shit again.

Then swoosh, we are flushed into the bigger toilet of Grade School where suddenly we are just a Little Turd again being forced to cope with an ever-thickening shit-soup of intellectual and social demands, and after eight years swirling around in that big crapper, it doesn't seem so big anymore—nor the shit-soup so thick!—because we are now a Big Shit of a Grade 8'er! And we become that Big Shit of a Grade 8'er just when we are entering puberty and thinking and talking about sex a good bit of the time—or maybe even engaging in it, or its near equivalent—and really enjoying lording all that "adult stuff" over all the younger kids who we see and treat as babies.

And much as we are so enjoying being that Big Shit Grade 8'er and feeling our groins start to glow and lording all our hard-earned superiority over the kids in the lower grades, along comes another swoosh, and suddenly we are flushed out of that comfortable crapper and again find ourselves to be just another Little Turd of a Grade 9'er in The Really Big Crapper of High School, where the shit-soup of intellectual and social demands approaches the viscosity of the proverbial "molasses in January," but where sex is a really big deal and never farther from anyone's mind than is their underwear from their genitalia, (if they are wearing any) and where the only knowledge worth knowing is how play the petty and often vindictive power-and-sex games that define who we are as a member of whatever clique we are able to worm our way into—or outright start!—in that school. And of course, high up there on the list of social essentials is the expertise to obtain the necessary booze and drugs so we can "party-hearty"—or "party-hardy" as the boys would say—on the weekends! And sometimes even during the week!

Ironically, even with all of that real important social stuff going on, we are still—depending, of course, on how demanding your parents are—expected to fit four years of learning dreary, useless intellectual shit in it before the Big Flush of Graduation and THE PROM. (Good-golly-gosh-gee!—but we can't forget that ever-so-important sextravaganza and rite-of-passage/membrane-of-fate, can we!) And once we have done the Graduation and the Prom thing and thus have been flushed out of that big, but now claustrophobic toilet of "flesh-and-fantasy" called High School, we can put off our swoosh through the huge sewer pipe that leads us to suddenly becoming a really Tiny Little Insignificant Turd in the monster cesspool of The Working World by taking the narrower sewer pipe that leads to Crapper Elite, aka University, where we once again will be a Little Turd in a much bigger, and more demanding toilet where power-sex-and-partying is still important, but if you put that ahead of learning "all the important shit," you will pretty quickly get flushed down one of the many sewer pipes that lead to that cesspool of The Working World.

So, if our survival-radar is working even remotely well, we know that we better take our learning of that dreary shit more seriously than we did in High School, (especially since now either our parents, or worse, ourselves, are paying for it!) and if we stay in it long enough, and cram the loft of our head-barn with enough straw bales of inedible nonsense (that's one of John's metaphors for going to University, which at first I didn't get because I didn't know that straw, unlike hay, is not edible for animals, and used only as a stall-lining for soaking up shit and piss) we graduate as a Really Big Turd with a PhD, who can then—maybe—enter the upper-level cesspool of The Working World as a Not-So-Small Turd with the power to become a truly Monster Turd in it. (Obviously, if you have a more positive view of life and our educational institutions than do I, you will unequivocally reject all of the above, or at least re-think its graduated—membranes-of-fate—system in a less crude and excremental metaphor!)

But my metaphor (Professor Gerald Weirs, PhD, would be shocked by the imaginative scope of it!) does, to my philosophically-challenged mind, seem to cover what John was trying to say about our process of spiritual growth, which entails—or more accurately demands!—that over the course of a truly spiritual human life—a life that is only truly human when it is spiritual!—we must leap up to, then grow into, then grow out of, multiple quantum levels through the enigmatic process of acquiring and storing Consciousness, which is the quantum-fuel propelling those enigmatic quantum leaps that he called membranes of destiny, but which can also be called metanoias, or points of know return, or lift-lock levels, or sea-changes, or nautilus chambers, with each successive level at first seemingly pretty broad and spacious but which after a time—and lots of experience and suffering and spiritual growth—eventually becomes like a confining womb, or egg, or nautilus chamber, or level of schooling, that we have to be enigmatically pushed/launched/graduated out of, so we can progress on up to our more capacious and demanding level/womb/egg/chamber.

John more than once stressed that he was sure a lot of serious "mental health problems" were not really mental problems at all, but were spiritual ones—with depression at the top of the list!—and were caused by the refusal of our ego to be humble enough to acknowledge, and accept, that it is basically the caretaker of our infinitely more important spirit-being, charged with looking after it on its essential experiencing-and-learning-mission in this human life, and that if we set our ego-needs up as the kings or queens of our lives, we strip those lives of all their real meaning because it is only our spirit-being that is not only truly real, but is the only aspect of ourselves that can experience meaning, and thus be of any real importance to our lives.

(Believe me, if there is one thing that an ego-maniac cannot, will not, ever accept, it is the spiritual notion that the ego is an ephemeral fiction, a delusive force. Or more accurately, a delusive Fifth-Dimension current that we get sucked into—to varying degrees—during our childhood and which spits us out onto a very rocky and barren shore at our death—and even sometimes at the close approach of our death—it having no more lasting solidity than those water-on-the-highway mirages we see in the distance on a hot summer day that always so mysteriously either keep receding as we drive towards it, or vanish utterly on our close approach to them.)

Now that I think of it, it would be a good time to define the terms fate and destiny as John used them. Most of the few people who think about these things tend to lump the two together as synonyms, but John did not. To him, our fate was the life that was decreed for us through our ego choices and the Dark Forces that constantly try to control us through our ego and our ego-choices. And yes, I know, that takes us into that fuckin free-will debate that can barely be scratched with a whole philosophical tome of its own—written by someone a lots smarter and better educated than I!—, but suffice it to say here, that the true freedom of our will lies in the degree to which we do not live in our ego.

As far as John could tell—he always said he was never very sure about this mysterious subject—the more we lived in our ego the less free we were because our ego—the delusive current that swallowed us up to create the illusion of it—by its nature, was a dark and driving force that was open to the influence of Dark Forces and existed solely to direct and determine our actions in such a fashion as to enslave us to those Dark Forces.

And whenever I'd get real scorpion-paranoid at his mention of those "Dark Forces" and what the fucking hell they were, he'd just shrug and say, "I don't think any living human being can ever know what they exactly are, just like even our smartest Priests of the Religion of Materialist Science cannot know what gravity is, but like gravity, we can know them by their malicious effects—which are always obvious and easy to observe in the dark, malicious behaviors of human beings. Especially supremely egotistical and power-corrupted one. (If he was saying that today, he'd be using Mad King Donald as the perfect example!) And most particularly, human beings channeling that malice through giant, fascist institutions, like Constantine's Imperial Abomination, or the more nasty politicians of their world who use their armies, not only to try to conquer it, but to channel as much malice into the world as they can through wars. Anyone who can study Hitler, the Nazis, and the Holocaust—or for that matter, the history of Constantine's Imperial Abomination, with its crusades and Inquisitions!—and not believe in the existence of Dark Forces, are ostriches with their heads stuck in well-cured concrete!"

Hard to gainsay those word, if you take the time to think about it a bit, but that an extreme and obvious example. More important yet, as John often stressed, is that one force themselves to learn to see—even in their own, seemingly insignificant little life!—that their ego-choices always had a kind of driven inevitability to them, an inevitability related to the fact that they primarily enhance your ego, and even more inevitable when those choices had a dark, malicious genesis to them. Or if not overtly dark and malicious, then just plain ego-serving and ego-enhancing.

Perhaps a perfect example of that being the time my father went into the GM dealership to buy the four-door Chevrolet that his family needed and which our family budget could afford, but ended up driving out with a two-door Cadillac coupe because the salesman was able to play up to his egotistical need to be a big-shot. Or maybe his malicious need to passive-aggressively get back at my mother for not only doing her best to preserve our frail, family budget, but for her not-always-subtle hints that one of the reasons our family budget was so frail, was because of his drinking problem.

I think the instant that salesman got him to sit behind the wheel of that fancy, gizmo-filled, leather-seated metal monster of a "Caddie," it was inevitable he was going to buy it. His ego could just not let him get out of that leather seat—nor could it let him drive out of that dealership in a drear and practical four-door Chevrolet sedan and pass up the chance to thumb his nose at the world. Though most specifically, thumb his nose at my mother! (I suddenly am beset with the boot-to-the-gut insight that my mother's response him buying that Caddy was to withdraw whatever bit of sex she was giving him, and his response to that was to turn to me to get it. Not hard to see the Dark Forces and their endemic malice behind that—especially given all the malicious repercussion that have spider-webbed out from it over the ensuing decades!)

But on a less malicious, more "normal" level, you can see that ego/fate connection in the choice of which university you choose to go to when you've been accepted to more than one—the more egotistical you are, the more inevitable it will be that you choose the one with the highest reputation. And the most ivy on its hallowed walls! If you choose a lesser-accredited institution, your circle of friends and acquaintances will be commensurate—and the job opportunities available on graduation curtailed by that lesser-accreditation. And if you choose a higher one, you will be develop friendships and acquaintances with the potential movers-and-shakers of this world, and you will have a better chance of yourself becoming, on graduating, a mover-and-shaker—instead of a drudge teacher in a backwater "Little Mining Shitty" like I was limited to after graduating from the third-rate university my budget and situation forced me to attend.

And for any girl, likely nothing is more "fateful" than her choice of a husband—if there are two or three young men in the game, the one you will chose, if you are very ego-and-status-oriented will be the one most likely to be the one not only most like your father, but the one most likely to guarantee you the most affluent and status-satisfying life. This choice-parameter will also be the most parent-pleasing choice, which, if you are so not into pleasing your parents, you will eschew in favor of some prospect guaranteed to irritate one or both of those parents. And really, really fuck up your life down the road!

And if you are a "hot chick" with your brains firmly lodged in your ever-smoldering cunt, you will chose some over-testosteroned lout—as did I!—in order to keep your inguinal fires stoked and burning hot. (And just as likely, keep your parents disappointed!) And if you are all fucked-up, Daddy-diddled, and masochistic as hell, you will chose some over-testosteroned, philandering, malicious and irresponsible lout—as did I!—and spend the rest of your life ruing your stupid, mindless, masochistic, just-like-Daddy choice.

(Though how can I resist adding here that John more than once commented that he had the sense that karma, as much as, or even more than fate, played a role in our choice of a first-spouse—but I don't believe in that karma shit, so I don't even know why I have mentioned it!)

But you can easily see where I am going here, because I am sure all three of my Dear Readers of this ridiculous excuse for a preface will have been faced with, and made such choices, not just in picking a life-limiting and life-defining spouse, but in buying a new car—practicality or status?—but in lots of other buying choices where unnecessary extra money—sometimes lots!—is spent just to get the items with the most impressive-to-your-relatives-and-friends brand names. I mean, who the fuck ever really fucking needs way-overpriced Ray-Bans? Or a Cadillac? Or a fucking Rolex?

Though of course, wasting money on uber-expensive, status-branded sunglasses, or on a status-branded car (I once read a quote from a GM executive who said that the average Cadillac and a top-line Caprice cost about the same to manufacture, but they had to charge thousands more for the Cadillacs or no one would buy them) is not as serious as when it gets applied to the marriage-choice: is it done for love or status; or for lust or masochism; or to please-yourself or please-your-parents.

I could go on and on, but there's a pony of a Preface somewhere in all this stall full of diversionary shit "chomping at the bit" to get written, but I think you can get a sense of what the fuck I am trying so desperately—and ineffectually!—to say here, about the "fateful" inevitability of our life and choices if we make them solely to satisfy and enhance our ego, and that the accumulating sum of all those choices end up becoming our fate.

I think it was Heraclitus who said our character was our fate—Yup! I just Googled it and he did!—though sometimes the word used in that quote is destiny, which reflects our typical conflation of the meanings of fate and destiny. I can't get into it here but it is a subject worth spending a few hours meditating on, especially if you've made a succession of choices that have pretty much fatefully flushed your life down the toilet.

Apropos to that statement is a story in a blog being written by some obviously very unhappy lawyer who said when she graduated from high school she'd had a talent to write, and wanted to take university courses that would help her pursue a career as a novel writer, but her father, a lawyer, had persuasively pointed out to her that few writers make much—or any!—money at all in that novel-writing business, but if she became a lawyer she could start making a good living very soon after graduating, and then when she'd established herself as a lawyer, she could go back to her writing.

Needless to say, that by the time she'd become a successful lawyer, whatever blazing fire that had been burning so bright and hot inside the firebox of her steam engine-dream to become a writer (that's a John metaphor), was now just the flickering of a guttering candle and the best she could do with the faint light of that guttering talent, was sit in the cold, lifeless cab of her rusting-to-oblivious novel-writing dream and type out banal and boring blog-posts that I very quickly lost interest in following. But after each blog-babbling session in that stone-cold steam engine cab, she had a nice big boat of money and status to sail around in, the sails of her bitterness having no trouble catching the winds of her regrets. (Wow—not a bad metaphor! The nagual must be close!)

Anyways, what I have been flight-of-the-stoned-butterfly trying to get to here, is that John had very definite definitions of fate and destiny (don't ask how he arrived at them) whereby our fate was the driven, the inevitable sum of all the seemingly logical ego-driving and ego-serving choices we made in our life, while our destiny was that ephemeral something-else that gently—or not so gently, depending—tugged/pulled at our spiritual awareness and did its best to tug/pull our lives in a spirit-serving, spirit-satisfying and spirit-fulfilling direction. A direction almost always 180-degree opposition to the direction our ego/fate was pushing/pulling us.

(Interesting, in place of ego-serving in the above paragraph, I had originally typed ego-satisfying, but that didn't feel right and a moment of thought reminded of something John had many times tried to drive home to me: that harshest and most important—though almost always ignored!—fact about the human ego, which is that it is never satisfied! That it is—by nature!—a black hole that could devour an infinitude of universes of impressive ego-trips and still be ravenous for more!)

And it is in this notion of the ego's compulsive, never-satisfied wants and needs, that Heraclitus' definition of character as the defining force of our fate/destiny comes into play, because the weaker our character, the more likely we are going to make ego-dominated and ego-serving choices that sacrifice the needs and desires of our spirit-being, and lash us to an inevitable fate. And the stronger our character is, the more likely we will resist the insistent and shallow demands of our ego and make those choices that honor and serve the needs of our spirit-being.

And it is not like we are unable to know about the need to make that choice, for as much as the world outside us is always demanding the attention and service of our ego, our spirit-being within us is always whispering to us of its needs—whispering, that is, until we have ignored Its needs for too long and It is forced to shout and scream at us through our intuition and moments of silent stillness, and if that doesn't work, (it is for this reason our modern, ego-dominated world is so busy and noisy—so we don't have to hear and listen to the whispers, shouts and screams of our spirit-beings) it then manifests a succession of alarming dreams—nightmares even!—coupled with an attention-getting succession of synchronicities, and when those are dutifully and egotistically ignored—or explained away!—It slips into the dark, life-sucking current of despair and depression, which is why, in the affluent Western nations, gut-bloated as they are by the insatiable tapeworm of the American Dream, there are so many people who have so much status and material affluence, yet who need anti-depressants and alcohol and a host of other drugs and addictions in order to be able to stand "living" their "good life."

(Hell, years ago the Eagles covered that subject most insightfully in their song, "After The Thrill Is Gone." And alas . . . sigh . . . an SIP (Soar In Peace) to Glenn Frey, a truly great eagle of a songwriter and singer who, while yet way too young, has flown away on us. Flown high and away to join "Major Tom" Bowie up in his orbiting "tin can." And damn!—thinking about the two of them flying off the face of the "Gulag Earth" before even reaching 70, is enough to drop-kick my putative spirit-being deep into a thick, crushing depression-current almost as black as the one Mark David Chapman drop-kicked me into when he so maliciously shot the other, favorite John in my life!)

As I so very limitedly see it, from John's point of view, our spirit-being does not incarnate to play that silly game of pleasing or displeasing Nasty-Ol'-Nobodaddy-On-His-Celestial-Throne in the assiduous observing or breaking his countless and humanity-crushing/confining rules, thus earning—if we assiduously observe all those rules—a ticket to join him and Sonny Boy Jesus and Never-Fucked Mother Mary in Heaven and ever-after enjoy eternal, boring bliss kissing his great big celestial ass—or going to hellfire and eternal damnation if we don't! (Fuck!—every time I write about that absurd and cretinous shit I can't believe so many otherwise intelligent people have been buying into it for so goddamn many centuries!)

No, as far as John was concerned, our spirit-being incarnates to experience consciousness-expanding experiences and challenging situations for the purpose of growth, with the sum total of that growth that was intended—before birth!—to be acquired in any one incarnation being our destiny. Though he also stated that some rare, very spiritually evolved spirit-beings—bodhisattvas, as the Buddhists call them—did not incarnate to enhance their personal consciousness, but to enhance the general consciousness of the world with their enhanced consciousness. He used Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as three obvious—out of a plethora!—examples of genius-bodhisattvas who, through their very presences on this planet and their incredible creative efforts, left this world a more conscious place than it was when they entered it.

Thus, in John's worldview, we exit the far side of our puberty-membrane with both a fate and a destiny, and if, on the one hand, our lives are dominated by our ego and our compulsive, ego-serving—Ray-Ban-and-Rolex-acquiring!—choices, the sum of those choices becomes our very unfree, very ego and Dark Forces-dictated fate, while on the other, if we keep the aggressive pit-bull of our ego at heel and instead make choices that serve the gentle Collie of our spirit-being, then we are living out our very free destiny. Or something like that!

And as I type out these words I suddenly and profoundly sense how this connects with the Star Wars "Force" theme, where old Ben Kenobi teaches young Luke that the easiest route to power is along the "Dark" axis, but that darkness then utterly dominates and controls their destiny, while the harder route is along the "Light" axis, which does not give the Jedi as much power, nor give what power it gives as easily, but it does leave him or her free to make true choices in his life and his service to the Force.

You can see this acted out quite dramatically and insightfully in the Revenge of the Sith where the young, Jedi-in-training, Anakin, falls under the dark thrall of the Emperor's power, and as he does so, he progressively loses the freedom to personally chose the actions he will take in any given situation. Like when, against all his Jedi instincts and training, he gives into the Emperor's will—and demand!—and cuts of the head off the defeated and helpless Count Dooku. And conversely, one cannot even imagine the then still-young Ben Kenobi even coming close to making the decision to kill Dooku in a situation like that—his strength of character—and thus his commitment to the "Light" axis—would just not have allowed it! (In fact, he'd have forthwith told the Emperor to go suck a light saber!)

Thus it can be said our ego-serving choices have an easy, comfortable, enstatusing and enslaving inevitableness to them, (which of course implies that we must constantly kowtow to the powerful social gods of Security and Conformity) that then, by default, becomes our decreed fate, which often also, by definition, has a crushing sense of meaninglessness to it. On the other hand, our choices to honor our spirit-being, are never easy, often require courage and risk, and just as often do not lead to comfort and rarely to status or fame and fortune, but do leave us living a life that is light, free and meaningful. Thus, to John, our destiny is always contained in the sum of our spirit-honoring choices, a sum that only adds up to anything valuable if it subtracts from our ego-serving choices and keeps us from defaulting to our utterly meaningless fate.

Alas, I sadly suspect that very few people entranced by, and mindlessly immersed in living our American Dream-nightmare, if they happen to read the above, will find the fate/destiny divide even remotely comprehensible. Or relevant to their shallow, mindless lives. And needless to say, it is obvious I don't really understand this shit very well myself, which is why I am not explaining it very well, and I am not even going to apologize for my deficiencies because I am just Crazy Rachel and not Cowboy John! Or Heraclitus! Or Plato! Or even some modern, uber-IQ'd, philosophical whizz-head like a Robert Pirsig. Or an Ervin Laszlo. Or a Ken Wilbur!

### Chapter Thirteen

To John, meaning and spirit were as entwined as the strands of the double helix of our DNA, and much as our ego seems real enough when we are surfing the dark current of it, and it is holding us in its totally mindless and deluding thrall, it has no real substance—which is why John called it the ego-phantom. And why it is always so insecure—and has no endurance after death—and thus is powerless to connect with the realm of meaning—or some goddamned deep fucking shit like that! (Whenever I write about this deep shit, not only does my blood pressure soar up into stroke range, but I have to come face to face with the fact it is all so fucking far over my head that I can only make a fool of myself writing about it. But of course, playing the crazy fool is what I do best, isn't it?)

I would guess that the making of a quantum leap through a membrane of destiny, that sailing past a point of know return, is the equivalent of graduating to a higher level of schooling, which, in the "real" world, should we refuse to accept the reality and implications of it, could only leave us in some kind of limbo where daily life still crushes us with its demands and piles up behind us like traffic behind an accident on a freeway at rush-hour, but where no meaning or satisfaction can be gleaned out of the living of it.

It is a bit, I guess, like spending a ton of money and time at university getting a BA and MA in some really esoteric and impractical subject but then chickening out (or moneying-out!) at the five-yard-line of your drive for that touchdown of your doctorate—which at least might get you a university teaching or research job in that esoteric subject—so you have to settle for the field goal of the Job-Nowhere Nightmare and end up spending your (suspended) life as a night-shift manager at McDonalds. (Yeah, I love football—all that stupid, testosterone-driven violence helps "Brady" some air out of the pigskin of my self-directed rage and keeps me from punting myself into the end-zone of suicide. And if you can make sense of that metaphor, you're way smarter than me—or the average, defensive back who has spent his career giving himself concussions doing too much helmet-to-helmet hitting!)

Once when I asked John how we could for-certain know we were living a spiritual life, he just smiled and paraphrased that famous line from All The President's Men, "Easy—just follow the meaning. . . . But remember also—when it comes to this human life, we can't know anything for certain!"

That answer of course, got us into a head-fucking discussion of what the hell meaning really was, and how we could know we were tapping into meaning and not something else, especially since our modern affluent culture is built on the world of the ego and its endless parade of lusts, greeds, desires and achievements, which seem to have meaning at the time, except that sense of meaning never seems to last very long. To that question and stopped and thought a bit before finally saying,

"First of all, I have to refer you to something I read once about the Eskimos have many words for the different kinds of snow they encounter in their very snowy environment. Since snow was pretty much most of their world most of the time, they could only survive by paying a lot of attention to it. Thus, by survival-necessity, over many generations, they came up with a host of words to describe its many varieties. And the conditions that produced them. And equally, I am sure, would Indian tribes in the Amazon have no words for any kind of snow at all, but would have an intimate knowledge of, and words for, all the different poisonous snakes and pythons in their rainforest environment, which of course, the Eskimo would neither have nor need.

"So likewise in our culture today. Just as the Eskimo is very knowledgeable about snow and knows nothing about poisonous snakes or pythons, so we know a great deal about ego and pretty much nothing about spirit, especially in our Christian cultures where the dominant churches are so obsessed with the 'snow' of ego-and-power-and-wealth that they wouldn't know a truly spiritual 'snake' if it bit them in the eye or a truly spiritual python if it swallowed them whole."

And here he let out a laugh as he said, "Well, it was unintended, but this 'snake' analogy works out perfect for this discussion because in that myth about the Garden of Eden, the snake, the serpent, is portrayed, in its dumbed-down form by Constantine's Imperial Abomination, as the evil and tempting Satan, when in fact, in many of those ancient mythologies, the snake . . . or serpent, is seen in a very positive light. Seen and respected as wisdom, creativity, transformation, immortality, et cetera. So in a sense, after practically two millennia of swimming in the very stupid, ego-and-power-and-wealth waters of Christianity where ego is exalted and true spirit anathematized, we know about as much about spirit as Eskimos do about poisonous snakes and pythons. And Amazonian Indians about snow!

"Which of course, is why you have to ask me fundamental questions about meaning which, if we lived in a truly spiritual culture, would be as obvious to you as a 300-pound python slithering off a tree branch and wrapping itself around your neck as you walk along a rainforest trail. Alas, unlike a neck-wrapping python, meaning is a subtle feeling that you have to learn to discern as you live. It is ense . . . of inner fullness . . . of inner . . . rightness . . . that accompanies a choice or an action."

And here I could but say, "Fullness?"

To which he replied, "Again, I am stuck trying to describe a python to an Eskimo! . . . Inner fullness is . . . is . . .well, the best analogy I can give for that is the difference between a bowl of porridge that has salt in it, and a bowl that has none. And for that matter, any food that needs salt. I mean, what home—or restaurant—table doesn't have a salt shaker on it, so this is a good analogy.

"If you study our need for salting our food, it's not the food that needs salt, but us. And we need it very badly—just as do animals. Which is why ranchers and farmers put out blocks of salt for their cattle. And why those blocks attract deer and moose . . . and lots of other critters! It is fundamental to our mammalian, warm-blooded health. And I know this from experience because I have worked at a lot of jobs that involve a lot of sweating, and when we sweat a lot, we lose salt. So much so you can feel it on your skin after a hot, sweaty day."

And to that, for once, I could nod my assent to the experience, which John acknowledged and then continued,

"And there have been times, particularly when I've worked underground in very hot, damp mines, where I'd sweat so much that I'd sometimes have to stop and dump the sweat out of my rubber boots. And if I drank too much water without ingesting any salt with it, things would get real out of balance in my system and I'd keep drinking more and more water, which didn't quench my thirst but just poured out of the pores of my skin as fast as I was drinking it. And I'd end up feeling real sick and weak. And strange it would be, to take a handful of salt—which tasted almost sweet under those conditions—and find that the salt quenched my thirst when the water couldn't.

"So, from what I have read on the subject, it is the salt in our system that helps us keep the water in our body and allows us to function in a normal, healthy manner. Now in cold climates this is not usually a big issue, but in hot ones it sure is, which is why in the ancient world, salt was so important and valuable—and not just because it was needed for preserving food—that it was often used as money. You, as a teacher, collecting a salary, must know that the word harkens back to Roman times and has to do with the money paid to soldiers so they could buy salt."

And here he let out a loud laugh as he said, "Can you imagine one of those ancient Roman soldiers, while hoarding his precious supply of hard earned money needed to buy his precious quantities of never-cheap and never-easily-available salt, being transported to our northern climes in this modern world during a snowstorm, and watching salt get dumped on our highways by the thousands of tons!

"But the real point I am trying to make here is that the realm of Spirit is to our psyches like the world of salt is to our bodies, and whereas we are very keenly tuned into our body's need for salt—especially when it goes out of balance!—we are totally tuned-out of our spirit-being's need for the 'salt' of meaning, for fullness—with that sense of meaning, of fullness being felt by our spirit-being in a manner similar to our palate tasting salt in our food.

"Which essentially means that what we call a 'spiritual' value system, is one where we learn to understand the nature of our own spirit-being and its spiritual needs—needs for the salt of meaningful experiences and actions!—and the nature of Spirit, which our spirit-being must interact with to 'lick the salt-block of meaning,' as it were. To lead an overall spiritually meaningful life—though that's a redundancy, of course, because a truly spiritual life is always endemically meaningful!—we must on our own learn—because our institutional religions sure ain't gonna teach us!—to 'tune' our awareness into sensing our spirit-being's very subtle presence in our psyche, and equally becoming aware of its intentions and its needs—when they manifest. Capisci?"

Well, needless to say, I kinda capisci'd, but I mostly didn't, so all I could say was, "But you still haven't told me what that fullness is! Or what, exactly, fucking meaning, is!"

That got a laugh out of him and, "Language! Language! Rachel—the dog has excellent hearing. And though the dog had shown no interest in my swearing, on hearing the word, "dog" he let out a long, languid whine, struggled to his feet, yawned, then ambled over and laid its head on my thigh in his "I-want-a-cookie" gesture, which of course got him a couple from the plate of them always on the table when I was visiting John.

John, after smiling and half-heartedly wagging his finger in a no-no gesture to me for spoiling his dog, he said, "Well, quite naturally, the defining of the meaning of the fullness of meaning is a bit like trying to use our rational mind to figure out the processes we use to think rationally. The only definition I can give you for the meaning of fullness . . . and meaning . . . is that it is consciousness, which is the only sustenance—the 'salted' food!—that our spirit-being desires. But I suspect you are not going to accept that as much of an answer."

My response to that was, "Too fucking goddamn RIGHT, I'm not! That means nothing to me! I've never been able to understand what you mean when you say, consciousness. And yeah, I know you've also said that the nature and meaning of consciousness becomes obvious to us once we reach a certain threshold level on the spectrum of our own personal consciousness. But fuck!—there has to be some rationally, understandable framework for this . . . consciousness . . . meaning . . . fullness . . . stuff! There has to be something we can rationally learn about it so we can strive for it and recognize it when we encounter it! . . . And learn to enhance our level of . . . consciousness . . . so we can reach that level where its nature becomes obvious to us. . . . If this is all so damned important to our . . . spirit-beings . . .why is it all so obscure? Why is it so hard for us to notice . . .and know about?"

Those questions made him stop for a good long while as he thought up an appropriate metaphor, which was, "Well, first of all, if you are looking for a rational explanation for what consciousness is, you are like Castaneda always trying to find rational explanations for the truly weird—and utterly irrational—stuff that Don Juan caused to happen to him when he was in Don Juan's presence. Or, as Don Juan so vainly tried to get across to Castaneda, he couldn't explain the manifestations of the nagual with anything in his tonal. It just wasn't possible—like a garter snake trying to swallow an elephant! But let me ask you this: when you go outside on a winter's day, do you observe and name all the different kinds and shades of snow you see when you go out? According to the Eskimos, there's lots of them.

That got a laugh out of me as I said, "No, obviously not—there's just two colors of snow for me: the fresh white stuff and the stuff that's been around awhile and is filthy with sand and car exhaust! And dog piss!"

"Okay," he chuckling said. "That's about what it is for everybody around here. We're not Eskimos and the road conditions are a lot more important to us than the types and colors of snow. So we don't know the many subtle different types of snow the Eskimo knows because we haven't been taught about them. Same with the realm of Spirit—our dominant monotheistic religions have about as much use for us possessing intimate knowledge about our spirit-beings and the Ocean of Spirit as an Eskimo does for news reports about traffic problems on Los Angeles' freeways—so we don't know squat about our spirit-being or the Ocean of Spirit.

"But since those dominant monotheisms are pretty much built on an absolutely insane—or insanity inducing!—enhancement of our egos . . . I mean, you have to be an insane and totally deluded egomaniac to believe all that incredibly childish The-Supreme-Creator-Deity-Of-The-Whole-Damn-Universe-Is-Personally-Interested-In-Me nonsense! So all such credulous cretins end up with monstrously bloated egos . . . and also end up knowing a hell of a lot about the 'freeway road conditions' their monstrously bloated ego needs to know to drive to its next 'ego-fix,' while they know next-to-nothing about the subtle 'snow colors' of our spirit-being—or the nature and influences and demands of the Ocean of Spirit.

"So really what's happened is that our perception and understanding of our spirit-being and the realm of the Ocean of Spirit—a truly spiritual value system and practice!—has not been denied to us because it is too subtle and hard to detect, it is just that we have not been taught by our very fascist and very power-and-wealth-and-ego oriented monotheisms to see its true nature and its many manifestations. All Christians have been taught for all those dark centuries since Constantine created his Imperial Abomination, that our human reality is a crude and simplistic duality, a great, big winner-take-all battle between the forces of good and evil, with Sonny Boy Jesus and the angels fighting on the side of good, and Satan and his demons on the side of evil. But what has been defined as good and evil was pretty much determined, in our Christian monotheism, by whatever Constantine's Imperial Abomination could get the most power and control over its sheep-flocks with.

"With sex, of course, at the top of that list of evil, sinful things. As to the subtle needs of our spirit-beings and the nature and manifestations of the Ocean of Spirit . . . subtle things like meaning, like fullness—forget it! That's way outside its nasty, fascist, god-addled, sin-peddling, controlling and very political purview of that so-called religion!"

And here I had to throw up my hands and say, "So it's hopeless then! . . . I mean, how the hell am I supposed to believe in the existence of my so-called . . . spirit-being . . . and if I do decide to believe in it, to learn those . . . those subtle shades of the . . . 'snow' . . . of the Ocean of Spirit . . . since I haven't been taught anything about them. And since nobody else knows anything about them . . . or believes in them, for that matter?"

This got a real good laugh out of John as he slapped the table and said, "For one thing—there's more than a few philosophical and spiritual systems out there willing to teach us about those subtle 'shades of snow' of the spirit realms—Plato's Dialogues, which are full of spiritual teachings; Madame Blavatsky's Theosophy being another; . . . and that genius, Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy! And that trickster Gurdjieff's teachings. And the Hermetica of Hermes Trismegistus. . . . And the . . . . . . " And letting out a loud chuckle, added, "And even the works of your favorite bogeyman, Castaneda, are full of very valid teachings about the 'shades of snow' endemic to the spiritual world. Hell, as far as I am concerned, Don Juan's constant admonitions to Castaneda to curb his self-importance is one of the most important spiritual teachings anywhere. And it sure is something every priest . . . and bishop and cardinal and pope! . . . of Constantine's Imperial Abomination should pay a lot more attention to!

"And what do you think I am trying to do for you right now? . . . But teach you a little bit about those shades of . . . 'spiritual snow'? But with all true spiritual teaching—the best and most they can ever be is guides . . . is Zen 'fingers pointing at the moon' of nebulous truths, and it is always up to you . . . you yourself to find . . . and study . . . and evaluate those truths. You must do it! You must do the spiritual work! And do it on your own! With your own evaluative and discriminating mind. And your own efforts! And true spiritual work can never be like that ersatz crap Constantine's Imperial Abomination passes off as spirituality, where the mere act of having worshipful faith in Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy and Sonny Boy Jesus—and mindlessly, will-lessly, subjecting yourself to the dominant will and control of the Abomination and its priestly minions—is considered true and valid spirituality. And part of doing real spiritual work is that you have to rely, not only on your own efforts, but on your own judgments about these spiritual things we are talking about. Or that you learn in your readings! You cannot rely on convenient verifications and validations from the ignorant herd around you!

"Or from some book of ancient 'scriptures' the pages of which don't even make the decent arsewipe that is really all they are good for! You have to get past the fact that it is not Jesus . . . or the Pope . . . or some ancient divine revelation contained in some ancient and revered scripture speaking absolute truths to you, but just your Uncle John, Mr. Nobody-incarnate, passing on these ideas to you for you to mentally ingest and mentally chew—on your own! Ingest and chew so you can digest out of them—on their own merits!—whatever nutrients of truth might be in them. You've got to get out of that deadly and mindless trap taught to you all your life by secular and religious teachers that truth only comes from authoritative texts and from established authority figures . . . . from scriptures and priests . . . from textbooks and professors. The important thing is the ideas . . . which are powerful . . . mental things . . . have existences and lives of their own . . . and can be judged by intelligent, thinking people on their own merits!"

"But fuck, Uncle John," I countered, "How the hell am I supposed to know . . . the truth . . . of this . . . stuff? I'm not qualified—or fucking smart enough!—to think about these deep . . . things . . . and know if they are true or not!"

That got the table another slap, this one hard enough to send the dog scurrying out from underneath it and alternately giving each of us a pained, questioning look as he did so, and the very serious response from John, "Come on, Rache—you have to grow up sometime and do what all real, autonomous 'grown-ups' must learn to do—which is both think about important things for yourself and not passively and mindlessly rely on authority figures to do it for you, and then evaluate them with your heart, with your intuition.

"We've talked about this before—the rational mind is a very sharp but limited tool that can do a lot within its limited purview, but it cannot make value judgments about anything. That's not its purpose and it does not have that power! So real, honest-to-goodness human thinking is a combination of the rational and the intuitive—of the head and the heart. If all your thinking is head-work, is rational, you'll spend your life thinking a million thoughts—and learning a million things—that you can't make heads-or-tails out of . . . that you can't shuffle into any sort of meaning-order . . . or meaning pattern!

"And if all your 'thinking' is totally intuitive, is totally emotion based, well . . . then you are thinking like a very young child! Or a mindless, religious fanatic! A religious fanatic than any demagogue priest or pope can rile up and motivate to join a crusade . . . or burn some heretic at the stake—even if that heretic is their mother—or their daughter! Haven't we talked enough about how Constantine's Imperial Abomination got all its vicious, oppressive, fascist powers by appealing to the base emotions of weak-minded—or utterly non-minded!—oafs who were too lazy—or too utterly stupid—to do even a modicum of thinking for themselves and wanted the priests—and scriptures—to do all their thinking for them? And send them off on violent, murderous, very righteous and ego-satisfying crusades—or auto-da fé's—against any conveniently defined heretic or pagan! Is that the bozo-demographic you want to be part of?"

(Yikes, as I remember those words of John's, I cringe as I think about the situation I'd so lazily put myself in way back then, but cringe even more as I think about the kind of bozo-politics going on in the "Fascist Kingdom of America" today, where sixty five million really stupid and mentally lazy, probably inbred, weak-minded cretins, have willingly handed an incredible amount of political power over to a corrupt, criminal, deranged, malicious, manipulative clown-king who has convinced them that corruption is the new morality, that brass-balled lying is the only intelligent form of truth-telling, and that his "true-lies "are the new scriptures—and anyone who doesn't believe them is a heretic who should be burned at a stake—or at least have the living shit beat out of them by his fanatical, MAGA-hat wearing followers. Then be deported to some place where all the inhabitants are brown-skinned and impoverished and where no rich, white, assault rifle-toting bigots don't have to march around making the place safe and livable!)

And to that I could but sheepishly say, "Well . . . no . . . Uncle John—but how am I supposed to know the truth of these things . . . these . . . ideas . . . you are proposing?. . . . I mean, it's not like I can talk to anyone about them . . . to explore them . . . to understand them better!"

That got a frown out of him as he reached across the table and patted my hand as he said, "Yes . . .yes, of course! You are a hundred percent right on that account! You, through all your formal schooling . . . and for very . . . defensive . . . reasons . . . can only think with your head and not your heart. I've been living with these ideas for so long they are like old, very good friends . . . but for you, not only are they strangers . . . but strangers you lack the emotional capacity to relate to. And on top of that, they are the kind of strangers you don't ever want to be introducing to your friends at the work or the local tavern.

"But for reasons unfathomable to me—since I know they will probably always be strangers to you . . . strangers you don't want to get to know—I feel a great compulsion to pass them on to you. . . . It's my . . . destiny? . . . I guess, to do that . . . It's something I feel I must do but for which my reason has no power to figure out. . . . And what you do with them is up to you. Hide them away until some distant future day when they may come out of hiding and you feel a compulsion to think about them on your own . . . and make an intuitive attempt to validate them . . . on your own! Or share them with someone—though I can't imagine you ever doing that, since not only are these ideas strangers to you, but strangers so strange they are embarrassing to be around.

"Especially since you would—on your own!—have to try to validate the truth of them, not only through thinking about them, but by trying to intuitively/emotionally value them and then relate them to your life. By paying closer attention to what is going on inside you. By learning to sense the spiritual . . . meaning . . . the fullness . . . the saltiness . . . of the things you do . . . and are experiencing. And the meaning, the fullness, the saltiness of the choices you are making. And of course, you would have to study and understand the realm of your ego and the dominant role it plays in your life, so you can start reigning it in—or more accurately—turning down its volume.

(Ha! As I was typing those lines, a memory of Whitman's Song of Myself, Part 46—where I got that "level the lift" from—popped into my mind, and that gave me—believe it or not!—the intuitive sense to go online, induce "the Web" to manifest that poem for me, and re-read that section, where it re-affirmed what I was intuitively sensing—that Whitman had beaten John to those ideas by a hundred years. Not that John didn't always assert that "not a damn single one" of his ideas were even remotely original.

I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and

never will be measured.

I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!)

My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,

No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,

I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,

I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange,

But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,

My left hand hooking you round the waist,

My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,

You must travel it for yourself.

It is not far, it is within reach,

Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know,

Perhaps it is everyone on water and on land.

And shit!—if I could just get my reluctant, rational mind to believe in that reincarnation shit, I could make the wild and irrational surmise that John has been ol' Walt himself, returned for a 20th century incarnation!)

"I see you often listening to music through the . . . the ear-things . . . that are attached to that little tape player you always have with you (this was the mid-80s and I was in love with my Walkman!) so now just imagine going for a walk in the forest on a spring morning with those . . . ear-things . . .stuck in your ears and that racket you call music blasting out of them. Are you going to hear those birds?" (Interestingly, more than once I told John they were called earbuds, but he couldn't seem to remember that term.)

With that I had to laugh as I thought about strolling down one of his forest trails with Led Zep blasting out "When The Levee Breaks" or The Doors, "LA Woman" through the headphones, and could only shake my head.

"So, regardless that the spring forest is full of birds chirping their little head off and hearts out, you are not going to hear them because your music is blasting right into your ears is drowning them out. So think of your ego as that music blasting out of those ear-things and the whisperings of your spirit-being as the bird-song. Obviously, if you want to hear the birdsong of your spirit-being, you don't have to go on an arduous and expensive journey looking for it because it is already constantly filling up your psyche. All you just have to do is 'turn down' all that racket blasting in from the ear-things of your ego so you can you can hear it.

"This means that you, yourself, on your own initiative and with your own gumption, have to pay attention to, and teach yourself, about what all the ego-noise is in your life so you can turn it down and allow yourself to hear the chirping birds of your spirit-being. But you not only have to learn to hear the birdsong, you have to learn to recognize and accept that those soft songs have instructions woven into them on how to find—and hold onto!—the meaning, the fullness, the saltiness I have been talking about. And believe me—the birds of your spirit-being are always singing their lovely songs to you!

"So, as I see it—it is my . . . destiny . . . my spirit-being's job . . . to explain these things to you and point you in the direction you must go, but it is your journey . . . it is your spirit-being's. unique-to-It destiny to someday . . . . perhaps . . . do what you must with it. And only you can make that journey! And always keep in mind: if you try and take that journey along the pathways of your frail, ever-insecure ego and are always looking for authoritative—or crowd!—verification for what you are thinking and the choices you must make, it becomes an endless and futile journey. An endless and futile slog around a giant circle in a thick wood. But if you learn to take out those . . . ear-things . . . that are blasting all that 'ego-noise' into your psyche . . . so you can listen to the 'birdsong' of your spirit-being, then it is a very short . . . and well-guided . . . journey. Or should be a very short journey!"

That conversation that day pretty much ended with that and I seem to remember going home from it with an incipient migraine as I faced the daunting task of both following his advice, and trying to integrate that information with other stuff he'd said previously about the ego. Especially when he'd quoted both Don Juan and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin on the subject of the fight for the domination in our lives between our ego and our spirit-being, the soul, with the former having—more or less—said that our ego—tonal—was supposed to be a guardian of our spirit-being—nagual—but too often turned itself into a tyrannical guard of it, while the latter said that famous line about us: not being human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human one.

Of course, that saying of de Chardin's—in some New Age circles—is so glib and has become so over-quoted and clichéd that it has pretty much lost its original mojo, but if you spend some time meditating on it, you can begin to get a real sense of the meaning of your life, for if you are primarily an ego just happening to be having a spiritual experience, it leaves open the avenue of devaluing and rejecting that spiritual experience in favor the more enthralling ego experience.

But if you are a spiritual being having a human experience, then what you are experiencing and learning as a spiritual being during this human experience, is everything, is the raison d'être of your time on this planet, and if you reject that in favor of the more alluring but fundamentally shallow and ultimately irrelevant—saltless!—ego-experience, you are like a some cretin given a choice between a small pile of real money and a huge pile of Monopoly money, and you choose the Monopoly money because to the ego, more is always better. And besides, that Monopoly money is more colorful!

Interestingly, and apropos, John Keats said as much with his: This world is a place of soul making. (Though I think if John was alive today, and I ran that line past him, he'd say, "No, this world is a place of soul enhancing!)

But back—waaaaaaaaaay back!—to that graduated schooling analogy I was working with before that digression (I think I should just call this scatter-brained abomination—Digressions) where, just as your graduation from Grade 8 meant you had to go on to High School and could not keep hanging around your comfortable old Grade School anymore where you'd had such great fun for a year being such a magnificent Big-Shot Grade 8'ers, so also just such a reality and process seems to apply to be for our spirit-being. According to John's "philosophical" system, our spirit-being, on incarnating into a human being, is essentially enrolling in a school system in which It willingly goes through a range of learning-and-growing—soul-enhancing!—experiences designed to push It—depending on Its destiny—through a succession of membranes of destiny, with the passage through each of those membranes demanding, by the very nature of the process, that It/we, once we find ourselves on the far side of each membrane, make a drastic—and commensurate—life-change.

I'd forgotten it until just now, but John, in one of our many discussions on this subject—many because I had such a hard time grasping it!—had compared that process of spiritual growth through our traversals of membranes of destiny akin to a very hypothetical baby bird that flies out of the too-small and confining natal nest and into what it believes to be the real, forest world, except it is not the "real world" at all, but just another, bigger nest, which after it grows larger and gains more experience, it finds to be just like its natal nest—too small and too confining. And which point it senses it must fly out of that nest to enter and engage a "realer, real world." Except after awhile, it discovers that that new, "really real world" is just another too-small and confining nest, which in turn must be flown out of. And on and on, with each flight out of each successive nest—membrane of destiny—not only opening that bird (us) up to ever bigger and more demanding worlds, but in the process of making it (us) an ever big and more powerful and wiser bird.

I remember him saying that this was a perfect metaphor because in many "primitive" cultures, our spirit-being is conceived of as a bird. And too, in a sense this metaphor is copacetic with Whitman's lift-system, except that system just stresses our spirit rising to a new, higher world, but not our mandatory, though likely forced, spiritual growth with each lift—though it is definitely intimated.

And if we allow that fascist tyrant that is our ego to have too much power and control so that it refuses—because of its fear of growth and change—to allow those essential life-changes, refuses to allow the membrane-induced spirit-growth to happen in each expanding—and ever bigger and potentially more frightening—"nest," it could well force that "spirit-bird" to lifelong exist in that old, familiar, comfortable—and thus safe!—nest that was supposed to have been flown out of and left behind. And though that nest would feel comfortingly familiar and safe, it would be a nest that would become like a cramped and dank dungeon!

And if that happens, then we, dominated as we then would be by our over-empowered and uber-controlling ego, are in big trouble, for our spirit-being would be incarcerated in an old life that is not only too small for it, but which would contain no inherent purpose or meaning. It would be like those "professional students" who have graduated from university with a degree or three, but don't want to move on into the work-world and just keep hanging around the university, taking interesting but useless or redundant classes. Though that's a bit too voluntary a metaphor and what it truly would be like is a wild falcon that has been captured and kept caged and hooded by some cruel falconer, doomed to spend its life taking short, unchallenging and unsatisfying flights to kill tame pigeons solely for the falconer's egomaniacal amusement. It could then but plummet into the falcon-equivalent of chronic apathy and devastating depression.

And as you will read in The Fire, John got to know the reality of a forced transit through a succession of important membranes of destiny in an extremely intimate and intense way, and it is the story of those forced transits that dictates why I knew him as the "all-hat/no-ranch" cowboy. His ranching days, much as he passionately loved and missed them, lay far on the back-side of several very horrendous membranes of destiny he had been most unwillingly and harshly frog-marched through.

Actually, as the story of his life unfolds in The Fire, you get to witness him going through a lot of membranes of destiny, some more dramatic and traumatic than others, which is why, when I finally got to know him, he was so spiritually advanced and knew so goddamn damn much about so many things, regardless of—though more likely because of—the reality that he had never done his "Little Turd/Big Shit" ego-enhancing time in the various toilets of our excremental schooling system that is so adept at teaching us how to become Big Shits—or accept being Little Turds—in this Cesspool of Life, but never how to be truly spiritual and fulfilled human beings.

JESUS H. FUCKING GODDAMN CHRIST!—how in FUCKIN' HELL did I get from finding John dead in that rain-soaked patch of blueberries, to that extensive and extraneous flight of philosophical, school-shithouse sightseeing?

Well, I do know why—as surely you must!—that it is because I SO DO NOT WANT to deal with the road-rash of that still-painful subject of John's death that any and all diversionary ointments and salves could be but infinitely better! But the huge, irresistible, multi-thousand horsepower locomotive of . . . destiny? . . . is once again crashing into my big fat ass and pushing me along the tracks of this narrative, so now—reluctant as I am!—I must go baaaaaaaack to—???????—Christ, I've forgotten where I sidetracked from and again have got to scroll back . . . . . a lonnnnng fuckin' ways . . . . . . to find out that I was writing about, which was . . . was being at that special rock of John's in that blueberry patch in the forest, seemingly meeting a glowing spirit with a wind-chime voice and carrying the scent of blooming lilacs who told me I was to become a memory-keeper after going through a membrane of destiny . . .

So, much as I'd rather give myself an un-anesthetized root canal with a jack hammer than re-visit John's death, this fucking narrative which most definitely has acquired a powerful and malicious life of its own, has my weak, pudgy arm twisted up behind my flabby back and is forcing me to go back to that blueberry patch by the river, where after hearing the voice of what might have been a powerful spirit (I can't function in a worldview that includes spirits, so I am forced to believe it was an hallucination brought on by the trauma of finding John's body lying there!) then being distracted by the keeeing of that hawk, after which the only sounds I remember hearing were the rushing and gurgling waters of the storm-swollen river, the buzz of the mosquitoes, the soft, relentless whining of the dog, the harsh, regular breathing and occasional whicker of the horse—and of course, my own weeping and wailing that went on for an immeasurably long time as I cradled his head and upper body in my lap and while the mosquitoes feasted on every square inch of my exposed skin, I sobbed and whispered into his now forever-deaf ears that it was very cruel of him to have abandoned me as he had, especially since after meeting him, my whole life had revolved around his presence in it, and that like a bicycle wheel with its all its spokes kicked out, I could now just be a flimsy rim and cut-loose hub with a mess of useless, broken spokes sticking out of it. (Jonathan had once tearfully come home with the rear wheel of his brand new bicycle in just such a condition after a gang of tormenting punks had kicked the shit out of it. Though that was better, I remember thinking at the time, that it was better they kicked the shit out of his bike wheel instead of his head!)

Mostly what I remember of that fell and caustic time, though, is just sitting there on that wet ground, holding his cold, stiff body in my arms, weeping and moaning to him, over and over and over, of how much I was going to miss him, and how I really didn't know how I was going to get through the rest of my life without him in it. It was only to the eventual feeling of the dog licking my face and whining loudly in my ear that I finally snapped out of that grieving fugue.

Or thought I had! No easy thing was it to leave John lying there (after covering his face with his beloved, but sodden, Stetson) with only his dog—and of course, half a forest full of nature spirits, which I did not believe in—for company as I stiffly mounted his horse and, while slapping the mosquitoes that were biting my mosquito bites, rode it back to the house where I called 911 to report his death.

In my mind I thought I was reporting his death as it happened but the truth of the matter—as I was told about it much later—turned out to be quite different. I guess it is safe to say that it is the nature of psychotic breaks that they are a lot like falling asleep, in that there is no distinctly discernible transit from one state to the other (no stiff membrane to punch through!), and any person transiting out of Castaneda's ordinary reality and into a unique one of their own subconscious making (?????), often has no idea the transition has taken place, and such it was with me that dark and terrible day.

When John had so propitiously come into my life the way he had, that long ago post-Woodstock August afternoon, he pretty much arrested and kept locked up for me, the slavering, soul-devouring ogre of shame, self-loathing and self-destruction into whose vast black maw I'd been zombie-walking, and when all those years—and hundreds of hours of soothing companionship and philosophical talk!—later, he finally left the world and my life, that ogre, now bigger, angrier and hungrier than ever, smashed out of its cage and devoured me with one vengeful chomp!

I have been told that when I called 911 to report his death, I was so frantic and incoherent that the phone operator could barely make out me saying that "some evil Morrisons riding fiery horses had swooped down out of that terrible storm and had murdered my Uncle John and that he was now lying dead in the forest and that they should sent out a posse on a bunch of Pegasuses to track down those evil killers, bring them back to Earth and hang them by their balls in his barn until you could hear their screams on the moon!" (Hey, I was in the throes of a psychotic break, which by definition is irrational, so I have no idea why I said what I did!)

Anyways, after finally getting the information out of me as to where I was . . . well NOT!— for I guess the address I gave her was my address in the city, and when the police found no one there, they drove away and left things hanging until I got tired of waiting for them and called back, after the patient, 911 operator got out of me that I not at my home in the city but at my Uncle John's farm over twenty miles away, and eventually a squad car with two very wary officers in it arrived to question me, and of course, since I was behaving—quite literally!—like a raving lunatic, they assumed that what I kept telling them about John—I guess I was a broken record stuck on the evil storm-riders story—was just a lot of demented nonsense that they ignored completely as they radioed for an ambulance and kept me in the back of their squad car till it arrived to cart me off to the hospital in the storm-battered "Shitty" that I'd driven out of on my way out to the farm.

I guess I was so violently upset at their refusal to believe my story that John had been murdered by storm-riders—which I kept calling Morrisons, of all fucking things!—in the forest and that he was lying dead in a patch of blueberries beside the river with only his dog for company, that I kept trying to scratch their faces off—to get their attention, I guess—and had to be first restrained in a straight-jacket, then eventually sedated so heavily that I passed out on the way to the hospital, and John was only found many hours later when the police first tried to figure out who the owner of that farm was—which they did by running the license plate of his truck, and then figuring out where he'd gone to without taking that truck.

Fortunately I'd not tied up the horse on getting off it at John's house, so it had gone back to where John's body lay, and its absence in the barn—I guess the fresh shit on the floor of the stall made it was obvious to them a horse was being kept there—clued them in that that he'd very likely gone out for a ride, got caught in the storm and suffered some sort of misadventure, which given his age, may very well have killed him.

They eventually found his body exactly as I'd described it—sans any evidence of having been murdered by evil storm-riders called Morrisons—and according to the coroner's report, John was an extremely old man who died of a heart attack while out riding his horse and getting caught in a violent thunderstorm. POPPYCOCK!—Fuck, what a useless euphemism for BULLSHIT! So, BULLSHIT!—John didn't get caught out in that storm, he knew it was coming and he knew it was time to go—according to my vision, and from what I knew of his attitude to being alive—and he somehow knew his higher-level "spirit-friends" were finally coming to rescue his spirit-being from the hell of this too-long confinement in this Gulag Earth—and he gladly went out to meet them in that storm.

He'd often said he was never afraid of dying—for a man who had gone through combat in both World Wars and on top of that, was basically a shaman in constant communion with the realm of spirits, how could he have been?—but only afraid of dying in a hospital bed connected to machines and with all of his orifices ignominiously stuffed with tubes while a bunch of unsmiling nurses monitored those machines in an effort to keep him alive—no matter how badly he wanted to die—just so their egos wouldn't be bruised by him dying on their watch!

He, tough old cowboy that he pretty much lifelong had been—if not in actuality, then at least in spirit—wanted to die "in the saddle," and he made damn sure he did. And to have managed to do it out in the most violent thunderstorm to hit the area in years—all the more pure fucking John!

### Chapter Fourteen

Fucking hell, but I should not have gone into that nightmare about John's death! It took a lot longer to write than the few paragraphs show and at least a half a box of Kleenex to get through it. And worse, it got me so fucking agitated it sent me off to my "street-corner pharmacist" for a prescription of natural mood-medication, and then on to the liquor store for several flagons of Russian "potato water"—Moscow Mineral Water!—big enough to build a half-scale replica of the battleship Potemkin in, and though Einstein mind-fuckingly said time and space are as intimately connected as the Constantine's Imperial Abomination claims sex and sin are, that theoretical and intimate relationship of the two is not always shown accurately in a written work. And especially not in this one, for the short space between the preceding paragraph and this one took more than several stoned, drunken, and hung-over days to traverse.

So, since there is nothing more frustrating than a half-told story—especially from the teller's egomaniacal point of view!—I will finish this sad tale by saying that John, in totally underestimating the power of his presence in my life to keep me sane, left me as the executor of his will, one important proviso of which was that he was to be cremated after a simple send-off that in no way involved the Constantine's Imperial Abomination or any of its abominable priests!

Alas, I was in no condition to enforce that proviso, and everything to do with his burial was handled by my redoubtable little Mimi, who, uber-Catholic to every silent fart that sneakily slithered out of her tight, tiny bum and her big, tough core, passionately believed that since John had been baptized a Catholic, and since baptism was like circumcision (her words!) and could not be undone, that meant he'd died as a Catholic—however loathe he might have been to live like one. (Or, as he often said, go within half a parsec of a church!). And in being a Catholic, he therefore had to be buried (always buried, never cremated) as all Catholic's must be—in a consecrated Catholic cemetery after a proper Catholic service officiated by a Catholic priest.

Interestingly, John and I had several times talked about the cremation/burial divide, he believing in cremation because, not only was it cheaper and didn't waste good land, but he was convinced that once his spirit-being had departed his body, that body was now just a hunk of rotting meat of value only to vultures, worms, microbes and Victorian grave robbers, and no longer of any value to his spirit-being or Gulag Earth, and that burying the body in a graveyard, then honoring it with a headstone and visiting it regularly to weep over it and put flowers on it—or what-the-hell-ever—was not only supremely materialistic, but incredibly stupid, as all that was really left of that person on this earth was their memories lodged in the minds of those who had loved (and hated!) them, and not one tiny bit of the essential them remained in the pile of rotting meat sealed in a box and buried in the ground.

To John, to believe you honored the "luckily departed" any better by kneeling on their grave crying over your memories of them (or pissing out your hatred for them on it) instead of doing so lying in your bed, sitting on a toilet, or walking through a park or down the street, was usually as utterly infantile as it was ostentatious. And stupid. (Though as events in The Fire will show, John did not always possess that iconoclastic attitude towards grieving at a grave.)

Of course, Constantine's Imperial Abomination's insistence of burial over cremation, as I understand it, is so that the bodies of good, righteous Catholics would be intact (even for some, after 1700 years!) for their promised resurrection at the Last fuckin' Judgment so they could then be judged and sent either to their deserved eternal cremation in Hell, or ascend in glory to the right hand of Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy . . . and Sonny Boy Jesus . . . and his Pet Pigeon . . . all three being assiduously cooked-for and looked-after, by the poor, deprived, over-worked and under-appreciated, Never-Fucked-But-Still-A-Mother, Mary—if you can fuckin' believe such infantile and cretinous nonsense!

And especially infantile and nonsensical—and even downright fucking retarded!—does shit like that sound when you fathom how many centuries have passed since this notion became insanely extant, and just how much is left of those long-buried bodies to rise up to their glory on Judgment Day.

If you ever read The Fire, and in doing so truly plumb John's loathing for the Constantine's Imperial Abomination—if you haven't fully fathomed it from this "Preface"—which he considered the vilest and most evil political and fascist institution in the history of the world, you'll get to fathom the supreme irony (indignity!) of his body (almost) being subjected to a Catholic funeral in a Catholic church under the auspices of a Catholic priest and then having what he considered his worthless meat, buried in a Catholic graveyard! And a granite gravestone installed over it! (For absolutely no one to weep over—except me, for though I kinda believe in John's attitude towards visiting graves and weeping over buried "meat," I don't completely!)(And yeah—his sister, my Mimi, would have visited it too, but only to give him shit for being such a sinning apostate!)

Unfortunately—for the non-existent brevity of this poor "Preface"—the above paragraph provokes a pertinent memory of John once giving me a book to read which he said he found one of the most moving books he'd ever read. It was James Agee's semi-autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family, and it is one of those life-really-sucks-and-fate-is-a-mystery stories about a young father of two young children—one of whom is the six year old James, the eventual author of the story—who goes to visit his heart-ailing father because he is afraid his father is about to die, and himself gets killed in a car crash on the journey. (The old father lives, the young son dies, and fate is a fucking mysterious and capricious monster!)

Being the great work of literary art that it is, there is much that could be said about its literary qualities, but how it pertains to where I am at in this pathetic excuse for a "Preface" is that in the depths of the deep gloom of the young wife's grief over her husband's death, she gets bathed in a small, bright ray of comfort from sensing her husband's protective and concerned presence hovering around her. You can distinctly feel the dark mood of the story brighten a bit at the realization, by that poor, grieving widow and mother, that though her husband has died, he has not completely abandoned her or the children.

Then the story switches to her interactions with a priest, and all the dark Church dogma-shit surrounding the funeral and whatever bit of light that had come from the sensing of her husband's hovering, concerned presence is sucked into a shroud-black darkness brought to his death and funeral by the Church and that dark, death-vulture of a priest. I doubt that on my own I would have noticed that, but John, with his old hound dog's nose for the shit-stink of the dark side of what he always called Constantine's Imperial Abomination (or some variation on that theme) sure did, and once he pointed it out to me, it was obvious. (I hope I remembered that Agee story right, for it has been awhile since I read that book and I can't seem to find the copy of it I once had to check that out. And re-read it, because it is a great story!)

Just as obvious as the darkness and shit-stink brought to his own death—which he'd been yearning for, for years and which he'd welcomed like a lover!—by that funeral service held in that loathsome little rural church under the auspices of that loathsome little priest, and attended by a hypocritical horde of relatives, most of whom pretty much loathed him and were likely only attending because of Mimi's not-so-gentle persuasions! (She could be a true, irresistible force-of-nature, when she wanted to be!)

But now back to John's very undesired Church-and-priest-polluted funeral, which I was allowed several hours of leave for from the Shrink-Klink—under the supervision of a psychiatric nurse—to attend, though I did so, however drugged up so I would be, emotionally numb but in anything but a state of lucidity. I was just barely deep enough in ordinary—consensus—reality to fathom that John had died and I coped with that reality by weeping my way through pretty much a whole box of kleenex,(so much for those drugs keeping me emotionally numb) but not deep enough into it to miss out on what—to me!—was the main event of the whole dreary service.

While that infernally irritating, long-robed, pompous, and nasal-twanged young priest with an Adam's apple that looked, in his white skinny throat, like a hard-on in a tight pair of white chinos, was giving his pathetically insincere sermon about the "passed on" Catholic brother-uncle-cousin-whatthefuckever John—not that I can blame him since he'd not once seen the living John in his precious church—to the surprisingly large crowd of both young and old relatives that Mimi had wrangled into attending the event. And attending too, was a handful of the old farts John drank coffee with at Tim Hortons—one of whom had brought a mickey of vodka—or gin—and they were passing it back and forth between them during the service and making sotto voce comments—though about what I could not hear. (John would have slapped his thighs and howled with laughter at the sight of them—both for being there and turning the event into a bit of a wake!)

I tried my best to eyes-closed tune out the whole travesty—no easy thing when you are on drugs that short-circuit the will and addle the mind!—and was just drifting off into a fantasy/dream/hallucination of going out for a ride on the horses with John on a warm, sunny, leaves-red-and-gently-falling October Sunday, (fuck, I could not only feel the warmth of that bright sun, but I could hear those leaves gently falling and could smell that magical, earthy smell of that colorful carpet of already-fallen leaves being absorbed into the forest floor!) when I suddenly smelled the scent of lilacs so powerfully it was like a whole bush of them was blooming in that church.

Now, I'd rarely gone to mass—when very young—when there wasn't phalanxes of odors attacking my nose, be it various frontal attacks of male body odor, or spear-barrages of those veritable stinks that old women believe to be perfumes and which they seem to feel it necessary to bathe in before going out—but most importantly, when going to church—and of course, incense, but never have I smelled lilacs. Not in church and just as certainly not in July when their May blooming period is a distant memory and all lilac blooms have long gone to seed. So while I was busy enjoying that lilac scent while getting pleasantly transported back to some warm and sunny, lilac-blooming May day of my childhood, I heard an eerily familiar but unplaceable-in-my-drugged-state, soft, sweet, feminine, wind-chime voice saying, "Wake up, Rachel—wake up!"

At first I couldn't remember where I'd heard that very distinctive voice before, so I thought maybe it was a recurring hallucination—I'd had more than a few between John's death and that funeral—so I ignored it as just that, a sub-hallucination intruding into my main hallucination, and did my willful best to stay in that comforting "reality" of horseback riding with John through that warm, bright, magical autumn afternoon. (It was so vivid and peaceful and soothing—so utterly blissful!—I would gladly accept an eternity of that day and that ride as a perfect definition of Heaven!)

But that didn't last long because suddenly I felt a soft, warm hand gently pinching my cheek and that sweet, wind-chime voice again saying, "Wake up, Rachel. Please, wake up!" And much as I wanted to stay out on that horse in that lovely fall day with the living John and his comforting, soothing, stabilizing presence, I willed myself out of it and back to that depressing funeral and even more depressing church (like John for all the years I knew him, I had developed as much use for being in a Catholic Church reeking with the physical and psychic stench of a pack of mindless morons and resounding with the prattle of a pompous priest, as I did for a "colonoscopy with Saguaro cactus" (one of John's many earthy metaphors!) just to see who could be pinching my cheek and taking such a solicitous and unexpected interest in me.

But first, Dear Reader, I must explain that statement: my involvement with John, had, over the years, served to isolate and alienate me from the Clan every bit as much as John had isolated himself from it. I mean, in being a typical clan, there was no room for individual thoughts and opinions and actions amongst its plethora of members, so since the Clan's opinion was that John, in rejecting it, was anathema to it, so, by my close association with him, was I! (It's just like that clan of sixty five million, MAGA-hat-wearing American cretins who so passionately believe that Mad King Donald is Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy-incarnate that they willingly believe that anyone who isn't part of their mindless, MAGA-cult is a traitor deserving of exile—or more satisfying yet—death by water-boarding!)

And I should add here that my isolation—both spiritual and physical—was heightened by the fact that Terry was on a trip around the world—I think she was in India at the time—and obviously couldn't be informed of John's death, and Jonathan was in the middle of a business trip to some lump-of-polar-bear-shit the high Arctic and couldn't make the plane-connections that would have brought him back in time for the funeral. (He did manage to visit four days after it!)

When finally, and with great effort, I forced my eyes open, I saw a beautiful, smiling young woman who was completely enwreathed in a glow of shimmering white light standing in front of me, her right hand getting ready to pinch my cheek again while looking at me with the softest, kindest, light-brown eyes I'd ever seen. Her left hand was holding the hand of an obviously very intelligent and sensitive boy of about four or five, who not only looked so much like her it was startling, but was also surrounded by a similar, shimmering white glow. That stunning woman had shiny, long, wavy auburn hair with reddish highlights that seemed to flow like a dark waterfall from beneath the brim of an obviously expensive, light tan Cloche hat with a dark brown band and a flattened, faux corsage of a white rose and leaves attached to it that looked like she'd borrowed it from costume room of the film set of The Great Gatsby.

That fantastic head of dark hair framed a face that was both stunningly beautiful and subtly and potently sexy, and when she smiled at me, the smile was not only warm and comforting, but displayed, besides an array of perfect, white teeth, an entrancing mix of intelligence, imagination and humor. I was so stunned by her beauty and warmth, and by the warm, strange and soothing energy that flowed out of her hand and into my cheek, that all I could do was speechless stare at her, marveling at how I'd been woken from one heavenly hallucination only to find myself in another.

That had never happened before. (John once told me that during the BASS he'd once woken from a dream and into a world that seemed so real he assumed he was "awake" until abruptly he awakened again, this time to find himself in his trench, and only then realizing he'd awakened from that first dream into another dream, and the whole damn business was so confounding that it almost drove him crazy thinking about it back then, and that even all those years later he'd never been able to make heads or tails of it, though he said he got a smidgen of an intuitive insight into it when he encountered that famous quote by Zhuangzi,

Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.

But when I asked John what his "smidgen of an intuitive insight" had been concerning that quote of which I'd encountered a shorter version of several times and found as clear as coal, he just shook his head and said, "All 'realities' are just mere dreams when viewed from an outside perspective. And my only explanation for that 'dream-within-a-dream' experience was that dream-beings have bona-fide existences in their dream realms, and that as such, have the power to themselves have dreams . . . though I would presume that under normal circumstances, we are not able to tap into our dream-being's dreams." (He also said I should read up on what Castaneda wrote about 'the double,' and though I have—several times—that shit, too, is as clear as coal!) An answer that was then, and still is, as crystal clear as a lump of petrified dinosaur shit! Or a coprolite, if you are academically anal enough to care!)

It was while I was speechlessly staring at that lovely woman and that lovely boy that I noticed that not only had her hat looked like it belonged in The Great Gatsby, but both hers and the boy's clothes, clean, pressed and new as they were, looked like they did as well. It was like they'd just stepped out of a set from that movie and slipped into that dim, dreary and dusty old spirit-vacuum of a church for a quick and amusing look-see. Except all that interested her in that depressing place seemed to be me.

Me and John's body! While still looking at me with that absolutely angelic smile of hers, that scent of lilacs got deliciously and distractingly stronger as she lightly rubbed my cheek—I felt it, I truly did!—before turning to look at John's coffin, after which she slipped her hand off my cheek and used it to beckon to me to follow her as she softly and sweetly said—her voice made me think of an expensive wind-chime made out of crystals, which immediately brought back the memory of hearing it coming from that glowing creature on my finding John's body—"Come Rachel, let's go get John and get out of this horrid place."

My initial response was one of utter confusion, for how could a woman I'd never set eyes on before, and who certainly had never seen me, know my name and both look at me, and talk to me, in the loving manner I'd spent my girlhood wishing my mother had. (My mother used to talk to Daniel like that, but never me.) Then just as suddenly, as I wondered about that, some current . . . of something . . . from deep within me welled up and I had the absolute sense that I not only knew her very well, but had known her for a very long time—like she'd somehow, from her place in another world, been with me for the whole of my life and had been the source of the strength I'd need to keep myself alive during so many of my darkest, not-worth-living years—and most precarious events.

That realization only took a fraction of a second and my response to it was to stand up and loudly say, "I'm coming! I'm coming!" and though I could feel Mimi, who was on my left, tugging at my dress and harshly whispering at me to be quiet and sit down, (to her, Church services took one directly into the presence of Almighty God Himself, and priests were his very angels and as such deserved every ounce of awe and respect we could squeeze out of our hell-bound souls for them) and to her frantic and shushing consternation, I refused to do so. That beautiful woman and that lovely little boy didn't have far to walk—well, they more floated than walked!—to get to John's coffin, where it lay open at the steps leading up that obnoxious, prattling priest, behind which rested that almighty altar where we were expected to believe that that fancy-robed clown with his bad case of mouth-diarrhea and a hard-on in his throat, had the power to turn stale pieces of unleavened bread and cheap wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. When that beautiful, glowing woman got to that fancy open oak box containing John's discarded body—to him, now just a hunk of rotting meat—she smiling looked back at me and again beckoned me to join her, then leaned over it and softly and liltingly said in her wind-chime voice, "Wake up John, it's time for us to go."

Well, with my Mimi hanging onto my dress with her frail, nonagenarian hand strengthened by her timeless religious zeal, and my "4x4" mother, expecting me to be a problem, and acting like an NFL offensive guard, blocking my way out of that pew, (the psychiatric nurse, out of respect for the "grieving family," was in the pew behind me) I did my best to get past her—I still weighed in those day, at most, only about a hundred and ten pounds, while my mother wasn't much taller than my five foot two, she had her very "4x4" frame covered in very dense, robust flesh and outweighed me by at least a hundred pounds—while shouting, to the consternation of the whole church, but most particularly that pompous ass of a priest, "Lemme go! Godfuckindamnit!—LET. ME. FUCKIN'—GO!"

And while thus struggling and screaming, I never took my eyes off that glowing woman as she looked into that box and told John to get up. I really have no memory of doing so, but I have been told many times by more than one person that at one point—which I presumed to be that point—I roared out, "GET YOUR FILTHY FUCKIN' HANDS OFF ME, YOU FAT COW, AND LEMME FUCKIN' GO! And just as I shouted those words, John did exactly what that lovely, glowing woman had asked him to do and got out of that coffin.

Except it was not the thin, old John whose lifeless body I'd held in the forest that day of the storm, but a handsome and rugged young John, dressed in an old fashioned, Sunday-fine suit but still wearing his trademark Stetson—but most strangely, not his beloved bolo tie!—surrounded by a halo of white shimmering light and radiating more life than I could have ever imagined. The sight of that vision—visible only to me, of course!—of John looking like that—so young, strong, vital, and alive—was too much for me and I fainted. Which of course, to everyone's relief—particularly that pompous priest's—shut me up!

### Chapter Fifteen

Needless to say, my sudden drop to the floor, much as it shut me up, still, caused quite a commotion, but not half as much as when, while sitting in that pew after having been picked up off the floor and had my face slapped till I'd woken up, and I was again able to see that young and imposing—and goddamn breathtakingly handsome!—John, standing with that beautiful woman and that lovely boy, their respective glowing auras having melded together into one giant, embracing one that was about ten times brighter than each individual one had been, and looking back at me with a big smile on his face as he beckoned me to join them. Both the woman and boy smiled and nodded their assent to his wish and gesture, and at the moment of them doing so, a bright shaft of that white light shot out from the area of their hearts and beamed into my heart, filling me with a feeling of such profound and utter bliss and love that I thought I was going to explode.

Now, it was one thing to have a woman I only intuitively knew ask me to fight my way out of that pew, but it was a whole other order of incentive to have John do it—especially that John!—and though I have no memory of doing so, I guess I turned and almost broke my poor Mimi's frail old wrist as I wrenched her hand off my dress where she'd been gripping it in order to hold me upright in the pew while I recovered from my faint, then stood up and shoved my mother so hard I sent her sprawling on her back in the aisle. Though I do have a most vivid and enduring memory of charging out of that pew and rushing up to join that incredibly handsome and vital young John and that profoundly kind and beautiful woman with that delightful little boy, all three of whom were still collectively glowing so brightly and smiling so genuinely at me as they beamed their love—and all that bliss!—into my heart while beckoning me to join them.

When I got to them, the woman looked directly into my eyes, causing a beam of light to shoot between hers and mine as she seemed to say, not with her mouth and into my ears, but with her mind directly into mine, "You are the keeper of all of our memories, Rachel—guard them well and don't lose them until we give you instructions about what to do with them." As that thought-voice resonated in my head, my poor addled mind struggled with a tornado of questions about how I could be a keeper of her memories since I not only did not know who she was, but knew nothing of her life. Nor of that little boy. And of John's life, either! All I knew of that was the years of his seemingly uneventful existence on that farm that he'd seemingly plodded through after he'd returned to the area and I'd been blessed to meet and spend some time talking a lot of deep philosophical shit with him that I mostly didn't understand.

But that young, glowing John must have been able to read my thoughts—addled as they were!—like my mind was some kind of billboard and after he and that sweet boy nodded their assent to what that lovely woman had said, he reached out, grabbed me, and gave me a big, hard hug and a kiss in the middle of my forehead that sent a surge of light and bliss that felt like some strange kind of absolutely magical electricity shooting through my body, and then holding me at arms' length, softly said in a voice that may have been younger and huskier, but was still as enthralling as the older voice I'd been used to, "Don't worry, I wrote those memories down and put them in a safe place and we will help you find them in good time. And I know you will not fail us in doing with them what must be done. Goodbye sweet Rachel—much as you want to come with us now, you can't because you must look after those memories."

And then pointing to that beautiful woman beside him, John went on, "They are more important than you can imagine because they are full of all the horrible and needless suffering I caused this beautiful woman, my wife Catherine . . . and my only son Johnny, and every damn painful thing that I learned from my shame and guilt and remorse at causing that suffering. And when you have finished looking after them, we will be back for you. Your life is going to be very hard from this time on, but if you are a good memory-keeper—which I know you will be!—it will be meaningful, and as I always used to tell you, a spoonful of meaningful suffering always outweighs a trainload of meaningless comfort! So be brave and strong until then. I know you well enough to be certain that however hard your life is going to be from this point on, you are a hundred times stronger than you believe you are, and you will not fail us."

And with those words of John's, the beautiful woman—whose name, Catherine, and the fact of her having been his wife, which I learned for the first time that day—let go of the little boy's hand—Johnny, as John had said his name was—and stepping forward, gave me a hug that sent such a blast of pure and utter love surging through my body that I felt like I was melting right into her and that I'd die if I let go and separated from her. (Ever after that, if I had ever been asked to define both bliss and heaven, I'd have defined it as that hug.) But however much I did not want to release her, she slipped out of my grasp like a mist drifting through the branches of a winter tree, leaving me feeling exactly like a winter tree surrounded by a cold bleak fog.

And with that the three of them, united in that stupendous glow, turned and walked back down the aisle away from me, leaving me feeling so sad, lonely, and winter-tree abandoned that to this day I can still remember the emotions but can in no way describe the profound intensity of them. And watch them I did in heart-frozen silence until they reached the vestibule, at which point the exquisite Catherine and that sweet Johnny both turned and smiling waved to me, then they walked right through that unopened door, leaving John looking back at me.

And on our eyes connecting, a powerful electrical surge shot through me that made my knees tremble so badly I almost collapsed and then he held up the forefinger of his right hand which suddenly flared into flame like it was a giant match, and giving me a mischievous grin and a wink, slipped out of view in the left side of that vestibule, only to reappear seconds later with an even more mischievous grin on his face as he put the forefinger of his left hand to his grinning lips while pointing with his right forefinger, which was still flaming like a match, to something out of sight in the part of the vestibule he'd just visited.

Immediately after that, his grin turned to a big, loving smile as his voice filled my head with a resonant, "Be brave and strong, Rachel! Always be brave and strong!" after which he waved his right hand at me, which caused his "match-finger" to go out, then turned and walked right through that unopened door after Catherine and Johnny. My only response, drowning as I was in a maelstrom of loneliness and abandonment, was to let out a long, loud moaning shriek as a vortex of vertigo turned my head into a tornado, causing my legs to turn to overcooked spaghetti and instantly collapse from under me, and the next thing I knew I was staring up at a horde of grotesque, big-eyed, painted-by-Hieronymus Bosch faces swirling around me as they severely and contemptuously stared down at me, one of which was that abominable priest's whose Adam's apple was bobbing up and down like an ejaculating prick, and whose expression seemed to shout, HOW DARE YOU BEHAVE LIKE THIS IN MY HOLY CHURCH?

And just when I felt like I was going to be zapped like a mosquito in one of those ridiculous mosquito-zappers by the electricity of all the hate and disgust beaming down at me—most of it coming from that priest, but a good bit from my mother, too!—a shout of "FIRE!" resounded in the back of the church and drew all that negative attention away from me. Especially the attention of that nasty priest who took off down the aisle like he was a mutt with a string of popping firecrackers tied to its tail, shrilly yapping, "Oh my God, NO! NO! NO! NO!"

Seconds later my mother was grabbing my arm and trying to drag me to my feet as she shouted, "Come on, Rachel—get up! There's a fire and we have to get out of here!" But my head still felt like a tornado and my legs like they belonged on some Italian's dinner plate, and I could no more have walked down that aisle than I could have flown, but the problem was solved when some very strong male arms attached to some very over-odorized and under-deodorized pits and a very strong back, picked me up like I was a child and carried me out of there.

As we traversed the smoke filled vestibule that was crowded with shouting men frantically slapping at a wall of flames with their suit jackets, I realized that a fire had started in that very spot John had so mysteriously and mischievously pointed with his flaming finger just before walking out through that unopened door. I was in the process of trying to make sense of that when, the man carrying me—I was later told it was my Uncle Peter, my mother's eldest brother—was more interested in looking at the fire instead of where he was walking, and as he went through the door, he clunked my head against the frame and knocked me unconscious.

(And no, my hallucinations didn't start that John-cremating fire, for from what the Fire Marshall could determined, it had most likely been caused by mice gnawing on wires in a wall—a not uncommon, and often fatal, hazard, created by those vile, not-so-sweet, not-so-Disney-cute, Mickey-vermin! Though of course, the synchronicity of my psychotic hallucination of John's young "spirit" starting that fire with his flaming finger so exactly coinciding with the actual start of that fire is a mystery I don't even want to drive myself crazy—crazier!—thinking about!)

I remember nothing after that until I woke up in an ambulance on the way to the hospital, strapped tight to a gurney with that psychiatric nurse sitting near my head and my mother sitting beside me, looking down at me with a face that was a stern and disapproving mask I'd already spent too much of my life being subjected to. When she saw that I was awake, she harshly said, "Oh Rachel, Rachel, Rachel!—whatever are we going to do with you? You've embarrassed me so many times over the years that I learned to take it in stride, but this . . . this. . . behavior . . . in God's own Holy Church, of all places, is the last straw! And to think it was all over that nasty old Uncle John of yours—who wasn't even your uncle, but great-uncle! And not anything great was he, fallen-away Catholic that he was! He was nothing . . . nothing but . . . a bad influence on you! This world is a better place without the likes of him and you'll do well to learn that! And it doesn't surprise me that poor old church burned down (it, like the mall, didn't stop burning until it was nothing but a charred heap of coals and ashes!) out of the great shame it felt in having to hold the service for that terrible apostate!"

Those were pretty damn dark days, I can tell you, but one thing that brightened them up just a bit was the realization that John got his wish to be cremated, for the fire consumed that old wooden church so fast no one had the time—or likely even the thought!—to get John's coffin out, so it and his "rotting meat" were reduced to the ashes he wanted them to be.

And too, now that I think on it, so also did he get his other "wish," for when, on him telling me about wanting the cremation, I tearfully asked him what he wanted done with his ashes, thinking he'd at least request some dramatic and suitable destination—like that big, favorite boulder of his where he'd died—for them, but his reply was a sardonic, "I don't much care what you do with them. They will not be me and will be of no value than a plastic wrapper ripped off a new pack of cigarettes. Flush them down a toilet if you want."

That was a thought that, needless to say, horrified me at the time, and which I had no intention of doing, but as it turned out, during the three days following the immolation of that church, the area was beset by one of those low-pressure monsoons we sometimes get, during which we got about three or four inches of steady rain, (female rains, as John loved to say the Earth-wise Navajo called them) which surely had the effect of washing his ashes deep into the soil beneath that erstwhile church. And not long did it take my slow, unimaginative, metaphor-challenged mind to see that because of those timely rains, John got his humorous wish of having his ashes flushed down a toilet, for to John, all of Constantine's Imperial Abomination's churches were just glorified out-houses full of the shit-stink of the hypocrisy of the world's biggest, most powerful, most brutal, most enduring and most fascist dictatorship. So it kinda makes ya wonder, don't it?

Boy, memories sure are like a bucket full of three-pronged fish hooks—there's no such thing as pulling out only one! (And when they are about funerals, no way of avoiding painfully pricked fingers!) I was in pretty damn bad shape during those following days in the Shrink-Klink, and don't remember much but I sure do remember how I was crying constantly inside that place while it was constantly raining outside it, and how absolutely appropriate it was that the weather so matched how I was feeling.

And believe me, it was brutal weather, for not only did the rain pour down with a seemingly endless and relentless vengeance, but the thick black clouds from which all that rain was spewing were so low they blocked out the view of most of the big, sky-raping "phallus" of a smelter smokestack that was normally visible in all its distant, towering, phallic, 1200-ft magnificence from my window! And I remember thinking, as that rain douched out of those low clouds and fire-hosed against my window, about a very great and appropriate song I'd absolutely loved years before, "The Sky Is Crying," which "Groucho" introduced me to in the back of his Shagginwaggen through Albert Kings' great version on his Years Gone By album. (Which I liked it so much I subsequently bought for myself.)

For a lot of years, and through a lot of listenings, I had always assumed King had written it because it so seemed to "belong" to him, Then I kind of lost track of the song until I picked up a DVD of that great 2004 blues concert, Lightning In A Bottle, on which the now late-great Gregg Allman does a version of it that he seemed to "own" as much as Albert King had, and so disturbing was it to listen to it after my John's-death associations with it, that in the many times I have subsequently watched that DVD, I have always skipped that song.

Then recently I got blindsided by another great version of done by one of my favorite modern female blues artists, Ms Modern Blues herself, Susan Tedeschi, during the 2012 Tedeschi Trucks Band's Live At Red Rocks performance. And most interesting it was, on watching Susan seem to "own" that song, that I started to get an inkling of what a "power object" it seemed to be, (power object as defined and talked about by Castaneda and John both) for that song had the power to apparently "take over" the performers of it in such a fashion that it seemed to be intrinsically theirs! Which certainly reaffirmed something John always asserted about any true, Muse-inspired object of art—meaning anything truly poetic and artistic, from the "fluid" music played by musicians on instruments to the "frozen music" of architecture, which was that it was always a manifestation of the nagual, of the Fifth Dimension, of the Ocean of Spirit, and thus always essentially was the nagual, the Ocean of Spirit.

And in essentially being the nagual, the Ocean of Spirit, it was a conscious "entity" with an identity and agenda of its own, and though most inspired artists like to claim such "creations" as their own, those "creations" are anything but, because in being conscious "entities" in their own right, they firstly belong to themselves and secondly, belong to the world. The artist is merely the midwife and the greatest poets and artists—or inventors—are always humble enough to see themselves as such. And equally most often quite content to experience the shamanic ecstasy attendant to midwifing these "entities" of the nagual, the Ocean of Spirit, into this realm of the tonal. Again, back to that Eternity is in love with the productions of time, aphorism of Blake's!

And as I spent those drear, monsoonish days in that Shrink-Klink, I had some strange, rare moments of rational lucidity—always accompanied by the faint scent of fresh blooming lilacs—where I suddenly and completely understood that stuff John had talked about so often and which I'd back then, had such a hard time understanding. I could very clearly "see" that song, "The Sky is Crying" as a living "entity" that had been written—"midwifed"—into this world back in '59 by Elmore James (I only just learned that this minute as I Wikied it!) and once in this realm, had enough intrinsic power to "take over" each artist who loved and performed it often enough.

And John always stressed that when human attention was paid to these "entities of the nagual" they grew stronger on that attention, no differently than a newborn grows stronger on its mother's milk and attention. And thus, as "The Sky is Crying " moved from artist to artist, group to group, it not only had the power to "take over" the artist, the group performing it in such a fashion as to create the illusion that it "belonged" to that group, but it also grew stronger on the attention-energies it got from each artist and group—and the attention-energies of the audiences who listened to their renditions of it. And if it was a really powerful "entity" with a potent will to continue to exist in this world, it would use that power to keep "moving on" to new hosts who revitalize and re-expose it to new audiences. And new sources of renewing/recharging power.

John wasn't a big jazz fan but he did listen to it and made the comment that the world of jazz is full of such "standards" that have so much power they keep finding new "hosts" to take possession of so they can remain vitalized and in the minds—and attentions!—of new audiences. And of course, the world of Classical music—and opera—is all about powerful, musical "entities" constantly getting "reboots" by a succession of artists and orchestras. I wouldn't even dare to guess how many productions of Madama Butterfly, or La Boheme, or Wagner's Ring Cycle, there has been, or how many orchestras have staged Beethoven's Ninth of Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusick! Or Ravel's Bolero!

But there is no shortage of inspired rock songs that get similar, revitalizing "reboots," with Jimi's version of Dylan's All Along the Watchtower coming to mind. Putting myself in John's worldview for a few minutes I will have him say that "it manifested out of the nagual as just another great Dylan song on his John Wesley Harding album, but then that Hendrix fellow 'fell under its nagual-spell' and did his own version of it that redefined it completely and made it the monster hit that most people today know it as. It was like that Hendrix fellow got nagual-inspired to take that 'ninety-pound-weakling' of a Dylan song and pump it full of steroids before again setting it loose in the world."

And I've heard that Dylan's nose got pushed way out of joint by the success of Hendrix's version of his song, but as John would say about that, "He's not being humble enough to acknowledge that his songs are not his 'creations' but manifestation of the nagual, and as such he is only their midwife, not their creator, and that once in this world, those songs belong to this world." Of course, I can't imagine the Nobel Laureate Dylan being humble any more than I can imagine Mad King Donald uttering a single sentence that was even on the same planet as "the truth!"

But John—as he would have been the first to claim—is hardly the "creator" of these ideas and other—many—artists have expressed similar notions. I once read that Keith Richards said that the riff to "Satisfaction" came to him in a dream, or, as remember reading somewhere else, that he once said the writing of an inspired song was 'like sticking an aerial up into the ether and catching it as it flew by.' Or something like that. And then there is that famous song of Paul Stookey's (of Peter, Paul and Mary fame) "Wedding Song (There Is Love)" which he wrote for Peter's wedding to Mary (not band-member Mary Travers!) and which he said was so "divinely inspired" that he neither wanted to claim credit for it or make money from it, so gave the copyright to a charitable foundation he created just for that purpose. (Interestingly "divinely inspired" can be seen as a redundancy because, in its original manifestation in the English language, the word inspiration took for granted a divine origin, and the fact that it comes from the Latin, inspiratus, "to breathe in" certainly implies the notion of the "taking in" of something that is both exterior to us and essential to our existence. So in the creative sense, to be "inspired" is to take into the mind and spirit something that is exterior, yet essential to it, as essential to its health and well-being as is the breathing of air into our physical body essential to its very existence!)

And of course, how can I fail to mention one of the most famous and uber-recorded songs of all time, (Googling it reveals it's been covered no less than 2,200 times!) the Beatles' "Yesterday," the melody of which "manifested" itself to Paul (another Paul—fuck, I wish I'd been named Paul!), one night, whole and complete, in a dream, and which Paul was wise enough, on waking up, to jump out of bed—his girlfriend's bed!—and play it on a piano so he wouldn't forget it. It's manifestation in that dream was so vivid and complete and compelling that Paul, for weeks after, was sure it was a song that someone else had written and that he'd somehow subconsciously plagiarized it. And with regards to the incredible popularity of that "dream song," you could consider the converse of Blake's aphorism to be equally true: Time is in love with the productions of Eternity!

(Some of them, anyway—I'm not so sure about atomic bombs, TNT, Sarin gas, DDT, Agent Orange, land mines, cluster bombs, napalm, et al.)

So, Dear Reader, you will likely by now have judged most of John's ideas to be steaming piles of bull manure—or heaps of moose pellets!—but there are people out there who share them, regardless that they may not always express them the same way. Like Paul Stookey, who as a born-again-Christian, considered the "Wedding Song" to be divinely inspired, while John would have said it was a powerful manifestation of the nagual, of the Ocean of Spirit, which Paul midwifed into this world—for the delight and inspiration of nuptial couples ever after—and not any anthropomorphic, Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy! (There is certainly a nil likelihood of Paul Stookey ever reading this "Preface," but I am sure if he did, he'd be calling me pawn of Satan for suggesting his "divine song" manifested out of something as "pagan," as "heathenish," as Castaneda's, nagual—devil sorcerer that he was!)

And there is one other point that John off-hand made and it was that no one ever says that a musician works their music or works and instrument, but always plays their music or plays and instrument. He claimed that this was done subconsciously and was a proof—of sorts—that there truly was something so joyful about music that it could hardly be classed as "worldly," especially in world where there was so much work and so little play. Now he did add that since he was not a musician and had never played any music or a musical instrument (like John, neither have I—though I have "played" more than a few "organs" and blown—sometimes playfully—a fair number of "flutes" and "whistles" and "horns," but I don't think that counts!) he couldn't say from experience, but he often got the sense, when watching musicians play the music on their instruments, that the big reason it was always called play and not work, was because the music was a powerful, conscious, living entity that was using the musician to "play," and thus manifest itself in this world, and this always mystical and magical process was always both joyful and satisfying to the "musician"—like all shamanic ecstasies and play to a child.

(I have just had the sudden inspiration that this "Preface" is a living, conscious, willful "entity" manifesting out of the fuckin' nagual, the Ocean of Spirit, and "playing" me for its own purposes! And maybe that's true, because I do feel incredibly fuckin' compelled to write it—and I sure feel like I am in a kinda state of ecstasy when I am working on it—though that is likely as good a description of every manic-depressive's mania as any! Fuck-an-hallucination!—how's that for deep dive into the 2,000 foot depths of the Crater Lake of delusional grandiosity!)

### Chapter Sixteen

Now back to the poor chopped-up and well-blended narrative line of this pathetic "Preface"—if you still have the slightest bit of interest in trying to follow it!—not that I can even remember what the fuckin' hell I was babbling on about before the above spider web of random and parenthetical sidetracks. Let me once again scroll back and see . . . . . . Fuck it!—there's too goddamn much gobbledy-shit to read through and I don't have the concentration to bother, so I'll settle with the shit-on-my-lips memory of being with my fuckin' mother in that fuckin' ambulance on the way to the fuckin' Shrink-Klink, and she was dissing John and calling him a fallen-away Catholic. To my more-Catholic-than-the-Pope mother, being a fallen-away Catholic was the ne plus ultra of mortal sins. (If there was such a thing as a mortal, mortal sin, that would be it!)

And hell, if Hitler, Catholic that he was, had gone to confession every Saturday and mass every Sunday, she'd have thought him an infinitely better person that Uncle John. Ha!—can't you just see it: Hitler goes into the confessional box of his personal priest and says, "Bless me holy Father, for I have sinned most grievously since my last confession. You see, it's that temper of mine again! I got raging mad at that pathetic little shit of an underling Herr dummkopf Himmler because he promised me that he'd have exterminated at least million of those Jew-vermin last month and he barely achieved a quarter of that! I SHOULD HAVE HIM PUT IN THE OVENS!"

With the good, holy priest paternally and condescendingly, (do they have any other attitude towards us pathetic laity-sheep?) replying "That's okay, My Son—don't allow yourself to get so angry over trivialities . . . well, hardly trivialities, of course, for those ungrateful and arrogant Juden did murder our good Lord Jesus and deserve what you are so righteously doing to them, but it is a big undertaking . . . exterminating . . . so many . . . Mein Gott, but they breed like . . . kaninchen! . . . And though I do know it is hard to stay calm when underlings don't live up to expectations, such rage is the purview of our good and holy, Gott, der Vater, and we must not become so arrogant as to take His righteous rage onto ourselves. I have forgiven you, My Son, your terrible sin of that arrogant rage, and for your penance, light a candle to our Blessed Virgin Mary, say a rosary in her honor, and on your way out, put a little something in the poor box. And do try, My Son, to control that temper of yours—it is most unchristian! . . . And by the way, what time am I to come for dinner tonight?"

It's a funny thing, that phrase, fallen-away Catholic, for it hasn't entered my head in years and the only people I've ever heard use it has been my mother and Mimi. And ha!—that bit of maternal nonsense brings back another nonsensical maternal memory that relates to something that is anything but nonsensical, this one about books banned by the Catholic Church. She was pretty fanatical about that truly Nazi-fascist shit (yeah, I've learned a bit about fascism since my Groucho days) and she used to invade the sanctum sanctorum of my bedroom and my precious, teen-age privacy in her efforts, not just to express her contempt for my individuality, but to make sure I wasn't reading anything that was declared verboten by that proto-Nazi church!

Shit, what a memory-monster to get suddenly attacked by! Now I've got to Google that absurdity and see if Constantine's minions are still banning dogma-dissing-and-threatening books . . . . . . . . . . .Well, it looks like Pope Paul VI officially abolished that Nazi-arm of the Church called Index Librorum Prohibitorum, but it sounds like the process is still going on to some degree.

No surprise there, given that the history of Constantine's Imperial Reich (another of John's many derogatory names for that derogatory name-deserving abomination!) is one of total, fascist, political and moral control of all the prisoners in its concentration camp of "the Church body," so why would it really give up something like the Index Librorum Prohibitorum expressly designed to keep the inmates conveniently and unquestioningly sheep-ignorant, sheep-mindless and sheep-docile. And it's kind of too bad that Index is officially gone for I can't think of anything that would get John's ashes up out of that field of wildflowers where that old church once stood and dancing on moonlight breezes like the reality of his memoirs getting published then forthwith being officially banned by that fascist Church he loathed so totally. (Alas, that vast evil monster of Constantine's Imperial Reich will never know of The Fire's puny and innocuous publishing existence!)

And it's too bad The Fire is only going to be published as an eBook because I have suddenly had my head filled with a vivid vision of big pile of real, paper-and-print books of The Fire being set aflame and ritually circled by a howling horde of prancing, pedophile priests. (And if you like the kind of excessive alliteration all good $tyle-Nazis abhor and excise: pedophile priests prancing in a perfect circle with their nether proboscises probing the prostates of the panting pederasts preceding them.)

But back to what I was saying about my more-Catholic-than-the-Pope mother, who was never one for bad-mouthing anyone except those nefarious, fallen-away Catholics. To her, being a Catholic was not only a relentless, 24-7 moral duty, but an honor beyond measure and a commitment never to be broken. Interestingly, though I never saw it this way before, there is a lot of similarities between that now-blessedly-defunct Communist tyranny that terrorized the Soviet Union for seventy years, and the tyrannical power Constantine's Imperial Abomination held over its vast sheep-flocks.

I mean, Stalin's KGB—MGB, actually, Wiki informs me!—were just Inquisitors-by-another-name, with a very clear job description of very assiduously and passionately dispensing absolute terror and total control! From what I've read—particularly in the great literary works of Solzhenitsyn—a Soviet citizen could wind up in a real gulag—or dead!—for the mere uttering of a single, heretical word against the state, no differently that had thousands of Christians wound up in Inquisitors torture chambers and fires for similar, very trivial, reasons!

Either Stalin closely studied the organization and operations of Constantine's Imperial Reich, and incorporated all of its very intolerant and very paranoid and very violent and murderous and tortuous policies and practices, or there exists a very powerful and evil archetype that's been manifesting for seventeen hundred fucking years through Constantine's Imperial Reich, and which managed to pull off a new manifestation—albeit blessedly shorter!—through Stalin's uber-tyrannical, uber-murderous, MGB/Inquisitor terrorized and controlled, "Communism!" (Ah, would that Constantine's Imperial Reich would not collapse and rid the world of its vile self as suddenly and completely as had Hitler's Reich and Russia's Soviet Union!) And of course, no surprise should it be that Soviet "Communism" so hated and outlawed religion, given that it, itself, had been as much a tyrannical and intolerant religion as it had been a tyrannical and intolerant political system. And as Constantine's Imperial Reich so consistently and violently demonstrated, there was only room for one institutional religion—sheriff!—in the "Dodge!" of the Middle Ages!)

So heinous, in the petrified hummingbird egg of my mother's mind and coprolite-desiccated/petrified soul, was that crime of apostasy that if her exalted Pope's powerful Inquisitors had still been romping their ravening ways through the countryside around here, roving their sadistic malice through his parishes to protect the power of his almighty Church by righteously burning heretics at the stake, she'd have long before sent them out to John's farm—along with a truckload of well-seasoned oak firewood and a five-gallon container of gasoline.

Hell, she'd have gone with them with her box of Redbirds, but she'd only had used them after making sure her donated truckload of faggots was properly piled around his cowboy boots and up as high as his chin, and that five gallons of gasoline had been poured over his head and into his boots as well as over all that wood! And of course, stand as close as she could to the conflagration that she might most satisfyingly listen to his screams and watch his soul fly out of this world and straight down to that other, bigger, and eternal—and more satisfying to her—fire that he surely and righteously belonged in.

But back to the back of that ambulance on its way to the Shrink-Klink after John's interrupted funeral.

Needless to say, I could not allow that swarm of hornets of her words into my ears without a violent reaction, which was to raise my head, spit every bit of saliva and blood (I guess I'd bit my tongue at some point) in my mouth into her startled face, then scream at her, "SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU HYPOCRITICAL COW! JOHN WAS A BETTER HUMAN BEING THAN YOU AND YOUR WHOLE FUCKING 'FAMILY' PUT TOGETHER, AND IF IT WASN'T FOR HIM I'D HAVE COMMITTED SUICIDE YEARS AGO—JUST TO GET AWAY FROM YOU, YOU HYPOCRITICAL OLD CUNT!"

Or something like that . . . I think . . . I had a lot more I wanted to shout into that wide, pale, stolid and for once, finally animated face (first with shock, then anger), but by then that attending nurse was jamming a needle into my neck, and the next thing I remember was waking up strapped tight to a bed back in the sanitarium and a veritable Nurse Ratched (like from Ken Kesey's brilliant One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest) staring down at me with a nasty enough look on her face that you'd have thought she was my fuckin' mother. (I had to laugh when I was watching that Cloud Atlas movie, because Hugo Weaving—Agent Smith in The Matrix and Elrond in Lord of the Rings—played, among other roles, Nurse Noakes, a brilliant homage to Nurse Ratched and a—much taller—dead-ringer for my mother!)

I woke up back in that Head-Shop (Cuckoo's Nest!) so deeply swallowed up by a tar pit of the blackest of depressions that it took a lot of pills, injections, and a good few bolts of brain-lightning to drag me free of it. The end result of all that brain-lightning was a (more or less) temporarily brain-fried Rachel who was not only no longer drowning in her own private tar pit, but who (more or less) behaved in a passive, predictable and creditable fashion, not just to please my noggin-mechanic and the Head-Shop staff, but because I lacked the energy and wits to do otherwise, and entertained (more or less) and expressed (always) conciliatory and forgiving thoughts towards my dull and hypocritical twat of a mother and my bibulous, incestuous and hypocritical Uriah Creep of a father, though deep down I knew the core of my spiritual salvation lay in hanging onto enough hatred for, and anger against, both of them to keep my whole personality from getting lightning-fried out of existence the way the original Pirsig's—Phaedrus—had been, after which it was replaced by his walk-in replacement that subsequently gave of really deep and futile thinking, got into motorcycling, and wrote himself a fortune with the story of that part of his life, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

And obviously, that term brain-lightning is not my own invention, but something I got from the already-mentioned, thirty-something fellow prisoner/victim/patient of that Shrink-Klink with the moniker, Sprocket, who even after more of those sessions of brain-lightning that he could remember well enough to count, had an infinitely more active imagination than I ever possessed, and it certainly does add a new dimension to the term, brain-storm. His nickname was Sprocket because he was crazy (enthused crazy, not insane crazy, if there's a diff!) about bicycle racing and even used it as a great metaphor for his manic phases, saying that being in a manic state was like going for a too-long training ride with a strong wind at your back—he came from the prairies—all the while believing your sudden incredible strength and stamina were all your own and not wind-aided, only to come crashing back to a very depressing reality when you had to turn around and pedal all those many miles back against that wind.

And while the hummingbird of my thoughts are visiting the feeder of my memories of the handsome and beguiling Sprocket, his story is quite interesting in that he came to this little "Mining Shitty" from a "regally named" prairie "Shitty" to escape his toxic family by working in the mines, but carried all of its toxicity with him and cracked up underground in quite a dramatic fashion, deciding that he "just had to hang around a blast site at the end of a shift so to he could see what all that dynamite looked like when going off!" His shocked, quick-thinking, and fortunately martial arts trained partner had to knock him out cold with some kind of fancy choke-hold, and then using the "fireman's lift," carry him to safety before getting the shift boss to call for the police and the boys in the white coats with their convenient supply of quick-sedating drugs.

It was from Sprocket that I picked up names like Head-Shop and Shrink-Klink for sanitarium, and head/noggin-mechanic for shrink. (He loathed using the dull, accepted names for almost everything, even his bicycle, which he always called his Pegasus!) He had a great sense of humor and loved to tell shrink-jokes, and had head-full of old stand-bys that squirted out of his mouth "like shit out of a goose with dysentery" (that was his phrase for what came out of the mouths of shrinks!), only two of which I now remember:"Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist needs their head examined," and "How many noggin-mechanics does it take to change a light bulb?". . . . One, as long as it wants to change."

He also told some that he seems to have made up himself, and which I find more memorable, my favorites being, "Dogs and shrinks come in many shapes and sizes, but they are all alike in that they are full of shit that they like to leave in stinking heaps on the lawns of other peoples' heads." And "Hey, what's the difference between noggin-mechanics and a car-mechanics?—Car-mechanics can actually fix cars!" Though I also loved his animated little shtick: "Why do noggin-mechanics always think they are so fuckin' smart?" . . ."I dunno, Sprocket, why do noggin-mechanics always think they're so fuckin' smart?" . . ."Because of relativity."..."Relativity?—what the hell does relativity have to do with it?" . . . "Well, relative to all us patients who have been zombied with drugs and lobotomized with bolts of head-lightning, even a fuckin' bale of hay could think it was pretty damn smart!"

And since his short-term memory (but strangely, not his creativity!) had been pretty much fried out of existence by all the brain-lightning he'd been subjected to, you got to hear those jokes a hundred times and have him tell them to you like he'd just thought them up only minutes before. But hey, just looking at Sprocket's handsome face and listening to his soothing voice was worth the boredom of enduring a hundredth-told-joke . . . and what the fuck else was there to do in that fucking place?

My time in that Head-Shop—broken up by two short, strained visits by Jonathan and one emotional plane-wreck of a visit from Terry—she had to deal both with the death of John, whom I think she loved as much as did I, and my crazy crack-up!—who traveled—without a plane wreck!—all the way from India for it, was as dreary and crushing a dark night of the soul as any St. John of the Cross could have gone through, save he would not have been subjected, during its duration, to a whole lot of brain-lightning, nasty drugs, and lots of painful and boring and useless yikkity-yakkity sessions with a bespectacled noggin-mechanic named Dr. Green who had no use for deodorant and picked his big Jewish nose when thinking deeply (he was known on the ward as Doc Booger) while believing he had to convince me that my seeing John—and Catherine and Johnny—in the church during John's funeral was nothing more than an elaborate hallucination brought on by my psychotic break—with the unfortunate fire that destroyed that church after his "strange antics" being nothing more than a coincidence. I mean, as far as I was concerned, that's all John and Catherine and Johnny could have been was hallucinations, because I sure as fuck didn't believe in ghosts! And obviously the fire had been a mere coincidence, because I knew that my hallucinations couldn't start fires! Did he think I was that crazy!!!

And when I explained my POV about them—and that fire-coincidence to him, he just said, "Mmmm . . . the way you were describing those people . . . and those events . . . it was like you believed those people were real . . . and the events really happened. . . . My mistake!"

He got real confused when I corrected him about his saying it being unfortunate the church caught fire and burned down, when I slipped into John-speak by saying that it was never unfortunate when one of Constantine's Imperial Abomination's churches burned down, except without realizing it I'd said "crutches" instead of "churches." After giving me a long, penetrating stare he finally said, "What do you mean by "Constantine's Imperial Abomination's crutches?", seeming to assume that I had slipped into a real weird halluco-trip and was just loon-babbling—or word-salading, being the phrase Pirsig used in his book.

Of course, I hadn't realized that I'd used that term so common to both John and I, Constantine's Imperial Abomination instead of Catholic Church, something I was usually always super-conscious about not to do unless talking to John. And worse, I'd used a slip-of-the-tongue John had once had where he'd said Crutch instead of Church! (I can still remember that day and that conversation, and when I'd pointed that slip-of-the-tongue out to John, he'd said, "Ahhh, interesting slip, that! Freud would definitely have a cynical comment about that! Because in a way that is exactly what that young church was to Constantine—a crutch for his gimpy empire! . . . So Constantine's Imperial Crutch defines it perfectly!"

And when I went into a long spiel for Doc Booger explaining that John, in the many conversations we'd had over the years had most often called the Catholic Church, Constantine's Imperial Abomination, but once in awhile he'd call it Constantine's Imperial Church, and that once he had a slip-of-the-tongue in which he said Crutch instead of Church, and since, as far as he was concerned, the word fit perfectly, he would sometimes, after that, use the term, Constantine's Imperial Crutch, too. And there appeared a slight smile on Doc Booger's usually impassive face when I said he also sometimes called it Constantine's Imperial Reich, because it was so totalitarian and fascist.

And since, Jewish as he was, Doc Booger hadn't studied much early Christian history and wasn't remembering very well what he'd learned of the Roman history of that period, after commenting that John certainly had a powerful—almost Voltairean!—animus towards the Catholic Church, he got real interested in what I was saying and asked for a quick run-down on John's take on this Constantine-and-the-Catholic-Church business. I explained the historical aspects of it as best as I was able to remember, finishing up with John's assertion that without Emperor Constantine making a particularly fascist, Christian cult—of the many that were sprinkled around the Empire—the official religion of the Empire in order that it help him unite and solidify his tenuous hold over it—and thus using that cult as a crutch to keep his civil-war weakened empire on its feet—the Roman Catholic Church, which evolved out of that cult, would never have come into existence in the powerful and very fascist fashion that we know it.

And most likely, on top of that, that particular cult, like all the other, always-feuding-over-doctrine Christian cults of the time, would have just remained just that—but one of a collection of minor and always feuding cults—and would very likely have eventually ceased to exist as a religious force. Much like Mithraism, which had been very popular with Roman soldiers at that same time. Along with that I hodge-podge of information, I also gave him the proviso that it was my uncle John who had been really passionate about, and had really studied, "that stuff," and that I only kind of half—or quarter—knew it.

Needless to say, I was thrilled—as thrilled as a head-lightninged, meds-dulled, light-bulb-screwed-into-a-dead-duck's-ass "loonar" can get—when he said this Uncle John of mine sounded like he'd been a very individualistic, interesting, knowledgeable—and very opinionated!—man, and that he seems to have been an extremely important person in my life.

He then took off his shrink-hat completely as he looked out the window and pensively said to me, like I was human being and not a patient, "Emperor Constantine's use of the Christian cult—that John had most interestingly labeled fascist and which became the Roman Catholic Church—as a crutch for his empire, had been a disastrous, water-shed event for the Jews of the Roman Empire, because before that particular cult—which very well may actually have possessed strong fascist inclinations!—got all that imperial power from Constantine, the Romans usually only paid any attention to Jews who actively rebelled against their "Pax Romana"—or didn't want to pay their taxes.

"While later, as the Catholic Church began to dominate that crumbling empire, it was actively and maliciously anti-Semitic—no less so than fascist, Nazi Germany—right to its power-corrupted core—and the basis of that anti-Semitism was—or at least, ostensibly was!—over that strange notion that the Jew Joshua—aka Jesus, in the Greek rendition of his name—was both messiah and God, and that the Jews had killed their precious messiah and God and for that deserved perpetual harassment, ghettoization, and even extermination. Something so egregiously irrational that few Jews could make any sense of at all—especially when it instigated their being herded into ghettoes like diseased cattle and being slaughtered by the thousands in Church-instigated pogroms!"

Boy, did I ever feel good for those few minutes when Doc Booger had taken off his shrink-hat and was talking with me like that—just like John had used to talk with me!—but all too quickly he snapped out of it, sharply shook his head and after looking embarrassed for a few seconds, put his shrink-hat back on and once again he was Warden Green and I was just prisoner-Rachel getting indoctrinated into life in the Shrink-Klink.

And once he'd again become "Doc Booger," he focused on my noggin-problems and said that given I was still struggling my way out of the psychotic break cause by finding my uncle John dead in that forest, it was no surprise that his funeral—he hadn't really wanted me to attend it but felt that it might help re-ground me in "reality" if I did—might provoke such hallucinations in my subconscious efforts to deny the reality of his death by seeing him as still alive. It was obvious to him that I'd suffered that initial break and subsequent hallucinations at the funeral because of my intolerable grief for the death of an uncle I'd obviously been very close to and whom I'd loved a great deal.

Unfortunately, for some utterly irrational reason, (LOL) my rational mind was still a bit prone to going walkabout from my head and I suddenly did believe that I'd actually seen the spirits of John and his lovely, lilac-scented wife Catherine, and their sweet little Johnny, and had watched the spirit of John set fire to that infernal church, which confused the hell out of him because but minutes before I'd been assuring him I'd absolutely known them to be hallucinations because I sure as hell did not believe in ghosts, and his attempts to convince me that it had all been a mere hallucinations caused by my psychotic break, provoked my paranoia-scorpion into a fiery, tail-raised, stinger-throbbing rage that filled me with the desire to jump up, and use my chewed-off fingernails to remove his face and shove it up his skinny ass.

But I'd fortunately read, at John's insistence, Pirsig's uber-popular magnum opus and had imbibed his wisdom of escaping a "Shrink-Klink" by pretending great respect for the Noggin-Nazis who had the power in those institutions of Hitler in his Reich, and playing along with their nasty and corrupt little power trips, pretending to get better by incremental degrees—like tightening a critical bolt on your motorcycle to a specified torque with a torque-wrench—in exactly the ways they wanted you to. So, while leaving imprints of my fingers in the wooden armrests of the chair, frowned and very calmly said, "Yes, I am sure you are right, Doctor Green (I sure didn't dare call him Doc Booger to his face; or even Doc!) Those had to be hallucinations, and I know that, because some of the biggest arguments Uncle John and I used to have, were over his belief in spirits and ghosts, and my belief that it was impossible for them to exist. . . . Though . . . sometimes . . . when I think back to that day in that church . . . everything that happened in that . . . obvious hallucination . . . sure did seem real!"

That got a nod and a real serious look from Doc Booger as he said, "That is the intrinsic nature of hallucinations—they feel . . . they seem . . . so real to the person having them. Which is what gives us most of our work as this . . . hospital . . . trying to convince people who are having them that they are not real, but just gratuitous productions of their own . . . erroneously functioning brains. And fortunate we are in this modern age to have the drugs that can control the problem . . . not like in the old days . . . during the middle ages in London's Bedlam . . . where all the doctors could do was lock their patients in foul cells and let them rave and suffer through those too-real-seeming hallucinations.

"But this Uncle John sure sounds like he was—for the most part!—a very rational and thoughtful man . . . so why do you think he believed in spirits . . . and ghosts? They obviously must have been some sort of hallucination for him as they were for you—in that church—though obviously he has learned to live with those hallucinations without having them deleteriously affect his life. . . . Though from what you have told me about him, he does seem to have lived a very isolated life . . . perhaps to help him cope with his irrational hallucinations by avoiding conflicts with other peoples' rational worldviews. . . . Though for some reason he let you into his life . . . and though your worldview had no room in it for spirits and ghosts, that didn't seem to have bothered him. Or even threatened his beliefs . . . and worldview . . . about ghosts and spirits. Verrrrrrrrrrry interesting!

And all I could given him in response to that was a long sigh and a despairing, "Believe me, Doctor Green, I asked him that question myself . . . about a zillion times. And all he'd do was laugh and say 'I'm a shaman, Rache! I've had experiences! I've been through things! Things that have opened me up to much bigger realities. Realities in which ghosts and spirits are as natural and logical as tables and chairs and money and cars . . . and death . . . in this reality. In this worldview.'"

And the only response Doc Booger could give to that was to unconsciously dig a booger out of his nose and wipe it on the underside of his desk as he let out a long, "Mmmmmmm." followed by his signal that it was time for our session to end.

And really weird it is, to force myself back to that dreadful, drear and tearful time to dredge up the toxic waste of those dreadful, drear and tearful memories when I was so absolutely crazy that I truly did believe I'd seen the spirits of John and lovely Catherine and sweet little Johnny, while now, crazy as I know I am for having been walkabout from the Meds-Rez as long as I have been, I can no more believe in spirits and ghosts than I can believe that the endemically mendacious Mad King Donald is going to fall down, bump his head, wake up sane—and ever after go all "George Washington" and never tell another lie! Or chop down any cherry trees! LOL!

But I sure can remember all that dreadful, drear and tearful shit! And can remember coming back to consensus/ordinary reality (more or less) during my re-admittance to the Head-Shop, and adamantly telling the head-mechanic who first interviewed me—not Doc Booger—that I'd had my outburst/breakdown in the church because I'd been visited by the spirits of John and his dead wife and son, and that they'd told me I had a very important job to do for them as their memory-keeper. (I was just tenuously enough connected to consensus reality to keep to myself my belief that John's spirit had somehow—don't fuckin' ask me how!—started the fire in the church over his displeasure at having his funeral held in it and his desire to have his "meat" cremated.)

Well, since my mother was there at that time, she was equally adamant with the admitting shrink that she had no knowledge of John ever having been married, let alone having a dead wife and son, and besides, as far as she was concerned, there was no such things as spirits, just Christian souls (to her, non-Christian heathens didn't have souls—and couldn't get one until they were baptized!) that were either blissfully in heaven with God the Father and his dutiful son (sure-Dad-I'll-gladly-incarnate-on-Earth-and-get-tortured-and-crucified-for-that-pathetic-bunch-of-sinning-humans-you-are-always-obsessing about!) our Dear Lord Jesus Christ, or down in Hell with Lucifer getting their hemorrhaging hemorrhoids cauterized by his flaming trident, and that John's soul, being the evil, fallen-away-Catholic that he'd been, at his moment of death, righteously and eternally damned to Hell by our Holy and Almighty God the Father and his beloved Son, our Good Lord Jesus Christ, and thus could not have been hanging around that church, so unless I was seeing demons—which of course, was entirely possible!—then it was apparent I was being totally delirious.

HA! I just had come to me a vivid and very enthralling vision—a John . . . or more accurately . . . a Blake-type vision!—of a typical day in Heaven where son Jesus goes into the celestial throne room where Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy is on the throne (a real throne, not a Thomas Crapper "throne"—choose your chuckle) seemingly deep in thought, and says, "Hey, Pop, whaddaya think of the idea of me taking a break from all this tedious human murder and mayhem being done down on Earth in your name and zipping off to the Eagle Nebula for a visit to those real cool Pillars of Creation so I can watch some stars being born! I really do like stars, Dad, they are so . . . peaceful...compared to those human creatures you are so obsessed with. Mom says she's okay with that as long as I stay away from the Andromeda galaxy . . . she says that ancient pagan . . . sl . . . girl is not fit company for a young Christian God like me. But I kinda like her. And Spooky says she'll fly me over. She says those lobotomized cabbages you call humans aren't paying any attention to her inspirations anyway . . ."

With Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy's immediate reaction being, "WATCH WHAT YOU LET COME OUT OF THAT STUPID BLACK HOLE IN YOUR FACE, SON!—your sister's name is Sophia, not Spooky! And where in heck did you get that "Spooky" from anyway?"

"Ah, you know, Dad, those two-legged cabbages you call humans are always calling her the Holy Spirit, so once I jokingly called her the Holy Spook, but she objected to that word holy because it had no real meaning and it just raised a lot of unreasonable and misguided expectations among those two-legged cabbages she's supposed to be filling with her wisdom, so I shortened it to Spooky. She prefers Spooky that to Holy Spirit any day!"

"Yeah, well son, your Mother named her Sophia and she doesn't like you calling your sister Spooky! She says it shows lack of respect for her, as her mother. And your mother! And you know what I've told you about respecting your Mother! And why are you always so down on my human creations? What did they ever do to you?"

"Do to me!?!—come on, Dad! You suckered me in to going down amongst that sweaty, stinking herd of two-legged asses to try and help them behave a little less . . . asinine! . . .and what did I get out of it? Imprisonment! The scourging! The crown of thorns! The crucifixion! I doubt you can imagine this, but you know, hanging naked on a rough wooden cross—that I had to carry all by myself all the way up that damn mountain . . .and it was damned heavy . . . and it really chaffed my shoulders and filled them with real nasty splinters—and after all of that, having big rusty spikes pounded through my hands . . . and I had to hang there for hours with a couple of real low-life trailer-trash hanging beside me! Real . . . louts . . . who were cursing and swearing like . . . trailer-trash! . . . the whole miserable time. And no anesthetic, either! . . . Then nothing but vinegar for my thirst! . . . Even the execrable wine they made back then would have been better than that vinegar! Though not much! . . .Which is why I made my own at that drag of a wedding at Cana. . . . But the absolute worst was that dull, filthy spear that cabbage-head of a Roman soldier jabbed into my ribs! He'd been using it to kill rats, for Chrissakes! Jeez, I could have got blood poisoning from that! . . .You think all that was fun, Dad?"

"Ah, give it a rest, Son—that was millennia ago! Ancient history—you should be over all that by now! Maybe you have to go back to Hell and have another chat with that Jew, Freud about those unresolved issues! . . .Oh yeah, I forgot, Freud was an atheist Jew who didn't believe in ME . . . or all that Hell stuff your dear Christians so love to believe in! So he obviously couldn't be sent there! I mean, how can any soul go to an imaginary place it doesn't believe in? Though of course, there is nothing funnier than that idiot-poet Dante who wrote that silly 'Divine Comedy' and got it into that addled Florentine head of his that a solely Christian hell could be populated with characters from the Greek myths! . . . . Well, like you've too often said, the term 'intelligent Christian' is an oxymoron! . . . But back to that apostate Jew, Freud—go find him, wherever he is—AND WORK OUT THOSE DAMN ISSUES—ONCE AND FOR ALL ETERNITY!

"But what do you want to go flying all over the galaxy just to watch stars being born? Stars are one of the most annoyingly self-absorbed things I ever created during those crazy, six manic days of creation! . . . Well, obviously I didn't create the ones just being born right now, did I? But I created those dust clouds and the process that allows stars to create themselves!—I want my due credit for that! But all they do is keep to themselves, shine for a few eons, then get all red in the face and die. Or up and explode—just for the attention! But NEVER FOR ONE INSTANT do they bother to worship ME, their CREATOR!

"Now those humans—which I really resent you calling lobotomized cabbages or two-legged asses . . . though yes, they do tend to act like both of those most of the time . . . but ahhhhh, can't you just hear all those hundreds of millions of my faithful Christian humans all over that beautiful little gem of a planet Earth—that I created!—down on their knees, their rosaries gripped tight in their frightened little hands, their empty heads bowed, worshipping and reciting the LORD's Prayer!"

"Oh, for Christ's sake, Pop—don't you get just a little bit bored with hearing those tedious, insincere words mindlessly recited over and over again, ad nauseam! For hundreds and hundreds of years! Jeez, Mom said she got tired of hearing all her Hail Marys by the end of the Middle Ages, especially as no one paid the slightest attention to what they were saying. She said the words just squirted mindlessly out of their mouths like greased grain out of a goose's . . . you know what!"

"Shhhhhh—you watch your tongue, young fellow! No blasphemy and foul language in my celestial court! Or I'll wash your mouth out with boiling lava! But it's no surprise your Mother tired of her Hail Marys so fast, she gets ten times as many of them as I get Our Fathers! And no wonder those humans just mindlessly mouth the words—they have no fear of your Mother to motivate them. I mean, who the hell ever heard any human cabbage . . . I mean, being—especially any ecclesiastical functionary of that delightfully totalitarian church those . . . 'cabbages' . . . of mine created around your crucifixion! I mean, can you even begin to imagine one of those functionaries standing in a pulpit in one of your churches, and trying to put 'the fear of Mary' into anyone's heart?

"I mean, Son—nothing puts genuine fervor into prayer like the FEAR OF GOD! Now just listen to them . . . listen . . . to their fervent, obsequious words: 'Our FATHER, who art in Heaven, hallowed be THY name, THY Kingdom come, THY will be done . . .OH!—but isn't the sound of all those reverent THYs almost as beautiful as all the screams that those skilled and dutiful Inquisitors—of your church!—once tortured out of those despicable heretics—and always in your name, by the way!—who often refused to even believe that you—or I, for that matter!—existed! Let alone be willing to dutifully worship either of us.

"Or the sighs and moans and screams and laments—and prayers!—from those infernal, covenant-breaking Jews during a righteous pogrom—instituted by your church, by the way!—especially that real big pogrom of Hitler's—who'd been baptized into your church as a sweet little baby boy—as sweet a little boy who'd ever been born of a human woman!—and because of that that despicable act of human . . . of human . . . intercourse! All those sighs and screams and laments—and insincere prayers—of those ingrate-Jews is sure is a lot sweeter music to these weary old ears than anything that slug of a Beethoven ever composed! Especially the pernicious and utterly blasphemous, 'Ode to Joy' of his! DIDN'T HE KNOW HOW MUCH I HATE HUMAN JOY!

"Why did he think I created all those silly sins? Heh, heh—especially all those ones to do with that nasty, natural and utterly disgusting business of sex that I so cleverly tied to guilt and shame! Though God-only-knows why they like it so much—that business of them grinding their sweaty, stinky bodies together . . . sticking their filthy tongues in each other's mouths . . .and worse, men sticking a part of their . . . filthy plumbing . . . into women's . . . filthy plumbing! UGH!—disgusting. Utterly DISGUSTING! But they sure do like doing it . . . so much . . . that I just had to make it a sin! Snagged 'em like a fish on two hooks with those two nasty little emotions of guilt and shame, I surely did—one hook in the eye and the other in the tail! . . . No naughty pun intended there, Son, so get your mind out of the gutter! Pure DIVINE inspiration!—all that sin and guilt and shame stuff was! Lots of power and control in that! So I guess I owe your sister Sophia one for that, don't I? Heh, heh—just don't tell her I said anything or she'll get a big head and come around looking for favors! Or dispensations! Last I heard—from your mother!—was she had a galaxy-sized crush on that good looking Greek . . . _demon,_ Apollo! CAN'T LET IT HAPPEN! CAN'T LET IT HAPPEN!"

### Chapter Seventeen

Well, fun and satisfying that extraneous bit of Absurd Trinity satire was . . . Hey, can you just imagine that as an old-time Saturday Night Live skit?—a long-bearded Mad King Donald guest-starring and playing his favorite role of himself as Big Boss Nobodaddy; Billy Crystal . . or better yet, Eddie Murphy, as Sonny Boy Jesus, (wow, can you imagine all those lunatic racists in the American Christian Right dealing with their beloved Lord Jesus, as a black man; Gilda Radner as sister Spooky, hopping up and down in the background making faces and pantomiming flying; and a guest appearance of . . . well, who else but "Like a Virgin" Madonna, as that never-fucked-mother, Mama Mary!

Though now that I am on the subject of trinity, John had a celestial trinity he felt it was incumbent on all human beings to honor—not worship, just honor!—that being Father Sun, Mother Earth, and Daughter Moon, all three of which are absolutely essential to our very existence. And when I said to him that I didn't think the Moon was that important to our existence, he said, "Neither did I until one day I watched a documentary all about the importance of moon to life on this planet, with one of the most important things—of many—being that without the gravity of the Moon slowing down the Earth's rotation over the eons, the Earth would be spinning so fast we wouldn't be able to live on it. I mean, just imagine us trying to function with days and nights that were one or two hours long! I can't even imagine it. And then there was speculation that there'd be very little plant life because of problems with photosynthesis . . . or what the weather would be like: the winds would be horrendous and the temperatures . . . god only knows what!"

John also had another trinity of divinities he was quite passionate about, which he called the Vienna Trinity, comprised of Papa Haydn, who is said to have created the matrix of forms that we now call Classical music, Mozart, who he said so copiously and untrammeled channeled the creative impulses of the nagual, the Ocean of Spirit, or, in another sense, the pure musical inspirations of Sophia that he basically was her incarnation, then that rebellious son, Beethoven, who though every bit as Sophia-inspired as Mozart had been, so forcefully hammered those inspirations with his powerful and rebellious will and personality that he transformed Classical music into Romantic.

Actually, John said that he felt the genius/Sophia that was in Mozart, left Mozart on his death and took up residence in Beethoven. He felt that was the reason Mozart had to die so young so this process could happen, and it had to happen because what was going on in Vienna at that time was a big sluice-way for pure Consciousness, for the nagual, for the Ocean of Spirit, to tsunami into, and alter this world, but that Mozart, by his nature, was not going to match the rebellious times (remember, the French revolution happened just two years before Mozart's death!) with his music, so Sophia had to move into Beethoven, who was, by nature, not only cantankerous, but rebellious as hell. (And deaf to all criticism, the double entendre intended!)

There was also the fact that Mozart pretty much worshipped Papa Haydn and his music, while Beethoven had little use for either Papa or his music (perhaps because everyone called him "Papa" and Beethoven loathed all "Papas," starting with his sadistic, bullying drunk of a father!) his musical idol being Bach, whose incredibly complex and intricate Baroque music appealed to Beethoven infinitely more than the simpler, more refined classical stuff of Papa Haydn's. John even quoted me that famous quote by Count Waldstein, written by him in a letter to Beethoven on Beethoven leaving Bonn in 1792 to go to Vienna to study with Papa Haydn,

"Mozart's genius mourns and weeps over the death of his disciple. It found refuge, but no release with the inexhaustible Haydn; through him, now, it seeks to unite with another. By means of assiduous labor you will receive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn."

And as far as John was concerned, that is exactly what literally—spiritually!—happened, whether or not Waldstein meant it merely as a metaphor, which also explains why Beethoven was subsequently so quick to break with the Classical forms of music created by Haydn and filled to excess by Mozart—he had a total, "been there, done that" attitude to them. Of course, I very quickly asked John how the hell a spirit-being could leave the dying Mozart and immediately incarnate in the adult Beethoven, who would have had his own spirit-being, to which he just shrugged and said, "We are not talking about rationally normal stuff here . . . nor about an ordinary spirit-being—we are talking about the powerful and inspiring Sophia, that conduit of Consciousness into this world, so normal rules hardly apply. And this is a good example for the power of going through a membrane of destiny. Who knows—maybe all 'membrane' transits are really just a change of spirit-beings in us? We change so dramatically with our passage through a membrane of destiny because we suddenly are a different being! But don't go quoting me on that because I could just be talking through my Stetson when it comes to that stuff!" (Sorry Uncle John—I just couldn't resist "quoting you on that," but it doesn't matter, because I am writing solely for the wind—and the Akasha (LOL)—with this "Preface!")

And I remember thinking to myself back then, "What the fuck did I even ask that question for, since I don't believe in that spirit-being- and reincarnation-shit anyway!" Just as I am thinking now, as I type this out, thinking to myself "Why did I bring up the subject and why am I wasting my time and effort typing this out, because I still don't believe in that spirit-being- and reincarnation-shit!" Though as I typed that out, I had come to me another thought about why I am typing this Vienna Trinity shit out, since about as many people today listen to Classical—or Baroque or Romantic—orchestral music as read poetry—well, no, likely ten times more, but multiplying a real small number by ten still doesn't give you a fuck of a lot!—so it's all about as vain and foolish as would be trying to convince those 65 million MAGA hat wearers—MAGA-hatters?—that voted for Mad King Donald, is only a mad, malicious king, and not God Almighty himself! (Though his bigotry, his negative attitudes towards poor people, and total intolerance of anyone who isn't both white and at least a multi-millionaire, qualifies him to be Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy!)

Though still on that subject of Beethoven and yawn music—I mean classical—John once told me that every December the Japanese go gaga over Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which they call Daiku, and it gets performed and listened to very fanatically during that month! Which is ironic given that I doubt Beethoven had even heard about Japan during his life, and in 1824, the year of its first performance, few in Japan would have heard about Vienna or Beethoven. Or cared. So go fuckin' figger!

And while I am as totally lost as I am in "grasshoppering" from topic to topic, I am reminded of another comment of John's that he made when I asked him why he was even talking about that shit since hardly anyone listened to that music anymore, and he just chuckled and said, "You're right—few do. But I'll bet you'd have a hard time finding anybody who hasn't heard of the names Mozart or Beethoven, regardless they are probably more familiar with "whale music" than they are the music of those great composers, which is a testament to the amount of power, of Consciousness they channeled into this world with that music when it was widely listened to."

And I remember thinking, "Yeah, whatever!" though I do remember that mid-80s film about Mozart, Amadeus, was pretty damn popular. So popular in fact, I actually shanghaied John into a theatre to see it and quite enjoyed it myself, regardless that back then Classical music was still very foreign to my ears. But then again, developing a liking for Mozart's ear-candy music is like a bit like developing a liking for a Starbucks' Chocolate Cream Frappuccino sugar-bomb! (Yummmmmm. Drool . . . drool . . . drool . . . Too bad the closest Starbucks is 20 miles away or I'd be heading out right now to buy myself two or three of them. Yummmmmm!)

But now it's high time I got back to this . . . "Preface?" And . . . . . . back . . . . . . Jesus H. Fuckin' Christ!—to . . . scroll . . . scroll . . . scroll . . . Ah yes!—finally found it—back to the notion that I was totally delirious when I said I saw the spirits of Uncle John and the wife and son I'd at that time had no idea he'd ever had! And for sure, like my imagination-moribund mother before me—and as you well know from reading this "Preface," before my psychotic break and those very vivid hallucinations of John and Catherine and little Johnny, I was not even remotely inclined to believe in spirits, so when that nose-picking noggin-mechanic, Doc Booger did his Skeptical-Scully routine and dismissed what I had said about seeing spirits at John's funeral as being nothing more an hallucination, I had no problem agreeing with him, of reining in my paranoia-scorpion and changing my new, "Jeez-maybe-spirits-exist" tune back to my former, "Spirits-sure-as-fuck-don't-exist" tune and likewise convincing him that I truly believed that everything I'd seen in that church that day had all been an hallucination created by my psychotic break—which is what I wanted it to be anyway!

What I did have trouble convincing him of, though, was that the hornet of a lie my malicious mother had put in his ear about the cause of my mental problems being my long and incestuous relationship with "that nasty heathen, Uncle John." That what she'd said was just that, a malicious, hate-him-because-he's-a-fallen-away-Catholic, whole-cloth, lie, and that my problems were really caused by a long period of sexual abuse by my father and that in my long relationship with Uncle John, he'd always treated me the way my father should have treated me!

I really didn't expect that annoying, nose-and-head-picking (his nose, my head!) pompus-prick of a noggin-mechanic to believe me, but after a lot of long conversations (with me of course doing all of the talking) about my childhood, (which he bored and compulsively nose-mining listened to like he'd heard it all way too many times before) he eventually did come to believe me. Or said he did. And I think he really did, especially when once, during those angry and Kleenex-devouring conversations, he pulled his finger out of his schnozz, wiped it on the underside of his chair—or the ass of his pants, I couldn't tell—and made the comment that it is quite common for mothers to "put a reversed telescope to their Nelson eye", then go "go all the way to the headwaters of that famous Egyptian river" about, a daughter's molestation by her father because it then gets her "off the Red Devil" (which, as already talked about, is a popular lure, so I guess he fished in other lakes—the real lakes of this area filled with pristine water and hosting real fish and real loons, not the foul, rotting, leech-infested, head-waters of the loons that filled that head-shop) for either her own sexual inadequacies and problems and/or her failed responsibility to get out of a toxic marriage.

Doc Booger also said that such mothers only had three good friends to aid them in such marriages, and they were "those three famous monkeys who lived in that fantasy world where evil was never seen, where evil was never heard, and where evil was never spoken of, a fantasy world that could only be found at the headwaters of that famous Egyptian river."

That irritating, nose-mining idiot constantly used metaphors like that which, literal-minded as I was, he had to constantly explain to me, and when I pugnaciously castigated him for it one day, he laughed and said, "Because they are intended to provoke your imagination—but they obviously don't, which tells me just how literal-minded you really are, which can only mean you have suppressed your imagination almost out of existence because you find it too disturbing and frightening for your meager supply of courage, and that in turn means you are only good at seeing parts and not wholes, the trees and not the forest, or worse—the colorful paintjob on the outhouse and not the half-rotted crapper underneath it!

"And certainly not the essential symbols representing deeper truths that guide us through the labyrinth of this life. And that means it is always going to be very difficult for you to navigate your way through the labyrinth of your life. Human life truly is a labyrinth, but not just a simple two-dimensional one, but a multi-leveled labyrinth, the shallow, two-dimensional surface levels for children and literal-minded adults with sick, fractured, psyches who need life to be that two-dimensional and simple, and the deeper symbolic levels for real adults with whole, healthy psyches who can see, understand, and can navigate those multiple levels—simultaneously!—with a modicum of expertise. In a sense, right now, you are currently living your life like someone with a migraine trying to drive a four-lane freeway at rush-hour while staring at the license plate of the transport truck you are tailgating."

Needless to say, I had to think about that long, stinking stream of explosive diarrhea of words for a good long while after our session before I truly fathomed what he meant and the implications of it to my life. And it wasn't a new problem. John had constantly harped on that point—of living my life from a higher vantage point to get a bigger, broader picture—of seeing the totality of the forest and not just always focusing on the few trees that I found the least frightening—but I'd never really gotten the hang of it while he was alive. And still fucking haven't!

Or, more truthfully, I never found the courage to look at life that way. (Back to that old too-true truism of Heraclitus, that our character—or lack of it!—is our fate!) And though I constantly struggle to find that necessary courage that will allow me to face the bigger picture, the whole forest, containing not only beautiful trees but swarms of black flies and mosquitoes, not only pretty lakes and sweet, babbling brooks, but inaccessible and insect-swarming swamps and nasty, snake-slithering bogs, I still tend to get caught up in, or at least find most comforting, the tunnel-visioned, license plate-minutiae and trivialities of life—which of course leads to bad life-driving, lots of accidents and more time getting towed out of ditches than rolling down that highway.

But back to the issue at hand—Doc Booger would not have thought or said what he did about my mother and her denial (yup, I eventually figured out what he meant by that Egyptian river and I think someone should start a support group for those up-d'Nile-mothers of daddy-diddled daughters called The Three Monkeys Support Group!) if he truly had continued to believe that it had been John, and not my father, who'd molested me, especially once I convinced him John had come into my life long after I'd started sexually acting out in the ways I described to him.

Even more shocking—though only to me—than the reality of me finally opening up that big, piss-reeking box of mouse turds of that nasty business with my father, and the hantavirus of the soul (Wow!—good fuckin' metaphor, Rache! Where the hell did that come from?) it afflicted me with, was Doc Booger's reaction to it, which, as I may have already mentioned, was like he'd heard it all so many times before it had become to him like just another well-picked booger wiped on his chairs-seat or underside of his desk. Or more appropriate to me, like my own "listenings" to Sprocket's over-told jokes.

Alas and alack, as I've been writing this bit about me and Doc Booger sifting our way through that nasty, reeking box of mouse turds of my father molesting me and my mother Three Monkeying the whole insidious process into her own private oblivion, I've had this constant sense of literary déjà vu about it that's been driving me absolutely nuts (just figuratively folks, just figuratively—since I am already obviously more nuts than a California almond grove,(that's one of Sprocket's gems!) and only just this instant has that finally resolved itself: it's the main fuckin' theme of Fitzgerald's great classic, Tender Is The Night, where at the end of it you have to decide who was the bigger loon, the noggin-mechanic Dr. Dick Driver, (yeah, I get that naughty bit innuendo, too!) or his patient, the fucked-up, daddy-diddled Nicole, whom he falls in love with and marries.

I go with Dumb Dick—Sticky Dickey?—being the crazier of the two, because Nicole, in being daddy-diddled as she had been, had little choice but go insane to survive the horrors of her abuse, while Dumb—sticky-dick—Dick, as a noggin-mechanic, should have known the dangers inherent in dick-diving in a loon pool, and not just lust-diving, but getting emotionally involved with—and marrying, for fuck's sake!—a mentally ill young woman. Especially one he was supposed to be professionally helping!

I mean, Jupiter Jung at least was smart enough to just fuck-and-forget—and not marry—any of his many fucked-up "moons"! . . . Though the fact of him being "happily married" and having a strong, supportive wife at home, likely precluded that problem! But here again we are back to Heraclitus and his assertion about character and fate.

The hardest part of being subjected to all that head-mechanicking was to convince Doc Booger that I'd forgiven both my father and mother and that I was willing to let it go of all that angry-loon-shit and move on with my life. Well, I may have been willing to try to move on with my life—if one ever can do such a thing after being so persistently and maliciously damaged. And I mean damaged! I am a great fan of U2, and back in the day when Bono was a young, rebellious hunk, my crotch would dampen just at the thought of him and would virtually Niagara while I was listening to him sing, but one of U2's songs I absolutely could not—and still cannot—listen to is "One," for whenever I heard, (in the few times I allowed it bludgeon my ears and sensibilities) Bono asking his erstwhile "baby" a bunch of questions, one of which was about disappointing her and leaving a foul taste in her mouth, all that could come to my mind was, "YES, DADDY, YOU FUCKING STINKING STREAK OF SHIT! YOU DAMN WELL DID DISAPPOINT ME HORRIBLY—AND LEFT MY WHOLE LIFE TASTING LIKE BETRAYAL-FLAVORED CUM!"

All that ever came to mind on hearing those words was the way too many—ONE was way too many!—dick-sucking my father forced me to have with him! And when Bono sings about lepers in the head, I again could never help but thinking of my father and how he always acted holier than Christ while standing beside his holier-than-Mary wife in his precious Church in front of his precious priests, yet but hours later be doing heinous things to me that he could only have been the anti-Christ "come" to fill my mouth with his cum and my head with lepers, which is a perfect metaphor for the outcast leper colony of the destroyed childhood and warped self-esteem and the bat-flocks of deformed, diseased and deranged thoughts that flew out of the reeking, guano-filled cave of such a heinous betrayal and its on-going abuses, regardless of what Bono might have had in mind when he wrote that song. (Fuck!—if you can follow that last sentence you're way smarter than I am! Or not very smart at all—in trying to follow it!)

But back to the damage both my parents did to me, and my need to profoundly forgive them so I could move on with my life, something I doubt I will ever be able to do, for it is very much as a fellow incest survivor—a young man molested by his lonely, fucked-up, single mother—in our group sessions once so aptly put it: "It's like a baseball player getting permanent brain damage from being hit in the head with an errant fast ball, and though he may give the pitcher the benefit of the doubt about it being an accident and not something he did intentionally and maliciously, that still doesn't mean there was no permanent brain damage to ever after deal with."

But I know enough about baseball to know there's a big difference between an errant fastball and a bean ball, and it was a lot of innings of bean balls those two malicious assholes, who called themselves my "loving parents," threw at me, so I'd have to be some unreal and exalted fiction of a Christ to truly forgive them for it, and not a flesh-and-damaged human being! My father knew exactly what he was doing to me with those bean balls—and other balls!—of his molestations, and my mother, in knowing exactly what he was throwing at me, just held my head steady for him so I couldn't duck out of the way, which means there is a level of intentional culpability there on both their parts that is patently unforgiveable. Except like I said, by some fictional and totally humanly unreal Christ—and sure not by the very real human victim of their malicious, demonic behavior, ME!

And if John's cockamamie assertion that reincarnation is a spiritual fact and not a childish fantasy of those with a pathological fear of death, (though to be sure, I never ever once got the sense he was even remotely afraid of dying—in fact, as already mentioned too many times, he quite looked forward to it!) I am certain it will take me many purported lifetimes to truly forgive those two "good Catholic" monsters who may have assiduously and ostentatiously gone to "confession" every Saturday, and holy Mass every Sunday where they sang the hymns—on key!—and appropriately loudly enough, and where they piously and eyes-closed stuck out their "forked" tongues to receive that dry, stale and tasteless "veritable-body-of-Christ" bit of unleavened bread even a starving sparrow would turn up its beak at, and after the Mass made sure to stop at the door to shake the holy hand of the pompous priest, and cheerfully pour into his eager ears the bottle of Stroke-My-Big-Priest-Ego liqueur (while before mass some hapless altar boy had had to stroke his big something-else!) of what a great sermon he'd just given, but who were as close to being holy as a steaming pile of dog shit in the middle of the dining room table at Sunday dinner, is to being a prime rib of beef!

Ha!—Now there's a synchronicity for you—in order to keep myself somewhat calm while writing this manic and shit-disturbing mess, I like to random-play my iPod music through the stereo and Crosby Stills & Nash has come on playing Graham Nash's great song, "Cathedral," which he wrote while tripping in Winchester cathedral. I love its chorus which is essentially about the grotesque and hypocritical absurdity of all the people who have been murdered in the name of Christ, and have sung it to myself so many times many times I have it memorized, that really gives my soul a lift. Alas and alack, in order to avoid having my blubber-ass sued off by the recording company that owns that song, I don't dare type it out here, so you'll just have to take a minute and Google it.

And I even remember once playing that song for Uncle John—and telling him that it was inspired by an acid-trip Nash had in Winchester cathedral—who nodded his head whenever they sang the chorus, though when it was over, his only comment was, "He's got that right!—but why did he have to be out of his head on some drug in a church to see what Western European history has been blood-dripping full of since the time of the complete collapse of the Empire? It's all there in black-and-white for all to see who have the guts to do so. You don't have to search very hard for books to read about the so-called Christian, very Roman Catholic Church perpetrating its righteous, hate-and-paranoia-fueled slaughters of the Pagans . . . and it righteous, hate-and-paranoia-fueled destruction of their religion, their temples and their sacred groves . . . and especially heinous and absolutely evil was its provoking of mindless mobs, to destroy . . . with nothing but 'righteous' hate and paranoia in its collective heart, the famous and irreplaceable library at Alexandria and torture and murder one of the most brilliant women of history, the philosopher Hypatia!

"And the horrendous, hate-and-paranoia-fueled slaughters of fellow Christians, the Gnostics, and centuries later, the equally hate-and-paranoia-fueled slaughter of the Gnostic Bogomils and Albigensians that Constantine's Imperial Abomination sent hordes of crusading, psychopathic mass murderers to destroy, like they were a pack of starving Dobermans let loose in a hutch of rabbits!

"And the 'righteously Christian,' hate-and-paranoia-fueled 'Crusades' themselves, which 'spiritualized' mass slaughter, not only of the Mohammedan 'infidels' in that very misnamed 'Holy Land,' but of thousands of Jews, not only in that 'Holy Land' but along the way. Centuries of 'Christian' anti-Semitism made them easy targets and good practice for killing infidel Mohammedans—and just about everybody in its path along the way! The only way to look at those 'Christian' crusades is as a pre-figuring of 'Pope Hitler' sending his righteous—and Christian!—hordes of rabid, ravenous Nazi, Dire Wolves, out to ravage and raze Europe and Russia.

"And then of course, there was that absolutely evil precursor to the Nazi Gestapo, the Inquisition and the evil cadres of hate\- and paranoia\- and righteousness-fuelled, Dominican-Doberman-psychopaths abusing all that power bequeathed to them by Constantine's very powerful Imperial Abomination in its desperate and vicious efforts to keep its childishly credulous sheep-flocks suitably childish and credulous and intimidated extraordinarily fearful—and ever-willing to pay its tithe-taxes! Keeping in mind, always, that the Roman Catholic Church was always and only ever an extension of the Roman Empire, which was, at its core, only ever a dark, violent and insatiably power-and-greed dominated institution designed solely to acquire and hoard power and wealth, both of which it guaranteed itself to constantly accrue by keeping its vassal states suitably intimidated, suitably fearful, and exorbitantly taxed!

"And on from there to the Thirty Years War, that beyond-insane, righteousness- hate\- and paranoia-fueled Reformation slaughterfest, during which 8 million Christians killed each other, ostensibly in the name of Christ, but actually in the name of power and wealth! It was basically a civil war between economic factions in the vast 'Roman Catholic Nation' that was occupying Europe at the time and being ruled over by a Roman Emperor who cleverly and cynically passed himself off as a spiritual leader and called himself Pope, when the truth was, he was just another Roman Emperor, little different than Julius Caesar, Augustus, Caligula, Nero, and the centuries-long lineage of their generally greedy, corrupt, and power obsessed ilk!

"And that subsequently bifurcated, and ever-after murderously contentious 'Christian Nation' didn't see another war creating as stupendous a 'body count' as the Thirty Years War until the BASS, where again, so-called Christians, so-called worshippers of their exalted divinity, Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, slaughtered each other by the millions with weapons so horrendous that if that war had lasted thirty years, it would not have ended with an armistice, but only when there was nothing left alive in Europe but the corpse rats! Rats that would have been the size of St. Bernards!"

Fuck-a-fulminating-fountain-of-righteous-rage!—Yeah, that was one fuckin' passionate and fuckin' well-thought-about subject for John, and he had a point there, didn't he? European history is nothing if not a relentless and depressing cataloguing of the violent, hypocritical crimes-against-humanity of that fuckin' very Roman, very Imperial, Abomination of Constantine's and the mindless, soulless, ravening hordes of hate-and-paranoia-filled, "Christian' Dire Wolves that multiplied like e-coli bacteria in a in a dying man's gut! (I loved that term of his, Dominican-Dobermans, for Inquisitors, though I guess to be accurate, it should be Rabid Dominican-Dobermans!)

But enough of that dark, violent, and boring historical shit no "Christian" reader is going to want to blacken their day hearing because it can but create cracks in their precious "faith"—their childish credulity!—and back to my crazy story—literally!—and my efforts at playing the get-out-of-the-Shrink-Klink-in-one-piece game, for that was, from my perspective, a life-and-death match really worth winning! And made especially pressing by the fact that it never left my mind that I sensed there was something more to what I'd experienced at John's funeral than just a run-of-the-mill, psychosis-produced hallucination, and that somehow, someday I was meant to become the keeper of the memories of John, his lovely wife and his sweet little son (who would have been another of my uncles—a truly interesting and worth knowing one—had he lived) something I knew I could not do while a prisoner of that Shrink-Klink, so I played that get-the-fuck-out-of-jail-alive game with the passion and intensity of aging, worn-out-by-the-gridiron-wars NFL quarterback making the most of his one-and-only appearance at a Super Bowl.

After getting effectively brain-lightninged out of my deep La Brea Tar Pit depression (my equivalent of Churchill's Black Dog) and then fighting for all I was worth to identify and keeping myself—more or less—locked into consensus reality, (and when less in consensus reality, I still learned, like the wise Robert Pirsig, to know enough to do my best to adequately fake it) I gradually had to take less and less of their hideous drugs, got the grizzly bear of my rage, the scorpion of my paranoia, and other errant—leprous!—emotions under enough control, and after enough time had passed that the healing of the gaping wound of my great grief at the loss of John had finally started to scab over, the day finally came when I walked out of that Shrink-Klink a free and functionally—though drug-dependent—bi-polar (with paranoid tendencies) woman with only one thing on her newly, if precariously, stabilized mind—STAY THE FUCK OUT OF THAT GODDAMN GESTAPO-RULED STALAG!

And as I wrote those above words and once again fathomed the mental milkshake John's death had blendered me into, I was glad he'd lived so long that my children had grown up and left home and hadn't had to go through the trauma of being foster-homed due to their mother having a mental breakdown and subsequent incarceration like that. Though of course, if my children had still been in my life when the gale of John's death had struck my frail sloop, I doubt I would have felt so abandoned and alone, and surely the keel of my sense of responsibility for them would have kept me upright through that storm of grief and loss and I would not have foundered as I did, and sunk so deep, into that terrifying ocean of psychosis.

Wow, that's another great metaphor that the nagual has gratuitously manifested into my mania-sizzling brain (where the fuck was that stuff when I was fucking and sucking—and getting fucked-over by—Prof Weirs and trying to become a novelist!) though of course, if Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is right, that very ocean I drowned in is what he—and Joseph Campbell—called the Mythos—and which Castaneda called the nagual and John the Ocean of Spirit—the very source of such inspirations. Which of course means Joe Campbell was right on when he said, "The psychotic drowns in the same waters the mystic swims with delight." And the genius too, I guess. Like Nietzsche, who swam for too long in those waters then lost his strength and got swallowed up by them.

And I can see why, because this totally whacko process of saying-anything-that-pops-into-your-crazy-head is fun! It's ecstatic! And fuckin' powerful! And scary! It's just too bad I lack the willpower to control it, because if I could, I could be a fuckin' genius! Like Nietzsche! And yeah, I know—I'm as manic as a chipmunk eating coffee beans and thus drowning utterly in those dangerous "waters". . . glug . . . glug . . . glug—but it's a fun thought for a long-failed writer riding the Psychosis-Coaster at the Delusions of Grandeur Funpark!

And of course, if I embrace Wiki's psychological definition of metanoia as "a transformative change of heart," and subsequent, positive psychological re-building or "healing," then perhaps that breakdown was a necessary part of the process of changing me from a highly ego-oriented, middle-class-indoctrinated Rachel intent on living her well-planned and cherished, middle-class Rachel-ego-life, into a new, more humble, more spiritual Rachel willing to selflessly give her life over to doing all those years of work on John's memoirs and thus creating—for however few readers who discover them—the the rendition of his memoirs I called, The Fire.

Of course, that's a POV that takes as a given the real existence of that damned hard-to-imagine/harder-to-believe-in nagual and of and equally hard-to-imagine/harder-to-believe-in Ocean of Spirit full of its many denizens—from peaceful porpoises to devour-you-whole, "Great White Sharks"—and their various too-big-to-comprehend agendas, and of course, that POV makes me feel even more crazy than I already am—if possible!—and so I will leave it at that!

### Chapter Eighteen

And much as on intuitive faith—damn, but Constantine's Imperial Abomination and its abominable minion-priests has taught me to absolutely hate that fuckin' word, faith!—I'd wanted to believe that what I'd witnessed and experienced in that damned church that day of John's funeral had been no mere run-of-the-mill psychotic hallucination, (my rational mind really couldn't process it at all) it wasn't until I came into possession of, and read John's memoirs and through them, not only truly met his wife Catherine and their son Johnny, but I learned—in what I eventually turned into the Prologue of The Fire—that Catherine's "spirit"—or more likely, an hallucination of her on John's part—was such a regular visitor with John over the years that she'd become as much—or more—of a part of his consensus reality—as was I! Then learning much later on, the horrors he'd so blindly and viciously perpetrated on their lives, that I had my intuition about those spirits confirmed for me. Though of course, given how much I hate the notion of a world of spirits hovering around me, I wish I could, with absolute rational certainty just write it off (ha—good, unintended pun!) as a run-of-the-mill psychotic hallucination!

And much as it had definitely seemed to have been no ordinary hallucination that day, but an event that in some way, and in some unfathomable-to-me realm, had been real, so also was extraordinarily real, the true meaning of that lovely woman, Catherine, telling me I was their memory-keeper, with me right now, as I sit fat-fingered hammering away at this poor, abused keyboard, in the process of fulfilling that role as I write this outrageous "Preface" as part of the course of getting ready to release, as their memory-keeper, all of those safely kept (and necessarily and assiduously translated) memories of the three of them—four if you include the still-born Emma, who never lived a minute in this world, but around whom their collective fate/destiny pivoted! Releasing to a most certainly indifferent world all of those memories that John had distilled into his memoirs—and what Book One of The Fire is essentially all about.

With his long-delayed parole from his sentence in Gulag Earth, besides driving me "stark raving bloody bonkers!" as some Brit might say, John left a canyon-scar in my soul twice the size of the monstrous Valles Marineris on Mars (if you are not familiar with it, go on-line and check it out: it's truly awe-some—2500 miles long, 120 miles wide, and over 4 miles deep!) It goes without saying, that his "parole" and my subsequent insanity, however much work the Shrink-Klink, the brain-lightning, the infernal drugs and Doc Booger did to repair the noggin-damage done by it, left me in a mental and emotional state too compromised and fragile to ever again allow me to work as a teacher, which really didn't matter because I was getting real tired of that boring, thankless and stressful job, and with his "parole," John had left me his house and farm—and a ridiculous amount of money!

And boy-oh-fucking-joyful-boy, but did that ever piss my mother off! And it confirmed for that paranoid bitch that he just had to have been fucking me! Since the house has two, upstairs bedrooms but there is one one—physical!—me, I long ago turned one of the rooms into this office in which I am sitting at my old, ailing, no longer Microsoft-supported computer, hammering out these words. (I'm lucky if I get a year out of a keyboard, which like a busy "working girl's" bed, can only take so much pounding!)

Along with leaving me his house, farm and money—and his beloved horse and dog, both of which long ago (the poor, disconsolate and depressed dog had, within weeks, laid down and died at the spot John had!) followed him onto that endless range in the sky—John also left me his vast collection of vinyl—now worth a fortune since it's in vogue again—most of it classical music albums, but a good number of jazz, too. And believe it or not, many of those classical albums I have learned to love even more than my beloved rock 'n' roll, especially the ones by the randy and ever-inspired Mozart (I've read he used to write special and personal arias for beautiful opera divas just to get into their . . . bloomers . . . corsets . . . or whatever the hell they wore in those days that were supposed to prevent "quickies"—but likely only slowed them down by four or five seconds!) and that dour, revolutionary Romantic, Beethoven, who had he been born a modern "boomer" would surely have been a rock star—John Lennon no less! (Though more likely, Bob Dylan!)

HA!—I once had a really vivid acid flashback where I saw the incredible genius behind the Beatles lying in the spirits of Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert temporarily possessing John, Paul and George respectively, with Papa Haydn residing in the phlegmatic Ringo, there to watch over them and calm them down a bit, and that the reason the Beatles had to break up as soon as they did was because all that incredible creative nagual-energy and talent was going to kill them as young as it did the three originals. (Beethoven lived considerably longer than Mozart and Shubert, who died in their 30s, but by today's standards, he died young.) Quite a vision for someone who at one time hated Classical music almost as much as the idea of the existence of spirits! (Much as I now like Classical music, I still don't like to believe in the existence of spirits!)

Along with the farm came an old truck that he'd not used in years and had parked in an old lean-to type of shed attached to the barn that was so full of spiders I never went into it; his big, old, faded-red, rust-pintoed 4x4 Ford 250 with a snow-plow apparatus attached to it, which I immediately gave to a neighbor that he still uses—a rust-holed, unregistered old trooper that it now is!—to gratis plow my long drive after every winter storm, as well as his own. And in an unused part of the barn, long covered with a huge canvas tarp that was a dust-and-cobweb-decorated playground for more fuckin' damn spiders than any arachnophobe ever wants to encounter, was an almost-new Volkswagen camper van (a newer, infinitely more sedately-painted version of Groucho's Shagginwaggen, sans 8-track stereo, tapes, cum-stained mattresses, and reek of stale sex and marijuana smoke!) that he shocked the hell of me by buying when he was ninety years old and taking off with his dog—weirdly named Schnitzel, but which he affectionately called Scheisse, the explanation of which he never gave me and which I had to read well into his memoirs to find out—for a year-long, Steinbeckean, Travels With Charlie trip, most of which he wouldn't tell me about except for his time in the American Southwest.

That part of his trip he talked about quite a bit, particularly his love the Navajo and Hopi reservations at the Four Corners area—which I knew from his stories that he'd visited when he was younger—though his favorite area was the Mojave Desert, of which he said that when he read the Castaneda books, he was a hundred percent certain could not have been much different than the Sonoran desert to the south, and that Carlos truly had spent time in such a desert and hadn't been exaggerating one tiny bit the magic inherent in it, but if anything, he'd been understating it. He also said that he seemed to sense and appreciate the magic of them more on that second, much later trip, and had he sensed just how truly magical they were when he was younger, he'd have been in big trouble as he'd have spent his last number of years constantly yearning to move down there. (When I asked him why he felt he couldn't have moved down there, he just gave me an exasperated look as he smiling said, "We've talked about this before—it is because it is my destiny and karma to be here—having a relationship with you.")

It was only in reading his memoirs that I learned that his second trip to the American Southwest was only a side-trip and the main trip was to his former ranch out in the northwest that caused Catherine and Johnny—and eventually him!—so much grief and pretty much engendered the writing of The Fire. Interesting and bizarre as that story is, it represents his ultimate act of redemption for his "sins," and he tells it in detail deep in Book Two of The Fire. It is so dramatic and important I am going to say no more about it besides what he enigmatically said to me—to counter my objections—just before he embarked on his outrageous journey in that van, which was something to the effect of, "I am going off to rescue a very special spirit-being who is trapped in his justifiable rage against me and slowly sliding into hell for it."

And that is what, in his memoirs, he describes himself doing, but it's a complex story intimately related to the whole debacle of that phase of his life, so you'll have to wait until then to read about it. (Be patient, Dear Reader—and be hopeful I live long enough to make it available to the e-World!)

That said, what more can I say but that it was a splendid machine that I gave to the grateful Jonathan who, after spending a month vacuuming all the dog hair out of it, has put, and is still putting it, to good use. He regularly emails me pics of him and his family, usually camping with it in the splendorous mountains they live near, but also a bunch of a trips they took to the Southwest, particularly the twin canyons—those so-hard-to-believe-they-are-real-I-wish-I'd-got-to-see-them—the Grand and the Bryce. (Mere gullies—arroyos!—compared to Valles Marineris!) John would have been—likely is—thrilled at the use Jonathan is getting out of that van of his!)

And too, he of course left me his large library containing, among many other valuable sets, the complete set—up to the time of his death—of obviously well-read and assiduously annotated books by my old "literary" bogey-man, Castaneda, which, much as I have read just about everything on the Web that exists there to read about him being nothing more than the world's most successful literary sham, con artist, and manipulative cult leader, there is still something in those books that disturbs the hell out of me when I read them, so much so that I learned to never read them before going to bed because I'd then have extremely vivid, weird and sleep-disturbing dreams.

John and I had more than a few heated debates about Castaneda and his books, which John more than willingly acknowledged could not be totally and literally true, but were nonetheless full of profound truths and a hell of a lot of power. I guess it's the power that disturbs my dreams. To that effect he referred me to Marianne Moore's poem, "Poetry" where she talks about "imaginary gardens with real toads in them", saying that what Castaneda did was give the world a lot of big and important toads hidden in the imaginative and essentially poetic, "desert-garden" of his tales about Don Juan and his sorcery. (Though he was sure those desert gardens weren't completely imaginary.)

And when I brought up the assertion of more than a few scholars that Don Juan was a complete fiction, he just laughed and said, "Don't believe everything that those anal academics say—most of them are as full of crap as they full of their own self-importance—which remember, Don Juan was always warning Castaneda—an academic!—about having too much of! Besides, that respected explorer of shamanism, Michael Harner, in his famous work, The Way of the Shaman, speaks of Castaneda with a great deal of respect and seems to assume that Don Juan had some form of factual existence. So though I am certain Castaneda wrapped some fiction around him, there was more than a good deal of truth to him. . . . In fact, I am sure that he was as real as Socrates, whom we accept as having a factual reality however much we also accept that Plato did more than a little fictionalizing about him when he wrote his Dialogues.

"I mean, do you really believe that the Socrates who Plato gave us in his dialogues was the real Socrates? And that he said all the things—especially all that high-brow metaphysical stuff that the flesh-and-blood Socrates would have scoffed at and kicked his student in the ass for? Or that if Plato had only written what Socrates actually said, would his works would be as great? I suspect that that the greatness of Plato's writings lies as much in the 'real toad-ideas' about the Socrates he created within the gardens of his dialogues, coupled to a strange sort of power and poetry he possessed as a writer that naturally worked its way into those dialogues.

"And I am sure the same is true for Castaneda and Don Juan. Those books of Castaneda's have a strange sort of power that cannot be gainsaid and it keeps them selling year after year—I've noticed there's always a complete set of them on sale in the books store—and the first one is almost twenty five years old! Not many famous modern novelists of that generation are so fortunate! . . . I mean, how many of Norman Mailer's books do you think are on the book store's shelves right now? I think the importance of the Castaneda books lies as much in that power as in what is said, though figuring out the nature of that power—and how to enhance and channel it—is something else entirely."

Though with that he grinned and added, "Which of course is what real sorcery and magic have always been about—regardless of whether or not you are capable of believing in it."

John used to grimly tell me that my childhood of abuse and shame had so shut down my fourth, my heart chakra which was blocking the ability of my kundalini, my fundamental and energetic stream consciousness, from reaching my sixth chakra, (which according to self-proclaimed expert on the subject, Layne Redmond, opens the door to clairvoyance, intuition, heightened mental faculties and self-realization) that I could no more believe in the existence of magic and sorcery than could a Kalahari bushman believe in snow—or any "tall tales" about children having fun throwing balls made out of the stuff at each other. Or making "men" out of the stuff!

He also said that if I really wanted to heal myself I should take an extended trip to India and experience some real spiritual and magical power firsthand, as had he had long ago done, and which changed his life. (You will—if I live long enough!—read about those interesting travels in Book Two.) It was an idea that while he was alive always seemed as far-fetched to me as it was alluring, and though I did then think it remotely possible, once he died and I had my psychotic break and subsequent chronic mental problems, it was off the table completely.

Fortunately, I was able—in a vicarious way!—to go there under the literary auspices of one of my favorite modern writers, a fellow incest-survivor, the prolific and award-winning author, Sylvia Fraser, who wrote about her solitary, interesting, adventurous, magical and enlightening travels to that incredible country in the book, The Rope in the Water.

The title comes from a swimming incident in the ocean where she is being fatally sucked out to sea by a rip-tide and is saved by discovering a rope in the water that she uses to pull herself to shore, only later discovering there was no physical way for that rope to have been there. A mystery, perhaps even a miracle of a most interesting and existential nature because had that "miraculous" rope not been there, her book _The Rope in the Water_ would not exist because she would not have been alive to write it. But on that account you'll have to read the book and decide for yourself, because in my worldview, there are no such thing as miracles and there must be a rational explanation for what happened to her! (However much she assiduously presents, then equally assiduously refutes, a bunch of them!)

But there was a downside to that book, for I spent my time reading it quite awestruck by her courage and intrepidity which left me feeling both hideously weak and shamefully inadequate and vainly wishing I could have been as courageous and strong as her and have sublimated my similar father-abuse into a life that was as adventurous and creative as hers. Of course, as she explains in her book on the subject, My Father's House, her abuse happened to her at a younger age than had mine, (how the fuck does this world produce such malicious, fucked-up "fathers"??????) and she was able to repress and forget it.

And as John would remind me—if he was here to so wisely do so—that had I been like her, a world traveler with an exciting and demanding career, I would then not have been a very good memory-keeper. (If you too, Dear Rare Reader, are an unfortunate survivor of incestuous abuse, check out My Father's House for it is a great depiction of how a great big, three-monkeys inconvenient truth can get so dragged underwater by the crocodile of conventional, oh-that-can't-really-be-happening daily life, and the hidden-in-the-swamp-muck of denial and convenient lies to decompose until it becomes croc-edible.)(Crocodiles, I learned on some Aussie documentary on the subject, only eat rotten meat.)

And as to what seemed to became the new reality for John after that mall fire—when I first met him and for a decade after would only release words from his mouth like they were gold bricks being squeezed out of a miser's ass!—once he got started on a subject, whole passenger-pigeon flocks of words would pour out of his mouth until he'd exhausted that subject to his satisfaction. Pet subjects like:"Do we really know the real nature of fiction, or any product of the imagination? Do we yet today, even come close to understand the Imagination as Blake knew it? Or any sorcerer or true magician knows it, both arts of which are dependent on powerful and trained imaginations? On visualizations? Or as every young child naturally knows it? Knows it in such a way that the monsters under his bed are damn-certain real! As no less so are his or her imaginary friends!"

As far as John was concerned we have taken a giant leap backwards from what the so-called "primitive peoples" knew for so long and so well, and we have restricted the meaning of real and reality so drastically that we have reduced ourselves to that (likely already mentioned) metaphor of us being children playing in a sandbox in a high-fenced suburban backyard and believing it to be the whole world. Or Universe, even!"

Then, during one of our many talks about Castaneda, he stopped for a very long moment, a rare, impish look on his face revealing he was about to say something outrageous, "If Castaneda's books are to be classified—as so many critics want them to be—as fiction, then he should be seriously considered for the Nobel prize for Literature for them, for as a collective work of fiction, they are stupendously imaginative, original, enthralling, and . . . spiritually profound. Not to mention, popular!"

And what can I say to counter that, especially now that I have read the whole series and cannot be but awed, not only by the strange, seductive and mood altering power imbued in them, but as well the deep, vast, intricate and unpredictably imaginative scope of the whole thing. (If you haven't read the whole series—and not just the first three or four as most fans do!—at least three assiduous times, you are in no position to judge! It truly is deep shit!) And of course, I must grudgingly admit, by some of the very real wisdom contained in it—especially Don Juan's relentless harping on the dangers of self-importance, no small matter to a manic-depressive where the mania is nothing but a drowning in the ever-gushing artesian spring of out-control self-importance and grandiosity.

And of course, there is that shifty "spot" of brighter light within our "luminous being" called the assemblage point which purportedly alters/sets our consciousness for us, as well as "assembles" our reality and works a lot like the tuning dial on a radio, that everyone—except kids today, most of whom have never seen a device with a tuning dial on it!—knows, can, with but a slight twist, take you from a rock to a pop to a classical to a country station, each very much representing its own unique "reality."

And as a manic-depressive and paranoid schizophrenic, I was—once I truly understood the slippery concept—really able to relate that notion of that station-tuning radio dial of the "assemblage point" and its capacity to move—and be moved!—and in doing so, alter/dictate our reality to us, especially when some "stressor" would abruptly reach up from some deep dark place within me and into my more or less "normal" (drug stabilized) reality and drag me into a black, seething pit of paranoia where even a chance, innocuous glance from an innocent child could turn me into a hostile, raging, tail-raised-and-ready-to-strike, scorpion! (Without my "meds" I have a very reduced capacity to control my very negative—and too-close to violent!—reactions to things like that, which is why, now that I have gone walkabout from the Meds-Rez in order to write this "Preface" I have to keep as isolated as I can in my little—fortunately isolated!—farm house! That John so generously gave me!)

And many times, when I have been walkabout from the Meds-Rez—like now!—and while moving back and forth from mania to depression—and way too often too drunk and too stoned!—I've definitely had the sense that something very much like an invisible tuning dial existed on the side of my head—or my hypothetical spirit-being!—and that malignant forces very much outside of my control were diabolically twirling it from one end of the frequency range to the other. And truly, the very reality of the manic phase is extraordinarily different from that of the depressive—and for sure from a "normal" person!—and though I won't go into the plethora of my own noticed verifications of that statement, I will relate one I read somewhere—maybe in a Colin Wilson book—of a manic-depressive who observed that during his manic states, his hair and fingernails grew faster than when he was depressed.

Of course, that statement also demonstrates the reality of the supreme, self-absorbed egoism inherent to the manic state, for who but a supremely self-absorbed egoist would even think to observe and measure such a personal—and laughably trivial—phenomenon? No healthy person would, that's for sure! And believe me, I've done a lot of outrageous, trivial and ridiculously self-absorbed things when I was in my unmedicated manic states, but never anything as incredibly Monk-anal (Tony Shalhoub's Monk) as that! (Boy, can I sometimes ever relate to that show! And Shalhoub's great, and obviously well-researched acting in it!)

And while on the subject of that assemblage point, I must state that John—no less than Castaneda claimed about Don Juan—had the unconscious power to shift a weaker person's assemblage point, and I cannot count the times I went to his place feeling like a flea-fart in a force-ten gale, and three minutes in his company would pull me back together and ground me thoroughly. Well, obviously!—for my psychotic break immediately after his death was a testament to his power to keep my assemblage point lodged, however precariously, in the sane range of the dial.

Nor can I count the times way-back-when, when I was feeling my blackest and having my hardest times coping with single motherhood such that thoughts of suicide would be hovering in the back of my mind like a flock of black bats hanging in the dank cave of my skull and I'd be wishing John was there to make me feel better (I've already discussed him "picking up" that wish and responding to it), and totally out of the blue, he would show up at my place for a cup of coffee and his very presence for the half hour it took him to drink his cup of coffee before being on his way was enough to pull me out of that deadly, black bat-dominated reality.

Wow!—the metaphor just came to me that as John drank his cup of black coffee, he downed my black bats with it. Call him the depression-drinker—though if you can accept the existence of that Fifth Dimension, that Ocean of Spirit, then that depression I was feeling was the result of me drowning in the rip-tide current of depression flowing so powerfully and stickily in the dark depths of that "Ocean", then he was more like a life guard—or a "rope in the water"—showing up at a most crucial moment to drag me out of it to keep me from being swept away and drowning.

On the subjects of suicide and Castaneda's "fictions" I feel compelled to add another anecdote to this ever-growing heap of dog's barf of them, the first one being to state that the impulse to commit suicide had been with me since my proneness to depression started when I was about eleven. It had reached its peak that Woodstock-summer when I met John, for in the six months leading up to it I had been filching one or two sleeping pills and Valiums out of each bottle my mother had prescribed to her over that period (it never occurred to me at the time that that unimaginative lump of petrified Catholic dogma-shit was actually a living human being with a sentient soul who was having problems of her own!) and I had stashed more than enough—when combined with a bottle of my father's Scotch—to drop-kick me out of this foul, dark and relentlessly stupid football game called life whenever I could find the courage and the will to do so.

And still today I am not totally sure what the problem with not being able to that escape-this-gulag-deed was, but even when deep in the jaws of one of my many La Brea Tar Pits (or Churchillean Black Dogs), when even the sun itself on a pristine day looked like it was shining through a blanket of high, grey clouds, I could find the will to put on Jimi's Are You Experienced album with his "Manic Depression" lyrics, (Google them if you are curious as to what they are), and though I could find the will to hold those many pills in one hand and the bottle of booze in the other, getting those pills into my mouth and washing them down with the booze, (thus ensuring I'd go on down to the fiery hell prattled about by no end of priests and both my parents, which I felt would be brighter and cooler than the one I was in) was a whole other matter and I just couldn't get the damn deed done.

(Fortunately I didn't encounter that great song, "Suicide is Painless," from the movie M*A*S*H until after John had "stopped my world," and in doing so, greatly lessened my need to pill-launch myself out of it. In fact, I saw that movie three times—with three different boys—when it came out, and all the way through the first viewing of it was quite willing to left-brained believe it was about the Korean war until Groucho, the first of the three to take me to it, afterwards commented on it being an absolutely brilliant satire about the Vietnam war—which made him even more glad he'd escaped that murderous debacle.)

Though I guess now I kind of know what the problem was—I'd sensed a presence in the room with me at those darkest of times, a presence that at the time I begrudgingly acknowledged must be the guardian angel some silly, wimple-brained old nun in Grade 1 had assured us that each one of us had, but which I now suspect must have been the hypothetical spirit that had woke me up in the church that day of John's funeral, who, with her hypothetically great power, and in the interest of keeping her future memory-keeper alive, was hypothetically short-circuiting my will.

And maybe even holding onto my wrist to keep my hand from making it to my mouth while whispering in my ear not to do it because I had a good reason to live! Albeit a reason that existed so far in an unimaginable future that had a vision of it been projected into my head, it would have been as totally intolerable as it was incomprehensible—I mean, just imagine for a moment that 90 pound, slim and beautiful hippie-chick me, seeing, as her future self, this filthy, stinking, unkempt, hippo-ugly and 300-plus pound now-me sitting in a filthy room in a garbage dump of isolated farm house, her blubber-ass squeezed into this poor groaning office-chair, pounding away at this keyboard while attempting to write this insanely unreadable puddle of dog-puke of a "Preface." Fuck!—I'd have popped those pills into my mouth and whisky-washed them into my gut faster than a Great Dane could gobble up a hamburger that had been dropped beside a barbeque.

### Chapter Nineteen

And with the subject of suicide covered, I now again find my mind swirling around the drain of the subject of that ancient "bogeyman," of my teen life, Castaneda, and how the two were related in my life under that strange, and just mentioned, concept of "stopping the world," which John often talked about as an important psychological and spiritual phenomenon—as elucidated in Journey to Ixtlan about a troubled and acting-out child of a friend that Castaneda was concerned enough about to bring the subject up to Don Juan. And in reply Don Juan told Castaneda to advise his friend to go down to skid row and pay the nastiest looking derelict to accost the boy when he was walking down the street with him and thrash the hell out of him, the terror and pain of which would stop the boy's world, and when it resumed its flow, the boy would be in a better place.

This to me seemed like some story Castaneda made up while stoned out of his gourd on datura or some such diabolical shit, and which made no sense to me either as a concept or a phenomenon until long after John was dead, regardless one of the most important things John did for me early on in our relationship was very dramatically stop my world for me, which not only turned my life around, but definitely took it to a better place that probably saved my life. I mean, if it was possible to take the (possible) presence in my life of the hypothetical spirit of Catherine, John's very real wife (according to his memoirs, anyway) as a "guardian angel," out of the equation, sooner or later I was going to realize that if I drank half a bottle of my father's Scotch—mixed with cola!—first, it would make it infinitely easier for me to get that handful of sleeping pills out of my hand, into my mouth, and down into my gut where it could do its escape-the-gulag thing. (Remember, I was an avowed druggie back then, not a drinker, and the idea of drinking half a bottle of Scotch struck me as being as crazy as drinking drain cleaner.)

HA!—only just this stupid fuckin' minute do I get the a-ha epiphany-thing that the whole purpose of those damn sessions of head-lightning, were to stop my fuckin' world, to stop the out-of-control depression-carousel I was on so I could be kicked/dragged off it. Though I guess that is a bit of a mixing of metaphors because I usually describe me depression as a tar pit. Or as Churchill's Black Dog (A Rottweiler on steroids with long fangs and a powerful jaw that just won't let go!) So to keep things copacetic, that head/brain-lightning yanked me out of the tar pit, or pried open the jaws of that Black Dog for me. (As I guess it was designed to do for all the uber-depressed and out-of-control mentally ill, and though it is probably more controllable and easier to administer than an unexpected thrashing by a drunken derelict—or the whack in the head with a baseball bat that I think is what Pirsig said it was supposed to "harmlessly" emulate!—the damage, as mentioned, has been considerably more lasting!)

And since I have given you an itch-in-the-middle-of-your-back with a mention of that "stopping-my-world" event that saved my then beyond-pathetic, sex-addicted, drug-addled, self-destructive life, I guess I better scratch it for you with the story of exactly how and when John stopped my world for me. And believe me, it is such an incredibly embarrassing (for me, now) story that fortunately has been known to only two people—John and I—and I have been so reluctant to tell it that I've probably written a hundred pages of deflective, side-track nonsense solely to avoid telling it.

But since I have been filling this anecdotal spittoon up with a plethora of honest and revealing gobs of autobiographical chaw, and since it happened so long ago that I cannot now, as this obese, menopausal, sexless sexagenarian, even remotely relate to the crazy,(well, I can relate to that part) out-of-control, over-sexed,, nubile, and young girl it happened to, there is no reason—save for the brevity of this "Preface," which is a now utterly laughable notion—I might as well tell it. In all its once shitty—literally!— and embarrassing details.

Less than a week after I'd met John as his "home-coming" Clanboree, I decided I was going to pay him a visit on his farm with the ludicrous and lubricious intention of seducing him. (Fuck—I'd once almost fucked a donkey in a porno movie for a small fistful of dollars, so fucking an uncle, especially one I had never known as an uncle, was no big deal to me in those dark, self-destructive, second chakra-drowning days when my ever-inflamed cunt had devoured my whole stupid, fucking life!)

In order to get to John's farm, I called up my favorite "free" taxi—kind of a very distant-future, pre-Web precursor to Uber—Groucho, and after first sharing a joint with him then paying him with a nice long blow-job so he would drive me over there with the promise of an hour of van-rockin' humping if he took off for an hour then came back and got me. (When I told him what I planned to do, he just laughed and did an eerily accurate, "homeboy" imitation that I thought funny then but now find—even in my off-meds lunacy—distasteful to be repeating here, as he lowered his voice and said, "Dat's shoor does seem ta be a real wi-ald, Wi-ald Theng-theng ta be a'doin', Wi-ald Theng!")

Interestingly, though probably synchronistically (as John certainly thought), Groucho had dropped me of there just as John, a slim, half-smoked 'rollie' hanging from the right-hand corner of his grim-lipped mouth, was finishing the mucking out the horse stalls (he had two horses then) and was shoveling an old wooden wheelbarrow full of the reeking contents of it onto the reeking-in-the-hot-sun manure pile. Much as his dog was barking his head off at the surprising sight of me, John seemed neither surprised nor alarmed at my appearance there. In truth, he almost seemed to be expecting me.

His first response—after giving the dog, a border collie, a short, gruff command that instantly shut it up—to my walking up to the paddock fence as Groucho drove away in his psychedelic van, was to first take a drag on his cigarette then pull the butt from where it was hanging on his lower lip and after flicking it into the manure pile, slowly blow two streams of smoke out of his nose as he stared at the van with a look of puzzled amazement on what I could see of his smoke-shrouded face under the shade of the brim of his Stetson, which was a decidedly older and shabbier one than what he'd worn to the Clanboree. It was a look that instantly and dramatically soured when he turned his brim-shaded gaze on me and took in just how I was dressed, which was more a state of un-dress than dress, given I was wearing a very mini, mini-skirt that I'd made out of an old pair of jeans and a tie-dyed silk halter top that I'd made from an old white shirt of my father's, while in my hair I'd laced a tiara of wild daisies that I knew contrasted nicely with its jet black color, while around my neck I sported the half-dozen de rigueur strings of shop-lifted and home-made necklaces.

And of course, how can I forget a light dabbling of patchouli on my neck, under my breasts and in my pubic hair, though now that I think of it, that musky "perfume" that would likely have smelled worse to John than the shit he'd just been shoveling. And it goes without saying that I was not wearing anything under that mini skirt. Fuck!—my face is getting so inflamed I feel like I should back away from the computer monitor so I don't melt it! And I feel like I am going to vomit as, in the writing of this, as I look back and see just what I was in those wild and ridiculous days, what I had intended to do that day, and how ridiculously absurd I must have looked to the 70-year-old John who'd already seen too much of the absurd and ridiculous in those 70 years.

Since his hands were anything but clean, he said, as he waved his right hand towards his small house, "Go on in the house while I clean up," which I did, the dog, having, in that short command by John, been informed that I was not a threat, loping on ahead of me. And stunned I was, on entering that old farm kitchen, to see how neat and clean it was—I was used to visiting young bachelor boys who couldn't keep an empty closet tidy or an unused glass clean—though even as I stood in the middle of that room fighting to keep the dog's cold wet nose out of my crotch, which was not very well armored and still somewhat heated and musked-up from giving Groucho his blow job, John came into that kitchen, first filling the doorway with his massive presence, then the kitchen itself, not only with his bulk and presence, but his very manly body odor. After drying his hands on a towel hanging by the door and giving another short, gruff command to the dog, which sent him scurrying to an old blanket on the floor by the stove, where he laid down with a loud sigh, John took off his Stetson and after hanging it on a peg beside the door, turned and softly said to me (in a tone of voice that betrayed he already knew exactly why I was there, "Mmmmm . . . Rachel, isn't it? To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?"

Since my head was nicely fuzzy and floating free from that hash-oiled joint Groucho had rolled for us, and since my already warm crotch was starting to steam in the presence and odor of that most-definitely manly man who didn't seem anywhere near his age, I wasted no time in putting my plan and my well-honed seductive powers to work. My sweet, sexy, it-gets-'em-every-time little-girl voice while alternately staring at his crotch and face as I glided towards him, said, "I dunno...John...after meetin' ya the other day, I got ta thinkin'...ya know...that a man like you might be feelin'...ya know...a little...lonely...and...ya know, frustrated, livin' alone like ya do way out here . . . ya know . . . all by yourself, and that ya might need . . . ya know—a little . . . female company." (Or some such shit like that, though probably with more hippie argot thrown that I now, most blessedly, cannot remember to repeat here.)

Well, barely had the honey of those words flowed out of the stupid and lubricous pot of mouth and across the room to his weary old ears, than I saw his face harden and his eyes turn into dark, black points of polished obsidian (I remember the thought flashing through my mind that I had his eyes) and a tempest of rage blasted out of him that seemed to envelope me like red-black hurricane

And I can still very eerily remember that during those few seconds, on the heels of the thought that my eyes were like his, I had the flash of a vision that I was facing an enraged bear, something to bear in mind (no pun intended) when you read The Fire and the events that led up to him fleeing the farm. And the next thing I knew he took the two steps to close the distance between us as his huge right hand snake-whipped from his side and violently grabbed a hank of my hair at the back of my head, which he used to lift me straight up off the floor like I weighed no more than a big doll, and with my scalp screaming in pain, I kicked and flailed and screamed at him, "Put me down you big dumb fuckin' lunk!"

But he ignored me and the frantically barking dog as he stepped over to the kitchen table, kicked out one of the old chrome and vinyl chairs, and handling me like I was a toddler having a tantrum, he sat on the chair, draped me face-first across his knees, and proceeded to use his big, rough hand to give me the spanking of my life. Of course, since I'd worn that damn mini skirt with no underwear, most of the hard slaps fell on my bare, butt-cheeks, his giant hand covering both at once. And it's a good thing that farm was as isolated as it was, for with each loud slap I let out either curses or wails that the dog frantically barked along with. (Alas, big as John's hands were, they wouldn't even cover one of my butt-cheeks now, those two great blobs of blubber having a tight squeeze getting between the armrests of this ample—and ever-groaning—office chair that I feel like I am going to crush like a pop can every time I sit down in it!)

Even all these years later, I can remember, like it was ten minutes ago, the surprise, rage and utter humiliation I felt during that handful (no pun intended) of painfully long minutes of that spanking, my head bizarrely filling with the memory of my last spanking, that being from my mother when I was acting out after my first encounter with my father's lust and his filthy big prick, and I had wrecked half of her sparse cosmetics collection applying them to our poor, hapless dog, an aging bulldog named Satchmo—named by, and favorite of, my father—that was no match, and in no mood for, my displacement mischief.

I don't know what criteria he used to determine that I'd had enough of that big hand of his, though perhaps it was when he got tired of listening to me scream at him every foul word and phrase I knew dozens of times over, with the most used phrase being, "YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE!", but finally he stopped, stood up, and tucking me under his arm, and with the dog yapping like crazy as he raced around us, he stomped out of the house, (he must have grabbed his hat on the way out because the next time I was able to look at him, he had it on) and while I cursed and shrieked and ineffectually kicked my feet and flailed at his thigh with my puny fists, he stomped across the farmyard and over to the manure pile, and stopping at the fence—pretty much where I'd been standing when I first got there but minutes before—he dropped me onto my face on the filthy ground. And before I could even begin to get to my feet, he grabbed me under my armpits, lifted me up like I was just an oversized Raggedy Ann doll, and heaved me over the fence so that, after arcing through the air like a shovel load of shit, I landed face-first into that hot, reeking, fly-swarming pile of manure.

Well, needless to say, nothing shuts up a screaming, cursing brat like a mouthful of fresh horseshit made acridly soggy by a few buckets of weirdly foul-smelling piss, and as fast as I sat up and was frantically trying to both spit and dig that piss-sodden shit out of my mouth so I could recommence screaming and cursing at him, John stood on the other side of the fence and while again giving me the sense of being a giant, enraged bear, he slowly and steadily said to me in a harsh, low, measured, Clint Eastwood, make-my-day tone of voice, "I had the feeling from the moment I saw you here today that it was most appropriate that I was cleaning the horse stalls! If you are going to act like shit, you belong in shit! I know exactly what your father has done to you to make you act like shit, and I would like to first geld him by crushing his testicles between two big rocks then stock-whip his rotten, worthless life out of him, but there are laws against that, and much as you have a good reason for acting the way you do, it does not mean you can act that way around here! Save it for those long-haired, silly-dressed young fools you hang around with. You can visit here any time you want but come here properly dressed and acting like a niece visiting an uncle, not like some filly in her first heat looking for a stallion." Then finally unleashing that bear that he'd been keeping under such tight control, he deafeningly roared, "I WILL HAVE NONE OF IT!"

And with that, he turned away from me and stomped over to his truck and as the dog let out a yelp, leapt through the open window, and settled himself beside the passenger-side door, he turned back to me and glaring at me from under the shading brim of that filthy Stetson, said, again in that Clint Eastwood, make-my-day tone, though now with a bigger dash of malice added to it, "Don't-be-here-when-I-get-back."

Then after getting into the truck, he pulled his "makin's" out of his shirt pocket, deftly rolled himself a cigarette, stuck it in the right-hand corner of his mouth, and after lighting it with a match that he ignited with his thumbnail, whipped the flame of the match out, and after dropping it into the gravel beside the truck, started the truck and drove out of the yard without glance at me. Even the dog completely ignored me. It was like I'd suddenly become invisible! And utterly irrelevant.

My immediate impulse was to vent my shock and indignation by shouting back at him—as he sat there rolling that cigarette—as loud a "FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE!" as my shit-and-piss fouled mouth could hurl at him, but something instantly rose up from deep within me and froze my mouth even as it filled my mind with the potent sense that I was the one who had been in the wrong from the get-go, not him.

Now, if some event like that were to happen today—being stranded at an isolated farm, not t the "tail-end" (LOL) the process of trying to seduce and uncle!—I'd just dig out my cell phone—if it hadn't been lost in the manure pile—and call Groucho on his cell phone and tearfully tell him to come pick me up. But those nefariously handy—and Borg-assimilating—devices were still decades away and so I had no choice but wash myself off as best I could using the horse-trough pump, (where I sucked in, swirled around, and spit out at least twenty mouthfuls of that cold water but even its strong, metallic taste could not get rid of the taste of that pissy horseshit!) then begin the long and unpleasant walk along John's road, steeped as I was in the barf-inducing aroma of horseshit and weird-smelling, ammoniated piss. (I didn't know at the time it was the mare's piss that stank so bad as I only learned that later from John who said it was because she was pregnant and the stench of the piss of pregnant mares is something only a horse—or a dog—could tolerate.)

Anyways, regardless of why that piss smelled so bad, I sure knew I couldn't go home and walk into the house smelling like that as nothing my pathetic imagination could come up with could even remotely explain it, nor could I expect Groucho, when he came back along that road, to let me into his precious Shagginwaggen in that foul condition, so I detoured to the river for a skinny-dip during which I rinsed out my clothes—what fuckin' ridiculously little of them there was!—well enough go back out to the road, sit on a big rock in the sun, and dry off while waiting for Groucho's return. (And wishing I had a joint to smoke, as much to get high so I could distance myself from the shame of what had happened, as to mask that taste of shit and piss in my mouth.)

And even then, as I sat on that rock waiting for Groucho and thinking over what had happened, I felt like a very different person than the one I had been but an hour earlier while riding with Groucho to my "appointment" with John. Over and over again I replayed the mental tape of what had happened in those few, tumultuous minutes when John had first lifted me up by my hair, then was so humiliatingly spanking the hell out of me, then so effortlessly carrying me across the yard and throwing me in that shit-pile, and I could make very little sense of it because it felt like the girl who was sitting on that rock was a very different girl from the one who'd gone to that farm with her head—and her cunt!—filled with the idea of seducing her uncle.

What I could remember—though only vaguely—was that at the shock of being the object of John's incredible rage, then of his grabbing me by the hair and lifting me up like I was nothing but a doll, I seemed to leave my body such that I was up at the kitchen ceiling, looking down at the scene. And that I was able to watch everything that subsequently transpired from that hovering, out-of-body vantage point, only abruptly returning to my body when I landed face-first in that pile of shit. Except the "me" that re-entered my body instantly felt like a different me than the one that had "leapt" out of it in that kitchen. I quite literally felt like a new girl!

And to that new girl, what that other, old/former/erstwhile girl had tried to do seemed absurd to the point of insanity. It was like that old/former/erstwhile girl had been living and acting-out in a bubble of unreality and, when she was in that bubble, it seemed real and natural, but when that bubble had somehow burst while I was outside my body—and due to the sudden and expected violence and humiliation of that spanking and heave-ho into that shit-pile—nothing of the everything that had for so long been so logically and necessarily happening in that bubble seemed real or made any sense anymore. No different, I guess, than waking up from a bad dream that seemed so real and bad in the dreaming of it that so quickly turned to absolutely nothing on waking.

And now that I thinking along these lines and explaining the process with these words, my head-lightning treatments in the Shrink-Klink had an identical effect—minus the OBE!—of dragging me either out of one of my debilitating La Brea's, or worse, a psychotic state, which on getting out of them, I not only didn't miss them, but could never figure out how I got into them in the first place. Or got so damned thoroughly engrossed by, and trapped in, them.

Though John, once, on the subject of depression, said, "Depression is a bad place, don't go there!" Though on demanding an explanation for that—this was before our discussion on the nagual, the Fifth Dimension, the Ocean of Spirit, with its many currents—he just shook his head and said, "Sorry I said that—it's a view from a certain level of consciousness that can't be explained, and doesn't make any sense, to a person not at that level . . . and with enough personal willpower to stop themselves from 'going there.' Someday, when you get to that level, we'll talk about it and you'll understand."

Well, I'm damn near at the end of my "life"-sentence in this Gulag Earth (as he often called it) and I still don't totally understand what he meant, (I'm still having a problem accepting as even remotely real all that nagual, that Fifth Dimension, that Ocean of Spirit shit!) though I guess, in an intuitive sense I do understand it, for when I call depression an entrapment in a La Brea Tar Pit, I am definitely viewing it as a very bad and sticky place to be! Though of course, if I was truly able to accept all that shit about the nagual, about that Fifth Dimension, the Ocean of Spirit with all its many reality-altering currents, I could rationally understand it—or so I rationally believe!—but total acceptance of such a monstrous, powerful, and irrational realm is just too big a leap for my frail rationality, for my tenuous ego-consciousness, which seems to have the same level of agility of this blubber factory encasing it.

And now that it pops into my over-revving motor of a head, apropos of this discussion of depression being a place—though more accurately, powerful dark and life-negating current in that Ocean of Spirit—I should pass on to you, Dear Reader, John's constant assertions about the importance of willpower to control the effects of those currents—particularly the dark and destructive ones—on our lives. And his belief that if we didn't "exercise" our willpower, it will inevitably get so weak and atrophied that we'd lose all ability to master our lives and thus be doomed to live them as victims of those many currents of the nagual, of the Fifth Dimension, of the Ocean of Spirit, and not masters of them.

According to him without adequate willpower, we become like small boats in a gale with broken motors. As I have mentioned—likely ad nauseam!—I never met anyone with a more potent willpower than John, so he seems to have practiced what he preached on the subject, which was that in order for our willpower to be strong we had to daily exercise it, and the only way we could exercise it was by willfully doing things we didn't want to do and didn't have to do.

Needless to say, this occult subject sparked for us a most fiery of discussions as he tried to get into my thick skull exactly what he meant by his very exact definition of what sort of actions would truly exercise our wills. Shit!—I guess first I must say that as far as John was concerned, our capacity for manifesting what we know of as will exists solely in our spirit-being and not in our brain, our bodies, or our egos. My reaction to that was to outright gainsay him and claim that it had to be in our brain and our thinking, and he didn't need to postulate the existence of a spirit-being to explain willpower, which to me was just what it felt like to have our brain and our thoughts directing our activities. (Remember, I still don't completely buy that spirit-being shit!) That got a real laugh out of him as he said,

"Okay, so if our will is just our sense of our brain—and our thoughts—affecting our actions, how is it that on a cold winter morning, when we have to get up and out of our warm bed, we can lay in that bed for an hour thinking about getting up—and all the reasons why we have to!—yet at the end of that hour, still be abed?"

Of course, all I could say to that was, "Well, that just means you're not doing the right kind of thinking about getting up and out of it!"

"So according to your 'scientific' paradigm, the brain is capable of doing different kinds of thinking? . . . Kind of like a car engine that when idling doesn't do much to move a car regardless that its automatic transmission in drive, and then, when it revs up enough, engages the transmission and sets things in motion."

"Yeah," I replied as I thought about his metaphor, and since I knew as much about how an automatic transmission worked as I did about how the wings of a 747 lifted that monster off the ground and kept it up in the air, I assumed he knew what he was talking about and replied, "Something like that."

"Okay," he said. "But when you finally do get around to getting out of your bed, what sets your body in motion? Is it because you've "revved up" your thinking past the critical-threshold rpm and engaged some kind of automatic transmission that makes your body move?"

And that got a laugh out of me as I said, "Well, in my case, it's always the fear that if I don't get up I'll lose my job and my life will then really turn to shit—so I . . . get up!"

"Exactly!" he said, with a big, shit-eating grin. "So it's not any particular thought—or high rpm thinking that gets you out of bed, but a feeling. Nothing gets one out of bed—or motivates us for anything!—like fear. Or greed. Or desire. But if it is any of those very emotional—primitively emotional!—motivations, it is not brain-generated thoughts you are using to get your body moving. but very primitive emotions. Primitive emotions generated by what some savvy scientific priest has called our reptilian brain—motivating you, which are something quite different."

"Well, that's still our brain!" I said, in a huff, trying my best to remember that once-learned and long-forgotten, triune-brain shit. "And as far as I am concerned, what you call will . . . and think of as willpower . . . is just the way we sense . . . the effects . . . of our brain-generated thoughts on our body! Like . . . like . . . when you're in your car and you start the engine and put it in drive and the engine makes the car move. Straight simple cause and effect—and nothing magical . . . or occult at all!" I adamantly asserted.

"Okay—I'm glad you like my motor-transmission metaphor, but it prove my point, not yours." And when I just looked at him, frowned, rolled my eyes, and stuck my tongue out at him in frustration, he went on, "So okay—you see your car's motor as equivalent to your brain, but is that car motor some kind of perpetual motion machine? Is it always running? Does it run on its own without any exterior inputs."

Now I was getting a little pissed and truculently said, "No, of course not, Uncle John. Don't patronize me like that! I'm not that . . . stupid—of course it runs on . . . gasoline!"

"Right!" he smiling said, as he patted my hand to calm me down. "But not just gasoline, but on electricity too! Without electricity—and enough of it, too!—running through big thick wires to the starter motor so it can spin and get that engine running . . . then lesser amounts electricity to the spark plugs to induce them to continually spark and continually ignite that gasoline each time it enters the combustion chambers, that engine sure would not run. And of course, there's that all-important carburetor that sends—and vaporizes!—just the right amount of gasoline into the combustion chambers of that engine to allow it to run properly, but it doesn't stop there, does it?"

And at that point, being one of those classical, mechanically disinclined klutzes, I wasn't following him too well—which he was more than aware of—he went on, "That all-essential carburetor wouldn't be of much use, would it, if there was no human being in the driver's seat pushing down on the accelerator pedal and controlling it. . . . Oh, to be sure, without that human driver, the engine would idle along quite fine until it ran out of gas, but an idling car won't get you to work in the morning, will it?"

My response to that was to get really frustrated and say, "Fuck, Uncle John—you lost me back when you first started talking about the damn carburetor, which I have no clue about what the hell it is."

To that he just laughed and said, "I just told you—the carburetor is the simple little mechanical device that meters out—and vaporizes!—just the right amount of gasoline to the combustion chambers make the engine run at just the speed you want. But the point I am trying to make is that the car engine is like a brain, and it sure is important to making a car go, but by itself it isn't the whole story, is it? . . .There are some definite outside agencies at work each morning when you drive your car to work!

"The first outside agency is the electricity produced by the battery that spins the starter motor and fires the spark plugs, then the gasoline that the carburetor that meters out that gasoline to the motor's combustion chambers that the electricity arcing through those spark plugs ignites, which then powers the movement of the pistons up and down in that engine. But let's not forget the all-important human being who turns the key to send the signal to the solenoid/switch that allows the battery to send a big jolt of electricity to the starter motor which allows it to spin the engine to get it started—but it will only start if the carburetor is metering gasoline vapors to the combustion chambers and the battery is sending electricity to the spark plugs. And of course, once all those factors simultaneous—and very ingeniously, I might add—come into play, the motor will commence running—idling!—on its own, and will only run fast enough to allow the automatic transmission to set the car in motion if that human being pushes their foot down on the gas pedal and instructs the carburetor send enough gasoline vapors to the combustion chamber to get that motor running fast and powerful enough to move the car."

Now I was getting frustrated—and feeling really stupid!—and the usually quiescent—when around John—scorpion of my paranoia was rearing its tail enough for me to spit out, "So what's your goddamned point!"

Again another chuckle as he put another shit-eating grin on his face and said, "My point is that there is a lot more to our functioning as human beings than just what our brain is, and what it can do, and that there are some outside—and very spiritual—agencies involved in making the "car" of our being move about and do the things we want it to do. Our spirit-being is like the human being that sits behind the wheel and after turning the key to start the engine, pushes on the gas pedal that controls the carburetor that meters out the gasoline vapors that make the engine go at certain speeds, while our will is the gasoline that powers that engine. Though of course, in our case the gasoline and the operator aren't separate—like they are for the car.

"And one of the most important things about this 'outside agency,' which of course is our spirit-being, which of course as well—when it is incarnate in our body—is us, as an independent, functioning entity, is that it can channel that force we call will, which is not some side-effect . . . some epiphenomenon . . . as the reductionist Priests of our Religion of Materialist Science like to reduce it to . . . of our brain's synaptic activities, but a very important and powerful current in that Ocean of Spirit that can be accessed by our spirit-being—and our energy body—through the direct agency of intention.

"Castaneda writes a lot about that force called intent, some of which I can't relate to, but some of which I can, especially when I am trying to get out of bed on a cold winter night to go to the toilet and my lazy old body, after having given me the need to do that chilly duty, sure as hell doesn't want climb out of that nice warm bed to do it, so I have to not even think a single thought about getting up—or not wanting to!—but just intend myself to do so. Just do it! You know—like that slogan that seems to be everywhere lately!"

That got a chuckle out of me and a sense of relief and satisfaction that I could add something—however trivial!—to our conversation. "Yeah—that's Nike! The mega-corporation that sells over-priced running shoes and sports clothes made by virtual slaves in the Third World. It's all for affluent sports nuts who think it's fun to run marathons and ride bicycles for hundreds of miles. Or do the Iron Man . . . or Woman, thing—not exactly my type!"

"Yes, but the principle is the same: if you want to run twenty six miles or get out of bed when you don't want to on a cold winter morning, you still must mindfully and effortfully make an act of will that is activated by the intention to do it. And I am sure that what is implicit in that slogan is the four missing words that would normally precede it, "Don't think about it—" Which means, 'Get out of your brain, get out of your thoughts about doing whatever must be done, and just use your intention to activate your will and—just do it!' Just intend it into action and completion—no thinking involved!"

He then suggested that I try a little experiment where I very consciously lift my hand off the table, first by thinking about lifting it, and then by just doing it, though while doing it, get a feeling for the process I was using to do it. Of course, when I just looked at my hand and thought about lifting it, nothing happened, and equally of course, to make it move, all I did was—move it. In a fashion I had lifelong been moving the parts of my body that need moving when they need moving. Which wasn't at all difficult, so after lifting it up and dropping it down five or six times, I stopped and said, "Okay, when I'm moving it I obviously only briefly think about moving it, then when I am moving it, I don't have to be thinking about moving it at all. I'm doing . . . something else . . . but really, all I'm doing is . . . moving it. Nothing special is happening."

That got a laugh out of him as he said, "That's because it is too easy and you have to use so little intention and will to move it that you can't get a sense of what you are doing when you are doing it." After saying that he put his hand on top of mine and pressing gently down on it, said, "Okay, lift it now. A dozen times."

And after a loud sigh and a roll of my eyes that got a good laugh out of him, I started lifting my hand off the table. One . . . two . . . three . . . and naturally, it was a lot harder with his hand resisting my doing so . . . four . . . five . . . at which point he pushed harder on it . . . . . six . . . . . .seven . . . . . . eight . . . . . . nine . . . . . . ten . . . . . . and harder . . . . . . . . eleven . . . and at that point he was pressing down hard enough that I couldn't lift my hand at all, and just looked at him and shrugged, which prompted him to say, "You agreed to twelve! Gimme twelve, Soldier!"

That got both a laugh and an eye-rolling groan out of me as I made a concentrated effort to raise my hand. Grunt . . . grunt . . . groan . . . groan—and I still couldn't move it.

"Come on, Soldier!—get that hand off the table! Focus! Will it! Even half an inch will do! . . So just—do it!"

And after getting mad and saying, "Enough with all that Soldier shit, already!" I focused and with a grunting effort that almost turned into a scream, I got my hand clear of that table—but just!—and John instantly removed his hand in order to clap and say, "Bravo, Soldier—you did it! Now can you think about, and tell me, what you did."

And after catching my breath and thinking about it a bit, I finally, and sheepishly said, "You're right—I had to . . . to really . . . really use . . . something inside me . . . my . . . will . . .I guess . . . to make the effort to get my hand to move . . . It wasn't easy at first, but since I knew you'd keep . . . soldiering . . .me until I did, I made the effort . . . and did it! . . .But what's with all that soldier shit all of a sudden?"

That got a laugh out of him as he said, "Usually I try never to think about being a soldier, but it was while being a soldier that I really learned about using my will power. Basic training for a soldier is all about just that. Those non-com officers—while yelling their heads off calling us Soldier—and lots of other way nastier names—would drive us to a point of exhaustion in our training where we'd think, 'Well, this it it—I've got nothing left! I'm finished! Caput! Crap-ut!. I have to stop now!'. But as far as those bastard trainers were concerned, we weren't finished, we were just getting started! And then they'd really start driving us. Some of us, of course, broke under the strain, which was what they wanted, so they could separate . . . what they always mockingly called, 'the wee girls from the big men' . . . but it was more like the chaff from the wheat. Some men just have weak wills . . . weak characters . . . weak . . . spirit-beings . . . or weak energy bodies, and would just be liabilities in combat and have to be winnowed out.

"But most of us—fools that we were!—held it together and kept going . . . and going . . . and going! Just like that silly pink rabbit with the drum in the battery commercials on TV commercials. Kept going well past the point where we were running on our own physical, human energy and coming up against a huge wall of pure can't-go-no-further, then suddenly something would snap inside of us and we abruptly found ourselves in some other . . . other realm . . . some other . . . dimension . . . of energy . . .that was really powerful and really strange. And with that strange . . . energy we could do absolutely amazing—even otherwise inhuman things. Things we couldn't have even imagined ourselves doing before we had broken into, and discovered that realm."

And here I could but interrupt him and chime in that I'd read about real high-level athletes—Olympians and tri-athletes and those masochists to do that Tour de France bicycle race—experiencing the same thing and being totally amazed by what they could achieve once they'd broken into that strange realm. The zone, as some called it.

"Exactly! That realm is there for everyone but few really get pushed, or push themselves, enough to access it. And I doubt those athletes understand it any more than did we, for none of us, back then, really understood what was happening, but now I have the sense of understanding it . . . a bit! Of understanding we'd broken out of our normal, human, ego-limitations and into the realm of the spirit-being where we could channel another, more exotic form of energy. And that some other energy was our pure will power. And the more of it you were able to muster . . . or more like, channel, the better the soldier you were and the easier it was to do the insanely dangerous and difficult things that were demanded of us. And of course, to stay alive under conditions that would kill a person trying to function in their normal frame of mind.

"I guess, from a Don Juan point of view, our assemblage points were moved very drastically and to an incredible powerful and . . . perhaps even magical, place! . . . And I think that's why a lot of ex-soldiers, after they leave the army, look back on their army days—especially the combat ones—with both wonder and nostalgia because it felt so . . . magical . . . . . and so powerful . . . to be so willful.

"Interestingly, now that I think about it, Castaneda writes about this on numerous occasions when Don Juan has him 'power run' across the desert at night, and even more dramatically, one night, to deftly climb a cliff in pitch darkness to get away from some big cat, and when Castaneda later went back to that cliff in daylight and saw how high and steep it was, he could not figure out how he and Don Juan made it to the top.

"And of course, it always feels good to be so willful—so full of will!—not just because of the power and achievements involved, but because in being so intentionally and extremely willful, one is then living directly out of their huge spirit-being and not out of their pathetic little ego. Which of course, is what Don Juan was constantly trying to teach Castaneda to do! . . . And naturally, since we soldiers didn't understand the magical nature of will and the occult process of channeling it . . and of connecting with our spirit-being when we did so—all we were trying to do was first survive our sadistic non-coms' program of very sadistically bully-pushing us to the point where we all wished we were dead—or wished we could kill them!—but as soon as the pressure to access and use it was off, we'd lose that connection to that magical, 'superman' realm of pure will and fall back into being plain old ordinary ego-motivated human beings. Not that that 'falling out of it' mattered, because once we'd achieved that 'magical' and totally willful state once, it was easy go get back into it—especially once the terrors and demands of combat gave us the incentive to get back into it!"

It goes without saying—but I will say it anyway!—that lecture from "Professor John" (his ashes must be quivering in the dirt on my calling him that!) was making a little—but not a hell of a lot—of sense to me, so I deflected him from the topic a bit by saying, "So why did you end up understanding it so damn well?"

And that got a frown out of him as he said, "That brings us back to that world of spirits you don't want to believe in and hate talking about—it was important that I learn about it and so they made sure I did. I actually re-learned it, and put it too good use, when I was crawling out of that deep dark crevasse of my alcoholic dissolution. In fact, I am certain that without their willingness to behave like sadistic non-coms in their efforts to get me to learn this stuff, I sure as heck wouldn't have! Just as I wouldn't have learned about the existence of will if I first hadn't stumbled into the army and been forced to do so by those sadistic—but combat-wise—non-coms.

"And for the longest time I sure wondered why those spirits were pushing me so hard to learn it—I mean, after I got out of the army, I sure didn't need all that much willpower . . . except when I was starting my infernal ranch . . . and for sure when I was recovering from my alcoholism!—but then they revealed to me all that stuff about the Fifth Dimension, about that Ocean of Spirit and all its powerful currents, and I came then to realize that it is only with our will that we survive our encounters with the dark, lower currents of that Ocean that can be so powerful . . . and sticky.

"Unfortunately, not many people today go through military basic-training . . . and even less strive to be high level athletes . . . and because our world is so mechanized and comfortable and most peoples' lives—in our affluent cultures!—are basically easy, we don't need to develop much willpower. Or more accurately, much access to the channeling of it, in order to get by, or even to thrive, and that is the reason so many in our affluent societies today are so prone to falling into depressions. And addictions! The corporate world constantly bombards us with clever and manipulative advertisements inducing us to want to buy tons of crap we don't need, or with just as many advertisements manipulating us into believing that if we live a certain type of busy, well-dressed, materialistic, status-enhancing, power-wielding lifestyle, we will not only acquire all those things and status and power we have been convinced we need, but we will be extremely healthy and happy to boot!

"But just wanting all those advertising-created 'needs' doesn't activate or challenge our willpower—it just over-provokes our greed for those things and our egomaniacal need to satisfy that greed. But our plethora of material . . . and status . . . and power greeds . . . and our egomaniacal need to satisfy those greeds, are dark, low-level motivations—dark, low-level currents in the Ocean of Spirit—that are always provoked by outside, compete-with-your-friends-relatives-and-neighbors motivations, and none of them activate, or challenge, our willpower.

"Thus, though so many people in our culture have so much success and wealth and status that they achieve—mostly!—through institutional power, yet few actually have any real willpower. This is because, most of the time, we are only truly using our will when we know what our will is, what it feels like when we are using it, and of course—as you just learned in that arm-lifting exercise!—what it feels like when we really have to use it to do something unusually difficult. And for most people in our affluent, mechanized cultures, very little is physically very difficult any more unless you are a soldier or a miner or an outdoor trades worker. Or, I guess, an Olympic athlete."

After thinking about that for a bit, I finally, and quite sarcastically said, "Well, that's a really shitty situation. I mean, why the hell should we need so much willpower to survive in this world? Dealing with that . . . Fifth Dimension . . . as you call it! And more importantly, why is it so damn hard to actually use our willpower? I mean, if it is part of our fundamental . . . being, of our . . . spirit-being you are always yakking about, why can't we just use it—all of it—whenever we want, or need, to use it? . . . Why is it so damn difficult to use?"

John actually had to brow-furrowing think about that for a bit, after which he frowning said, "That's a damn good question that I have given a lot of thought to, believe me! And I still don't have a clear answer to it. But what I . . . see . . . is that we have something inside us I call . . . the Opposer! Actually, what helps me understand this just a little bit, is Don Juan's teachings to Castaneda about something he called 'the rolling force' or the 'tumbler,' and though I didn't understand it very well in terms of Don Juan's strange sorcery teaching, my intuition somehow grabbed onto it and related that 'rolling force,' that 'tumbler,' to a cosmic force that, from the instant of our birth . . . from the instant of our spirit-being incarnating into our physical body in this physical world, constantly attempts to thwart, to oppose our spirit-being, constantly tries to wear us down and crush us, a wearing down and a crushing we can only counter-oppose with an active use of our willpower."

Needless to say, the thought of some cosmic force constantly bombarding and opposing me for no other reason than to wear me down and destroy me, was just a bit too much, and I could but practical shout, "Fuck, John—why do you bombard me—no pun intended!—with outrageous shit like that for? What goddamn possible fucking use could there be for such a . . . force . . . like that, to be constantly bombarding us? To be constantly opposing . . . and thwarting, us? It sounds downright crazy—and demonic!"

That got a bit of a chuckle out of John as he said, "That's because you are looking at it from an egotistical . . . and paranoid frame of reference—one engendered by your fear. Your fear of the unknown . . . and of course, everything that has to do with that fraud of a 'bogeyman,' as you like to call Castaneda! And your misunderstanding of this . . . Opposer! . . .As far as I can get a grip—a very tenuous grip!—on an explanation of it, this Opposer exists for the benefit of our spirit-being . . . in order to help to . . . condense . . . and strengthen it. This is because our spirit-being, by its very nature, is very . . . diffuse . . . very . . . uncondensed . . . like steam . . .which is okay for it in its own dimension where the reality-rules and demands on it are very different . . . but which makes for a very difficult incarnation in this realm for it.

"If it diffuses and melds with everything in its own dimension, it doesn't appear to suffer any negative consequences, because the rules of that dimension allow it to easily return to its discrete and condensed state. Like water boiling out of a kettle that has been placed in a big, iron pot, where it condenses on the cool metal and drips back into the kettle. But when our spirit-being is this dimension, it diffuses and dissipates like steam boiling out of a kettle outside in the desert. Which is not a good situation for it if it has incarnated to do the job of energizing, motivating, and spiritually enhancing our human body, our human psyche, and our human life. So as I very limitedly see it, the only way it can remain discrete and strong . . . and . . . un-diffused . . . is to have a constant and very mindful awareness of the relentless onslaughts of that Opposer and to mindfully and intentionally resist those its onslaughts with its will!"

I had to interrupt here and say, "Fuck, John!—are you even speaking fucking English? There should be fuckin' subtitles underneath what you are saying—I don't understand a word of it!"

As usual, whenever I got upset and started "swearing like a miner" as John liked to put it, he'd get highly amused and with a slight shake of his head and big grin on his face, he went on, "Yeah, I don't blame you getting all 'miner' about this, Rachel, because it is such a weird concept I can barely make sense of it myself, except to see it in physical terms. If any man—or woman, of course—wants to maintain a certain level of strength and physical fitness, they have to work at it. You know, train in some way, with the lifting of weights being the best way to maintain—or increase—physical strength. But no person's muscles stay strong for long if they don't intentionally lift or push against something heavy once in a while . . . and lifting Styrofoam weights . . . or pillows . . . just doesn't . . . do it—does it?"

I had to shake my head and have a loud laugh at the thought of the mighty, pile-of-muscles-on-muscles-on-muscles, Arnold Schwarzenegger, going to Gold's Gym every day and getting his Hercules body lifting pillows, and I could but say, "Obviously!"

"So then," John went on."You can see that in order to get and stay physically strong one must constantly exercise—run, cycle, do yoga, lift heavy, muscle-opposing weights made out of steel or cast iron. Foam and feathers won't do the job! And I suspect it is no different for our spirit-being when it is incarnated in a human body—it needs to keep itself strong and cohesive through maintaining the efficiency of its will-function, this being the spiritual equivalent of a physical body doing strenuous exercises. So this Opposer is really the equivalent of a set of weights that forces the spirit-being to use its will-function in its resistance to its destructive effects, the constant use of which allows it to remain strong and cohesive.

"And I guess the reason this Opposer opposes the spirit-being so constantly is because unlike the body, which can stay strong for a period of time after a weight work-out, the spirit-being, because of its spiritual/mystical nature, very quickly tends to—even loves to—dissolve and diffuse when it is in this realm. That situation is okay for it in its home realm, but a total disaster when it is incarnate in a human body—and this Gulag Earth!

"And actually, this brings to mind some other thoughts I have had about us human beings possessing what scientists like to call our 'ape' body . . .basically, like the writer of that bizarrely popular, but essentially shallow and male-sided book, The Naked Ape, saying that we are nothing but very intelligent apes—minus all the hair of normal apes. To that lunatic Priest of the Religion of Materialist Science, the notion that we, this 'naked ape.' are also a spirit-being would have been as absurd as the notion that chimps believe in the existence of a Supreme Nobodaddy Ape and worship it—and leave offerings of food . . . and willingly slaughter—or torture!—any fellow apes that refuse to believe in that Supreme Nobodaddy Ape!

"But we obviously, even physically, are not just a 'naked ape,' because though our bodies do have some animal features—and even do resemble a 'naked ape—they have been dramatically altered, not only so, as he mentioned in that book, that we can have sex 'on demand' and not have to wait for periods of heat in the female to get things going, but because they don't maintain a natural level of strength the way animal bodies do. Animals don't need weights, or marathons, or yoga classes, to get, or stay, strong and fit. I never once in all my years as a rancher observed bulls, steers, cows, stallions . . . geldings, even . . . doing regular and ritualistic exercise regimes to stay strong and fit, and yet to the end of their natural lives, they all remained—unless they lived too long or were seriously ill!—damned strong and as fit at ever!

"Nor ever, in all my wanderings in the bush, come across a gym for bears, yet they are they likely one of the strongest animals out there! As no less is a moose—not a one of which I ever saw using one of those . . . treadmill contraptions! And neither geldings or steers—nor dogs or cats—get noticeably weak and useless when they don't train at being strong the way human beings do! Hell, cats can lay around like absolute slugs all day, every day, for weeks, and still, if they can get outside, will catch mice—and birds and chipmunks—with all the strength and agility they need.

"But you know how weak and flabby human beings pretty quickly get when they sit around all day doing nothing. This town alone has enough of such 'welfare cases'—trailer trash, as some call them!—to provide ample and definitive examples of that! (One of John's pet peeves, beside Constantine's Imperial Abomination/Church/Crutch, was people who didn't work for a living and lived off the taxpayers' dole—but I don't want to get into that here, given all the years I have spent "not working." and living off his dole!) And if you look at them, you can see they are in a process of dissipation and disintegration—both physically and spiritually. If not from all the drugs and alcohol they indulge in, then from ending up fat as whales from all the junk food they eat and the exercise they don't get while they go about everywhere on those scooter things, not because they are crippled, but solely because walking around is too much goddamn work! (Yeah, if John saw this 300-plus pound me today, he'd take his stock-whip to me—he sure as fuck wouldn't put me over his knees, paddled my well-padded ass, then pick me up and heave me in a shit-pile—though in deference to his oft-expressed antagonism to those scooters and the ambulatory morons who use them, I do not possess one—though I've been tempted to have my van rigged up with a ramp so I could easily get one in and out of it and use it while shopping!) Because it requires a little bit of willpower! Which none of them have even a thimble-full of!

(Ironically, a few years back, when Jonathan took his family to Disneyworld, his pet peeve about the place concerned the hordes of perfectly healthy—but generally obese!—people that zoomed and bullied their way around the place on those infernal scooters—and expected people to just naturally make way for them because they were infirm enough to need them. Except they weren't infirm at all, just fat, weak and lazy! And apparently quite proud of being fat, weak and lazy!)(I guess if Groucho were to be able to put his two-cents worth in here, he'd say they were living and manifesting the "American Nightmare!")

"And I suspect why we have this tendency to so readily disintegrate when we aren't willing ourselves into activity and fitness, has to do with our fundamental free will that defines us as being human beings and not just 'naked apes!' That notion of our free will is something philosophers and theologians possessing brain-motors with a lot more horsepower than my little one-cylinder put-putter, have been cogitating on, and debating, for millennia. But as far as my little one-cylinder brain-motor can make sense of it, it is really quite simply about our fundamental motivational difference from animals, whose wills are totally bound up in their instincts!

"I mean, face it, horses, cattle, bears, moose, dogs, cats, whatever, are not free to behave like anything but horses, cattle, bears, moose, dogs or cats.! Have you ever seen a cat chase a car, meowing its head off at it, or a dog that is willing to crap in a box of sand? Animals just don't have the freedom to behave outside out the programming of their instincts—but human beings, obviously, have the freedom to behave any damn way they feel like—or can imagine! And can will themselves to behave like!"

John had to stop there because I was having such a good laugh at the picture of cats chasing cars and dogs shitting in litter boxes, but he quickly went on,

"So though we, as human beings, have a body with similarities to that of an ape—we have to eat, drink, shit, piss, sleep, and have sex just like all animals!—but something has been very fundamentally altered in us so we can make choices in all these matters: we can willfully choose to eat beef or lamb instead of pork of chicken—or even each other, for that matter. And we can also willfully chose—if we feel the enough compassion for animals—to not eat their flesh at all, and just eat nuts and grains and vegetables. And we can willfully choose to shit and piss in bathrooms instead of wherever we happen to be when the urge hits. And we can even choose where we direct—and how we act out—our sex drive!

"When a stallion encounters a mare in heat, he has no choice but to mate with her, but a man, on encountering a sexually predatory woman with her nether region veritably aflame, can put discretion before ardor and run for the hills. (I could be shudder when he said that, though I don't think that heave-the-predatory-slut-in-the-shit event that had been so embarrassing for me, even entered his memory!) And of course, vice versa—a woman can make the choice to have, or not have, sex with a male who gets her hormones all riled up. And if either one can't resist the other, they can choose to have sex in the privacy of a bedroom—or the back seat of a car—and not wherever they happen to be when the lust hits!"

I had a good laugh at that as I thought about some of my early, sexing-out antics and the outrageous and very public places I indulged my out-of-control lust, I interrupted him with, "Well, most of the time that is the case—but certainly not always! Hell, there was a thing in the news the other day about a couple who got arrested when they got off a passenger jet—for having sex right in their seats! And it happens I lot I hear—though usually in the bathrooms! They call it joining the "Mile-High" club."

That got a laugh out of John as he said, "Cute moniker for it! But most of those passenger jets fly five miles up, so maybe it's the thinner air that increases lust and decreases willpower . . . and brings the 'naked ape' out of those people. And of course, there will be no end of religious moralists who will call such out-of-control sexual antics, 'animal behavior,' but it is not even close to animal behavior, because, from what I know about female mammals, is that they are only willing to have sex when they are in estrus—in heat—and capable of conceiving. Of course, the males are always ready to oblige a female when she is in heat—and often when she is not—but they'll usually get a pretty cool—and often violent!—reception from her when she is not."

And here he let out a loud chuckle as he said, "Many a stallion has gotten a nasty nip from a mare who wasn't interested in his attentions! And sometimes even a kick in the head! And unlike a female human, his attentions, however persistent, won't send her into heat—only the natural rhythms of her own body can do that. So I'd say human sexuality is an expression of a form of spiritual behavior—lower spiritual, to be sure—but still of a spiritual nature that needs to be controlled with willpower. Which of course, is why all societies have had very strict customs and laws and taboos dealing with the sexual behavior to keep it in control. And like the Chinese and Indian cultures proved for millennia, you don't have to go that dark and insane route of the Judeo-Christian lunacy and turn it into humanity's number one and most heinous, Nasty ol' Nobodaddy-displeasing sin—and eternal damnation!—in order to socially control it!

"But the real issue to be stressed here is that because we are, in our most important essence, spirit-beings incarnate in a naked ape-like body from which many of the normal, ape-instincts have been removed or suppressed, we then have to accept and recognize that Opposer for what it is—a weight-training gym for our spirit-being! And likewise we have to recognize and accept the spiritual injunction that it is most necessary that we, in essentially being a spirit-being who is incarnate in an ape-like body, have the drastic need—the injunction!—of keeping ourselves—as a spirit-being—discrete. strong and cohesive. And we can only do this by making the mindful, willful effort to constantly oppose the Opposer, which is the only way we, as a spirit-being, can remain strong, discrete, and cohesive—and spiritual.

"Interestingly, Don Juan gets into this sort of spiritual 'weight-training' notion with Castaneda in . . . Tales of Power, I think, where he talks about, and points out people, to him who have good tonals, as he calls them, and people who have bad ones. Even thick-headed Carlos could see the difference, though of course, he couldn't quite understand the processes behind the creation—or manifestation—of that difference. And in another of those books, Don Juan points out the difference in the tonal of one of Castaneda's fellow apprentices, a young woman nicknamed La Gorda—fat girl, I think it means in Spanish—before and after her sorcery training with Don Juan. Castaneda had been more than a little surprised and puzzled by that change . . . but I think he had a hard time rationally accepting Don Juan's explanation for it. Or so I seem to remember it—so don't quote me on it. Ha! Ha! (John always got a good laugh out of that "don't quote me on it," shtick because he knew I didn't believe a word he said about most of the stuff he talked about and wouldn't "quote" it to anyone to save my life. Particularly all the Castaneda shit he liked to yammer on about!)

"And of course, you were easily able to see it yourself when you were living in that rough part of the "Shitty" when you were a student and a single-mother. You even commented on it! Just about all those people around that area had drug and alcohol problems—and half of them were on welfare!—and those problems were written all over their faces and their bodies—their tonals! In fact, you really looked out of place there because your tonal looked so good and contrasted so obviously with theirs. Which of course, was because you weren't 'one of them' due to the fact you were only temporarily there as a student and single-mother trying to stretch your dollars, while they were there because it was their natural habitat . . . so to speak. (If John had been familiar with computer-speak, he'd have said it was their default habitat!)

"Which, of course, brings up the question of which comes first, the bad tonal or the bad lifestyle, though I guess as you pointed out at the time—at least about the ones you got to know—they all had self-esteem problems, which meant the two probably went together in a kind of self-feeding, negative synergy."

And so ironic it is that though John maintained his excellent tonal—or whatthefuckever!—for the whole of his long life, my poor tonal has taken a royal shit-kicking over the years and I am now truly am a La Gorda—three times over!—and I could move into that old trailer-trash neighborhood I lived in when going to university, and I'd look right at home there! I'd have no end of fellow loons and dopers and alkies for company! And likely with no small number of them being incest—or some severe form of abuse—survivors. Especially the Aboriginals who lived there, with, in this country, with its utterly evil residential "school" system, , the term Aboriginal pretty much being synonymous with being abused! (Ironically, in his memoirs, John tells a story about an Aboriginal couple whose children were taken away from them very early in the dark lifespan of that nefarious institution, with the Aboriginal man very accurately calling those shit-stitutions—hey, I just invented a new fuckin' word!—prison-schools!)

"Well, you know what I think about all that Castaneda nonsense, Uncle John, but like Castaneda, I not only don't really understand this tonal shit very well, and what little I do understand about it leaves me wondering how . . . by what sort of mechanism . . . or practice . . . does one keep their tonal good . . . or better yet, how the fuck one can make one's willpower strong enough to oppose that fucking damn Opposer! (Even today I go totally scorpion-paranoid when I even think about the notion of the existence of that fucking Opposer—not that it takes much to make the scorpion of my paranoia rear its tail when I'm off the Meds-Rez!) I mean—we can't all join the fuckin' army or work in mines or on outside construction jobs. Or train for the Olympics! This really doesn't make any sense—and I don't really believe you when you say it's that important, anyway!"

This got a belly laugh out of him as he said, "You have lived with the trailer-trash! You have seen first-hand the effects of those pathetic people indulging in . . . pandering to . . . the dark, violent and usually self-destructive side of their human nature and more than willingly opening themselves up to the Opposer. And thus practically turning their weak and pathetic lives into garbage dumps—and you still don't really believe we need much willpower to keep ourselves from falling into a cesspit like that! You still don't believe we need to keep from allowing ourselves to weaken . . . to rot . . . to dissipate . . . like that! To get so . . . incohesive . . . that we can't keep ourselves from getting sucked into—and drowning in!—those dark, sticky currents of the Ocean of Spirit? From becoming like that trailer-trash where you used to live? . . . And which, if I remember correctly, you had such a difficult time being around . . . because their lives were so hopeless—and they were so depressing!"

"No, I sure don't. . . . I can't believe in that Opposer!—It's just too . . . irrational . . . a concept! And too damn . . . frightening!"

"Well just think about all those trailer trash you once rubbed shoulders with and which you sure did not like being around—or so you said often enough back then!—who define their lives by eating a lot of bad food, drinking a lot of alcohol, doing a lot of drugs, and having a lot of utterly indiscriminate sex—usually while under the influence of drugs and alcohol. Lives that end up so fundamentally dark, shitty, dissolute and depraved that they would make a battlefield full of corpse-rats look like a monastery full of Zen monks! Utterly dissolute lives they have no hope of ever crawling out of because of the will-sapping nature of all those addictive substances and dark behaviors they love to indulge in.

### Chapter Twenty

"Or—though I don't want to mention this, but it is such a good example—your own father! I doubt if that asshole of a failed priest ever did a lick of hard, willful work in his life, and as far as I'm concerned, ever possessed the backbone of an earthworm, which is what allowed him to do to you the things he did! . . .I mean face it, sure—he could have had some untoward lusts concerning you, his young daughter, but he didn't have to act on them. He knew full well that was he was doing was heinous and depraved—and within the context of his precious religion, mortally sinful!—which means he not knew he should have been trying to resist those pernicious lusts, but should have resisted them! Just because they were so heinous!

"He could very easily have gone into the bathroom when the heat in is groin got too intolerable and manhandled his sick lust into the sink—but he didn't! And didn't solely because he lacked the willpower to do so. Same with all those infernal priests who prattle on so mindlessly about the 'importance of sexual purity,' and the doing 'God's will' and never think for a moment that they need some will of their own to control their perverted lusts and depraved actions . . . though I suspect in the case of most priests—and surely bishops!—a lot of their behavior is the result, not just of a sick lust combined with a pathetically weak will, but of pure, power-corrupted arrogance—which that malevolent lot has in abundance!"

John's mentioning of my father didn't bother me because we often discussed "that asshole of a failed priest," which is what John only ever referred to him as, but I did press him on how a normal person who was not interested in becoming a soldier, or a construction worker, or an athlete, could increase their willpower.

"Ironically," he said, "It's really not that hard. And you're right—not many need—or get the chance—to become soldiers or Olympic athletes so they can break into that realm of pure will. But we do have to learn to exercise it so it has that modicum of strength to oppose the Opposer—even if only once in awhile . . . and not very effectively. Much like the way normal-living people don't have to exercise and train like Olympic athletes to stay moderately fit and healthy—and keep a good tonal—but they still have to get some exercise! . . . I mean, it's important enough that I've been seeing government ads out there urging people to get off their fat arses and do something—anything! (He was referring to the program ParticipACTION, which came out in the 70s because the government was horrified at how inactive and unhealthy all we Canadians were getting as we drove our cars everywhere—often just for a block to the corner store to buy junk food!—and lived most of our daily lives either in offices or in the temples of our living rooms worshipping our greatest god, Television! Though compared with today where the power of the new gods of the computer and the Web are threatening to de-throne the TV god, people, particularly kids back then, were practically Olympic athletes compared to today!)

"So just as we need to exercise our body in order to be healthy, we need to exercise our will!" And here he let out a soft, sardonic laugh before going on, "Heh, heh—we first need to exercise our will so we can muster the gumption to get off our fat lazy arses and exercise our bodies, don't we? . . . Kind of a vicious circle there, isn't there? . . . But the only way we can really isolate our will and exercise it is to strip our actions of the normal ego motivations of fear and desire . . . or greed. From all ego motivations. Which means we must willfully do some activity that we both don't want to do and don't have to do."

That statement prompted from me a soft "Bronx cheer" followed by, "What the hell does that mean? And what damn difference does . . .want to . . . and have to . . . make? I'm really not following you on this . . . shit! . . . you're slinging at me. At all!"

"Ah, good!" he laughing said. "Your 'righteous irritation' shows you're at least paying a bit of attention to this stuff. You have to get the want to and the have to out of the equation, so to speak, because both of those are ego motivations, and if the ego is motivating your actions, there is little or no will power involved. It's kind of like having your car lights on when the car is running, and when it's not running. If the car is running, the lights are powered by the alternator and the battery together, but if the car is not running, those lights are powered solely by the battery. Now, in a real, car-situation, you wouldn't want to be running your headlights solely on your battery—especially when its 40 below!—but for the sake of this analogy, let's just say you want to run your lights solely off the battery, something that is impossible to do if the car is running and the alternator is constantly recharging it. So you have to turn the car off to do that.

"In this analogy then, turning the car off in order to power the lights solely with the battery is the equivalent of turning off the ego and its motivations so that you are running "the lights" of your activity solely on the battery of your will . . . and thus your spirit-being. Now in our affluent, mechanized society, where King Ego rules the land and spirit-being is the lowly, dungeon-confined serf, just about everything we do is motivated by the King Ego, and our spirit-being serf, dungeon-bound as it is, gets no exercise at all, and thus it not only feels neglected and hard-done-by, but ends up getting very weak. Much like you'd get if you spent a month confined to a bed in a hospital—you'd not be running a marathon an hour after you got back on your feet, that's for sure. (Ha!—even back then I couldn't have run a marathon even if I'd trained for it for a year!)

"Because most people in our culture live their lives under the tyranny of King Ego with its motivations of fear and desire . . . or greed—fear of losing something they have, and/or, the desire/greed to initially obtain it—or obtain lots more of it!—which means the serf of their spirit-being, where resides all our power of will, sits atrophying in that dungeon King Ego has banished to, thus ensuring they have no access to any will at all and they become easy prey to depression. And all sorts of those addictions that the trailer trash think are so much fun. They are like cruise ships trapped in a hurricane with failed engines!

"So, in order for your will to be strong and available for you to use when you need it, you have to exercise it—much like you have to exercise your legs if you are going to run a marathon. But—as I have been trying to explain!—you have to isolate your will from your ego motivations . . . like the battery from the alternator by turning off the car . . . in order to do that, which is why I say that in order to exercise your will with any activity, it must be an activity you don't want to do and don't have to do. Fear and desire and greed must be factored out of the equation.

"A perfect example of such a situation is the act of getting out of bed an hour earlier than you have to every morning before work so you can do some calisthenics or yoga or other exercises—hell, just bend down and touch your toes ten times!—or to read a challenging book for awhile. Since obviously you don't have to do that, and you surely wouldn't want to do it, then if you 'just did it.' you'd be using your willpower to do it. . . . Try it sometime and notice the difference between willing yourself out of bed early when you don't have to and launching yourself out of it when you are late for work and in a fearful panic of losing your job. And that's just one example—there are many available to us every day. Like even just going for the walk after a big supper that we sure don't want to go for because we'd rather just loosen our belts and belch and fart our way through an evening of TV watching.

"Or even something as simple as making your bed when you get out of it in the morning—it's not much, but since you don't have to do it, and likely don't feel like—don't want—to do it, the act of doing it is a small act of pure will that exercises and strengthens your overall will. . . . Or doing up your dishes right after a meal . . . or immediately putting them in the washer if you have one. And if you do all of these things with a state of mindfulness, they are even more effective. . . . And oh yeah, I almost forgot—nothing requires us to use our pure willpower like the enduring of physical discomfort."

And here I could but slap the table, disturb the poor dog, and practically shout, "Christallfuckingmighty, John—now you're really talking through your . . . Stetson!

"Language, language, Rachel—how do you think that poor, Christian dog is going to feel, you taking his Good Lord's name in vain, like that? He's very sensitive to blasphemy! So much so I think he was an Inquisitor in a previous life! . . . But I truly mean what I just said. And it is this notion—of building up willpower through physical discomfort—that many historians—though not in so many words—assert is most instrumental in the rise and fall of empires. And most especially as demonstrated in the rise and fall of the Roman one. When times are tough and difficult in a culture, its members are strong and tough and willful, but as power and affluence grows, so does the general comfort level of the population—except for the slaves!—that by its nature seduces anyone with affluence into it. Seduces them into it and pretty much destroys the fiber of their will like a hemp rope being weakened and destroyed by being soaked in hot water. Or, as we were talking about before, turns them into a nation of trailer trash!

"And of course, in our modern, mechanized culture, where even some of the poorest people have more comforts available to them than did medieval kings, this is a major and very serious problem. We have come to think it is almost "inhuman" to have to endure the slightest bit of discomfort, and you can see that in people who have to warm up the interior their car up for half an hour on a cold morning because they sure don't want to get a cold ass driving to work! Or have their homes air conditioned all summer . . . and their cars as well. Like the sweating of a few unnecessary drops of sweat is going to kill them.

"Same with physical pain—we have to carry a bottle of aspirin around with us just in case we get an itty-bitty headache, because we sure don't want to have to put up with something as inconvenient and day-ruining as that. We are all becoming like over-boiled strands of hemp rope—soft and weak and prone to falling apart under the smallest of stresses! Which of course, is really the natural state of affairs produced by the Opposer when it goes unopposed for too long! . . . No different, to be sure—and just as catastrophic!—now that I think of it, as the effect the winds had on prairie lands during the droughts of the 30s, when the natural prairie grasses that had opposed those winds for millennia had been ripped-up and destroyed by the cretinous farmers in their mindless greed for all those quick, wheat-bucks, thus allowing those ever-blowing winds to blow those dried up topsoils to kingdom come!

"But even more recently, I think this concept was demonstrated very dramatically during that war in Vietnam where the mighty United States of America sent a bunch of kids who'd been lifelong softened on school-and-TV, over to those jungles and rice paddies to try and stop a bunch of work-toughened peasants from achieving their independence from a colonial power, no differently that the original Americans had from the Brits in the 1700s, and even with all those fancy and powerful weapons those American kids had, and the millions of tons of bombs dropped, and millions of artillery shells lobbed, to help them with their bloody massacres, they were still no match for those tough little peasants who'd spent their childhoods working in the fields and eating rice and fish, not sitting on their arses watching cartoons and eating bowls of over-sugared cereals!

"Though of course, those three perfidious, mendacious, and self-serving presidents, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon deserve their 50%-share of the credit for that debacle, along with the 40% that belongs to that arrogant, promoted-beyond-his-intelligence-level, Westmoreland, who was so righteously and self-satisfied ignorant of the true nature of the war he was generalissimoing, that he was psychotically retarded about it, and who like too many similarly arrogant and psychotically retarded generals in the BASS, believed that if you had a strategy that clearly wasn't working, the way to fix the problem was to just to escalate and intensify what you were already very ineffectually doing. . . . And, if I am not mistaken, did Einstein not define insanity as the doing of the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result?

"Of course, Westmoreland had little incentive to learn the ropes of that unfamiliar-to-him guerrilla-type, hit-and-hide type of warfare and adapt accordingly—and effectively—because that self-important Texas Turkey, Johnson—and the Nixon—was so willing to conscript and send to him an unlimited supply of 'grunts' for him to slaughter with his not-working, retarded, psychotic strategy to that war—which more than a few other, brighter, less arrogant and psychotic generals were quietly saying was unwinnable by any strategy.

"And then of course, there was that 'insanity-of-all-insanities' in that debacle, Westmoreland's McNamara-pleasing count-the-corpses' practice, as if the BASS hadn't years before hadn't so bloodily disproven—for all time!—that heaps of rotting enemy corpses, piled however impressively and reeking high, can in any way constitute a victory. Or even lead to one!"

In fact, I was always surprised at John's interest in, and knowledge about, that crazy war, but as you will see very quickly in The Fire, his so-young—he was fourteen, for fuck's sake!—involvement in what he always called the BASS, truly shaped his character and subsequently, if Heraclitus is right, his fate. And of course, his attitudes towards wars—and especially stupid and futile wars run by soldier-sacrificing "generalissimos! And though no "commie-sympathizer" by any stretch, I got the sense that he had a grudging respect for those "tough little peasants" who beat the shit out of those mighty, affluent, over-armed, bomber-supported Americans, because he himself grew up as a work-and-abuse toughened peasant and that toughness served him well during the BASS, as it no less served many of his equally work-and-hardship-toughened brothers-in-arms, who likewise came to those slaughterfields of France straight from their very crude and labor-oriented farms, and in so doing, produced some of the toughest fighters in that ridiculous debacle that too many still like to call The Great War.

And yeah, I know you need another parenthetical aside like you need three bellybuttons, a new asshole, and a bull-ring through your nose, but here comes another one anyway: that business about discomfort and willpower sure hit real close to home for me, because during the first summer I lived in this house, I got an air conditioning system installed along with the new, oil-fired central heating system, and because in the winter I sure did never want to drive an even a remotely cold car on a cold morning, I'd run out and start it so it could run for half an hour and warm up real good. Though of course, now my new van has a remote controlled starter that allows me to start it and let it run and warm up for that half hour before I have to walk the ten frigid feet to get into it, and if there is any chill at all left in it, it has great seat warmers that ensure my great big whale-blubbered hippo-butt doesn't suffer the slightest bit of discomfort when I get into it.

And back then, after that conversation, I did try getting out of bed early, like he said—and even making my bed on doing so—and there certainly was a difference between that and my de rigueur leaping out of it in a last-minute-after-the-third-damn-pushing-of-the-snooze-button panic, but me being me, I could never reach that necessary threshold of willpower needed to do that getting up earlier than I had to more than two or three times before my desire to stay in bed as long as I could overrode all that willpower I need to get up early, so I gave up on it completely.(Like John had said: there's a real vicious circle in this lack-of-willpower business that's hard to break, since it needs willpower to break it!

Since John always exhibited an enormous amount of willpower while I knew him—he sure was no comfort-junkie like me!—and since I had the willpower of a child, part of me knew he was probably right-on with what he was saying, but my great big and education-bloated Queen Ego—remember, I had a BA degree—and a year of "Teacher's College"—and he hadn't even gotten half way through grade school!—still had to do its "Charge of the Light Brigade" thing and say, "Well, okay—I'll accept that there is something . . . special . . .about willpower, but I still think it is just a function of our brain and has nothing to do with this so-called spirit-being you're so convinced we have. All we have to do is train our brain properly and we'll have all the willpower we need!"

This got a laugh out of him as he said, "Your thinking is all wrong about this . . . spirit-being business—and perhaps I have been speaking sloppily about it . . . but our spirit-being is not something we have, it is what we are! . . . But remember awhile back when I tried to teach you how to meditate?"

"How can I forget!" I sarcastically answered. "It turned into the most ridiculous thing I have ever tried to do! Christ—I couldn't do it for three damn minutes!"

"Exactly!" he said again, with that same, smug, irritating, shit-eating grin. "The meditative exercise is designed to teach you to willfully control your mind, but you had a hard time doing that, didn't you?"

"Hard time! No kiddin'! My thoughts were like a barn full of mice scampering all over the place to get away from a handful of cats! I couldn't control them at all! It was hopeless, so I gave it up real quick."

"Okay," he said, this time without that shit-eating grin. "So all those thoughts are in your brain . . . are functions of your brain . . . synapses that are firing willy-nilly that you find so hard to control, right?"

"If you say so! Christ!—I don't know what the Christ they exactly are!""

"But what are you trying to control them with?"

"With . . . with . . . my brain, of course! What else?"

"So you are asserting that when a person is meditating, they are attempting to use one part of their brain to control another part of their brain."

"Right!"

"So, let me get this straight—from what I have read, our thoughts are the product of some very complex electrical processes going on in our brain . . . synapses firing . . . or some such thing. So these synapses are firing away in one part of our brain and generating all those scampering mice of thoughts that you can't seem to control, right?"

"Yeah . . . I guess . . . I mean, I don't know much about that but it sounds . . . about . . .right . . . maybe."

"Okay, so you have all these mice-thought synapses firing helter-skelter in some particular part of your brain that you want to control—what are you supposed to use to control them? . . . Other synapses in another part of your brain? . . . And if that is so, what sort of mechanism would make that possible? Is there some sort of hierarchy in the brain were some parts of it are like army officers capable of giving orders to all the 'Tommies-in-the-trenches' parts willing to follow those orders? And more importantly, why should the synapses in one part of your brain have more power than in another part . . . or at least enough power to impose their . . .will . . . on another part? And how do the 'officer' parts know what the 'Tommy' parts are doing, since they are in different areas of the brain. And when those 'officer' parts want to control the 'Tommy' parts, how do they effect that control?

"Remember, the brain is a physical mass—basically just a big, fancy, electrified lump of porridge kept warm by our blood coursing through it in the pot of our skull—which means the different parts really are separate, and that all brain functioning is just the electrical activity—just those synapses firing away in that lump of porridge!—so how does the electrical activity in one part of that porridge change and control the electrical activity in another part it? Wouldn't that be a bit like this little radio here in my kitchen being able to perform—on its own!—the function of a remote control and turn on and off my stereo in the living room . . .and alter the volume and tone . . . and whatnot? Or vice versa?

"Does that really make any sense? . . . But let's get this out of the esoteric realm of meditation and into the 'real world.' How many times have you been reading a book and suddenly realized that you'd read a few pages—or a whole chapter—without paying enough attention to you reading to have any idea of what you have just read?"

On my sheepishly grinning and nodding like one of those little bird gizmos that dips its beak in and out of a dish of water, he continued, "And the same thing with driving your car. Have you ever driven a whole lot of miles so mindlessly and automatically that suddenly you are at your destination and don't know how the hell you got there? Or worse, so inattentively you almost have an accident and only realize you were being inattentive when some other motorist blasts his horn at you?"

Again, another sheepish grin and series of bird-gizmo nods on my part.

"So each time—reading and driving—you decide it would be better if you paid more attention to what you are doing. It would be better if you focused more! Focused your attention more on what you were doing! But by your definition of what's going on, are not both attention and focusing then nothing more than intrinsic brain activities? Synapses firing in particular patterns? And if so, then what agent is behind that act of focusing your attention? Or for that matter, what agent is manifesting your sudden realization that you have not been focusing at all, just wool-gathering . . . just chasing butterflies in some imaginary meadow? What has just manifested the embarrassing realization that you have read a whole chapter of a book and have no idea what you've just read! Or worse, have driven half-way across the city in rush-hour traffic with no idea of how you did it?"

At this point, because he had so totally lost me with that line of thinking, I interrupted him by rolling my eyes, giving my forehead a loud thwack, and saying "D'oh!"

This got a chuckle out of him as he said, "Want me to get some yellow paint out of the shed so you can paint your face to match? . . . But back to this topic that is either baffling or boring you . . . ."

"Both Uncle John—both! You lost me waaaaaaaaaaaay back!"

"That okay! You know me—once I get on one of these . . . blabber-horses of mine I just want to keep riding and riding! . . . So, to keep riding—as far as I am concerned—but of course, never quote me on this, ha, ha!—it has to be something outside our brain that instigates and controls this capacity, not only to focus our attention, to force us to pay attention. And just as importantly, to suddenly step back far enough to realize we have not being focusing, have not been paying attention—when we should have been! Like when driving a car in rush-hour traffic!

"Thus . . . as far as I can figure out . . . it must be—has to be!—something outside our brain . . . something separate from synapses firing away in our big, electrified pile of skull-porridge doing that, because I can't see how one physical part of our brain can play 'army officer' to another . . . a 'Tommy' part of it. Either to control and motivate it, or to train it! That doesn't make any practical sense! And if so, what trained that 'officer' part to be superior enough to order around the 'Tommy' part? And there must be some training involved because there's obviously a big difference in the 'officer corps' of some peoples' brains compared to their 'Tommy' parts.

"I mean, face it: you're a teacher so you can't miss—or gainsay!—that fact! Uneducated children don't become educated children just for the fact of sitting with a teacher all day bored to death in a classroom! There's even less sense to that! But I think I need a better metaphor . . . actually, it would be . . . like a camera lens being able to focus itself on an object, would it not? But how would it know if it is in, or out, of focus to the human eyes looking through it and taking the picture? And how would it physically alter itself? What sort of mechanism would it use? . . . Am I not correct?" (Ironically, today, digital, computer-controlled cameras do exactly that, but back then, such a notion would have been utterly unthinkable, even ludicrous—and still would be today for anyone using manually operated lenses—and even as I think about that I realize that a digital camera can only focus itself, its lens, because the incredibly complex—human being-programmed—computer at the core of it that is capable of playing the role of "the ghost in the machine"!)

Needless to say, I didn't have a ready reply to that as I tried to imagine the physical process whereby one part of brain-functioning would control another part of it—like a camera lens (without an advanced computer) focusing itself. And as if reading my mind John broke my silence with,

"Would that not be a little bit too much like having two untrained pups and letting them loose in the yard every day so they could train themselves into well-behaved dogs? Sounds absurd, doesn't it?"

And all I could give in reply to that was a grinning nod as I remembered my mindless lout of a "Hubby," most unexpectedly bringing home a puppy for Jonathan and Terry, and all the work and frustration I/Me/Mommy had to go through to train it into a creature that didn't shit and piss everywhere in the house and chew up all our shoes. The metaphor of two such impulse-driven creatures training each other into a well-behaved dogs was as brilliant as the notion was ludicrous.

"So okay—it's not hard to fathom that good, well-trained dogs don't exist because they train themselves out of their pup-wildness, but solely because some outside agency willfully trains them to behave like well-behaved dogs. . . . Keeping in mind, of course, that we, as their human masters, want dogs well-trained to our human standards and values . . . though even in the wild, wolf pups have to be carefully and continuously trained by their parents to hunt and follow pack rules, etcetera. So if we want to have a well-trained mind, it is much like a pup that has to be trained by some outside—and willful—agency. And that willful, outside agency is, for us human beings, our spirit-beings, which has the capacity to be aware of our reality and what we are doing—and should be doing!—in it, then access the realm of will and use it to control and create order in our minds . . . and thus in our reality . . . our lives."

John, during several other "discussions" on that arcane subject, got me to most reluctantly accept that things might be as he said, but I had to prod him into explaining, over and over, more about what will really was, and then explain, over and over, how that bizarre process of exercising, and thus making stronger, this will, actually worked. And whether it resided in his hypothetical spirit-being or somewhere else in our physical being. I mean, in being a true, willless-wonder, my experience with and understanding of will, was pretty shallow and vague and I truly did have a hard time grasping how it could possibly exist outside of my body in John's hypothetical Fifth Dimension, that Ocean of Spirit, how it could be both weak or strong, and less so, how it could be open to exercise and improvement.

And I did have to admit that my brain—my rational mind—failed utterly at grasping any sort of explanation for how our will—weak or strong—could reside anywhere but in our brain, assuming that if some people had strong wills while others had weak ones, that's just the way they were born—no different than the fact that some very, very few kids are born Einsteins and no too few others total retards (pardon my lack of PC, which always goes out the window when I'm walkabout from the Meds Rez!) while most of us find a comfortable and acceptable niche somewhere in between.

Now of course that gets us into that damn mind-fuck of a who-gives-a-shit debate over the totally mind-fucking question of the dominant force in our mental life being our physical brain or our immaterial mind, which I am, quite literally—like a whole lot of scientists and philosophers who have been wrestling with the issue for a very long time—unable to make up my mind about. (No humor intended!) Or give a shit! (Crudity intentional!) Though of course, on that subject, John, the voracious and eclectic reader and opinionated and iconoclastic autodidact that he had been, had his well-chewed views, and was adamantly certain that there was a world of substantive difference between our brain and our mind, with our brain being, as he once described it, "that big lump of electrified porridge that in most people is used for little more than stuffing to keep their skulls from collapsing," and which is just a tool used by our immaterial mind to allow us to interact with, and survive on, this Gulag Earth, with our minds being a fundamental attribute of our spirit-beings.

(As I write this there comes to mind a line of Joseph Chilton Pierce's from one of his head-fucking Cosmic Egg books, where he deals with somebody's quote, about there cannot be any mode of being except through a mode of being, and for a few seconds, as I saw our physical brain being the mode of being for the being of our spirit-being, I got the meaning of those words . . . kinda . . . a little bit . . . for a wee . . . short . . . tiny . . . little . . . while . . .)

And needless to say, there are likely whole mobs of brain scientist-priests and materialist philosophers who, on the non-chance of reading this thing, would be ready and anxious to lynch me for passing on—quoting John!—on that most hideous of heresies to what John called their Religion of Materialistic Science, (to me, who doesn't give a fiddler's fuck, it's just Science) but the whole debate is so fucking far over my thick—and basically uninterested!—brain? . . . mind? . . . whathefuckever! . . . that I can say little more on the subject.

Other than that, according to John, these ideas were not endemically his, but a product of his various readings on the subject of the primacy of mind over matter, (I think) which he said the philosopher, Gilbert Ryle, (I remember the name only because John made a rare pun about him really "riling" him up!) glibly mocked by calling our mind "the ghost in the machine," a descriptive term subsequently taken up a philosopher he seemed to respect to a limited degree—likely because he'd almost been executed during the Spanish Civil War—Arthur Koestler, in his book titled, The Ghost in the Machine, which like Ryle's high-brow yada-yada-yada on the subject, I have not abused myself reading. (Yeah, right: groannnnnn—who gives a flying fuck! And if you do give one, you better Google it, because I am sure I got it all wrong. And truly—I. DON'T. GIVE. A. FLYING. FUCK!)

I think the only reason I remember that term "ghost in the machine" is because I had an early 80s album by the Police, called The Ghost in the Machine, which I bought because of its hit single, "Spirits in the Material World," which I not only liked as a tune but had wanted to play for John because of its title, but once I got the album and listened to the lyrics more closely, there was pretty much nothing of substance in them on the subject of us being "spirits in the material world"—or "ghosts in the machine," either! (I mean, it was pop music, so what the fuck did I expect!)

And no surprise there, given that before he became the gazillionaire rock icon with the Police, Sting, had been a likely very ordinary school teacher with the very ordinary name of Gordon Sumner, and you already too well know my attitude towards us school teachers, so it is no surprise there was no profound and worldview-shattering insights in that song. Though he does pose an important question in the final verse, where he asks where the big answers to life's questions lie, which, since it can't be something we can buy, there has to be a different way to gleaning such a profound truth. (Google the lyrics if you've got time to waste . . . well, d'oh—if you're reading this you obviously do!) Though one of the first thoughts to come into my head when listening to it, was that John Lennon had already answered that question more imaginatively, courageously and deeply decade earlier in his song, "Imagine." (Definitely Google the lyrics to that song—not a waste of time!)

But now back to the subject of me wasting my time asking John about what will actually was and how it could be exercised. To that he just laughed and said, "You want me to tell you what will actually is? Come on, Rachel (he only ever called me Rachel when he wanted to show how exasperated he was with me!)—I'm just an aging ex-rancher who reads a lot of books full of other peoples' ideas, mentally chew on them like they are sage-cud—no pun intended!—and then I regurgitate some of their thoughts back to you, and even after all my readings, I can tell you—no one knows what the hell will is! . . . Except maybe Castaneda and his Don Juan, who called it intent, and learn to play with it like it is toy, but too damn few believe a damn word he writes so I won't push that on you because what he said about it is very . . .what's that term you like to use . . . far out? But because of some insights I gained from those Castaneda books, I'd simply say what I've said before—that will is something . . . "

And here looked up and he waved both his hands at the ceiling as he went on, "Something . . . out there! Some . . .current . . . in the Fifth Dimension . . . in the Ocean of Spirit that our spirit-being can tap into an use to make changes in this material world."

"Like 'the Force' in Star Wars!" I excitedly said, getting a rare-as-mosquitoes-in-January flash of inspiration and finally happy I could grasp a bit of this and add my hundred dollars-worth of Monopoly money to the discussion.

That interjection brightened John's eyes as he raised he index-finger of his extended right hand and with a jerk pointed it at me as he said, "Precisely! Thank you! Great comparison! Like 'the Force,' which as I understand it those . . . whatever they are called . . ."

"Jedi knights!"

"Right! Those fictional Jedi knights have to learn to use that 'Force' in a master-apprentice relationship involving lots of difficult teaching and practice. Obviously just like in any Oriental martial arts program where the martial artists have to learn from a master how to channel and use the chi, with some being better at it than others. So it is with will! . . .Which is, by its very nature something . . . immaterial and mysterious like that chi . . .like that 'Force' . . . which is . . .out there . . . and of course, also all around us . . .which our individual spirit-beings have access to and have to learn how to . . . to first sense . . .then channel . . .then control . . . so we can make changes in our lives.

"And if I remember that movie correctly, that old teacher, when he was trying to teach that annoying, whining kid how to use . . . to channel . . . that 'Force,' kept telling him he first had to feel it. And it is no different for us in our interactions with will.

"We first have to feel it and practice channeling it to make it a strong . . . force . . . in our lives. And we can only feel it if we are forced to use it, but we can't use it, and thus feel it, until we first strip away all the other more mundane and ego-emotions that drive our actions—like fear, and greed, and hate, and anger . . . and whatever! So it is only when we strip all those other, mostly ego-motivations, out of our actions that we are then forced to use that will to execute those actions.

"That is why getting out of bed an hour early every morning is such a good exercise of the will, because getting out of bed is always real hard even when we want to, and more so when we don't want to—but who the hell ever wants to! And making the bed on immediately getting out of it is also an act of will, because we are not in the army and no non-com or officer is going do his screaming bully-thing for us not making it. . . . And now that I think of it, I am sure that when Don Juan had a conversation similar to this with Castaneda, he said that reading difficult and boring books was also a great way of exercising and strengthening our will power. . . . Something I totally agree with.

(That was a good point being made by that fictional Don Juan, because being a compulsive reader, I was familiar enough with the world of trash fiction, which is usually all plot-twists and one-dimensional, soap opera-characters doing shallow, emotional, soap opera-ish things, and once you get past the first paragraph, the exciting, unfolding story slips a ring in your nose and drags you through the pages, even late into the night when you should be sleeping! As no less was I familiar with many of the plodding cart-horses of "great literature" and the loaded stone-boats of my university text books, which were heavy drags from page one all the way to book's end. Alas, many university grads are too much like me, in that they develop a powerful reading-will—well, since all that is motivated by the greed to succeed and the fear of failing, likely no real will was involved!—while striving for their degrees, then quickly let it atrophy once they graduate.

(John, always a slow but relentless reader of difficult books, didn't have that problem, because, like he once jokingly said, "I'm an autodidact, which means I have, for many years, been attending the University of Eclectic and Questionable Knowledge, which only charges the tuition fees of your time and effort and the cost of books you can't get at a library, which offers no frat parties, degrees or status, and from which you can never graduate! Or get a fancy certificate that you can use to get a good job! . . . And then frame and put on a wall to impress a whole lot of people who will never give a shit!")

"But on a more mundane—and apropos to everyone—level, it is the same with regularly doing our dishes after a meal. Actually, it is the doing of dishes that gave me my personal term for all these act-of-will exercises, which I now call rice bowls."

Needless to say, that term got a questioning look from me but he explained it quite simply with the fact that he took it from a Zen Buddhist teaching-story where a novice in a monastery approaches the master and says, "Master, I desperately want to become enlightened as quickly as possible—how do I achieve this?" And the Master's enigmatic reply was, "Go mindfully wash your rice bowl."

Again, needless to say, that just got another questioning look from me, and a chuckling reply from John, "It means, 'Don't concern yourself with such big, exalted ego-things like becoming enlightened so you can beat your breast with pride and yell it from the roof-tops to an uncaring world—just willfully and mindfully do the simple, humble things in your life and someday, if you are assiduous in your practice, enlightenment may find you.' . . . Actually, that word 'mindfully' is vitally important to that Zen story. . . . And to the doing of all 'rice bowls.' . . . Though in all truth, being 'mindful' . . . pushing yourself into a state of mindfulness . . . is a massive act of will in itself, so there is a bit of that famous 'Catch 22' in that. Especially since in order to consistently push yourself into a state of mindfulness, you first need to possess a fair bit of willpower.

Zen Buddhist masters are always stressing the need for mindfulness, and they will also stress that it is not an easy state to achieve. It must be worked at and strived for constantly . . . and assiduously. Of course, the mindfulness of the Zen monk is the same as Gurdjieff's 'waking up!' And both all Zen monk are, and Gurdjieff himself was, quick to say that it is so easy for us to be—and to fall back!—asleep, and so hard for us to willfully 'wake up' from our natural state of unconscious slumber, for us to be in a state of Zen mindfulness!

Of course, in that Zen 'rice bowl' story, like all Zen stories, a lot is left unsaid so the student can work these things out for himself . . . if he wants to become enlightened. And if he can't . . .or doesn't want to make the effort to work them out—he doesn't deserve to become enlightened. . . . And though neither you nor I will ever become Zen monks—though who knows, maybe someday you will want to . . . one just never knows what the future . . . and our destiny holds for us!—we can daily practice our 'rice bowls,' our little intentional and willful acts—like making our bed each morning on getting out of it!—with the very important willful component added to it of doing it mindfully . . . of willing yourself into a state of mindfulness—however momentary—while doing it!

"And never underestimate the value of those small, willful efforts . . . those 'rice bowls' and moments of mindfulness, because they do involve acts of will, and each time to do one of those acts of will, your willpower increases in strength, and though at first—and maybe for years!—you will have no sense of it getting any stronger, until one day you discover that you have more willpower than you realized and can do things with it you never imagined. Like some Zen monk who for years assiduously and mindfully washes his rice bowl after each use, and suddenly one day finds himself in a state of enlightenment! Suddenly finds that being almost constantly mindful is real easy—and that enlightenment wasn't all that he thought it would be, heh, heh."

And, needless to say, (redux, ad nauseam!), as I typed out the above, I had the same thought that I had when John—jokingly, I'm sure!—said that bit about me someday becoming a Zen monk—that there was a better chance that I'd climb Mt. Everest than do that! Especially today, packing the load of lard that I do! And as well, needless to say, (redux redux!) though even today, that notion of John's of all our small acts of will being called rice bowls has never left my consciousness, I still can't really willfully—or even remotely mindfully!—do them . . . not that I still really understand what being in a "state of mindfulness" really means! . . .any more than I can control those cat-scampering mice in my head through the "rice bowl" of meditation, which is one reason the idea of me ever become a Zen monk is beyond ludicrous, and why I am—when not taking the chemical strait-jacket of my meds!—the manic "loonar" that I am! The manic "loonar," who lacks utterly the necessary willpower to control my wild, scampering manic-mouse thoughts, my errant, manic emotions—especially the scorpion of my paranoia!—and of course, all the manic, scriptorial rantings and ramblings that are so ruining this poor, FUBAR "Preface." Heraclites, you are so fucking right—character is indeed fucking fate! (Or, in my case, the total fucking lack of it!)

But that was not the end of the discussion on will because I then, on thinking things over a bit, had to give my ego a stroke and get another of my Monopoly-money opinions into the conservation by asserting that just feeling and exercising the will through his so-called "rice bowls" couldn't be the whole story because as a teacher I'd too often and too obviously seen that some of my students exercised a lot more will than others. Some seemed to have way too much and others way too little. And I'd seen the same thing as a mother: my daughter Terry was born with a lot more will in her psyche than my son Jonathan, and that fact became obvious when she was still a toddler. (That obvious reality certainly explained her willingness to fight with me so much as both a child and a teen, and then finally flee to the other side of this fucking planet just to safely get away from me and this confounded fucking lunacy of mine!)

John took one look at my Monopoly-money objection, which in no way baffled him, but just brightened his eyes and his interest in the conversation as he said, "Precisely! And that not only proves my point that our access to the realm of will is through the agency of our spirit-being, but it also proves the both the reality and importance of reincarnation to the development and evolution of our spirit-beings. Not all spirit-beings are the same! The more times a spirit-being has incarnated—becoming what the Hindus call an 'old soul'—the better able it is to feel and channel will. . . .Which of course, is why one of the hallmarks of an 'old soul' is that it is always more spiritually oriented than a 'young soul,' because not only does it learn much knowledge in its many incarnations, but it gets more proficient at channeling the necessary will to repress and control the influence the ego has over its life. And isn't that what true wisdom always is—the ability to keep the young, ever-yapping, floor-pissing, slipper-chewing pup of the ego in check so the old sled-dog of the spirit-being can quietly, diligently and willfully work on pulling the sled of the agenda of its spiritual evolution that it incarnated for?"

Well, it goes without saying, (fuck, I've almost worn out that cliché, too!) that last bit answered my riddle about why I was such a willless-fuckin'-wonder—I was born that way. I was a "young-soul" and not responsible for my deficiencies of will—and wisdom! And when I passed that brilliant insight across the kitchen table to John, he gave me his natural-to-him, "Spock-imitation" of the arched left-eyebrow accompanied by a wry grin and a mock-withering stare as he very seriously said, "I wish that could be your excuse, Rachel—but it is not. You are anything but a young-soul. In fact, you are a very old-soul . . . and if you weren't we wouldn't be having these conversations! But what makes you believe you are a young-soul is all the damage done to you by both your parents—your father for sexually molesting you and your mother for her terrible betrayal of you by knowing about it and doing nothing. And of course, by that sin-and-guilt-slinging religion of theirs, which caused you to almost completely close off your heart chakra, which by its nature, is the doorway to our psyche's access to our spirit-being."

And here, while I rolled my eyes and stuck my tongue out a him, he paused and after a moment of grinning—at my facial antics—thought, went on with, "In many way you are like one of those beautiful big old elm trees that has died from that insidious Dutch Elm disease. Do you know how that disease kills those lovely trees?"

And to that bizarre, out-of-left-fucking-field question, all I could do was laugh, roll my eyes again, and say, "Fuck, John—do you really think I give a shit about what kills those damn trees? Anymore than I give a fuck about that damn chakra system of yours."

That got a truly loud guffaw out of him that woke the dog from its slumbers and caused him to yawn a long, whining yawn, after which he said, "My chakra system! Hardly!—it is a system that is thousands of years old and has been followed, and used wisely, by countless millions over those millennia! . . . But back to that Dutch Elm disease—it is caused by a fungus spread by beetles, but it is not the fungus that kills the tree. The tree actually ends up killing itself as it plugs up the tree-equivalent of our veins and arteries in an effort to stop the spread of that fungus. It never quite stops it and just keeps shutting down those essential pathways for water and nutrients just behind the spread of that fungus—basically isolating the crown from the roots—until it dies."

He stopped for a second while I frowned, scrunched up my face, and rolled my eyes, indicating I really wasn't following him at all.

"So as I see it," he went on. "When the elm tree of a young person gets emotionally abused and traumatized by the fungus of that abuse, he or she copes by closing off their heart chakra, which then isolates their psyche from the necessary spiritual influence of their spirit-being, which whether a 'young-soul' or an 'old' one, can't get through to them and help them spiritualize their life. And a whole range of psychological . . . and life problems . . . result from this defensive process, which effectively renders a person as 'dead' as too many elms around here."

And though on one level what he said made a lot of sense, my rational mind could just not get over the Berlin Wall of its refusal to accept the de facto existence of a spirit-being as part of my psyche, just as it couldn't get over the Himalayas of believing in all that Eastern mumbo-jumbo about the chakra system and reincarnation, especially once it shoved into my face the shit-dripping diaper of the thought of having to live through many shitty lives just to be able to acquire the willpower and wisdom to live one good one. I mean, why couldn't I just fucking buy that willpower and wisdom from some big department store of some sort that specializes in such stuff? Needless to say, I made no more efforts to keeping that discussion going by "getting any more of my worthless, "hundred bucks worth of Monopoly money" in after that, because no subject made my head feel like it was going to explode like that favorite one of John's—fucking reincarnation.

And John, sensitive as he was, always knew when my head and psyche, like that teacup in the famous Zen story, had been filled to the brim and was overflowing all over the table, and so pretty much ended our discussion with that, though not before apropos adding, "And you know, crazy as this sounds, I think it ties in with the popularity of dogs in our suburban culture. What family doesn't have a dog—or two or three—regardless of how much damn work they are and the attention they demand . . . I mean, face it, if you have a dog, your whole life revolves around that creature! Hell, I've seen mothers out for what can't be very enjoyable walks where they are pushing a stroller with one hand and hanging onto the leash of straining, pissing-on-every-post-and-tree dog—and with an older child holding onto the side of the stroller! "

On his saying the word "dog" the first time, the dog woke up, yawned, whined, and padded across to floor to John's side where it rested his head in John's lap for some de rigueur ear scratching, as John went on, with both his pontificating and ear-scratching of the dog, "And I am sure that our modern, suburban obsession with these creatures is because our modern, over-mechanized, crazy-busy, affluence-and-status obsessed 'culture' is so traumatizing to peoples' spirit-beings that they 90% close off their heart chakras to cope with it, and though few human beings—even their children!—can worm their way through that tiny, 10% gap that remains open, dogs, which are 99% heart and only 1% brain, can slip through that tiny opening real easy, because they aren't perceived as any sort of emotional threat. So all those traumatized suburban over-achievers use their dogs for their basic—and usually only!—truly heart-oriented relationships . . . but please, don't try taking that check to the bank because I am sure it will bounce all over the place and embarrass the hell out of you!

(At that time, I wouldn't have put that "check" of an idea in my purse, let alone take it to a "bank" to "cash" it, but now, after having lodged deep in my subconscious for so many years and noticing how our modern, suburban obsession with owning dogs is going exponential—I mean, have you not noticed all the fucking big-box pet stores springing up in malls like mushrooms in a rain forest, and seen the size of dog food sections in department and grocery stores—in Canadian Tire, even!—and all the dog-shit left in reeking piles just about everywhere? I am beginning to think John might have had a point. Though I still can't accept that I have a spirit-being—or a heart chakra that gives that hypothetical being access to my psyche!)

### Chapter Twenty One

Fuck, fuck, fuck!—what a long goddamn ridiculous sidetrack! I wish I would have had the willpower to have puts the brakes on it and saved you, Dear Reader, the mud-slog through a subject you surely could only manufacture "rice bowl" interest in—mindful or otherwise. But I will mindfully (LOL!) try to get back on the main line—if I can recognize when I so totally derailed from it by scrolling . . . . . . back . . . back . . . . .baaaaaaaaaaaack . . . . .(Fuck-a-freight-train!—but I hope all this derailing and ditch-rolling and back-tracking isn't as irritating and confusing for you, Dear Reader, as it is for me!) to that subject of John most decisively "stopping my world" that day he so rightfully and wisely gave me a long-overdue spanking and heaved me into that pile of shit, where, piece-of-shit that I was behaving like, I certainly belonged!

And I doubt I can even begin to explicate here just how dramatic a change that "stopping my world" had on my subsequent life. A change that I noticed immediately when Groucho picked me up expecting his second blow-job for the taxi service. As I was climbing into the van, he ejected whatever tape had just finished playing and jammed in Aretha's already-classic, I Never Loved A Man . . . album (he knew how much I loved Aretha and how it turned me into "sexacious nymph!"). And while the Queen of Soul sang Otis's "Respect" I proceeded to perfunctorily gave Groucho his promised blow-job, but whereas before, giving a guy an impromptu blow-job in his vehicle always felt cunt-warmingly naughty and rebellious, suddenly it felt meretriciously degrading and disgusting. And especially the smell and taste of him, (he was not always the most assiduous of bathers and I really used to get turned on by the smell and taste of other girls on him) , and every time Aretha sang out that word "respect," I didn't hear it in the context of the song, but as some kind of order being given to me by some deep, inner part of myself, a clear and very officious order to start respecting myself.

Needless to say, that was more than a little distracting, but I listlessly sucked and slobbered my way through the next couple of songs until "Soul Serenade" came on with its line about being free to fly away in it, which really seemed to resonate somewhere deep in my being. And a few songs after that, when she was singing "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man" and uttered that word, respect, in such a way that it seemed to Muhammad Ali-punch into my deepest being and holler at me like some ten-foot-tall drill sergeant. That had the effect of instantly stopping my sucking, lifting my mouth off his softening prick, and staring at it like I didn't even know what it was, while thinking to myself, "What the fuck am I doing?"

All of this unusual behavior was beyond strange for Groucho, who'd become used to—and very spoiled by!—my theretofore predicable "sexacious nymph/Wild Thing" behavior, that he lifted my head off his lap, and after turning down Aretha sailing on her angelic vocal chords through, "A Change Is Gonna Come," he very seriously asked me what the hell had happened to me at my uncle's farm to sap my usual enthusiasm for giving him a good "hoovering" as he liked to call those blow-jobs he loved so much. And why my hair was wet. And why I smelled so strange.

And when all I could do was shrug and say, "I'm not sure yet," and while "A Change Is Gonna Come" ended and the tape started up again with "Respect," I went back, with little enthusiasm—and that damn word respect jack-hammering into my consciousness!—to getting that ride-paying "hoovering" over with, he replied with, "Ya know, Wild Thing, when I saw yer uncle that day at your grandmother's place, I was soaring through the astral on acid as well as our little hash toke, and I swear he looked about ten feet tall and had an aura as big as that fuckin' room and as bright as a nuclear explosion. I think, ya know, that dude's no fuckin' cowboy but some kinda evil . . . magician . . . like the Beast, Crowley—that steals and collects peoples' souls for his power. . . . I get the feeling that when you fucked that dude . . . he like . . . like . . . ya know . . . stole yer fuckin' soul. That's why yer actin' like some kinda . . . some kinda zombie all of a sudden. Ya gotta stay away from him . . . an' figger a way ta get your soul back!"

And equally as much as I'd suddenly lost my enthusiasm for giving front-seat blow-jobs, I also suddenly found his "Wild Thing" nickname for me both irritating and degrading, but I still felt trapped in the river of the "old Rachel's" life and just shrugged and kept on sucking, but he found my lack of enthusiasm—or the idea that I'd just had my soul stolen by a powerful magician—so disturbing that his prick wilted in my mouth, and yanking it out, he tucked it away and while giving me a series of puzzled and disappointed looks, drove me home. Our "relationship" pretty much ended that day and for months I really missed his van, his drugs—and that stereo!

Well, up to that point I'd only read Castaneda's first book, The Teachings of Don Juan, and had not yet encountered—nor would I for many, many years—his Journey to Ixtlan, with his tale about the process of stopping the world, so I had no idea that John's totally unexpected and violent rejection of my always seductive "Wild Thing" charms, had stopped my world, and that in having my world stopped, that unnatural—and totally psychotic—bubble that I had been trapped in, and which had been floating me straight to an early, self-administered death, burst, and I was dropped back into a more normal, saner, safer reality-bubble. Dropped back into ordinary reality, as Castaneda called it, and consensus reality to transpersonal psychologists.

And once out of that psychotic bubble and back in the bubble of ordinary reality, my formerly so-pressing need to commit suicide vanished with it, and the very next morning I flushed all my hoard of sleeping and Valium pills down the toilet. (Only later giving myself a bit of an ass-kicking for doing that because realized I could have easily traded them in at the nearest "Hip-Mart" for a good bit of grass and hash—though it wasn't long before I realized that once my "crazy-bubble" had been burst by John "stopping my world," my interest in, and enjoyment of drugs, also diminished considerably!)

My depressions didn't completely go away but they were never again so black, heavy and suicide-inclining, and though in those days I knew nothing about Churchill's Black Dog, I had, while in Los Angeles, visited the La Brea Tar Pits and I didn't need much of an imagination to call those bouts of blackness either tar pits, or my La Breas, and think of them as black, sticky upwellings from deep within me that thickened life to the speed of chilled tar, stained to varying shades of black the very tapestry of my reality, and gobbled up all hope like a starving dog a dropped sausage, and which, when they so darkly swallowed me up, I had to fight against for all I was worth.

And much as that stopping of my world dramatically altered my general behavior enough to shock and dismay all the men, young and old, that I'd been so psychotically flinging my out-of-control, "Wild Thing" sexuality at, it still took two months before I gave in to the irresistible compulsion that I was constantly feeling to pay a humiliating and apologizing visit to Uncle John. Which I finally mustered the courage and the willpower to do—on foot up his road, after hitching to the highway turn-off!—one bright, sunny but chilly and windy October Sunday, my head, as it had been for weeks, full of a half dozen scenarios of how I was going to apologize to him, and my body clothed in a pair of jeans, a dark red, polo-necked wool sweater, and a suede jacket. And when with great trepidation (and an urge to run back down his road that I'd walked up with a heart that felt like a bag of sand and feet that felt like I was wearing diving boots) I knocked on his door, my face, I am sure, as red as a beet—and not the least from the cold wind I'd spent an hour walking against.

Once again, as on that first debacle of a visit, I'd swear he'd been expecting me, and but seconds after my knuckles had contacted his old wooden door and set the dog—I finally just remembered that one's name: Argos, named after Odysseus' old dog—barking, John, with a freshly-lit "rollie" hanging out of the right hand corner of his mouth, opened that door, and as a warm blast of coffee-and-cigarette smoke-scented air washed over me, took the cigarette from his mouth, briefly glanced over my attire as Argos ran up and sniffed my leg, and with a smile stood aside and said, "Like coffee?" Needless to say I just had to get that hurricane of apologies that had been cycling around in the Caribbean of my head for so long and onto the Jamaica of his ears, but barely had I spit, "Uncle John, I really want to apologize for . . . out from between my chilled lips before he shook his head and laughing said, "You don't have to apologize—just don't be that way and we'll get along fine." And of course, as this "Preface" has been showing—I wasn't, and we did.

Well,, needless to say (needless to say, I way over-use needless to say, don't I? Well, needless to say—fuck it!) from what I have told you about John so far, he was not someone that you went to visit to talk about the weather or share any local gossip (he was so disconnected from everyone I knew it would have been meaningless anyway) and not long did it take before I asked him the one red-hottest rivet of a question that had been rattling around in the bucket of my brain (if you are wondering where I am getting these unusual-for-me-metaphors from, I have no idea save to say that when I replaced my industrial meds with my favorite herb-med, aka grass/weed/Maryjane etc., that tends to have the effect of de-Spocking my dull, over-literal brain just enough to make such rabbits pop willy-nilly out of the meadow of my mind—or maybe it's that putative nagual, which maybe/perhaps/putatively has some occult agenda behind getting this abomination written in a half-assed interesting fashion!—since that first debacle of a visit, that being how he had known about what my father had done to me.

He didn't answer that question immediately but first rolled himself a cigarette, which he left unlit on the table while he got up, refilled our coffee cups with a brew I found so strong I had to add three teaspoons of sugar and a good bit of fresh-from-the-cow cream (up until that last couple of years of his life, John kept a succession of cows, each one with the name Bossy) to make it palatable, (he drank it straight and strong) and after sitting back down at the table and lighting up that cigarette, took a deep drag and after blowing the smoke off to the side, very seriously said, "I don't expect you to believe this, but when there is something that is important for me to know about, I get very vivid dreams about it. That night, after meeting you for the first time at that hideous family scrum that my infernal busy-body of a sister decreed—against my passionate requests—to be necessary, the spirits sent me a very lucid and disturbing dream—well, nightmare, is more like it!—of you as young girl being regularly . . . raped . . . by your father, which not only made for a very disturbing dream for me, but represented a reality that had, and still was, infinitely more bad for you. But worse, what also came clearly through that dream—more as a distinct knowing than an image—was the fact that your mother knew about it and did nothing, and that you were always aware of the fact your mother knew exactly what was going on, but didn't love you enough to stop it.

"I woke up from that dream knowing, not only who you really were, (in case you haven't been paying attention, or have forgotten, John considered me the reincarnation of his long-dead sister, Lisette—or Lise as he called her.) but that you had been horribly betrayed by both your parents and that is was a miracle you were still alive to meet me that day. . . . And like I said to you on your first visit here, if I could get away with it, I'd like to geld that monster by crushing his testicles between two rocks and then stockwhip him to death for what he did, but I don't want to spend my remaining years in a prison so I will let the Lords of Karma deal with it when the time comes . . . and in their own mysterious way."

Well, just as it is one hell of a crushing, wearying thing to carry a reeking load of shit around inside of your heart for years and years (when you are that age, years are really long!) and feel like you can never talk about it with anyone, it is also one hell of thing to have someone you barely know—but feel a strange, powerful and inexplicable sense of simpatico with—cut open your chest, rip out that load of shit, throw it on the floor and stomp on it like it is the monster it is. My reaction to his unexpected revelation was the equivalent of that scene in Lethal Weapon 2 where Mel Gibson's crazy, depressed, self-destructive character is in the office of those South African bad guys and he shoots the giant aquarium built into one of the walls, causing a monstrous wave of water and squirming, flapping fish to Niagara onto the floor.

A hell of a lot—but I don't think quite that much!—water came gushing out of my eyes, but infinitely more demonic, bottom-feeding fish came tumbling and thrashing out of my psyche as I sat in that chair weeping like a child for a good twenty minutes before I was able to get control of myself. In all that time John never made the slightest move to physically comfort me, leaving that up to Argos, who rested his head on my thigh and stared up a me with his big brown eyes as he whined along with my weeping, though John did go into the bathroom to get me a fresh roll of toilet paper—he wasn't a Kleenex kind of guy—that I pretty much used half of while he just sat there and stared out the window, drank his coffee, and smoked several of his "rollies," appearing in no way surprised nor embarrassed by my prolonged lachrymal outburst.

(If you are wondering how someone as willful—and knowledgeable about willpower as he was—could smoke, when I once asked him why he didn't quit, he just gave me a strange look and said, "I don't want to—I like smoking." Though in the early 80s, when John was also in his early eighties, he ended up in the hospital for a bad asthma attack and when the doctor advised him to quit smoking or continue to have such attacks—all of which had the power to kill him!—he immediately did—right from that instant on. I remember that time well because in my concern over his health I visited him quite often, and he sure was unusually irritable for several months. And fairly early on in The Fire you will read his hilarious description of how and why—in his youthful efforts to appear "manly"—he very intentionally got started with that nasty habit.)

If that stopping my world experience from two months before had made me feel like a dramatically different Rachel, that smashing of the "aquarium" within my psyche, and the twenty minutes my eyes spent imitating Niagara Falls, made me feel like a lighter, cleaner one. It had been as if I'd been a filthy troglodyte (Ha!—no wonder that Troggs' song had fit me so well!) living for years in a dark cave half filled with foul, rank garbage, who was suddenly dragged out of it and thrown into a tub for a long, hot, soapy wash.

Needless to say, I was in no shape to do anything after that and John drove me home in is truck, Argos on the seat between us with his head in my lap and his big brown eyes staring concernedly up at me the whole way. And that was unusual behavior for Argos because, as I was later to learn when driving with John in his truck, Argos either rode in the box, or when in the cab, like most big dogs—I think they must get bad cases of claustrophobia when stuck in a vehicle—absolutely had to sit snug against the door with his head, or at least his nose, depending on the weather, stuck out the window.

Interestingly, all that could come out of my mouth during that ride home was another red-hot rivet of a question that had been heating up in my brain-forge from the moment I'd regained a semblance of control of myself in his kitchen, a question of no small importance to a Catholic who has thrown all spirituality out with the filthy black bathwater that is the Catholic Church, it's Blakean, "Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy" God, and its crushing and enslaving fascist politics, and I said, "Do you really believe spirits exist, Uncle John."

I didn't then, and I still today, really don't, have any idea what a world of spirits could actually be, but to that question John just laughed and replied, "I don't believe a "world of spirits" exists, I know that it exists. That spirits exist!" Then gripping the steering wheel tightly and giving it a shake, he added, "Know it with the same certainty I know this steering wheel exists when I am driving around a curve at too high a speed and that it is fundamentally important to my staying on the road and making it around that curve ."

And for that short, cathartic visit, I left it at that, though rarely ever after that did we spend time together without that subject inevitably coming up, for with John, who essentially—though incomprehensibly in our western, rational, material, scientific culture—was a shaman, there was nothing in his reality that could be isolated from the realm of spirits. Just as, as he often expressed in his favorite metaphor for it, "There was nothing in a loaf of bread that could be isolated from the yeast that had magically transformed a small lump flour and water—that, on its own, would only bake into a tooth-cracking brick—into a light and delicious loaf of the staff of life."

He often stressed (I originally began this paragraph with, Needless to say, but, needless to say, I have been way overusing that ridiculous phrase, so I deleted it!) that his world of spirits, and its life-leavening powers, (he called the world of Spirit and spirits, the leaven of Man) had as much to do the with the world of institutional religion as the flight of a falcon with the waddling of an oven-fattened goose. John also liked to say there is was a whole lot of the fat, oven-ready goose in people who allowed themselves to be conned into believing they needed an institutional religion and its fascist dogma to connect them with that Mystery out of which every atom of the universe was made. "It's like," he'd chuckling say, "Some really clever con artist of a Moby Dick selling Mama Whales swimming lessons for their babies!"

Yikes, I am really out of control here, but as the Brits say, In for a penny, in for a pound! . . . (or definitely more apropos, as all Canucks should say, in for a penny, in for a loon . . . oops, we don't have pennies anymore, so, in for a nickel, in for a loon—until the nickels follow the pennies into mint-heaven!) so, apropos to the preceding paragraph is this anecdote I just have to relate. One of the things John and I very quickly ended up doing was taking long horseback rides along a network of trails and roads in the area (once I learned how to ride, and after having asked him, very early on in my visits to him, why he had bought two horses, to which he replied, "To go riding with you, of course. . . .Though it's also not very fair to any horse to keep it isolated from its own kind.") and it very quickly became obvious that he had very specific spots he liked to stop at, get off his horse—even though he was obviously not the least bit saddle sore, as I always was at first!—and spend some time sitting in silence at. Often at those spots, he would dig out of his saddlebag the battered old metal thermos of coffee and two of those blue-speckled, enameled, metal "campfire mugs" he always brought along, and after filling those mugs with his "strange brew," we'd sit there in silence and drink the coffee. And when, at one of those "coffer breaks" I asked him what we were doing, he noncommittally said, "We are stopping for a visit with my friends."

Now these weren't Tim Hortons' full of retired and bored old farts getting away from their nagging wives for an hour to indulge in some overly-loud and manly bull-and-bluster, but silent and deserted spots that were the perfect antithesis of any coffee shop. When I anxiously queried him on just what the hell he was talking about, he said what I feared most—that he was stopping to visit the nature spirits that he'd made friends with at these spots. He said this with such a calm and confident seriousness that I knew he was neither joking nor having a psychotic episode, and when I almost shouted back, "YOU CAN'T BE SERIOUS!" he just laughed and said, "Totally serious. The natural world is full of nature spirits and if you stop at the same spots—even just for a few times—and talk to them, you can make friends with them and every time you are out for a ride—or walk, or whatever—they will be waiting for your visit and they will make it very companionable and comforting to be at that spot."

My reaction to that was to frown, grimace, and roll my eyes, which caused him to grin and stop talking for a moment, take a sip of his coffee, then go on, "Well, that's not always true. There's a spot down the river from here where about twenty giant, old-stand pines are growing amidst some giant boulders and which got left alone by the loggers at the turn of the century . . . ." And with that he pointed off to his right where the tops of a large clump of giant white pines—that I'd seen many times and even used as a location marker, but never really truly fathomed the oddity of them being there—towered above the lower scrum of maples, poplars, birches, balsams and jack-pines.

"One hot summer day I intentionally fought my way through the underbrush and mosquitoes to get to that grove, knowing that those trees would provide a cool, shaded, and bug-free place to sit and enjoy the river. And that such an isolated spot would have lots of nature spirits to visit with. Well, even as I approached that grove I was struck by the strange silence of it. I mean, even on the hottest of summer afternoon, the birds along the bank of this river are involved in some sort of activity and always making some sort of noise. Then I don't think I was four steps into the lovely open space created by those giant trees when I suddenly felt really cold . . . like I'd walked out of a mid-summer day into a late-fall one! . . . And worse, I felt more fearfully uncomfortable than I'd ever felt in my life. I instantly felt like I'd intruded into what I can only describe as . . . as a very hostile place . . . and I could clearly sense I was surrounded by a throng of very ancient, powerful and hostile spirits that very passionately did not want me in their grove of trees.

"Even though one of the things that had made that day so oppressively hot was the fact not even the slightest of cooling breezes had been blowing, a ferocious wind abruptly came blasting through that grove and sent my hat sailing off my head and rolling along the thick carpet of pine needles between the trees. And as fast as I made a step to run after it, I tripped onto my face like I'd just had a big foot stuck in my way, and while struggling to get up with what felt like the weight of a grizzly bear on my back, I heard—not with my ears, but right in the center of my head—a chorus of very nasty voices shout, 'GET OUT OF HERE AND NEVER COME BACK—OR-WE-WILL-KILL-YOU!'

"That weight immediately came off my back and as fast as it did, I both gasped for breath and jumped to my feet and started to go after my hat, but I felt a very definite shove that sent me staggering back in the direction I'd come, followed by a loud, 'GET OUT!—NOW!' I felt like I'd stumbled into the midst of a hideout used by a gang of very nasty and powerful outlaws, and to say I beat-feet out of there is an understatement. The very idea of screaming like a scared child and running through thick bush like a deer before a fire is ludicrous, but I screamed my fool head off and ran for what I was sure was my life for a good ways through the bush that day and I was glad to trade all the scratches and scrapes—and my hat!—for the safety of being as far away from that hostile place and those hostile . . . beings as I could get."

And there he paused for an unnerving long time as he was obviously trying hard to think about something, before finally saying, "Actually . . . I am being nagged by a distant memory of having a similar experience many, many years ago. . . . But I don't remember the beings being quite so . . . hostile!. Powerful, yes . . . and very interested in . . . Hmmmm . . . but not hostile like in that grove . . ."(In The Fire, John describes quite vividly what might have been the incident, he had been alluding to that day, which took place when he was on an interrupted train trip to his army training immediately after running away from home, and he and a friend killed the time by taking a walk in a nearby forest, with that incident having a powerful sexual element to it that I think he began to describe, but which I am now sure he quickly decided was a little too personal to share with me.)

After another pause during which he took off his Stetson and scratched his head, then used it to shoo away a horsefly, he carefully set that beloved thing back in place and went on, " I had more than my share of dangerous and terrifying experiences during both wars, but during none of them did I feel the absolute and horrifying . . . terror . . .that I felt in that grove of trees. During the wars, the terror and fear always seemed to come from a shallow, controllable part of my psyche, but the terror I felt in that grove over there was so profound and came from so deep within me that my will was totally impotent in its efforts to resist it.

"For a few seconds there I felt like I'd fallen in a hole that dropped me straight out of this relatively safe little . . . world . . . safe little reality . . .and into one that was infinitely bigger . . . and infinitely more dangerous! I felt like I was falling straight into a hell infinitely more . . . hellish . . than anything those infernal priests of Constantine's Abomination prattle on about. I also felt that had I gone too far into it, there would have been no escaping it. I'd have ended up like a saber-tooth tiger trapped forever in a tar pit.

"I am sure that grove still stands there today as untouched as it is because the loggers who went in there eighty or so years ago to chop it down felt the same thing that I did and had no choice but beat-feet the hell out of there and never go back! To this day I'd rather face a twelve-hour Hun artillery barrage than go anywhere near that grove."

Needless to say, that story itself scared me so much I almost pissed myself, but what scared me most was the look on John's face as he told it: I'd never before—or again—saw it look so pale and strained and downright—terrified!

### Chapter Twenty Two

I think I can honestly say the impact on me of John's story about those nasty, hostile spirits in that grove—and the look on his face!—won't describe my inner reaction to those words, which was on par with my first rape by my father. I guess you could call it John's first real rape of my worldview, though I can't say his intentions in doing that were anywhere near as vile as my father's, for in essence, as far as he was concerned, he was a shaman in an intimate relationship with the world of Spirit and its many spirits, and if I was going to have any sort of meaningful and lasting relationship with him, I was going to have to face and accept that.

And I quickly realized, as I got to know him, that for the most part he much preferred the company of his dog and all those—benevolent!—nature spirits to any human company, and that he was making quite an exception in being so willing to spend time with me. And with that realization came the insight that if I wanted to have a relationship with him, it was going to be on his terms and in the big "corral" of his worldview and not in the little "rabbit pen" of mine.

And fortunately, much as we ended up spending a lot of time riding and hiking along those trails in and around it farm, he was deadly serious about his fear of that grove and made no effort to take me anywhere near it. Ironically, up until he told me that story I'd had the sense that John feared absolutely nothing, and the fact that he so profoundly feared whatever was in that grove of trees told me there had to be some truth, however bizarre and Scully-unbelievable it was, to that story. And though he didn't take me to that mysterious and hostile grove, he didn't exactly make things totally easy on my poor, fragile, Scully-worldview, for he often took me to an easily accessible spot by the river where a giant, lichen-covered boulder—one of those erratics, as they are called by geologists, carried from afar and dropped there by a retreating glacier—with several step-like flat areas at its top, and which ponderously rested in a giant patch of blueberry bushes. (Yup, the very spot where, as I described earlier, he went to die!)

After dismounting, he walked up to that rock and giving it an affectionate pat, said a loud "Hello, Ancient Friend," first to it, then another "Hello, good friends," to the nature spirits he seemed to sense/assume/know were present around it, after which he turned, pointed to me and with absolute seriousness said, "This is my niece and good friend, Rachel—she is way too rational to be capable of believing a rock can be alive or that nature spirits exist, so I won't try to get her to say hello, but she's still a good person . . . with a real big spirit-being . . . and I ask you to be patient and nice with her."

After saying that, and while still patting the lichen-layer on that silent monster of a boulder, he walked around to the back of it, which, unlike the sheer face of the front of it, had some crude "steps" that made it amenable to climbing, and after climbing on top of it, helped me do the same, whereupon he immediately took out his tobacco pouch, and instead of rolling a cigarette, sprinkled the tobacco all around the top of the rock while muttering words I could not make out, after which he brushed some twigs, dirt and dead leaves from one of the natural steps most serendipitously existing on the side facing the river, then sat down on what was obviously a perfect, and very old—if somewhat hard—bench, and indicating I should sit beside him, which I did, proceeded, very spookily and disturbingly, like Don Juan talking to Castaneda out in the Mexican desert, to tell me that the rock was a place of real power and was a favorite of the nature spirits. (He made a comment about Stonehenge and Carnac and how the ancient "stone-wizards" had gone through a lot of trouble to put huge boulders in the ground to tap telluric energies, while the more than mile-high ancient glacier that had once covered this area had done the same thing with this huge boulder—with no effort at all.)

He said the first time he came across it he climbed up on it to have a smoke and watch a kingfisher do its very efficient fishing on the other side of the river. He said that he very quickly felt mildly uncomfortable, like he was being subjected to controlled hostility and instantly knew he was in the presence of nature spirits—though not spirits of the same dark power and ball-shriveling hostility of those in that grove of pines—who didn't like him being there. But much as they didn't like him being there, he felt no sense of being threatened like he had been in that grove of pines, so he mentally asked them why they were hostile to his being there, and their first response (Hey, Dear Rational Reader, you don't have to believe this shit—I am just relating what he told me!) was to express surprise that he knew they were there, and when he said he could feel their presence, he then sensed that they were all jumping and dancing around him and shouting out their surprise and elation that a stupid, white-skinned two-legged could sense their presence. (John said he surmised from that statement that the brown-skinned two-leggeds—the Indians—always knew they were there.)

They then said they wouldn't mind him visiting their special spot as long as he didn't smoke cigarettes there because everything about smoking cigarettes all the time was bad and it attracted nasty, hungry ghost-spirits they didn't like having around. They also said they liked it when human beings gave them gifts, their favorite being unburned tobacco, like the nice brown-skinned two-leggeds used to give them for many, many years before the nasty white-skinned two-leggeds drove them all away.

I don't think I need to say that I was swan-diving into a major freak-out at this point, and when John held out his open tobacco pouch to me and told me I should say hello to them and sprinkle a pinch of tobacco around for them, I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up as I was sure there was way too many invisible entities clustering way too close around me. Forthwith letting out as loud a scream as my vocal chords could manage, I butt-slid down the damp moss on the steep, north side of that rock, and not even bothering to get on my horse, went running down the trail in the direction of John's house.

It didn't take him long to catch up to me with my horse, (a beautiful roan mare named Molly, and yup!—the same mare whose piss I'd found so gross when John had so rightfully and wisely heaved me into that manure pile, she carrying at that time, a lovely, frisky, black colt named Jet that was back at the farm anxiously, and surely hungrily, awaiting his mother's return) and looking down at me as I breathlessly, and surely white-faced, stared up at him, he smiling said, "There is nothing to be afraid of with nature spirits as long as you show them some respect. They can be the greatest of friends."

And after waiting for me to remount Molly and settle my now uncomfortably moss-wet butt into the saddle, he chuckled and added, "Though sometimes some of them can be a bit of a nuisance. Sometimes if I got to a really wild spot when I am picking blueberries, where the nature spirits aren't familiar with human beings, one or two of them will follow me around and even attach themselves me . . . to my aura, I guess. I think they like the energy we give off—and I will end up inadvertently taking them home. I only really know they are there when I am falling asleep and they give me very disturbed, almost nightmarish dreams, but usually after one night they disconnect and go home. . . . Or someplace. Though once I had one that bothered me so much for three nights running that I sensed it didn't know how to get back home and it really missed its companions. So I had no choice but to go back to the spot where I figured I must have picked it up so it could get home. When I got there it must have been the spot because on getting there I practically heard it shout, 'Thank you.' And its friends dancing around me with unrestrained happiness. Now when I leave such places I stop to inform them I am leaving and that they should get off me.

"Though in truth, I can't say all of them are completely harmless—I have met some out in the wilderness that were downright lascivious and which attacked me right in my . . . groin . . . which made me think I'd stumbled into a grove in a forest in Ancient Rome or Greece and was being dragged into an orgy by a horde of nymphs or fauns or satyrs or whatever . . . which made me realize those ancient, so-called Pagan peoples sure weren't making all that stuff in their literature up—they experienced it! It was an integral part of their reality!"

"And I have met others while berry picking that exuded enough territorial hostility—though nothing like in that nasty grove of pines—that I'd have no choice but take off and pick elsewhere—even if that spot was the best one of the day! It's hard to know exactly what was going on. Maybe they just didn't like human beings or maybe it was because I had blundered into their domain without first sprinkling a bit of tobacco to show my respect and acknowledge that I was an intruder. Back in the really old, before-the-white-man-days, Indians kids were trained from birth all about spirits and how to sense when they were near and show proper respect to them, which they usually did with all kinds of gifts—obviously not of tobacco this far north because it doesn't naturally grow here. . . . Though they very well could have traded for it with Indians from down south.

"Unfortunately I was not born into a spiritually wise and intelligent culture like those Indians were, but into a crass, stupid, materialistic, white one dominated by Constantine's Imperial Abomination, which is about as spiritual as that granite boulder back there is light and soft, and where the act of childishly believing in ancient, Middle Eastern fairy tales so silly an intelligent child could not believe them to be true, is considered true spirituality, so though I was taught as a kid how to go to a church so I could try to believe in, and kneel down and like a pathetic and abject slave, pray to, the Almighty God of our Universe who knew every little sin every human being committed and who the priest and my mother said lived there, but nothing about it all made the tiniest bit of sense, or felt even a little bit 'spiritual'—not that I knew what 'spiritual' was supposed to feel like!—and so at a very deep, 'thoughtless' level I found it all nonsense and hated going to that church.

"But even as a very young child, as soon as I got anywhere near the forest surrounding our farm, I felt like I was in a very spiritual place, regardless that at that time I had not an inkling of what the word meant. I think I even had the sense that 'Almighty God' was everywhere in that forest—except it seem to be a very different 'Almighty God' than the one my mother constantly prayed to and which the Abomination's priest was always blathering on about.

"So I have had to learn by trail-and-error how to honor a world of Spirit . . . and its many spirits . . . that I am a hundred percent certain does exist because I can experience Spirit directly and sense the presence of spirits and communicate with them——so I just I sprinkle a lot of tobacco around now whenever I go berry picking. Or if I have no tobacco with me, I give them part of my lunch, and if I don't have that, I just give them a Hindu Namaste and a reverent bow, which seems to work."

To save me the trouble of asking him what a Namaste was, he put his palms together in that traditional, "the spirit in me recognizes the spirit in you" greeting, but due to my George Harrison wannabe friend, Harpo, I was more than familiar with the gesture of the Namaste greeting, if not the name, which, during our brief relationship, he gave me constantly, and which, cult-trained, Inquisitor-fearing Catholic girl that I was, I considered something vilely pagan—or heathenish!—and never felt comfortable receiving and even less, giving.

Then, after saying nothing for about five minutes, he said, "You know, it's sure strange how I can talk to you—and just about every other 'white-faced two-legged' around here—about nature spirits, and to you—and to them—it is like I am talking about Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, yet if I talk to just about any Indian about them, their only surprise is that I, as a Whiteface, is capable of believing they exist. One of the most wonderful places I have ever visited was the reservations of the Hopi and the Navajo down in the Southwest. I loved it so much there I wanted to move there to spend the rest of my life, but the spirits were adamant that I come here. Many of the Hopi and the Navajo still follow the old ways and that whole area just shimmers with spiritual energy and spiritual presences.

"Years ago, when I made a camping trip south of the 'Medicine Line' . . . to the Navajo reservation . . . and to a place called Monument Valley—damn, but it is so beautiful . . . and holy . . . there that I want to weep just thinking about it—I was able to witness their pollen-sprinkling, greet-the-dawn ceremony and it was incredibly moving. I'd swear that a whole host of spirits show up each morning to witness it—along with busloads of white tourists who don't have a clue what it's really all about but go so they can then do what all tourists do: take some pictures so they can rush back home and show-and-tell them to a lot of friends who couldn't give a shit that they have been there—or have a clue what the place is really all about.

(I can but chuckle writing that, thinking back to when those pics were taken on rolls of film that were only developed and printed and shown to friends after the trip, while now, most of the pics would be fuckin' selfies with the scenery in the background that would are instantly—and narcissistically!—Facebooked or Instagrammed or Whatthefuckever'd to hundreds of equally couldn't-give-a-shit "friends.")

"I really loved the Hopi reservation though. The Hopi live pretty much on a reservation of their own in the center of the Navajo reservation—don't ask me how that came about!—up on three mesas that at first glance are so hot, dry and barren you think you are in a vestibule of hell, but then when you spend a bit of time there, it is so alive with Spirit, and spirits, you know it is Heaven's living room. I attended a Hopi Kachina dance and ceremony at a little village called Walpi, and believe me, when those Hopi men dress up like their Kachinas, which are how they see the spirits that rule their lives, and do their dance, those spirits they are depicting really are there. Most of the tourists that go to these dances think it is just all a lot of empty ritual, like going to mass and trying to force yourself to believe Jesus Christ is really in the bread and wine, but to those Hopi—and to me too, because I could sense their presence—those spirits are as real as these horses we are riding. More real, actually, because those spirits exist in a realm that is eternal and have been on this planet a hell of a lot longer than we human beings have—and will continue to be long after we are gone."

And while my poor rational mind shook in its foundations like San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake, and my soul writhed and squirmed like a toddler trying to escape the perfume-reeking embrace and slobbery, lip-sticked kisses of some gushing old aunt, John rode on in thoughtful silence for a good bit before finally saying, "It's a funny thing, you know. I've been to the so-called Holy Land that we Whitefaces believe all kinds of stupendous and holy and spiritual stuff happened in the past, and it felt to me about as spiritual and holy as a filthy washroom of a highway gas station, while those Navajo and Hopi reservations felt incredibly . . . clean. Clean and spiritual and infinitely holy! . . .Whatever that actually means. Though I am glad the mindless masses don't know that or those truly holy places be over-run and utterly despoiled with trampling herds of god-crazed pilgrims looking for easy salvation that would suck all the spiritual, all the holy out of them and turn them into wastelands."

I think it might have been at that time that I asked John what the word "holy" really meant to him, and after thinking about that a moment, he said, "I guess it is the way a lower level of consciousness always perceives a higher level. Kind of like the way a dim light would perceive a brighter one. But don't quote me on that because the only thing that I can understand about the nature of consciousness and its many levels, is that only the absolute highest levels can understand it—with the lower levels only able to understand levels that are lower, but never any that are higher, and certainly not Consciousness itself—and though my level of consciousness is higher than that of the average Walmart shopper, that's like saying the instep of my boot is higher than its sole! (To John, the ultimate insult he could throw at someone was to call them a Walmart-shopper, a place he loathed because, as he often said, "Too damn often people don't go there to buy what they need, but just to shop—which is to indulge in the addiction of mindlessly buying things for the sake of buying things and not because they need them!" Though of course, if he was alive today, he'd change that insult to go with the current political flow south of the "Medicine Line" and consider the ultimate insult to throw at them would be to called them "mindless MAGA-hat wearing morons"—or MAGA-hatters for short. Not, of course, that most of those MAGA-hatters aren't inveterate, shop-till-they-drop, Walmart shoppers!)

I hadn't been saying much on that ride, but I did respond to that assertion with, "But Uncle John, all those people that go to the Holy Land . . . and especially Jerusalem . . .can't be wrong when they say they feel it is a very holy place. They can't just be imagining it! . . . Can they?" His response to that was to both expel a gob of spit, and then spit-out, "Holy my ass! Never underestimate the power of suggestion . . . and cult conditioning when it comes to matters like that! If you grew up being taught that the "Holy Land" is the holiest place on Earth, then that is exactly how you are going to convince yourself you are perceiving it if you go there.

"Hell, if people all over the world had been taught that Los Angeles truly was a 'city of angels' and a place so holy that driving its freeways at rush hour could induce mystical experiences and visions of God—and hosts of angeles!—and its smog could cure cancer, half the world would be going there as pilgrims and some would be having mystical experiences and seeing God—and hosts of angeles!—on the freeways. And the Virgin Mary in swirls of smog! With others getting their cancers cured by breathing in that smog. And be screaming their fool heads off about it on some mindless afternoon TV show!

"If that so-called "Holy Land" was truly a spiritual and holy place, would there be so much contention and war there? Hell, all three monotheistic faiths call it their holy center, yet each is willing to shoot, stab, slice, dice and blow the other to bits—even nuke the whole area if they have to!—in order to be king-shit of it. Only a powerful and pervasive presence of evil could create that much hostility, contention, and violence. There's been so much hatred and war and killing in that land for so long the whole area is psychically saturated with active malice.

"I am a hundred percent certain most pilgrims just feel it is holy because they have convinced themselves it has to be holy because all the damn fairy tales they have been told for so long say it is! I've been in truly holy places and the last thing you feel in them is an inclination to violence. You can walk into such places feeling no end of spiritual dis-ease . . . feeling inside like you are one big poison ivy rash . . . and within no time at all, it's like a bucket of calamine lotion has been rubbed into your psyche . . . into your spirit-being. And I have been in dark and diabolical places—mostly bars!—where you can walk into them feeling as good as a newborn baby getting its first nipple full of Mama's warm milk, and within minutes you are feeling enough paranoia and rage to want to kill your best friend. Or your Mama! After devouring her teat!

"And that is what that so-called Holy Land felt like to me! Of course, I went there as a curious visitor, not a religion-and-faith-addled pilgrim, so you have to take that into account. But you don't have to take my word for any of this—the proof of what I am saying is amply and constantly displayed in the hateful, paranoid and violent 'pudding' constantly being cooked in the blackened cauldron of that cursed place and gore-splashed all over the news everyday!"

Much as I never thought much about it, I'd have to have been living on Pluto not to have known about all the violence endemic to the Middle East, it first breaking into my self-centered, sex-obsessed reality with the onset of that Six Day War between Israel and the Arab nations in the summer of '67, which, "out-of-it" as I mostly was that "Summer of Sex and Drugs," that war came to my attention because I'd been spending a couple of great, lubricious days with a Jewish fellow named Aaron, whose interest in me and sex pretty much vanished the instant that damn war started and he got totally obsessed with it, which though it only lasted six days, was too long for me, so I split from Aaron and his martial obsession and found someone more inguinally more interesting to be with.

And of course, having grown up in the cesspit of Roman Catholic hypocrisy and the dark, violent and uber-righteous tales of the "Christian" Crusades—you know, Richard the Lionheart and all that righteous Christian blah, blah, blah, blah-blahlony, I had no problem seeing John's POV that there was something dark and violently attractive about Jerusalem, that so-called "place of peace," which seemed to appeal to "the dark side of the Force" in so many religious fanatics of all three monotheistic faiths, and which the mindless hordes of faithful, tourists/pilgrims might sense as a simpatico vibration while visiting it, which of course would confirm for them their passionately preconceived belief that it truly was a holy place.

Fuck-a-real-bad-idea!—but in taking a quick cruise through my favorite, simpatico-when-I-am-walkabout-from-the-Meds-Rez. conspiracy-theory websites, I just recently came across something truly deranged about some Jewish group calling itself The Temple Institute that wants to tear down the Muslims' precious and revered Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem in order to rebuild the ancient Jewish temple—with period garments and animal sacrifice!—in order to fulfill some crazed, end-of-the-world Biblical prophecy found in the gospel of Matthew. Except the gospel of Matthew is part of the New Testament, a whole lot of Christian non-shit (as John used to call such stuff that was so nonsensical even the word nonsense was too ineffectual at describing it!) that has nothing to do with the Jews, most of whom have as much use for anything "Christian Biblical" as they have for the Christian bullshit that the powerless and crucified Jesus Christ, was their long awaited Messiah, given that to them, their notion of "the Messiah" was that he was to be a powerful temporal King who was going to bring back the glory days of David and Solomon. Or what-the-fuck-ever! So go fuckin' figger! And fuckin' figger with your fingers crossed because if that deranged, Temple Institute-shit happens, the Western world will see a worldwide Jihad that will make 9/11 look like some toddler knocking over a couple of towers her older brother had just finished building out of wooden blocks!

In fact, that brings back a memory of John, in another conversation about the psychological reality that our point of view, and our worldview, dictates much of our reality for us, for which he used the apt metaphor of the mole, which, if its underground warren is suddenly dug up and it was abruptly exposed to sunlight, would have no choice but to "see" that sunlight as not only evil, but dangerous and frightening, for it was only in its familiar, ever-dark tunnels that it could feel comfortable and safe. To the mole the darkness of that dark world, compared to the light, would truly feel "holy."

And since he knew I was a Star Wars fan (Fuck-Luke's-light-saber!—I waited on tenterhooks for so long for The Last Jedi to come to come out on DVD so I could watch it on the comfort of my couch because my hippo-ass doesn't fit comfortably in theatre seats, and I might as well have saved myself the thirty bucks I spent on the damn thing because it was the worst Star War movie ever—worse even than Return of the Jedi with those stupid, please-the-five-year-olds, Ewok-teddy bears in it!) John said it was like in that great, archetypal story, (he described it as "that way too human story taking place in a galaxy-not-nearly-far-enough-away!") where, as far as any members and supporters of the Empire were concerned, the Emperor was the equivalent of God, and Darth Vader of Jesus Christ. It's all POV! (Kinda like all those mindless, MAGA-hatters who attend Mad King Donald's "mini-Nuremburg rallies" all of whom swoon and scream and chant and rant like Nazis at Hitler's rallies, all totally convinced he is either a modern day Hitler who has come, not only to again make America this world's "Biggest Bully On The Block" (which, like Groucho so long ago, I am sure it has never stopped being!), to save them from all their paranoidly perceived—and always black, brown or yellow enemies, and assuage their paranoidly perceived grievances against their wealthy exploiters and oppressors, (like it isn't as obvious as a boil on Melania's perfect nose that their Donald Dearest is one of those wealthy exploiters and oppressors!), or better yet—as Jesus "the Donald" Christ, returned, as promised in their precious Bible, to save their wretched, Walmart souls!)

Though hey, in swooping back to that Star Wars story and its archetypes that I was so surprised John actually liked, he compared that POV of supporters of the Empire who saw the Emperor and Vader in a supremely positive light, to that pernicious order of priests knows as Jesuits, who call themselves "soldiers of God!" And rarely did John allow his voice to drip with the acid of sarcasm like it did whenever he talked about that bunch, more than once saying, "How do you reconcile an elite group of Christian clergy, supposedly teachers of the wisdom of Jesus Christ who is often known as the "Prince of Peace," calling themselves 'soldiers of God!' And with these oxymoronic—and normally moronic!—'soldiers of God' behaving like precursors of the Nazi Storm Troopers trained to fight for the their Fuhrer, the 'Prince of Peace' while defending that bucket of dog-vomit of Catholic dogma and the Pope's political hegemony against the ravening hordes of apostate Protestants. Those Jesuit 'soldiers of God' have the reputation of being the smartest and most rational of all Constantine's Imperial Abomination's orders of priests, yet even with all their purported intelligence and reasoning powers, they can't see the obvious-as-a-billboard-in-the-middle-of-a-highway hypocrisy inherent in all that they are!"

So okay, POV is an important, even a valid issue, to always take into consideration in any discussion of those two, pin-pulled, and ever-ready-to-explode grenades of Middle Eastern politics and religion—not that they, as John always asserted, are ever separate, or can be separated!—but sometimes you truly had to take a close look at "the proof that was in the eating of the pudding" of any POV, not of how "true" it objectively might be, because, when it comes to the irrational, emotion-fueled worlds of religion and politics, all POVs are equally true—from any holders POV. With the proof-that-is-in-the-eating-of-the-pudding being how humanly salutary it proves to be. (I think Kant really gets into this kind of shit but I'm not smart enough to get into genius Kant's over-intellectual, brain-straining shit!)

And the proof of the absolute insalutariness (if that's not a real word—just pretend it is!) of that POV was inherent, John grimacing said, "In the bitter, hateful, paranoid, violent and utterly poisonous 'pudding' constantly being cooked in the blackened cauldron of that cursed and anything-but-holy land, where rarely a day goes by when its violence isn't in the news as passionately indignant Mohammedans have killed 'infidel' Christians, and passionately righteous Christians have killed 'infidel' Mohammedans—all to please Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy, that 'super-powerful tribal deity' most imaginatively conceived by of a bunch of ancient Semitic tribesmen who, if they were around today we'd dismiss as ignorant and stinking savages! And as to that 'super-powerful, Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy tribal deity,' if 'he' truly was behind all these homicidal—even genocidal—atrocities, could only be some sort 'celestial' monster every bit as psychopathically insane as the homicidal psychopaths perpetrating those deeds in 'his' name."

So okay, I could, with reluctance accept that the "Holy Land" might be "holy" in name and idea only, thus rendering it and just another irrational religious delusion, however many millions partook—often as murderously as passionately—in that delusion, (Like Pirsig wrote in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called an insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion, it is called a religion.) but what I did have a problem with that John would say things like that as if he was some kind of expert on a subject that even the real and famous experts on the subject could get no real handle on.

And when I'd try to inject my worthless, hundred-Monopoly-money-bucks-worth into the "conversation" and task him with that, he'd just let out a whoop of a laugh and say, "Christ, Rache—I'm just an isolated old ex-cowboy living out my years on this farm and blowing my halitosis through my Stetson! I can spout off my opinions about any damn subject I want because I'm no well-known expert on any of these subjects and nobody but you will ever hear what I say. And I know you sure don't give enough of a damn to take this stuff-and-nonsense seriously enough to keep it in your head longer than it takes you to drive home!

"I am an old man who has a lot more time on his hands than good sense in his thick skull, so I spend a lot of that too-much-time thinking, as best as this manure pile in my thick skull allows me to, about these things to amuse myself, and when I am with you, I express those very inexpert thoughts just to give us something to talk about—and of course, to provoke you to think a little about these big things for awhile instead of your little personal problems. I mean, hell, you're not a reporter for a major newspaper or magazine who is going to quote me on these issues, so everything I say will stay between you and me. And of course, good ol' Argos, here!"

"And I am so sure Argos finds this stuff just as boring as you do so I have no fears about him ever taking the trouble to bark it out to Selene when she is full—who I am sure would find it all pathetically and humanly quaint and amusing, even if he did!"

That, of course, got a thoughtful laugh out of me as I realized that if I wanted to spend time in his warm, calming, enthralling and security-inducing company, I had to talk about all this stuff that interested him, because if I talked about what interested me at that time, it surely would only have been my trivial personal problems, most of which had to do either with the trials and tribulations of being—at that time . . . I think (believe me, Dear Reader, it's been a good number of years and my "loonar-mind" has had more than its share of brain-lightning attacks during those years, so I'm never a hundred percent certain under what situation we talked about this stuff!) an unhappily married mother of two with a husband who was as much of a husband and father as a mosquito is a 747!—and with my mother and her malicious and deprecating interference in my life, especially her criticisms of how I was raising—though as far as she was concerned, mostly not raising!—her precious, Catholic grandchildren, a subject that would have been extremely irritating and boring to him for he had as much use for my mother as for a boil on his horse-riding ass, (exactly what she always was to me!) and which would have exhausted itself very rapidly. Though to be sure, at that time, I had not even the slightest of an inkling that someday I would be quoting him—though hardly, Dear Reader-or-two—to any audience the size of any major newspaper or magazine! (Though to be sure, most of this may well be a misquoting of him! FAKE NEWS, as Mad King Donald would Tweet! And of which John would not give a flea-fart!)

And of course, too, on a personal, and typically me-trivial subject, when he'd say things like that—about the Middle East, and other places he'd visited—I was always shocked that he'd done so much traveling, and it irritated me that he'd never talk about those obviously educating and mind-expanding travels and always kept up the pretension of being just a big, simple, hick-cowboy who wanted nothing more than to ride around his farm on a horse all day. Hell, in that respect he was like a big, blue-jeaned, smart-as-a-whip-"Columbo-cowboy" always pretending to be a dumb-as-a-MAGA-hat-wearing-moron (henceforth, if the need arises, I'll just call them MAGA-hatters and you can take the moron part for granted!) while his thoughts galloped half a mile ahead of those of everyone else.

Much of the later stuff in Book Two of The Fire is full of great descriptions of those travels, but if you read Book One and develop a keen interest in John's very early life, don't get too excited about what is in the far reaches of Book Two because I'll bet this farm on the fact that I'll surely "buy the farm" before I am able to get that out into cyberspace. I mean, I can't imagine that my waaaaaaaaay overworked and under-exercised "ticker" is going to be keep this old, lard-layered hippo-body going much longer, which of course, is one of my rationalizations for allowing me to take my foot off the brakes, put the "pedal to the metal," and send this out-of-control, Cor-azy-vette of "Preface" zooming off "in all directions" as I am so outrageously doing, by filling it with so many utterly disconnected anecdotes about John—and so many of his truly "far-out" ideas—all of which I'd not initially planned to talk about at all because he expresses—and explicates—most of them in that Book Two. And does so much more clearly than I have been able to present them in this "Abominable Preface" that doesn't need a $tyle-Nazi, but a whole Wehrmacht of them!

HA!—that brings to mind something very apropos that actually relates to both to John and this subject of death-disturbing writing, and that is the final two novels by the Brit novelist Nicholas Monsarrat, whose many sea novels had fascinated John. (Not many modern novels had caught his attention, though John also loved the works of Laurens Van Der Post, especially the ones about the Kalahari Bushmen!) Monsarrat wrote a long list of books, one of his early one's The Cruel Sea, having been made into a famous movie, but it is his last works that are of interest here, that being The Master Mariner, Book 1, and The Master Mariner, Book 2, in which Monsarrat connected the events of the long history of Britain's sea faring expertise by creating a character, the very ordinary seaman Matthew Lawe, who was cursed to live forever and thus he lived through about three hundred years of British naval history. (Ironically, though perhaps pertinently, when this subject came to mind, I couldn't remember, after all these years, the author Monsarrat's name, but I remembered Lawe's, his character's name, which enabled me to look up Monsarrat's. Hail the Web!) John found Book 1 so interesting that he made a point of buying Book 2 when it came out and was both disappointed and fascinated with the fact that Book 2 was just a compendium of outlines of the stories Monsarrat had planned to write into it, but wasn't able to, because he died before he could get it past the planning stage. (Book 2 only exists because of the efforts of his wife to put it together from the notes he left behind about it.)

Since just about everything that concerned John, or even peripherally caught his interest, was, for John, fodder for thoughts and meditations on it, he blew that bit of existential trivia right out of proportion. At least as far as I was concerned. I mean, if I'd purchased The Master Mariner, Book 2 and discovered it to be just outlines of a novel that would never be written because its author had kicked the bucket, I would have just said "Oh fuck!" and taken the disappointing thing back to the book store for a refund, then instantly put it out of my mind. But since, as that old saying goes, John and I were "as different as chalk and cheese" he kept that book and read the outlines and we ended up having a discussion about this whole intricate and fascinating imaginative world of Monsarrat's that had been manifesting itself into existence, only to get abruptly truncated by Monsarrat's untimely death. (Though John did point out, that his death was only "untimely" for any readers of his books—and of course publisher, his wife and family, and his close friends!—while for Monsarrat, he died because it was very much his time to die—unwritten books or no unwritten books!)

One of the points about this that fascinated ever-thinking John was that fact that when every human being dies, the narrative of their life dies with them—no one else can live that particular life—but when a fiction author dies, two, maybe even three or four, narratives die with him or her—depending on what they have "cooking" in the oven of their imagination—and their manuscripts. And of course, in this case, things were even more ironic and interesting because though the Matthew Lawe character was suffering under a nefarious and onerous curse to live forever, however much he yearned to die, his curse was broken when his human creator, suffering on no such nefarious a curse, died mid-story, and thus Lawe was able to finally die with him.

(Though I don't think John knew about this fact, but F. Scott died while in the process of writing The Last Tycoon, and the novel only exists as such because a close friend took what Fitzgerald had written, and his notes about it, and created a publishable version of the novel—though that's not the same, I guess, as unlike The Master Mariner, Book 2, The Last Tycoon didn't have a character and a story-line that readers had already been following.)

Another point John flogged half to death (hey, great metaphor, Rache!—especially while on the subject of the British navy that had as much use for compassion and human kindness towards its sailors as it did for pirates!) was that most human beings—he jammed his finger into his chest as he said that—have such inconsequential lives that when that "narrative" ends with their death, only their relatives and close friends—if they have any—grieve over its termination, but in the case of this Monsarrat writer, who had a Book 2 outlined to be written as an interesting sequel to his Book 1, suddenly the thousands of readers who had been following the story would end up grieving both his death and the death of that outlined novel, which was in a sense an aspect of him and his life they'd become intimately involved with, and which also truly spotlighted the true power and importance of human creativity and imagination made possible through the existence of that particular human life. (This harkens back to that head-fucking line of somebody-or-other in one of Joseph Pierce's head-fucking, Cosmic Egg-books: there can be no being except with a mode of being.)

And since John also had a compulsion to push everything we talked about to as deep a level as he could—though when I once commented on that, he tapped the side of his head and laughing said, "Well, that's never very deep is it, because how deep can any pile of manure get?"—he also talked about how this relates to Fate, for much as the character, Matthew Lawe's fate—his life-narrative—was being written into existence by Monsarrat, with that fictional fate being totally in Monsarrat's hands and creative mind, while Monsarrat's fate was equally being "written into existence" by another, and higher order of "novelist," such that on one level, Lawe's fate was a subset of Monsarrat's—like one soap bubble inside another! But on another level, for all the avid readers of The Master Mariner, Book 1, Lawe's fate and "life" was of more interest to them than Monsarrat's personal life—of which, in those pre-Wiki days, they likely knew next to nothing!—which meant Monsarrat's life became a subset of Lawe's—until of course, Monsarrat's cancer terminated both him and the story, and both vanished from Fate's stage like a popped double soap bubble from the gaze of the child that blew it into its short, frail, and unlikely existence.

Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!—talking about that complex and confusing fate-shit is bring on a migraine, and though John got more deeply into it than that, I can't think about it, or explain it, to any deeper a level than I just most imperfectly have here, because my poor brain, addled as it is by erstwhile bouts of head-lightning and current bouts of boozing and toking, and fatigued by lack of sleep and all this really manic-crazy writing, just isn't up to the task. (I feel like Danny DeVito trying to physically emulate his "twin" brother, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in that ridiculous 80s movie, Twins!) I will add though, that since The Master Mariner, Book 1 was in John's library, I did, one boring winter weekend, read it, and I did find it fascinating, both from an imaginative literary perspective and from an historical one, and yes, when Lawe's evolving and unfolding and very human sea adventures ended with Book 1, I could but feel a pleasant tingle of imaginative anticipation for their furtherance in Book 2, a tingle that instantly turned to sadness—and a bit of depression, even—at the realization that that "furtherance" I was anticipating, was not to be, and though I skimmed the outline of Lawe's adventures contained in Book 2, it was like reading an obituary and I was then able to empathize with John's reaction to it. (His emotional reaction to it, not is deep thoughts about it!)

Zounds!—another one of those damn de-rails that I have to scroll back over to see where I de-railed from . . . . . . . .Yeah, right!—I was keyboring . . . hey, I just-accidentally-invented the word keyboring for babbling incoherently on a computer—though I think that might already have an official name—blogging!) about the fact of me very likely dying before getting any of Book Two of The Fire out to my future horde of phantom readers, which of course is my rational estimation of the situation and does not factor in that hypothetical—to me—world of spirits, and what three—hypothetical!—spirits in particular seem intent on getting from their self-designated memory-keeper! I may yet be cursed to live as long as did my far-from-slim, loathe-to-exercise hero, Black Dog-dogged, Churchill, but don't go betting any world wars on that happening! (I guess you could say that he won the Battle of Britain and lived to write about it, while I am very much losing the Battle of the Bulge as I sit here, eating enough junk food for Patton to feed half his troops while keyboring in existence this big bucket of dog-barf that I am calling the "Preface!")

### Chapter Twenty Three

Jesus H. Eff'n Christ, Rachel—get an eff'n grip! How the hell did you get Star Trek-transported from riding down a river-trail on John's farm talking about nature spirits, to the goddamn Middle East . . . and Monsarrat's fictional, undying character, Lawe? Yeah, yeah, I know—my manic, fucked-up toddler-in-Granny's-living-room mind totally lacks the discipline to stay on any one topic-knickknack and get from A to B to C without visiting S and F and G and Z and X and T—and the fuckin' moon!—along the way!

So anyways, still on the subject of those very putative nature spirits—I'm sticking to it for as long as I can stick to any topic because for reasons totally incomprehensible to me, they were so damned important to John. In fact, he often used to sarcastically say that he was amazed at how many people professed to have a spiritual value system yet absolutely refused to believe in the existence of any spirits at all, or if they could accept they might exist, dismissed them, as per Constantine's Imperial Abomination's self-serving dogma, as demons.

And he'd even more sarcastically added, "I find it hilarious that people call spiritual both their passive, mindless, Church-sanctified and childishly credulous belief in all those fairy tales (Nobodaddy and Sucker-Son-Who-Tried-To-Save-The-World Tales, he sometimes called them) told in the Bible, as they no less call spiritual their act of bended-knees, slave-worshipping Blake's monstrous, Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy, who is nothing more than a collection of the nastiest aspects of the human ego projected 'out there!' onto an anthropomorphically fantasized Supreme Creator Deity of the Whole Damn Universe!"

And as far as he was concerned, the abject and bended-knees slave-worshipping of Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy, as demanded by those Big Three Monotheisms, was just a cynical and power-and-money-grabbing re-creation of the very ancient, very human, and very power-corrupted, master-slave relationship, and it is something the Ocean of Spirit would find—if it had the capacity to care!—not only utterly ridiculous, distasteful, and irrelevant, but worse—utterly demeaning. Utterly and insultingly demeaning for it implies that the Being that is being worshipped somehow needs that bended-knees, slave-to-master worship, when, if you stop and think about it objectively, only a sick, insecure, bloated, and demented-with-self-importance human ego needs and desires worship. (Mad King Donald comes to mind as a perfect example of that fuckin' too-common pathology! GOLLY GEE WILLIKERS! Ya think instead of Sonny Boy coming back here for a hot-cross redux, Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy decided to take his place and incarnated into that narcissistic pile of gold-dusted feces that considers himself Regent Royale of the Fascist Kingdom of America. Far out!)

"As far as I'm concerned," he once said. "The Ocean of Spirit needs worship to feel satisfied and complete about as badly as any Earth ocean needs rain to feel wet! Anyone who thinks they are being spiritual when they are worshipping their Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy are not only supremely stupid, but utterly infantile! . . . Or I guess, in Trickster Gurdjieff's worldview, so deeply asleep they haven't even managed to reach a level where they can yet be labeled stupid or infantile. Actually, as far as I am concerned, they are less naturally asleep than they are in a deep, sleep-like hypnotic state created and perpetrated by Constantine's Imperial Abomination and it demonic clergy in its need to keep them in a state of total, mindless, and will-less sheepishness that it can then exploit for all its worth by playing 'the good shepherd'!"

At this point I couldn't resist saying, "Well, when you sprinkle tobacco around before going into the woods, and do all that . . . . hocus-pocus stuff . . . you do for those so-called nature spirits you are so damn sure are there, aren't you worshipping those spirits? It sure looks to me like you are!"

That got a good long laugh out of him that sent him into a long coughing fit, and when that was finally over, he smirking and breathlessly said, "That's not worshipping them! That's just showing them basic respect. Showing them a level of respect that we naturally, in a civilized society, expect from each other in our interpersonal relationships. . . . I mean, when I go visit you, do I not knock on your door and wait for you—or Jonathan or Terry—to open it for me . . . and then invite me in. (We must have been having this discussion after my break-up with Jonathan Sr.!) Then do I not say a friendly hello to them—and you? And if I am coming over to enjoy one of your delicious home cooked meals (John was stretching things a lot with that delicious part, because though I am not certain about much in this life, I am very certain I am a lousy cook!) do I not bring a little something to add to the meal. A pie or cake—or loaf of fresh baked bread. (John loved baking his own bread and it was always sumptuous!) And when you come visit here, do you not do the same. I've never once seen you come here where you did not first knock on the door, and on entering after being invited in, not only say a friendly hello to me, but to the dog! (He used the dog's name but I don't think this one was the—by then—long-gone-to-the-rabbit-filled-meadow-in-the-sky, Argos—and I don't remember what that current dog's name was.)

"Well, I guess he usually he gets it first because he demands it. . . . But really, all I am doing with those nature spirits when I sprinkle some tobacco around before entering their territory—which is like knocking on their door . . . and which is a time-honored Indian way of showing respect for them—showing them, with a definite physical act, that I think they are my equal and deserving of that respect. And I can tell you—I sure am not worshipping them, and if I tried to do that, I'm sure they'd make me feel very uncomfortable and unwelcome for doing so—no less than I would feel very negatively towards you if every time you came over here, you played the obeisant, abasing slave by kneeling down before me and placing gifts at my feet and calling me lord or master or . . . whatever!"

Then, because his several utterances of the dog's name had roused the dog out of his dog-reveries and brought him to John's side where he sat in his doggie-wants-a-cookie stance, John gave his ears a scratching as he chuckled and went on, "Or basically acting like ______ here after I've gotten mad at him—groveling and waging his tail and whining for forgiveness! Hell, if you did that even once I'd never let you back in here again because I'd find it absolutely embarrassing! And insulting! It would instantly turn our relationship into something I'd sure consider not worth having!"

He hit my metaphorical thumb right on the nail with that hammer blow and it woke me up enough to send me into a fit of laughter as I thought about how embarrassing it felt to have his dog tail-wagging and whining behave that way with me if I hadn't been around for a visit in a long while, and thought to about John's ridiculous vision of me kneeling down at his feet and bringing him gifts and calling him master or lord! It certain did bespeak a very human—and utterly pathetic!—master-slave relationship and suddenly I saw the absolute and grotesque spiritual travesty of all those billions of utterly mindless slaves—sheep-people!—being herded into church\- or mosque-pens in order dutifully and knee-bending worship their favorite deity/master/lord!

And too, in a sudden and too-brief flash of very frightening insight, I saw just how utterly dehumanizing such a socially acceptable—socially demanded!—act surely is, and why so many of those who allowed themselves to get sucked into that delusive and dehumanizing, slave-master relationship, could then be so easily induced by the clergy-Gestapo of any of those monolithic monotheisms claiming to be the sanctified representatives of the delusion of that "Cosmic Master," that "Cosmic Lord," to go out and righteously maim and torture and slaughter their fellow human beings—fellow fuckin' sheep!—in that name of that "Cosmic Master," that "Cosmic Lord!"

For that brief, insightful and frightening flash, I way-too-clearly saw the total and all-encompassing and often homicidal lunacy of our modern world, which was still nothing more than the medieval Christian world on steroids, nothing more than the medieval, feudal world with a plethora of weapons of mass destruction for methods of coercion and control, but no more wisdom or restraint than Constantine's fascist, paranoid Imperial Abomination had during the Middle Ages when it sent out its psychopathic cadres of Gestapo-Inquisitors to force "the sheep flocks" to "keep the faith,"—keep their credulity in irrational fairy tales!—when it sent out it ravening, slavering, insatiable Dire Wolf-hordes of Crusaders to wreak havoc on the infidel Muslims—and anyone else they came across!—and when it sent millions of Hyena Warriors into catastrophic battles during the Reformation, all bent on slaughtering millions of a "heinous foe" that was only "heinous" and a "foe" because of doctrinal differences concerning the nature and provenance of the "Prince of Peace!" (Fuck!—and they say I'm fuckin' insane!)

And too clearly too, I saw that essential truth that John had been trying to hammer into my rock-solid, left-brained head since our relationship had started: that humankind was doomed if it couldn't learn to see all institutional religions for what they truly were—clever, cynical, greedy, and hierarchical accumulators of wealth and temporal power hiding their profane agendas behind a smokescreen of a simplistic, mostly ersatz spirituality. And doubly doomed humanity would be if it couldn't see, then break its heroin-like addiction and enslavement to, the bended-knees, slave-master relationship with the anthropomorphically defined "Cosmic Lord" that each of those institutional monotheisms uses as a stout, shepherd's crook to exploitingly beat their sheep flocks into docile—and tithe-paying!—subservience.

And so clearly was I able to see that exploit huge flocks of "human" sheep those institutions have for too many long, dark centuries, an exploitation that was now getting as exponentially out of hand as is our global arsenal of mechanical, uber-evolving weapons which can, through their inherent power and malice, drag us to our eventual, total destruction! And most eerie about that brief flash of insight, was the fact that John knew I was having it while I was having it, and when it was over, made brief eye-contact with me and with a solemn, knowing look on his face, nodded his head, after which he got up and without saying anything more, went off to the "the John."

As much as I can remember about that disturbing and momentous day, I think my visit ended with John's visit to the bathroom because I had to head back home, but though we had other conversations about true spirituality, I never again, though, had such a disturbing flash of insight into the dark, very unspiritual and essentially fascist natures of our Big Three monotheisms with their worship-demanding "Cosmic Master-deities" and their Gestapo-like control over their "credulous" sheep flocks!—as I did that day, but John never gave up on his mission of trying to inculcate in me the notion that true spirituality was not—and never could be!—about the knee-bending, abasing, slave-worship of any darkly conceived, anthropomorphic and ego-projected Nobodaddy, but about accepting, understanding, honoring and working for, our own spirit-being in the context of its—our!—enmeshment in that Fifth Dimension, that Ocean of Spirit, and its many currents, the high ones being light, enfreeing and spirit-exalting currents, while the low ones were dark, enslaving and spirit-oppressing ones.

And it sure doesn't take an Einstein or a Newton to figure out which currents those Big Three monotheisms have been tapping into! And once, when I once pointed out to John that Judaism, small as it was, didn't have the same oppressive and controlling role on the world stage that Christianity and Islam did, and to that he just shrugged and said, "As far as I am concerned, it is the parent of those two oppressive monstrosities and must bear its share of responsibility for what they have done to the world—I mean, within the contexts of those institutions Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy is Yahweh is Allah is Yahweh is Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy!" (John had a profound objection to using the word "God" in any context, and when I asked him about that, he shrugged and said, "Constantine's Imperial Abomination made the word 'God' into an abomination for me and I cannot even think about it without thinking 'Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy,' so that's the term I use. Call a spade a spade, and an abomination and abomination, I say, and there is nothing about that intractable, egomaniacal, genocidal, sin-obsessed Judeo-Christian 'deity' that is not abominable!"

And of course, these conversations about true spirituality could never happen without John gravitating to his "pet peeve," that being the grotesque and evil hypocrisy of Constantine's Imperial Abomination, in which a succession of all those gloriously and regally be-robed and be-ringed Popes had for centuries sat on their fancy throne in their Vatican Palace, and where today, if anyone desires to have chit-chat with his Eminence—or what the hell ever you address him as!—they first have to supplicate for an audience, which his Eminence—or his gate-keepers—may or may not grant, depending on your status on the world stage, and sure as hell if there had existed a flesh-and-blood Jesus Christ, and if, as the mindless flocks of bended-knees sheep believe, he should happened to return to this Gulag Earth as the impoverished, no-name mystic he was portrayed as being two thousand years ago, he'd find it easier to hit the moon with a Nerf rocket than get that audience with his Eminence, no matter how long and hard he supplicated!

And rarely did he pass up the chance to comment on those equally hypocritical hordes of righteously Church-attending morons who considered themselves spiritual people because they regularly allowed themselves to be sheep-herded into "church-pens" where they were forced to listen to power-corrupted priests passing on the often violence-inspiring injunctions of power-corrupted Popes—minor functionaries of those popes who believed that they were spiritually superior "shepherds" compared with their spiritually inferior "sheep-flocks, because they had been noticed, had been singled out, had been chosen, and had thus been given "the call," as a superior, spiritual being by their omniscient and omnipotent God the Father, his omniscient and omnipotent son, their Lord, Jesus Christ, and the indefinable, Holy Spirit.

Shit-on-a-stick, but I could go on to no end with John's oft-voiced loathing of the utterly unspiritual hypocrisy of Constantine's Imperial Abomination that all faithful Catholic sheep have been cleverly and assiduously brain-washed into believing to be true spirituality, but neither my energy nor my mind is up to the task . . . well, shit!—maybe neither my mind nor my energy is up to the task but I can feel a great, inspiring pressure to continue on in this vein, however chaotic and incoherent it might get due to my brain-addling fatigue and the cannabis I have been trying to counteract it with, so I'll continue on.

Continue to pass on here—under great, inner duress!—several of John's very important "takes" on just exactly what, not only that nefarious, Imperial Abomination of Constantine's was, but what all institutional religions were, most of which he hated with a measured equality—save for Constantine's "Crutch," which he loathed without any conceivable bounds or measure.

As far as John was concerned, all of these institutional religions existed as a response to what many secular sociologists and psychologists have labeled the "religious impulse," which they tend to believe to be some sort of over-powering spiritual impulse—or drive—common to all human beings but only manifesting as a life-dominating force in certain individuals.

But to John, he didn't consider the "religious impulse" to be real at all, though he was certain we did have a "spiritual impulse" created in our consciousness by our spirit-being as it attempted to guide us in spiritual directions. Unfortunately, our dark and controlling religious institutions take this slim stick of a "spiritual impulse" and wrap it in a thick, ego-intimidating shit-floss of whole-spun lies about our endemically "sinning" nature, coupled with promises of salvation through belonging to that religion and mindlessly and slavishly accepting and following all of its dogma about it being the one, true religion of this universe's Supreme Cosmic Master, and its Supreme Cosmic Master-dictated methods for salvation from all those sins we are just naturally going to commit as frail and faulty human beings.

In John's book of personally "drowsed" cosmic truths, (take them as you may) our natural, spirit-being-created, "spiritual impulse" was only the tiny diamond around which the foul, black, egotistical coprolite-pearl of our always mindless and too damned often murderous religious impulses were artificially grown in the black oysters of those institutional religions. To John, our egos have no de facto existence in their own right, which is why they have to so compulsively attach themselves to, and identify with, anything and everything that gives it a sense of existence and importance. Our egos, essentially, are the equivalent of the ripples one sees in a pool of water when a pebble is thrown into it. The water is real, enduring and deep, but the ripples are nothing more than the shallow, transitory effects.

And much as in our modern, affluent cultures, our egos are seduced into constantly and passionately attaching and identifying themselves with material things, especially fancy cars and impressive mansions—and insanely expensive watches!—they just as much love to attach themselves to, and identify with big institutions and all the power that big institutions channel in this profane world. Thus the two most popular and powerful institutions for most people to attach their egos to, are political and religious institutions, not that there is any real difference between them, except the religious institutions have more effective methods of gaining sheep-herds of followers by guilting—and often outright coercing!—them into identifying with, and belonging to them.

And on making that point, John laughed and said, "I mean, political 'preachers' can, with straight—though usually angry—faces, tell all their stupid and thoughtless listeners (their MAGA-hatters!) that their country is going to go to 'hell-in-a-hand-basket' if they don't vote them into office so they can be a hero and save it, and since such 'preachers' have been saying that since the democracy of Athens imperially ruled the Aegean, and of course, the country does eventually end up 'going-to-hell-in-a-hand-basket' regardless which 'saving preacher' they elect—and everybody senses that and so they doesn't take it too seriously.

"But when the religious preachers tell their stupid and thoughtless sheep-flocks that they are literally going to very mightily displease the Supreme Cosmic Master and go to Hell when they die if they don't join—and assiduously follow the dogma!—of their Supreme Cosmic Master-created religion, and since no creditable dead person has come back to gainsay that assertion, those stupid, thoughtless and child-credulous sheep-flocks believe them. Their fear cattle-prods their insecure egos into passionately attaching to that religious institution, thus giving it an exponentially expanding base of power.

"Though in the case of Constantine's Imperial Abomination during the Dark and Middle Ages, it wasn't the fear of hellfire that drew people into joining—or toeing the party line!—in that very violent, very political, and very evil institution, but a fear for their lives. During that time, that nefarious outfit was as fascist, as murderous, and as politically powerful as the Nazis had recently been during their vile and violent reign over Germany, and, as too many learned too late—in both Medieval Christendom and Nazi Germany—often just the whispering of a negative opinion about either regime—Papal Christendom or Hitler's Nazism—could get that whisperer a 'tortuous date' with an Inquisitor—sent to a camp be tortured then 'disappeared!' Fortunately the world wisened up to the evil that the Nazis were channeling into the world and extirpated those psychopathic, fascist rats from it after a decade and a half, while alas, even after more than a millennium and half, we are still tolerating the even more evil and pervasive Abomination of Constantine's that has, for the last seventeen hundred years, been making the Nazis look like pathetic amateurs! Especially in the propaganda department!"

Fucking hell!—but I wish John was alive today to comment on that MAGA-movement that Mad King Donald has created and which has attracted so many stupid, thoughtless and very passionate MAGA-hatters to so passionately and mindlessly follow. Though of course I know what John would say—that it is not a political movement at all, but a quasi-religious one; that Mad King Donald isn't viewed by his followers as a the crazed, political demagogue that the rest of the world knows he obviously is, but as a religious leader, as America's God-sent messiah! And on saying that I can just hear John chuckling and explaining why "Messiah Donald" is so passionate about keeping all his election promises, regardless they were idiot-utterances designed to be attractive to his millions of moronic, MAGA-hatters, like the expensive-beyond-all-practicality wall along the Mexican border that America so direly and desperately needs to stem the tsunami of Mexican "rapists and murders" flooding into the country, because he well knows what history has shown mindless religious mobs do to their Messiahs when they don't "deliver the goods!"

And I couldn't disagree with his view that all of the most powerful "religious" impulses, revolved around either a belief, force-peddled by a powerful religious institution, in our sinning, human nature that was going to propel us straight to some intolerable hell if we didn't join that institution and believe in, and follow, its controlling, manipulative dogma, or the equally strong ego-belief that if we joined that institution we'd personally be as important and powerful as that institution and its powerful minions.

My parents were prime examples of that. My mother was a passionate Catholic because she was a mindless, gutless wonder who couldn't have "thunk" and original thought of her own to save her life, and she totally bought into all that you-are-born-a-sinner, you-will-lifelong-live-as-a-sinner, and if you belong to the Church and follow all its dogma, we-will-save-you-from-your-sinning-nature-and-inevitable-and-eternal-damnation-in-hellfire shit.

While my father, on the other hand, though he had no use at all for the Church's dogma (I mean, fuck!—one of the reasons I didn't get pregnant from all of his cum-spewing penetrations of my post-pubescent body for the short time he continued to use it after that biological watershed, (his pedophilic lust at that time was being stoked, I am certain from the way he'd look at her, by my younger sister, Joanna, but she was so sensitive and frail and close to my mother that had he tried to do with her what he was doing to me, she'd have immediately run, weeping and wailing, to my mother and my mother would have believed her, and his vile "game" would have been "up!") was because he always used a condom, something that is still very verboten to the Abomination's fascist dogma, and which my mother took mindlessly seriously, which likely explains his initial interest in me as an object for his febrile, Catholic lusts, because after my younger sister, Johanna was born, he decided he neither wanted nor could afford any more brats, (the cost would have interfered with his buying his booze—and a new Caddie every three years!) but since my mother—because of the "wise" dogma so dogmatically dictated by "celibate" Popes and their "celibate" minions—would rather have douched with sulfuric acid than take "the pill," or fuck my father while he was wearing a rubber. And since the absurd "rhythm method" was as reliable as any statement uttered by Mad King Donald, (especially the one about getting Mexico to pay for his crazy wall!) their marital cohabitations, such as they were, ended at that point and the job of being a convenient cum-receptacle for my father's lusts fell to me.)

While my father, on the other hand, though he had no use for any of the Church's dogma that impacted the real god of his life, his Pedophilic Lust, he sure got a sperm whale (LOL) of an ego-trip out of being a Catholic. I doubt he was more proud of anything in his life—except getting away with fucking me in every bodily orifice I possessed!—as the fact that he was, as he called it, "a practicing Catholic." He went to confession every Saturday and Mass and Communion every Sunday (if there truly existed a God with a flea-turd of love and compassion in him, he'd have induced my super hypocrite of a father to choke to death on that communion wafer the first time he took it after the first time he forced me to suck his filthy, stinking "schlong!") He very piously went through the Stations of the Cross "devotional pilgrimage" with my mother when the church, during the evening of the last Saturday of every month, was opened for a special, candle-lit, "Stations" service led by one of the priests. Or even, though rarely, a visiting bishop or arch-bishop.

He was a committed member of the Knights of Columbus, and to his great pride, achieved its "third degree," whateverthefuck that was! (All I am sure of is that a Knights of Columbus "third degree" sure wasn't no form of the torture the hypocritical asshole deserved!). Hot damn, but my mother sure was proud of him for that! And being the slick-tongue sleezeball that he was, he sold tons of Knights of Columbus life insurance, (with its implied slogan: when you are sitting at the right hand of God you know you will have done right for your family.) for which he got tons of gratitude from the local chapter and even a fancy certificate from the head office, and tons of praise from my mother—but no fucking sex!

I mean, even before I started to "bleed" and "grow some hair down there," forcing my father to use the ultimate of Catholic bogeymen, a condom, when he fucked me, (while imagining that I was Johanna!) I knew there was something grotesquely ridiculous and hypocritical about my father's passionate involvement and identification with the Catholic Church. But I never quite understood it until John (very sarcastically) started talking about the truly illusory and insubstantial nature of the ego and thus its need for finding—and constantly re-finding and reaffirming—a semblance of identity, importance, and substance "By attaching itself to powerful institutions—like Constantine's Imperial Abomination, and its con-every-moronic-sheep-every-time teaching that if you followed all of the seventeen quadrillion rules of its sacred dogma, each one cosmically dictated to some Pope—or one of the Pope's theologian-minions—by Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy, this Universe's Supreme Cosmic Master, then for the whole of your Church-sanctified life you'd be personally known to, and personally pleasing of, not only to this Universe's Supreme Cosmic Master, but to his "only begotten Son,"—who was supposed to be his equal—but not quite! (and who kept a Pet Pigeon that also was supposed to be equal in power to him and his big, powerful Daddy, but anyone who'd believe that would believe that all the cheese we buy from our grocery stores are chunks of the stuff chipped off the moon!) and when you died, your Church-saved-and-sanctified soul would instantly rocket up to the Celestial Palace where this Universe's Supreme Cosmic Master and his equal—but-not-quite—Son and his really-not-equal Pet Pigeon, resided and co-ruled—but-not-quite—this whole Universe, allowing you to spend all of eternity at the "right hand side" of this Universe's Supreme Cosmic Master and his almost-supreme Cosmic Son—and his sure-not-supreme, Cosmic Pet Pigeon, as one of their known and cherished favorites.

"And Holy Molly!" John laughing went on, keeping the super-strength vitriol of sarcasm in his voice. "There can't be a bigger and finer goddamn ego-trip on this planet than to be personally known to, and eternally in the good graces of, this Universe's Supreme Cosmic Master and his almost-supreme Cosmic Son—and his sure-not-supreme, Cosmic Pet Pigeon, not only during your Church-sanctified life, but for all eternity as well! So no bloody wonder so many millions of morons are so willing to jump on that Big Ego Bandwagon of Constantine's Imperial Abomination that has been Nazi-blitzkrieging through this planet's history for seventeen hundred years, crushing all the flowers and trees of true spirituality in its path!"

And the example John loved to use to get across the ego's need to find identity and substance—and self-importance!—by mindlessly and emotionally attaching itself to powerful institutions, was our modern, basically insane obsession with professional sports teams. "And what a phenomena it has become!" his voice truly full of amazement. "Millions upon millions of peoples' self-importance, self-worth, and equanimity, 'live' and 'die' with the fortunes of the professional sports team their ego had very irrationally attached itself to, a team which may or may not be located in their home town, but which is always populated with way over-paid 'hired guns' from other towns. During the Stanley Cup finals, millions of fans—fanatics!—will invest no end of emotional energy attaching themselves to their favorite team, which is most likely from some city they don't live in—and likely have never visited! And will never visit! And of course, that American orgy of ritualized mayhem that passes for a sport, the . . . Super Bowl . . . I think it is called, is even worldwide-worse! And with fans—obsessed fanatics!—on both sides, not only half-bankrupting themselves to get to the game, but feverishly praying to this Universe's Cosmic Master begging 'him' to throw is considerable cosmic weight behind their precious team in order to ensure what they consider, its cosmically crucial victory.

"I mean, think about it! Millions upon millions of lunatic fanatics actually lose all their already too-few marbles during that . . . Super Bowl . . . Cosmic Bowl, to them! . . . and thus truly do believe that their precious team's victory is not only cosmically important—it would have to be if they are praying to their precious, Supreme Cosmic Master about it!—but is so crucially important to their sense of self-importance and self-worth that if their team loses they will just want to die! And if that doesn't prove the utter lunacy of our human ego's capacity to attach itself to, and identify with, things and events that have no intrinsic importance whatsoever—beyond their momentary entertainment value—nothing ever will!

But our mindless and passionate ego-attachments to those sports teams was, to John, just the tip of a very large and dark iceberg ripping a gash in the side of the Titanic of our modern world and causing it to sink! We have the same capacity for this mindless and essentially lunatic ego-attachment to all big institutions, whether they be a country, an army, a multi-national corporation, (particularly the corporations manufacturing automobiles and trucks) and worst of all—an institutional religion! As I've already said, according to John, what we so proudly and sanctimoniously label in ourselves our "grand and redeeming religions impulse" which we call—and believe to be spiritual—is just our ego's very powerful impulse—need!—to attach itself to a ridiculous, childish, and parochially-reduced concept of this Universe's Supreme Cosmic Master, and to the monstrous and powerful institution that mendaciously and manipulatively claims to be its bona fide and sanctified representative on this planet! An institution that at its core is purely ego-serving and power-corrupted and no more spiritual than any political party—or professional sports organization.

I can still remember the day we had this conversation—not that it was much of a "conversation," given that John was unusually riled up and vitriolically sarcastic as he spouted off like a geyser that didn't need to re-charge itself—and I was stunned by his assertion. Much as I had no use for any institutional religion, I was well enough historically educated to know that institutional religions are as essential to all civilizations as the agriculture that feeds and makes them possible, so I had a hard time accepting that something that big and powerful could emanate out of the human ego and essentially be the product of a "fiction".

When I brought my objection up to John, he just laughed and said, "Well, given that hockey, baseball and football are just ego-entertainments and ego-attachments for the mindless masses, and the combined importance of the Stanley Cup, the World Series and the Super Bowl, in the grand schemes of human history, doesn't amount to thimble full of ant turds, how do you explain the importance attached to them, the efforts put into winning them, the hundreds of millions of fans who follow them, and the billions of dollars spent on them?

"This capacity and need of the frail and ever-insecure human ego to attach itself to what it perceives to be things and events and ideas and institutions of great power and importance, is as absolutely boundless as it is absurd! And as far as I am personally concerned—for what that's worth!—there is no real difference between a religious institution that mindless masses of people ego-attach to and a professional sports organization that mindless masses of people ego-attach to. . . . Well, of course, that's not entirely true, is it? Except for some of those soccer hooligans causing riots in European cities after a game, no professional sports institution that I know about, has incited mindless masses of people to the levels and violence and murder—and torture!—that the two major institutional monotheistic religions have over the centuries—and all done in the name of this Universe's Supreme Cosmic Master!

"So these perversely ego-exalted religions institutions—particularly those damned monotheistic ones—are no different than any nation-state on this planet, a Republican or Democratic or Liberal or Conservative political party, a Pittsburg hockey team, a Dallas football team, a New York baseball team, a Ford Motor Company, or a United States Army—all of which have the power to suck no end of attention and loyalty of out no end of mindless hordes of frail egos looking for big and important and powerful institutions to attach themselves to in order to feel big and important.

"And I doubt this sports team analogy as applied to religious institutions ever found stronger expression than during the Reformation when lots of Christian "teams" were driven to break free of the repressive, controlling, fascist tyranny of Constantine's Imperial Abomination! So now instead of millions of Vatican-ruled Catholics identifying with Team Constantine and going to war against Team Mohammad or Team Abraham. . . . Ahhhh, Team Abraham!—now there's the team to be on! The team chosen by Big Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy-Yahweh to be his All-Cosmos-All-Stars, to be his best and most favorite of all creatures in this whole vast Cosmos! You can't get a bigger ego-trip than that!

"So since Team Constantine's ravening hordes had completely destroyed all the Pagan and Gnostic teams, you then had Team Constantine fighting with Team Luther and Team Anabaptist and Team Calvin and Team Presbyterian—you get the picture. And these weren't gentlemanly Super Bowls or World Series where the players shook hands after the contest—this was total war where Team Constantine wanted to hang onto its lucrative, fascist hegemony over Europe and those Protestant teams wanted, not only to escape that fascist, oppressive control that Team Constantine had been crushing them with for a millennia, but they wanted "a piece of the action," wanted what they considered their fair share of the spoils the mindless millions were willing to throw into the tithe and collection boxes—and millions were wantonly and viciously slaughtered in those very profane wars for those very profane spoils!"

And when I necessarily pointed out that all of those religions did have their spiritual teachings and members who followed them, John just grimaced and said, "Sure they do—since every human being is essentially a spirit-being, spiritual tendencies and wisps of spiritual wisdom quite naturally have to manifest and assert themselves—in spite of the best efforts of the institutional churches to keep them from doing so! But those spiritual inclinations and tendencies and teachings don't have to find their mode of being in a big, power-and-wealth corrupted institutional church, especially any powerful and corrupt institutional church that cynically pretends—or deludes itself into believing—that it has been created by, and de facto represents, the ultimate wisdom and will of this Universe's Supreme Cosmic Master!

"I will concede that millions of Catholics actually do behave like 'Christians,'—or some semblance of what they believe Christians should behave like!—and do so out of an inner impulse that is in spite of, is utterly distinct and divorced from, any of the dictats and mountains of dog-shit dogma of that damned abomination of Constantine's and its Gestapo clergy. They can be compassionate and generous and loving and tolerant of other peoples and other religious identities. . . . as no less do lots of Jews and Muslims and Protestants and Hindus and Sikhs—and no end of atheists and agnostics!—behave like very good 'Christians!' In fact, better than most baptized Christians behave—especially the Gestapo-clergy of Constantine's Imperial Abomination!

"And they behave that way, not because of any stupid and mindless ego-identification with any particular Team Religion, but because they are open to living according to the subtle guidance—the gnosis—of their spirit-beings, which by its nature and spiritual purpose, induces them to behave that way.

"But most importantly, when these various people basically spite the controlling, manipulative dogma and political dictaks of their institutional religions and truly behave spiritually—with love, compassion, charity, tolerance etc.—they never do so violently and intolerantly. The Ocean of Spirit and our spirit-being never demands violence, torture, and murder in defense and propagation of spiritual values the way institutional religions demand it for their so-called religious values, because the Ocean of Spirit—and equally our spirit-being—is real and eternal . . . is like a real ocean, whereas institutional religions are just big and transitory ripples that the Dark Forces creates to manipulate and control the mindless hordes of human egos that equally mindlessly rush to identify with and attach themselves to that institution and its power and values.

"And in the utterly insane mindlessness of that ego-attachment and ego-identification with any institutional religion and its 'sacred, mystical founder' and its 'sacred revelations' and 'sacred dogma,' all of which those utterly mindless hordes of egos are only too-willing to commit torture and massive slaughters to defend! And violently proselytize. Mohammedans with the scimitar and Christians with their pointed and edge-sharpened cruci-swords!

"And never more ardently or violently so than with those two, now world-dominant monotheisms with their infernal and deified fiction of a personal, anthropomorphized male God! That infernal fiction that fills millions of empty and credulous human heads with the delusional notion that this Universe's Human Male-like Supreme Cosmic Master, not only created and rules the whole damn vast-beyond-imagining-and-measuring Universe, but is cognizant of, and passionately interested in, our tiny little planet circling our run-of-the-mill star lost in the vast swirls of this multi-billion-galaxied Universe—which is likely but one universe amongst uncountable millions of universes in this beyond-fathomable Cosmos! And not only most absurdly and insanely that—but the Supreme Master of all of this vast-beyond-imagining Cosmic 'real estate,' is keenly cognizant of, and interested in, you as an individual on this tiny little planet circling our run-of-the-mill star lost in the vast swirls of this multi-billion-galaxied Universe—which is but one universe out of millions in this beyond-fathomable Cosmos!

"And on top of that insane absurdity, this Human Male-like Supreme Cosmic Master is so enthralled with us human beings on this tiny planet circling our run-of-the-mill star lost in the vast swirls of this multi-billion-galaxied Cosmos, has a passionate interest in creating human religious institutions and decreeing that they must be controlled and ruled only by human males—who are just like 'Him, and that that those created-by-Him, religious institutions must dominate, control, and oppress women in the service of keeping those religions—and thus the societies they dominate—rational, stable and enduring. (On Wiki-ing the subject I have learned that some Jewish sects allow women to rabbis, but it is hardly universal—kinda, I guess, like the Church of England allowing women to be priests, but not the much larger and more dominant, Imperial Abomination of Constantine's.)

"I mean—WOW!—some insanities are so insane they are beyond all definitions of insane—and that is one of them! But you can see and understand the incredible appeal of it! How many generally stupid, thoughtless, and basically infantile human males wouldn't want to jump at the chance of partaking in the gargantuan ego-trip of being on Team Constantine . . . or Team Mohammad! And especially in our Christian West, where they can have the omnipotent, Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy-Yahweh as their team's Cosmic Owner and Cosmic Son Jesus—while being inspiredly advised by his Cosmic Pet Pigeon!—as its Cosmic Coach! . . .Of course, you may wonder why I left Team Abraham out of that, but it's a pretty small team and no one—however much their frail ego may wish they could!—can join it anyway! You have to be one of this Cosmos' Human Male-like Supreme Cosmic Master's 'CHOSEN'—and chosen solely through the process of being born out of the womb of one of its second-class members!"

(If, Dear Reader, I have already recorded a similar conversation with John, please forgive me—John had such a passionate loathing for Constantine's Imperial Abomination and the catastrophic credulity and mindlessness of the sheep-flocks that, quite literally, bought the historicity of its silly myths and its fascist, controlling dogma, thus empowering and enriching it for so many dark centuries, that we ended up having many discussions about it. And as I've likely also said already, when I go walkabout from the Meds Rez with my best friends, Bobby Booze and Mary Jane, for constant company, my memory goes walkabout from my head!)

### Chapter Twenty Four

At this point—during one of our many conversations on this subject—with my ardently Catholic mother and my Mimi in mind, I interrupted John to say that though it is true the "Big Three" monotheisms were fundamentally women-oppressing—even women-hating—and patriarchal, a lot of woman sure managed to nonetheless attach their egos and their self-importance to them—and I wondered what his take on why that was.

He had to think about that one, so he got up and poured us each another cup of very "patriarchal" Joe, re-filled the dog's water dish, then put some more cookies on the table, after which he sat back down and after sighing a long, exasperated sigh, finally said, "Well . . . that's a tough one . . . and all that comes to this old manure pile in my head is that after all these millennia of being oppressed and abused and repressed . . . and even hated—basically treated like sub-human slaves!—women, as we now know them, are no long really true women as we could know them to be."

That got a loud snort out of me as I practically shouted, "Christ, John!—if we aren't 'true women,' what the fuck are we?"

"Ahhhh," he went on with a chuckle. "Miner Rachel is roused out of the deeps! At least I know you are paying some attention to what I am saying. . . . Okay, I'll qualify that. To be sure, deep inside, all women are women! They are all that they were born to be—very naturally spiritual, compassionate, nurturing and sexual beings. Potential or actual mothers, as they must be if this species-human is to survive! But as I so limitedly—and quite possibly, erroneously—see the situation, just about everything about women is now an ego-facade they have created over the millennia to cope with and survive their long and de-humanizing enslavement to the world of men. And most particularly the dark, oppressive, degrading—basically hating—patriarchal agendas of the Big Two Abrahamic Abominations! And since they have collectively lost sight of the fact that this survival-facade is just that—a facade, they have no choice but take it for their real nature.

"So in a sense, they are really just extensions . . . appendages . . . of men. Like arms and legs and fingers and toes! . . . They are—lock, stock, and barrel!—exactly what the Patriarchy has demanded they be for the world of men in order for them to survive the ravages, hatreds, abuses, and demands of the patriarchy. So naturally they get sucked deep into the ego-identifying, ego-attaching, women-denigrating, women-oppressing, women-hating patriarchal religious shit so many stupid and fundamentally infantile men do. Except maybe once they get sucked into it, they embrace it even more passionately than the men do, not just because the violence and oppression of men has forced them to constantly adopt the only survival strategy that they know will work—which is the pleasing of the men in their lives. And of their culture! And not just their dominating and bullying husbands, but the dominating and bullying clergy of the two dominant, Abrahamic Abominations that are in turn ruled by their respective dominating and bullying, Supreme Cosmic Masters!

"Actually, this brings to mind something that was in the news a few years back in Europe about some bank robbers' hostages that after being held captive and traumatized by the robbers, when they were freed and the robbers were captured, for some reason so identified with their captors they refused to denounce and testify against them. The trauma of the abuse was so hard for them to deal with that the only defense mechanism they could come up with was to discard their original identity and identify with their captors and tormentors. The phenomenon was given a name but I don't remember it."

"Stockholm Syndrome!" I was pleased to pipe in. "Because the robbery took place in Stockholm, Sweden! And yeah, everything about it seems psychologically counter-intuitive, but it is a phenomena that has been demonstrated to be valid in a lot of other cases. Shortly after that incident, that super-rich brat, Patty Hearst, was captured and held hostage by some terrorists and the same thing happened to her. Shit, they so fucked over her head—and I am sure every orifice she possessed!—that she even went out robbing banks with the assholes! . . . So I guess it's a pretty powerful defense mechanism."

"Ah yes," said John. "Stockholm Syndrome!" And with that his face took on a grim cast and a sudden mood of depression boiled off him like a real bad case of psychic b.o. It perplexed me at the time, and the reason for it only came to light years later when I was "translating" his memoirs and discovered that he'd basically done to his wife Catherine what those banks robbers had done to their hostages in Stockholm . . . but you'll have to read The Fire to learn all about that—because that is its main goddamn theme!

And while John fought with his dark thoughts and accompanying wave of depression—and got up to let the whining-at-the-door-dog out, (who likely wanted out at just that moment to get away from John's foul mood!) I thought about the fact, that until that day when John "stopped my world," I'd been suffering from that same syndrome. Actually, what really broke its powerful hold over me was my next visit where he told me he knew exactly what my father had been doing to me. Until that instant when I knew I wasn't totally alone with the dark reality that abuse, I'd been able to hate my father for it but I always felt real guilty about that hatred, especially since he'd managed to always give me the impression that I was somehow at fault for it. The cause of it! And of course, the only way I could cope with those powerful and conflicting emotions was to do a shit-load of drugs and constantly act-out sexually. And other ways.

It didn't take long for John, with his great willpower and mental strength, to master his dark thoughts (memories?) and depressive mood, and as his face and the "vibe" at the table returned to normal, he thoughtfully said, "This is a very interesting . . . insight . . . into probably what is the biggest spiritual challenge facing this world today—that of having the women of this world, after so many centuries of suffering from a collective case of 'Stockholm Syndrome,' breaking free of it and again becoming the strong, intelligent . . . independent-thinking . . . compassionate . . . nurturing . . .and naturally sexual and spiritual beings they were born to be.

"And what a different world we'd have if that happened! I mean—look at the shit-house world we have today that has basically been rammed up our fundaments by those patriarchal, women-hating, women-oppressing, women-enslaving "Big Two" monotheisms! They are totally male institutions created and run by males, not only for the benefit of males, but in direct opposition to women, and with the 'sanctity' and authority of those institutions based on their claim that they were created by mystics working directly for the Supreme Cosmic Master, which they most conveniently envisaged and defined as a human male. And not a complete and balanced human male, by any stretch, but a totally one-sided human male. With that side being the frail male ego's need to enhance and validate itself by oppressing, dominating, denigrating, controlling, and using and abusing the female of our species. And much worse!—convincing all women that their very sacred and necessary sexuality—the foundational source of our species!—is both filthy and evil, and that if they naturally express it in their own ways and on their own terms, they are filthy, evil . . . sluts! Or whores! Or whatevers!

"I mean, it's obvious—to me, anyway—when reading about Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy-Yahweh in the Old Testament, that he is nothing more than a violent and intolerant tribal tyrant who is all male-ego without a smidgen of spirituality in him. He's all about male power and control and dominance. I mean, what's the first commandment but: 'I AM YOUR LORD AND GOD AND THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME!' I mean, isn't that exactly the direct—or implied—message every husband in a patriarchy gives to his wife on their wedding night—'I AM YOUR LORD AND MASTER AND THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER MEN IN YOUR BED BUT ME'—a message backed up by the patriarchal culture they are in . . . and doubly backed up by the patriarchal religion, because that new young wife instantly knows that if she displeases her 'LORD AND MASTER' she'll not only get a beating from him, but will displease her Supreme Cosmic Master as well—maybe even burn forever in hellfire if she does so! Or, in some of those really backward patriarchal religions, even today, get stoned to death or have her head chopped off!

"And when you think of it, all this violent lunacy—so much of which is directed at women!—comes about because if the ego's infantile and utterly simple-minded—single-minded!—capacity to attach itself to, and identify with, any damn thing that excites and exalts it. I mean, if infantile, stupid egos can get a big boost out of attaching themselves to, and ego-identifying with, the football or baseball teams of towns they don't even live in . . . and have never visited! And ego-identifying with the players on them whom they don't know and have never met—and probably wouldn't like if they did! . . .Or ego-identifying with the big corporation—and its fancy emblem—that employs those players . . . who really are just exalted entertainers! Or ego-identifying with this or that car or truck—or car or truck manufacturing corporation with its fancy, easy-to-identify-with logo that sells them shoddy, over-priced vehicles.

"And even infinitely dangerously—and usually derangedly!—worse, are those mindless automatons who so passionately ego-identify with their corporate nation and its clever logo—it's hallowed flag!—that they'll willingly and proudly wave that corporate, logo-flag while marching off to usually stupid and utterly pointless wars where they face injury and death in their willingness to serve the base and imperial and violent needs and greeds—or just plain damn folly!—of that nation's powerful leaders by injuring and killing as many fellow human beings as they are able. (John would surely have more than a lot to say about Mad King Donald and his millions of MAGA-hatters, especially if he gets around to sending them, and their sons and daughters. off to slaughter and get slaughter for his mad, MAGA-ideals!)

"So, if credulous, mindless morons can so passionately ego-identify with their corporation-country and its logo-flag and the cynical designs of its exploitative, corporate-political masters—right or wrong!—then just imagine the monstrous, mind-boggling ego-boost similarly credulous, mindless morons get from ego-identifying with one of the Supreme Cosmic Master-'teams' of those Big Three Monotheisms, all three with their anthropomorphically male, Cosmic Master-CEO, especially Team Constantine with its always-male, Emperor Coach . . . and his huge contingent of always-male, red-robed Assistant Coaches!

"No wonder that level of insane ego-identification with, and ego-attachment to, such insanely grandiose male conceptions has so consistently produced so much utterly insane male violence over the centuries and given males in those patriarchal monotheism carte blanche permission—license!—to think of, and treat women, like sub-human slaves! Just think of the implications of that—we are part of a species so ignorant and spiritually retarded that its main religions basically refuse to accept that half the species—the most important half, given the roles mothers play!—is not even fully human! . . . I mean, if they were considered fully human they'd have to be treated as equals, wouldn't they?

"And as far as I am concerned, this diabolical patriarchal lunacy is the reason we, as a species, it on track to rub itself off the face of this planet! . . . I mean, face it—it is a situation analogous to some lunatic in a mental asylum so totally believing that the left side of his body isn't actually him, that it is some kind of enemy, and that he has to constantly beat the hell out of it with his right fist to either make it submit to his every whim and demand—or to make it go away!

"Interestingly, once you truly begin to understand and meld with the Ocean of Spirit, and have an undeniable sense of the reality and nature of your spirit-being, you instantly know that there is nothing about Spirit that your ego can identify with. You just absolutely know that in melding with the Ocean of Spirit, you have instantly soared so far above the sticky, voracious, greedy muck of the identifying and attaching ego, that all memory of its existence and demands vanishes. It's a quantum leap from a low, dark, tar-sticky and incarcerating level of being to a high, bright, fluid and free one.

"The Ocean of Spirit no more needs human institutions with their power-hierarchies and power-greedy-climbers-up-the-ladders-of-those-hierarchies, than hawks and eagles need mini-jet engines strapped to their backs to fly so high. And the Ocean of Spirit could no more demand that its integral spirit-beings torture and slaughter fellow spirit-beings in an effort to defend and propagate spiritual values than a mother could demand that her newborn infant first sign a contract to look after her in her old age before she would be willing to allow that infant to start sucking the milk out of her breasts!"

Whew! Just re-thinking that conversation and those ideas—especially the notion that the many of the women in this world, particularly ones dominated by the Big Three Patriarchal Monotheisms!—are suffering from a debilitating case of collective Stockholm Syndrome! It's such a mind blowing notion I am going to go sleep on it for a bit . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

It's amazing what an hour's nap will do!—not only for one's energy, but for one's thinking capacity and memory. I had been wondering if hitting my mental reset-button with that nap would have made the notion that many of the women of the world are suffering from a collective case of Stockholm Syndrome, but on thinking about it now that I am nap-refreshed, it makes even more sense. I have suddenly remembered another conversation I had with John along these lines—oddly, I can remember the conversation clearly but have no recollection of its context at all!—which went like this . . . oh yeah, now I suddenly do remember the context!

John and I were out riding the horses one Sunday afternoon after I'd made one of my very rare efforts at attending Mass with my Mimi, an event she loved infinitely more than did I! And after the Mass—which I survived, as I survived all the Masses I'd ever attended, by daydreaming I was just about anywhere else but in that incense- and hypocrisy-reeking church—I'd had lunch with her but which I had been a little too anxious to cut short in anticipation of my visit with John. A reality that didn't go unnoticed by that lonely old woman who had the intuition of a witch. Though I never once told her I'd be visiting John after our Mass and lunch, she always knew that I was in a hurry to go for a visit with the man she often referred to as, "That Prodigal Brother—who never returned!"

Anyways, with Mimi's untiring devotion to attending Mass several times a week—what a sickening thought!—fresh in my mind, I'd thought about, not only my own loathing for even driving past a church, let alone attending a Mass, but my sense of the utter pointlessness of it, so I'd asked John what made the church-attending and God-worshipping impulse so strong in some people, while in others it was weak, even non-existent. And in my case, engendered such a feeling of aversion that I think swallowing a handful of fish hooks would be more pleasant that attending Mass.

His reply to that was an almost instant chuckle, followed by a clearing of his throat, and, obviously divining exactly who I had in mind when I'd asked the question, said, "Well, I'm sure I've answered that question a half dozen times for you before—and each time I think I told you not to go quoting me on the subject!—but I am quite sure that 99.9999 percent of the time, it's not a religious impulse at all that sends people into churches to so willing fall to their knees to slave-worship the Supreme Cosmic Master . . . and to be so equally willing to part with their usually hard-earned and scarce money in order support of those churches and their clergy, but just an infantile impulse! An impulse akin to that of a hungry infant's need to get one of its mother's nipples in its mouth and suck into its screaming gut some of her nice warm milk."

And though he was right in that it was not my first foray into asking him about that subject—or boring the snot out of you, Dear Reader, with it!—but this time his answer set howling a set of bagpipes screaming in my psyche over a sense of the absurdity inherent in what he was saying, given that I'd just spent time with my Mimi in a church that she loved going to, and of the many things I could have said about that dear old woman, her being infantile was not one of them. She was the most down-to-earth adult adult I'd ever met in my life!

The notion of her being in any way infantile was absolutely absurd, so I almost screeched at John, "Christ, John—you can't mean that! I mean, you can't really be saying that millions and millions of very adult people have been spending hours of their life—and lots of money that many don't have much of!—going to churches over the last few thousand years because . . . because they are being infantile? That's fucking . . . absurd! That many people can't be . . . that wrong . . . can't be so . . . developmentally arrested . . . for so damn long!"

And barely had those words come out of my mouth than my horse stopped, let out a monstrously loud fart, then proceeded to fertilize the trail with a "basket full" of fresh, steaming "road apples!" She did this pretty much right beside John and that got a long, loud laugh out of him and once she'd finished and resumed her slow trot, he said, "Your horse seems to have the same thoughts about that assertion of yours as I do!

"Believe me—when it comes to plumbing the well of human stupidity and credulity—and infantile behavior!—that damn black hole is as replete as it is deep! Especially when it is kept that way by the clever and malicious propaganda of Constantine's Imperial Abomination and its damn, Gestapo clergy! Which was easily understandable in the Dark and Middle Ages because, besides those times being grotesquely dark and stupid and harshly ruled by lots of petty, tyrannical kings and war lords who were in turn being ruled by Constantine's Imperial Abomination and by its Emperor Popes and all their dog-shit dogma, it was also being ruled by two other monstrous and iron-fisted forces: ignorance and scripture! Though as far as I am concerned, when it comes to most of the nonsense contained in the Bible, those words are synonyms!

"And it is a situation that is no different today for many 'ardent believers' who are just as totally uneducated and catastrophically infantile, ignorant and credulous as those denizens of the Dark and Middle Ages. But unlike back then, when the light and intelligence of Pagan civilization had been intentionally extinguished in the swamp of ignorance that Constantine's Imperial Abomination needed to intentionally create to obtain its vast power, it was understandable, because ignorance and scripture—and the Emperor Popes!—ruled as tyrannically and capriciously as had any Roman Emperor during the heyday of the Empire.

"So that level of ignorance and credulity is almost impossible to rationally understand today, especially in light of what the Priests of our Religion of Materialist Science are discovering, and teaching us, about this universe. And how each new discovery not only progressively shrinks the anthropomorphic "Supreme Cosmic Master" of those ignorant and credulous believers, but renders their beliefs about 'him' well beyond ridiculous!"

And here, I had to rein my horse to a halt and say, "Bathroom break!" as I dismounted, and made my way into the bushes to do my "business," which, as usual, induced John to dismount, call the dog to him, gruffly order him to "Stay!" to keep him from, quite literally, "sticking his nose in my business! . . . and my "privates!" Though I sure wish John would have had a similar power over the horde of mosquitoes I stirred up on my way through the undergrowth and which thought nothing of dining on my "privates!" And anywhere else they could find bare-assed skin.

And once again having my slacks up and offering a suitable defense against those mosquitoes attacks on my backside—oh how I envy men, who don't have to bare their butts to take a pee when in the bush!—and back in the saddle and enjoying the comfort of a non-screaming bladder as we allowed the horses to amble along the trail at their own pace, and though I totally agreed with what John had been saying, I just had to play devil's advocate—particularly with my visit with my Mimi so fresh in my mind!—and say, "But John!—you are criticizing peoples' fundamental human right in a democratically free country to be free to hold whatever religious beliefs they feel inclined to. I think you might be way out of line here!"

And he just snorted and chuckled and wryly said, "And I am exercising my fundamental right as a free person in a free society to freely express my opinion—for whatever the hell little it is worth! I mean, it's not like I am a Pope issuing an encyclical that is going to affect the lives of millions of people. All this stuff I am saying is solely for your ears . . . though of course, the horses will be hearing it too, but your horse has already passed judgment on what she thinks about it all. And the dog might be hearing bits and pieces of it as he romps around in these woods, but he's only going to bark it at Selene—and I am sure she is just a little bit 'above' it all!"

And when I'd finished laughing at that absurd notion of what we were talking meaning anything to the horses and the dog—or the moon, he went on, "Sure, I agree that in a free and democratic society like ours, all people should be entitled to their religious beliefs and practices, and in no way should be hindered from observing those practices—however ignorant and infantile they might be!—but when those beliefs and practices become a danger to this world, I think it has to be incumbent on somebody—somebody important and powerful!—to point out to those people just how infantile and dangerous those absurd beliefs and practices are!

"Christ, we have Mohammedan psychopaths blowing innocent people to bits claiming the act was either in defense of, or in service of, their exalted Allah, their human male conception of a Supreme Cosmic Master! As if such a Supreme Cosmic Master wouldn't be capable of doing 'his' own killing of those who piss him off by not properly revering his Supreme Exaltedness—or even believing 'he' exists at all. I mean, how hard could it be for this Supreme Cosmic Master to manifest an earthquake? Or a flood? A tornado? A hurricane? Even an asteroid-strike? And on a more personal and precise level—a heart attack? A stroke? A car accident? An industrial accident? A fall down a flight of stairs? A drowning? A choking on a chunk of food? You get the picture.

"If the Supreme Cosmic Master cannot take care of his 'enemies' on this speck of ant-shit of a planet himself, he sure can't be very supreme or the master of anything! Personally, I think any such Supreme Cosmic Master, humanly conceived to possess such a gargantuan human male ego, would be supremely and mightily angry with any such obsequious and ignorant and incredibly stupid followers who were arrogant enough to think they had to take it upon themselves to do his killing of his enemies for him. Just imagine how Joe—the "Brown Bomber"—Louis would have felt if his fans would have consistently beat the crap out of his opponents before every one of his fights because they were afraid that he wasn't enough of 'a man' and 'a fighter' to do the job for himself!"

That got a good chuckle out of me, for though I'd heard about Joe Louis—who the hell hadn't!—I didn't know much about him, but I thoroughly "got" his example by mentally substituting that too-handsome-a-hunk-to-be-a-boxer, Muhammad Ali, for Joe Louis, and induced me to say,

"Ya, you've got a good point with that example, John! A point that sure could have been applied to the Catholic Inquisitors and witch-murderers who managed to convince themselves that their Almighty God wasn't almighty enough to look after his own affairs."

"Yeah, the Inquisition with it hordes of psychopathic, sadistic and murdering 'dogma-defenders' and those equally psychopathic, sadistic and murdering witch-slaughters are perfect examples of such evil lunacy—and hypocrisy, given that each very likely was very good at deluding himself that he was exercising 'the will of God Almighty' while getting a lot of sadistic and sexual pleasure out of the suffering and death he was wreaking upon innocent human beings!

"As was the Thirty Years War a prolonged act of evil lunacy, in which between eight and ten million Christians either slaughtered each other outright—or died hideous deaths from war-related plagues and famines—and all of it over the infantile and psychopathic notion that the male-gendered, Supreme Cosmic Master was paying close attention to events on this speck of ant-shit of a planet to care that all the members of 'his' Numero Uno Religious Institution—Constantine's Imperial Abomination!—stuck together and believed exactly the same things about 'him'—and bended-knees, slave-to-Master, worshipped 'him' in exactly the same and proper ways! Ways, of course, that 'he,' in his Supreme Cosmic Anality, had explicitly dictated and expected to be followed! To the letter—or else!

"But things, though different and less overtly murderous, are no different now. . . . I mean, take this one absurd example of the Emperor Pope of Constantine's Imperial Church decreeing that it is heinously offensive to the male-gendered Supreme Cosmic Master who is supposedly the creator and 'emperor' of this whole vast Universe—and beyond!—that we male human microbes on this speck of ant shit of a planet put tiny little pieces of latex over our tiny little penises to prevent pregnancies or the spread of heinous diseases. Or that women use diaphragms . . . and whatnot . . . or take anti-conception pills to prevent pregnancies.

"Shit, there's no shortage of very knowledgeable Priests of our Religion of Materialist Science out there screaming at the wind about the fact that our population numbers are now increasing exponentially and that one of the biggest threats to our survival as a species, is our 'microbial' over-population of this little piece of ant-shit of a planet. Yet that beyond-moronic Emperor Pope—and the beyond-moronic Imperial institution he is emperor of!—sticks, like fly-shit to a window, to that infantile and irrational-to-the-point-of-insanity notion that having sex while wearing a condom is somehow mightily and morally offensive to the Supreme Cosmic Master, the creator and emperor of this whole vast universe—and beyond!—especially since, if we, as this ever-burgeoning, 'microbial infection' over-running this piece of ant shit of a planet, are to survive as a species—and while surviving, do so in a manner salubrious enough that we want to survive!—we must get more than a modicum of control over our exponentially burgeoning population numbers!" (John would have loved Dan Brown's book, Inferno, which was all about that very subject! )

And here I managed to get my bit into that "conversation" by saying, "Yeah, you've made that point before and its unassailable, but I think a big part of that no contraception thing—which as far as I am concerned is so irrational . . . so downright evil . . . especially as a working mother who is often overwhelmed by just two children . . . that I feel a migraine coming on every time I think about it! Especially when I also think about that great horde of children my great- grandmother—your mother!—had! . . . Christ!—but she must have been one tough woman! But I think a big reason for it is that if that abomination of a church—the Abomination!—allows its . . . 'sheep' to use contraception, then it is tacitly giving those 'sheep' permission to indulge in sex solely for the fun of it—and as you've said often enough, all the great power and wealth of Constantine's Imperial Abomination is built on the foundation that everything about human sex is evil and dirty and sinful in the eyes of the 'Supreme Cosmic Master' and that it can only be good and clean and holy in the eyes of the 'Supreme Cosmic Master' if it is indulged in a legal—Church-sanctioned!—marriage between husband and wife and solely for the purpose of inducing conception! And I am sure there is some 'dogshit-dogma' somewhere stipulating that if that husband and wife enjoy themselves while inducing conception, they have committed a mortal sin. . . . Well, two, actually—one for each. And more—if they 'get it on' more than once in a session! . . . Or if they use their mouths for more than a perfunctory and affectionate, pre-coitus kiss."

As I was saying that John had a look on his face like I'd slipped drain cleaner into his coffee cup and he'd just taken a big gulp of it, and for a second I thought he was pissed at me for bringing up the subject of his mother and that horde of children she had, "You're right, my mother was one 'tough woman' but she was also a supremely ignorant and uneducated woman who lived in a tiny world and possessed a tiny worldview that revolved totally around that farm and her husband and her family and her faith, and her life in it, hellishly bad as it was, was not as bad for her, as you can imagine that same life being for you—as the educated woman you are with the worldview you have—when you project yourself into her situation.

"But you've got an excellent point there . . . about Constantine's Imperial Abomination being obsessed with the 'evil' inherent in any of its sheep daring to indulge in sex for the sheer, lustful, playful enjoyment of it! But just thinking about the lunacy and the evil of such dogma is going to give me a migraine too—and I don't get migraines! Though I think what is threatening to put an alligator like that in my head is thinking about the hundreds of millions of pathetically—no, psychotically!—passive and mindless Catholic sheep who accept that lunacy, that irrationality . . . and that level of utterly manipulative and coercive evil, as somehow being a dogma that is good and wise and spiritual. . . . . And is the de facto will and wisdom of their Supreme Cosmic Master!

"And the eating-proof of that rancid pudding of an assertion is daily being borne out with the problems now constantly in the news with that AIDS disease, especially where it is ravaging Africa the way the Black Death once ravaged Europe! The situation shows the Emperor Pope's no-condom decree to be both catastrophically inhumane and evil, given all the deaths and suffering caused by that disease. Hell, I hear there's hundreds of villages and towns in some African countries where most of the children are being raised by their grandparents because their parents have all died from this AIDS disease. Christ!—can you just imagine and the incredible amount of and grief and trauma being suffered by all those children losing their parents like that! And the grief and suffering of the grandparents who had to watch their adult children die—just for having sex! And not to mention the economic and emotional strains put on them in having to raise their grieving and suffering—and in the young ones' eyes—parent-abandoned grandchildren!

"That vile Emperor Pope claims this condom-taboo is all about 'God's love for life'—and for his human creation!—and that condoms, in thwarting the creation of that life, angers God because it is preventing the creation of more life for him to love. Or some such infantile and irrational and insane nonsense. . . . Matter a fact, the whole situation is so irrational I can't think about it for long because it just drives my blood pressure through the roof! . . . Especially the truly irrational 'thinking' behind Constantine's Imperial Abomination's dogshit-dogma about condom-use having to do 'God's love of life' and how it thwarts it, then why the hell doesn't 'God's love for live' extend to all those people dying of a disease that can so easily be prevented by the wearing of a condom? . . . And then if you factor in the harsh fact that eventually our over-populating this poor planet the way we are, is going to degrade its capacity to support us and that billions . . . of the Supreme Cosmic Master's precious life-forms . . . will end up someday dying from that degradation . . . ."

And with that John took off is Stetson, whapped himself real hard on the forehead while shouting "D'OH!"

And after laughing both at himself and at me, who was laughing so hard at that unexpected Homer-shtick that I was almost falling of my horse, he very sarcastically went on, "But of course!—the Emperor Pope is a rich white guy . . . well, at least he sure damn well lives like one! . . . and most of those people are impoverished colored people, and in being a rich white guy, he probably refuses to believe that impoverished colored people are human enough for him to care about—except for their indulging in sex and enjoying themselves!—and being the emperor of Constantine's Imperial Abomination with its belief that all sexual acts committed outside of a marriage and not solely for the purpose of conception, are heinous and mortal sins, he is even more certain that the Supreme Cosmic Master is intent on sending all those impoverished colored and incorrigible sinners straight to an eternity in hell for their out-of-wedlock—and thus unnatural and anathema to him—acts, anyway!"

And at this point, I had to laughing comment, "Ya know, Uncle John—that's a very effective rhetorical device you use, so sarcastically calling 'God,' the Supreme Cosmic Master! The term God has become so trite and over-used that it is practically meaningless as a term. Shit, people say 'God bless you,' when you sneeze—as if the 'Supreme Cosmic Master' should have his vast, cosmic attention drawn to one of us human 'microbes on this bit of ant-shit of a planet,' when we reflexively expel a bit of air out of our faces. And TV celebrities who likely live utterly godless and amoral lives, saying 'God bless!' at the end of their show. But if people were to say, in those—and so many other—circumstances, 'May the Supreme Cosmic Master of this Universe—who I have the ear of!—bless you!' I think it would sound so insanely ridiculous that they wouldn't be able to do it. Or not for long!

"And I love that super-derogatory name for 'God' you from Blake—Nobodaddy! Especially you rendition of it as Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy! Can you just hear some TV celebrity—or asshole politician, say, "May Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy bless you!"

That got a guffaw out of John but nothing followed, so I went on, "And you know, if that Nobodaddy-Yahweh god-character of the 'the Chosen People'—or 'the Chosen People With The Clipped-Cocks,' as you once hilariously called them!—had called himself by his true name, Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy when he 'chose' them, it would have robbed so many blasphemers of their favorite blaspheme. Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy damn you! sure doesn't roll off the tongue like God damn you! and neither does, Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy damn it! And even less, Supreme Cosmic Master damn you!

And when John had finished laughing at one of my rare bursts of original humor, I asked, "Where did you pick that Supreme Cosmic Master phrase up?"

That got a loud chuckle out of him as he said, "I didn't 'pick it up' anywhere. . . . I fact, I'd say that it picked me! I'd spent a week a few months back doing a ton of thinking about this . . . stuff . . . and the lunatic absurdity inherent in so many otherwise intelligent people so mindlessly male anthropomorphizing whatever-the-hell-it-is that is the process of creating this cosmos . . . and not just anthropomorphizing it but so ridiculously and insanely degrading and delimiting it by somehow convincing themselves—or letting a lot of cynical, manipulative priests . . . and bishops and whatnot—convince them, that this . . . and at that point I was at a loss for mental words to name it with something besides that loathsome word, god, and the phrase Supreme Cosmic Master popped into my head. Quite all on its own, I might add—and out of 'the blue,' so to speak. Hell, maybe it was pure—divine, heh, heh!—inspiration sent to me by 'the Pigeon' itself. And quite behind Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy's back! Heh, heh!"

Then after a long pause during which the horses clomped along and I tried to think of something to say, he took off his Stetson, scratched his graying hair, and added, as he put that beloved hat back on, "Actually, now that I think of it, it popped into my head one night when I was watching an astronomy documentary on TV. This one . . . I think . . . was about astronomers being in the process of building a really big and important telescope that they are going to launch into orbit around the Earth—that I am more than anxious to see the results of should I live long enough!—full of fancy technologies that will let them take pictures of some really faraway stuff—galaxies and supernovas and whatever ever all is way the hell and gone out there.

"As I remember the program, talk of that space telescope was only secondary to talk about the enormous size of this Milky Way galaxy we live in, which as far as galaxies go, isn't considered by astronomers to be all that big . . . even though it does contain an estimated two hundred billion stars. Christ, I can't even imagine that number of grains of sand, let alone stars! And they figure our closest galactic neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, to be twice as big. And according to their . . . guesstimates . . . this universe contains uncountable millions of galaxies, some smaller, some bigger, than our Milky Way! Which meant this universe contained uncountable trillions upon trillions of stars!

"I guess it was while I was trying to expand my stiff, aging mind to take in the absurdity of those numbers that I started thinking about our modern world, that now knows such incredible things about this vast-beyond-imagining universe being dominated—as it still is!—by ancient, Semitic, ignorance-based religions supposedly 'ruled' by ancient, ignorant, tribal Semitic deities. The catastrophic absurdity almost gave me a bad case of heart burn! It suddenly struck me, like being kicked in the chest by an enraged stallion, just how ludicrously and dangerously parochial and credulously . . . infantile . . . it was for modern people—people possessing this level of knowledge about the size and complexity of our Universe!—to still want to believe in—and to bended-knees, slave-to-master worship!—any such male anthropomorphized, ancient Semitic tribal deity!

"And if it wasn't crazy enough that this particular Semitic tribe first imagined then projected this male-anthropomorphized, tribal warlord-deity into the sky, then imagined that HE had chosen them to be its one-and-only very special people, what was even crazier—and more catastrophic for Europe and now all of human history!—was that Constantine's Imperial Abomination's theologians—god-babblers!—liked this male-anthropomorphized Semitic tribal war-lord deity so much they adopted 'him' as their own but decided that his being just a petty little warlord-deity for one pathetic Semitic tribe wouldn't impress their sheep flocks very much, so they expanded him into being the master of the whole cosmos! . . . I guess it wasn't a big leap from that to having 'Sophia'—or Jesus' Pet Pigeon—inspirating the phrase, Supreme Cosmic Master into my thick skull. To get a better handle on putting things into perspective.

"And no less than it is utterly infantile idiocy for modern human beings with this as-yet-limited understanding of the size and nature of this universe, to worship such a cosmically—and tragicomically!—tiny and ludicrously misconceived tribal, ancient Semitic warlord deity, it is outright psychopathic lunacy for anyone to kill one single fellow human being—let alone thousands, even millions of them!—in the name and service of that ridiculously tiny and ludicrously misconceived ancient Semitic tribal warlord deity.

"And of course, it is not only infantile—and tragicomic—lunacy to believe in the existence of a male anthropomorphized, ancient Semitic, tribal warlord deity obsessed with doing his nasty, warlord business here on this insignificant little speck of ant-shit that planet Earth is in the grand, cosmic scheme of things, but to believe that this male anthropomorphized ancient Semitic tribal warlord deity possessed then—or now has!—the power to create and rule this whole, vast universe containing as it does, millions of galaxies and trillions-upon-trillions of stars.

"And an even more absurd lunacy than that, is believing that anything as so humanly and cosmically minutely conceived as a anthropomorphically imagined 'deity' capable of creating and ruling such a vast and galaxy-filled universe, could even remotely care about us human beings worshipping it, given that to it, we human beings would be just so many insignificant, two-legged microbes swarming around on one tiny, insignificant speck of ant-shit of a planet swirling around a non-descript star that is but one of trillions upon trillions of stars in this universe that it had created and ruled.

"Or an even more absurd and infantile lunacy than that, is the notion that this deity who had created and ruled this whole unimaginably vast universe with its millions of galaxies and trillions upon trillions of stars, could show an interest in hearing, and responding to the pitiful and self-serving prayers and supplications sent to it by the two-legged microbes swarming that speck of ant-shit of planet swirling around that non-descript star."

John laughed so loud after saying that, that he startled my horse enough for her to almost shake me off it, and after I'd recovered my equilibrium and gotten her under control, he apologized, then went on in a more subdued fashion,

"The Big Three monotheisms, with their hordes of delusive and self-important theo-logians—'god-babblers'—spouting off their ludicrously limited and catastrophically infantile pronouncements about their one-hundred-percent-certain and absurdly reductive and 'rational' conceptions of 'their' deity . . . of the creative agency . . . of the really, really, 'Big M' Mystery behind this vast universe, are so far off the mark of anything even remotely reasonable . . . remotely sane . . . that by all rights they should be no more common on this Earth today than livery stables and horse-shoeing blacksmiths in downtown Los Angeles!

"But alas, they are still as absurdly common as was once horseshit on the streets of Victorian London! Christ, that same TV program stated that astronomers have estimated this universe—which of course, must be smaller than any 'deity' who created it!—could be as large as 90 billion light years in diameter! And since those damn light years just don't compute for this dried up old horse turd of a mind, when the program was over I got out my calculator and converted those damn light years to miles. It worked out to some totally ridiculous number like 55 with 22 . . . or so . . ..zeros after it! Well, that damn crazy big number didn't mean a damn thing more to me than those damn light years! So I spent some more time computing how many trips between the earth and the sun that would entail and came up with a number of 60 with 14 zeros after it. And that didn't mean a damn thing more to me than those other numbers—it was all just too damn mind-bogglingly huge!

"But I persisted in trying to imagine what that many miles could actually represent but after awhile I actually started to feel like I was going insane. I started to feel like one of those astronauts doing a space walk and having their tether break, and with nothing to grab onto in order to save themselves, they just helplessly drifted off into black, endless space. Nothing in my mind or my imagination could find anything to grasp onto concerning the unimaginably vast scope of this Universe. Nor could it grasp the fact that this unimaginable monstrosity of a 90 billion-light-years-across universe with its trillions of trillions of stars would have billions of billions of planets swirling around them, and that surely millions upon millions of those planets would be capable of supporting some form of life, with uncountable forms of that life being sentient beings.

"And since that program also said this universe was created in a Big Bang from something called a singularity—don't ask me to understand that!—which occurred somewhere around thirteen billion years ago . . . and since I'd learned in books that our sun and this Earth was created about four billion years ago, that means lots of those sentient beings would be living on planets created billions of years before our sun was even born, and thus, if they were still around, would be so far advanced in their evolution from us that we would no more be capable of imagining their natures than a colony of microbes on one of my dog's fleas could imagine what the hell my dog is!"

At this point I had to interrupt John and try to get him to calm down because this subject was getting him extremely agitated and putting a real wild, almost crazed look in his eyes. And disturbing his poor horse, which obviously was tuning into his mood and responding to it. When I pointed this out to him, he instantly dismounted—as did I—and as we walked along the trail with the horses ambling along behind us, he made an obvious and effective effort to calm himself down as he said, "Yeah—this subject always does that to me! It's so . . . so . . . damn—mind-boggling! . . . Especially in the way that it makes my individual human life—and all human life!—seem . . . so absolutely absurd . . . which it is—when viewed from an ego-oriented perspective!

"So then one has to move into a spiritual perspective to make any sense of it all—which does the trick! But I mean a truly spiritual perspective—not the religious perspective rammed up our fundaments by the Big Three Monotheisms with their bended-knees, slave-to-master worshipping of a ridiculously conceived and horrendously limited, male-anthropomorphized ancient Semitic tribal warlord deity! This limited and ridiculously—for today!—conceived ancient Semitic tribal warlord deity that is just a crude and infantile projection of the dark side of the frail, human male ego!

"And it is because of that ridiculously conceived and very egotistically human—and in all three monotheisms, male—deity, that we have, as a collective species, and because of the immense and tyrannical temporal power and coercive influence of those Big Three monotheisms over the last two thousand years, been kept in a state of perpetual spiritual infancy. Or at best, at best—perpetual childhood! But given that we are now infants—or toddlers!—in a symbiotic relationship with a rapidly evolving race of ever more powerful machines which gives us the power to destroy, not only ourselves, but almost all life on this planet, I truly believe it is time that we set aside that grotesquely childish worldview centered around that tiny, trivial, male-anthropomorphized "Daddy-deity," and grew up—or at least reached some sort of species- puberty after which we could start imagining—and hopefully initiating—a process of spiritually growing up! . . . Though I guess that's a redundant statement, because all true spirituality is—and can only ever be!—about growth. About truly growing up! A necessary growing up that our Big Three, Worship-Master Nobodaddy-on-bended-knees religions utterly thwart! To do anything less will surely see the end of us as a species on this planet!"

And here John let out a real loud and long laugh that fortunately also seemed to ground out all that disturbing agitation in him—I had been terrified he was going to have a stroke!—after which he said, "You must be familiar with that oft quoted passage from the Bible—don't ask me to be like some obsessive thumper and quote chapter and verse!—that goes something like, 'When I was a child, I thought and behaved like a child, but when I became an adult, I put away those childish things,' which, given that it is in the Bible, is an incredibly true, wise and rational saying that means it is long past the time for us to grow up and put away our childish love for, and dependence on, that damn Bible—which though it has some wisdom in it, has a lot more very pernicious nonsense designed to keep us thinking and acting like toddlers! And that's not including everything in it that has to do with that tyrannical—and often genocidal!—ancient Semitic tribal warlord deity that so many mindless sheep are—literally!—hell-bent on believing is the Master and Creator of the Whole Damned Cosmos!

" And of course, not only grow out of our infantile dependence on that that damn Bible—and for the Mohammedans, their Koran—but for all institutional religions which gain all their wealth, power and influence by keeping their vast and credulous sheep-flocks in a state of perpetual childhood . . . and emotional and spiritual dependence on them! Keep in mind what I have likely said too often before, true spirituality is always and only ever about a conscious and willful process of the inner growth and change of our individual spirit-being. Of a constant adult quest to raise one's level of spirit-being consciousness out of the thick black muck of the non-consciousness of the ego! But powerful institutional churches, like the Big Three Monotheisms, don't want—can't have—real, mature adults—who are capable of critical thought!—in their sheep-flocks! And certainly not adults in a continual and intentional process of spiritual growth and change! All they want—all they can glean power and wealth out of!—is just sheep-flocks of credulous children who lifelong live in awe—and fear!—of their Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy God and their precious Church and their shepherd priests, and who are sheep-content to die at the same, limited level of consciousness they were born at. To be born as lamb and die as mutton!"

Then pausing a moment, taking off his Stetson and again doing the Homer shtick of slapping his forehead and practically shouting, "D'OH!" went on. "NO!—what am I saying? NOT the same level! A spirit-being incarnates into a newborn infant at a high level of consciousness, and in that process of described so perfectly by that poet Wordsworth in his famous poem . . . about immortality . . . about vague, childhood memories about the high level of consciousness of his 'childhood soul' . . . slides, during his or her life, into a suffocating state of darkness and unconsciousness."

And here I could be interrupt to say, "Yeah—'Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood' . . . or something like that. I remember having to study that poem in grade eight because it was considered an important poem by a famous poet, but the damn thing made absolutely no sense to me! I thought he was writing gibberish! And I don't even think our teacher, an old French nun named . . . Sister Angelique . . .with a personality more like a junkyard dog than an angel . . . understood it very well, either. She kept saying Wordsworth was a pantheist, and saying it with a look on her face and a tone in her voice that suggested that being a pantheist was on par with being a rapist! Or worse—a Protestant! Which of course, in being Church of England, he also—from her POV—most damnably was! She then said the poem was his very pagan attempt at expressing his adult fantasies about the perfect childhood he likely never had. Or the childhood that only a pagan child could have had, and since Wordsworth, even in being a Protestant, had most definitely been baptized a Christian, so he should not even have been thinking such pagan thoughts, let alone writing poems about them! I think it was the only time in those eight years at that sad excuse of a school that I ever agreed with that horrible nun—any nun!—about anything!"

That got a long, low chuckle out of John as he said, "Well, your Sister . . . 'Junkyard Dog' . . . sure would not like me because I sure am a pantheist. And since I do not consider myself a Christian, I am most definitely an infidel and a heretic and an abominable Pagan! Though even in being all of those inhuman and totally unchristian 'horrors,' I am most definitely not a wise, poetic pantheist—or pagan—like that Wordsworth fellow. But your anecdote drives home the point I was going to make. The poem is all about Wordsworth's remembrances of the time in his early childhood when his freshly incarnated spirit-being dominated his life and made it obvious that absolutely everything was bright and alive and enchanted and connected and intrinsically . . . divine.' Don Juan would have said it was the time of his life when the nagual had suffused and dominated it. Then comes the inevitable dominance of our ego and our reason and we slowly slide into its enveloping and disconnecting and disenchanting darkness . . . and an inevitable forgetfulness about those bright, enchanted, and 'divine' days. And it is usually only poets and mystics—if there is a difference!—who naturally retain or retrieve powerful enough memories of those bright, connected, 'divine' days to write about them.

"And that is a perfect situation for institutional religions—particularly the Big Three Monotheisms!—because their whole modus operandi is designed to keep their sheep-flocks in that state of disconnected and disenchanted darkness. When in such a state, it is so easy for those powerful and power-greedy institutions—and their cynical and cunning clergy—to induce their credulous sheep-flocks to believe absolutely any nonsense they can dump into their empty heads. And with that nonsense, not only control those sheep flocks for their power and profit, but keep them in that state of darkness. Sister 'Junkyard Dog's' derogation of Wordsworth and his poem is just such an example of how the clergy of those institutions can keep their sheep-flocks in a lifelong state of ignorance and darkness! . . . And how those clergy, when they become teachers, can so easily strip mine all the gold of enchantment out of a child's life!

"True spirituality, as that Wordsworth fellow was trying to teach us in that poem . . . or as I vaguely remember it . . . is that long and difficult process called gnosis, that process of waking up and truly knowing that we are, in our essence, a spirit-being who, on our earthly birth, incarnated into our infant body in a state of brilliant enlightenment and then gradually fell into a pit of darkness—a crushing pit from which we then must lifelong strive to help it escape back into the light. And if there is one thing those Big Three Monotheisms hate, it is that process of true spirituality, of true spiritual growth, known as gnosis.

"Hate it wish murderous—and Inquisitorial!—vengeance because it is an inner and very personal process for which no power-and-wealth mongering clergy are needed. And which, of course, is why Constantine's Imperial Abomination murdered all the original Christian Gnostics and almost totally erased them from the historical record! I guess you could say that true spirituality, true spiritual growth, is to the Big Three Monotheisms like political dissent was to Hitler and Stalin!"

Well, yeah I know—there's little in the above that isn't a rehash of other stuff I've already written into this poor "Preface"—this lunatic blog, more like!—and if I was to $tyle-Nazi the thing I'd have to send most of it to Concentration Camp Delete! And of course, there's a lot of very unoriginal stuff there that the atheist/agnostic/don't-give-a-flying-fuck-about-religion-and-spirituality "Priests of Materialist Science have been saying in various ways for a very long time now, but I felt the need to express John's version here, especially since John sure was neither an atheist—nor even an agnostic. As Sister "Junkyard Dog" would have said, "He was one of those vile pagans—and a pantheist!" And of course, if the Inquisition still existed and he was still alive, she'd be siccing an Inquisitor or two on him. Or helping my mother do that! (Ha!—I just Wikied Inquisition and discovered that evil, fascist institution still exists within the Abomination, though it now sports the innocuous and head-scratching name of, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which I suspect is the Abomination's attempt to call a rabid Rottweiler a stuffed poodle and not attract any attention to it. And as to whether the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is behaving like a stuffed poodle or a rabid Rottweiler, I have no idea. And don't give a flying fuck—as long as those Inquisitors-by-any-other-name stay off my doorstep!

And, oh yeah (redux)—just in case you give a sweet flying fuck, John did live long enough to see the Hubble space telescope launched—and its flawed mirror repaired!—and even long enough for me to buy him a Christmas present of one of the first books of the incredible pictures that thing takes. I think of all the books he owned, that one, by the time of his death, was the most worn, and rare it was after his acquisition of it, could I go over for a visit and not have him excitedly show me pictures in it—and excitedly regale me with explanations of the discoveries those pictures represented. And believe me, it was a sight to see, and an experience to behold, because there was little in those waning, nonagenarian years of John's life that got him excited—but that stuff sure did!

And even once, while pointing out some incredible picture of two galaxies colliding—no, actually, I think it might have been those incredible pictures of those huge and towering—ten light years "high!"(as John always said: there is no up and down in space)—cosmic dust clouds that were given the name, the Pillars of Creation—because they were nurseries for stars (my mind still won't wrap itself around the reality that those clouds, which look like they could be in our atmosphere, were ten light years "high!")—and he once, sotto voce, and obviously quite unconsciously said, "How Catherine would have loved this stuff!"

And when I instantly said, "Who was Catherine, Uncle John?" he instantly got both very pale and just a little bit testy as he stared blankly at me a moment before saying, "Catherine!—how do you know about her?" And when I said, "You just mentioned her, Uncle John—you said she'd love this stuff!" he just got a faraway look on his face and with a strange tremor and more sadness in his voice then I'd ever heard before, and said, "Well, I shouldn't have!" And with that he got up to busy himself with very noisily making a fresh pot of coffee, and when he returned to the table with the coffee, he had returned to his normal self and I never heard him mention the name Catherine again—or at least not till working on his memoirs, which of course, are pretty much all about her!

Fuck!—nothing brings tears to my eyes like too-vivid memories of those Sunday afternoon rides with John and the dog!—dogs, really, since there was a few of them over those years, though since they were all Border Collies they sit in my memory like one dog!—so now, after going through the handfuls of toilet paper—gotta remember to buy some tissues next time I venture out into the world!—needed to dry my eyes and blow my nose, I will try to try and crane-lift the ditch-plowing locomotive of that emotion-stirring derailment back onto the track of this narrative by getting back to that probably totally forgotten topic of nature spirits, which was as brightly dear to John as the topic of "Team Constantine" was darkly dear. Or the male, anthropomorphically-projected tribal and patriarchal Semitic warlord-deity, the ever-petty and sin-slinging Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy, which was as anathema him as Martin Luther had been to that Medici profligate, Pope Leo X!

"You know," he once said to my don't-wanna-hear-this-shit-about-them ears: "I once asked those friendly nature spirits about the really hostile spirits in that grove of pines, and what I sensed they were trying to 'tell' me—not that I am a hundred percent sure I got it right!—was that those were the spirits of the pine trees themselves! As I understood what they were trying to transmit to me, there had long ago lived a very powerful and solitary Indian shaman in that grove of trees, and that he'd developed a close friendship with those trees and used his shamanic powers to enhance their tree-spirits. Though the shaman is long dead, he died in that grove and those trees are protecting it for him. And protecting their own power by keeping people out of that grove—especially loggers!

"Now, I hardly expect you to believe that, but can you just imagine what it would be like if all trees were as powerful—and hostile to human beings!—as those pines? There sure would not be a lot of logging going on . . . and we'd have to build our houses and whatnot out of something else. . . . So maybe that's a good thing . . . "

And hey, if you are capable of getting off on this kind of shit and want to explore the world of nature spirits a little deeper, I can but refer you to an interesting, disturbing book John bequeathed to me called The Magic of Findhorn by Paul Hawken. That book was not only well-read by John but equally well-written by Hawken, who is one of those California-born sunshine "boys" (he's older than I am) who is such an over-achiever in so many areas besides writing books that he makes Superman look like a slug and me feel like a gob of frozen spit on a metal fence post in January. In this 70s book of Hawken's, there is not only an account of the incredible "growings-on" in that Findhorn garden in the far north of Scotland, but also an extensive account of an eccentric old Scotsman known as ROC (Robert Ogilvie Crombie) who gets so deep into the nature spirit/Pan thing you'd think he was Crazy Horse or Black Elk! (that Oglala Sioux shaman written about by Neihardt.) And speaking of Black Elk, here's a quote of his John liked to throw at me all the time,

Crazy Horse dreamed and went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that one.

He'd always he'd laughing follow that up with, "Now isn't it interesting how all mystics seem to wind up at the top of the same mountain of consciousness, where the view of the Ocean of Spirit cannot be missed—or gainsaid! And where in hell do you suppose that uneducated old medicine man living on the American prairies way back then got a hold of and read a copy of Plato so he could talk about his realm of the Forms? Amazing, isn't it!"

I didn't discover it until after John died, but watching Joseph Campbell's Mythos lecture series on DVD, I came across, right at the very beginning of the first lecture, Joe describing the four purposes of myths,

The first function is the mystical function; it opens up a realization of a mystical dimension. Behind the surface phenomenology of the world there is a transcendent mystery source and that is the source also within yourself.

Though in his The Power of Myth lecture series, he goes further by saying,

If you lose that, you don't have a mythology. If mystery is manifest through all things, the universe becomes, as it were, a holy picture. You are always addressing the transcendent mystery through the conditions of your actual world.

And like we used to say back in the day, "This is real deeeeeep shit, man!" which it surely is for me with my booze-and-drug-addled left-brain, Monk-anal orientation, but for John, he lived that "deeeeeep shit" as naturally as he rode a horse, and which he once very angrily expressed with, "Removing the mystery from life is like baking bread without yeast—all you end up with is that flat, tasteless crap the priest shoves into your mouth on a Sunday morning and tells you to pretend is the body of Christ. But the real Christ is the Mystery, the leavening yeast that makes the bread of life edible, and I find it highly symbolic that that infernal Imperial Abomination of Constantine's uses bread made without leavening in its communion ceremony. To me the only mystery inherent in that abominable religion is that so many otherwise intelligent people have—and still!—buy and pay into it, thus keeping it so wealthy and powerful for so long. It is definitive proof that Gurdjieff is right and that human beings are somnambulant cretins! And Christian—particularly Catholics, the most so!" (You didn't want to be around John when he started expressing his anger Constantine's Imperial Abomination/Church/Crutch and its bat-flocks of black-robed minions, because it was a little bit too much like being in a hang-glider over Mt. St. Helens when it was erupting."

But now, after that butterfly flight into the worlds of Black Elk and Joe Campbell, back to Hawken's book, which makes for really interesting reading, especially in light of what I have just quote by Campbell and John above, for if even only one third of that book is true, that Findhorn place, for awhile at least, had a great big set of double doors swung wide open into Mystery—the nagual/Ocean of Spirit—allowing a whole lot of really "heavy shit" to happen.

Stephen King, in his great hero's-journey, Gunslinger/Dark Tower series, has a perfect word for that—a thinny. Which is a place where, within the context of his story, the normal barrier between the our world and "the other" has grown thin, allowing that "other" world to bleed/intrude into our world. And vice versa! (King believes the series is finished, but I believe not—he still has to write a ninth volume of it, which would basically be a rewriting of the first story, The Gunslinger, to subtly show that Roland's achievement of his Dark Tower-quest had subtly, but deeply, spiritually, and gnostically, changed him—had raised his level of consciousness—for the next go-round of the quest, so that in that next one he is not so reckless in his willingness to use and kill the people he encounters on that quest. I mean—as I know John would have said about it—what the fuck's the use of anyone going on any sort of spiritual quest if completing it does not enhance their consciousness and make them a more complete, compassionate, and spiritual person?)

Actually, while I was writing the above parenthetical stuff, I was reminded of when I once pushed John to really define what he meant by a truly spiritual, spiritual value system—unlike the pseudo-spiritual value systems of simple, slave-minded god-believers/worshippers!—he said it was any value system that aided one in raising their level if consciousness, which he said was the foundation of Buddhist and Gurdjieff—and other—practices, and even part of Christianity when Christians were really Gnostics who'd gotten got past the mindless notion that the mere believing in childish scripture stories constituted spirituality, and actually practiced consciousness-enhancing behaviors like meditation and charity and compassion and most especially—tolerance. And didn't suffer the company and egomania and power-corruption of bishops!

He also said—and I think I've said this already—that there actually are a lot of truly spiritual people in Constantine's Imperial Abomination, but most of the time they behave in a spiritual fashion in spite of that abominable institution, and not because of it.

And again, back to Hawken's The Magic of Findhorn (The Thinny of Findhorn?) for anyone who likes to believe in that kind of "weird shit," it is, quite literally, an enthralling read, though for me, with my fragile, eggshell worldview, the whole book was just disturbing as hell because, like the Castaneda books, it tolled some kind of giant, disturbing and worldview-expanding truth-bell too damn deep in the mysterious core of psyche for me to be comfortable with!

But hey, man—if you like that kind of mind-blowing, worldview-shattering shit, you might want to check out the book that pretty much ended up almost becoming John's Bible in the last years of his life—Wallace Black Elk's, Black Elk: The Sacred Ways of the Lakota. (if you can find it—I'm not sure it's in print any more but on-line used booksellers like Alibris will surely have copies of it you can acquire.)

Man-oh-fucking-man, but I'll tell ya, if John would have lived anywhere near Wallace, they'd have become bosom buddies in a big way over their attitudes to the world of spirits. Though I don't know if it would have been feasible to have two powerful shamans like that together in the same place as it would likely create a doorway—a thinny—into the spirit world that would scare the living crap out of anyone who came near them. On the first page of his Preface to that book (it's a real Preface of about ten pages, not an over-blown abomination—obesenation?—like this!) William S. Lyon makes some interesting comments about shamans and shamanism, taking the liberty to assume the existence of a spirit-world as he does so:

Shamanism involves the ability to enter into an altered state of consciousness at will in order to acquire help from spirits. Both the spirits and their aid are manifested mysteriously.(Yeah, no shit on that account, William!)

Then there is this that truly applied to John:

The actual rituals or techniques used to do this usually differ from shaman to shaman because, most often, such instructions come directly from the spirits to the shaman. Frequently the shaman receives a sacred song—a spirit-calling song—to be sung for this purpose.

(From what I can most limitedly deduce from this weird shit, The Fire, essentially, is both John's sacred song and the story of his long and tortuous syllabus of instruction in the ways of a unique-to-him shamanism.)

Then things get really interesting on the next page, where after doing a mandatory, academically-demanded dissing of Castaneda and his "ersatz" shamanism, Mr. Lyon goes on to write:

Shamanic training requires a great deal of personal suffering, social isolation, and the psychological fortitude to withstand great terror. It takes years to master the ability to self-induce a trance at will; just to reach the first Lakota "level of power" often takes around sixteen years of training in self-control. The most powerful shamans often lead solitary lives full of arduous service with few personal reward.

(I wonder if that sixteen years of training in self control is just to keep them from shitting their pants every time those putative spirits manifest?)

The shamans who do marry often fear for the safety of their children. Because their powers always manifest themselves on the wings of mystery, shamans are more likely to be suspected than respected. Finally, there is no graduation from the school of shamanism, for it is more a way of life than a school of techniques for effecting magic.

That above quote certainly applied to John, for if The Fire is nothing else, it is a record of John's long life of personal suffering, social isolation, and the psychological fortitude he had to develop to endure it. Well, that's not completely true, for Book Two is all about that, while Book One is all about being a total self-obsessed, self-serving, ego-maniacal macho asshole and the suffering he caused Catherine and little Johnny while totally indulging that ego-mania, the subsequent guilt from which sent him spiraling into the underworld of his shamanic journey and training.

Actually, in recently reading Pirsig's second book, Lila—man-oh-fucking-man, that was a real disturbing head-fuck for me to read because the book is about a young woman named Lila who is a sex-obsessed fuck-up and a bona fide loon like me who ended up on the narrator's—Pirsig's—boat for a trip down a river to New York, except in New York she hooks up with an erstwhile pimp who steals her anti-psychotic meds, an act that sets her off on a psychotic-break that poor Pirsig, who only hooked up with her (as a rich, famous, but aging geek . . . famous enough to be meeting Robert Redford in a hotel room for a talk about Redford buying the film rights to Zen and the Art . . .) for a quick piece of the kind of young and succulent ass he'd dreamed of having as a young geek (but never got!) has to deal with—or so the narrative unfolds.

But back to my real reason for bringing up Lila, which is where Pirsig talks about Native American shamanism and quotes some anthropological expert called E.A. Hoebel on the subject:

Although in many primitive cultures there is a recognized division of function between priests and shamans, in the more highly developed cultures in which cults have become strongly organized churches, the priesthood fights an unrelenting war against shamans. . . . Priests work in a rigorously structured hierarchy fixed in a firm set of traditions. Their power comes from and is vested in the organization itself. They constitute a religious bureaucracy.

Shamans, on the other hand, are arrant individualists. Each is on his own, undisciplined by bureaucratic control: hence a shaman is always a threat to the order of the organized church. In the view of the priests they are presumptive pretenders. Joan of Arc was a shaman for she communicated directly with the angels of God. She steadfastly refused to recant and admit delusion and her martyrdom was ordained by the functionaries of the Church. The struggle between shaman and priest may well be a death struggle.

Yuppers!—that first line of paragraph two, Shamans, on the other hand, are arrant individualists—sure as fuck describes John to a T! And that line, hence a shaman is always a threat to the order of the organized church, fits in perfectly with a line I read in one of Colin Wilson's books, that There was nothing a bishop hated more than a saint in his parish. And fits in too, with John's assertion that had he lived when the Inquisition still had the power it once had—which he was sure many hard-line members of Constantine's Imperial Abomination still wished it had—he'd have been "Bruno'd" at the stake long before! (Bruno'd being his reference to Giordano Bruno, that genius, friar-scientist-philosopher poet who was shish kebab'd by Constantine's Imperial Abomination's Gestapo-Inquisitors for proposing the absurd and heretical notion that the stars were faraway suns like our own surrounded by their own Earths with beings—maybe like us—on them. (Fuck—can you even imagine someone thinking that way back then. He could have made a fortune as a sci-fi writer!)

Of course, that communal, Inquisitor-ignited, barbeque-event happened back in the days when every person in Christendom who wanted to stay off the Church's shish kebab-list couldn't even entertain, let alone express, any notion about the nature of the universe that was not in exact accord with what was written in those ancient Semitic fairy tales written by a bunch of uneducated, tribal warlord-deity-obsessed fanatics of highly suspect intelligence and uber-bloated egos (Chosen People—yeah, right!) who had no more of a clue about what the hell the universe was all about than I have a profound understanding about quantum physics. Or the capacity to keep this damn blog of "Preface" short and on track!

But now for a re-rail back to this pathetic narrative: as Book One of The Fire elucidates all too dramatically, there is a great deal of truth in Lyon's words, The shamans who do marry often fear for the safety of their children. Well, not quite!—John didn't know he was a shaman-in-training when he got married, and it was his poor wife and son, Catherine and Johnny, who subsequently had to fear for their own safety because of it. And though John never exactly expressed it in these words of Lyons', there is no graduation from the school of shamanism, he often said as much in his own words, many times expressing the notion that he'd been propelled into an web of knowledge so vast, intricate, and multi-dimensional that it would take him ten lifetimes to explore one tenth of it. Actually, he once said that just about everything he learned made him feel stupider and less knowledgeable, because each newly learned thing opened ten doors into realms of knowledge he knew nothing about. Ad infinitum!

If Lyon was correct in commenting on how dangerous it can be to be around shamans, it is a wonder I survived my relationship with John, though given my psychotic break when he died, I guess I can't really say I did survive it, can I? Though that's nonsense, because, as I long ago said, I was doing a perfect swan dive off the CN Tower of my daddy-diddled depression straight into the 45-gallon tar-drum of suicide when he came into my life and saved—and enhanced it!—for all those years I spent in his company.

Years during which I got married (and divorced) and had two children that I raised well enough that they are now coping with their lives and this world better than I now am—so there was absolutely nothing toxic about John or his shamanism. Or at least, not for me while I was part of it! (I sometimes get the absurd, fleeting and intuitive sense that I was his reluctant apprentice for all those years, and because of my fear and refusal to 'graduate' as the shaman I was supposed to have become, I remained a reluctant apprentice who, when Shaman John left this world, I cracked up because I wasn't prepared to handle being a true shaman.

Well, no fuckin' goddamn kiddin' there! A true shaman interacts with, and in some way, masters, spirits, and I still don't fuckin' believe they even exist. Or at least refuse to even entertain the notion that they might exist! So I became like poor Mickey Mouse in Disney's version of that ancient tale about a sorcerer's apprentice who has access to his master's powers, but can't control them. So possibly all my too-many and too-catastrophic psychological problems are caused by the fact that I am a failed shaman. John opened me up to a worldview and a world full of spiritual powers that because I refused to take them seriously when I had him for a teacher about them, they now over-whelm me. Again, like Heraclitus so wisely fuckin' said so long ago, "Character is fate!"

But back to that redoubtable Lakota shaman, Wallace Black Elk—he was one real tough hombre no matter how you took him! (If you are a spiritually-open white person like John was and believe in spirits, Wallace was a bona fide shaman; if you are a spiritually-anal white person and cannot believe in spirits, he could only have been a deluded lunatic; and if you are a committed fence-sitter on that subject like I am, then you will never be able to decide what the fuck he really was, and just dismiss him as a weird old Indian!) And his toughness is not only demonstrated in his interactions that he relates himself having with the world of spirits, but all the vision quests put himself through.

Real vision quests, not the watered-down New Age facsimiles you can buy books about or spend a bundle taking for a weekend under "expert" guidance. He'd go off alone and stand outside on a cliff or some such remote and unsheltered place in all kinds of weather for four days and nights without food, water, shelter or sleep, so he could make himself both tough and worthy enough to deal with those spirits. Or to fine-tune his spirit-radio, I'm not sure which, (and I don't want to know, because to a comfort-junkie like me, doing something like that just sounds a lot more insane than the insanity I have been too often institutionalized, drugged and brain-lightninged for!) though I am sure John used to go off and do the same thing, but he'd never talk about those ordeals or the experiences he had with them—not to me and not in his memoirs. (I remember visiting him one Sunday when he looked real tired and thinner than usual, and when I asked him why, he just laughed and said he'd been in the bush for a bit of R&R and had gotten lost for a couple of days. The idea of John getting lost in the bush for a couple days is as absurd as the idea of Mad and Mendacious King Donald telling a couple of truths—or one, for that matter!)

And apropos to that subject, John many times said that if you did something truly spiritual then frog marched it (John used that term a lot and I had no idea what it really meant until I looked it up in Wiktionary, and it originally meant: to have four people carry a person face down with one person holding each limb.) into the realm of the ego by bragging about it, you immediately grounded into oblivion all its spiritual value like—a static-spark grounding into a touched doorknob, and there existed no more pathetic a joke than those self-important New Age jackasses who go on some so-called spiritual retreat or weekend spiritual seminar, and both before and after the event, make a big ego-production out of it.

Or those writers who write so-called spiritual books, put a picture of their smiling face on the back dust-jacket, and make a lot of money and fame out of them. He said ego is to spirit as is a pin to a balloon and if you don't bury all your ego-pins real deep in the haystack of humility, you can never gain permanent access to the Ocean of Spirit or be truly spiritual. And of course, he once sneeringly added, "And that sure leaves Constantine's Imperial Abomination and all its Pompous Popes, Cunning Cardinals, Bullying Bishops and Pedophile Priests out flapping in the hurricane of hypocrisy, doesn't it!" (He actually used those alliterations, so it was something he'd obviously thought a lot about before expressing it to me in that fashion!)

He once very seriously pointed out that as far as he was concerned, "Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a very spiritual book that Pirsig made wads of money and got mountains of fame out of, which may have been too much mammon for such a spiritual work, and that from a certain way of looking at it, he possibly paid an incredibly high karmic price for with the very ominous and synchronistic murder of Chris, the young son he took the motorcycle trip with.

Pirsig writes about that dark and tragic event in the Afterword to later editions of the book, and describes how his son was mugged and stabbed to death one evening just outside the Zen Center in San Francisco and just hours before he was to leave on a trip to Europe to further his Zen studies. . . . Even Carl Jung would have found Chris's death an interesting synchronicity, given that Pirsig's book was about Zen, and values, and his trip, years before, with the young Chris, was from the Minneapolis to San Francisco. And Chris got murdered by thugs close to that Zen Center, where he was a student, just hours before he was to leave San Francisco and fly to Europe. And if you think about it, our values shape our lives the way a nozzle shapes a stream of water coming out of a hose. Did Pirsig, on a cosmic scale of things, screw up, when, while being enlightened enough to write that book, betrayed that enlightenment by embracing his fame and fortune. . . . Certainly not something that can be said for certain—but something to think about!" (On reading that Afterword by Pirsig, it appears that Chris behaved in a very un-Zen way with his muggers, twice saying un-Zen-like things to them that exacerbated their anger at him for having nothing in his pockets for them to steal. Again, cf.—Heraclitus!)

At the time of him saying that stuff, I would have sworn I sensed a subtle cracking in John's voice, but dismissed it because I could see no reason for it. If you make it deep enough into Book One of The Fire—and if I live long enough to get all of it into "print"—the reason for the cracking of his voice in talking about the death of Pirsig's son becomes only too dramatically obvious as he writes about his own son's—Johnny's—death!

And when I commented to John that it wasn't Pirsig's fault the book got so famous and made him so much money, so what could he have done differently about it? John thought about that for a bit before saying, "Since I am neither rich nor famous, nor will I ever be, I am not sure . . . but maybe in a situation like that an author should give a good bit of that money to a charity and hide from away from the world and all the attention that fame brings. Like it looks like Pirsig now does. The Lords of Karma like to keep things balanced and they miss nothing, so it is up to us to keep awake, be humble, keep things as balanced as we can and thus keep them appeased."

That was not the first time he'd used that term, Lords of Karma, and every time he subsequently used it, it sent shivers down my spine, though on asking him who the hell he thought the "Lords of Karma" were, he just shrugged and said, "Damned if I know! Some . . . forces . . . that are very powerful . . . very controlling . . . something very . . . unknowable! Perhaps even, something like the wind—something knowable only by their effects on life. . . .In truth, I think they are the cosmic agents that Charles Fort believed we, as a species, were the property of.

"But you don't want me to get into that subject because it is not something I can really explain, and if I could explain it, I fear it would be something you would be utterly unable to face!"

And he sure as fuck was right about that!—and it's still something that I sure don't want to get into myself right now! Or face! So I will say no more about it!

Well, I will say just a little bit more: I tried reading John's copy of Fort's The Book of the Damned, but it confused me too much for me to get far into it. The stuff Fort writes about, and presents as factual accounts in various newspapers and magazines, it so far-out that I could only but consider them as ridiculous fictions, though always, in the back of my mind, was the sense that they just might be a little bit true. So to me, if they were fictions, they weren't worth reading, and if they were a little bit true, they were too scary and worldview-threatening to read about!

But back to that Pirsig business—I did challenge John on his bizarre notion that Pirsig could have pissed off those so-called Lords of Karma enough for them to—hypothetically!—engineer the death of his son just because he got rich and famous—and thus, powerful and ego-stroked—from writing a book that was fundamentally spiritual, and if that was the case, no one would want to become rich or famous by writing spiritual books because it would be obvious that any spiritual person who gained fame and fortune from writing books, would always end up having too much bad karmic shit happening to them—which obviously doesn't happen. I mean, the Dalai Lama is a very famous spiritual leader and he writes lots of spiritual books, and nothing bad happens to him!

His response to that was to admit he'd had the exact same thoughts many times, but his intuition kept telling him that was the case, and that the karmic effects of fame and fortune are both dependent on the level of consciousness of the person achieving them, and how strongly that person's ego attaches to that fame and fortune. The higher the level of consciousness of a spirit-being, the more responsibility it has to live wisely and spiritually—and humbly! John was also quick to comment that the Dalai Lama was a good example of that, because his level of consciousness was so high, and his spiritual/meditative discipline so strong, that he never allowed his ego to swell up enough to attach itself to his world fame. And he also doubted the Dalai Lama kept any of the money he made from his books, but likely donated it to organizations dedicated to helping Tibetans driven out of Tibet by the Chinese. Which of course, made a lot of sense to me.

Then, as I remember it—don't bank on the accuracy of that memory, whatever you do!—something set him off into one of those patented, Greg House moments (if you are familiar with that bizarre TV hospital-show, House, you will know it well: when someone makes an offhand comment to that misanthropic genius doctor that sets him off to staring at a wall like some catatonic on a "space-walk" then coming back from it with the brilliant solution that solves the mystery of the case, saves the dying patient's life, and climaxes another show that was too much of a clone of all the previous ones!) from which he came back with an explanation so outrageous I couldn't forget it if I wanted to.

He said he'd just had a complex vision that had to do with Hindu beliefs about avatars, of which they considered there to be three different kinds, "Not," he said. "That that distinction is relevant in our culture, since we don't even believe one kind exists." He then said he saw that this Hindu notions about avatars had its counterpart in the Buddhist doctrine about bodhisattvas, which he explained to me was the situation where highly evolved beings, due to their great compassion that they acquired on their long journey to the pinnacle of Buddhahood, of Consciousness, put off the imminent and easily obtainable bliss of that pure Buddhahood by continuing to reincarnate in this earthly charnel house in order to spiritually help us lesser mortals creep a little closer to our necessary enlightenment.

Anyways, John's said that his vision enlightened him to the fact that, according to Pirsig's autobiographical story in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the original, pre-road trip/book Pirsig was a genius-level professor teaching in a third-rate college out in the boonies of Montana, who went catatonically insane thinking too deeply and rationally about what he called Quality—but which is obviously Consciousness, which cannot ever be rationally fathomed!—and was snapped out of his catatonia by a series of electroshock treatments.

Those shock treatments, according to Pirsig in his book, not only blasted him out of his catatonia, but blasted his original, his primary, Robert Pirsig-personality into oblivion and replaced it with a much different, secondary one. One of the sub-plots in the book and a major aspect of the road trip, is this secondary Pirsig-personality trying to face, and understand, the nature, and possible "haunting" existence of the primary Pirsig-personality, that though electroshocked out of Pirsig's body, wasn't totally blasted into absolute oblivion. (Sure sounds a lot like that stopping my world event John put me through when he heaved ol' slut-me into that piss-sodden manure pile and sent her packing, don't it?)

In John's worldview, those electroshock treatments applied to Pirsig's primary personality—the genius-level college professor who rationally thought himself into insanity by thinking too much about something that exists totally outside the small, safe, picket-fenced yard of rationality—ejected Pirsig's original spirit-being out of that body and allowed a new and very different spirit-being to enter it and take up the rest of Pirsig's now sane, less rational-thinking obsessed, and grounded (in his new, main job of computer programming, and his new, main hobby of motorcycle riding and motorcycle repair) life.

Except that new spirit-being was not just any run-of-the-mill spirit-being, but an avatar, but a bodhisattva, who moved into Pirsig's temporarily vacated body with the purpose of writing that very spiritually important book, and for whom a different set of karmic rules applied. Pirsig's ego, as all that unexpected fame and wealth enveloped him, didn't intuit those karmic rules accurately enough and he paid a very dear price for not doing so.

### Chapter Twenty Five

Needless to say, all that shit about Pirsig and his book and his "walk-in" (as some New Agers might call it!) was all a bit too weird and for the most part, not only out in left field, but out of the fucking ballpark, for me to understand very well. And less, accept! Though now that I think of it, I don't feel very bad about my ignorance and incompetence—and Scully-skepticism!—because I can remember John saying that he couldn't explain what he was seeing very well because his visions were too much like dreams, and that he couldn't do justice to them with rational explanations.

He then babbled on about that same damn subject by saying that the way he limitedly understood his vision, "Was that these Hindu and Buddhist notions of the avatar and the bodhisattva could be both schools of spiritual teaching referring to the incarnation into the lower, karma-controlled level of our physical, Gulag Earth-existence, (that phrase always really depressed me!) a limited number of very advanced, high-level beings—'divinities,' for those to inclined such nonsense!—that incarnate expressly to change the course of human history—and its spiritual evolution.

"The East has had a plethora of such avatars and bodhisattvas that we in the West know little about, save for the Buddha, and that conquering Indian Emperor, Ashoka, who converted from Hinduism to Buddhism after witnessing firsthand the incredible slaughter created by one of his conquering battles. And in Persia, Zarathustra. And of course, that modern avatar who was such a raging, bleeding-hemorrhoid for the aging and antiquated, British Empire, Gandhi!

"But we are all more than familiar with what I consider our Western avatars . . . though not so much our bodhisattvas, and much as some enlightened Christians will claim Jesus could be considered a bodhisattva, I will always consider him a historicized myth . . . the best known political and martial avatars being the likes of Hannibal, Alexander, Caesar, Attila, Napoleon, Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, not a one of them a piker when it came to using and abusing their political powers, and many of which were driven mad by their great powers. Though of course, a few were great and wise statesmen . . .while all were big changers of human history.

"If you study the history of these "men" you discover in them the common thread of great vision and even greater willpower to effect it. Their willpower was so supra-normal as to be distinctly felt by those who dealt with them—and especially if they opposed them—that it noticeably affected the very reality around them until that reality conformed to, and brought to fruition, the essence of their vision. Hitler is famous for his vision for a renewed Germany that he expressed in Mein Kampf, and the incredible power of his personal will to bring most of it to its evil fruition. (I wonder if his supporters wore MGGA (Make Germany Great Again) hats to go along with their arm bands and brown shirts?)

"But if you read enough about Churchill, he was no slouch in that department either, given how he rallied the ill-prepared and peace-at-any-cost emasculated British nation against that demented and very well prepared tyrant-Hitler and his invasion plans. And there are stories of Caesar altering the flow of seemingly lost battles solely with his presence on the front line and his enormous power to will his men to fight for that victory. As far as I am concerned, only high-level beings—avatars!—can do that!

"Hell!—nobody exhibited a stronger will-to-conquer than that basically snot-nosed kid, Alexander the Great, who sensed his 'divinity' powerfully enough to declare himself a god while conquering most of the then-known world in a fashion totally outside the pale of anything some "kid" in his twenties should even have been able to dream about doing! . . . In fact, I think it's safe to say most 'kids' of that age are infinitely more interested in 'conquering' a passel of pretty girls than the whole damn known world!"

Then letting loose a long, sardonic chuckle, he added. "As to Hitler, I don't know if he thought of himself as a god or not. . . . Probably not! I'm sure he thought as himself as something considerably greater than a mere god—as a medieval Pope, more like it!"

That bit of facetious sarcasm aside, (Only two subjects ever launched John into such vats of vitriolic sarcasm: the pope-emperors of Constantine's Imperial Abomination and my father!) as far as he was concerned these avatars did not just incarnate to play out political and martial roles, but artistic and philosophical ones as well, though I think at that point, with thoughts about the obviously history-changing effects caused by Jesus , I mentioned that, and the fact that Jesus must have been an avatar too.

But he just laughed at that and said, "I covered that under the word political—you know that I consider the that damn Christ-story to be pure, Gnostic myth and that the effect that mythical Jesus Christ on had history was due solely to all the very political and Roman power of Constantine's Imperial Abomination. It was all just the worst aspects of that nasty and corrupt Roman Empire bloodily and brutally ruling on through his Imperial Crutch—that infernal Church-Abomination! And the eating-proof of that bowl of shit-pudding was demonstrated most convincingly by Pope Leo X, who is reputed to have said, 'It has served us well, this myth of Christ.' And if he didn't say it—as most Catholic clergy must-needs claim—then somebody did, and it sure rings true. At least to my ears . . . and maybe the ears of a lot of others who are able to see Constantine's Imperial . . . Crutch, as the 1700-year-old, fundamentally political institution that though it sports a worn-out sheepskin of a very spurious spirituality, underneath it is one big, brutal, ravening Dire Wolf!"

Interestingly—and actually apropos—a few years back I most synchronistically came across a few very interesting books dealing with that "Christ-story-as-Egyptian-myth" issue, and John sure would have loved them had he lived to their publication. Three of those books were by a couple of very smart and well-educated Brits, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy: The Jesus Mysteries: Was The Original Jesus A Pagan God?, and its follow-ups, Jesus And The Lost Goddess: The Secret Teachings Of The Original Christians. and The Laughing Jesus: Religious Lies and Gnostic Wisdom. All three books are well-researched and annotated and not only deep as hell, but very disturbing to any practicing, faithful Christian who believes its institutional religion to be the ne plus ultra of spirituality. And though it has been awhile since I read them, I got a particular charge out of The Laughing Jesus, because to a limited degree, John was always saying much the same stuff about Constantine's Imperial Abomination that those authors were later so eruditely—and well-researched!—say in their books. And like I said, I sure wished it would have come out before he died. (Or not!—for he'd likely have been shoving that book in my face, and not only ordering me to read it, but saying, "See, see—I am right about that infernal Imperial Abomination of Constantine's!")

And then there's Tom Harpur's The Pagan Christ: Recovering The Lost Light, which is not only great reading because of Harpur's excellent scholarship on the subject of the Christ-story being an Ancient Egyptian myth about the descent of what John would call our spirit-beings into our human bodies, that worked its way into the Levant and became a core, Gnostic teaching-myth until it was literalized and historicized by the institutional Catholic Church that Constantine eventually turned into his powerful and very political, "Imperial and Abominable Crutch!"

But all four of these books have a very limited appeal because they can only "preach to the very small choir" of those who have both lost—or thrown away—their Christian faith! Or at least the ridiculous notion of the main character in its tear-jerker of a drama—milked for a ton of money by Mel Gibson with The Passion movie!—and still care about it as a mythical, spiritual-teaching story. Truly a small demographic indeed given that most who lose, or throw away, their Christian faith, do so because it has turned into a back-breaking, life-sucking burden not only of irrational nonsense for them, but of oppressive, dogshit-dogma, and caring about such nonsense, and dealing with such dogshit, once you have thrown it away is like any dog owner caring about their poodle's little plastic bag of doo-doo once they have dropped it in a garbage can.

And nothing proves the limited appeal of such books like the fact that Freke-and-Gandy 's The Laughing Jesus: Religious Lies and Gnostic Wisdom, says some pretty negative things about Islam's sacred—almost-deified!—prophet Muhammad, and so far no faithful fanatics—self-appointed Inquisitors!—of that ultimate of abject-slave/Transcendent Lord institutional religion, whose very name means total submission to Allah (which of course, is exactly what is expected from all abject and compliant, no-trouble-for-their-masters, "yas suh/no suh" slaves) have as yet received "instructions" from Lord Allah to blow them up or abduct them and chop their blaspheming, infidel heads off!" (You can easily see those ISIS psychopaths as a self-proclaimed "nation" of self-appointed Inquisitors intent on torturing and murdering, in just about every way imaginable, any perceived heretic—man, woman, or child!—who doesn't exactly follow their very narrowly defined interpretation of their exalted, Lord Allah's divine commands.)

And of course, those who are still clinging to the guard rails of Titanic of their faith in the bona fide literality and historicity of that Christ myth, sure aren't going to read books like that that have been expressly designed to play the role of being but more icebergs capable of ripping even more gaps in its hull. And I am sure if Constantine's mighty political Abomination/Church/Crutch still had its notorious, proto-Nazi, book-and-critical-thought-banning Index Librorum Prohibitorum in existence, those books would be on its "anathema list! And if it still had its precious Inquisition, those two pernicious heretics would have long ago been "toast!" Very burned toast!

Though John did say that he would classify real, historical spiritual teachers of the likes of Gautama, Confucius, Zarathustra and a few such others as avatars, but since institutional religions "grew up around, and perverted to hell their wise, mystical teachings, all they really ended up doing is serving the Dark Powers and their dark, controlling and spirit-being denying/oppressing agendas.

But on to his thoughts on the avatars who played artistic and philosophical roles: "They are easy enough to pick out, he said, "Homer, Herodotus, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Luther, Shakespeare, Goethe, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Melville, Freud, Jung, Rousseau, Nietzsche—and don't ask me to spell that damn name!—to name just a few in our Western European legacy. Hell, even that Hemingway fellow was surely an avatar, which is why he is so famous that just about everybody—even the millions who have been no closer to his books than driving past a library with them in it—knows his name and could likely tell you he was a writer!

"But let's not forget the musicians, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schuman, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Verdi, Rossini, Mahler . . . and lots of others! . . .Though I guess we can't leave out the scientists and thinkers that have created our modern age and worldview, can we?—Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Newton . . . and lots of other of that lot, too! And of course, there's that most famous scientist of all, that wild haired, mystical old physicist, Einstein, who gave us that relativity and quantum stuff that stretches my poor brain out like its warm toffee—then ties it into knots! And though I am no big fan of the anti-spiritual nature of the modern science those avatars created with their insightful and creative efforts, I have to give them their due credit—not that it's worth a tinkers dam in the grand scheme of things!—for having channeled a great deal of Consciousness into this world. Consciousness that has changed this world. . . . And though maybe not always for the better, but certainly changed it!"

"Okay, Uncle John!" I interjected. "Sure I can see your point that these people you have named were unusually powerful men who truly did change history—but why the hell do you have to 'posit the proposition' (that was a phrase one of my more pompous professors always used, and I liked to use it on John when he was 'positing propositions' that my rational, left-brained worldview found either irritating or threatening) that in order for them to be what they historically were, that they had to be . . . avatars . . . be 'gods' of some sort? Couldn't they just be . . . extraordinary, ordinary people?"

Since John could always read me like a Dick and Jane book, he laughed and said, "Well, my esteemed Professor Rachel, that is because . . . well—let's face the bare-faced fact that there's billions of very ordinary people presently living on this Gulag Earth and countless more who have come and gone, 99.99999 percent of whom make, or made, no major—or even minor—difference for living, or having lived on it. Yet there are those few score of historical giants who stand out from the masses like towering white pines from patches of low-bush blueberries."

John never mentioned Carlyle's controversial Great Man theory of history to prove his point, so I suspected he hadn't come across it, and when I mentioned it to him, his response was to chuckle and say, "Ahhhh—I'll have to read up about that! . . . So even you are willing to admit that I am not totally at the bottom of the manure pile with this line of thinking, am I? . . . I don't know how Carlyle explained how history's 'Great Men' were intrinsically great and why, like cream, they rose to the top of the bucket of the milk of humanity the way they did, but my take on it is that they were not normal, evolving, karma-controlled spirit-beings like the rest of us spiritual slugs, but were members of that very powerful species of beings whom Charles Fort was certain owned humanity. Owned us like chattel, like gulag prisoners, and keep us penned up in this Gulag Earth and have been, and still are, directing and shaping both our history and our evolution. . . .Though right now, with a nuclear holocaust hanging over our heads like an ever-threatening, terminal thunderstorm, it looks more like devolution, doesn't it?"

He once conflated Fort and Shakespeare by saying, "We are to the gods as cattle to a rancher—they raise us for their 'meat'!" He was also was certain that those avatars lived their Earthly incarnations outside of the purview of normal karma because some of them caused so much death and suffering it would take trillions of lifetimes for a normal spirit-being to work off that much! He actually speculated those history-changing avatars/gods might be the Lords of Karma themselves.

"But don't quote me on that!" he'd laughing added, perhaps intuiting that I might someday have the chance to—though more likely just his way of admitting he wasn't a "professional cogitator"—a "talking head"—and quite likely wrong. (Not that most "professional cogitators"—talking heads!—are ever as always-right as they like to delude themselves—and their usually gullible audience, that they are!) Ironically, at the time the idea of quoting John and his "far out" ideas to anybody seemed as absurd as trying to patent and sell egg-shaped billiard balls, yet here I am, quoting him in this crazy "Preface"—which is an egg-shaped billiard ball if ever there was one!

Well, needless to say, I did feel the need to push back against some of his ideas—especially any notion that we might, as human beings, be nothing more than "Fortean cattle" to some "higher" race of beings! And I definitely had to call him out on the absurd notion that since so many of his "Carlylean" Great Men were little more than glorified mass murderers, that they could in any way be considered "high-level beings." Like I had said to him, "They had to come straight from Hell, if they came from anywhere!"

His response, was a long stretch of silence followed by, "Yes . . . I quite agree with you on that account and it has caused more than a bit of smoke to pour out of this manure pile between my ears as I have thought about it. All I can come up with is that, first, I should not be labeling them 'higher-level,' beings, because that implies a higher level of spiritual development, but merely more advanced, more evolved ones. . . . And second—my intuition is always screaming at me that there are two groups of these advanced beings meddling with us 'cattle' on this Rancho Planeta Tierra! (I didn't like that "cattle on Rancho Planeta Tierra" metaphor any more than his "prisoners on Gulag Earth" one!)

"So, as I very limitedly see things: one group is very power-obsessed and spiritually retarded, while the other is spiritually advanced enough to know the seductive, corrupting effects of power. From the first group we get the 'Great Men' who are, to a man, bloodthirsty conquerors and power-addicts—and scientists and inventors with a passion for inventing weapons of any form of destruction, while from the second we get our great statesmen, poets, artists, and scientists with a passion for inventing anything that helps improve our lives—the invention of television excepted!

"Sometimes, when I look at things this way, I can't but hear in my head Shakespeare's famous line, 'As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.' though my intuition always tells me it's not quite as simple as that. I think that first group of 'advanced beings' are like those 'gods' Gloucester refers to, and truly are the ones that Charles Fort believe own us like so many two-legged 'cattle,' and they sometimes do incarnate as avatars to indulge in their power . . .and history-altering! . . . games and induce us to slaughter ourselves both for their sport—and other incomprehensible-to-us!—ends. In fact, I sometimes get the sense that Shakespeare was wrong when he said that 'all the world's a stage, and we are just the players,' for we are often—especially when we get corrupted by power—less players on the stage of human history, and more like mere costumes being worn by players so advanced we cannot sense then 'wearing' us—or for sure not comprehend what the hell they really are! . . . And this is most essentially so when we are in that mindless, ego-dominated sleepwalking state Gurdjieff was always railing against!

"While that other group, the spiritually advanced ones . . . well . . . I kinda see them as . . . our . . . secret teachers . . . who infiltrate Rancho Planeta Tierra and attempt to raise us dumb, mindless, ego-obsessed sleepwalking 'cattle' out of our dumb, mindless, sleepwalking 'cattleness' through themselves incarnating as our great spiritual teachers, our great true statesmen, our great philosophers, poets, artists, playwrights, novelists, composers, musicians, benevolent scientists, etc. . . .Of course, these ideas take us deep into the realm of Gnostic—or Zoroastrian—duality that no rational, materialist philosopher even wants to entertain the idea of entertaining, because to them it is too simplistic and it presupposes the existence of invisible beings that absolutely cannot exist in an rational, materialistic worldview. . . . And it's too much like that God-versus-Satan crap Constantine's Imperial Abomination has been plaguing—and manipulating and controlling!—the credulous sheep-flocks the world with for seventeen hundred years!"

"And again," he said with a sardonic chuckle. "Don't quote me on this, but I am certain that the normal rules of spirit-being karma don't apply to these avatars on either side of the divide I have just described. I suspect cannot morally judge the actions of any being who exists and acts at a higher level from the perspective of our lower one. I mean, what did the cattle that were being raised for bully beef to feed the allied soldiers during WWII, know about Hitler and the Nazis and the efforts of those soldiers whose bellies they were filling, to rid this world of that evil?

"We may have a little better view of the bigger picture than those cattle, but not likely all that much bigger, so all we will ever have is a very small and always incomplete idea of what is going on. At best, we'll be just like those blind men in that story feeling up that poor, perplexed elephant."

More than once John had said that "the Truth" was, as so many of the mystics of history had been saying, was an infinitely faceted and constantly evolving—and growing!—diamond that could not ever be seen in its totality from any limited human perspective, but only intuited—and usually only dimly!—by both being in, and at one, with it. Though in order to do that, the intuiting mystic had to break out of, first, his or her hard nutshell of their ego, then soar above all the static-interference of all their naturally occurring rational concepts and words about it. This meant "the Truth' could only be intuitively experienced—to the extent of the always limited powers of human intuition!—and never really thought about, and especially, not rationally thought about. And for sure, never rationally explained!"

(Godfuckingdamnit!—but I always HATED his statements like that one where he denigrated rationality the way he did, and stopped all rational arguments by saying such stuff couldn't be rationally talked about! And just typing this out sends my blood pressure into stroke range, and makes the scorpion of my paranoia explode like a "toxic, Hiroshima mushroom-cloud," especially in being the teacher that I am . . . well—was! A teacher who for many—very normal and productive years, I will have you know!—during which I worked my then slim—and shapely!—butt off trying to rationally teach rational truth to my students . . .though even as I write these words, I feel like I am being frog-marched into an X-Files episode and am being forced to play the role of the frantic, desperate Scully making a fool of herself vainly trying to come up with de rigueur, rational and logical explanations for some of those really weird and obviously rationally-inexplicable cases Mulder was always dragging her off to investigate!)

And all I could think about while he was saying that bit about our inability to judge the actions of so-called "higher-level beings," was what the evil mass murderers Hitler and Stalin had been, and the patently absurd notion that their existence had in any way benefited this world! And when I pointed that out to him, he agreed with me, but then said, "But look at the bigger historical perspective. Probably no two "human beings" changed the course of history as much as did Alexander the Great and Hitler, and if Hitler had won WWII, he'd be getting the same accolades that Alexander still gets. I mean, neither man was on the world stage very long, both were essentially monsters and mass martial murderers, but both left that stage very altered after their short presences and martial activities on it.

"Much as few like to pay attention to the fact, but not only did Hitler and WWII accelerate the evolution of our technologies, it also dramatically changed the political landscape completely. It totally destroyed England, France, Germany, and Japan as world powers and woke up two paranoid, sleeping Rottweilers, the United States and the USSR. Not only woke up both those very nasty super-dogs, but put them in a position to spend decades in this so-called Cold War that has been 'freezing' the hell out of this world for a few decades now. . . And man-oh-man!—it that moniker, Cold War, ever a misnomer for this dark and stressful period of ever-pending nuclear lunacy! What it should be called is the Precarious Paranoid Peace, being that it is a Mexican standoff between two paranoid-to-the-point-of-utter-madness, snarling and slavering, chained-on-opposite-sides-of-the-kennel male Rottweilers, to see which one could be the most paranoid without going completely psychotic, losing control, and pawing 'the button' and blasting all the organic life on this planet into a fiery and radioactive oblivion.

"And from another perspective, they are two giant, dualistic, Gnostic principalities or archons, each seeing themselves as agents of the good and the light and seeing the other as agents of evil and darkness. To go from a world dominated by those previous four, middling world powers to one dominated by those two gigantic, paranoid Rottweilers with nuclear missiles for teeth, was a hell of a big global political change that was brought about in only five years and all pretty much because of one man—Hitler!—who obviously was no mere man. . . . Actually, as many writers about him try to hint at, we sense he was no 'mere man' but our worldview is now too small and too limitingly 'rational' to offer an avenue of explanation for both his personal power, and his incongruous rise to Europe-dominating political and military power, because we are too 'modern, advanced and rational' to believe in the existence of the 'gods/avatars' whose presence, and interference in our world, could explain what he truly was."

Having taken enough history classes, and done enough reading on the subject to get a sense of the truth of his POV on the subject, I tried to sneak past that massive, and totally irrational and enigmatic nightmare that had been Hitler, by saying, "But . . . but—what about Stalin! He was nothing but a monster and a mass murderer of his own people on a scale greater than Hitler. How could he have been any sort of . . . avatar?. . . any sort of . . . higher-being? I don't see him as being that historically significant. The Soviet Union, sure—but not that monster, who is most famous for his purges and gulags and for murdering millions upon millions of his own people!"

To which John chuckling replied, "I only said these history-makers were higher beings . . . meaning, more advanced that we are, which sure as hell does not necessarily make them good ones. Or at least not from our limited perspective! I mean, hell, I knew some ranchers who were damn good men in just about all ways, but if their cattle would have had enough self-awareness to know what being cattle on their ranches really meant, they'd have seen those men as absolute monsters!

"As to his personal importance to world history . . . Stalin means "Man of Steel" and he was pretty much just that to the USSR during World War Two—which was really just a continuation of the BASS after a twenty year, grow-some-new-cannon-fodder hiatus! Russia, during Part One of the BASS, and under the Czar and his corrupt regime, was nothing more than a toothless and crippled old hound that probably couldn't have scared away a tribe of attacking Zulu! Hell, I read somewhere that at one point during the BASS, barely-trained Russian soldiers were being sent to the front with no weapons and being told they might find some to fight with once they got there. Though if they had no rifles to train with, what were they being trained to do—throw rocks! Can you imagine, being sent to fight with empty hands against that well-trained and well-armed Hun army? Hell, we were sent there with at least a modicum of training and a good supply of weapons and we still got our asses blasted off! So what those 'soldiers' of the Czar were doing was way beyond ludicrous—and real deep into total lunacy!

"And they might have ended up the same rag-tag, rock-throwing rabble in WWII . . . actually, they pretty much were for the first months of Hitler's Barbarossa . . . but the "Man of steel," once the sauerkraut-farts of those Nazi hordes started polluting the air of the outskirts of Moscow, psychotic that he was, put a stainless steel rebar into the backbone of the Soviet industries, and especially its army and air force, that allowed them—with the help of that same, brutal Russian winter that defeated Napoleon!—to begin the eventual defeat of Hitler.

"Don't get caught up in American propaganda about the role of the United States in that war. It was a big role, but the Nazis were essentially defeated along the Eastern Front by Russian, 'blood, gore, and more blood!' If Russia had fallen during the onslaught of Barbarossa, which it surely would have under weaker leadership—Hitler would have had such a vast array of material resources and oil at his disposal that his armies could have easily crushed the Normandy landings, then turned around and with its great generals and constantly evolving and excellently-made tanks, planes, jets and rockets, conquered both China and Japan. Thus the whole of Europe and Asia—and likely eventually including Britain—would still today be one big Jew-and-gypsy-free labor camp serving the needs of a Nazi Germany that would be every bit as ruthless, powerful, corrupt and soul-crushing as Constantine's Imperial Abomination was during the Middle Ages!

"Psychopathic monster that Stalin was, he was a very important monster in the defeat of that infinitely more nefarious monster, Hitler—and his Nazi rat-hordes!—and that monster's quest for a world hegemony on par with the one once enjoyed by the Roman Empire—and its Emperors!—and then it's clone, Constantine's Imperial Abomination—and its Emperor-Popes!—over Medieval Europe. Actually, the one thing that still makes WWII such a consistent generator of books and movies is that it was really a mythical 'clash of Titans' on a scale not seen before in recorded history. Hell, if you look at it the right way, even as pure myth it would almost be unbelievable!"

Well, shit—I didn't set out to teach Modern History 101—According-To-Cowboy John, so I will get back to the spiritual stuff that set me off on that errant panegyric to "Mars." So . . . . . where the fuck was I . . . ahhhhh, okay . . . I was keyboard-babbling—blogging?—about those purported, lower-order-of-life, big-shot, history-manipulating avatars of a questionable provenance . . . but as far as I am concerned, I am done with them and I'll get on with his notion of the bodhisattvas, which had to do with the higher-order-of-life, spiritual concerns of this herd of cattle belonging to those so-called Lords of Karma.

John said about the bodhisattvas, that since they were/are pretty much superiorly enlightened spirit-beings who voluntarily incarnate, not to further enhance their enlightenment, but to bring what they have already achieved into the world and spread it around with each incarnation, the normal rules of karma don't apply. Or can't apply if you accept the notion that negative things happen in a current life to balance negative things done in a previous life. (I have a hard time sticking to the distinction—as no less did he—but John more than once said that we'd understand spiritual matters better if we did away with that very loaded and morally pejorative word, bad, and replaced it with negative—like the negative pole of a battery, which has no moral connotations attached to it, but just describes a condition necessary for electricity—energy!—to flow—from the negative to the positive—through a circuit.) They would, as he saw it, have to start each voluntary, enlightenment-dispensing incarnation with a clean slate, and thus would have to have their karma balanced during that lifetime.

When I asked him how such an enlightened being could, firstly make karmic mistakes, and secondly, if it did, why, given that it is so enlightened, would it even need to have its karma balanced. He replied by saying, that as he very limitedly understood these things, "that at the instant of incarnating into a human body with its human ego, the spirit-being is compelled to forget it is a bodhisattva as it both comes under the sway of that body and ego's needs and desires, and of course, the jurisdiction and rules of the Lords of Karma." Just like, he added, "if you go to a foreign country, you have to live by that country's laws and if you break them, even in ignorance of them, you have to suffer its judicial retributions." That, to me, made being an incarnating bodhisattva (if you can actually believe such nonsense!) sound like a total shit-assignment, but then I guess you'd have to be an enlightened bodhisattva to both understand it, and want to take it on—and many things I may be, but a bodhisattva I ain't! Nor do I possess even a firefly-flash of enlightenment!

John also said that the act of forgetting that accompanies all spirit-being incarnations would have a very practical aspect to it, in that all normal childhood development would be short-circuited by a child having conscious memories of previous lives. Or consciously knowing it is a bodhisattva with a spiritual mission. "I mean, just imagine the situation," he once jokingly said. "Where some spirit-being, at death, leaving the body of an alcoholic, then in its new incarnation, while still just a toddler, remembering the bibulous joys of that former life and feeling compelled to constantly try to get into his—or her—daddy's booze cabinet! . . . And just imagine some bodhisattva with an enlightened understanding of the absurdities, hypocrisies and inherent evils of any powerful, institutional church, incarnating into a Catholic or Protestant . . . or Mohammedan child, then being dragged off, as a young child, to attend Sunday church services being held by an institution it knows to be fundamentally evil, and worship a god that they intuitively—but absolutely!—know cannot exist as it is conceptualized and worshipped! Or into a mosque to pray to Allah, who equally cannot exist as conceptualized and worshipped! . . . That would be one damn difficult childhood and a big problem for the parents! . . . I mean, most religious parents have a lot of difficulty with their teenagers when they losing their 'faith'—their childish credulity concerning silly fairy tales—and refuse to go to church services, but to have a child born with a powerful antipathy to that church would be a most difficult problem to deal with. Or even begin to comprehend! . . . And it would be absolute hell for the child too, because it wouldn't be able to escape having its spiritual 'nose' shoved into the shit of a religious institution it knew to be fundamentally evil!"

Well, as I may or may not have said, I have as much use for the notion of reincarnation as I do for a three-cup bra and a lifetime supply of jock straps, but John accepted the notion of reincarnation as a fact that to him was as real and hard, as he liked to say, "As a hammer smashing a thumbnail!" (And fortunately, he was amazingly tolerant of me constantly groaning and rolling my eyes when he brought the subject up and pontificated on it—though I dare say he'd have been more than a little insulted by my use of that word, pontificated!)

Now as I may or may not have said—when I write in a manic state I retain almost no memory of what I write—John not only had no use for Constantine's Imperial Abomination, but for him, any always abominable institutional religion. In fact, he once said that all institutional religions with their priests and dogma and great power, were but the packs of hyenas feeding off the rotting corpse of the mystic-revealed Mystery that they had slaughtered on the altar of the very human and egotistical greed for money and power. But he did often betray a soft spot for the Japanese religion of Shinto, which he said was based on a profound respect for, and interaction with, nature spirits, but I have to take is word on that because I know about as much about Shinto as I know about mating habits of pythons. (I wonder if they've figured out a way to do it "standing up." LOL!)

He also said that if there existed somewhere in the past a real "Jesus Christ,"—more than once pointing out that Jesus was a Greek rendition of the Jewish name, Joshua, and Christ was not his Jewish surname, but a shortening of the Greek word christos, which was a title meaning anointed!—the last thing that "Jesus Christ" would have wanted to be, was a "Christian." And likewise with Buddha—again more than once pointing out that Buddha was not a personal name but a title meaning awakened—concerning the institutional religion of Buddhism, which in many ways was even more of an abomination than the institutional church Constantine created out of the Christ-myth, because Siddhartha Gautama had explicitly told his disciples that he was just an enlightened—an awakened!—human being, not a divine one, and that when he died, as all human beings must, they were not to make an institutional religion out of his teachings.

But of course, as John was quick to harshly say, "They obviously weren't awake—enlightened!—enough to understand and pay attention to his wisdom on that account and so severely degraded 'the Buddha's' wise teachings about how to 'wake up' by creating an institutional religion designed to ensure that its sheep-flocks stayed deeply asleep. Unenlightened adults are basically perpetual toddlers who need strong parents to feel safe. In other words, they need an anthropomorphic god figure, and too many institutional Buddhists have turned 'Buddha' into a father-divinity that they are wont to worship!"

And on that topic he added: "So no surprise it should be that most sheep-people find it easier to attend some kind of church or prayer service in order to bended-knees, slave-worship either an imaginatively anthropomorphized Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy or Allah, or the deified and distorted memory of Siddhartha Gautama, than to follow the admonitions of the Gnostics—and Siddhartha as a Buddha, an awakened being—to wake up! Though of course, Buddhist worship isn't quite as atavistic as Catholic worship, with its cannibalistic ritual of the Mass. . . . I mean, what else can you call 'eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ' be . . . as many before me have pointed out . . . but cannibalism? And as far as I am concerned, priests saying mass should not wear all those fancy Roman robes—or their black, Mithraic dresses!—but just a loin cloth and a bunch of tattoos! And a bone stuck through their nose!

"And for the Buddhists, I am certain they find it a lot easier to indulge in comforting Buddhist rituals than it is to follow the Four Noble Truths and stay on the Eight-fold Path and lifelong make that difficult struggle to become, and stay, enlightened . . .which is all that the very human—but awakened—Siddhartha, asked of his followers. I once watched a TV program where Tibetan Buddhists were strolling through a temple and spinning a 'prayer wheel' on the believe that it was the equivalent of spending a multitude of hours actually praying . . . to their god, the Buddha I guess . . . who sure did not want to be prayed to. . . . I think that activity is in same category as Constantine's Imperial Abomination enhancing its wealth and power through the selling of indulgences to the gullible masses—and pissing off Martin Luther enough to have him nail his Ninety-Five Theses to the eggshell of Catholic Dogma and cracking it into a whole bunch of Humpty Dumpty-Protestant pieces!"

Alas, Poor Dear Reader, if the above paragraphs appear ridiculously confusing, that is because I, back then, did not—and certainly don't now!—understand this highfalutin, Bodhisattva-and-karma-shit, and though part of me tells me to go back and delete it all, another part says, "Fuck it and carry on!" And I would stop with it right here but—alas, for you, Dear Reader!—there suddenly comes to me a memory that, given my love of the Beatles, sits dear in my heart and which brought it all a little bit down to a level I could relate to, when John once made the comment about hearing on the radio a most strange and startling song about instant karma, which he said really caught his attention because the word karma doesn't come up very often anywhere in our culture.

Well, I obviously knew that song he'd heard could only have been John Lennon's "Instant Karma," and that provoked in me my very own House-moment which allowed me to made a lot more sense of out this whacky stuff than I previously had been able to. I mean, if anyone could have been the incarnation of a so-called bodhisattva, it would have been John Lennon. Of course, as Lennon himself rightfully, though infamously, (for his generally brain-dead and "Christian" fanatical, future MAGA-hatters, American audience) said: "The Beatles are more popular than Jesus Christ," which meant he was likely way too famous—and rich and powerful—for any incarnating bodhisattva to safely be.

When I mentioned to John that the song was called "Instant Karma" and was sung by another John with the surname of Lennon, who was shot and killed outside his New York apartment by a lunatic fan, John actually remembered the incident. (I mean, why wouldn't he—the whole fucking world knew about, and countless millions grieved over, it!) And he remembered it well enough to know it happened the same year the mall burned down. (That too many times already-mentioned event which inspired him to begin writing his memoirs which I ended up translating and turning into The Fire, and which in its turn, provoked the writing of this crazy "Preface!")

And when, on thinking about it from John's bodhisattva/instant karma perspective, I saw something grotesquely ominous in two eerie facts: one being that Lennon had fought the American Immigration Gestapo tooth-and-nail to remain living in the United States—where it is infinitely easier to obtain a gun (a fucking assault rifle, if you want one!) than a good education—when they wanted to ship him back to the considerably safer England, and the other being that he'd co-written and recorded with the Beatles a song called "Happiness Is a Warm Gun."

When I pointed those very synchronicitous facts out to John, he just nodded grimly and said, "I don't know enough about that Lennon fellow to decide if he was a bodhisattva or an avatar , but from how much his death was in the news he was obviously very famous—and equally well liked by a lot of people, so it was likely he was one or the other. He sure was no ordinary person like you or me, I can safely say that! . . . And those events around his death have the Lords of Karma's fingerprints all over them. But don't take that as gospel, because when it comes to figuring out this difficult stuff . . . stuff that the poet Rilke rightly called 'the Deeper Laws,' . . . I am like one of those proverbial blind men feeling up that poor elephant to try and figure out what the hell it is."

And then getting a glint in his eyes, chuckling added, "And too often over the years of 'feeling up that elephant,' I've inadvertently grabbed its balls and got stomped on! Or stuck my hand up its ass and got shit on!"

Well, John may not have known much about Lennon (or even the Beatles, for that matter) but I—and hundreds of millions of others—sure did, and if I could make the leap to believing in avatars and bodhisattvas, I could easily believe Lennon had been one or the other. And if that was the case, he was surely way too famous for the nasty "judicial system" of those Lords of Karma. And, for what my opinion is worth, I'd say I'm not going out on much of a long limb to say that Lennon was more likely an avatar than a bodhisattva, and even a shorter one to say that George Harrison had likely been a true bodhisattva. And though he lived a few years longer than John, he was still "shot dead" way too damn young—58!—by cancer.

Instant Karma?—who the fuck knows for sure, though if John was alive to make a comment on him, his life, and his early exit from this world, he'd probably have said something like, "That Harrison fellow's fame—and Beatle fortune—was likely incompatible with being a bodhisattva, and that though he could have done little about his fame save hide from the world like that recluse who wrote that silly book, The Wanker in the Wheat, he certainly could have—likely should have—set up a charitable foundation to dispose of his Beatle fortune. That might have kept those Lords of Karma off his case . . . though of course, don't quote me on that!"

(I gave John that uber-famous book, The Catcher in the Rye by the equally uber-reclusive Salinger to read, but I had no idea at the time that John had been an uber-impoverished and uber-abused farm boy who had fled his nightmare of a family farm to spend his teenage years in the infinitely worse nightmare of the muddy, bloody trenches of France fighting "the Hun" during the BASS, so he sure would not have found anything to relate to in Holden Caulfield's petty, teenage problems—and he couldn't make any sense out of the title, Catcher in the Rye, so on the few times he referenced it, he sarcastically called it Wanker in the Wheat!)

Well, just out of curiosity, I just finished Googling George's wealth, and discovered he died worth about 400 million dollars. Yikes!—that just might be a tad bit of money for a bodhisattva to possess, especially one whose guardian ego so consistently professed a more-than-rock-star level of spirituality. Google also informed me that back in '73 George set up a very generous charitable foundation called, Material World Charitable Foundation with the profits from nine of the eleven songs off his Living in the Material World going to that foundation. Very generous gesture indeed, but if those putative Lords of Karma exist and putatively like to keep the spiritual '"books" balanced, maybe it wasn't enough!

Maybe from their—putative!—point of view, he should have divested himself from almost all of his Beatles—and solo career—fortunes. Like, who couldn't live a secure and comfortable life on one million dollars, with the likes of four hundred million being beyond absurd—and necessary! (Though of course, there are scores of billionaires—Mad and Mendacious King Donald being one of them!—who consider a billion (a thousand million) dollars an inadequate amount of wealth to satisfy the dark and insatiable greed-demons who have taken possession of their cesspool psyches!)

I mean, just imagine what that kind of money Harrison died in possession of—and sure, as the saying goes, couldn't take with him!—would have done to help the poverty stricken of India. Of anywhere? What could Mother Teresa and her organization, Missionaries of Charity, have done with even a tenth of that! But hey, who am I too fucking judge! (I'm no fuckin' Lord of Karma, that's for fuckin' sure!) And like John a few times said, "Rich fools always believe they own their wealth, while the wise know that if they horde wealth, it owns them—and always in direct proportion to its extent, and their level of obsession with it."

Those wise words of John's drive into my crazed skull the reality that if I possessed that kind of dough, I'd likely be a bona fide rich fool, because sure as shit I've never manifested an instant of wisdom in my crazy life and I'd be hoarding and obsessing about the stuff—no differently than my fellow loonar, Mad King Donald!

And we can't leave McCartney out of this discussion, but all I can say about him with any certainty is that as the premiere rock 'n' roll Mozart of the 20th century, he is likely an avatar, for whom the karmic rules are different than for bodhisattvas! And of course, we also can't leave the lovable Ringo out of the equation, who with his seemingly irrepressible good moods and priceless, deadpan sense of humor, likely kept the Beatles from breaking up a lot sooner that they did—which likely means he is an avatar too. (But don't fucking quote me on that!)

### Chapter Twenty Six

Christ, now that that long, manic, off the topic, flight-of-the-stoned-bumblebee is over, (Yeah, right—I know! I have no main topic for this long streak of keyboard diarrhea!) I have to again scroll back to find out which nectar-filled flower I took off from . . . . . ah yes!—since I want this poor, pathetic "Preface" to be (mostly) about John (instead of me) and his essentially shamanic nature, I'll go back to when I was talking about that redoubtable Lakota shaman, Wallace Black Elk, and his book, Black Elk: The Sacred Ways of the Lakota, which I'm still working at getting all the way through. I mean, I do have to take it slow because it is a bit too disturbing for my ever-so-fragile world view.

To wit, at one point Wallace equates the occupants of UFO's with spirits and treats them as nonchalantly as one treats the existence of cars in a Wal-Mart parking lot, especially since, unlike Castaneda, Wallace did the lecture-circuit thing and, until his death in 2004, got a good deal of media coverage and acceptance. (You can even see him, and listen to him speak, on YouTube if you are so inclined.) Though in a way, Wallace and I do have something in common, as shown by Lyon writing in that beautifully short Preface:

Also, the organization of his thoughts follows the Lakota pattern of making a point from many different angles, in contrast to our holding to one subject. Therefore when you hear him speak, his thoughts seem to circle about. He drifts along, and, if you don't sense the point being made, you often wonder what he is talking about.

He drifts along, and if you don't sense the point being made, you often wonder what he is talking about. Now if that ain't a description of me writing—babble-blogging!—this poor fuckin' "Preface," I don't know what the fuckin' hell it is! Except in Wallace's case, it's an acceptable Lakota cultural thing, while for me it is just a symptom of my unmedicated "loonacy!" And hey, Dear Reader, if all this manic circling about and drifting along is boring the lead out of your pencil and turning your brain into one big over-cooked haggis, I'm not an American gun-nut sitting beside you holding a legal and licensed assault rifle to your head, so you can, if you wisely wish, immediately/right away/forthwith/without fuckin' delay, cease-and-desist in reading all this Rachel-nonsense. And go do something useful—like wash your underwear or trim your nose hairs.

Lyon then goes on to write,

The real gap, however, is not so much between the Lakota and English languages as between the sacred and profane levels of being. In Black Elk's world, spirits are more real than matter.

As with Black Elk, so with John, to whom the Ocean of Spirit and the world of spirits was definitely more real, and infinitely more important, than the material and ego-worlds around him, something he certainly felt very strongly about and demonstrated by not only underlining—once in pencil, then two more times with a red pen, then highlighting with a fluorescent yellow highlighter, these next words of Lyons':

We live in a world devoid of the sacred mystery powers that once abounded via shamans throughout humankind. It is difficult for us to imagine that perhaps we could all use a little magic in our lives.

John also annotated that passage with the tiny but legible printing:

I have the feeling everyone senses, especially, as Wordsworth wrote about in his great poem, when young children, the presence of those mystery powers, but our modern, material-science dominated "adult" world treats them as hallucinations and mocks and humiliates anyone—child or adult—who perceives and talks about them. Thus now those powers are solely the purview of Indians who have cherished and preserved their original cultures, and the mentally ill. And empirical, materialist science, continuing and aiding the vicious pogrom started by Constantine's Imperial Abomination and still going on, has mocked and driven underground the shamans who understand and work with those spirits. I am surprised this book even got published!

But to John there existed no sacred/profane dichotomy. To him, there existed only the sacred and what we thought of as the profane was just that which exists at a much lower, denser, and slower level of the sacred. And similarly with the spiritual and rational. To him the spiritual was a whole picture of reality—or at least reality to the extent we were humanly capable of perceiving it—and rationality was just a small and limited subset of it, like going out to the prairies and gazing at the vast vista of land and sky on a bright summer day, then taking a snapshot of a lone tree and trying to capture in that tiny picture that whole vast vista spread out around that tree. Also, cf. that already mentioned Castanedean nonsense about the nagual and tonal! (Pirsig talks about that capturing-the-vastness-of-the-prairie-landscape-in-a-snapshot problem, in ZAMM!)

Wow!—ya fuckin' hear that? Well, obviously I guess you don't—but I sure do! While I was typing out the above, Crosby, Stills &Nash randomly came on my iPod with "Southern Cross," and that smooth-as-Greek-yoghurt-voiced Stephen Stills singing about being knocked on his ass, and then being used by spirits, about bigger "voices" calling out to him!,

Shit, I've heard that song a thousand times over the years and never has those two lines been so occultly highlighted in my brain like this time! I mean, think of it!—that's the shamanic journey in a bloody nutshell! The whole thing being a process of being knocked down so you can get up just to get knocked down again. Each time getting up stronger and wiser—and according to John, living in a bigger worldview. And of course, with each climbing back on your feet, being humbler! And while it is going on, realizing that you are being used by spirits and being called by them to live a bigger life.

Now to have that come on as it did, struck even Scully-skeptical me as something that I'd call a putatively interesting synchronincidence! (I was trying to decide whether to type synchronicity or coincidence and ended up mindlessly typing that non-word, synchronincidence, so hey, Jupiter Jung!—you sure ain't the only egomaniac who can coin an unnecessary and basically meaningless word!)

Of course—oh yeah, it would be more normal for me to write, needless to say—Jupiter Jung, in his need for scientific acceptability, would have used that fancy, mealy-mouthed, pseudo-scientific invention of his, synchronicity, to describe that coinciding of what I was writing with "Southern Cross" coming up in my iPod scramble, while to John it would have just been another of the zillion omens he seemed to constantly get from his putative spirit-powers, and never failed to notice! He called them "telegrams from the spirits" and said they could only be deciphered by both sides of the brain, by intuition and reason working in tandem.

But damn!—I wish I would have noticed those lines while John was alive; it would have helped me be a tiny bit more accepting of that spirit world that was so important to him! I mean, if a rock star like Stills is going to mention them in a great song, then they can't be total hallucinations! (Well, yeah, you're right—given all the drugs of all types used by rock stars, they very well could be hallucinations!) And maybe it would have given a bit of consensus reality-validation to what he was always going on about.

But, God—what a dumb and totally Rachel-thing to think and write about! John had not one iota of doubt about the validity of what he was "always going on about" concerning the world of spirits, and Stills words in that song would have been no surprise to him because he more than once said to my half-deaf ears, "The tribal shamans, who would certainly have known how important their job was as the mediators between the spiritual and material worlds, have surely been replaced in our modern, materialist, empirical-science dominated world by poets, artists and musicians. I mean, if Mozart and Beethoven, working always so efficiently with such powerful Muses, weren't shamans, what the hell were they?

"And other great thinkers who may or may not know anything about shamanism but who sense that a bigger mind than their own was whispering wisdom in their inner ears. And that a bigger will than their own puny one, was manipulating and directing their lives. The poets Shakespeare, Goethe, Wordsworth, Coleridge—and especially Blake!—were definitely shamans, as also were modern thinkers like Einstein, who was more than willing to admit he had been listening to the whisperings of bigger voices. And even Jung, who alas, wasn't quite that humble. . . . And of course, that poor Nietzsche, who was most definitely a shaman dealing with some very powerful, inspiring spirits but totally lacked the shamanic discipline to remain sane while dealing with them!

"Actually, once you know what to look for, you can see many of them throughout history. . . . and I know, we've talked about . . . this shit, as you like to call it . . . too many times already, but I'm getting old enough not to care that I repeat myself a lot. . . . But, who can miss that greatest of history-determining battles between those two colossal and arch-adversarial avatar/shamans, Hitler and Churchill? And that battle is further enriched by its dualistic, Gnostic, light-versus-dark, freedom-versus-enslavement, theme. . . . A theme that obviously found its way into those Star Wars movies you like so much and that are so popular. Not that the creator of them was trying to hide the fact, given he called those hordes of white-armored dummies, stormtroopers . . .which was a misnomer if I ever saw one because I fought against the real Hun stormtroopers in both wars and they were the fiercest and nastiest and toughest of warriors on this planet. Not the blundering dolts too often portrayed in those movies! So you'd have to be an absolutely ignorant and literal-minded moron not to see that Hitler/Churchill theme running through those movies!" (Yeah, even literal-minded ol' me had kinda got that, but I am also getting right now is a strong sense of déjà écrit about the above paragraph, which means I probably covered that subject some ways back. If so, please ignore and forgive. After all, crazy is as crazy can't stop mindlessly doing, not as crazy wants ta do!)

And as Stephen Stills' smooth and soothing yoghurt voice, mixed in as it is with the butterscotch harmonies of Crosby and Nash trails off in the song's ending, and while I am circling about here like some bona fide Lakota with a bad case of scriptorial vertigo, I will pass on to you a radio-relevant anecdote I have suddenly remembered about John's response to my assertion that since we cannot see the Ocean of Spirit or spirits, it is impossible to empirically—and satisfactorily to our modern worldview—prove they exist. To which he responded by going over to his FM radio, turning it on and turning it up, then twiddling the tuning dial, first picking up the three local stations available, then going off them and intentionally fiddling it through a whole lot of static. After five long, irritating minutes of that, he came back to the table with an affected look of disappointment on his face as he said, "Damn, I can't pick up any FM stations from that "Big Shitty" down south—I guess none exist!"

And when I laughing said, "Of course they exist and of course you can't pick them up—they are too far away! What's your point?"

He chuckled for a bit as he grinning stared at me before replying, "My point is, it is not so much that they are too far away, it is that my aerial is too insensitive to pick up a strong enough signal for this weak receiver to amplify and make sense of. And like you said, that certainly does not mean those stations don't exist. It's no different with the Ocean of Spirit and the world of spirits. At one time everyone had inner radios capable of tuning into the Ocean of Spirit and its realms of spirits, and now, in the three hundred or so spiritually dark and sterile years since Descartes and Newton and the so-called Scientific Revolution set into motion by them and their ilk, our modern scientist-priests, as passionate propagandizers of that Religion of Materialist Science have been—and still are!—like those cretinous Christian monks who destroyed the great library in ancient Alexandria and deprived this world of thousands of volumes of valuable ancient knowledge and wisdom. They are on a similar, three-hundred-year-rampage—a rationality-rampage, you could call it!—perpetrated with their frantic need to not only destroy our inner, spirit-radios so we can then no longer have any access to the Ocean of Spirit and the realms of spirit, but our capacity to even know those radios exist!

"In fact, that Religion of Materialist Science, which, as I have said before, is the obverse of the poisonous, lead-coin of Constantine's Imperial Abomination, has done this for the same reason Constantine's Abomination destroyed everything Pagan—so it could be our dominant, uncontested religion and worldview. And of course, so it could acquire incredible amounts of wealth and wield incredible amounts of temporal power.

"Be very careful when you say that what you cannot perceive with your five, material senses, does not, and cannot, exist, because you are assuming that your perceptual 'radio' is so incredibly powerful and refined that it is capable of picking up the totality of all that exists, and that to me sounds dangerously egotistical and arrogant—in fact, way too much like the powerful and dogmatic clergy of Constantine's Imperial Abomination! Which is what too many Priest of the Religion of Materialist Science are behaving like when they start pontificating on, and severely limiting, the nature of this universe based solely on what they can perceive with their five senses—however machine-enhanced those five may be—and what their severely limited rational minds can figure out about what they perceive with those five senses—however machine-enhanced! . . . Again, as I am sure I have said before, when it comes to those Priests of Materialist Science trying to explain the Universe—and explain away the Mystery—with their reason, they are like garter snakes trying to swallow an elephant. Or a minnow, a blue whale!"

"That kind of hubris can but be construed as insanely arrogant, and surely only someday attract, as the Ancient Greek tragedians knew, the wrath of the gods. . . . Though from the look of the shape of this world that those Priests of the Religion of Materialist Science have bequeathed to us: two catastrophic world-slaughterfests; insanely huge atomic arsenals, mutual-assured-destruction; biological and chemical weapons, not only of mass destruction, but of unimaginably hideous mass destruction; ever-increasing and ever-more humanly deadly pollution; the destruction of the rain forests—and the 'Supreme Cosmic Master'-only-knows-what-else! We sure don't need the 'wrath of the gods' to destroy us, we are doing quite fine on our own!" (He made that comment before the Soviet Union collapsed and before global warming became a big issue.)

Fuck—what a goddamn mess I am making of this poor "Preface." I feel like a young child who wants to ice a cake for Mommy for her birthday, and after Daddy has left her with a baked cake and a bowl of icing for an hour, he returns to find she has eaten both half the icing and half the cake, while the other half is just about everywhere but on the remaining half of the cake. After all those digressions I have no fuckin' idea what the hell I was digressing-on about in the first place so once again I'll have to scroll back to find out.

(I am getting a vision of this poor "Preface" as an abandoned outhouse that a thousand acid-stoned spiders have spun their inter-tangled webs in! Though hey—now that I think on that vision, maybe I am right-on with what I am doing here because that is how some mystics and avant-garde scientists—and the Hindu god Indra!—view the universe! As a vast, intricate, multi-dimensionally entangled web!)

And speaking of the tolling of uncomfortable truth-bells, (a term I seem to remember using umpteen sidetracking pages back) I can't help but think of a whole other aspect of those—to me!—denizens-of-other-dimensions stuff that was dear to John's "perverse" heart that I really should only briefly think about and forthwith get out of my thought-scrambled head, but since that poor, over-speeding mania-scrambled brain of mine is playing this hummingbird-in-a-hurricane writing game (or more like a thousand-tripping-spiders-in-a-shithouse writing game), what the fuckin' hell!—I'm going to take you on another tangent-flight you probably are groaning at the thought of as fast as you are reading these words.

But, needless to say, they are, after all, just harmless words showing up on your computer screen—or whatever e-reading device you are using—and not great white sharks chewing off your butt, so you can water ski right over them as rapidly as you want or swim to the beach and escape them altogether. Capisce? (Yeah, I know, that metaphor is pretty scrambled, but what else can I make with my Humpty Dumpty brain after it was "kicked off the wall" by the hob-nailed boots of too-many bouts of head-lightning?)

So here I gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

As you can't help but have figured out by now, John was sensitive to (had his inner-radio tuned to) those "other-dimensional beings" (however real they might really be! . . . though I guess if I uncategorically asserting that they are not, and cannot be real, then that means John was hallucinating them into existence, which in turn would mean he was more insane than I now am, a notion which, if you'd ever met the man in person, you'd know to be absolutely ludicrous!) which he thought of, and treated, as real as—or often more real than—his fellow, flesh-and-fart human beings, with one of the—to me!—freakier aspects of what he could pick up with that uber-sensitive "inner radio" was his contention that machines are alive.

Of course, in his worldview, every damn thing, in being integral parts of an obviously conscious and alive universe, (obvious to him, and some mystical others but sure as fuck not to me!) must to some degree, be conscious—and thus, to whatever degree of being conscious, alive! But to him machines weren't just conscious and "alive" the way all things are conscious and alive. He said they were inhabited by actual beings no differently than we—as biological, ego-dominated entities—were inhabited by spirit-beings, except the beings inhabiting machines were inorganic beings, not organic ones. Hell, if you'd witnessed the way he constantly talked to, and pampered the hell out of his trucks while getting miles—often years—of trouble free service out of them when they should have long before been towed to the dump, you'd know he "walked the talk" ("drove the yakkity-yak?") on that belief! And never once, while I was with him, did he ever get out of his truck without first patting the dashboard and saying "Thanks, _______.", for providing him with a trouble-free run! (He had a pet name—always female—for each vehicle. And people think I'm fuckin' crazy!)(Attach a great big long LOL to that, because, believe me, I am fuckin' crazy and he sure as fuck wasn't!)

And as fast as the words were coming out of his mouth on that subject of machines having beings in them, he totally lost me on that subject—more than he usually lost me on most of his subjects!—until he drew my attention to the fact that Castaneda wrote a great deal about inorganic beings, and the fact that they were called inorganic because there was something in their nature that made it impossible for them to incarnate into, and inhabit, a physical-plane organic organism—like a human body—which in turn got its energy by consuming its organic environment the way an organic being could. This meant that if an inorganic being wanted to partake and grow on the energies inherent to the physical plane, it could only do so indirectly—by forming a symbiotic relationship with an organic being, whose energy it could "eat" and thrive on by attracting and absorbing its attention. (Exactly, he said, like Don Juan claimed his inorganic allies did in their relationships with him.)

My response to that assertion was a disturbed, "Christallfuckinggoddamnmighty, John—why do you always have to fuck with my poor head like that! Can't we just have a plain simple visit where all we talk about is the weather and who the hell your neighbors are sleeping with? Or murdering! Does it always have to be this deep, head-fucking shit? Fuck—you make machines sound like . . . like goddamn vampires!" thinking as I said it, that since vampires weren't real, scary as they sounded, they were not a threat to me, and thus those inorganic beings, those machine vampires, wouldn't be either.

His response, after a good long and loud laugh at my profanity-laced outburst that always instantly clued him into the fact that he was pushing things beyond the white picket fence of my safe-for-me, little-house-on-the-prairie worldview and thus scaring the crap out of me. Finally he quit laughing and said, after the de rigueur coughing fit that always followed his bouts of laughter, "Yeah, pretty much like a vampire, I guess you could say, though from what I know about vampire lore, the vampire attacks its victim and takes its energy, in the form of blood, by force, while these inorganic beings seduce us into a symbiotic relationship with them where they give us power . . . or make our lives easier for us—or both—in exchange for the energy of our attention, and in that way leech that energy out of us without us being aware that anything nefarious is going on. Except it is not an equal relationship because whereas we human beings have been able to get by—and thrive even!—for millennia without inorganic beings in our lives, those inorganic beings, though they can get by without us, they cannot thrive and evolve without us.

"But here's the rub," he said with a sardonic chuckle. "Though we demonstrated over countless millennia that as organic beings living in this totally organic environment of this incredible Earth, that we could get by just fine without machines and their inorganic being occupants, over this last hundred and fifty years or so we have been so corrupted and weakened by the flood of machines—and all the corrupting convenience and comfort provided by them—that we now truly do need them no differently than any alcoholic, corrupted and weakened by alcohol, pretty much needs that alcohol, no matter how bad it is for him."

And however much every single cowardly fiber of my being wanted to utterly deny the possible existence of even the notion of these inorganic vampires, a strange and unexpected surge of courage flowed through me and I was able to calm down enough to understand that reply of John's and make a modicum of sense out of it. Though of course, as I allowed that modicum of understanding into my battle-scarred head, and limitedly accepted the possibility that inorganic beings might be capable of inhabiting machines, it served only to increase my anxieties to a skin-crawling level, and it is a good thing I encountered it for the first time in John's presence and not in his memoirs, or I'd have had a major freak-out—no drugs needed!

But what really blew those anxieties off the scale was him then going on to say, "Well, as far as I'm concerned—and for what it's worth—vampires as we know them through fables and fiction, are really just convenient metaphors for the many demonic entities or hungry ghosts—if there is any difference—that can reach into our psyches when we are depressed and open and vulnerable to them. And we are particularly open and vulnerable to the compulsive predations of such nasty entities when we are indulging in our addictions, whether they be drugs, alcohol, pornography, compulsive sex, compulsive shopping, compulsive television watching, and compulsive . . .what not! . . . Hell, perhaps even the compulsive thinking that I indulge in!"

And I remember thinking, as he said, that, about my father's compulsion-driven alcoholism and compulsion-driven pedophilia and the obviously compulsion-driven daughter-diddling state they would put him in . . . and needless to say, all of my own past compulsion-driven drug use, compulsion-driven sexual antics and resultant depression, and then saying, "Thanks Uncle John, I sure really needed to hear about those demons...and hungry ghosts!"

And barely could I come to grips with those just mentioned thoughts than he gave into his seemingly compulsive need to fuck with my head by lobbing another anxiety-grenade into my poor, fragile psyche, as he said, "But those inorganic beings are something infinitely more nefarious and powerful than any run-of-the-mill demons or addiction-attracted hungry ghosts, for in essence, they are a distinct species of alien beings that have invaded this Earth from another lower, darker and heavier dimension and have virtually conquered us in a most ingenious fashion."

Needless to say, his words were freaking me out so bad that I couldn't contain myself and shouted at him, "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, UNCLE JOHN? ARE YOU SAYING THIS SHIT JUST TO SCARE THE FUCKIN' CRAP OUT OF ME? . . . BECAUSE IF YOU ARE IT'S SURE AS FUCK IS WORKING! . . . . FUCKING LITERALLY!"

And even while still shouting those words, I was in the process of jumping up and running for the bathroom—even though I'd just been there ten minutes before—and just sat on the closed toilet seat until I'd calmed down, wondering why such utterly preposterous and purely hypothetical shit was disturbing me so much.

I mean, my rational mind knew that most of what John was saying was a lot of provocative malarkey on his part—he seemed to have days when he took more delight than usual in pushing the boundaries of my pathetically small worldview! My rational mind knew that he was spouting off about that kind of disturbing shit either to amuse himself or to wind me up like some child's toy—or both—but some other deeper, wiser, more intuitive part of me somehow knew it to be true, and I knew that if I was going to finish that always-too-rare-and-too-short visit with him (I was, in those days, a working single mother of two very demanding children with as much free time on my hands as the "Supreme Cosmic Master" during the first six days of creation!) I'd have to pretend it was all nothing more real than if he was reading passages from Alice in Wonderland to me.

And John, as I'd been rushing off to the safety of that "shithouse refuge," knew exactly why I was going there and what was going through my head and soul, for his reaction to my doing it was to laughing shout at my retreating back, "Why do you always swear like a miner when you are frightened Rachel? . . . And run to hide in the bathroom like some child trying to escape a whupping?"

And much as I'd hoped he'd have some pity on my poor weak character and my endemic lack of courage at facing such disturbing shit as that, and would change the subject, he did not. While I'd run to my "bathroom refuge," he'd gotten up to stretch his legs and drip another pot of his "Sunday Special" coffee, the Starbuck's French Roast that I'd bring him a pound of every couple of months and which, love it though he did, he would save and only brew it during my visits. And after bringing two fresh mugs of his "Hulk Hogan brew" to the table and waiting for me to cream-and-sugar mine into something reasonably "pencil-neck geek" enough to be drinkable, he took a long, meditative, and obviously very pleasurable sip of that strong black brew and then smiling a demonic smile, carried on with his self-anointed task of severely fucking over my poor, frail head. And blowing to smithereens my tiny frail balloon of a worldview.

"Where were we now? . . . Ah, yes—I was talking about how our 'species-human' has, over the last hundred and fifty years or so, been totally conquered by that 'species-alien' of inorganic beings. And conquer us they certain did—every bit as much as Hitler conquered Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Belgium and France! But not by over-running us with superior force and slaughtering us by the millions, but by slowly, incrementally and cunningly making us utterly dependent on them. And doing so with a process that prevented us—well, most of us, as some sensitive souls have sensed this reality right from the get-go!—from having any awareness they even exist, let alone that they were in the process of conquering us. We, right now, in effect are in a state of almost total enslavement to them and in many ways have become little different to them than a giant, global herd of well-fed and pampered milk cows to a dairy farmer. Or worse . . ." And here he let out one of his patented sardonic chuckles, "And more accurately—as hogs to a bacon-maker!"

I'd more or less gotten used to theoretically accepting the notion that the human race might/could/possibly be little more than a Fortean herd of cattle to those Lords of Karma, and grudgingly "accepting" it because there was no empirical proof those dark beings even existed, (thus making it not really very frightening!), but the idea that the human race could just as well have been reduced to little more than a giant herd of cows being milked for its energy and service by an alien machine-race, seemed to have just a little more—and very obvious!—validity to it than I could be comfortable with.

I mean, to anyone alive today in our "advanced" affluent "cultures" it has become as obvious as a cardinal in a flock of sparrows that machines—and technology—have become a very dominating phenomena in our modern world and super-hectic, machine-driven lives. And of course, by this time I'd seen The Terminator series 3 times—I'm a total Arnold fan!—and was starting to accept that some modern people, in the vein of the Luddites and their ilk—and those poor "production-line slaves" who threw their sabots into the works to get a break from the relentless, exhausting and utterly inhuman pace of the factory's machine-ations—were starting to get a real bad feeling about the role machines were playing in both dominating and degrading our lives, so to keep from totally freaking out, I just kept telling myself, as he spoke, "It's all just Alice in Wonderland . . . just Alice in Wonderland . . . just . . . just . . . just!

And in order to keep this diversionary bumble bee-flight as (un)reasonably short as all the other diversionary flights comprising this so-called "Preface," I will summarize what he said as succinctly as I can. (Which, as you by now too well know, that means very likely not succinctly at all!)

To John, what we call the Industrial Revolution was really the beginning of a massive and total invasion by this alien race of inorganic beings. Actually, when he said that I freaked out badly enough that I could but shout, "HOW-IN-FUCKING-HELL-IS-THAT-POSSIBLE?" followed by, "What fucking proof do you have concerning such an outrageous assertion as that?" And he reacted by saying that he'd had such ideas very nebulously on the cusp of his mind for several years but they hadn't coalesced into anything very cogent until just a week before when he'd picked up Michael Crichton's book, The Great Train Robbery at the library. It was a novelization of a famous train robbery in England in 1855. (Two things about that book would have attracted John's interest, one, it was about trains, and two, about an historical event.)

As John quite animatedly put it, "It was while reading Crichton's Introduction to that book—he's a very knowledgeable fellow, by the way!—that I got my 'revelation' about that 'machine-invasion . . ."

And at that point he got up, went into his living room and returned with the book, from which he read the following passage,

"Victorian England was the first urbanized, industrialized society on earth, and it evolved with stunning rapidity. At the time of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, Georgian England was a predominantly rural nation of thirteen million people. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the population had nearly doubled to twenty-four million, and half the people lived in urban centers. Victorian England was a nation of cities; the conversation from agrarian life seemed to have occurred almost overnight: indeed, the process was so swift that no one really understood it." (And no, Dear Reader, I did not type that out from memory, I had to go to the library the other day and get the book, which, aging, oft-read wreck that it was, I was almost sure was the same copy John had read that passage to me from—until, on finding the passage, I saw that it was faintly underlined in pencil with the word INVASION! neatly printed, in John's hand, beside it. I wept at how close that suddenly brought him back to me!)

After putting the book on the table, he went on, "While I was reading that last line I just quoted, about the rapidity with which England went from a predominantly rural to a 'Big Shitty' nation—a real shitty, 'Big Shitty' in the case of Victorian London . . . as captured so well by Dickens!—a vision formed in my head of Hitler's Nazi rat-hordes swarming over France—and around its 'redoubtable' Maginot Line!—in an invasion of thousands of tanks and other motorized vehicles that lasted only six pathetic weeks! An invasion that was such a rapid, total and utterly stunning defeat of the 'mighty' French Army, that it left the rest of the world in shock! And even modern Frenchmen still—very embarrassingly!—scratch their heads when contemplating the ignominy of it. Those four absolutely terrible years of bloody, stupid, slaughter and devastation of the BASS had been completely undone and rendered utter folly, within six weeks!

"And when that rapid. Nazi-invasion-of-France-vision ended . . . an invasion that was all about blitzkrieging tanks swarming through that country like mechanized locusts . . . another vision replaced it—a vision of a horde of machines invading and conquering our modern world, beginning with their 'beachhead' in Victorian England—and blitzkrieging out around the world from there. Just like Hitler's tanks through France!"

John from there then went into his complex—and to me, utterly incomprehensible!—theory about how such an "invasion" had been possible. His first line of "attack" in explaining the "mechanics" of that "invasion" was to say that I'd first have to accept and understand what William Blake—and a lot of others with the imaginations to do so!—took for granted about our imaginations, which is that they are not some childish, irrelevant, and entertaining add-on to our brain, or even just a handy tool for inventors, poets and porno-wankers, but an interface with the continuum of spiritual realities that comprise the Ocean of Spirit.

And only if you can accept that mystical proposition—which I cannot, because, as John would assert, I lack the imagination to do so!—that our individual imaginations are a lot more important and powerful a mental faculty than our modern priests of the Religion of Materialist Science have reduced it to, and as such are our essential, de facto interface—he didn't use that word, but another that I don't remember—with that Ocean of Spirit, does what follows next make any sense.

John was certain that this race of alien, inorganic beings invaded Earth through the imaginations of certain open and susceptible—and thus obviously very imaginative men—manifesting to those men as very attractive ideas and visions for practical machines for them to "invent" and build, while accompanying those ideas and visions would be an irresistible compulsion in those men to build them. (I recently watched a documentary on that genius inventor Tesla, who got visions of machines that were so vivid and detailed he could build those machines directly from the visions—with one of those machines being the alternating current motor, which can both be a motor and the generator of all the alternating-current electricity which powers our modern world!)

And once those machines were built by those inspired men, the inorganic beings would somehow "incarnate" into them. We think of those inventors as great, world-transforming geniuses, mighty men with uber-superior intellects who thought up those mechanical creations on their own through their own unusual mental/imaginative processes, but, as John saw it, they were anything but—they were merely convenient, open, and willing channels for those inorganic beings to exploit in order to manifest into physical existence the "mechanical bodies" they needed to inhabit in order to exist in our world, doing so in order to conquer and enslave us. (Though on my asking about it, he did acknowledge many of them were likely avatars—which is why they had such "open" imaginations in the first place.)

And the reason they wanted/needed to conquer and enslave us, was so they could not only vampirize our organic energy while we operated those machines, but so we could be used as slave-tools to help that race of inorganic/machine beings with their evolution—and of course, build lots and lots and lots more machines into which lots and lots and lots of inorganic/machine beings could incarnate into—and do so without our ever knowing, or even suspecting, (most of us, anyway!) that we were being systematically and relentlessly invaded and enslaved. And "milked" like cows and goats!

And when John said it was a big, clever con-job, even as I was freaking the fuck out over the very notion of such a nefarious and clever "invasion," I could not help but think about that big con pulled off by those two uber-hunks, Newman and Redford, in that movie, The Sting, where their lives depended on their mark—a psychopathic Irish gangster—not ever realizing that they'd conned him out of his money.

Needless to say, even at this point I wanted to dive head-first out the door of John's kitchen and out-race the dog down his road so I didn't have to hear anymore about this uber-disturbing shit, but I restrained myself and was able to calm myself down enough by constantly telling myself it was all just Alice in Wonderland . . . just Alice in Wonderland . . .just . . . just . . . just!—finally finding the willpower to say to him, "Well, that's an interesting . . . thesis, Uncle John, but you can't prove that!"

A statement that got from him one of those intentionally exaggerated "taken aback" gestures, followed by a wry smile and a chuckling, "Well, of course I can't prove that . . . any more than I totally believe it—but I don't have to prove anything! I'm not a famous scientist-pope—no Carl Sagan!—pontificating on the nature of this Universe to a horde of wide-eyed and gullible scientist-priests in the equivalent of St. Peter's Square, but just an inconsequential old man living out his final inconsequential years on this inconsequential little farm located pretty much in the middle of Inconsequentiality itself. An old man who not only lives alone with his old dog . . . who is too wise to pay any attention to such nonsense . . . but an old man who has nothing but way too much times on his hands to think the most outrageous of thoughts about life and the Universe—and then pass them on to the only person in his life who willing to pretend to listen to him . . . pontificate . . . as you like to call it, about a lot of nonsense she is too rationally intelligent and rationally skeptical to take even remotely seriously.

"So this inorganic being invasion notion of mine is just that, a notion, an idea—that in your arcane vernacular is very 'far out!'—and I'll agree, that when you look at things in one particular way, it seems to fit. . . . And yes, you have to look at things in kind of a crazy . . . 'far out' . . . way for it to fit, but still, when you do look at it that way, it sure does make sense! And ideas, as you must have learned in school, are just that—ideas!—physically insubstantial patterns of thought . . . that may pre-exist on some higher plane . . . like Plato said . . . and which can shine into our brain like a ray of light and brighten things up, or invade it like mice a granary and foul it up to no stinking end. And like mice, ideas can breed so prolifically they are a nickel a gross and no single one of them is worth getting excited about unless it catches on with the teeming human masses and alters their collective worldview—and behavior."

And at that point he stopped to think for a moment before frowning and going on, "Something like the way Chamberlain's lunatic idea of "Peace for our time" caught on with the British public back in the late 30s even while they, and the rest of Europe, could feel the hot breath of Hitler's giant and vicious "Wehrmacht Wolf" breathing down their necks! . . . And while Churchill was so loudly and futilely shouting 'WOLF! WOLF!'.

"But this worthless little mouse of an idea of mine is never going to escape this kitchen because I'd bet my best pair of cowboy boots—with my feet still in them!—that you sure aren't going to talk about it with anyone, so it stays here forever with you and me. . . and of course, the dog here, who cares about this stuff even less than you do and isn't even going to bother to bark it at the moon!" (Well, if even one person buys and reads this pile of dog-barf of a "Preface," then John will have lost his bet, but no one can collect his best pair of cowboy boots, because they—and his feet!—were long ago cremated in that church fire that consumed his coffin and the rest of him!)

On John saying, "the dog," (I think by then Argos had gone off chasing rabbits and squirrels in dogeternity and this was another border collie whose name I don't remember), let out a long, yawning whine, slowly climbed to his feet from where he'd been lying on his blanket, and after a good, long stretch, walked over to me and with a sigh dropped his head on my thigh in order to get the vigorous ear-rub he knew I would give him . . . and a couple of the home baked oatmeal cookies—ANZAC biscuits, he called them—John always had a plateful on the table during our coffee-and-yakkity-yak sessions. And while I gave "the dog" his ear-rub and three cookies, I was able to collect enough of my scattered wits to ask John what on earth could be the purpose of this "very, very hypothetical invasion" of the machine-incarnating inorganic beings

(I mean, I could understand The Terminator-movie Sci-fi premise of a race of suddenly sentient, computer-operated machines wanting to rid this planet of humanity to have it all to themselves, but this idea of these alien, inorganic beings coming to Earth and inspiring us to build machines that they then incarnate into so they could turn humanity into a global herd of milk-cows—or bacon-sows!—just seemed too weird! . . . Or, given how much the notion disturbed me, perhaps too intuitively and possibly true!)

His reply was that the answer to that 'very astute and necessary' question lay in the inorganic nature of those alien beings, which meant they could only obtain the energy they need to grow and evolve through symbiotic relationships with organic beings—which is what we are. Without that symbiosis they existed in a kind of stasis, which, he grimly added, "As you know, cannot long exist without eventual disintegration, because this Universe seems to have some over-riding rule—some 'Deep Law'—written into it that everything in it must evolve to a higher state of being or devolve into oblivion, with stasis being anathema to it. Kind of like a bicycle—if a rider wants it to stay upright and balanced, he has to keep it in motion, and the second it stops, it falls over."

Which of course, was something I hadn't thought about all back then, and still cannot truly fathom, even though the evidence for that truth is everywhere around us in our physical world, where not only the individual birth of every creature begins its period of growth that leads to a brief maturity before falling into an inevitable decrepitude, death and decay, (and of course, every machine, much to the delight of mechanics and car dealers!) but every civilization, every empire, as well, all of which have struggled out of humble, acorn-like beginnings to grow into towering oaks, that, however towering and massive and expansive, reach a limit of growth that initiates the beginning of their slide down that slippery slope of disintegration and oblivion. And firewood!

Hell, even Neil Young was onto that with the title of his great Crazy Horse album, Rust Never Sleeps, a concept which anyone who owns a car in these northern snowlands where the roads are heavily salted in the winter, knows only too well—especially the reality that if you aren't constantly and expensively fighting that rust-monster, it quickly eats your expensive car "alive," thus sending it to the crusher and you to a car dealer for another expensive package of rust-monster food.

John said he considered this "machine invasion"—if that is what it truly was!—as the cleverest thing imaginable. Literally! He said if there is truth in his vision—which he sincerely doubted!—those inorganic beings started the invasion by manifesting as practical things in certain inventors minds, things which once built, not only made our lives infinitely and desirably easier and more comfortable, but at the same time, because of their practicality and desirability, made their inventors, and the manufacturers of them, more rich and powerful than theretofore imaginable.

He said the largest machines in the world are the railroads—in their collective, continent-spanning totality!—and their dominance of industrial nations and the trainloads of money sucked out of farmers and working people by its robber barons would have made a Renaissance pope murderous with envy. Not, he added, "That those psychopathic, wealth-and-power greedy monsters needed such envy to be murderous!"

(And as I write these words a hair-raising chill scampers down my spine as I think of our modern crop of high-tech robber barons: Steve Jobs of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Page and Brin of Google, and the worst and biggest baron of them all, Facebook's Zuckerberg, who have not only been sucking Grand Canyons' full of money out of the people of this world at a level that would have made those original robber barons murderous with envy, but have been dictating the very nature of our modern, basically Borg-assimilated reality to us!)

But back to John, who luckily died before what he would have labeled, that "latest and most total" wave of invasion by the inorganic beings, "So," he said."With dark and fundamentally egomaniacal and greed-dominated motivations like that, those 'chosen-channelers' couldn't resist 'inventing' and building more and more inorganics-inspired machines in their unrestrained quests for infinite wealth and absolute power. And standing out from all of history's many great inventors, Thomas Edison, would have been viewed by those inorganic beings as their Pope Urban II, basically leading the crusading and invading Armies of the Inorganics in their conquering of the 'Holy Land' of an unimaginably vast, wealthy, and very lucrative empire of human slaves!"

"And," he derisively went on. "In being the fallible and morally weak humans that many of those avaricious inventors naturally were, they just couldn't resist believing the big ego-con that it was their own human minds inventing these machines, just was we, in being the fallible and weak humans we are, cannot resist being made comfortable, soft, more weak and thus easily controllable by them! (And, like I said, John most fortuitously died before this latest techno-invasion that is putting smart phones into the hands of toddlers and turning modern children into virtual house-bound slaves of plethora of iGizmos and the Internet!) And just as for any rich master who has his servants and slaves do so much for him that he becomes enfeebled and utterly dependent on them to the point where they effectively become the master of the household or plantation, so it is with our relationship with machines and those inorganic beings!

"The history of our increasing dependence on, and enslavement to, those inorganic beings through their now ubiquitous machines," he said. "Is as impossible to ignore as is one of those asshole bikers who thunders past you on an unmuffled Harley, which really is all part of the dark process of our total, machine-enslavement!".

John, who got more and more sensitive to noise as he grew older, loathed such unnecessary and intentional, attention-getting noise-making and had nothing but contempt for those making it, saying they were just over-compensating for their little dicks—or no dicks, if they were women! He also said—facetiously I'm sure—that "the people really responsible for that racket was the cops, who'd instantly pull one of those assholes over if they weren't wearing a helmet, but not for thundering around with deafening and illegal straight-pipes. Which is ridiculous, because we could sure use a break from their imbecilic racket while what the hell did those assholes need helmets for, since they obviously had absolutely nothing in their heads worth protecting!"

If you are wondering why I threw that bit about the noisy Harleys in there, and his contention that they were part of our "dark process of enslavement," it was because John always contended that our connection to Nature, and thus to our own natural organic nature, included a symbiotic relationship, not only with the natural world that fed and sustained us (he said we can't eat our cars and televisions, and I update that to: we can't eat our iPhones and iPads!) but with the Ocean of Spirit and the realms of nature spirits, and that we could only access the Ocean of Spirit and those realms of the nature spirits, through silence, and that in our modern, machine-invaded world, silence was something that was no longer golden, as the poets of old saw it, but now scarcer and more valuable than plutonium! (In case you care: I just looked it up and a gram of plutonium will run you about 5 grand—or about 31 million if you want enough for the critical mass of 6 kilograms needed to create a bomb—not, I assume, that you can purchase the stuff at your neighborhood Wal-Mart! At least not in this civilized country, though I can't speak for what goes on south of the "Medicine Line" where teenagers are allowed to buy assault rifles!)

He said the noise created by those all those machines that we now totally take for granted as essential to our modern, "advanced" world, is blocking our natural access to the living, conscious essence of Nature, and to the spiritual realms that are as endemic to Nature as is brightness to sunlight, and our tolerance of that noise—as shown in the example of our acceptance of illegal and outrageously loud motorcycles on our streets—is a measure of just how totally we have been invaded and corrupted by the inorganic beings and their machine-world. (Sadly, in the last decade, morons in hyper-powerful 4x4 trucks with over-sized tires and useless—or, no!—mufflers on them, roar around making as much—and often, more!—noise as those unmuffled Harleys!)

John also pointed out another disturbing aspect of our modern world, with its total—if tacit—acceptance of this "inorganic-invasion" in our relationship with our cars, all of which have very distinctive, often very psychologically "loaded" names that some people so powerfully identify with that they will buy a vehicle solely because they like, or in some way identify with, the name of that car. And obviously, one of the most dramatic car-name to him was Ford's uber-famous, ego-and-testosterone-boosting, Mustang. (Cowboy that he was, he never got sucked into buying one—though maybe if there had been a truck called Mustang—who knows?)

And though I'd never given the issue even a passing thought, he pointed out just how dominant, and humanity-sidelining machines have become for us—particularly cars!—in the observable fact that if there is a big car accident, the subsequent news item in the paper—or on TV—will explicitly name the cars involved in the accident along with the victims. He said this truly exemplified just how totally insane we are in our relationship to cars that they get named in an accident reports along with the injured or deceased human victims.

As he put it, "Who the hell needs to know that when Mr. and Mrs. Smith and their four young—and unnamed!—children died horrible, body-mangling deaths when their car smashed head-on into an unnamed tractor-trailer, that their 1985 Chevrolet Impala . . . or 1978 Ford Country Squire wagon was also destroyed in the crash! It's not just absurd—it's insane! . . . Ha!—can't you just see this tagged onto the end of the article: Funeral services for the Impala will be held at Joe's Junk Yard as soon have police have completed their investigation and released the wreckage."

John said this invasion, and resultant corruption of our essential organic reality, is now so total that most people in industrial societies today cannot even imagine what we have lost in losing our connection to this living Earth, to that Ocean of Spirit, and to its realms of nature spirits, especially since once the connection to such a world is lost and subsequently slips out of memory, that world ceases to exist for us. It is no longer even a valid idea anymore—and especially not for the following generation that never gets to know it! . . . In fact, it's a lot like many of those Indian tribes that are trying their damnedest to hang onto what little of their ancient and original heritage they have left—or resurrect what they know they have lost—but no longer have any shamans in their midst to re-connect them with the spirits and their realm. They are trying to re-build the house of their culture without its essential foundation to build it on."

Fuck-a-hot-straight-Harley-pipe!—but did John ever have that right! There is a lot of stuff in the news lately about the worry of many child-psychologists about that fact that most children spend way too much time indoors playing with their iGizmos and way too little time playing outside, getting fresh air and exercise, and communing, even just a little bit, with nature! They claim this is creating the potential for a future, ecological disaster—not that we are not in the middle of one already!—as those children become adults devoid of all sense that nature even exists, let alone has any intrinsic value to their human lives. Kind of, I would guess, like an Indian tribe trying to go back to "the old ways" but lacking the shamans who—putatively—were so essential—according to John—in connecting them with their—putative—spirits.

Another point John liked to make was how people, especially on weekends, like to pour out the "Big Shitties" (to John, all cities were shitty places to spend time!) to "get out into nature," especially out to northern, wilderness lakes (like the one abounding in our area of the boreal forest) but they go to those once lovely lakes all loaded up with an expensive array of machine-toys—over-powered motor boats, personal watercraft, ATVs, off-road motorcycles, etc.—all of which either make such a racket or destroy everything they traverse—or both!—that all of nature runs and hides at the sound of them coming.

He made a statement once I thought was pithily wise: When you go into the wilderness on a machine, you do not have a wilderness experience, just a machine experience. Which, he added, "You can have aplenty on your over-crowded streets and your insane freeways and without leaving your 'Big Shitty' and bringing all that foul machine-and-noise pollution into our wilderness! (Of course, if John's income and wealth had depended on "tourist-and-cottager" bucks, I am sure he'd have sung a different tune! Or not.)

### Chapter Twenty Seven

And while on the topic, though much as John hated those noisy motorcycles, his ultimate loathing was for snow machines and the morons who drive them. (We live in snow-country and they are as ubiquitous and annoying from December to March as cigarette smoke once was in a bingo hall!) He called them snow-vermin, using that as a collective term for both the machines and their drivers, especially when those drivers went off the trails to wreck the forests and harass and kill the animals. With beer being both gas and anti-freeze for both classes of those snow-vermin, and once liquored-up—de rigueur for that mindless lot!—they thought it great sport to run down and kill any deer, wolves, coyotes, or foxes—or a dog if one caught their attention and couldn't get out of their way! (No easy thing for any animal in deep snow, which truly made such "sport" all the more malicious and moronic!)

The point of this (I am always, in this "Preface," trying to make a valid point, not that my crazy idea of a valid point is always going to be copacetic with your sane idea of a valid point!) is that John more than once commented on how easy it is to observe how a man's—or woman's!—personality could be instantly altered by the machine he or she was driving, creating some kind of dark symbiosis—women not near so much, he was certain!—the effects of which were directly proportional to the engine-power of the machine and the square of the lack of thinking-power of its operator.

He said he'd known fellows who were average, well-behaved "Joes" when off their snow machines, yet once suited-and-liquored up and astraddle them, they would turn into total, mindless morons. It was a real Jekyll and Hyde effect that seemed to him as obvious and inevitable as the stink of burning oil that came from the two-stroke engines of those over-powered machines! And of course, he speculatively attributed this dark symbiosis to the fundamentally stupid nature of the class of inorganic beings that took up residence in such basically overpowered toys, with those fundamentally stupid inorganic beings having, in that dark symbiosis, the power to move the "assemblage point" of whoever was driving "their" machine, to dark and stupid position.

Then he really disturbed me by going on to say he'd seen a similar, though more deadly effect, in how guns affected a person. Every gun, he said, is a machine and in being a machine it would naturally become the home of an inorganic being no less than any other machine, and that the nature of the machine either affected what kind of inorganic being it attracted—or perhaps, he surmised, all inorganic beings existed with generic, amorphous "personalities" that got changed by whatever machine they took up residence in. With every machine carrying in it the intent imbued in it by its design and purpose, with of course, any and all manner of guns and killing-devices either attracting the worst-of-the-worst kind of inorganic beings, (the Mafia thugs and assassins of the inorganic realm) or turned generically benign ones into absolutely malicious entities.

And as far as John was concerned, guns, were, by their very nature, the most malicious of machines, because they were invented and manufactured with but one, single, solitary, utterly unambiguous purpose: to kill living, organic creatures. And as I've said, (and will say again because it seems so important!) he was sure that the intent with which any machine was designed and manufactured subsequently lifelong imbued that machine with a specific nature, a nature that had the unmistakable power to either attract like-intentioned inorganic beings, or turned banal ones into monsters existing with but one purpose—to slaughter organic life!

And I guess he spoke with no small amount of "authority" on that subject (as much "authority" as any non-Priest of our global Religion of Materialist Science can have!), because, as you will see in The Fire, he grew up on a boreal forest-farm and was killing animals—for very necessary sustenance—with a gun at a very young age, then went through the BASS where he said, "I was basically married to my Lee Enfield rifle, though a Lewis gun (some kind of machine gun) was my favorite mistress, and Mills bombs (grenades, I think) were my children that I took great delight in lobbing at the Hun in whatever number I had available."

Then from the BASS he went on to owning a wilderness ranch where toting a rifle and killing predators and vermin was as de rigueur as owning, raising and selling cattle, then on to WWII where he said he had bonded with no end of very powerful weapons that never hid their very endemic and powerful intention—their need!—to slaughter human beings.

"And every one of them," he said. "Changed me in some very unsubtle—to me, anyway!—fashion when I was in possession of it, always making me feel like a natural killer with a great—and natural!—need to kill. It was as if the gun, in order to fulfill itself . . . in order to fulfill the intent with which it had been designed and manufactured . . . had to kill as many organic creatures as it could, and to fulfill that intent, it took possession of—and passed that need on to!—whatever human being was holding it."

And John wasn't the only one who sensed this because one of his fellow soldiers in WWII had a bent for writing poetry, and one of the few poems he was willing to show anyone, was one he showed to John as they were taking a break in a shell hole after a particularly bloody encounter with the Nazi hordes, and which he was unable to forget. The soldier-poet has called it "Lethal Symbiosis" and John had a faraway look in his eyes, and an ominous tone to his voice as he recited it to me,

A man is a man;

A gun is a gun;

But a man with a gun

Is not a man and a gun,

But is a gunman.

John said he hadn't understood the meaning of the word symbiosis at that time, (and didn't want to reveal his ignorance by asking his friend its meaning) and thus truly didn't understand the poem at the time, but it stuck with him, and it was only after learning about the process of symbiosis, and of the capacity of disparate things to enter into an intimate relationship that was not only advantageous to both of them, but also altered them both—for good or ill. He said Castaneda's ideas about our assemblage point, and its capacity to move about in our "luminous being" and while moving about altering both us and our reality, helped him make total sense of that very "Lethal Symbiosis!"

He said it very disturbingly made him see the powerful and malicious effects that a gun could have on any human being who possessed one, and which, when coupled with the fact that every gun had a very powerful and intimidating effect on every human being it was aimed at, thus instantly connecting its wielder with that dark, sticky and utterly enthralling and corrupting current of power coursing through the lower realms of the Ocean of Spirit, that enthralling and corrupting current of power which we tapped into with our third chakra. And in seeing it through the conceptual lens of the chakra system, he was able to very clearly see and understand the dark, powerful, easily observable, and symbiotic reality of how normal, sane—even otherwise gentle and compassionate!—young men could be inducted into an army and so easily and instantly turned into savage, deranged demons, turned into instantly-corrupted-by-their-savage-power, homicidal maniacs when in possession of a gun, and never more so than when in the adrenalin-throes of combat.

And even each type of gun had different, symbiotic effects on those otherwise normal, sane, gentle and compassionate young men. A normal rifle had a negative enough effect, but that was nothing, he said, that compared with the effect of having possession of a machine gun—a machine with no redeeming qualities whatsoever, imbued as it was, from the instant of its design, with pure malice, because the sole purpose of its design was the slaughtering as many organic beings as it could in as short a span of time as it was able.

And though I obviously wish John was still alive today so I could both visit him regularly and be sane, I also wish he was alive so he could witness his theory about the dark, malicious, symbiotic relationship between guns and humans beings getting validated almost monthly in the Groucho's "Fascist States of America" for the last few years, with horrific stories of mass slaughters of kids of all ages at their schools by malicious lunatics with assault rifles—machine guns! And with no legislative end in sight for the ridiculously easy ability of Americans—even teenagers!—to acquire machine guns for their personal use. (One cartoon I saw on the Web most accurately depicted the lunacy of American gun laws by showing a teen being told he had to be 21 to legally buy alcohol, 24 to rent a car, but only 18 to buy an assault rifle! D'OH! D'OH! D'OH!)

As I must surely have apprised you of by now in this "Preface," I was—and am still not!—very understanding and accepting of most of John's more mystical and "far-out" theories, but I had—and am still having!—a hard time shaking off his ideas about the dark, malicious symbiotic relationship that can develop between human beings and "our" machines. Given all the horror stories in the news of late of one school shooting after another—and that horrific massacre in Las Vegas!—I can't help but think there might be a smidgen of truth to them, with guns of all sorts being at the top of the spectrum—keeping in mind that in that so-common-to-us-word, gunman, the first and dominant word of that symbiosis, is gun—with his other pet-peeve, snow-vermin, being about half-way down.

And though I have an avowed aversion to guns and have never in my life fired one—I even refused to fire my brother's BB gun when he encouraged me to give it a try!—I do have some experience with his contention that that over-powered toys have the symbiotic power to turn otherwise ordinary, sensible and law-abiding citizens into morons and lunatics once astride and at the controls of one of them. Of course, there is no doubt that alcohol plays a big part in the snow-vermin subculture, but there must be some symbiotic influence on the part of those infernal machines to fill otherwise ordinary, sensible, and law-abiding citizens with the belief that it is de rigueur that they be drunk when operating them!

And though I have never driven—or even sat on—one of those "Boyz-Toyz," the winter news around here every year is peppered with of stories of fatal accidents involving them, most centering around the basically moronic actions of the drivers. Actions: like drinking and over-speeding at night on lakes and hitting ice ridges! D'oh! Like drinking and over-speeding at any time on lakes and trails and hitting trees, rocks, other snow-machines and ice-fishers! D'oh! D'oh! D'oh! Like just this winter past where some mouse-brained snow-vermin, while rocketing along a lake through a collection of ice-fishing huts, hit and killed a teenage girl and himself! D'OH! D'OH! Though the most telling part of that story was that the operator involved was not some brainless, asshole teen showing off to his friends about how testosterone-stupid he could be, but was a man in his forties—a steady worker and good provider for his wife and children—and certainly normally mature enough to have known better! Then there's the "Einsteins" that break through thin ice on lakes and rivers and drown! D'oh! Or smash headlong into trains while rocketing along twisty, curvy railway tracks! D'oooooooooooh! D'oooooooooooh!D'ooh! D'ooooooooooooooooh!

And then of course, there's those groups of "Mensa-Elites" out in the western mountains who get themselves killed by avalanches while performing show-off stunts pretty much designed to trigger avalanches! I remember hearing on the news—about ten years ago—of about eight ("mature" family men!) getting killed in an avalanche-incident that way—basically, as I understand it, playing "chicken" with avalanches by zooming up a slope, triggering an avalanche, then turning around and rocketing away before it could catch up with them! I can just see them in a bar, bragging their adrenalin-charged heads off after successfully completing such a stunt—and their families weeping in a funeral home when not so successful.

I guess their fatalistic philosophy is that old one usually said about bears: some days you defeat the mountain, and some days the mountain defeats you. But only once, for the latter! And fuck-a-snow-machine!—but people say I'm crazy! (I guess if you want to get away with being crazy, you have to pick a socially acceptable form of craziness: like playing chicken with avalanches on a snow-machine—or, like Mad King Donald, by going into politics and out-lying the professional liars and out-crazying the professional crazies!)

All of which either means that in order to get a snow-machine license—if you are one of those anal nerds silly enough to believe you actually need one!—I am certain all applicants must de rigueur provide proof of either a serious mental handicap. Or of having had a prefrontal lobotomy! Either that, or that those machines just plain have the symbiotic power suck the intelligence right out of their operators' heads! Since the former doesn't sound too likely, all that's left is the latter, for as that old axiom of Sherlock Holmes' goes, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable (unpalatable?), must be the truth."

Of course, if you go with John's definition of a snow-machine, I guess it's all contained right there in it: "An over-powered toy designed to attract an under-brained buyer who then projects his very fragile and stupid male ego onto that machine's very big power, after which, while riding, he of course has to use every bit of its too-much horsepower in order to stroke that frail and stupid ego into whatever artificially enhanced state that suits him."

And still of the subject of those snow-vermin, you'd not believe the money John spent over the years to erect barriers to keep them off his land—and his horse-trails—and once, in a pique over them still managing to get on it, said, "If I wouldn't end up in jail for murder for it, it'd put up trip-wires at neck-height to lop off their empty heads! . . . And I am certain the sure-fire way to lure a whole baboon-troop of those arseholes into such a trap would be to install a great big sign on a ten-foot high gate leading to a forest trail that said, PRIVATE PROPERTY! NO SNOW MACHINES ALLOWED! Once glance at that sign and those moronic scofflaws would be crashing through the bush and over my fence so they could get around that gate and roar down that trail like a dog after a bitch in heat! And going so fast they would never know their empty heads had been lopped off by that wire! And even if, like that Kurtz guy in Apocalypse Now, (John loved that movie) I stuck their severed, helmeted heads on spikes along the top of that gate, more brainless arseholes would still roar around it—just to spite me for putting it up!"

He once made the laughing comment that he couldn't figure out why the Trail Associations (these northern snowlands are spider-webbed with groomed trail for those snow-vermin, the things having been vainly designed to try to keep them off private properties—which is like keeping mice out of wooden granaries!) wasted money putting up little, quite unofficial, Stop and Slow and speed-limit signs along the trails because snow-vermin, by nature, are compulsive scofflaws who are so adverse to being told how to drive their verminous machines that they don't even pay the slightest attention to the big and official STOP and speed limit signs in towns and along highways, (or, as I often hear in the news, school bus STOP signals!), where they run the risk of having serious accidents with much larger vehicles. Or getting tickets from the police for ignoring them. "Not that they ever run the risk of get such tickets," he grimly said. "Because unless a cop is on a snow machine himself, he's not going to be able to apprehend those law-breaking snow-vermin once they scream off into the bush or across a field—or through somebody's yard!"

John also lamented that long-gone are the days when you could take a magical walk out in the soft silence of freshly falling snow, because now there is no silence when it snows, just the snarling, howling banshee-shrieks of the snow-vermin going a hundred miles an hour on the lakes and trails and, and if the noise pollution isn't bad enough, they fill the air with the stench of burnt oil and make even taking a shallow breath an unpleasant experience.

And if it was bad when he was alive, it is considerably worse now, the power, noise and prevalence of those noxious machines increasing with each passing season, and it is a rare, moonlit winter night when I can step outside to gaze up at Selene not be assaulted by their racket—even at midnight!

Though to be sure, more and more people today are becoming cognizant of the harsh fact that our modern world is too insanely noisy. A few months ago I came across a book in Chapters titled, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise. It seemed to be about John's long-ago conflation of silence and spirituality and I would have bought and read it, but it was written by a Catholic Cardinal, so that instantly turned me off it.

I tend agree with John that "Catholic spirituality" is way too often an oxymoron.(Especially when propagandized by that politico-class of clerics, aka bishops, cardinals and popes, who rise through the ranks of that very Roman hierarchy on their ability to ram the Vatican party lines up the asses of the faithful. Party lines like convincing impoverished Africans that they will suffer eternal hellfire and damnation if they use any form of birth control to limit the size of their family to the two or three children they can feed, instead of humbly giving in to God's loving will that dictates they have thirteen children—six or eight of which will most certainly die from malnutrition and disease before they reach puberty! Unless one of the births kills the half-starving mother first—which of course, will be a manifestation of God's loving will and considered by Constantine's Imperial Abomination, an acceptable form of birth control!) Interestingly, John bequeathed me a book by Castaneda called The Power of Silence, which is not one of my "favorites" of his because it deals a lot less with silence than it does the manifestations of spiritual powers in a sorcerer's life.

But back to those snow-vermin: needless to say, I don't have John's energy, motivation, ingenuity or physical prowess to keep them off my land, so, to the detriment of its many deer and the odd hapless wolf or fox or coyote—and often my sleep—those drunken, verminous, Borg-assimilated snow-vermin morons now have free run of it! And of course, if you are enough of an old Trek fan, you will easily be able to see a direct correlation between those terrifying, in-your-face-to-assimilate-you Borg villains, and the infinitely more subtle and dangerous—and infinitely more hard to perceive and fight!—inorganic beings!

Anyways, after that unnecessary but interesting—to me, anyway!—revelation about John's moderate inability to tolerate unnecessary mechanical noise and absolute inability to tolerate snow-vermin, I'll get back to what he was saying about our corruption by, dependence on, and enslavement to, those inorganic beings through what we deludedly believe to be "our" machines. His favorite example of that corruptive and enslaving process was in the "invention" of the push-button phone to replace the rotary-dial phone. In his words, "No one thought it was all that difficult to dial a few numbers on a phone until they encountered, and got immediately spoiled by, the use of a push-button phone, which instantly made the dialing of the numbers a veritable 'labor of Heracles!' (Ha—now today, if most people had to push more than one button to make a phone call, they'd be blogging about the horrendous effort of it!) We are constantly getting very easily corrupted by, and dependent on, our lemming-hordes of ever-evolving technologies, without most of us ever stopping to look at, and fathom, the corrupting and enslaving implications of it."

But when I—technology-and-ease-loving-slob-that-I-am!—frantically countered that with, "But Uncle John—that's just normal technological advancement. It's completely logical and human for us to want our technologies to advance and make things easier and easier for us! There is nothing sinister—or even remotely alien—about it!" On my saying that, he laughed and said, "If you study your history you'll discover that the longest-lasting cultures were the ones that accepted the difficulties of life without constantly trying to makes things easier and more comfortable. Hell, the Romans in the time of their mighty Republic, neither feared hardship nor courted luxury or kings, and their Republic thrived for longer than our modern, industrial civilizations have been around. But then came their Empire, with its 'kings,' it's great wealth and concomitant love of material things and comforts, and it was all a very slippery slide down into the Dark Ages from there. . . . Though I am quite convinced there was some rightness to Gibbon's oft-questioned and contentious assertion that Constantine's insane empowerment of the Christians and creation of his Imperial Crutch had a lot to do with that!

"But notwithstanding the fact that there is nothing sinister about improvements in something as innocuous as the dialing of a telephone, an honest gander at the bigger picture tells a very different tale. Go to that really 'Big Shitty' (John's hatred for big cities was limitless!) down south and drive on its freeways during the morning and afternoon rush hours and tell me if you don't get the sense we have been invaded and enslaved by some very evil force! Especially if you look at the zombie-like faces and often unrestrained aggression of all those drivers enduring the traffic congestion and the almost unbreatheable smog of it. In fact, Pirsig goes on for a bit about this very subject in his Zen-motorcycle book—though a lot more intelligently than I am here. But even on a practical, physical level, I'll bet most miners working underground have better air to breath than rush-hour freeway drivers—and that's more than a little disturbing.

"And worse, if you are sensitive to the dark, despairing, exhausting, and life-negating psychic energies that hang over those freeways, you'd really fathom the extent of it. And if all that isn't bad enough, pretty much all of those "freeway zombies" are likely listening to rock and pop music on their radios, which in being created by amplified instruments, is basically machine-music, which means it is likely being inspired by the inorganic beings in order to facilitate their 'invasion' and subsequent enslavement of us!"

Interestingly, before his saying that, I'd always wondered about his extreme antipathy to modern rock music—not that most classical music aficionados find it easy to listen something as simplistic, usually overly loud, and often intentionally feed-back distorted and discordant—sensing that his loathing for it had some deeper genesis. I guess he saw it as just another—and very annoying—aspect of the machine/inorganic being-invasion going on around him in the modern world.

I had never spent much time on the freeways of that "Big Shitty" four hundred kilometers south of here that he was referring to, but I had been on the freeways of a much bigger and shittier, "Big Shitty," Los Angeles, where the traffic volume was horrendous and, given it was in those days before pollution-control devices on cars and trucks, the freeway smog often not only toxic and unbreatheable, but shockingly and filthily visible, so I couldn't gainsay what he was saying there. Interestingly, Don Henley captures that reality most succinctly in his song "Sunset Grill," by using the word auburn to describe the Los Angeles sky. I mean, auburn is a nice, poetic word and a great color for a woman's hair, but when the sky is that color you know you should be wearing a mask to breathe the air creating it—most desirably one connected to an oxygen tank!

And even as the very psychically insensitive me—especially back then!—I had felt that bad, energy-sucking psychic "vibe" he referred to, but had never thought about it much, just reacting to it by never feeling comfortable on those freeways and doing my best to avoid them.

John then really "made my day" when he said that if you look at the two world wars—which he said was really one war—like the Peloponnesian War in Ancient Greece—with a twenty-year hiatus in it to give the mothers of the warring nations a chance to re-birth a new crop of cannon-fodder that the idiot-Politicos and General-idiots could then reap in a new and bloody harvest—from a certain perspective, you can see it as something, at its root, instigated by those inorganic beings, which had by then pretty much totally become our invisible masters. And they did so in order to facilitate and accelerate their own evolution.

He said you don't have to leaf through many picture books on the BASS, Part 1, or watch very many documentaries of the BASS, Part 2 (World War II) to see that that both of them were, in their essence, wars of machines. Machines battling machines! With other, less lethal, machines—most particularly the railways—facilitating the battling machines! And with human beings not only being slaughtered by the millions as they operated those machines, but feeling compelled—by a need for even a slight advantage over the enemy's machines—to constantly push the evolution of their own machines so the slaughtering effects could increase exponentially.

And when I said I could see that for World War II, but not the "BASS" as he called it, mentioning my recollection of those pictures mostly showing hordes of soldiers trekking across no-man's-land, he grimly laughed and said those pictures don't even being tell the real story of what went on with the real slaughtering of the millions in that debacle, most of which was done by thousands of giant artillery guns and mortars situated well out of view of no-man's-land and fed by long, constantly running trains loaded with more tonnage of shells than is easily imaginable.

He said trekking across no-man's-land, even into the face of fierce machine gun fire—however much it has become the de rigueur depiction of the slaughtering horrors of that war—was usually a picnic compared with what an artillery barrage could do, especially as machine gun bullets just killed you dead, while those artillery rounds could vaporize you right out of all existence. He said, "It was one thing to watch my brothers-in-arms falling to bullets and quite another to have an artillery round land just a bit down-trench from me, knock me flat and cover me with mud and gore—maybe even temporarily deafen me—with its concussion, only afterwards to struggle—utterly discombobulated!—to my feet and after scraping enough of the mud off my face to again use my eyes, discover that ten men that were in the trench with me but seconds before were gone. But not just gone—they had utterly ceased to exist! As also ceased to exist a big chunk of that trench. KABOOM!—everything and everybody gone without a trace! And there were a damn lot of those KABOOMS!

"Though of course, not gone completely without a trace, because that mud you were busy wiping out of your eyes was inevitably full of their gory remains—blood and brains and intestines and bits of bone! And the saddest part is they were all gone without any one of us survivors ever getting the chance to yell a parting goodbye to those poor sods!"

And since, of course and most fortunately, I'd never experienced such a horror, I could not gainsay him on the subject! (Compared to horrific shit like that, a few years of daddy-diddling doesn't actually sound so bad. COMPARED!)

John said he'd read in several books on the subject, that World War II represented, in its five year duration, almost a thousand years of normal machine evolution, a fact easily borne out in that at its beginning, wood-and-fabric bi-planes were still in use in some theatres, and by its end, jet planes were in the air and V-1 ("doodlebugs") and sophisticated, ballistic V-2 rockets were raining destruction down on Britain.

And worse, by far, than those London-terrorizing machines (the 'V' he said, stood for 'Vengeance factor!') the ultimate of nefarious machines, the atomic bombs, were created and then maliciously deployed at the end of that war. He said the author of one of those books was certain, that without the pressing exigencies of that war, and the monstrous and concerted efforts and enormous costs needed to do so, those atomic bombs likely would never have been created.

John then talked about the fact that in the (then) forty years since that war, the German rocket technology that had rained such chaotic destruction on the British, in being pushed forward by Nazi engineers—many of them cynically and conveniently pardoned war criminals—eventually helped the Americans to build the rockets that constitute their kill-the-whole-world-a-thousand-times-over ballistic missile fleet—and of course, put men on the moon.

"And who can leave out," he sarcastically said, the rapid evolution of those the two crude atom bombs that had blasted the hell out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki into a hydrogen-bomb arsenal capable of blasting all organic life off this poor planet—especially when wedded to an ever-evolving array of ever more and more powerful ballistic rockets with ever more and more sophisticated computer-aided guidance systems!"

Fuck-a-mushroom cloud!—but what John was talking about there was what our "scientific experts" and "political pundits" called MAD: Mutual Assured Destruction, the totally insane and monstrous "angel of death" that Kennedy and Khrushchev conjured out of its evil realm and induced to keep brushing its gargantuan black wings over the whole of this terrified planet for two weeks in October of 1962. AND PEOPLE SAY THAT I'M INSANE!

I still remember that infernal Cuban Missile Crisis only too well, given that my father must have been real stressed out by it and was fucking me—and getting me to suck him off—way more often than usual during it. And what I remember most vividly, as those dark memories of it suddenly come flooding back, is that when I heard the news reports about it—and when it got talked about constantly at school—was that I wished both those Kennedy and Khrushchev morons would hurry up and push their respective "buttons" and end the world so I could be put out of my father's reach—and my own cavernous and constantly-aching misery!

And fuck-a-forest-of-mushroom-clouds!—even more memories of that dark time are crowding the razor-wired fence of my necessary forgetfulness of them, with too many crashing through and filling up my aging, drug-and-brain-lightening-addled head with their disturbing garbage. And one of those fence-crashing memories is of exactly why my father had such easy access to me during that period. I now remember my mother being absolutely totally freaked out by it. So much so, that she actually called her exalted uncle, Father Matthew, and asked him about how a devout Catholic could cope with what was happening.

As I remember it, Creep-shit Matthew told her that since Kennedy was a devout Catholic (yeah, right!—that hypocrite was as "devout" and randy as my father, with one big difference being that my father never got to fuck Marilyn Monroe, however much he might have fantasized doing so—when she was a little girl—while fucking me!) all Catholics should see this as God's testing of their faith, both in his earthly Church and in Him and his limitless wisdom and compassion, and in turn re-affirm and strengthen that faith by attending extra masses and saying extra prayers to Him so he would find it in His capacious heart to give both the "good Catholic Kennedy" and that "heathen Communist Khrushchev," the strength and wisdom to avert that world-destroying disaster. (I wonder what the name of the altar boy was who was likely sucking on that creepy lecher's "holy candlestick" while he filled my mother's empty, credulous head said that load of standard, Catholic dogma-shit?)

The upshot of that phone call and Father Matthew's advice was that my mother not only made plans to attend early mass every morning before work, but after morning mass the very next day, talked to our parish priest and convinced him to keep the church open late every night and form a prayer vigil that concerned and pious Catholics could attend in order to pray to God to give that the good Catholic Kennedy the strength and wisdom not to blow our planet out of the solar system.

That idiot priest thought that was a great idea and did exactly as she suggested, and almost every evening and late into the night, she was at the church, on her knees, praying her empty head off to her "good and almighty God" so he would deign to induce the "good Catholic Kennedy" and that "heathen Communist Khrushchev" not to blow the world to smithereens. (Speaking of "blowing," I spent a lot of those evenings on my knees too, but I sure as fuck wasn't praying!)

And to this day, my mother still believes that the Cuban Missile Crisis was peacefully resolved because of all the devout Catholics who spent extra time praying to God to give Kennedy and Khrushchev the strength and wisdom not to blast all the organic life off this planet—and irradiate it so badly no organic life would again thrive on it for thousands of years! And who the fuck am I to gainsay her!

Though to be sure, when I once told that story to John and asked him for his take on it, he just laughed a sarcastic laugh and said, "If that good, wise, and loving God that your mother was praying to actually existed as she and the rest of the Pope's credulous sheep-flocks envisioned him, there would have been no Cuban Missile Crisis because humanity would not have been allowed to invent atomic bombs in the first place. I mean, what kind of God is that who claims to care about his "human children" the way it is said he does, then he allows them to build weapons with the power to destroy the very world they live on! That's like parents giving their children live grenades to play with on the assumption that the fact that they can blow themselves to bits with their 'toys' makes their play more interesting! It makes no sense to me at all. . . . Not that anything about Constantine's Imperial Abomination makes any sense to me beyond its limitless greeds for wealth and power—and its ability to abuse that power once it gets it!"

But back to John pontificating on his absurd theory that the inorganic beings used—or most likely instigated!—World War Two in order to vastly accelerate the evolution of the machines they love to "incarnate" into. When I asked him not to talk about that "real scary shit!"—remember, we were having that conversation in the 80's when the Cold War was still constantly in the news, was still fodder for Le Carré's great spy novels and Sting's song, "Russians" (with its poignant line, "Russians love their children too") and most of the world lived in the frigid blizzard of fear that a world-ending nuclear catastrophe was imminent—because he was scaring the hell out of me, he laughed and said, "Okay, Rachel Ostrich, we'll ignore that rumbling Vesuvius until it erupts and buries us in radioactive debris, and for now just focus on an aspect of that 'machine invasion' that you won't find so distressing—the rapid technological evolution of automobiles and trucks over the last fifty years.

"Not only," he pseudo-pompously pontificated. "Are cars getting better and more sophisticated, but relatively cheaper and cheaper, so more and more people can afford them. And look how the yearly model changes are like the push-button telephone thing—each year a new model comes out with its new look and better and more gizmos—like electric windows and heated seats!—and makes the one you presently own seem like a heap of junk even if it still has a lot of good, serviceable years left in it. So don't tell me you can't see something akin machine-evolution going on even at this innocuous, domestic level!"

John—unlike my father, who, as already mentioned, was always a sucker for the "new look" and the latest gizmos and needed my mother's iron will and threat of a cast iron skillet over the head to keep him from buying a new Cadillac every year—kept the few vehicles that he owned during the years I was in his life, running year after year and only got a new one when, like some old dog, the current one that he was "babying" its last few miles out of before having to be reluctantly "put down" due to extreme old age.

"Put down" and grieved over!—which brought me face-to-face with an interesting conundrum he was quite comfortable living with, that being that he often came out and said, and demonstrated in his treatment of them, that he loved machines and would—me excepted!—take the company of an inorganic being over a human being any day, (for their absence of ego and love of human attention) but he had no illusions about the dark side of their general intent and collective presence here.

And when I once brought that contradiction to him, he just laughed and said, "Don't you have individual human beings you like—or love, even—yet can still look at the whole human race in general as something less than intelligent, less than good, and certainly less than salubrious for this planet? (If there was one irritating thing about Uncle John, it was that he had a damn good answer to just about any question I could throw at him. And when I once brought that to his attention, he just laughed and said, "Me?—have an answer to everything? Not by a long-shot! I am as dull as under-bed dust and as dumb as a mound of manure, but I have a very smart and wise . . . Being . . . hanging around me who is more than willing to thought-whisper those answers into my head. And all I have to do to give the illusion of being smart and knowledgeable is pass on—unhindered and unaltered!—the stuff which that Being deigns to thought-whisper into the Carlsberg Cavern between my ears. No great achievement to that!")

Fuck-an-inorganic being! (Well, I guess that's what I'm doing when I kill the batteries in my vibrator, isn't it!)—but you are just not going to fucking believe this! (And just as likely not care!) While I was typing out the above I noticed the time had reached the hour, and turned on the radio to the national public station to catch the news and weather. At the end of it, as I was reaching for the dial to turn it off, the announcer commented that the following program was going to be an hour-long repeat-broadcast of an interview with one of my favorite old hipster-rockers, Neil Young, (which was originally broadcast to coincide with his then-recent publication of the second volume) of his auto-biography, called Special Deluxe: A Memoir of Life and Cars. (I own the first volume of his autobiography, Waging Heavy Peace, and it is the most delightful bit of chaotic writing I have ever read, it being close to, but not quite on chaotic-par with, the scriptorial chaos of this "Preface!")

Well, what choice did I have but roll and toke an extra big joint then sit and listen to Neil wax eloquent about cars and life, and especially the many he owned and loved, and most particularly that famous hearse of his—that he affectionately named Mort!—that got immortalized in his hit song, "Long May You Run." Now, to my rational, Scully-reductive mind, that is just a coincidence of no real-world/consensus-reality importance, but if I was to zip back a bit in time and across the Atlantic to Switzerland so I could be sitting in Jupiter Jung's consulting office talking about it, he'd pompously call it a "significant synchronicity" (being as old, fat and ugly as I now am, I'd not have to feel uncomfortably worried about him wanting to "get into my pants" and make me one of his moons—though from what I know about moons, they are supposed to be smaller than their host planet!). And if John was here, he'd call it an omen—but hardly a very important one.

Regardless of that beyond-the-pale-of-consensus-reality shit, it was a damned interesting interview. Or at least, in me both presently stoned while having been a former-hippie and ol' Neil still being as hip—if not stoned!—as he ever was, it was to me! (He claimed in Waging Heavy Peace that he'd "gone off the grass," but how long he stayed "on the sidewalk," I don't know.)So much so that I Amazoned that book and am looking forward to its arrival at my post office box in a couple of days.

### Chapter Twenty Eight

(One, Neil Young-delayed hour later.)

In a nutshell, John's general argument—about those putative inorganic beings—was one that, in many ways, was hard to gainsay, in that those "invaders," (I wonder what car-lover Neil's honest take on John's "far out" theory about those invading inorganic beings "incarnating" into his beloved cars would be?) through their accelerated evolution spurred by both the exigent demands of the wars and the greeds of the robber barons (not that the two don't go together like death-and-decay) during and after the Industrial Revolution, then into hyper-evolution by the two world wars, then into the superhyper-evolution now taking place as the two new, Super-Horsemen that are herding the other Four Horsemen in front of them, the out-of-control uber-greed of our modern global corporations that feed off the Internet and the technologies that access it, and our rampant and uber-addictive consumerism that keeps feeding those ever-growing global monsters.

Fuck-a-truck-load-of-cell-phones!—John thought things were bad in those days, but he had no idea of what was on the horizon when those supra-greedy technology-mongering corporations got access to all that cheap—basically slave labor—provided by Mexico, China and India, and we got uber-seduced by, and beyond-uber-addicted, to their rapidly evolving technologies.

And Christ!—if you can't quite fathom the level of our dependence of modern technology, just look at the havoc a power-failure of just a few hours can wreak on a big city. Or worse, like a couple of years ago when that ice-storm knocked it out for days! John, with his wood-burning stove, full pantry and cold-cellar, and supply of kerosene lanterns, had no fear of such things, but I've modernized this place to the point where if there was a two or three day, ice-storm induced power-failure followed by minus 35 temperatures, I'd be fucked! Well, hardly something as delightful as that! More like just plain fuckin' frozen! Though of course, maybe all this whale blubber I'm lugging around might finally come in useful and save my life.

Though, bad as that can be, as John more than once said in varying arrangements of words, "Our infantile dependence on all these modern technologies (which, as just said, sure were not then what they are today!) is not the worst aspect of it, with that worst aspect being that we, in being so seduced and corrupted by the technologies, are cretinously willing, while using those technologies, to degrade our beautiful, living, organic planet in such a rapid and disastrous way that it won't be long before the only thing that will be able to 'naturally' exist on it will be machines!

"For us, the now-indentured servants of those inorganic beings and their ubiquitous occupation of this world as machines and technologies, there is only a future of too much physical comfort and ease coupled with an horrendously bleak, spiritual misery made just-barely tolerable by easy access to our desperate addictions! And there sure is no shortage of them—be they a corral full of inorganic being-inspired, machine-manufactured drugs and technological contraptions, especially television, or the old standbys of alcohol . . . which, though it is an organic creation, is only available on the scale it is because of machines! . . . pornography, junk food, shopping, and what the hell all people now do to distract themselves from the fact that they are alive in a life that they fundamentally hate—however easy and comfortable it might be!

Or perhaps just because it is too easy and comfortable and bereft of the challenges and discomforts that make it humanly meaningful!"(And if John were alive today—bless that thought!—he'd have to included in that list of inorganic being-inspired and machine-manufactured "contraptions," not just this world's biggest technology, the Internet, but all those serious addictions facilitated by it, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc., and of course, smart phones—and all the as-of-yet unimaginable and uninvented iGizmos that those putative, uber-busy inorganic beings will manifest into existence and induce to become globally popular in the months between me writing this and anyone reading it!

Of course, being a Trekkie who is more than a little familiar with that already mentioned, ne plus ultra of villains, the Borg, I couldn't help but see what he was describing—which to him was an irrefutable truth few wanted to face—as a very subtle but hard-to-miss form of Borg-assimilation. And since this assimilation was being done so subtly, without the obvious and nasty methods used by the fictional Borg with their vampirish modus operandi of forcibly piercing a victim's neck with the equivalent of metal, vampire-fangs and injecting nanoprobes—well, I guess that makes them more like half-machine vipers than vampires, doesn't it?—that forthwith turned them into utterly mindless, half-human/ half-machine drones collectively serving an uber-telepathic Queen with an agenda of the total assimilation of every organic race in the Universe, it was something very difficult to fight against.

Whenever John talked about this putative, improbable and disturbing shit, he must have had the power very dramatically move my "assemblage point" so that I would be very effectively sucked right into his imaginative vision of it, because as he spoke about it, everything he was saying sure seemed frighteningly real! And during those "assemblage point-moved" conversations, it was patently obvious to me we were virtually becoming mindless slaves—Borg-like drones—to the massive collective will of those inorganic beings and their incarnated-presences in our beloved machines! And though I knew from experience that when one of those particular "discussions" (more like just real interesting pontifications on his part!) was over, and I'd been back in my own reality for a few hours, the seeming powerful reality of all that frightening nonsense would slowly dissipate—like the memory of some Sci-Fi movie I'd watched and enjoyed but sure a fuck didn't take as real!—and my "reality" would go back to "normal." Or almost normal.

But when those "pontifications" of his were in full voice, it all did seem only too damn real, and never having the courage to face such a too-damn-disturbing reality, as he "pontificated" on, I would do my effortful best to turn those crazy-ideas and the shit-crazy worldview they represented, into a kind of fairytale/Star Trek/ Borg-episode that was interesting to listen to but sure as fuck was not was not real enough to be existentially dangerous.

And even now, when my "assemblage point" has long been firmly lodged back to its safe, more or less rational, (on this matter!) Scully-location on this issue, sometimes when I think of his vision of our modern techno-world as a de facto invasion/assimilation by a race of inorganic alien beings, (which gets affirmed for me when I'm in town and observe kids—and teens and adults!—walking along the streets so absorbed in staring down at their iPhones they could get run over by a car (and actually often do!) or mugged—or get Trek-teleported to the moon!—and would barely notice the fact! And when I see insane shit like that, I get momentary glimpses of John being absolutely right about those inorganic beings and their machine invasion. I guess in a way it's like one of those optical illusions that artists create, like that old hag/young woman one (it is quite famous and easy to find on the Web) where if you look at it one way, it's an old woman, and if something in your brain shifts a bit, you see it as a quite different picture of a young woman. And if you mentally play with it a bit, you can very eerily get it to shift back and forth with very little effort, the effect driving home Castaneda's—and Kant's!—assertion that what we call reality is a perception, is a construct of our brain, and not any fixed absolute that is objectively out there. (Fuck, I must be in a real, nagual-inspired state to write shit like that because I so do not fucking understand it!)

So it is with this scary shit—once in awhile my brain slips out of its normal safe and "rational" young woman-groove and into the old hag-groove for a scary few minutes I really do see it through the eyes of John's ridiculous theory and it becomes absolutely obvious we have been enslaved and invaded by an alien race of very inorganic beings that is turning this planet into a machine heaven and a human hell. But then my brain shifts back into its comfortable rut—the young woman-groove—and that view once again becomes utter paranoid nonsense, and the whole techno-world—with its obvious dark, but fixable, down-side—is all just something we, as human beings, have invented and are constantly improving so it serves to improve and advance our lives for us. And that long before it totally "enslaves" and destroys us, we will use our rational wisdom to stop the process. (Alas, I can suddenly hear a way-too-vividly-envisioned John let out a rollicking belly-laugh, slap his thigh, and say, "Yeah, sure, Rache—can you just see people en masse, willingly throwing away their iPhones? Or staying off their social media sites? Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!")

Of course, there have always been Luddites and similar technology-adverse groups as the Amish, who can only see the dark side of our techno-word and both decry and eschew it, but they are only a inconsequential minority, and this new generation that is growing up with all this ubiquitous iShit—I've seen ads for baby-walkers with iDevice holders built into them (no fucking baby left unassimilated, I guess)—and if that doesn't scare you, you truly have been assimilated and you are now manifesting a worldview dominated by all three of those infamous monkeys living up at the headwaters of that famous Egyptian river!

Needless to say, I continue to flip back and forth with the old hag/young woman picture of that vision of modern reality that John ice-bucketed over my head and down my back, not only that day but many others, but given how much and how fast things have technologically evolved over the years since his death, I am starting to more and more see the dark, old-hag, human-enslavement-to-a-race-of-inorganic-Borg-assimilators side of it a lot more often—and a lot more clearly!—than I want to. I mean, shit!—look at how the Internet has turned into a giant, global techno-mind and virtually changed/enslaved this world as it has taken over our lives, the facilitated recruitment opportunities for terror groups and their acts of terror, with the most nefarious act of terror being its Russia-facilitated installment of Mad King Donald on the thrice-gilded throne of that Kingdom of Cloud Cuckooland, formerly known as Republic of the United States and birthplace of that utterly Cloud Cuckooland notion of the American Dream!

And forget about John's quaint—and utterly incomprehensible-to-any-modern-young-reader!—rotary-pushbutton phone analogy, replaced now with the ubiquitous and uber-evolving cell phone craze. It is said more cell phones have been sold than there now exist people on this planet, which is no surprise since they go obsolete faster than a roll of toilet paper in a one-bathroom army barracks, and most people end up buying a new one almost as often as packages of super-soft ass-wipe.

Hell, Apple with its iPhones—that I think I read somewhere have more computing power than the computers NASA used to put the men on the moon—has us conned into believing we have to constantly line up, and shell out fists full of dollars for their latest edition of their magical little iGizmos that that we actually need as badly as "we need a second nose located two inches north of our arseholes!"(that's one of John's apt and earthy metaphors) but which we have been conned into believing we need as badly as the one on our face.

I have an iPhone 4 which does about a 100 times more than I need it for, (or am capable of figuring out what it can do!) and when it was superseded by the 5 model, I thought it was almost a sick, manipulative, suck-your-money-out-of-your-wallet-and-your-mind-out-of-your-head ploy by Apple, especially since the 5 needed a different charging system, but now people are mindlessly lining up by the millions to shell out their thousands to buy . . . no longer the 6, or the 6s . . . or the already obsolete, 7—but the XS Max, which costs over a thousand smackeroos!

That massive global assimilator, Apple, which puts out new versions of its iAssimilation devices more often than I fart after a plate of bean tacos, likely touts—toots? (LOL)—it as being so incredibly advanced and improved over that "obsolete slouch" of a 7" that it will give prospective, "Borg-drone" buyers multiple orgasms just pondering the fact that they own one! I cannot even remotely imagine anyone having a human need for one beyond the ego-trip of saying you have one. (Although I guess there's lots of mindless fools out there who just love being assimilated—and the deeper and more totally the better!)

Oh fucking goddamn hell!—I'm listening to the radio as I write this and the newscaster has just exploded the atomic bomb in my soul that Aretha has died. Christ!—I had heard a few days ago that she was ailing, but she's had a lot of health problems of late and I'd figured she'd pull through this one just like the others. Fuck!—obviously not! Shit!—I'm crying so hard I'm going to have to stop writing for a bit . . . . . . . . .

Well, that was more than a bit! I ended up assuaging my grief (it's times like this that I miss being on the Meds Rez where, in feeling like a light bulb screwed into a dead duck's ass, I'm pretty much numb to news like that!) with two bottles of distilled Russian potato water and half a bale of marijuana and it is now two days later and I am still feeling a little fucked up from those grievous excesses! (Ya, Dear Reader, I fuckin' know—that was a real bad pun!) Well, needless to say, however much I imbibed and toked and toked and imbibed—ad infinitum, it seems!—in order not to think and feel, I ended up, during that debauched debacle, doing a lot of both, with one long run of thoughts rummaging through John's crazy ideas about avatars, and I could but come to the conclusion that Aretha had obviously been one of John's putative avatars. Everything about her had been so goddamn obviously larger than life—and I don't mean her later-in-life physical size, which so much resembled my own, now-in-life physical size, except she was taller!—but her spiritual size. And that angelic voice of hers! That voice that so effortlessly soared out of her throat like a giant, glowing eagle soaring out of its aerie and was always so obviously Aretha!

As John would surely say, no one who could stand out from the teeming hordes (herds?) of humanity the way she so effortlessly did, could in any way be considered a normal human being. She obviously could only have been an avatar—like that other Afro-American giant of modern world history, Muhammad Ali who died . . . when exactly was that? . . . I better Google it . . . Yeah, he died just two summers ago. . . . And fucking hell!—I can't fucking believe this! I'm switching back and forth from Wiki's bios on both Ali and Aretha and I see that Ali was born in January of 1942 and Aretha in March of that same year! Two middle-of-the-war Afro-American avatars born but weeks apart in the same year into humble families in one of this planet's most socially and spiritually retarded nations which could only, in its social and spiritual retardation, treat them as second (and third and fourth) class citizens while intentionally—even legally—limiting their rights and their opportunities for the ne plus ultra of the American Dream, upward mobility!—but who, on the uniqueness and power of their respective avatar personalities, talents and efforts, rose to pinnacles of world fame that few ever achieve!

Fuck-a-box-of-fortune-cookies!—it's enough to make even me believe in avatars! And synchronicities—especially since both died but weeks apart in the order they were born—albeit in different years.(It's obvious—to crazy ol' me, anyway!—that those two avatars incarnated just in time to help their fellow Afro-Americans join that other obvious-avatar, Martin Luther King Jr., in their gargantuan struggle for at least a semblance of equality in that socially and spiritually retarded nation of Cloud Cuckooland they were born into, and one can only hope that some new avatars have incarnated to take up the torches passed by those three, especially now that that little bit of a "semblance" of equality is being so intentionally degraded and jeopardized by the pro-active bigotry, overt racism and sanctified malice of the reigning regent of Cloud Cuckooland, Mad King Donald!

But back to . . . whatever the fuck I was letting my fat fingers babble on about on this keyboard . . . Oh yeah, more nonsensical shit about the Invasion of the Inorganics . . . . well, I can't say I can remember what I was going to say two stoned-and-drunken-and-grieving days ago, so I will start anew with a sudden memory that just popped into my "substance"-ravaged head about a book that John gave me to read and which disturbed the hell of me. It was Lyall Watson's The Nature of Things: The Secret Life of Inanimate Objects. Watson was a bona fide scientist-priest in the Global Religion of Materialist Science, and though that book was anything but scientific, it was full of ideas and anecdotes so disturbing—especially with regards to how "alive" cars can be!—that if one tenth of those anecdotes were true, that's still ten times too many for left-brained me!

And Watson wrote it in the late 80's and well before the Web and iGizmo explosions, and I sure have to wonder what he'd have to say—and what strange stories to relate—about those iBorg devices if he were still alive and bothering to collect data on them! (Beside the fact the over-use of them causes brain cancer . . .but given how utterly brainless we are about this stuff, I doubt that it can be considered a serious disease anymore. Especially since I am sure that a decade or so from now removing a cancerous brain and replacing it with an iGizmo will be as common an operation as face-lifts and boob-enhancements in Hollywood.)

And I doubt anyone can gainsay me on the assertion that almost the whole world is utterly addicted to using those infernal things, young kids especially. The malls on a weekend are full of kids of all ages either talking, texting, surfing the Web, or playing games on the damn things. I've seen parents take their kids into McDonalds for a family meal and spend most of their time staring down at, and fiddling with, their phones, totally ignoring the poor kids completely. (And the food they're absentmindedly shoveling into their mouths. Fuck-an-Unhappy-Meal!—it could be patties of re-fried dog shit sandwiched between two slabs of piss-soaked drywall recycled from a public washroom in a Greyhound bus depot and they'd not even notice!)

I've heard on various radio programs that adults and kids both are actually addicted to their phones in a big way and that kids can experience serious withdrawal symptoms if they are deprived of them cold turkey. Parents have to wean them off them if they are going on a holiday or some such thing. And they say I'm fucking insane! I mean, fuck-a-cell-tower!—just how fuckin' brain-washed—or just plain Borg-assimilated—are we are going to allow us to be by all this techno-shit? I mean, think of it—for their own, and society's benefit, we attempt to keep kids away from alcohol and drugs and Internet porn as much as we can, yet parents are throwing these damn iBorg/iGizmos at them—even when just barely toddlers!—like they are harmless toys! Can't you just see the latest Apple ad: ON SALE—the latest, most up-to-date, iInfant! It is not only a fully functional iPhone, but is 100% shock-proof, 100% pureed-peas resistant, and 100% saliva-resistant, thus making it not only a great first-phone for your precious child, but an excellent toothing-toy!

And on top of that, all parents are not only too willing to buy these iBorg devices, but just as willing to pay for their phone and Internet plans. (No child left unassimilated!)

### And they say I'm fucking insane!

Fuck!—I listened to another program on this subject on the radio the other day—I'm listening to more radio than I usually do while writing this shit, and am discovering there's no end of concern about the problem!—where some head-mechanic expert pontificated about the fact that there now exists such a phenomenon as the pre-Internet brain and the post-Internet brain, and that the young kids growing up in this modern, uber-Internet era are so "assimilated," so hard-wired to the Internet at the deepest level of their brain, they believe the Internet is reality. Christallfuckinmighty!—if that priest-with-a-functioning-brain, Teillard de Chardin called the thought-field around this planet the noosphere, then the field created by the Web should be called the nullsphere! A huge void of utter mindlessness! An envelope of pure, amped-up mental static surrounding this poor planet!

Though I guess, from another Web-addiction that I've been hearing about on those radio programs—government subsidized public radio, obviously!—perhaps it could just as well be called the pornosphere! Though hell—mindlessness and fantasy are about all we really respond to in this modern techno-world anyway, given that countless millions of North American are as addicted to their TVs and soap-operas as are too many kids—and just as too-many adults!—to their iGizmos and the Web, and it would seem that both demographics tend to believe what they were indulging in is a slice of reality! (Which is why Mad King Donald is so popular with his Doofus-Base of MAGA-hatters: they truly believe he is the character he played on The Apprentice, and that he will surely run their Kingdom of Cloud Cuckooland as efficiently as he "ran" that inane show!)

Of course, now we have all kinds of popular "reality" TV shows that are about as close to being reality as Tang is to being fresh-squeezed orange juice, and millions upon millions of TV-addicts with minds as empty as empty Tang packets relate to the situations in them like they really are real. D'oh! And how can I leave out NFL football, the addiction-of-choice for so many North Americans who actually think that those games are events that are truly important and consequential—and not just mindless entertainment!—and that their favorite football "heroes" are somehow real heroes on par with war heroes and heroic firefighters and cops and the person who jumps into a raging river to rescue a stranger, and not just exorbitantly paid entertainers. (I wonder how many fans of Tom Brady realize he is just another entertainer no more important in the grand scheme of things than a Justin Bieber? Or a Michael Jackson! Or a Liberace!)

Ha! I suddenly feel the earthy, John-like inspiration invade my head—Hey, is that you, Uncle John?—to the effect that the next "generation" of iPhone (like us human beings, these iBorg-gizmos "procreate" in "generational" leaps!—is going to have a roll of special toilet paper incorporated into it so you don't have to take your eyes off it when you wipe your ass after taking a dump. Or maybe the XS Max already has that very necessary feature! (And have I mentioned yet that when I have been off the Meds Rez for too long I tend to get really gross!) Though all of that will be moot with the iPhone 8 or 9 which will be some kind of molecular chip implanted in our brain so we can truly become Borg-assimilated—not that we will think of it in those dark, enslaving terms because we, as a collective, modern species, will collectively have the null-intelligence of MAGA-hatters and refuse to face the fact we are in the process of being assimilated. (Just like all MAGA-hatters refuse to face the fact they are being totally conned by that uber-con artist, Mad King Donald! . . . Who is so endemically—and proudly!—corrupt and mendacious he makes "Tricky Dick" look like Abe Lincoln!) In fact, we cannot imagine we are basically becoming "Borg-assimilated" because so many today have been so totally—and fucking willingly!—assimilated they have reached the point where they cannot imagine any other way of being. And of course, at that level of assimilation. the last thought that could ever enter their totally assimilated head would be that they could ever be disconnected from "the Hive" for even a few seconds!

When I start forcing myself to fathom all of that and how fast it is all evolving, I can't shake that old-hag version of that "optical illusion" and I truly fear John was right, and we have been invaded by a terribly powerful and cunning race of alien beings who inhabit our machines and technologies and are not only sucking our humanity right out of us, but at the same time sucking all the organic life out of this planet, which too soon will become their comfortable home and our intolerable nightmare as we live out our fates as their mindless and indentured servants made conveniently docile and accepting by a smorgasbord of cheap, easy to acquire addictions—all of which will be readily supplied—and machine-manufactured!—of course, by our uber-greedy and uber-profitable modern corporations!

Fuckin' hell!—but am starting to believe that someday this beautiful, living, organic Earth will end up like Coruscant in Star Wars, just one great big fuckin' planetary city! (Or, in John-speak: one big "Global Shitty!") Even the oceans and lakes and rivers will be completely covered over with massive, interlocking barges and solar panels so there will be no more clouds and rain and interminable sunshine will bathe this planet and power those solar panels. Not that that will concern the "human beings" cursed to inhabit this uber-techno gulag, since they will live the whole of their lives indoors. All memories of blue skies and white fluffy clouds and long languid summer afternoons and green forests and sun-dappled meadows and fertile fields and rivers and soft breezes—containing fresh air!—and bird song and the flight of a high soaring hawk and wave-crashing ocean beaches will vanish utterly from their techno-lobotomized minds. Their food, of course, will by then have long before been reduced to artificially flavored and vitaminized synthetic concoctions—like replicated food in Star Trek—manufactured in massive factories by robots—or robotic "human beings!"—and sold at exorbitant prices. Or it will be soylent green! (If you are too young to know what soylent green is, take advantage of the fact of your almost-total assimilation and Google it on your iGizmo!)

Of course, if by some glitch in their AP (Assimilation Programming) these future, pathetic "human" techno-slaves get a stray and strange, thought—or urge—to see a tree or a patch of grass—or an expanse of blue sky and surf-pounding ocean!—and are insane enough to express that desire aloud to anyone, they'll be forthwith frog-marched into a street-corner Shrink Shop for a necessary re-tech—a simple, painless procedure guaranteed to ensure that their brain never again manifests such atavistic and socially disruptive thoughts and urges.

Fuck!—come on, brain, switch off this depressing old fuckin' hag vision of reality and give me back my comforting young woman one! (Where's a convenient goddamn Shrink Shop and some quickie, re-tech therapy when you fucking need one!)

By the end that disturbing conversation that day (that day in John's kitchen when he really "introduced" me to the inorganic beings!) I was so distressed I sarcastically asked him why those so-called higher spirits he believed existed would allow something as horrible as that to happen to us. His answer to that, which was immediate and matter-of-fact, was the most frightening part of our whole conversation. He said he'd asked that question of those higher spirits more than a few times and for the longest time he didn't even get a hint of an answer. Then when day, after he'd pretty much given up on getting an answer to it, and forgotten the issue, he was browsing in a used book store in our nearby "Shitty"—I'd been to that store with him several times and it's probably one of the best used-book stores in the country!—when a book fell off a shelf behind him and hit the floor with a thunk that really caught his attention because he knew he was absolutely alone in that isle. He said he's had one of Koestler's "library angels" intuitively point out important books to him before but never by anything so dramatic as knocking them to the floor, so he turned and picked this one up with a great deal of interest.

On first picking it up and reading its title, he said, he couldn't fathom why the "library angel" would be pointing it out, because nothing about the title or the unfamiliar author's name seemed related to that bone he'd been chewing on for weeks concerning the possibility that his vision of our machine-dominated world being an actual invasion by inorganic beings. (He, like me, had that old hag/young woman relationship with the idea, though I think he leaned as heavily toward the old hag as I did to the young woman!)

The book that the "library angel" had "pushed off" the shelf, was Worlds in Collision by Immanuel Velikovsky, and though little in the synopsis on the back cover stimulated his interest in it, the book seemed to vibrate in his hand and almost scream at him to buy it. He figured since it only cost a couple of bucks, he'd buy it, and if it was a complete dud, he could get a bit of value out of it burning his stove. So he took it home, and though he'd felt a great compulsion to buy it, once he got it home he felt no pressing desire to read it. In fact, he said he felt like he was definitely not supposed to read it at that time.

He said he was more than familiar with the reality that his reading of certain books—or even specific passages in them—had to have an apropos timing to them. He followed that by saying that more than once he'd suddenly lost interest in reading a particular book, had quit reading it and set it aside, then months later, on getting a sudden compulsion to resume reading it, he would discover that the timing to do so was exactly right to enlighten or deepen stuff he'd subsequently read, or fit in exactly with problems and ideas he was currently wrestling with. Thus he didn't think there was anything unusual in having the "library angel" push Worlds in Collision off that shelf to attract his attention to it, then on buying it, discover it wasn't yet time to read it.

So he bought it and forgot it, until one night when he'd had one of the most disturbing nightmares he'd ever had in his life. (If you eventually read The Fire, you will discover his war experiences and subsequent (never diagnosed, but obvious) PTSD gave him no shortage of nightmares.) Except this nightmare, he said, "Started out as just an ordinary dream in which I was out working in my garden one evening and I happened to look up at the lowering sun and noticed it was just about to reach the tops of the pine trees on a distant hill. This told me I still had lots of time to work so I went back to whatever I was doing in the garden and did it for a good long while. At some point I had the feeling that something wasn't quite right, particularly in the fact that after that much passage of time, the sun should have sunk behind the hill and that the dusk should have been rapidly deepening and the day cooling off. Except it was still bright and sunny and warm in that garden. So I again looked in the direction of the sun and there it was, still hovering just above those pine trees, which was definitely not right. So I stood there staring at the sun and waiting for it to drop behind the trees as it was supposed to. . . . I mean, if you've ever watched the sun go down you know quickly it actually moves across the sky.

"Except it wasn't moving! It just stayed right there—right above those trees. Stayed there . . . . . and stayed there . . . and stayed there. After watching it for a good long while I abruptly dream-realized that something was wrong with the sun not going down as it was supposed to, and on making that realization, the total "feel" of the dream instantly changed and instead of the pleasant feeling I always had working in my garden, or gazing at the lowering sun, I now felt like I was being boiled, first in a powerful and caustic sense of dread, then in a feeling of absolute ball-shriveling terror, (John didn't usually talk crudely around me—sure not the way I often talked crudely around him—but he was really caught up in the telling of this dream and hardly seemed to notice who he was talking to) especially as while staring at the immobile sun, I felt the ground start shaking so violently I could barely keep my balance. But the worst wasn't the shaking ground, but the ball-shriveling sense of dread and terror that filled that dream and which I can describe as making me feel like a frog that's just hopped into a bucket of battery acid!

"I abruptly woke up at this point so drenched in sweat that I'd soaked the hell out of my mattress so bad that I had to haul it outside in the sun so it could dry out. But though I'd woken up in that sweat-soaked bed, the feelings of dread and terror still seemed to cling to me like crude oil to a hapless sea bird,, and just as bad was the lingering sight of that unsetting sun, which seemed to be so vividly scorched into my mind that all memory of it felt, not like a memory, but like I was still right back in that nightmare. Right back in it, feeling that dread, feeling that terror, and feeling the ground shake."

At this point I was really starting to freak out because John was looking deathly pale as he spoke and his words seemed like they were transmitting that dream vision directly into my head—I seemed to be seeing what he was describing with a vividness and clarity that was way out of normal for me. And feeling his dread and terror! And to make matters worse, as I was observing him turn that very definite and disturbing, "whiter shade of pale" he went on, "Even after all the years that have passed since experiencing that nightmare, any thoughts about seems to drag me right back into it! Like it happened just last night!"

John then went on to say he had been very puzzled by that nightmare and thought about constantly for days, totally confounded by what it might mean, since he'd never heard of any such thing happening before. Though here he stopped and managed a grim grin as he said, "Well, I had, actually—in the Book of Joshua in the Bible, but I'd find it easier to take a Superman comic as "gospel truth" than that panegyric those ancient Hebrews wrote to themselves as "Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy's Chosen," and which Freud dismissed as a bunch of badly regurgitated Sumerian and Babylonian myths!"

John then said that he didn't have to stay confounded for very long because one evening, while reading another book, he suddenly felt his interest in that book vanishing, replaced by a powerful sense of dissatisfaction and restlessness. He forced himself to read a few more pages of whatever book he had been reading, then suddenly just knew he had to go to his bookshelves to look for a more appropriate book. As he put it, "I didn't so much wander over to my bookshelves as felt pulled to a particular section like a hooked fish being pulled to a boat. As fast as I got to where I sensed I had to be, that book by Velikovsky caught my attention so keenly I instantly knew that it was the book the "library angel" had drawn me over to pick out and that it was finally time to read it. Which is what I proceeded to do, and was very quickly totally astounded by what I was reading in it, with two main things about it filling my head!

"The first one was Velikovsky's contention that Venus was—and not all that many millennia ago!—a comet ejected from Jupiter which roamed erratically through our solar system, wreaking all kinds of havoc along the very disturbing lines of knocking many of the other planets out of their normal orbits so they were doing things nobody on Earth sure wanted them to be doing! Interestingly, Velikovsky was certain that the Greek myth of Athena erupting—fully armed and ready for battle!—from the head of Zeus, was an imaginative depiction of that utterly unimaginable event.

(Fuck-a-honey-wagon!—but you're not going to believe this! Truly not! I finished writing the above yesterday, and this morning, while sucking up my first cuppa Joe in an effort to kick-start my noggin full of neurons that felt like they were encased in January-molasses, I turned on the radio to catch the top-o-the-hour news in order make myself feel better about how shitty I was feeling by hearing about all the really bad shit happening to other people all over the world, and caught the tail end of some program with that "tail" being a short interview with Brian May, the lead guitarist with the now—alas and alak!—Mercury-free, uber-rock band, Queen, who, if you can believe this, is also an Astro-fucking-Physicist with a PhD in that truly lofty discipline, (yeah, I know—real bad pun!) talking about just how much of a threat no small number of Earth-crossing asteroids pose to this Earth because they are just itching to someday pay us an up-close-and-personal visit. And that we are not spending enough money tracking those little shits that, small as they are up in space, when they knock on our door with the speeds they are traveling at, they do so with a big, loud BANG! A bang .that can not only knock the door off its hinges, but a whole city off its sewers—or a country off its political Porta Potty! Shit, this is a big enough concern for this planet—and us mindless "viruses" infesting it!—that June 30th of every year has been set aside as Asteroid Awareness Day. Ha!—like us being aware of those fucking pesky little shits is going to send them knocking on Venus's or Mar's door and not ours! Needless to say, this news does not "make my fucking day!")

"And the second one being the incredibly intelligent and exhaustive scholarship Velikovsky had conducted before writing his Worlds In Collision book, and which he assiduously annotated while writing it in order to prove his point.

"But what really caught my attention and quite literally felt like it was a stallion kicking me in the guts, was the part where he relates many tales from many diverse peoples about our Earth having a violent encounter with the giant comet, the net result of which was the rotation of the Earth on its axis stopped, which of course, meant that the sun stopped its motion in the sky. Just like in his nightmare! And just like in the Bible for Joshua! Velikovsky provided a number of folk tales where people—even Plato has such a tale!—in the West claimed the sun stood still in the sky and refused to go down, while on the other side of the Earth, many cultures—particularly the Aztecs in Mexico—had important myths about it refusing to come up when it was supposed to."

At this point in his telling of this, cowardly ol' me had my hands over my ears and was thinking I should have worn some Depends for that visit while shouting at him to shut up about all that stuff because it was too terrifying to contemplate—even if it wasn't even true, which I was sure it wasn't! John's reaction to that was to laugh a grim laugh and say that Velikovsky was a psychoanalyst as well as a voracious reader and researcher about this strange stuff, and he said this catastrophe was so horrific that the humans who survived it developed collective amnesia about it, a proposition he believed so totally he wrote a book called Mankind in Amnesia. (Still available— at Amazon!)

I have subsequently—since John's death!—read Velikovsky's book and all about its reception, denunciation and "burning" by the Inquisitors of the Religion of Materialist Science headed by the astronomer, Harlow Shapely, and though I won't get into its Inquisitorial reception, I will say it is the most frightening book I have ever read—hands down! And if you are the sort who gets off on being scared stiff while sitting safely in your living room, give it a read. . . . In fact, I just checked Amazon, and Worlds in Collision is still in print and available to order! It's a tad on the expensive side, but if you are horror-freak, you'll get your money's worth out of it—it's a "total fuckin' freak-out, Man!" as we used to say in those long-gone hippie days.

But enough about Velikovsky and his books, which I recommend you read (but only if you are sleeping too well and deeply at night and want to cure the problem) and back to how this relates to my question to John about how, if those purely hypothetical inorganic beings were in the process of turning this whole Earth into one, not-hypothetical-enough-for-me machine-dominated and machine-serving Coruscant, and why the hell didn't his so-called higher spirits do something to stop this seeming "machine-invasion" catastrophe.

His reply to that went into that sidetrack about his sun-not-setting nightmare and Velikovsky's horror stories about planetary collisions because it led directly to the answer he wanted to give me to my question. An answer I ended up not wanting to hear any more than his synopsis of Velikovsky's book, which was that after reading Velikovsky's book, he had a waking, end-of-the-world vision that was ten times worse than that original nightmare which showed that somewhere in our machine-dominated future lay a planetary collision disaster infinitely worse, than anything Velikovsky wrote about. A disaster with unimaginably violent earthquakes ripping the continents apart, with humungous volcanoes erupting everywhere, and with ten-mile-high tsunamis charging, pole-to-pole, up and down the length of the planet.

Well, needless to fuckin' say, those words revved my terror-tachometer so far above the red-line I was sure the motor of my head was going to explode, and I screamed at him, "Fucking hell, John!—that sounds like something those raving fundamentalist Christian street-corner lunatics go on about. Are you telling me that you believe that all those damned higher spirits . . .or powers . . . or whatever the fuck you call 'em, have been watching too many bad Hollywood disaster movies and all they have in store for us is our total and useless destruction? Fuck, that makes them sound just like the gods Shakespeare wrote about in King Lear, As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport. I CAN'T FUCKIN' BUY THAT!"

By this point the dog was whining and John was laughing so hard—and was so red in the face—that had I not been so lost in my fear and rage, I'd have been worried about him having a heart attack or a stroke. And while still laughing, he got up, patted my hand, and said, "I'm going to make us another pot of coffee while you calm down. . . .Or do you want some chamomile tea? (That was an old joke between us—I so hated that shit I once told him I'd rather drink pregnant-mare piss than that stuff!) Try and calm down and take some deep breaths—that will help."

Then while I took my deep breaths as he went to the counter to make another pot of coffee, (I'd by then finally convinced him to deep-six his old percolator and buy one of those automatic "dripping devices"—which he loved. And which allowed him to make what I considered drinkable coffee!) he went on, "I told you, that was a vision I had. Visions aren't exactly registered letters from "God" you know—they are like dreams that happen to you when you are awake and can be just as confusing, irrational and metaphoric as night dreams. It is not something to take too literally."

(I will tell you here that deep in John's memoirs I found a description of that vision and what John went through as he experienced it. It didn't seem to come across as confusing and irrational at all, but truly like some stupid Hollywood disaster movie. I only got about half way through working on it before it terrified me so much I have still not gone back to finishing it. And though I may never finish it and it will thus never appear in The Fire, where it belongs, I will spend every remaining minute of my life hoping that it is all just a metaphor because no human being would want to experience what he describes without a gun handy to blow their own—and their loved ones!—brains out with so they don't have to go through the unimaginable horror and terror of it.)

### Chapter Twenty Nine

And when he finally came back to the table with two fresh, steaming mugs of his great, but gut-gougingly strong coffee, (John didn't pamper himself much, but he sure knew and loved a good cup of coffee and would spare no expense to always have lots of that already mentioned, Starbucks French Roast on hand.) he said, with a mocking grin on his face and a sardonic tone to his voice, "Nice to see you've calmed down about this, Rachel—you really upset the poor dog when you get agitated like that. And when he gets that upset, then I have to force him to drink some chamomile tea to calm him down—and I am sure he hates that stuff as much as you do!"

That got the intended laugh out of me and served to calm me down enough that I was able to breathe a little slower and deeper as I said to him, "There is so much stuff around about end-of-world scenarios, I almost get the feeling there might be some little bit of truth to it. I mean, I came across a book in the bookstore the other day talking about an ancient Mayan prophesy that our world will end on the winter solstice of 2012. It seems they have some complex calendar system that ends on that day. . . . I should have picked the book up, you would have liked it! I wish now I had."

That got a good laugh out of John as he said, "2012, eh. Well, I don't like to make predictions but I predict with 100% certainty that I will not be alive to see that event!" And as always, when John talked about his pending death (he was well into his 80's so it was not something he, or I, could ignore), I practically shouted at him, "Shut up, Uncle John—you know I don't like you talking about that!" And though he did stop talking about that dread subject, he went on to say that there have been many terrible catastrophes during the course of human history on this planet and our collective memory of them surely resides in Jung's so-called collective unconscious.

He also reiterated Velikovsky's contention—as both a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst—that such global catastrophes are so traumatic for us as a race we develop a collective amnesia regarding them. Except, such a collective amnesia notwithstanding, something like that is always going to be like bubbling to the surface like lava out of Mt. Kilauea in Hawaii. (John's use of that Kilauea simile created an interesting, if very delayed, synchronicity, because as I write this, so many years later, that volcano has been suffering from a bad case of indigestion of late and been doing enough lava-vomiting to destroy hundreds of homes and send people fleeing its vicinity!)

He also said that since human history is full of natural disasters and catastrophes, it would be naive to think they can't or won't happen again. And when one does happen, it will be a natural occurrence because there certainly exists no Blakean, Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy sitting on his big, Heavenly Throne who is getting so pissed at us for our cosmically trivial failings that he is going to cause one. And that made me feel better until he added, "Of course, if you can accept the "Gaia hypothesis" of Lovelock's, that this Earth is a living, conscious organism, which I do accept implicitly—and likely on a deeper level than his hypothesis covers!—then She herself may initiate a catastrophe to get us, and those infernally destructive and exponentially expanding machines, "off of her back" and out of her system. Of course, if that happens, that is solely our own fault and we'd deserve what we may get on that account."

And on seeing me starting to get agitated again, he went on. "Of course, I firmly believe that if such a catastrophe were not in line with the higher spirits plans for us, they would stop such a thing from happening. Or at least stop it from happening at the wrong time."

That of course elicited from me an instant and raging, "CHRIST, JOHN—WHAT WOULD BE A GOOD FUCKIN' TIME FOR SOMETHING LIKE THAT TO HAPPEN!" I'd intended the question rhetorically, but he took it as a valid question and answered it with, "Actually, from what I have read and intuited, there actually would be a "good fuckin' time" for it, as you put it. And we actually could be heading to that time through this "machine invasion," which by its nature is exploding our population on this earth to an unnatural level with that unnatural level perhaps pushing us to the critical level for humanity to make its quantum leap to a higher level of existence."

(I should re-iter-iter-iter-ate here that John saw that machine invasion theory much the same way I did—like that old hag/young woman optical illusion that rendered it in two valid ways, depending on how you were looking at it—though he also saw all of human life and reality that way, describing it not so much as an optical illusion, but as a giant magician's trick, which is why we have such a hard time figuring things out, since once the mechanics of a trick are known, it no longer works.)

Needless to say, John totally lost me on that crazy idea of humanity making "its quantum leap to a higher level of existence," so while I zipped off to the bathroom to deal with the result of the previous two cups of his caffeinated X-lax and all the gut-churning agitation he'd provoked in me with this end-of-world shit, (eschatological shit, if you are into big, impressive words—which is awful damn close to scatological!) he poured us each a third and when I got back to the table and expressed my utter befuddlement at what he'd just said, he laughed and more or less said, "Well, don't feel too bad. I can't exactly say I am smart enough to understand it myself. . . . But to the level I do understand it, what I do see is a future for humanity that is heading towards something akin to Teilhard de Chardin's Parousia, but without all the Catholic dogma-shit-spin smeared all over it, that he had to believe—or at least pretend to believe—as a frocked priest.

"That guy was a bona fide genius and polymath who forgot more every day than I am capable of knowing, so I am likely the last person who should be regurgitating his ideas, but the way I limitedly understand some of them, is that he believed that all the individual minds of the whole of humanity are telepathically melding together to create a giant thought-field around this planet, which he gave the highfalutin name, noosphere. His idea was that humanity, weakly connected as it is by this telepathic field, the noosphere, is heading for something he labeled the Omega Point, which in Christian terms means something along the lines of the whole of this Universe spiraling into Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy . . . you know—that Grand Old Prick spends six busy "days" out-breathing this Universe into existence, then spends his single, R&R-day admiring his magnificent Creation, after which he proceeds to spend the next few trillion days sucking it all back in—while cataloguing in his Big Book of Judgment, all the sins committed by the two-legged microbes he created on a pollen-speck of a planet circling a firefly of a star in one of his Universe's billions of galaxies. (He once gave me a perfect metaphor for the Supreme Creator and Ruler of this Whole Vast Damn Universe paying the slightest bit of attention to planet Earth and its two-legged vermin by saying, "It's as if I were to paint a grain of sand blue, then during the night, bury that grain of sand on a vast ocean beach, and the next morning tell you that I'd give you a million dollars if you could find that grain of sand.")

"But if you find yourself choking on the insane absurdity of that party-line spouted so 'religiously' by Constantine's Imperial Abomination, you might find the secular interpretation of it a little more swallowable, which is that when the number of human beings on this planet reaches a 'critical mass' and the telepathic unity of all those minds supercharges the noosphere to a high enough level, we could conceivably be induced to make a collective quantum leap to some presently unimaginable higher level of consciousness and being.

"And I've explained my limited understanding of what a quantum leap is to you before—what occurs when an electron orbiting the nucleus of an atom absorbs enough energy to allow it to jump to a higher 'orbit' with no process that is discernible—to scientists!—as to how it got to that higher 'orbit.' And though an electron can seemingly spontaneously make its quantum leap as soon as it gets its requisite energy, it is not the same with humanity . . . in this situation. As that too-smart-to-be-a-dogshit-dogma-believing-priest, priest, he saw it, though we are, everyday, collectively and unconsciously, creating and enhancing the noosphere, because we are doing so unintentionally and unconsciously, it is not as strong and unified as it needs to be for us to spontaneously make that quantum leap.

"I guess if all five billion of us (that was the level of this planet's human infestation-number in the mid 80s, and John would freak out—or not!—at its today's—a mere 30 year on!—number of 7.5 billion! . . . Fuck-a-factory-farm!—but I've been hearing news reports by more than a few Chicken Little-experts screaming that the sky is falling over our exponentially escalating population numbers, but until typing out those just-Googled statistics, (provided by worldometers) I was not able to see—and fathom!—just how insanely exponential those numbers are: it took all of the many millennia of human history to build our numbers up to 5 billion, and just 30—THIRTY!—fleet fucking years for us to increase that number by 50-fucking-percent! And in another 30 years—three decades!—it will be 10 billion people. That will represent a doubling of our population in six short decades! And as those "Chicken-Little"/the-sky-truly-is-falling experts keep trying to drum into our thick skulls, with global warming making more and more of this planet infertile and its water resources in the highest populated areas even more scarce, and with the catastrophic depletion of its soils, food production can only degraded to the point where the not-so-distant future can but hold for humanity—not for me, I'll be blessedly dead!—nothing but famines and colossal wars over food and water. Or mega-tons of not-very-succulent soylent green!

And if all of that dire prognosticating ain't enough to make you wish you had a gas oven so you could turn it on and stick your head in it, you have to face the insane reality that one of the dominant, institutional religions on this poor planet—with a collective congregation of more than a fucking billion!—is dogshit-dogmatically against the use of birth control. There are more than a few who claim their present pope, Pope Frank, is more intelligent and progressive than the average pope, but the fact Constantine's Imperial Abomination has been under his "infallible" divine guidance for five years, and in the face of the facts of those exponentially increasing population statistics which can but show we are rocketing to a global disaster, and he hasn't scooped-and-bagged that insane dogma-shit against birth control and deep-sixed it, is proof positive that he is neither intelligent nor progressive, and that his "infallible divine guidance" is infinitely more demonic than divine.

I mean, face the fucking facts folks!—any leader of a powerful, world-shaping institution that will dogmatically tell people that their "loving God"—who is behind his "infallible" decision-making as Supreme Emperor-Pope of Constantine's Imperial Roman Abomination!—will send them to an afterlife hell if they use birth control to interfere with his desire to use them in the constant creation new and expanding generations of mindless, child-credulous, sheep-brained worshippers of him. I mean, he does have to preserve his malicious reputation by living up to his name of Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy through banning birth control in his malevolent and sadistic need to witness millions—billions!—of his "beloved" worshippers living in a present-life over-population hell—where they will die—by the billions!—hideous deaths from hideous wars, extreme poverty and diseases and plagues!

This of course, to those with eyes even "a little bit open," can see that the only thing this "loving God" of Constantine's Imperial Roman Abomination truly loves to do is live up to his reputation as Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy! That he is really nothing more than a clever con-artist of a Demonic Cosmic Monster full of unimaginable levels of hatred, cruelty, and malice, and not a "loving" anything at all, and that any Supreme Emperor-Pope of Constantine's Imperial Roman Abomination, for whom he absolutely guarantees cosmic wisdom and utter infallibility, can himself be but a berobed-and-mitre-wearing "mini-me demon" in abject service of that Demonic Cosmic Monster! AND THEY SAY I AM FUCKING CRAZY!)

Fuck-a-freight-locomotive!—but that was a long and distracting parenthetical, off-the-rails side-track, so I better start that paragraph over again with John saying, "I guess if all five billion of us started meditating on channeling our collective intent to make that quantum leap, it might happen spontaneously, but that sure isn't going to happen! Teilhard believed that in order for our collective intent to become strong enough, humanity, after reaching a critical population-mass—which our "machine invasion" is facilitating—needed to be united in one, concentrated emotion, which could either be love or terror. He was sure that, human nature being what it is, we could never be united by love, but speculated that terror would work just fine, especially if it was the terror of an impending global catastrophe caused by this good Earth getting a "Joe Lewis" to the chin in the form of a head-on with a giant comet or asteroid. (This notion isn't as fuckin' airy-fairy as it sounds: about ten years ago I picked up a book at Chapters by Lynne McTaggart titled The Intention Experiment. Because John—and my bogeyman, Castaneda!—often used that word intention, it caught my attention, as did a small yellow circle on its green cover with the words, Take Part in the World's Largest Mind-over-Matter Experiment in it. The book was a bit too much of a head-fuck for meds-addled me, but I did get out of it some modern scientific verification of what John—and Teilhard—had been talking about!)

"Because of our telescopes and satellites, the whole human race would know about that comet for weeks, maybe even months, before it arrived to deliver its knock-out punch, and everyone would see it very clearly in the final week, and for sure, we would be collectively terrorized beyond measure by our impending doom on its final approach when it would likely fill up half the sky. I am sure our that terror—if terror is even strong enough a word!—would mentally and spiritually unite the whole of humanity enough to ramp up the energy of the noosphere-field to the critical point where those higher spiritual powers could give us the necessary nudge needed for humanity to make its collective quantum leap to another level of consciousness . . . of being.

"This—possible—'quantum event," the nature of which, of course, is unimaginable to us right now—as no less, I would guess, is the slim, big-winged Monarch butterfly that will emerge from the cocoon always utterly imaginable to the fat, leaf-bound caterpillar spinning that cocoon—would give ultimate meaning to the dark, stupid, greedy, caterpillar-history of our collective human suffering and would explain why the higher spirits allowed that invasion by those inorganic beings and the mechanization of our once magical, organic world in the first place."

Of course, though for brevity's sake (Ha!—I think by now you have figured out that brevity has the same meaning to me as truth to Mad King Donald!) I have presented that as a monologue by John, it had been anything but, as I interrupted him many times, not only to machinegun a lot of question-bullets at him, but to dart off to the bathroom several times, his coffee and terror-tales being the best bladder-stimulator and laxative anyone could ever want. And besides, in the vernacular of this day, back then I so did not understand all that shit that I needed those bathroom-breaks just to—metaphorically!—stick my head in a sink full of cold water to keep my poor brain from over-heating and self-combusting!

And why I am cursing the hell out of myself for allowing the memory of that fell conversation from entering the pathetic, fucked-up, and brain-lightninged pile of moldy porridge presently keeping my skull from collapsing, especially since I now totally lack the willpower to banish—or even minimally control—it.

Sheep-shit-on-a-real-short-stick!—but I am presently helplessly watching as John's described vision again unreels in my horrified mind and seared psyche, which, as I just said, because I am off the Meds Rez and in a weak-willed and vulnerable manic state, I can't even begin to control.

And what makes it all even more horrifically real today, is that back then, the idea of a comet or asteroid hitting our lovely Earth and "rubbing us all out" was nothing but a fanciful hypothesis and a bunch of money-making Hollywood-hype! That is, until a few years later, in 1994—much to John's great interest, and told-you-so enthusiasm!—a veritable cosmic express train of comet fragments plowed into the night side of Jupiter, leaving, much to the delight of the discoverers of that comet—Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker and David Levy—once the planet had rotated into sunlight, a series of massive blotches in Jupiter's atmosphere. If that same express train of comet fragments had plowed into Earth, I'd most definitely not be around to write about it and you'd most definitely not be around to care!

I can vividly see—with my out-of-control imagination—the scenes John described back then, and keenly feel the globalized terror of watching, day and night, that massively huge—and growing huger by the hour!—cannonball of a comet streaking towards our helpless planet. It will be up there in the sky for us to see—day or night, depending—and we won't need one of Don Henley's (Ambien-dosed!) "bubble-headed-bleach-blondes" on CNN (or any other major TV network) sitting, glassy-eyed and shitting her thong, in front of a giant screen with a live, zoomed-in shot of it while giving the world her babbling commentary on its size, composition, where exactly it will strike, and the final speed and energy-release of that strike, for us to know that our collective, human ass is "grass!"

Tinkers, tailors, soldiers, sailors, beggar men, thieves, kings, queens, princes, princesses, presidents, prime ministers, tin-pot dictators and uber-billionaires—as well as atheists, agnostics, Muslims, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, Hindus, Taoists and supreme Chinese Communist poobahs will be down on their knees praying to Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy to save them from such a foul, and undeserved end. Hell, I can even see Mad King Donald taking a break from Tweeting that all that COMET CRAP is nothing but FAKE NEWS! and PELOSI-PROPAGANDA! so he could try to eat all his gold in an effort to make sure he "takes it with him"—on the extreme, off-chance it wasn't FAKE NEWS after all! But all that praying to Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy—and his Brother-In-Anthropomorphized-Lunacy, Allah, would be in vain as that celestial monster got closer and closer, and loomed larger and larger. Ha!—we'd be one, big, collective, Christ on our planetary cross, shitting our collective loin cloth and collectively crying out, "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken us?" (Boy, if that bit of egregious blasphemy doesn't get a couple of modern, scowling, uber-armed, helmeted, and flak-jacketed Enforcers from the Abomination's Congregation of the of the Doctrine of the Faith showing up at my door with tasers, bottles of pepper spray, and truncheons shaped like crucifixes—and several cans of gasoline!—nothing will!)

And though, as my out-of-control vision plays out in my head like a demonic, YouTube video, I can but terrifyingly understand that the ultimate end for most human beings would be blessedly quick—before it even struck this planet, its gravitational attraction would cause massively violent earthquakes would reduce all multi-story buildings to World Trade Center, ground-zero heaps of dust-and-smoke-spewing rubble. In Manhattan, the former Freedom Tower will have the distinction of being the highest pile of rubble in that erstwhile New York borough! (Yes, Mad King Donald!—your precious Trump Tower too! Reduced to a heap of twisted steel, and smashed glass—with you, hopefully and blessedly, a crushed and finally Tweet-silent gob of gold-plated guts and gore in the penthouse rubble!)

But those heaps of rubble wouldn't last long, for hard on the heels of the "great levelers" of those quakes, will roar the ten-mile high tsunamis created by the gravitational and electromagnetic attraction of that monster, to not only spread that rubble both inland and out to sea, but to snuff out any hapless survivors of those quakes—like microbes being pressure-washed off a dirty driveway! Needless-to-fucking-god-damned-say!—those final days of unimaginably intense and caustic terror—and the sudden realization of how unimportant all wealth and status and self-importance really is—would be . . . UNIMAGINABLE!

So unimaginable that I lack both the expertise and courage to try to describe this uber-scary shit any further! Though like I said earlier, if you're one of those bizarros who get off on being scared shitless—and don't like sleeping well a night!—then take a break from watching all those B-grade Hollywood disaster flicks you like so much and strain your brain a bit reading Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision. And if you are a firm believer that our modern Religion of Materialist Science is the polar opposite of Constantine's Imperial Abomination and not merely the obverse of the dark, dominating, controlling and power-abusing "lead-coin" of its very Roman nature, then take the time to read about the already-mentioned Inquisitorial response the scientist-priest of the day, particularly the response instigated by the uber-egomaniacal, astronomically self-important, and self-appointed Inquisitor, Harvard astronomer, Harlow Shapely, who led that McCarthyean witch-hunt against Velikovsky and his book, without—admittedly!—ever having actually read the thing himself. Ironically, while recently reading something totally unrelated to this end-of-world-shit, I came across a most humorous and apropos quote by Groucho Marx that fit Shapely's uber-arrogant and condemning response to Velikovsky's book that fit him like a custom-formed dunce cap:

From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down

I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.

Though of course, in Shapely's case, the first part of that second line would go: I was enraged with indignation.

And as John pointed out to me more than once, Velikovsky was no street-corner, tinfoil-hatted lunatic. He had scholarly "creds" coming out the "yin-yang" and was a personal friend of Einstein's, (A man who, I would assume, would have been just a little bit picky about whom he spent his free time with!) whom he ran these ideas past on numerous occasions during and after publishing them. Einstein didn't agree with all his conclusions but he was impressed with the thoroughness of his research and didn't think he was out on the far reaches of the solar system "counting fleas on Pluto" with his ideas, either.

And now, because writing all this terrifying shit has both exhausted and upset me so much that I've had to make several lumbering trips to the bathroom (it was sure a lot easier back then when there was just one of me doing it and not three!), I am going to leave it at that, heave myself out of this poor, groaning, fart-choked chair and head down that execrable flight of stairs—someday I'm going to move all this computer shit down to my living room!—to the kitchen for a big glass of distilled "potato water" which I am going to drink after I roll the biggest "doobie" I can using two pieces of hash-oil painted rolling paper, and deep-toke it while I watch a whole bunch of concert movies, starting with the "concert movie of all movies"—The Last Waltz featuring The Band and a bunch of their (to this modern generation of "assimilated" teens) no-name friends: Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Eric Clapton, Neil Diamond, Muddy Waters, "Van-the-Man" Morrison, and Bob Dylan. . . . just to name a few! (Yeah, I know—you've never even heard of them! So fucking take a minute from your texting and sexting and look them up on the Web. And give them a listen on YouTube!)

Then I'll move on to Peter Gabriel's stupendous, Secret World Live concert. Oh, how I love the sight, singing—and metaphor!—of the opening song, "Come Talk to Me" where he desperately and plaintively struggles and strains his way out of a phone booth towards the young and inviting Paula Cole—looking like the lovely Terpsichore (turp-sik-o-ree) herself, the Muse of music, briefly earth-plane manifesting at that concert to enjoy an evening of song and dance with her much-favored artist, Peter—while pulling the handset on a long, ever-resisting cord. And never quite makes it to her before getting hauled, lonely and heartbroken, back into the booth.

Then it will be on to my two favorite Crossroads concerts, 2010 and 2013, put on by a now considerably older that he was in The Last Waltz, (but just as great a "Slowhand" as he ever was!) Eric Clapton, and if I am still awake at the end of those, I'll put on Dire Straits' great, 1992, Live From Basel concert, and on the supreme unlikelihood that I make it through that, then Cream's great 2005 re-union at Royal Albert Hall concert.

I mean, fuck!—what choice do I have, facing as I am two end-of-the-world scenarios, that terrifying but unlikely one John had injected into my frail psyche and which I have just finished regurgitating out of a long-ago meal of it, and the very discouraging and utterly certain one of me very soon Jonathan showing up at my door in order to—very necessarily!—have me frog-marched back to the Meds-Rez so I can be turned back into that lusterless, light bulb-in-a-dead-duck's-ass, Crazy Rachel that I was when I first got the crazy (LOL) idea to go off my meds and write this FUBAR "Preface!". An event, of course, that will require me having to give up my beloved booze and cannabis for the—hopefully short!—duration of the rest of my stupid fuckin' fucked-up-excuse-of-a-life, never again being blessed to stoned-immaculate watch a stupendous Clapton guitar-solo turn into an exploding and writhing kaleidoscope of colors and shapes by my favorite Greek Muse—Mary Jane. Tokerpsichore (My assemblage point is so frail and loose now that grass and hash easily kick it around like David Beckham a soccer ball. And the way that only high-quality Sandoz acid had once been able to do!)

### Chapter Thirty

Hell-and-god-fucking-damnation!—but all that preceding, end-of-the-world (eschatological!) shit was so stressful to think and write about that it induced me to stumble into a major, emotional and behavioral fuck-up that is for-sure going to set a very pissed-off Jonathan on a forced, get-crazy-fuckin'-Mom-back-on-the-Meds-Rez trip, and I better have this damn thing finished by the time he gets here because once I am back on that Meds-Rez, I'll not only not be able to work on it, but if I even so much as read it over, I'll be forced to see, judge, and instantly condemn it for the chaotic lunacy I already—even in this lunatic state—know that it is, and I forthwith delete the whole damn thing faster than Mad King Donald can spin a self-aggrandizing—or self-exculpating—lie!

And that major fuck-up came about because when I went to get my necessary "dose" of "potato water"—Moscow Mineral Water—that I felt I needed to cope with writing about all this end-of-world catastrophe-shit, I discovered that my Mother Hubbard's cupboards were totally bare, so I had to go to the government liquor-pusher to restock them for "the children" of that dire need.

And while I was standing in line to pay for my two precious, 60-ounce "Texas mickeys" of vodka (for those not familiar with the term mickey in reference to booze, it is a Canuck term for a 13 ounce "hip flask" of the stuff, and since everything about Texas is legendarily gargantuan, some Canuckistan wag started calling those 60-ounce flagons, Texas mickeys) two young "girls"—they were obviously old enough to buy liquor but looked to me like mere girls in about grade 9 or 10—were giggling and whispering to themselves so obnoxiously that in the intensifying, scorpion-paranoia of my off-the-Meds-Rez state (enhanced and deepened by having been writing about all that end-of-world shit) I became convinced they were laughing and whispering about me and the fact that I was so fat. And ugly! And rattily dressed. And odiferous! And what-the-fuck-crazy-not!

I kept myself in check until I'd paid for my two precious "mickeys" then could not restrain myself from turning on them and while shaking my fist in their faces, shouting at them, "I don't know who the fuck you two sluts think you fuckin' are, talkin' about me like that, but I can hear you and you have no right to do it! I'm as much a human being as you two sluts, so just shut the fuck up or I'll smash your faces to a pulp. And I fuckin' mean it!"

Needless to say, both girls stopped their giggling and whispering and open-mouth stared at me during that tirade with looks of utter disbelief. And after I'd restrained myself from smashing my fist into the closest one's face, I turned and stomped—lumber-waddled!—towards the door, hearing one of the girls say to the cashier, "Who is that woman? We weren't talking about her—we didn't even notice her!" With the cashier, whose name was Bev and whom I'd gone to high school with, said to them, loudly enough for me to hear, "Oh, don't pay any attention to her! That's just our very own, home-grown Crazy Rachel—and she's obviously off her meds or she'd not be drinking. Or behaving like that! Someone is going to have to call her son soon before she gets too out of control and ends hurting someone. Or herself!"

Hearing those words filled me with a righteous, lava-spurting, Kilauea-rage against Bev and it took every ounce of my "mickey" of willpower to not respond and just keep lumber-waddling through the self-opening door, my almost-squashed-out-of-existence-by-my-scorpion-paranoid rage, rational mouse of a mind, squeaking out to me, as loud as it was able, to get the hell home and not cause any more trouble.

But what is a squeaking, rational mouse compared with a roaring, paranoid T-Rex, and barely had that automatic door closed behind me than my "mickey" of willpower fell on the pavement and broke and I was uber-convinced I just had to go back in and bop that bad-mouthing Bitch Bev on her always-sticking-it-where-it-doesn't-belong nose, but she must have read my paranoia-enraged mind—though more likely because we'd been through this the last time I went off the Meds-Rez!—because by the time I'd turned around, Bev was standing just far enough from the door to keep it from opening and with a nasty frown on her aging, scrunched-up face, a 1000-watt laser-glare in her beady little eyes, and while holding her left hand in a phone-handset-gripping gesture to her left ear, used the extended forefinger of her right hand to dramatically mimic the dialing of a telephone.

I was just compos mentis enough to figure out she was either going to call Jonathan or the fuckin' Fuzz, though I was betting on the latter, and since the demons in my two "Texas mickeys" of guaranteed oblivion were screaming at me to get the hell home and get started drinking them free of their confinement in those gigantic plastic bottles, that is what I proceeded to do, fuming hotly enough all the way back to the farm to almost set the inside of my poor van aflame. Though of course, before I could do that, I had to stop off at the convenience store attached to the gas station near the turn-off to my farm road where I loaded up on junk food: all the pepperettes they had in stock and a dozen bags of anything and everything that was crunchy, salty, and loaded with deliciously bad fats, my favorite—of which I scored four bags!—being HOT! barbeque pork rinds. (Hey, when I go "trailer trash," I go all hog! LOL!)

And after smoking that super-doobie and kick-starting my deserved debauch by chugging a quarter of the contents of the first of those demon-possessed bottle, and then while devouring—inhaling!—my first bag of pork rinds, I watched—and of course, listened to!—Scorsese's concert masterpiece, The Last Waltz, and settled in for a long, manic night of delightful, drug-and-booze-addled rock 'n' roll. (Is there any other way to truly experience rock 'n' roll? . . .Well, yeah, I know—I'm leaving out the most essential part, given that rock 'n' roll is a euphemism for fucking, but I'd have to be Mad King Donald to be able to afford to hire some scrumptious, big-"boned" porn-star stud to put a bag over my fat head and provide that for me, so it wasn't on the menu!)

Well, like Robbie Burns kinda said—or at least mighta said if he'd lived through "the Sixties": The best laid plans of tokers and heads go oft up in smoke, and though I had big, grandiose plans (do manics have any other kind?) to eat all my delicious junk food and drink as much booze as I could while watching/listening to hours and hours and hours of "drug-enhanced" rock 'n' roll and blues, I was only able to eat about half that delicious junk food and drink-and-toke my way through the aforementioned The Last Waltz, then that uber-hunk (back then, at least, in '94) Gabriel's Secret World Live, (well, I did watch the first half twice) and got about half way through disk 2 of the Crossroads 2013, New York concert when, just after getting past the half-way point of my beloved "Texas mickey," which I'd wisely brought to the couch with me—along with all that food!—I had to get up for a piss. Not just badly. Not just real badly. But piss-the-fucking-couch-if-I-didn't badly!

But getting this 300-plus pounds of whale blubber off my couch and into the bathroom is no small undertaking even when I am straight and sober, but it turns into a labor of Heracles when I'm when drunk and stoned, so I bladder-screeching delayed as long as I painfully could, after which I mobilized both of my "two-bits worth" willpower that I posses when off the Meds Rez and in my "natural" off-the-Meds-Rez-state of being drunk and "stoned immaculate," in order to grunt-groan-belch-curse-fart-and-dribble my way to my feet in order to lumber-waddle/stagger to the bathroom and

Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z . . .

the next thing I become conscious of is tentatively forcing open my eyelids to the bright light of the late afternoon sun saber-dancing through my living room window and slashing to ribbons my poor ocular orbs, with the next thing to stab at my consciousness being the hideous and nauseating stench of stale vomit, which I had a hard time not smelling because my fat slab of a face was squashed in a giant, noxious, toxic-waste pool of more than a few bags half-chewed and upchucked HOT! barbeque pork rinds! And other odiferous crap of similar ilk.

After that I became slowly aware of the fact that my head felt like a lump of pizza dough that some strong-armed Mama Mia was kneading the hell out of, while the WHUMP! WHUMP! WHUMP! of my still-alcohol-thinned blood whumping through it made me feel like I was trapped in an empty oil drum with Avril Lavigne and Alanis Morissette in a who-can-screech-loudest-and-harshest duel. Though I guess the worst realization came from the cold, sodden wetness of the groin area of my super-large sweat pants, telling me that, while passed out on John's lovely—and extremely valuable (like 3000 dollar!)—hand-woven Navajo rug-carpet, I'd pissed myself! And had done so a good many times more than the one I had a vague memory of getting up from the couch to take care of.

Ironically, one of first thoughts that entered that throbbing, hammer-whacked thumb of my expanded-to-the-size-of-Saturn head as I forced myself up onto my hands and knees and proceeded to dry-heave my guts out onto the half-dried puddle of barf on the carpet below my face, was that I was lucky I'd fallen on my face when I passed out and not my back, or I'd have drowned in that vomit the way poor Jimi had. But as that hammer-whacked-thumb of my Saturn-sized head (sorry about mixing those metaphors but that's what you end up doing when you mix too many tokes of cannabis with too many ounces of vodka!) throbbed and screamed while my guts churned, twisted, contorted, heaved and screamed, it didn't take me long to change my tune and wish that I had fallen on my back and choked my way into whatever lay beyond this vale of shit we call life in this Gulag Earth.

And most especially so when I first saw the mess I'd made of John's lovely and cherished blanket/carpet, (that he'd bought on the return trip he took in his VW van that I am sure I've already bored you with!) and then fathomed the permanent damage I'd done to it since its natural dyes had naturally bled together in both of the large splotches of incontinent damage that the "continent" of my inert, whale-body had done to them.

I even had the thought, as I wiped my bile-burning mouth on my sweat-top sleeve, that whereas Jimi's death was a tragic loss to the world, mine would only have been a loss to my the liquor store and my dope dealer. And no, not my poor children! Jonathan, I am quite sure would greet the news with a long, forehead-wiping whew! And Terry, when she got the call from Jonathan, would just shrug and say, "Good goddamned riddance!"

Needless to say, I didn't get any work done on this magnum opus—this magnum-full-of-pus!—for for two full days before that bigger-than-Jupiter hangover (or was it Saturn? . . . Ah, who gives a fuck!—they are both enormungus gas giants. Like me!) shrunk back to its normal size, my poor, booze-ravaged guts—after two bottles of Pepto-Bismol that went down a real pretty pink and came out fucking black!—settled down, and my blasted-to-a-fog concentration get concentrated enough for me to do the modicum of focusing I have to do in order to write this chaotic mess to a barely adequate level of coherency. (Coherency from my POV!) Though the next day I did feel "well" enough to roll up that sadly abused Navajo rug-carpet and haul it off to a dry cleaners to get it as restored to as normal a pre-puke-and-piss state as was possible. (They said they'd do what they could, but refused to make any definitive promises—while demanding an outrageous, up-front fee that my guilt made me pay without haggling over!)(Likely because I looked and smelled like some bag-lady who'd stolen the thing and they didn't want "the fuzz" confiscating it before their labors had been paid for!)

And, needless to say, when I finally got back to this magnum-full-of-pus, and dared to glance over what I have been writing, I could but instantly realize that I really do have to get control of my drinking and toking so I can get a modicum of control over these bumblebee-flight tangents, not only so this poor "Preface" doesn't end up longer than War and Peace, but so I can bring it to some sort of sensible (LOL!) conclusion before Jonathan inevitably shows up to haul me off to the head-shop for my necessary tune-up—more like a total fucking re-build!—and a return to my usual, on-the-Meds-Rez, light-bulb-in-a-dead-duck's-ass dullness which will, by definition and design, make me too stable and unimaginative to do any but watch TV—those "soaps" can get damned enthralling once you get into them!—all day and certainly quite unable to work on this. (Jonathan reluctantly—very reluctantly!—doesn't mind me—I think/hope!—going off the Meds-Rez like this about once every two or three years, but I am a hundred-thousand-million-billion percent certain that if I were to do it again anytime sooner than that in order to further work on this "Preface," his attitude would be "Fuck you, Mommy Drearest—you're on your own this time!" And I would hardly be able to blame him—so I have to wrap this up soon!)

Like my fellow madman and favorite philosopher Nietzsche said, "A creative person works by instinct and checks himself with reason," but alas, everything that is reasonably reasonable in my loonatic life comes out of the chemical straitjacket of my meds, which, since I have temporarily Houdini'd myself out of that straightjacket—oh right, in keeping the metaphor copacetic, "gone walkabout from the Meds-Rez!"—means I am both mixing metaphors as well as booze and grass, and flushing myself down the same looney-toilet of a psychosis good ol' Friedrich drowned in, which means this mania-turbocharged, doing-donuts-in-the-middle-of-a-bridge Cor-azy-vette is doing little more than "laying down a lot of rubber" with the mentritional value of a Harlequin romance. (Hey! Wow!—Can you fuckin' believe it?—I just invented a new word: mentritional! I like that word! It should be a rating category for books, movies, and especially TV shows! Especially American-made ones—for network TV—which quite naturally, have to have a junk food—or better yet, a garbage—mentritional rating to appeal to Mad King Donald's "mindless majority." of MAGA-hatters! And it means I only have to invent about 2000 more words to catch up with "Will the Quill,"—this world's all-time greatest wordsmith!)

And double alas!—for I am still feeling like dog-vomit (or like my own!) from my trip down that damned Vodka-Bottle Road where I made it all the way to the Oz of my (alas, not permanent) oblivion without sharing a drop with no joint-screeching Tin Man, no straw-headed Scarecrow, or no scaredy-cat Lion, and my (throbbing, ailing, castigating, really pissed) creative mind feels like it has been dragged by that flock of Winged Monkeys of all that booze and cannabinoids, straight into the Wicked Witch's dark, dull, life-sucked lair, making me temporarily feel like I was back on that dreaded Meds-Rez! Which would have been okay if I was still a teacher indoctrinating kids into the totally uncreative wastelands of their future lives, but of no use at all to helping me write this goddamn mess of a "Preface!"

FUCKING ENOUGH ALREADY RACHEL! Get your pudgy, sweaty hands out of your fat, sweaty and shit-stinking ass-crack of self-absorption and back on the controls of this "Preface"-plane so you can put a stop to this swooping, yawing, zigzagging, loop-de-looping and tangential flight to everywhere-and-nowhere, WHICH I WILL NOW DO!

Except I've forgotten where I fell off this fuckin' carnival ride—or that plane of that flying metaphor!—and now have to scroll back to see what I had been yammering/keyboard-hammering on about, which was . . . . . fuck!—the scroll button on this mouse has yanked me back waaaaaaaaay too far! . . . . . Fuck!—all the way back to the Castanedean subject of stopping the world! . . .

Shit-on-a-sorcerer's-dick!—I am sure I was finished with that shamanic subject, but now that it's back in my mind, I'll run (lumber!) with it a bit more, given that I eventually came to think of it as a real and effective a psychic/spiritual process, I am forced to face the unpalatable thought that there is more to Castaneda's books, with their tales about spirits and other invisible powers that can both affect and even shape our lives, than I want to—rationally—admit, and that there may be a real, powerful, Ben Kenobi-wise, flesh-and-fart Don Juan woven into them, (no less than there was a real, flesh-and-fart gadfly of a Socrates woven into Plato's dialogues) for as much as that stopping the world business rang loud and truly clear for me, another topic that old sorcerer preached a lot about was the dangers inherent in too much self-importance. (If I've already covered the subject just ignore this as the addled, post-hangover babble it surely is!)

Don Juan constantly harped on that subject, and possibly did so because he truly had been a bona fide sorcerer/shaman in a bona fide master/apprentice—nagual/apprentice!—relationship with Castaneda that had a very serious—to him and the invisible powers he "worked" for!—agenda behind it.

I amended that relationship definition from master to nagual because I have now read those books thoroughly enough to know that however fictional Don Juan surely—I hope!—had been, he very much really hated the term master, as he said it served no purpose but to stroke a teacher's self-importance, (great advice for all university professors!) and he truly seemed to fear getting drowned in the cesspit of that way-too-common human delusion! And, as someone currently drowning in a manic state where all my actions are pretty much just reeking bubbles of self-importance percolating out of the overflowing cesspit of my self-absorption, I—and Jonathan and Terry and my shrinks—can attest to the very real psychological dangers attendant to too much indulgence in it!

And what brings that up now is how badly I know I need my dear Uncle John to—right this fucking minute!—come stomping into the room and stop my manic, self-absorbed world for me. He can't, of course, yank to my feet by my hair, spank me, then throw me in a manure pile—it would take four of him to do that now!—but maybe some violent, CIA-perfected water-boarding in my septic tank will do the trick. Though of course, all thoughts about stopping the world, brings back vivid memories of that that fateful day when he rightfully and wisely pitched me into that shit pile, stopped my world, and saved my life.

For as I now look back on those out-of-control, sexacious days, the hallmark of that dark bubble I was in, was how I was pretty much the self-anointed ruling goddess at the center of it. In that bubble, however dark and deranged it was, I was—to me—the most important being in it and was so self-absorbed by that importance that I had basically strapped myself to a whirling, sine-waving horse on an out-of-control carousel, and the outside world did not exist as anything more than a backdrop to serve my carouselling, out-of-control needs and lusts.

I was back then in the same kind of insane, solipsistic hell that I was trapped in a couple of days ago during that unprovoked contretemps with those two young women in the liquor store, who obviously hadn't been paying the slightest bit of attention to fat old me—old people are pretty much as invisible to the young as they are unimportant!—while they giggled and talked in their own little worlds!

It is interesting that I could not write that above, hundred-dollar, shrink-jargoned word solipsistic, without thinking about that self-absorbed, uber-anxious scriptwriter Nicolas Cage played so masterfully in the movie, Adaptation, when he uses that highfalutin, fortunately rarely-heard word to describe his having written himself into his own script, something I have obviously done way to much of in this "Preface"—which is why I am screaming out my need for John—someone! anyone!—to stop my world for me so I can get myself out of this damn scriptorial carousel—which initially was supposed to be about John!—and back into the real world.

Or, as Castaneda called it, ordinary reality. And I think it might have been Joseph Chilton. Pierce who said, on the subject of insanity, that a reality of one always ends up an insanity for no other reason than that the isolation of it not only creates a level of loneliness that in itself can but drive the victim of such a Nietzschean-life psychotic, but provides no guard rails along the twisting mountain road of it to keep one from plummeting to their self-absorbed destruction as they manic-speed along it! Or maybe it was Robert Pirsig who wrote that, he having been another genius philosopher who went as thought-bonkers as Nietzsche but was fortunate enough to have taken his "loon-flight" after head-lightning had been invented so he didn't have to spend the rest of his life in the "loon-cage" of a Shrink Klink! But don't fuckin' quote me on any of that shit!

### Chapter Thirty One

Interestingly, and actually apropos, there suddenly jack-in-a-boxes into the otherwise empty box of my head a memory of John talking about the dangers of self-importance and self-absorption, for which he had an apt simile, "Being self-absorbed is like gazing at your navel for too long so that you develop x-ray vision and all you end up seeing is your own guts—and shit!" He also said the world that self-absorption drags us into is like the one the Ancient Mariner in Coleridge's poem ends up in, (that poem plays an interesting role in John's life which he describes in The Fire) who after the death of all his shipmates on that doldrums-cursed sea, laments,

Alone, alone, all, all alone,

Alone on a wide, wide sea!

And never a saint took pity on

My soul in agony.

The many men so beautiful!

And they all dead did lie;

And a thousand thousand slimy things

Lived on; and so did I.

And a thousand thousand slimy things/ Lived on, and so did I. Yup, bin there/done that! Even got the fuckin' T-shirt! I mean, it's got to be a given that when you are a pre-pubescent girl having the raging prick of your pedophiliac creep of a father's shoved in all your tender orifices, you end up living in a world that is pretty much all a thousand thousand slimy (leprous!) things! And as The Fire shows, so had John, who, after his long, Campbellean, "underworld," Ancient Mariner, Hero's Journey that that he came out of lugging the boon of the wisdom to be able to unequivocally say that, "Constantly living in our own heads and thinking the same boring thoughts over and over again is like living our lives in an over-used privy and breathing the same shit-stinking air day after day, with the only way to stay sane and balanced in this life is to get the hell out of that stinking 'in-house' of our head and into the big, wide, fresh-aired world outside us! Which means, in order to be truly sane and balanced, we must learn to discipline our minds to the point where we spend most of our time outside of our heads."

"Okay, Uncle John—you're talking about that meditation stuff again, aren't you? . . . Christ, why does it always come down to that . . . crap?"

That got from him his classic, raised-eyebrow, Vulcan Spock-look, and his classic, rational, Spock response: "Because, as I've surely told you a half dozen times already: our mind is a kind of muscle no different than our physical muscles, and if it isn't regularly exercised and kept 'fit' the way our physical muscles must be, it gets 'flabby' and 'weak' and totally useless—just like our physical muscles. Meditation is not just some airy-fairy Eastern mystical nonsense, but 'weight training' for the mind, and, as far as I am concerned, trying to live without a modicum of meditating in your day is like trying to run a marathon after spending a month in your bed!"

At this point, and likely like I had those other times he'd talked about that shit, I sarcastically said, "So you're telling me that unless I spend hours every day sitting staring at a wall with my legs all tangled up like spaghetti, breathing deeply and mumbling some silly mantra, that I won't be able to live my life. . . . Well, I don't do that now and I seem to be getting along A-okay. . . . Well, at least fine. . . . Kinda fine, anyway."

That got a chuckle out of him before he proceeded to say, "Well, that would be great—though hours and hours aren't needed. Twenty minutes a day of that would do wonders for you. But you don't need to formally sit at all to learn to meditate. You just have to do what Don Juan was always telling Castaneda to do—stop the internal dialogue. Practice not yakking to yourself in your head for . . . hell, for seconds at a time . . . three or four times a day. . . . And it does get easier with practice! And in those moments when you have intentionally quit yakking to yourself, you should also intentionally focus your awareness on something—in the physical world around you.

"In fact, the best thing to start focusing on is your own breathing. Trying breathing in and out slowly for five measly times while counting those breaths . . . and without yakking to yourself during those five breath. And once you can do that, practice focusing your attention—while not yakking to yourself!—on your body. Start with your feet and work your way up from there. Sense each part of your body in turn. . . .This, by the way, is a great grounding exercise . . . we've talked about the need for that before! . . . And when that exhausts you, go back to yakking your head off to yourself for a few more hours of mental normalcy. . . . Then when you've practiced that simple meditation for a few weeks, and you've reached the point where you can intentionally move your attention from your toes to your nose without getting distracted or exhausted, broaden you practice a bit. (I remember trying his five-deep-breaths-without-yakking-to-myself exercise and could never get past three—though usually two was the limit!—without the butterfly of my mind fluttering off to more interesting flowers—yakking to itself all the way. So I gave up on that silly, time-wasting Eastern shit!)

"Then, once you get really good at shutting up your internal yakker, and paying attention to those five breaths—maybe even ten!—expand that practice even more so that it moves outward from your body and becomes progressively more and more aware of the world around you. Foremost, you should make an effort to be aware of the basic, physical existence of your fellow human beings whom you interact with, then their fundamentally spiritual natures. Learn to see them as spirit-beings no different than the spirit-being you are—each deserving, not only your awareness of them, but your love and respect for them. . . . You're an educated woman—a teacher!—so surely you are familiar with that poem, "No Man Is An Island," with its famous lines, No man is an island,/entire of itself./ Each is a piece of the continent,/ a part of the main."

I could but interrupt him with, "Yeah, yeah—took it in school/ taught it at school! Still don't know what the hell it means. I am me and you are you and everyone else is just who the hell they individually happen to be. And as far as I am concerned, other people's deaths—if I don't know them!—don't "diminish" who I individually am in the slightest. When 'the bell tolls'—or I guess today, it would be when 'the ambulance siren screams!'—I have no sense that it is screaming for me. . . . Though I do worry it might be for one of my children—or for you!"

"Yes, well you've always been adamantly consistent in your literal-mindedness and no Inquisitor will ever burn you at the stake for being a mystic like Joan of Arc, but at least you do acknowledge that you are connected to your children—and to me, and that our deaths would in some way diminish you?"

The thought of either of my children dying had haunted me all their lives and I had, like all loving parents, made my peace with that fell, but remote, possibility, but thoughts about John's ever-impending death—he was in his eighties!—and my never being able to ever see him again, to bask in his presence, to sit yakking with him at his kitchen table, to go horseback riding with him and his dog, was a "diminishment" of my essential self that I could not face, so while fighting back the tears that were involuntarily forming in my eyes and threatening to course down my cheeks, I curtly said, "I don't want to talk about that, Uncle John!"

Sensing my intense emotions concerning his ever-pending departure and my intense knowing that I would indeed be "diminished" by the scream of the ambulance that came for him, he moved the topic on. "But it is just as important for us to refine our impromptu meditations so that we become aware of, and pay some attention to, the beautiful, living natural world around us—to the sky, the clouds, the rain, the hills, fields, birds, animals, insects, rocks, trees, grasses (John, for some reason, loved grasses—and not just because he'd been a rancher!) rivers, oceans, the smallest brook, even, is all an integral and important part of the alive and very conscious Ocean of Spirit in which our—and everyone's!—spirit-being swims and 'feeds' and thrives! And when we look outward and pay attention to any and all of it—starting with our physical body!—that meditative activity not only grounds us, but everything we are gazing at willingly and freely gazes back at us and just as freely gives us its energy, which our spirit-being needs as badly as our physical body needs air, water and food.

"Thus, in our looking outward and paying attention to who and what is out there, we not only get truly connected with our fellow human beings—it is amazing how isolating self-absorption can be!—in an intimate, respectful and honoring way, but we also get intimately connected with the very alive, grounding and nurturing world of this living Earth . . . and all of Nature. And of course, the Ocean of Spirit! Self-importance, and it concomitant self-absorption, becomes like the spiritual equivalent of one of those bell jars that those heartless scientists used in their early experiments designed to figure out the components of air—and the importance of oxygen!—in which they enclosed mice and patiently watched them suffocate and die."

John also stressed—re-stressed, for the umpteenth time, is more like it!—the spiritual energy that our fellow human beings give off from their spirit-beings, and that spiritual energy—of the Ocean of Spirit—which permeates—which is!—all of living Nature, is the oxygen our spirit-beings need in order to spiritually breathe and thrive—which sure makes that dark, claustrophobic vision of this Earth becoming one global, machine-dominated, indoor mall—a Coruscant!—more frightening and oppressive than ever!

All of which reminds me of a book I read a couple of years ago . . . I'm going to pry myself out of this chair and see if I can find it in the chaos of my bookshelves. . . .Yup—puff! puff!—I'm back and I found it! It's a book by a wise, aging hippie with the aristocratic name of Stephen Harrod Buhner, titled The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature. And yeah—what a title! But all his books have comet-tail titles like that. And he's so fucking smart and well-read that reading them is a real mental comet-ride that kinda makes you feel like the Earth (putatively)—felt after being (putatively)—Velikovsky-smacked by Venus when it was (putatively)—an errant comet that had been ejected from Jupiter! (Yup—just like that warrior-goddess Athena from the forehead of Zeus!)

Actually, and most interestingly, I only have this book because I Amazoned it after finding another, more recent book of his in Chapters, that book also with the comet-tail title of, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception and the Imaginal Realm, which is such a "trip" that any reader with my limited, drug-booze-age-and-brain-lightning-addled intelligence needs to read at least three times before beginning to understand it—and I've only read it once so far. (And aha—I just discovered, while leafing through the Introduction to it, that this is the book where—waaaaaaaaaaaaay back—I mentioned I'd found that anecdote about Kubler-Ross telling the anecdote about that Holocaust survivor who said every single one of us had a Hitler buried deep in our psyche!)

But it was full of truly valuable, insightful and revelatory stuff for a loon like me (I wish the noggin-mechanics at the head-shop saw loonacy the way he did!) that he put near its end and which had to do with schizophrenia, paranoia, self-caretaking, sensory-overload and gating channels, which I won't get into here, though I will mention two great quotes that I found heading the Bibliography section that John would have loved: The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education, by Genius Albert (that vile, dangerous "Commie" on McCarthy's fascist, watch-closely-for-traitorous-activities list, and Paul Krugman's, The problem with digital books is that you can always find what you are looking for, but you need to go to a bookstore to find what you aren't looking for.

That first quote by Einstein truly sums up why John was such a shit-disturbing thinker, since he had virtually no formal education (I don't think grade 3 or 4 counts as an appreciable amount of formal schooling!) to interfere with his learning of all those rare trees of profound truths that are usually hidden from the educated by the thick forest undergrowth of their formal indoctrinations by our schooling systems. And their too many unimaginative and boring teachers—like yours-fuckin' truly!

And the second is truly profound because the whole digital "thing"—which of course is all part of that outrageous, though plausible, "machine invasion/enslavement" hypothesis of John's—cuts out that "library angel" as an active force in furthering and enhancing our true education. And even Jupiter Jung would have appreciated the synchronicity of me finding my attention strangely drawn to that book hidden in a bunch of others on a bottom shelf in Chapters, and while leafing through it, finding my attention equally drawn to Krugman's quote! It was that quote that provoked me to buy the book.

John told me no end of stories about important and essential things he learned from books that he "stumbled across" in very synchronistic fashions—though none more dramatic than that Velikovsky nightmare "falling" off a shelf right behind him!—and needless to say, I feel a kind of gut-wrenching dismay that The Fire—and this bucket of dog-barf of a "Preface,"—in being published solely as digital books, will not be available to the "library angel" to bring to people's attention in strange and unusual ways in bookstores, new and used, and of course, libraries. (But better a self-published digital book that somebody—however rare!—can read, than no physical book that obviously nobody can, because as sure as Mad King Donald loves lying and fucking porn stars—and lying about fucking porn stars!—no publishing house is going to be interested taking a chance on putting The Fire—or this bucket of dog-barf of a FUBAR "Preface!"—into physical print.)

But back to that first comet-tailed book by Buhner I was yakking about. Amongst a lot of other important and insightful and mind-challenging stuff in it, (about our heart as a kind of brain, and a lot more besides!) was his use of an interesting metaphor to explain some very complex stuff in cells, which I never quite got, though I did find a more personal use for the great metaphor he used, which had to do with a woman driving her car on a long distance trip to visit her daughter and lucking upon a great radio station she loved listening to, except, as we all know, if the car keeps moving, the radio station inevitably goes out of range, and as it does, first the music starts breaking up and fading out, then all you get is static. As Buhner wrote,

Part of the problem is that the radio itself is interfering with the signal from the radio station. As the radio signal grows weaker, the electromagnetic emissions that the radio components produce begin to get strong in relation to the signal. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is approaching 1; that is, the radio signal and the electronic noise in the radio are becoming equal in strength.

He then goes eruditely on for a few paragraphs about the peaks and troughs of waves being higher when the signal is strong, lower . . .blah, blah, boring . . .until,

As the SNR approaches 1, the peaks and troughs begin to decrease more and more, getting closer to the random electric (background) noise of the radio itself. The information (the music) contained in the peaks and troughs begins to be lost. . . . And though the signal is still there, it is hidden under the noise of the system itself.

Yeah, I eff'n know—that's as boring as baby barf on the back of your blouse or shirt, but I got quite an intuitive, insightful rush while reading it, not only because John had once used a similar to demonstrate a different point, but because I saw it as a perfect metaphor for self-importance, self-absorption and self-centeredness, and its relationship to mental health—my own, obviously! For if there is one thing John always preached was the need to keep our attention off of ourselves and focused on the world outside of ourselves if we wanted to be mentally healthy. In fact, he related to me an interesting anecdote about just how he truly learned that lesson, which had to do with his last months on his ranch when he was really depressed and so totally "fucked up" he could barely function, which of course was something I could not even remotely imagine him ever being, so I had to—then—skeptically take his words for it. (He describes that state and the conditions that brought it on more most uncomfortably vividly—for the reader—at the climax of Book I of The Fire!)

What transpired to create the notable incident was that while he was hammering staples into a fence post to replace some barbed wire that a moose had walked through it like it wasn't even there, and because of the depressed and distracted state he was in, he gave his thumb a hard hit—for the third time that morning!—instead of the staple. As he described it, "I'd already given that poor thumbnail two moderately good whacks in the half hour of so distractedly working on that fence, so it was already swollen and blackening and sore as hell and the pain from that third whack was not only almost unendurable, but the shame of hitting it three times in one day was totally so! And as usual. when things didn't go my way in those days, the shame and the pain launched me into a an explosive fit of rage (I can most readily attest to his capacity for explosive throw-the-stupid-slut-in-the-shit rage!) that provoked me to curse a blue streak as I blindly flung that hammer as far as I could into the tall grass on the other side of that fence.

"After hopping around and cursing for about five minutes, the pain from that third whack plus all that blood welling up under my nail drove me to the garage to drill a hole in that nail to let the blood out,

and after scrounging up a pair of pliers to hold those staples with—which I should have done after the first whack!—so I wouldn't hit that poor nail a fourth time, I was ready to get back to that fencing job, except before I could do that, I had to find that damn hammer. Since I wasn't paying attention to where I was flinging it in my blind rage, I only had a general idea of where it had landed, and it took me a good half hour of careful, observant searching through those grasses and weeds before I finally found it. And by the time I eventually did, and finally got back to that fence to recommence working, I realized that I—if not my poor thumb!—was feeling better than I had in days!

"And what brought about that temporary cure of my very negative and debilitating state was that since I wasn't going to find that hammer in the black swamp-muck of my head where I'd been spending almost all my dark, depressed time, but in that sunlit field of grasses and weeds—and a lot of interesting bugs!—I really had to pay attention to that field of grasses and weeds. I was forced to get out of my head and into the world and do some serious and concentrated outward looking in order to find that hammer. And to this day I will say that is the best—and probably only—recipe, for mental health."

And I can still most vividly remember him telling that story then stopping a moment before laughing and saying, "I mean, looking outward is the best recipe for mental health, not hammering on your thumbnail! Three stupid times! Though you know, when that inner pain gets too bad, maybe that what it really takes is a good whack on the thumb with a hammer, which strangely enough, is usually a more preferable and endurable pain to that damn inner pain." (I hear ya, John! I hear ya! I once, Dear Reader, broke both the back and front covers of a hardcover book by desperately, frantically and repeatedly smashing the thing against my forehead violently enough that the physical pain from that frantic and desperate act overrode the spiritual pain that at that time was devouring my soul—spirit-being—like it was a sparrow being devoured by a cat! Needless to say, my forehead was sore as hell—and red and swollen!—for a week afterwards, but that desperate, violent, painful act probably kept me from melting down completely and being hauled off in a special "white tux" for a complete "engine" re-build at the head-shop.)

Alas, even with that diamond of "Cowboy John" wisdom in my possession—and a hammer that I never found the gumption to use on my thumbnails, however much needed . . . though of course, that's what bouts of head-lightning are all about, aren't they? . . . I never practiced what he preached very well, nor truly understood the psychological "mechanics" behind it at all, but I did achieve a partial, and very nebulous understanding of it on reading those words of Buhner's. About the radio having an electronic internal-noise signal of its own that the exterior signal from the radio station had to overcome before the radio could "manifest" the music on that station.

Same with us!—if we indulge in too much self-importance, self-absorption, and self-centeredness, we are essentially turning up our own internal "noise" until it gets so strong and loud that we can no longer pick up the "radio stations" of the world around us. We become totally ungrounded, totally cut off from the necessary, sensible, "music" of consensus/ordinary reality, and especially of the physical world which both sustains and grounds us, and we get totally lost in the relentless, devouring, nonsensical static of our own compulsive thoughts and their resultant—usually paranoid—delusions. We go insane! Like the original, genius-level college professor Pirsig whom the still-pretty-damn-smart motorcycle-riding Pirsig in ZAMM described getting swallowed up by his OCD—and his utterly futile—quest to understand and define the incomprehensible and indefinable "Quality," an activity that drove him stark, silent, and pants-pissing catatonic!

So it's no small wonder both the maybe-real Don Juan and the definitely-real Cowboy John preached a necessary, intentional and disciplined—willful!—control of one's self-importance, self-absorption and self-centeredness through an equally intentional and disciplined program of getting out of our heads and into the absolutely alive world around us!

I was then, and still am now, quite capable of understanding the life-and-sanity aspects of paying attention to, and connecting with, our fellow human beings in meaningful relationships, (that's what my stay in the Shrink-Klink and all those conversations with Warden Booger were all about!—but back then, and still now, I am still somewhat at a loss to totally and rationally understand the notion that the same can be said about the material world, especially in its role of keeping our psychological signal-to-noise-ratio above ONE.

But of course, I know from experience that this is true, especially as the hallmark of my manic, slippery-slope-to-insanity state is excessive self-importance, self-centeredness and self-absorption—and of course, the GRANDIOSITY that goes with it!—but I don't know why it is true. Well, fuck-a-truck!—of course I don't know why it is true—who the fuck do I think I am: Carla Jung? GRANDIOSITY, thy name is Rachel! In truth I doubt anyone can truly know the answer to that, but then, if you are riding in an airplane you don't have to understand the physics of how that airplane's wings so mysteriously create the lift that keeps that damn contraption in the air (I hate flying!) for it to safely keep you there. In fact, I still can't grasp the concept, even though Jonathan re-explains it every time he flies here to visit me. (Not all his visits are to lasso the wayward cow of his mother and wrangle her back onto the Meds-Rez!)

And I think John said pretty much the same thing about the many things he talked about that I couldn't rationally understand. Over and over again he'd patiently remind me that life, as its core, is a "Big-M" mystery and that there are fundamental things about it that can never be rationally explained by the very limited rational mind and very limited rational thought-processes of any human being, but which can only be intuitively understood and limitedly worked with by that somewhat less limited faculty of the human imagination. And even that statement baffled the crap out of me, but it was just more of the same-old/same-old stuff he said back then that often flew so high over my head it was like he was whispering his wisdom from the summit of Mount Everest and I was trying to hear him while the riding rapids on the Colorado River at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

And that was all in the face of the fact I knew from personal experience exactly what he was talking about, especially concerning the downside of indulging in excessive self-importance, for I could never not be aware that when my manic states ramped up, so also equally, and disastrously, did my self-absorption and self-centeredness (I wonder which came first) and always, when in those obsessive, self-drowning states, I was equally in a downward spiral to a total loss of control. (Ah—a perfect metaphor: I can too easily see myself, sugar-junkie that I can be, overdosing on ice cream, pop and milk-chocolate and while feeling ever sicker and sicker with each mouthful, trying to make myself feel better by shoveling ever more and more of that damn stuff into my insatiable mouth. And expanding gut!) And never, in those states, did I—or could I!—feel good about myself or my life—any more than one of those experimented-upon, suffocating mice feel good about its life in that Bell jar, no matter how much deep breathing or breathless writhing it did—for as long as it could—while trying to alleviate its incomprehensible-to-it discomfort.)

John said that one of the hallmarks of the so-called "primitive" cultures, when still living in their natural conditions and preserving their ancient ways, was that they were always whole, healthy and spiritually connected because the very demands of their survival meant they had to pay incredibly close attention to the world around them that both constantly threatened them and provided their sustenance and shelter. Attention to their fellow human beings for necessary communal harmony; attention to the sky for the weather; attention to the ground and its plants and animals and insects for food and medicine and safety; attention to other animals for safety—see the tiger before it sees and eats you!—for clothing and shelter; attention to the nature spirits for companionship and guidance in their hunts and lives and plant-medicine help; and attention to their ancestral spirits in order to fulfill their duties and divine their fates.

He laughed unusually loud when he said, "You sure wouldn't make a very good tiger-tracker if, while you were tracking the tiger through dense jungle, you let yourself get self-absorbed by self-important thoughts about how you were going to impress your relatives and friends with the fancy robe you were going to make out of that tiger skin. And just as any fool stupid enough to do that would 'enjoy' wearing that tiger robe while it still belonged to the living tiger, then end up as the pile of tiger-shit they deserved to be, we have turned our lives, and this planet, into a great big stinking heap of tiger-shit by turning away from the world and allowing ourselves to get lost in the absurd, absorbing, utterly insane, and ultimately self-destructive fantasy that we are the powerful and clever masters of it—and in being its masters, thus separate from, and above it!"

And suddenly, as his long-ago words clickity-clacked through my mind like a speeding express train, I finally really saw the true nature of the madness of our modern, "inorganic being-invaded," mechano/techno-world for what it truly was, and why we were so hell-bent on destroying our precious "Spaceship Earth" that we absolutely need in a healthy state—or more accurately, allowing our monster corporations to destroy it through their greed-grasping after the wealth so readily available to them in their pandering to our own greed-grasping for suburbo-fields of resplendent McMansions (instead of fields of crops!) with swimming pools, triple-garages and driveways clogged with monstrous and uber-luxurious motor homes, gas-guzzling SUVs, monstrous 4x4 trucks, and fleets of PWCs (personal water crafts), not to fail to mention flat-screen TVs almost as big as drive-in screens, and other ever-evolving and uber-addictive techno-gizmos, toys, and distractions. And we absolutely need our "Spaceship Earth" to be whole and healthy no less than has every astronaut ever launched into space absolutely needed their "Major-Tom-tincan-capsules" whole and healthy for their survival.

Ironically, John had few pictures on the walls of this small house when he lived here, but right in the kitchen, above the table we used to sit at for our too-rare "philoso-chats," he had a framed poster of that famous "Earthrise" photograph taken by astronaut Anders during the 1968 Apollo 8 moon mission. (It is still there, though getting faded and needing replacement!) If you are not familiar with it, Google it, because it is surely the most stunning and beautiful photograph ever taken. Ever! It shows our bright, fragile, three-quarter, blue-and-white marble of a planet rising over a stark and lifeless lunar wasteland while looking like it is being swallowed up by the vast, pitch-black Void-Monster of inter-planetary space.

John often pointed to that picture while we were talking about these things, more than once saying, "Look how small and fragile it looks! . . . This picture serves really well to remind us that we are all astronauts on a long space voyage in a very fragile spaceship that is all that stands between us and our utter annihilation in that vast void of space around it, and yet we treat it like it's a soccer ball we can kick around for our amusement and profit. Everybody on this planet should have one of those posters on their kitchen walls—or better yet, tattooed on their foreheads!—just so they can never forget its true beauty . . and fragility . . . and value! And that it is a frail spaceship on a long voyage through the cold and annihilating vastness of space!"

And though back then I didn't think about it much, but now, with global warming so hotly breathing down our necks—especially this summer when its searing breath is blasting down the necks of California, British Columbia—and even Europe!—where monstrous wildfires are being touted as the new, "summer norm!"—even as the two and a half billion people in China and India want their fair share of the American Dream-pie with all the attendant and catastrophic and unsustainable resource-depletion and industrial- and auto-pollution that goes with that dark, damning and planet-raping nightmare, I now find myself thinking about it a lot.

And think—all on my own, for once!—all about our collective and out-of-control ego-mania, our collective and out-of-control self-importance, our collective and out-of-control self-centeredness, our collective and out-of-control self-absorption, and our collective and out-of-control greedomania—aka The American Dream-cum-Nightmare!—that has raised the volume of our collective and out-of-control inner-static so high that it has become a deafening and mind-obliterating roar that has caused us to lose all true awareness of what we are really doing and the implications for the future ability of this small, beautiful, and ever-so-fragile, "Spaceship Earth" to remain an integral organism healthy enough to sustain our ever-burgeoning population and our catastrophically-burgeoning machine-driven and machine-enhanced demands on it. As Buhner writes,

When the SNR . . . approaches 1, the oscillatory wave of the signal begins to be immersed in the noise. And though the signal is still there, it is hidden under the noise of the system itself.

We, as a species, have, in surfing the catastrophic shit-tsunami of the American Dream-cum-Nightmare—very likely only made possible by that Invasion of the Inorganics!—collectively gone egomaniacally insane. As more than a few, wiser-than-me experts on the subject have already as futilely said, "Spaceship Earth" is now but a giant space-capsule-cum-lunatic-asylum being run by its raving horde of inmates who think it's cool to use the capsule's walls as target backdrops for shooting their assault rifles at. This horde of crazy and out-of-control inmates, when it is not blasting this fragile "capsule-Earth" of ours all to hell, is running it down to a state of utter unrepairability.

It is a deranged horde that in its self-absorbed and insatiable egomania—and perhaps in the delusive grip of an inorganic being invasion and occupation—has driven the SNR so far below that crucial threshold of "1" that it is totally lost in its own, self-made, over-machine-amplified mental and physical noise, and I wonder if we can collectively ever again hear the "signal" of the true knowledge and wisdom of this living planet, of "Spaceship Earth," loudly enough to stop our crazed and mindless destruction of it.

I mean, fuck!—but we sure don't need a comet or asteroid to bring about our final days on this planet, though compared to what I fear will be our long, insane, hungry, thirsty, violent and self-induced, Lord of the Flies-end through the looming incapacity of this planet to sustain our reckless, greedy and vandalizing demands on it, a comet or asteroid strike would be a blessing—a bullet to the head instead of a long battle with a terrible, painful and progressively wasting colon cancer of the out-of-control American Dream-cum-Nightmare!

### Chapter Thirty Two

Now where the hell was I when all that stuff showed up? . . .Oh, wow!—I actually do remember! And that is even spookier! I was running-off-at-the-keyboard on the subject of truly seeing the world, and on that subject John also made the interesting point that the reason why we revere painters so highly is because they don't just look at the world the way the average person does, but they intentionally see it, and then, in their paintings, capture what they so clearly saw, thus forcing us—or at least trying to!—to likewise see what they saw. Or at least selected slices of it.

John didn't own any original paintings, and only had two framed prints on his walls—besides the unframed Earthrise poster in his kitchen—both of those by the naturalist painter, Robert Bateman, and both western wilderness paintings, one being the picture of a grizzly tromping through a shallow river while surrounded by squawking gulls, and the other of an eagle landing on its nest. (I love them as much as he did, and they still hang where he originally hung them—though the walls have been painted several times since.). He obviously had a passion for Bateman's work because he had several coffee table books of his painting in his collection and they were worn as hell. He seemed to have particularly loved those realist-type painters because he also had several books by Andrew Wyeth and Alex Colville.

Actually, I am wrong! He owned three framed prints. He also had a framed Colville print on his bedroom wall opposite his bed, which—omen-ously?—fell off the wall a few years ago, smashing the glass and frame, and which I haven't gotten around to getting reframed, so the print lies at the bottom of the bottom drawer of the bureau where I store spare blankets. You surely know the painting—that eerie, disturbing one of a horse galloping down a track towards an on-rushing steam train, (if you don't know it, Google it—Horse and Train, it's called) which, I guess, should not have been too big a surprise given his love of horses and an early life doing almost all his traveling on steam trains. Ironically, as you will see in The Fire, (particularly in Book Two) that picture represents a perfect symbol of his essentially futile, lifelong hatred of, and opposition to Constantine's Imperial Abomination, which being the dark, powerful, indestructible and charging-through-history iron-souled monster that it is, will always be, to any individual who opposes it, like that "iron horse" to any real horse mad enough to suicidally charge down the tracks towards it.

In fact, his active, stubborn, obsessive and passionately oppositional attitude towards that dark, violent, fascist institution was always a big bone of contention between us, for though I hated it as much—maybe even more!—than he did, my attitude to it was a lot like the attitude of the people of Lake-town—in The Hobbit—to the dragon Smaug dwelling in the nearby mountain, which was a leave-it-alone/don't-wake-the-fucker-up attitude. Or, to be copacetic with the metaphor in Colville's dramatic painting, an attitude of: if-you-stay-off-the-tracks-and-out-of-its-way-it-can't-hurt-you—and then you can then pretty much forget about its existence!

Alas, John's attitude towards it was definitely one of those unhealthy, monomaniacal, idée fixe, which kept him constantly "between the rails," and relentlessly and futilely charging at it. Though he did once say that my placate-and-forget attitude towards that nefarious monster of an institution is too much like this Western world's still-ongoing attitude towards it, which he was sure had given that fascist political monster (that so cleverly and cynically propagandizes itself as a spiritual religion!) the incredible power that it once so disastrously had over all of Europe—and which it still so nefariously wields in Third World countries—especially South America.

And—as far as he was concerned!—that placate-and-forget attitude of mine (and this world's!) has left me (and this world!) with such disastrously weak sense of self and self-autonomy, because, as far as he—and many others, particularly Edmund Burke—are concerned, when we do not constantly and actively fight every tyrannical and fascist evil that oppresses us, we allow that evil to steal—or corrupt!—the best of us. Our spirit-being! And to that he added, "If you want one single words to describe the dark, self-destructive state of the world today, it is that it is utterly soulless! Utterly dispirited! And yes, that's two words, but if you want a three-word phrase that I think would more accurately sum up the problems of our world today, it is that it now has a soul-of-shit!"

And though back then I disagreed with his assessment, of both myself and the world, especially the notion that "the world" could be suffering from a weak sense of self and self-autonomy, but he got more than a little agitated about that as he sarcastically said, "Come on, Rachel!—for countless thousands of years human beings survived, even thrived, on this planet without the aid of complex and destructive machines and institutions—no trains, planes, trucks, cars, guns, tanks, atom bombs or Departments of Defense or Catholic Churches!—because they knew exactly what they were as organic beings with a spirit-being at the center of their consciousnesses. And knew, just a surely, the fundamental role this living Earth played in keeping them alive.

"For thousands and thousands of years we knew exactly what we were and we knew we were as valuable to this living Earth as, first of all, its elemental components of sky, water, rocks, fire and nature spirits, and second, but no less important, all the living, organic systems that existed and thrived because of those elemental components. We, as a species, back in those distant days, could not even have conceived of the notion of not being an integral and essential part of this living Earth—and the living Cosmos that this Earth was just as much an essential and integral part of!—no different, in our essential, organic symbiosis with it, than wolves with the forest, bison with the prairies, or whales with the ocean. We never, back then, even had the capacity to entertain the notion that we were not an integral and essential part of it all! We never even had the capacity to question our value to this planet or doubt that we should be here!

"Now look at us! We are ravaging pack of arrogant, insane, Earth-hating, Earth-destroying egomaniacs who, through that dark necromancy of the Priests and Bishops of the Religion of Materialist Science, have—in one way of looking at things!—opened the doors full wide to a world of machines and inorganic beings that are not just aiding us, but inducing us, to destroy the organic essence of this planet.

"And why do we so willingly allow this catastrophe to happen? Solely because of Constantine's very evil, Imperial Abomination, with its evil hierarchy of clergy that put all the 'good' in this universe up in a distant, transcendent 'heaven' dominated by that transcendent and infinitely superior, anthropomorphized-fiction, the harsh, malicious and always judging and condemning, Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy who dictated to us—his pathetically 'imperfect' creation—that our organic natures and our organic planet was not only inferior to that transcendent 'heaven' and every entity in it, but was both worthless and evil compared with that transcendent 'heaven'! So worthless and evil that both it, and we, as part of it, could be viewed as fallen creatures, as fundamentally debased and evil entities!

"I mean, think of it Rachel!—without this Earth and what it provides for us to not only exist here, but to thrive, we would not exist at all. Yet that insane and evil Imperial Abomination of Constantine's pulled off one of the biggest and most pervasive cons in the history of humanity on this planet by convincing hundreds of millions of its utterly credulous sheep for so many hundreds of years that the very realm that both makes our existence possible and sustains it, is fallen . . . is evil! I mean, can't you see the incredible evil, the incredible insanity, of that point of view.

"A point of view that basically taught millions of child-credulous sheep-people on this material world, that this very planet that makes their existence possible was nothing but a worthless, vile, evil pile of shit and corruption, and that only the other world, the 'heaven' our weak and born-corrupted 'soul'—created, so inconceivably imperfectly, by that omniscient, omnipotent Paragon of Anthropomorphized Perfection, Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy!—might get back to—but only if we lifelong live to please this Paragon of Anthropomorphized Perfection by following all of Constantine's Imperial Abomination's ten thousand fascist and dogmatic rules about pleasing that ultimately unpleasable, Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy!

"And in those teachings about that transcendent, valued, and ever-promised, phantom-carrot-on-a-phantom-stick 'heaven.' was also the explicit teaching in that infernal Bible—which Shakespeare so wisely claimed even the devil could use for his own purposes!—that his concededly imperfect creation—born as it imperfectly was in a state of 'original sin!'—should have 'dominion over' this earth and all its living creatures, which, given our endemically imperfect, 'original sin'-natures, acknowledged that if we wreaked havoc to this fallen and evil world it was of no consequence.

"So that is what we have done! We have systematically turned it into a hell infinitely worse than that ridiculous one Dante envisioned for our naturally sinning 'souls' as their after-death punishment for not exactly following those ten thousand fascist and dogmatic, Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy-pleasing rules dictated by Constantine's tyrannical, Imperial Abomination as the requisite, admission ticket for our entrance into that Grand Carnival of 'Heaven'!

"And if things weren't bad enough when that Imperial Abomination of Constantine's was just 'the Church' playing out its nefarious and very Byzantine political hegemony ploys and machinations behind the smokescreen of an often totally ersatz—though often just plain childish!—spirituality, now that it has 'Frankensteined' into its obverse, its complement, the Religion of Materialist Science, with its powerful cadres of self-righteous and dogmatic Priest-scientists and its dominating and damning 'this-world-is-dead-matter-and-only-good-for-exploiting-for-all-its-worth' attitude that has allowed it to become every bit as much a dark and evil and fascist force that Constantine's Imperial Abomination has for so long been, while being, with its exponentially increasing capacity to channel inorganic beings and their machines—and their increasingly violent, destructive, and evolution-accelerating wars!—into this world, has become the most lethal-to-our-survival-on-this-planet institution in recorded human history!"

(I still remember the first time he'd made that bizarre assertion that our modern "Science" was the obverse, the complement, of the coin of the Catholic Church, and on asking him to explain what he meant by that absurd assertion, he went into a long, obviously long-thought-about and most definitely inspired "pontification"—that I could barely follow!—about how in "Ancient Times," philosophy, religion, and science were all, "quite naturally" contained in one, copacetic discipline. "But then," he said. "Along came Constantine's Imperial Abomination, which, because its very existence depended on its brain-dead, child-credulous sheep-adherents having blind faith in childish stories, philosophy and science had to be dumped in the privy of the 'workings of the devil' and covered over with the lime of 'the Church's holy, infallible wisdom.'

"But then, during the Renaissance, when some European minds managed to float their way to the surface the Le Brea Tar Pit of the infernal, fascist, stupidity-founded dogma of that Imperial Abomination of Constantine's, fight their way free of it, and use their brains for something besides skull-filler and the memorizing mythical tales in 'Holy Scripture,'—which when taken literally could often be to ridiculous and irrational for even young children to take seriously!—that threatened the mental and spiritual—as well as the political—hegemony of Constantine's Imperial Abomination, which caused it to unleash the dire wolves of its proto-Gestapo Inquisitors to gobble them up and silence them.

"This all done, of course, in the name and service of Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy! But those early, naturalist thinkers—scientists!—could not contain their driven need to use their big, neo-cortex for thinking about the nature of the world around them, calling the body of knowledge they were gleaning about it, science. And so powerful was this need to think about the nature of life, to develop their science, that they continued to do it even against the violent, murderous, and very fascist opposition of Constantine's Imperial Abomination, and the predations of those dire wolf-Inquisitors—those blood-and-terror-thirsty precursors of Hitler's Gestapo!—it unleashed upon them. A vicious unleashing that that cost more than a few of them their lives—at the stake!

"Bruno was but one of the more famous ones that got Inquisitor-incinerated, and that brilliant genius, Galileo, the father of experimental science, just barely escaped a similar fate! So in the minds of those early scientists, their science took on an identity of being the polar—and opposing!—opposite of the sticky, bubbling, boiling tar pit of Constantine's Imperial Abomination's superstition-based, dogshit-dogma, and its ravenous, dire wolf-Inquisitors bent on fulfilling the imagined desires and dictates of that Church's antithetical-to-intelligent-thought-and-living-life god, Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy!

"It seems to me to be an obvious psychological—and spiritual!—fact that when something comes into existence in provoked opposition to, and active rebellion against, an oppressive, fascist force, its own nature is determined and dominated by—and often made, not only exactly like, but more extreme than!—the nature of that force it had to fight against for its survival and independence. I think the Russian Revolution proves my point on that account, where the Communist leaders and the Politburo became the new Czars and Imperial Court of Russia, with Stalin out-Czaring the worst of all the Czars!

"Not that the American Revolution didn't suffer the same fate, replacing the rule of a mad English king and wealthy, powerful 'nobles' with a king-like president and wealthy, powerful, corporate robber-barons. So our modern, Religion of Materialist Science, in having to rebel as it so desperately did against the totalitarian fascism of the Religion of Constantine's Imperial Abomination, became the obverse, the complement, of the poisonous lead coin of that vile, totalitarian, fascist institution.

"And since that mindless and fanatical Imperial Abomination rose out of the muck of an Empire full of religious sects—many very gnostic and very spiritual!—and due to Emperor Constantine's cynical, power-obsessed, and intentional use of the most fanatical and fascist—and gnosis-averse!—of those many sects as a convenient political tool—a crutch!—needed to solve his dire political and imperial needs, sent whatever remnants of true, Gnostic spirituality still remaining in that initially Gnostic sect into the privy—along with all philosophy and science. I mean, face it, where there is free, philosophical thinking and true scientific exploration, the poison ivy of a fanatical and fascist religious institution based on blind, child-credulous, sheep-compliant faith, cannot thrive!

"And of course, when those Renaissance-emerging scientists used their keen, rationality-honed minds to salvage science from that cesspit, they naturally left all spirituality and philosophy—and Catholic superstition!—behind because all notions about spirituality—and all ersatz philosophical thinking!—had become totally dominated by Constantine's Imperial Abomination's dogshit-dogma about pleasing and placating the unpleasable and implacable Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy! Thus in equating all spirituality with the unpleasable and implacable Nobodaddy . . . and 'his' very political and very violent and murderous and fascist and ruthlessly totalitarian 'Church' created by the violent, murderous, and ruthlessly totalitarian Constantine . . . and wanting absolutely nothing to do with all that nasty, irrational, and oppressively totalitarian . . . shit! . . . this new, emerging science turned its back completely on all spirituality . . . and philosophy, because the two exist in a necessary symbiosis!

"So it can be no surprise that when those Renaissance thinkers rediscovered the power of rational thinking and the incredible power that the science they were creating with that rational thinking possessed—the power to explain the intricate and theretofore utterly mysterious workings of the natural world—and did so while hiding from the murderous, Gestapo-Inquisitorial gaze of Constantine's Imperial-Fascist Abomination—they not only greatly valued that very exciting and effective from of rational thinking, but they had to concomitantly denounce and discard, all of that fascist Abomination's superstitious, dogshit-dogma and sheep-controlling sacraments and its revered scriptures—which they'd been conned . . . had been bludgeoned . . . by the Abomination into believing was true spirituality—to as childish and nonsensical superstitions that could have no place in a system of rational thought.

"So to these rediscoverers of ancient, rational thought and thoughtful science, all notions of spirituality could only be but be darkly and negatively equated with Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy and the superstitious notions and violent, murderous, fascist agendas of Constantine's Imperial Abomination—and with its psychotic, heretic-burning, proto-Gestapo Inquisitors—and its need to preserve, at all costs, that power! . . . Actually, I think a very simple and direct metaphor for all this . . . very speculative . . . nonsense . . . of mine, is that Constantine's Imperial Abomination flushed the babies of true spirituality and philosophy . . . philosophy as philo-sophia—love of wisdom . . . into that foul cesspit of superstition, blind faith—childish credulity!—and dogshit-dogma, and when those rational thinkers of the emerging science emerged and had to pump out that foul and over-flowing cesspit into the 'honey-wagon' of their empiricism-based 'philosophy,' they pumped out the 'babies' of spirituality and true, philo-sophia philosophy along with it.

"A small wonder it is then, that all things that even hinted at being connected to this form of 'spirituality'—meaning mindless, abject, bended-knees slave-to-king worship of Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy and Sonny Boy Jesus—being fascist-fed to the 'civilized world' by Constantine's Imperial Abomination, were anathema to these rational thinkers and their new science and forthwith boiled out of it—like bacteria out of pasteurized milk! So now we have two monstrous fascist forces dominating our world: Constantine's Fascist Totalitarian Abomination, which continues to milk the gullible, childish, mindless, credulous, sheep-compliant side of human nature for its continued existence and enormous wealth and power, and which is still-spreading—like a lethal, viral disease!—and its opposing-clone, the even more powerful—and just as utterly bereft of all hints of spirituality and naturalist philosophy—Religion of Materialist Science, a religion so clone-similar to Constantine's Fascist Totalitarian Abomination, that any of its Scientist-Priests—the latter-day Brunos!—who try to explore parapsychological and transpersonal phenomena—and poor old Velikovsky!—quickly discover, is every bit as much of a fascist and totalitarian institutional religion as is Constantine's Imperial Abomination.

"It's a fascist and totalitarian religion that is just as quick to brand as heretics and subject to the Inquisition of censure, ridicule and the destruction of their careers, any of its members who think, and experiment, and theorize, outside of the expressed dogma of that religion. But for God's—Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy's—sake, don't ever quote me on this, because whoever you quote it to will laugh you right out of the room! Like happened to poor Velikovsky! . . . And no few others that I won't waste your time naming and explaining!"

Which of course, is something I just very foolishly did! So, Dear Reader, go ahead, laugh all you want! Velikovsky me right off the Web! Though because I still don't really understand what the hell he was going on about, I doubt I was able to "quote" him even remotely accurately.(Though, as the grunting, groaning, hard-squeezing bear who ate the crash-test-dummy eventually had to say, "Tough shit!")(That was one of Sprocket's many very imaginative sayings!)

Yikes, that was a long and distracting—and likely totally unfollowable!—fucking parenthetical diversion, so . . . back . . . . . to John's long, sarcastic and unusually emotional outburst about the role that the Religion of Materialist Science played in allowing those hypothetical inorganic beings to channel their very real machines and technologies—and uber-violent and destructive wars!—onto our planet, I will get back to me sitting there, in his homey, delightfully coffee-scented kitchen, listening to that "pontification," and on his seeing how intimidated, nervous—and probably pale!—I was beginning to look after enduring that intense and sarcastic outburst, he forcefully and visibly relaxed and softly added, "Or at least that's how I have very limitedly learned to see it over the years of my thinking and reading, and though I may in some ways be as wrong as I seem insane, I doubt I am in all ways! . . . Or at least I hope I'm not. Not insane, that is! I'm not the least bit worried about being wrong!"

Alas, I now can but daily, and horrifyingly witness the arrival of that frighteningly steep, "rocketing skyward" part of the exponential-growth curve of the hypothetical inorganic beings' machine "culture" that has occurred since John's death. Especially as the billions of people in China and India are quite naturally demanding their fair, very nightmarish share of "the American Dream." And just as especially, as it is accompanied by the computer and Web and iGizmo "Big Bang" that has also spread around the world in about the same length of time.

As no less has spread around the world—like that deadly Spanish Flu virus in 1918!—the Abrahamic religion-based terrorism that is being fueled and aided, not just by the physical, machine-medium of guns and bombs as plentiful and as easily acquired as nuts and bolts in a hardware store, but by the immaterial—but no less powerful and deadly medium—of the Internet, and its plethora of social media sites, all easily accessed through computers and iGizmos as plentiful and easy to acquire "as gonorrhea in a Tijuana whore house!" (Another of Sprocket's imaginative gems!)

And then of course, there is the ever-growing concern with the ever-more-hard-to-gainsay phenomena of global warming, which of course, is a direct result of that inorganic being/machine invasion—and our lack of wisdom to contain and restrain it!—all of which forces me to face the fact that in many respects John was right about his concern for these things. And even his assertion that though those inorganic beings might be but miasmas rising from the swamp of his aging mind, the machine "culture" that was dominating our modern world sure was not any sort of imaginary miasma! Especially in its ubiquity and the absolutely relentless way it was degrading and outright destroying our lovely and very living planet to the point where our spirit-beings, which he was a hundred percent certain did exist, could no longer live and thrive on it.

Fuck-an-ATV!—but if you are as tired of following these "noisy," off-the-main-road-and-into-the-bush digressions as I am of finding my way back to the main road after taking them, you must really be itching to deep-six this abomination of a "Preface!" So back to what I was keyboard-babbling—blogging!—about John and paintings. Much as he loved those realist painters, he no less had an eye for the Expressionists, particularly Renoir. He more than once referred to Renoir when talking about painters seeing the world so much better than the average person, especially with respect to light and color, and though he had no Renoir prints on his walls, he had an art book of paintings by Renoir that had been anything but ignored. And one painting that he made a point of showing me more than once, was "On the Terrace."

Google it, it's stupendous! It's the one with two girls—an older and younger one—sitting on a balcony, of which he said, "Just look at what he saw . . . and captured so well with nothing but paint—the colors! The light! And with such skill! And look at how he makes us—see!" Of course, at the time I didn't really see what he wanted me to, but I am slowly learning, and sometimes, when I get out that book and look at it, I get stunning—but extremely brief!—glimpses of what he always seemed to have seen so clearly in it.

(In working with John's memoirs, I also get stunning glimpses of how clearly John saw the world, if not while living the events of it, at least while so strangely reliving and writing about them. Of course, I sometimes get the feeling that the whole point of him writing his memoirs as he did, was to demonstrate how asleep he had been—as all of us usually are!—during the initial and disastrous living of his early years, and how it all suddenly so absurdly and disastrously looked once he "woke up," first to the world around him, then to the horrific and tragic fact of just how asleep he had been to perpetrate the follies he had, and wrote about it.

And he wrote about it using words and phrases every bit the equal to Renoir's bright dabs of colorful paint. . . . And, yeah—I know! The Buddha said the same damn thing about our need to "wake up" in order to truly be alive 2500 years ago, and even though a big institutional religion was created around him and his teachings about "waking up," I get the sense that few Buddhists have actually done so, preferring to pay lip service to the difficult, truly spiritual process of "waking up" while losing themselves in the easy "spirituality" of following the forms and dogmas of an institutional religion designed more to put people into a deeper sleep than to wake them up! (No different, as John once said, "Than with Christianity, which started out as a Gnostic process designed to help people 'wake up'—achieve gnosis!—about the Christ within them—their spirit-being!—but which got co-opted by Constantine's Imperial Abomination and devolved into an institutional program that eventually has served the consummately evil purpose of driving the whole goddamned world into a deeper sleep!")

Shit-on-a-short-stick!—but this poor, pathetic "Preface" is not only manifesting chaotically, but downright strangely—even occultly—because I suddenly find my mind, like an iron filing under the influence of a powerful magnet hidden under a floor (that magnet being my insanity) being drawn back to more of that damn Castaneda shit with the thought bull-bashing into my head—apropos, it would seem, of sweet-fuck-all!—back to a problem that Castaneda had with an important skill that Don Juan had been trying to teach him, which was to learn to see.

Castaneda—or so he writes—kept believing that this sorcerer-seeing that he was supposed to be learning was some enhanced form of normal, physical-eye seeing, when it was really, as John tried to explain it to me, a form of spiritual/imaginative-seeing, which is something the great genius-artists like Renoir and Monet and Da Vinci (he sure was seeing something else when he painted her—you know whom I mean!—famous smile!) just naturally did, with what they were able to see with that spiritual/imaginative ability being an aspect—a ripple, as it were—of the Ocean of Spirit, which they couldn't rationally understand but which they tried to convey in their paintings. And which made those paintings so instantly—and lastingly—great!

(That thesis of his certainly explained why some extremely technically proficient painters executed technically proficient paintings that ended up as unremarkable and forgettable as year-old newspapers, while seemingly technically crude painters like Gauguin and Van Gogh, painted masterpieces that still seem to "jump of the canvas" in ways that continues to snag our interest and rivet our attentions!)

And of course, me being the rationality-limited and literal-minded twit that I am, I kept trying to understand what John was talking about in terms the physical world and of the artist's physical eyes being able to see an enhanced, more accurate depiction of what was out there for all physical eyes to see, when the truth was that this seeing of Don Juan's that he was trying to teach Castaneda—and the seeing of Renoir's—was in truth our spirit-being's capacity to spiritually/imaginatively see aspects of that Fifth Dimension, of that Ocean of Spirit and then attempt the impossible by portraying it in a physical medium. . And sometimes, when I carefully study the paintings of great painters I get brief, firefly-flashes of insight-vision into what it is they actually saw—a glimpse of the Ocean of Spirit—and were trying to make us see.

Of course, as John vainly tried to explain to me, what they were actually seeing was the highly refined energy, the Consciousness—the Ancient Greek notion of Quality, that Professor Pirsig went insane trying to rationally define!—that comprises and constantly flows through the upper levels of that Ocean of Spirit, and whatever of that vision of that energy, that Consciousness, that Quality, they tried to portray in their paintings was, by the very limits of the process, bound to be a failure of sorts. But of course, never completely a failure because in looking at and studying those painting we can get brief, intuitive flashes of the true nature of their vision. He also commented that had Pirsig been an inspired painter and not a rationality-obsessed philosopher, he'd likely not have gone insane because where as such a rationality-obsessed philosopher wants to explain everything—even the "big "M" Mystery!—completely and rationally, any inspired painter would intuitively know that they are trying to paint a tiny facet of "the-impossible-to-paint" Mystery" and would be intuitively satisfied with portraying in their painting whatever glimpse of it they were able to intuitively get.

And once again, as always when I write about this stuff that eidetically manifests in my memory, I am doing so in quite a rote and mindless fashion, so if you, Dear Hypothetical Reader, can truly understand it, you are a hell of a lot smarter—and more conscious—than I am! Though while I am—once again, whether you like it or not—on the subject of my old bogeyman, Castaneda, and his even bigger bogeyman-teacher, Don Juan, I just may have to accept John's assertion that there might have existed a real-life Don Juan in those books of Castaneda's, for, as John several times said, not only did Don Juan constantly harp at Castaneda about the need to learn to see, he equally harped at him about the limitations and dangers of self-importance.

And as far as John was concerned—and which he so vainly tried to teach me!—there is such a deep, grounding, and unspectacular, and spiritual truth to what Don Juan kept harping about the dangers of self-importance, that he felt only a real Don Juan could have harped on them. Had Don Juan been a fictional creation of Castaneda's, John was certain that he, Castaneda, in being Carlos Castaneda, the famous and uber-important-to-his-many-readers, writer, would have written about more highfalutin and esoteric matters—just to impress his audience.

As you will—if you get around to reading it—discover in The Fire, all of the part of John's life where he mindlessly and somnambulantly committed the heinous deeds that necessitated the writing of his memoirs which became The Fire, was dominated and controlled by his excessive self-importance. This would explain why he responded to the notion of it so powerfully while reading Castaneda's books. It banged a great, big truth-gong in the center of his being! And why he was adamant that there was an inverse correlation between our self-importance and our ability to see aspects of that Ocean of Spirit, of that Fifth Dimension, even brief glimpses of which were so important to our properly living our spiritual lives. He said our self-importance was like the mirror-like coatings on the outer surface of some sunglasses, except in this case the coating was on the inside of the glasses such that when we tried looking outward at the world, all we were able to see was our own eyes—or more metaphorically, only what was important to the enhancement of our deified self-importance.

John, more than once and often vehemently said, that if we truly wanted to see the very real and important Ocean of Spirit behind this very distracting world of illusions and appearances, we had to get those glasses off! Great painters, he added—and likely all great artists, especially great poets—have always had their attentions turned more outward, towards the Ocean of Spirit, than inward on their tiny, trivial ego-selves, though after saying that he chuckled and said, "Whenever I see self-portraits by great artists—some of whom do a good number of them!—I can just see that they are trying to see—and capture—the essence of their spirit-being, of their Muse, that is allowing—or pushing them!—to see and capture, however imperfectly, their glimpses of that Ocean of Spirit. It becomes a bit like that eerie and very disturbing infinity created by two facing mirrors."

Yeah, no fucking kidding!—fucking eerie isn't even strong enough a word for that. Take two mirrors, set them up facing each other in such a fashion that your face is centered in the tunnel of infinitely receding mirrors—and meditate for awhile on what you are looking at. It doesn't take long before you feel like you are totally losing your grip on ordinary reality, as Castaneda called it. (Don't know if that term is original to him or something he borrowed—and don't give a shit!) And though this doesn't belong in this fucked-up "Preface" because it's about shit that happened after John died and has nothing to do with him, my manic fingers just want to type out that there's a plethora of stuff being written about Castaneda since his death, little of it good, less of it flattering, and all if it functionally confusing—which of course, is how Castaneda wanted people to relate to his life—even when he was alive. As the putative Don Juan taught him early on in his putative apprenticeship—if he wanted to become a sorcerer, he first had to erase his personal history.

(And that sure is a teaching—however putative—which very un-putatively drives home that I am not destined to be any sort of sorcerer, because this poor "honey-wagon" of a "Preface," which was supposed to all about John, is over-flowing with the reeking shit of my personal history!)

Especially interesting to read—for Castaneda-loathing me, anyway—was Amy Wallace's Sorcerer's Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castaneda, which chronicles her enslavement to a man so drowning in self-importance and megalomania that he allowed himself to become a power-corrupted, Manson-type (without, so far as we know, the Sharon Tate-type murders) cult-leader who eventually died—at not that old an age—of a cancer he refused to get proper, medical-science treatment for because he believed that he, as the great and powerful sorcerer-of-Oz, Carlos Castaneda, was above the need for it and could cure himself. NOT! All of which to me sounds like he was a manic-depressive (oh yeah, it's bi-polar now, isn't it, but "a festering thorn by any other name . . .") with severe delusions of grandeur who spent too much time off the Meds-Rez, definitely didn't practice what the putative Don Juan had "preached" to him, and was in need of having his obviously out-of-control world stopped so he could get off it! (Well, I guess Death, which Don Juan always told him to envisage as constantly hovering over his left shoulder, did just that, didn't it!)

Shit-on-a-really-short-stick!—look what I have just done! By again getting onto that damn Castaneda-carousel I have pretty much demonstrated—at least to my uber-addled self—the existence and truth of the very power—the Fifth Dimensional-influence!—in those books of which John harped about, and which had freaked me out so totally that first night so long ago, having done so regardless that I rationally consider Castaneda to have been a nasty little shit of a sham and a con artist not worth the spit that flies out of my mouth when I say his name! And yes—"Methinks this 'lady' (truly) doth protest too much"! (And for sure, as you, Dear Wearied Reader, will attest—keyboard-babbles way too fucking damn much!)

### Chapter Thirty Two

So, Dear Uber-patient Reader, with those ridiculous butterfly-flights-across-the-continent of off-topic excursions over, (Hey, like I've said: crazy is as crazy fuckin' does!) I will get back to the about-John theme of this poor, me-burdened "Preface," and re-apprise you of the very boring fact that, along with this farm and house and barn and sheds and vehicles, and of course, his very valuable collection of "vinyl" and veritable library of books, John also bequeathed to me—cursed on me!—a large, ugly, filthy, screwed-together plywood box with old chunks of hemp rope screwed to the ends to serve as handles.

It was filled with two large bundles of paper wrapped in black plastic garbage bags and taped waterproof-tight with grey duct tape. One of those bags containing the future, The Fire, (which you might actually get to read if I ever finish this "Preface" and Smashwords the poor thing into cyberspace!) Needless to say, the nature of that box showed how much he valued his memoirs for in constructing it he didn't even bother to buy a new sheet of plywood, but used pieces that had once been used for making concrete forms and which he'd likely scavenged from the dump.

It is interesting that, like nephew Frodo with dear old uncle Bilbo, niece-me knew that uncle John had been busying writing something over the last years of his life, because on the rare occasions when I dropped by unannounced (always when I was super-stressed about something and needed his broad shoulders to cry on!), he would be scooping up scribbled-on pages off the kitchen table and shoving them into a drawer. For some reason—probably because I felt I'd been invading his privacy by dropping in unannounced and was only too anxious to talk about the problems that had driven me there—I never asked him about what all that was about.

That is, until he had his near-fatal heart attack—while working on those "scribbles"—and had necessarily left a bunch of "scribble-pages" out on the kitchen table when he'd been rushed to the hospital. Most serendipitously, the only reason he hadn't died from that attack was because I'd had a really rare and powerful—for me!—intuition that something was really wrong with him, had rushed out of the school mid-class, drove like a mad-woman to his place, and found him unconscious on the floor beside the table—and his whining dog!

Needless to fucking goddamn say!—I'd been too stressed out by his hovering death to try and read any of it, and when, on a very tearful hospital visit I asked him about it, he just grinned a weak, heart-wrenching grin and mumbled out "Oh, that's nothing but poppycock! . . . I'm playing at being Churchill and trying to write out the long story of a war I fought, except unlike Churchill, I lost that damn war I am trying to write about! And of course, unlike Churchill, I can't write worth a damn so it is not something anyone will ever want to read."

I never again saw him writing anything and when, on cleaning this place out after his death, I'd not been able to find—anywhere in his effects—whatever it was he had been working on, I assumed that he'd given up on it after his heart attack and had burned what he'd written in his stove.

Which is what he used to often do with books he thought too ridiculous or shallow to remain in either his possession or existence, the most startling one being a compendium of Mark Twain's novels that he'd picked up at full price at the book store. I was with him when he made that purchase and he said he was doing it so solely to find out what Twain's great and lasting fame was all about. He only got halfway through it before "stoving" it with the comment: "As far as I am concerned, 'reports of his of his greatness have been greatly exaggerated.' (I didn't get that line until I came across Twain's humorous comment about erroneous reports of his death.) That old humbug had the talent to take up where Dickens left off but he wasted all that intelligence and talent on being clever and funny! . . . And on getting attention and money from audiences in lecture halls all over the world being clever and funny.

"As far as I am concerned, writers should hide away from the world and write, not roam the world as one-man travelling circuses. All his writings really are, is glorified money-making pap for spiritually shallow and intellectually toothless infants who think that laughing at the world's problems is the cure for them and not just a distracting placebo!" (Unfortunately, he didn't give himself the chance to get deep enough into the omnibus to read, A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court, which I know he would have loved and approved of, especially since it was about the negative effects of modern technologies on ancient, "enchanted" cultures, and as well, the fact that Constantine's Imperial Abomination plays an important—and negative—role in it.

I was visiting him when he "stoved" that book and his act of burning it shocked me as much as his comments about it. He often bought books he only partially read because he didn't like them, and he usually disposed of them by donating them to the library. Or just shoving them onto a shelf in his "library" and ignoring them. Though after reading his memoirs, I realized that probably what made him play Inquisitor with that book, and "Bruno-ing" it, was those tales about Huckleberry Finn. He for sure would have too easily seen in Huck waaaaaaaaaay too uncomfortably much of himself—both in Huck's wild, irrepressible and adventurous character—which I doubt bothered him very much—and his impoverished, shameful, raggedy-clothes-wearing, and chaotic childhood—which I am sure bothered him a great deal!)

Of course, since John had no formal education—no period of forced indoctrination, as he would have called it—he just read the books that interested him. And though he said he felt compelled to read many of them by a realm of higher spirits, he still would have read them without preconceptions about them, or any professor's "advice" on the preconceptions he should have about them. And thus made his seSlf-honest judgments of them without having a clue as to how he was supposed to judge them. Supposed to judge them, that is, according to normal, sanctioned, acceptably academic criteria, and thus he certainly didn't know he wasn't allowed to make such rash and negative judgments on a writer of such accepted and long-extolled literary genius and fame as Twain possessed.

But then I think it is safe to say that one of the great benefits of being an autodidact is you can think and say anything you want about anything that captures your interest, and though you can rarely get anyone to pay attention to you—and absolutely never be awarded a PhD in Autodictactism—or get a tenured professorship at Harvard in that discipline, you do get to live a life that, however financially impoverished and socially "basement," is not only absolutely your own, but is spiritually and intellectually free of the crippling levels of infantile sycophancy, of bovine thoughtlessness, of bloated self-importance (we know all about that, don't' we?) of glorified stupidity, of exalted bigotry, and of the mentally limiting and incarcerating indoctrination we educated types readily accept as the price of exalted degrees, big paychecks and penthouse social standing. And which, like the motorcycle riding/repairing Robert Pirsig wrote in ZAMM about his well-educated, college professor, certified-genius/certified "loonatic," former-self, we have to go insane to escape.

Actually, John and I talked about that very subject once and the fact that he'd educated himself so broadly over the years, but he Socratically refused to accept he was educated at all, claiming, that as far as he was concerned, formal education wasn't education at all, but indoctrination into a cultural and political system. As far as he was concerned, any true education had to be the drive and ability—and courage!—to lifelong attempt to see life as it truly is and try to think about it honestly without the distorting glasses of cultural biases, the compulsive and relentless gambits of self-aggrandizement and social gamesmanship, and the black smog of lies and deceits inherent to all attempts at acquiring social power.

And if you, Dear Weary Reader, are rightfully wondering how I can remember so well so much of what John said to me over the years, it is because—as I am sure I have likely most incongruously told you a half dozen times already—while there is something in my makeup that deprived me utterly of a capacity for deep, original and imaginative thinking, it was offset by—or caused by—the curse of a fantastic, eidetic long-term memory, which is why I couldn't "Sylvia Fraser" my father's abuse of me, and why I was able to accurately regurgitate on exams all the crap my professors jammed down my gullet during classes and thus I was able to easily get my Bachelor's degree in English Literature while yet being as essentially stupid and uncreative as the hippopotamus I am starting to look like. (No offense meant by that to the world of hippopotami, whose true intelligence I am not even remotely ken to.)

And if I have already bored you with that fact about my great, eidetic memory, I must add that obviously I have reached an age and level of booze, grass, and head-lightning brain-degradation that this curse of a fantastic memory is now limited to events and discussions in the distant past and that my short-term memory is now a colander with one giant hole in it!

John also said the biggest problem with what he was doing to "educate" himself, was it was like that wise old joke about the downside of doing nothing—you never know when you are finished. He laughing said that at least with that formal system of education/indoctrination there existed a sense of arriving at something resembling a goal, at an ending of sorts. Even if that goal was as shallow as the getting a couple of letters to attach to your name along with a fancy scroll pompously handed to you at a snobbish, family-cheering ceremony while you wore a ridiculous black robe and an even more ridiculous hat.

Self-learning, on the other hand, by its very nature, was infinitely open-ended. And on that account, I could not gainsay him, having gone through some of that system he'd had no use for—no access to, really—and seeing that when most students got their hard-worked-for B.A., or B.S. or M.A. or M.Ed or PhD—or whatthefuckever!—they'd attend a robe-and-funny-hat-wearing ceremony where a scroll would be handed to them attesting to the fact they were now duly and most superiorly educated—indoctrinated?—members of society, after which they packed all their text books away in boxes while assuming they'd done all the learning they had to do for this life and could now go out and "kick some serious butt" in the world.

Most students just get a B.A. or a B.S., while Master's degrees and the exalted PhD's were just more expensive versions of the same, especially that exalted PhD, which de facto and forever proved to the world—or at least the academic part of it!—that you were an uber-high achiever and true expert at . . . avoiding adult responsibility in the real world by spending your twenties as an wunderkind in the fantasy world of university.

John, who never even saw the inside of a high school, if you combined his life-experience, his broad curriculum of reading, and his compulsion to always be thinking, probably had the equivalent of ten PhD's—but no scrolls, no enstatusing letters after his name—nor the appellation Doctor before it—to advertise to the world that he was a bona fide, know-it-all expert who could now pontificate—to however big an audience he could command—on his subject of specialization and for the most part, sit back, rest on his laurels and cash big paychecks. (And because he didn't have even one PhD, he could only ever "pontificate" to an audience of one—me! An honor for which I still feel honored—however much I mock-complain that he "pontificated" to much and too often just used me as a kind of "sounding board" for all the ideas constantly bouncing around in his head!)

Which brings me around to another thing he once said, "Every time I truly learn something new and stupendous, it opens a hundred doors to realms of knowledge I previously had no idea even existed, and those damn 'hundred doors' always mock the hell out of me for not knowing what lies beyond them and leave me feeling as stupid and ignorant as the brainless lout I was the day I walked off the farm. Even more stupid, actually, because on the day I walked off the farm, I had no idea that I didn't know a damn thing and I sure wasn't interested in learning no damn thing that I had no idea that I didn't know. I had as much in my head as I did in my stomach—which was practically nothing at all save for the notion that I had to get away from that nightmare of a farm . . . and find a decent meal to eat!"

(Ahhhhh , that we should all be so stupid and ignorant, especially our ever-pontificating, PhD'd experts! And when (if!) you read The Fire, you will find that he wasn't totally honest with that statement, because he was just as interested, when he fled that nightmare of a farm, in getting laid as finding a good meal, but he spared me that—too personal and too human—revelation that day.)

Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!—I'm supposed to be writing about that ugly box that contained those memoirs that I turned into The Fire. And truly it is a "miracle" that I even became aware of the existence of that box at all, for John had stashed it under a workbench in an ancient, double garage attached to his even more ancient barn, a dark, dank, grease-and-oil layered, junk-crammed, tool-littered, oil-gas-and-dust smelling "cave" with two small windows, one boarded up and the other so covered in dirt, spider webs and fly-shit it was essentially opaque. That "cave" was also the final, resting place of an old, almost-buried-by-junk-dust-dirt-and-mouse-shit truck that hadn't run in years.

In fact, I am sure it is the one the one he describes himself being in at the beginning of The Fire, when he sat watching the remaining hour or so of the fire that destroyed the mall that inspired his writing of those memoirs. I would have to think back to when he bought a new truck sometime in the mid-Eighties to have an idea when he parked that old one in that "cave," but I have no exact idea when he stashed that box in there with the truck, and where it had anonymously rested (like the Ark of the Covenant in that warehouse at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie) until following the my selling of that ancient relic of a truck.

In case you are interested—which I doubt—it was a 1956 "Ford F100 with a 292 CID Y-block V8!" Or at least that's what the excited, pudgy, middle-aged, Paul Giamatti-clone of a buyer said about it to my uncomprehending ears when he handed over what I considered an outrageous amount of money for it. (Jonathan, after doing some on-line research, had told me what to ask for it, even though I thought the amount was so high I was almost too embarrassed to state it!)

Nor could that pleased and excited buyer shut up about getting started on returning that old relic to mint condition and putting it in the old car shows, and he even promised to bring it around for me to see when he was done with the job—in about five years! And yeah, he kept his word and all I can say is he probably wrecked his marriage putting all the hours of work into it that he had to have done to fix it up to look better than it did when it rolled off the factory floor. And certainly better than John ever cared that it looked!

I mean, John kept his vehicles (he also owned cars, none new, and none that he preferred driving over his beloved trucks) in excellent mechanical shape (he'd rebuild their motors when they needed it) but had no use for waxing or polishing them —"gussying them up," as he called it—and when they got rusty, he used a brush to paint over the rust with a coat of cheap, anti-rust paint that more or less—usually a lot less—matched the factory paint. And if the rust ate a hole in the body work, he'd cut away the rust, weld a piece of sheet metal over the hole, grind down the weld, and slap a coat of paint over it. And, to keep the undersides and frames of his vehicles from rusting away due to the winter salting of our roads, he'd park them over a pit, heat motor oil in an old electric kettle, dump it into a big metal weed sprayer with some kind of pumping mechanism on it, and spray the undersides of the vehicles with it.

Ironically, I doubt he for even a second thought he was doing anything unusual with all this mechanical care of his vehicles, but I'd grown up with a father who couldn't even check the oil on his fancy Caddies. Every bit of mechanical care needed to keep his succession of mechanical ego-trips running was done by the mechanics at the dealership. (He rarely took his current "Precious" to the local garage, once claiming that the aging, owner-mechanic was only an "ordinary mechanic" and not qualified to work on his Cadillac! So John's affinity for, and capacity to work on his vehicles, was nothing short of amazing to me, and once, when I mentioned that to him, he just gave me a strange, perplexed look and noncommittally said, "I was born on a farm."

Ironically, had I at that time known the role that old truck played in John's watching of the mall fire, an event that provoked, as I've just finished saying, the writing of what was to become The Fire, I unquestionably would not have sold it. But there was a definite and fateful Catch 22 to that. I mean, if I'd never sold that truck and got it out of that garage, I'd never have found the box with John's memoirs in it. (Which reminds me of a similar fate/destiny-manipulated, Catch 22 that I often think about when watching those great DVDs of those Crossroads festivals that Eric Clapton organized for a number of year in order to support his rehab-center in Antigua, festivals at which, given all the great blues guitarists playing at them, that uber-genius guitar-maestro of the Texas blues, Stevie Ray Vaughan, should have been playing.

Except, if Stevie Ray had been alive to play at those concerts, they wouldn't exist to be played at by anybody because Clapton would have been dead before being able to organize even the first one, he only still being alive to organize any of them because, as a favor to Stevie Ray after his concert in East Troy, Wisconsin on August 27, 1990, he gave Stevie his seat on the helicopter that subsequently crashed shortly after take-off and killed him. (Buddy Holly "déjà vu all over again!") And several members of Clapton's band. Ironically, perhaps synchronistically, Stevie Ray was the same age of that uber-genius Mozart when he died! So tamp that fate-tobacco into your thoughts-about-the-mystery-of-life-and-fate pipe and give it a good long smoke!

So anyways, in getting back to the narrative about finding that box: it was a hot, sun-blasting day sometime in early August and I had hired a couple of college students from the nearby town—my old hometown!—to clean out that "cave" of a garage so I could park my new car in it now that John's "Ol' 56" was gone. (Think: Tom Wait's "Ol' 55!") And what a shock it was, on hiring them, to be so utterly astounded at the reality of how young—even childish!—they looked and of how young—and childish!—I must have been on my first forays into college life!

I don't remember their names so I'll call them Tom and Jerry—the older one, Tom, being the owner of a tricked-out 4x4 truck with a super-loud stereo in it that he was trying to pay for by doing junk-hauling jobs. For some reason I can retrieve a clearer picture of that damn truck than I can of its owner, and even after living all these years of my crazy life and "John-thinking" more than a few thoughts about it, I still can't figure out—as nor John ever could!—how some obviously otherwise intelligent men (some are doctors, lawyers, high-paid executives) need to compensate for their insecurities about their manliness—or their embarrassingly little dicks!—with big, noisy, over-chromed toys

Ha!—I recently saw an absolutely apropos cartoon in my Web newsfeed: it had two panels, the left one with a huge dump truck and a small roar coming from its single exhaust, while the right panel had one of those huge-tired, tricked-out 4x4s with a giant R O A R coming from its twin, over-sized exhausts. Under the left panel was the simple caption, Dump Truck, while under the right panel was, Dumb Truck. Sometimes the brilliant insights of cartoonists totally blow my mind—or what little is left of it!

Anyways, the older I get the more I share John's loathing for these uber-idiots who connect their cajones to uber-expensive (to buy and run!) 4x4 trucks, or for that matter, uber-expensive and unmuffled Harleys, (Straight-pipe Stupidos, John used to call them!) or anything else that makes outrageously loud, "look-at-me!" noise. But then, as a woman, I guess that's a reality too far beneath my feminine mind to get a mental grip on, with all I can come up with for it is the anemic notion that perhaps they are suffering from a deep and profound identity crisis as fragile, insecure males in a world slowly shifting to the powerfully feminine. Thus their existential mantra has, by the necessity that drives all, ignored toddler-boys to noisily act out: I make noise—therefore I am! (a mannish boy!) And of course, these dolts are never self-aware enough to be aware of either their male insecurities or the pervasive depth of their stupidity that prevents them from understanding that it is a machine making the noise, and not them, and that the whole stupid, mindless process is alienating them even more from themselves and their threatened masculinity. (I wonder what Jupiter Jung would have to say on the subject if he was alive today. That is, when he wasn't roaring around Switzerland on his over-loud Harley, looking for nubile—and fucked-up!—chicks to pick up and "pillion.")

Anyways, back to those two "kids" that hot August day cleaning out that hot, filthy old "cave" of a garage—I don't usually get migraines but I guess making the decision to get rid of all that stuff in the garage—and the fuckin' heat!—stressed me just enough to bring one on, and I after frantically washing down a couple of Tylenol 3s, I stumbled into my darkened, air-conditioned bedroom very soon after the young fellows started working, put on my head-phones connected to my CD Walkman with my favorite relaxation disk in it—a soothing hour of ocean surf—and did my futile best to take some deep, focused breaths while doing my futile best to visualize (I'm a pathetic visualizer, which is likely one reason it made my writing of a novel impossible!) myself visiting at my all-time-favorite, escape-to-spots, a beach in the Big Sur area of California. (My visits to Big Sur and that beach harked back to '67, yet they, like the Monterey Pop Festival I was in the area to attend, still so vividly fill my mind it was like that "Summer of Love" was still happening! And alas, though Henry Miller, less than two years later, had become one of my favorite authors, I'd never even heard about him at the time of visiting Big Sur, where he was living, so never got him to autograph my eventually well-read copy of Tropic of Cancer—which of course, I'd not bought yet!) That cool bedroom, those very consistent surf-sounds, and my pathetic attempts to visualize myself at that surf-susurrating beach—along with the codeine-fortified Tylenol—cooled the volcano that was starting to erupt in my head and sent me off to what I hoped, as I felt myself slipping into it, would be a blessed, healing, wave-crashing sleep.

Or so one would have thought, save I don't think I was floating on my magic Zzzzzz's-carpet over that Big Sur beach for very long before I had an absolutely horrendous nightmare. It started out as a normal, if somewhat unusually lucid dream, of me driving up the road to my farm one dark night in my new car and guiding it through the open door of the—future—cleaned-out and empty garage, when, halfway into it, the car bumped over something big that let out a loud, resonant groan.

The dream-thought that came to me was that I'd run over Zoe, a neighbor's beautiful golden lab that often made forays over to my place for short visits and a handful treats I kept in a bucket by the door for her, so it was with great fear in my heart that I grabbed my flashlight and lunged out of the car to see how badly I'd hurt her. Save it was no dog lying half under that car, but John! His pale and lifeless face was a gruesome death mask that recorded his last moment of life as one of intense pain, while a geyser of blood gushed from a ragged wound in his chest—in the area of his heart.

In all my life, waking or sleeping, I'd never felt such heart-grinding horror as I screamed his name while sitting down on that filthy garage floor—in no different a fashion that I'd three years before sat on a wet forest floor to hold the real dead John—to cradle his strangely light head and shoulders in my arms and weeping ask him what he'd been doing out there in the garage—in the dark. But of course he was dead and obviously couldn't answer me, and shocked I was when, from a shadow hovering near him that I'd sensed, but not taken rational note of, there came first a familiar and entrancing scent of lilacs, followed by the sound of a very familiar and comforting, wind-chime voice, softly saying, "Don't worry about John, Rachel, he has been done with that old body for three years and doesn't miss it a bit. It's the blood that is important. You must catch it and look after it, and someday give it to the world, for it is our memories—and you, after all, are our memory-keeper."

As those words poured out of the darkness of that garage, the scent of lilacs became stronger and their speaker became ever clearer and clearer to me, and soon I could see Catherine, standing there, smiling at me. She was just as beautiful and kind-looking as she had been during my hallucination of her at John's funeral, but now she was wearing a dramatically different hat. (In The Fire, John comments several times that Catherine, when she was young, had a love of fine hats and a flair for wearing them.) This one was a tan, wide-brimmed hat with a band of wide green ribbon with a swath of tiny daisies attached to it (I think had Catherine been born into my generation, she'd definitely have been a hippie.) and she was wearing a simple, but elegant dress of the same color as the hat. (She was perfectly dressed—albeit seventy or so years out of date—for that hot, summer day!)

And as fast as I was able to dream-focus on her with any real clarity, she said, "Remember, sweet Rachel, don't lose any of that blood—it's the essence of out our sad and tragic lives. We know you won't let us down . . . and we will be with you always to help you preserve it." And with that she faded back into the darkness and disappeared along with that lovely scent of lilacs, leaving me holding John's light-as-smoke body while my heart filled up with the locomotive-heavy weight of my great grief over his death and the loss of his soothing, healing company.

That great grief gouged and gripped and ripped at my heart like that monster of a priest his terrified sacrificial victim's heart in that Indiana Jones' Temple of Doom movie, and so intense was the pain of that grief that I passionately wished someone would rip that heart out of my heaving chest and put me out of my misery.

As that black, ferocious bat of a thought finished swooping through my head, I was suddenly able to sense I was dreaming—nightmaring!—which allowed me to frantically will myself awake in order to escape it. And wake I did, with my poor heart boiling in the over-heated oil of the grief of John's fresh-in-my-mind-and-soul-again passing, my body racked with sobs and tears streaming out of my eyes for a full minute before I realized it had all just been a migraine-induced—or codeine-caused!—nightmare, the searing pain in my heart cooling considerably as I forcefully reminded myself that John was already dead, that he had been dead for three years, and that my heart, in already having been deep-fried in the boiling oil of grief over that death, would blessedly never have to go through that horror again.

But barely had I come to grips with that fact, and the memory of that hallucination of Catherine that had reappeared in that dream—though most confusedly, dressed differently—and again calling me her memory-keeper, than I again I smelled the faint scent of lilacs and again heard her sweet, soft and loving wind-chime voice, saying, "Better go check on how your two young workers are getting on, Rachel," while accompanying those words (I could have listened to that sweet, entrancing voice all day long and never tired of it!) I felt inside me a sudden and powerful compulsion, a pushing, almost, to get out there and do just that.

As I sat up on the bed I expected that burgeoning, lava-gushing volcano of a migraine to still be searing the inside of my skull, but the codeine, or my "visit" to Big Sur, or my pathetic attempts at breathing deeply while just as pathetically visualizing that beach, or the sleep, or the nightmare—I'd take a week-long migraine any day to that sight of that dead and bleeding John under my car after having run over him!—had sent that nasty old brain-chewing rat back to whatever demon-haunted hell those things came from. (Sorry about the mixing of metaphors—though I guess no one but a $tyle-Nazi will really care!)

So after going to the bathroom to splash cold water on my face and while scrounging around for my sunglasses to hide my reddened eyes, I again hallucino-smelled a sudden effusion of lilacs fill the room and heard Catherine's sweet, mellifluous voice softly saying, "Better hurry, Rachel!" And those words of hers were again accompanied by a powerful inner compulsion—a pushing!—to get down there, so I rubber-legged my way out into the blazing oven of the August afternoon and over to what was now—to post-nightmare, me—that very ominous garage as I equally ominously wondered if the re-occurrence of Catherine's voice in my head was a serious hallucination that represented the onset of another bout of psychosis—I'm not supposed to mix codeine with my meds, so I can get a prescription for the stuff so I had to obtain that bottle of Tylenol 3 from a street-corner-pharmacist for about then times its value!—which would necessitate another visit back to the head-shop for a couple of weeks as Doc Booger made adjustments to my meds—or worse, more sessions of brain-lightning that I was sure I would not survive with much of my poor, already over-fried brain left intact. Or at least not as I knew it. (I didn't want to do a Pirsig, who, according to his famous story, got hauled into the head-shop as an interesting-to-his-son, but catatonic genius of a college professor, and after his sessions of brain-lightning, came out as a dull-to-his-son computer programming motorcycle aficionado with an iron grip on his genius, a steel grip on his thinking processes, and a titanium grip on ordinary reality!)

I could see, as I wobble-legged my way towards "Tom's" truck, that it was loaded almost spring-sagging full of a heaping pile of junk, so I knew the young fellows had been working hard, and just as I got down the slope to it, they, now sweaty and filthy, emerged carrying a hideous old wooden box by its two rope handles. On seeing me, Tom said something to Gerry, who had a cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth and who squinted through the smoke as he nodded at whatever Tom had said and they forthwith dropped it in the dirt at their feet.

Wiping his filthy brow on the filthy bottom of his sweat-soaked T-shirt, Tom nodded his head towards it and asked me what they should do with it. My immediate reaction was to wave my hand at his truck and say, "It's likely full of junk—just pitch it," though barely had my hand made its deprecatory wave and my mouth uttered those words than I abruptly hallucino-smelled a veritable May-bush full of blooming lilacs as I hallucino-heard Catherine's voice again, though this time it had a distinct edge of urgency and a sense of command to it as she said, "Don't you dare let them do that, Rachel!" (It had been many months since the mid-May blooming of the lilac bushes on my place, so I knew the powerful scent of lilacs was not natural and had to be an hallucination.)

It was such a sudden and unexpected command that my legs suddenly felt wobbly enough to almost give out from underneath me, and I guess I went deathly pale as well. Since both of them were looking directly at me as I heard Catherine's voice, both suddenly looked alarmed as Tom abruptly took three steps towards me and grabbed my upper arm as he frantically said, "You okay, Miss ________? You look like you just saw a ghost and were about to faint and fall over!"

And I guess I looked every bit as bad as he said, because without hesitation, he stepped up to me, grabbed my left arm with his left hand, wrapped his right arm around my already "pork-belly" of a back, and led me to that rough old box so I could sit down on it and catch my breath and bearings.

### Chapter Thirty Four

After sitting on that box for several minutes breathing hard while fanning myself with my hat, I finally said, "Thanks. Must be this damn heat." Several minutes later, on quickly feeling better, I stood up and looking down at that incredibly ugly box, I said, "I think maybe we better open that box before you pitch it. You can never know might be in it."

And even as I said that, I smelled—or hallucinated that I smelled!—the faint, sweet scent of lilacs just before feeling a soft hand brush my cheek and hearing Catherine breathe a loud sigh of relief as she softly and sweetly wind-chimed into my—inner?—ears, "Thank you, Rachel! Thank you!"

Though to be sure, telling the boys to open it, and getting it open were two very different "kettles of carp"—as John liked to warp that saying—for the thick plywood lid had been screwed down with not less than—we counted them!—twelve screws. (It was like John had caged some potent and foul demon in that box and needed to screw down the lid extra tight to make sure it did not escape.)

After Tom had rummaged for what seemed like half of fucking forever—I was anxious to see what was in that box that could constitute the "memories" that that "hallucination" of Catherine had deemed so damned important!—in the toolbox that he'd taken out from behind the seat of his truck, looking for the right screwdriver, then, once he'd found the right one, seemed to take the rest of forever for him to back-out the dozen or so incredibly long screws holding the lid down. (John had definitely not wanted that box opened casually) But they were well spent minutes as they saved John's memoirs—The Fire—from the ignominious fate of rotting into oblivion in the local landfill. (Though I somehow doubt that "hallucination" of Catherine was ever going to have let that happen!)

When the last screw was almost out, Jerry dropped another of his endless cigarettes into the dirt at his feet, and as he ground it out, nudged Tom as he smirking whispered, "Maybe it's full of the weird old geezer's skin mags!" It was a statement that, considering the nightmare I'd just gone through about John, which had left me missing and grieving for him more intently that I had in a long time, I responded to with an automatic up-swelling, paranoid, scorpion-tail-raising rage that made me want to grab the screwdriver out of Tom's hand and gouge Jerry's eyes out, but before I could do anything so intemperate, a powerful scent of lilacs wafted around me as I hallucino-heard Catherine's voice urgently, but still sweetly, saying, "Control that scorpion of your paranoia and don't take it personally, Rachel—he has no idea you are John's niece—or that John meant so much to you."

The sudden eruption of that lilac scent, and Catherine's wise, sweet words, gave me the willpower and the strength to do just that, as my mind filled with the very rational realization that since I'd lived in the city for all of their young lives, neither of those boys—know of John though they likely did—had even the slightest notion that I was his niece. To them I was just some fat, ugly broad who'd bought the place after he'd died. (My Crazy Rachel persona had not yet made me "famous"—infamous!—in the area!)

On top of that, I was well aware that during the last years of his life, John had exercised no restraint in presenting himself to the community as a "weird old geezer." He'd often go riding into town on his horse with his dog trotting beside him and wearing his full cowboy regalia—to the delight of any small children who encountered him, especially if he had his handmade leather lariat with him (which he'd been given as a gift by an Argentinean gaucho friend during a visit there) and he'd entertain them with his prowess with it (he could make that damn thing behave like it was alive!) and to do his shopping, or even, though rarely, to go to the Tim Horton's to have a cup of coffee and shoot the bull with the other "old geezers" who were all retired miners.

And with John having also having been a miner (which I didn't know till I worked his memoirs into The Fire) he had no shortage of bull about his mining days to sling with them! And it brightened my mood a bit to think about that bunch of half-deaf retired miners in there practically every afternoon, shouting their heads off, first about weather, wives and politics, then onto their favorite subject, the re-telling-telling-telling-telling-telling of their favorite "drill-and-blast stories" about their "glory days" in the mines.

And a good chuckle I always got thinking about the reason they ended up spending those "afternoon shifts" in "Tim's" was because they'd been driven out of the house by their wives who wanted them out of their hair for a couple of hours so they could watch their "soaps" in peace. And there probably would have been a lot more of them in there, but few miners who retired after 40 or so years of hauling their lunch pails in those pits and putting in their day of hard, but satisfying, labor lived long afterwards. With everything that had been their whole life for so long suddenly over! kaput! finis!—they had nothing to live for. Either that, or the hostility—or poison—of their wives, who couldn't cope with them suddenly being around so annoyingly much, killed them. (LOL)

That "Tim's" which they all congregated at had recently been built at the edge of town, so John would hitch his horse to a tree in the woods adjacent to the parking lot and leaving the dog to keep it company, would head in for his couple of cups of black, no-sugar, "Tim-joe"(as he always called it) and an hour or so long "shift" of "drilling-and-blasting-the-bull" with "the boys." That dog and the horse were such a bonded pair that though John never tied the dog, it never strayed more than ten feet from the horse. Though if John got too involved in his bull-slinging and his "shift" in there was got too long, the dog would sit back on its haunches and howl like a wolf. And I know this because I once had to go to that Tim's looking for John to talk to him about something important, and as I walked across the parking lot towards the entrance, I couldn't help but hear that dog's piteous howls—and John's later explanation that the dog was like an alarm clock and would be patient and silent for about an hour—but rarely longer. "Which, he added. "Was great because it always reminded me that though an hour-long 'shift' of 'drilling-and-blasting-the-bull' with 'the boys' was good for my spirit—any more than that was a damn waste of time!"

Fuck-a-boiling-pot-of-"Tim-joe!"—but even I am starting to find these tangential flights of irrelevance . . . irrelevant . . . and damned fuckin' annoying! . . . so back to the narrative: three pairs of eyes were glued to the inside of the box when the lid finally came off, and I doubt any of the three of us saw in there what we'd individually expected. I don't know what Tom expected, but for Gerry there were no "skin-mags" to take home and "choke his chicken" lustfully drooling over. And as for me, who only knew there had to be something important in there for me to hallucino-hear Catherine telling me there was something important in there, but I had no idea what it could be.

And certainly the last thing I'd expected was the brown envelope duct-taped to the underside of the lid, with my first and last names printed on it in big, bold letters with a black marker. (Just like that glib, machismo-mocking comedian, Red Green, John believed that duct tape was the greatest of modern inventions—next to toilet paper!—and was as essential to modern life as toilet paper to a modern bathroom. (Fortunately he never got senile enough to confuse the two! . . . though he occasionally told me tales of ancient, out-house days, when any form of paper was fair game for "arsewipe," as he always called it, though the most satisfying for him was the months when he had a whole Bible to use for that purpose. "A truly fitting use for it," he'd sarcastically said. "Given that too much of that infernal thing is already full of shit about that nasty warlord-deity, Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy, and his 'chosen' tribe of self-important thugs whom he too often exhorted to perform genocidal deeds that would have made even the most psychopathic Nazis proud!")

Both Tom and Jerry, on seeing my name on that envelope, looked at me with surprise as Tom said, "You knew ol' Cowboy John?" And when I nodded and said I was his great-niece, he said. "Well, who woulda thought! Jeez, he was like a . . . a fixture in this town. When I was a kid we used to love it when he'd ride through town on his horse, all dressed up like John Wayne. And do his tricks with that lasso of his. I swear he could have lassoed a bird right out of the air with it! He even gave me a ride on his horse a few times. We used to ask him if he'd been in the movies and he'd just laugh and say, 'Yes-sireee, Bob!—one movie, and it was a real bad one!' And when we'd beg him to tell us the name of the movie, he'd just kinda frown and grin at the same time as he said, 'My Long and Stupid Life.'

"I haven't thought about that stuff since I was kid," Tom went on. "But now that I do think about it, I guess he'd never been in any movie and was just making a joke about his life that went way over our heads. As I am sure he intended it to! . . . But was his life really that bad?"

And a bit of a surprised looked he gave me when I replied, "I knew Uncle John for the more than twenty five years he lived back around here, but I know as much about the seventy years of it before that as you do—except for the fact that he was once a real cowboy who owned a ranch out west somewhere—and that he fought in both world wars!"

And here Jerry, after a few seconds of basic arithmetic, piped in and said, "Seventy . . . and twenty six—Christ, was he that old when he died? Ya never woulda thought!"

Needless to say, it thrilled me to no end to hear Tom say those wonderful things about John, and after having them lug the box up to the house and set it on the kitchen table, I gave those obviously parched-in-the-mouth but equally thirsty-with-curiosity young fellows the six-pack of beer I'd bought for them, then sent them back to that nasty old grizzly-cave of a garage to satisfy their former thirst while only whetting the latter, before going on with their hot, dusty, dirty, and dreary labors.

I then proceeded to make myself a strong cup of coffee and with shaking hands and tears in my eyes, opened the envelope to read my last, neatly printed, communication—dated two months before he died—from the living John that my rational mind told me I'd come so close to never getting the chance to read. Though while thinking those thoughts, I again hallucino-smelled blooming lilacs as I hallucino-heard Catherine softly laugh her sweet, mellifluous and ironic laugh and say, "There was no chance I was ever going to let those memories get lost, Rachel, any more than I was going to let John get away with not recording them."

(Even in just reading the Prologue of The Fire, you will see Catherine's influence in making it happen, as no less does she appear—according to John—at critical moments in the writing of it. I often, in my crazier moments, get the sense that Catherine was the real writer of The Fire and John just its scribe, but then I slip back into normal, spirit-impossible, ordinary/consensus reality and am forced to ask myself, "How could a schizophrenic hallucination of mine have written John's memoirs?"

Dear Rachel.

(If you are not Rachel ________do not investigate the contents of this box any further. There is nothing of interest in here to anyone but her! If you know Rachel ________and can pass it on to her, please do that. If you don't know her, or know of her, just dispose of it and its contents in a fire or the dump.)

Well, Rache, it looks like you found this damn thing! I was hoping that old garage would fall—or burn!—down (there's enough grease and oil in there for it to burn for a week) before you, or anyone else, came across it. I made it as difficult for you to find and to open as I did, for deep down I did not want you to find it at all. But there are other Powers at play here—those Powers that you sure did love to deny the existence of—and I figured if you were truly meant by them to find it, you would. The fact that you are reading this letter means that they made sure you found it.

Since you were always so interested in the story of my past—a terrible, shameful time engendering a terrible, shameful tale which I have, for so many years, felt so mortified by that I could share it with no one. But now that the body and ego that perpetrated that life of folly have both been consigned to their deserved fate of wind-scattered ashes—I trust you will have carried out my wishes in that regard!

And now that my spirit-being has finally achieved the release from that life of shameful folly that it has so long yearned for, you can read all about it. That is, if you are still desperate—really desperate!—to know the terrible truth of it. And if you have a lot of time to waste trying to read my terrible writing! (I'm hoping you don't!)

Much as it may have the power of doing so, I did not write what is in this box to satisfy yours, or anyone else's, curiosity about me or my life. I did it solely in response to a very powerful, gut-grinding, sprint-to-the-privy urge that seemed to come as much from outside of me as from within.

I can't imagine that you, or anyone else for that matter, will want to read all of it, for not only is my writing not very readable, but it most imperfectly covers over sixty years of very difficult, impatient, bad-tempered and greedy living. Living—if you can call it that!—characterized and determined by ridiculous, foolish, mindless, greedy, usually bad-tempered and often evil, ego-choices. And once my ego—and my vile, stupid temper!—backed off enough to allow my heart and brain to learn the art of doing what they were given to me for, lots of even more difficult feeling and thinking.

But that hardly matters, for its purpose, all the way through the frantic and very driven writing of it, seemed more to purge my spirit-being of its foul and poisonous contents than to enlighten anyone about them. (Shit is shit and it is , always foul and always stinks, and the deeper the hole it is dropped into, and the quicker it is covered with the lime and dirt of time, the better for everyone's' noses!)

My intention, on finishing the writing of the story of my stupid, temper-dominated and folly-filled life, was to toss all these sheets of paper into the stove and send them up the chimney. But hard as I did try, I could not summon the willpower to do so. It didn't take me long to figure out those strange Powers, (that you hated so much!) those Forces of Destiny—were as much behind the writing of this damned thing as they were in setting up the choices that allowed me to so foolishly choose the stupid, temper-dominated and folly-filled life behind it, and they did not want their efforts—or what I learned from my folly!—to go up in flame and smoke. Like the way our town's poor old mall went up in flame smoke—a "strange" event which set in motion the writing of it!

All I had the gumption to do was build this box out of scavenged plywood, pile them into it, and leave them to you. Though I did play a silly little game with those Powers, those Forces of Destiny by putting it in a place where, given your hatred for dirty, greasy things, you would only find it if they truly desired that you do so. Obviously, since you are reading it, either those Forces, or just plain dumb—or malicious!—chance, led you to a discovery of it.

Since I have now ridden up that steep mountain slope that has allowed me to escape this Vale of Folly and can no longer care about the foolish and shameful life I lived while traversing it, I cannot control what you do with what I felt I was coerced by those Powers, those Forces of Destiny to write. But it is my hope that, unlike me, you will find the willpower to do with these pages what I could not—use them for fire-starter in the stove, which is about all they are good for!

P.S.

If you slap a bit of paint on it, the box should make a great container for storing firewood beside the stove. That would be an infinitely more worthwhile fate for it than the storing of the story of my stupendously stupid life!

Much love and a big (belated) hug.

Uncle John

Well, not only did I get an oil furnace installed in this house long before discovering the box—John may have loved chopping wood, but I had no use for a such a difficult way of keeping warm (no double entendre intended). And soon after beginning to decipher the writing of his tale, I decided that the last thing those pages deserved was to be set aflame and reduced to smoke and ashes in the fireplace I'd had installed in the living room.

And no, I am not using that box for storing firewood beside the fireplace for it was too ugly even for that, but since to me it is every bit as important as his scribbled out memoirs, I long ago painted it black and stapled (using John's staple gun) a black-vinyl-covered foam pad to its lid, and it now serves as a bench of sorts at the foot of my bed. And it still stores all of those original scribble-pages which, after my laborious "translation" of them, are now taking up a considerably smaller amount of "bit-space" in my computer as The Fire.

So that crude box and its crudely written contents is patiently awaiting whatever fate befalls it after I am dead, and God forbid that The Fire should ever attract a readership big enough that some foolish scholar is going to get it into his or her shrunken head and anal psyche that he or she just has to get his or her trivializing hands on that box and its contents! Though what do I care—I'll just be ashes scattered over the weed, wildflower and bush-covered field where once stood that church that John had been "cremated" in. (Providing Jonathan follows my instructions in my will.)

Of the second plastic-wrapped bundle that was in that box I can't yet say much beyond the fact that it is full of thousands of various sized pieces of paper—receipts, bills, old letters, napkins, paper bags, notepads, etc.—of which, on every square inch of free space, he'd scribbled thousands of aphorisms and ideas—some but rudimentary notations, others worked out in more detail. I've not spent much time sorting through that mess of "scribbles," though a rare few of the more legible ones did catch my attention. Like this absolute favorite of mine that he carefully printed out—a simple poem that in three, succinct lines, most accurately summed up Part One of The Fire.

Brutal Sport

Marriages, like prize fights,

Need referees, who know

When to end them.

I have read very little of that stuff, translated none of it from "scribble" into typed "English," and thus have entered none of it into my computer. I only intend doing anything with it if I have the time and energy available after I am finished with Book Two of The Fire. But, Dear Patient Reader, as I may already have mentioned too many times, given my mental health problems, my obesity, my lack of interest in exercising, (or being alive, for that matter!) and my general, all-round state of ill-health, I have my doubts I'll be abusing this good Earth by stomp-waddling around on it with my sore, swollen feet and my varicose-veined legs long enough to get anywhere near finishing Book Two—let alone all those short items. (Most of which are scribbled out even more illegibly than his memoirs!)

Now, if you are even an indifferent reader, you will have noticed that this manuscript came into my possession in 1999 and I am writing this Preface in 2018. That may seem like a lot of years to have been sitting on John's manuscript—probably about the same number of years as it took him to write it—except I haven't been "sitting" on it at all—I have been busting my "flabbening" butt all those years "translating" it! And yes, John wrote in English but "wrote" is a misnomer for what he was doing with his pen on those pages. Sometimes "scribble" would even be too laudatory a word for what appeared on those pages. If the handwriting of the manuscript had been half as legible as the letter he so conscientiously printed about it, I'd have had it typed up years ago, but that is like saying that if Mt. Everest was three hundred feet high instead of thirty thousand, just about anyone could climb it. (Excluding me!)

Not only did I have to "translate" John's "scribble" into readable English, and not only did I have to spend countless very tedious and frustrating hours sorting the thousands of pages into their proper order, but I had to spend more hours than I ever want to think about creatively filling in, not only unreadable words, but whole lines—many so illegibly scribbled they looked like toddler-scrawl on a wall! But no small number of lines had been consigned to oblivion by coffee, tea, and even grease stains—obviously from his truck! And even lacunae created by skipping-problems with the cheap Bic pens he used—and which he didn't bother to re-scribble once he got the pen working again. Or got a new one.

John wrote those memoirs in one, long, unbroken train of poetically expressed memory—and insightful thought about those memories!—and it was me, in a seemingly endless "labor of Heracles," hat broke it up into the manageable freight cars of its two books, its many Parts, even more Cantos and their seemingly infinite number of sections. I even broke up the lines as much as I could because, for some unfathomable reason, I passionately hate plowing through monolithic blocks of poetry with each line the same length and often going on for pages without the equivalent of a paragraph break!

I also added the quotes found at the beginning of the Prologue, taking the liberty of doing so with the sense that with all the work I was putting into the thing, I was a co-writer of sorts and deserved a chance to add my two-cents worth. Of course, a Prologue only exists, as such, because I set that part off, and though, in my initial enthusiasm for this work all those years ago I had the intention of finding introductory quotes for all the Cantos, you know what they say about the road to hell and good intentions. (Being a moderately well-educated doofus who has had her imagination educated right out of her, I can find and recognize any number of good and appropriate quotes—especially with the Web at my fat, stubby fingertips, though not too rarely, in John's well-thumbed copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations—but I sure can't ever write anything original and insightful enough to be worth quoting!)

It took me several years just to—more or less—read (decipher!) the thing and a good many more to type it out, though in all honesty I must confess there is another, even more important reason for my dilatory behavior. Two months ago, my Mimi, the last surviving member of John's immediate family died—just three weeks shy of her hundredth birthday. In fact, we'd all been hoping that she, like her favorite entertainer, George Burns, would become a centenarian, though she seemed to be utterly indifferent to that idea. No less than was she utterly indifferent, even hostile, to all of her latter birthdays, even going so far as to say to me at John's funeral, "Don't cry for the old when they die, Rachel—it is a blessing! Getting old is no achievement—and old age is nothing but a terrible disease! It just happens to you one stupid, useless, boring, crippling day at a time! And the older you get the less life there is in life, let alone joy. Being old is tiresome beyond anything the young can imagine. It's a curse and its only value is to make you glad to die when that time finally and blessedly comes!" (John said pretty much the same thing once when he sardonically commented, "Old age is the curse Fate puts on you if you have the hubris to live too long.") And hell, I am presently still a lot younger than either of them were when they made their respective comments, but I can already sympathize with those sentiments—in my book, OAS doesn't just stand for Old Age Security, but for Old Age Sucks! (Yeah, that's a Rachel-original—to me, anyway!—but I sincerely doubt it is very original. Or quotable!)

But back to my Mimi and my excuse for my dilatory behavior with John's memoirs—she had been the last of John's immediate family to die which opened the final door to my loosing The Fire on what will surely be a very indifferent reading public, for "the clan,"—that gargoyle-horde of his ever-secretive siblings—could hardly have been indifferent to what he revealed about their early family life. And most especially, what he revealed concerning their violent, debauched and utterly evil father, their abused and religion-crazed mother, and the truth about eldest sister "Saint Lisette." And of course, about their "big brother John" and why, at the "tender age" of fourteen, he fled the living hell of that farm.

(Believe-you-fuckin'-me!—there was absolutely nothing even remotely fucking "tender" about that fourteen-year-old John, who several times in his memoirs described himself in those days to be: as big as a horse, as strong as a bull, and as dumb as a pile of manure! And the reality of that is borne out when, that same day he fled that cesspit of a farm and made his way to the nearby "Shitty", he unintentionally murdered a pimp—using a very clever and lethal truncheon he'd made to protect himself from his father who had made it his life's mission to beat the crap out of John whenever he felt like it—who is about to slit the throat of a drunk, card-shark of an army captain—over a gambling issue—in a back alley outside a sleazy bar. John then hooks up with Roxie, one of that pimp's pretty and vivacious young prostitutes, and several days later, the two of them end up murdering—in self-defense and in an incredibly cruel, gross, but appropriate fashion!—that dead pimp's henchman/bodyguard who had taken over his dead boss's business and wanted the high-earning Roxie back in his "stable." (When I read his memoirs—the veracity of which I still question!—I could not even remotely equate the violent and murderous (?) hurricane of a fourteen-year-old John depicted himself fleeing the farm as, with the kind and wise old man that I always knew John as when he returned to this area over fifty years later, but that pretty much defines time's arrow and all aging, doesn't it?)

And it is that army captain he saved, who after being duly impressed with the strength and Achilles-like ferocity John used in saving his life through the killing of that pimp with his truncheon, first helped John evade the police after that very brutal murder, then helped the homeless, runaway John find a "home" in the army at such a "tender" age. And if you think that bit of a "teaser" is both violent and interesting, things only get more interesting—and just as often violent!—from there! And John was right in his letter to me about his bad temper, which, during the following years of his maturing life, became the dominant trait of his youthful, one-dimensional character, and which, in very Heraclitus-ean fashion, became his fate!

Though to be sure, when you read about how his father treated him all of his life—and his several, altar boy-years of brutal, sexual abuse at the hands and prick of a malevolently debauched priest!—you can understand why he was a veritable volcano of rage ever-ready to erupt at the slightest of provocations!)

For some reason, I felt I owed it to the whole sorry lot of that "clan" to let them escape this Vale-of-Shit-and-Tears without being induced to weep any more tears over something for which they'd already likely shed enough and only wanted the whole business to remain safely sunken and out of sight at the bottom of the Challenger Deep of time, repression, denial and dementia-blessed non-memory.

My mother, whom I was never even as remotely close to—fuck, what am I saying: I hate the fuckin' cow!—as I was to my Mimi, is still alive, but she is in her eighties and has cataracts through which she day-long stares at her over-loud television and each evening before bed reads either her large-print Bible or her large-print version of Butler's Lives of the Saints, and in not owning an e-reading device, will never read this "Preface" and be forced to face the reality of the family her grandparents' created. Or the harsh, ugly fact that I knew that she knew her "good Catholic husband" and "good Catholic father" of her "good Catholic children" had been, for half a decade, raping her daughter, a reality for which she already had psychological cataracts long before her physical ones manifested.

As to that debauched pedophile of a "good Catholic husband" of hers, he has been dead almost twenty years now, his liver having finally been smashed into useless mush by the "Stompin' Tom" of his relentless bibulation, its failure freeing his debauched "ever-hungry ghost" from his "machine," thus allowing it to add both its dark and foul presence and its insatiable appetites to the horde of hungry ghosts that had lifelong sucked the humanity out of his life.

And once every year, with the onset of dusk on the anniversary of his blessed departure from this world—which was fortunately in the summer—I take my cue from Judy Dench's character in the movie, The Shipping News (where she dumps the urn full of ashes of the brother who had molested her, into the privy and pisses on them) buy a bottle of vodka, find my way to his nicely kept Catholic grave in its holy Catholic cemetery, and while lounging against the lovely granite tombstone my mother actually feigned perplexity over my refusing to chip in my share for, drink that bottle empty while cursing him to every hell on every planet in this universe.

And as fast as my bladder would fill up, I'd stand up to squat down and piss myself empty into grass under which his perfidious bones lay rotting into the state his soul had lifelong existed in. And when that bottle was drained of its spirits, my spirit-being temporarily drained of my hate, and my spirits thus elevated, I'd smash the bottle on the tombstone and totter off home, feeling almost a little bit good—at least for the rest of that drunken night. (In fact, when I celebrated that yearly ritual this year, and since the need serendipitously manifested at just the right time, I left him an appropriately hot and steaming pile of shit that I stomp-waddled away from dearly wishing I could have shat onto on his chest while he was on his deathbed—so he could have gone into the next world with the smell in his nostrils of what his pedophilic lust and lack of character had made of my life!)

And of course there is my one remaining sibling, brother Daniel, who might take no small amount of offence at what I have been saying about our family life, and most particularly about his beloved father (all fathers are to some degree lovable after they are rendered harmless by infirmity or death!) But I have as much to do with him as John did with his horde of siblings when he came back here. And like he said about those kind of relationships, "Some things, like worn-out boots, rotten ropes, and old newspapers, just aren't worth keeping."

### Chapter Thirty Five

Of course, there was a platinum lining to the dark, multi-layered cloud of my delays in the more or less finishing up Book One of The Fire, for, as is the case for many areas of our modern world and its rapidly advancing technologies, it allowed the reality of self-publishing through eBooks to come into existence and provide the venue for an overly long, chaotic, un-literary, poetic work that would have been as capable of sailing into normal, physical-book publication at the hands of a "profiting house" as that tragic, berg-gashed Titanic into its vainly waiting berth in New York.

Hard as sorting, deciphering, "translating" and typing out John's long narrative had been, reading it for the first time had been even harder. I have a son I love dearly and the thought of him going through one tenth of what John endured during his "childhood"—his father, (my great-grandfather) treated him no better, though likely often worse, than some southern plantation owners their slaves!—set my gut churning and the hairs on the back of my neck waving like a field of ripe wheat in a prairie wind.

And then there's "altar boy-John's" rape by the "good priest" as he always called that malevolent clerical monster, that set him on a lifelong path of a passionate loathing for Constantine's Imperial Church/Crutch/Abomination . . . but I'll leave the telling of that horrific tale to him. Though suffice it to say its close resemblance to my own rape by my father at an even younger age brought back too many heavily suppressed memories that had me puking my guts out in the sink a few times then driving to the liquor store for a few "Texas mickeys" of that delicious Russian "potato water! Or "Moscow Mineral Water," as I sometimes like to think of it."

As fiction, John's memoirs about his young life on that nightmare of a farm might have just seemed to any reader as just plain deranged, disturbing, obscene, and a "tad" excessive and exaggerated, but as the real-life story of my Mimi's—and all my many great aunts' and uncles'—lives on that small and isolated bush-farm, it was downright way past the Oort Cloud of being as revolting as it was unbelievable. I was finally able to understand why Mimi had steadfastly refused to talk about that time with me and only ever but rarely whispered about it with her brothers and sisters.

One of the hardest things to get used to in John's memoir-narrative was his total lack of any literary pretenses. For him, the writing of his memoir seemed to be as nothing more, or less, than the natural results of that salty concoction you have to take to prepare for a colonoscopy, for until well into Book Two, when he gets into his off-the-wall "philosophizing," it looks like he pretty much just wrote it, as he said in the letter to me he enclosed in "the box," to shit out of himself and his memory the horrific load of gut-poison that needed to be shat out with absolutely no regard for the sensibilities of any prospective readers. (Though of course, Dear Patient Reader/s, you must always keep in mind that to him, as he was shitting it out in the privy of his painful solitude, there existed—to him!—no prospective readers who were going to poke their noses into what he was dropping in that excrement-hole!)

That, coupled with either his extraordinary memory or his even more extraordinary imagination—I still haven't decided which, as there are many so outrageously "far-out" things in it that it often seems more fantasy than reality (which perhaps explains his soft-spot for Castaneda's writings!)—which he renders with stark, vivid, almost watching-a-movie like descriptions, making some parts of the narratives almost unreadable. (Absolutely unreadable, I am sure, Dear Prospective Reader/s, for any of you with ultra-sensitive literary palates.)

The violent parts, of which there are no shortage, starting with his enraged, truncheon-murdering that pimp and then the absolutely sadistic—spurred on by Roxie!—murder of that pimp's henchman, then on to his uber-violent war experiences—though his home-life was no less of a war zone!—are so descriptively violent you feel like you have bruises, broken bones, blasted-off limbs and your guts-held-in-by-your-hands when you are finished reading it.

And worse, the emotional parts are so emotionally direct and raw your heart ends up feeling, both during and after reading them, like a big ripe avocado being mashed into guacamole!

And then there's the touchiest bugaboo of the whole thing—the sexual descriptions, particularly the violent ones, that are so unrestrained that they are not only repugnantly disturbing, but pornographic. (On reading them you can get to thinking John was imitating Henry Miller, but I know for a fact he'd never read a word his!)And often in a de Sade sort of way! Especially the horrific-as-they-are-fascinating autobiographical tales his two prostitute friends, the young and "innocent" Roxie, and her aging, but redoubtable and delightfully earthy and still sexy friend/mentor, Sheila. The tales they relate—or spin!—about their fateful and unwilling indoctrinations into the trade by their first pimps are so outrageous and detailed I am tempted to think they just had to be true!)

In all truth, (fuck, I wish I could get away from all these damn clichés!) I'd sum up the reading experience of The Fire (once you get past the deceptively tame Prologue—which I kinda "$tyle-Nazied" to a boring, basically literary, death! ) by saying that it is analogous to the viewing of the TV series, Game of Thrones, so if you are a committed viewer of that series—and also one of the few committed readers left in this TV-dominated world—you will find reading The Fire bearable, maybe even enjoyable, especially if you like to be shocked/horrified and/or titillated/aroused by what you read!

But if you were not able to get past the first episode of that dark, stark, violent, sexually explicit and all-too-honestly-human and European-medieval story, tread no further into the veritable dragon's lair of John's memoirs! And for what my addled, loonatic opinion on Game of Thrones that series is worth, I will say that compared to what Constantine's Imperial Abomination did to the Cathars of southern France during the Middle Ages in its relentless campaign to preserve its very fascist and totalitarian European political hegemony by labeling all who threatened it killable heretics, Game of Thrones, violently medieval as it is portrayed, is as tame as Anne of Green Gables or Mary Poppins.

In fact, as far as I can imagine one, an honest movie, or TV series, about that dark, iconic episode in the history of Constantine's Imperial Abomination, would be unwatchable by anyone but psychotic, mass murderers like Alexander, Constantine, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Hitler, Stalin, Mao—or a Borgia pope!

(Hey!—did you ever wonder, Dear Reader, why Constantine, instrumental as he was in creating his Imperial Church that carried on his bloody, political and very Roman ideas seventeen hundred years into the future, was never canonized a saint by that dark institution? That's because even his own psychotically violent, Roman institutional-creation thought he was too psychotically violent to deserve being canonized. Though of course, Dominic Guzman, aka St. Dominic, depicted by some history books as the Constantine's Imperial Abomination's first real Inquisitor, was canonized—so go fuckin' figger!)

At one point, while casting my third-rate "educated eye"—which also, in my advancing, age with its microsecond-delusions of respectability—on the distant shore of the possible publication of John's narrative, I decided to play $tyle-Nazi and righteously soften, even expunge, some of the violence and all the explicit sex, doing so in the interest of finding for John a respectable readership—which, now that I think of it, would be like finding "reasonably-fitting horseshoes for a cockroach." Or a "suitable set of false teeth for a catfish." (Those were two of John's many favorite reductio ad absurdum similes!)

It was obviously a damned silly idea right from the get-go, but from my perspective, I was putting so much work into the thing I need the prospect of at least a few interested readers, if not to make the effort worthwhile, then to at least give my anemic willpower and flagging enthusiasm a bit of a boost.

And to further rationalize my silly actions—I mean, what can I say, but let's face it: we have a tendency to accept that our day-to-day reality, which all of us usually already have had too much of, (as evidenced by the enormity of our collective drug and alcohol use/abuse and love for watching utterly mindless, moronic and effectively distracting TV programming) at its core, as John once so aptly and excrementally put it, "Is rarely anything more than a guano-seasoned pile of road apples sandwiched between two soggy cow pats and wrapped in the used arsewipe of a lie of respectability that not even a lobotomized baboon could be fooled by!"

And much as our day-to-day reality, down at its colon-level is shittily that, we of course want our literature about that excremental mess to be mostly buttered white toast and extra-sweet marmalade. Or never be more than a faint memory of the brown stains on the strips of arsewipe—oops, tissue paper—after they have been duly dropped in the crapper atop the crap and frantically flushed out of sight and mind! (Have you ever noticed that no manufacturer of "tissue paper" call it anything at all! They give their so-necessary product fancy names and picture of soft kittens and bears, but they sure aren't going to call it what it is—ass-wipe . . . or shit-paper!)

Ha!—John, who severely limited his TV watching, as much because he couldn't stand the inanities of the commercials as the mindlessness of the programming, made a joke about those Royale commercials showing their cute, soft little Persian kittens, by saying he'd love to see a version where those cute white little kittens are frolicking beside a "throne" and one is suddenly snatched up by a big, hairy hand, and seconds later thrown back on the floor with a brown stripe down its back, and a satisfied voice saying, "Now, that's soft!" (Sorry, Dear Reader—if I was back on the Meds-Rez, where I'm supposed to be, I sure would not be passing that crude anecdote on here!)

I have been keeping my lightning-fried, drug-addled, age-degraded mind somewhat honed and coherent by wading through a book Jonathan gave me for Christmas—at my request—a few years back, Charles Taylor's 3D—Deep, Dense, and Dull—academic tome, A Secular Age, (I wanted it because Taylor explored our progression from being a bunch of "god-and-faith-addled sheep," as John once put it, to being secular, materialistic, conspicuous-consumption obsessed and status-addled sheep) in which he writes, twice in the course of several pages, about the general idea of our taste for of cream-of-wheat writing,

I talked of the "post-Schopenhuaerian" visions early, which give a positive significance, and/or vitality, creativity, strength, ability to create beauty depend on them. This turn finds a new moral meaning in our dark genesis out of the wild and pre-human. It comes of a rebellion against the standard for of modern anthropocentrism, along the "tragic" axis, rejecting the too-harmonized picture of life, in which suffering, evil and violence have been painted out.

Taylor himself, necessarily glosses over the reality created by "our dark genesis out of the wild and pre-human," with his use of the three words, suffering, evil, and violence, which though they have meanings, those meanings are, for the most part left as abstractions which do not plumb the deep, viper-writhing depths of the human misery-well any deeper than its rim.

Less abstract are news reports presently coming out of places like Gaza, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq. Especially Iraq and Syria where those ISIS demons have flown out of a hell-cave of pure malice and are behaving much as did those malicious, very unchristian mobs of Catholic monks that razed that venerable library in Alexandria and flayed poor Hypatia alive. Those modern-day, Islamic, "mad-malicious-monks" who are terrorizing and executing thousands for no other apparent reason than that in being human they can be terrorized, in being alive, they can be killed, and in having heads, they can chop them off!

Though no less horrific are those tales of malice and murder that came out of the "killing fields" of Cambodia and Idi Amin's genocidal rages in Uganda in the 70s, and the genocides in Rwanda and Serbia, in the 90s. Though I guess if I am truly going to ring any truth-bells with this insane babble, I have to yank on the bell-rope of one of the biggest "bongers" of all: that catastrophically malicious and murderous episode of modern human history perpetrated by the Fascist States of America in the late 60s and the early 70s with their catastrophically lethal bombing raids of both North and South Vietnam, and their indiscriminate use of napalm and Agent Orange. (Like my Shagginwagen-Groucho said, "If there was any true justice in this world, there would someday be some 'Nuremburg Trials' held for the war criminals perpetrating that egregious slaughter going on in Vietnam—but there never will be because what nation on this planet could ever have the power to hold them?")

And what I have just so shallowly covered here represents but a brief, reversed-telescope glimpse of the true nature and depth of this world's bottomless, viper-swarming misery-well, into which one can but only most reluctantly and tentatively drop in the bucket of their interest to draw out a tiny fraction of its pestilential and malice-poisoned water of Taylor's violence, suffering, and evil.

I mean, JUST THINK OF IT!—just think of but one, simple bellwether of the true depth of that human misery-well, as dramatized by Romeo Dallaire, who was the Commander of the peacekeeping force in Rwanda during the massacre there and was totally traumatized and scarred for life by it, regardless that none of the victims of that massacre were his friends or relatives! If a stranger in that country could be traumatized into a state of PTSD by the evil violence of that massacre, what did it do to the survivors of it. And to the family members of the victims!

I mean, JUST THINK OF IT!—just think, in another too-common scenario, of two hundred people in Iraq attending the funeral of a relative killed in a terrorist attack, and while attending that funeral, fifty or more of them get blown to shredded bits of flesh and bone and blood by a fanatical, religion-motivated, Allah-guided suicide-bomber!

I mean, JUST THINK OF IT!—just think of the many U.S. soldiers, back in the days of that Vietnam debacle, who couldn't figure out what the big fuss over the Mi Lai massacre was all about back in "the States," in which a mere 500, or so, civilians were slaughtered by a handful of psychopathic American "grunts" during a murderous rampage, given that hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese peasants were at that same time being systematically sent to the Great Rice Paddy in the Sky by the 7 million tons of bombs (5 million tons more than dropped by Allied bombers during WWII!) dropped on that small, helpless, mostly agrarian country during the course of that war! (Of course, bombs impersonally dropped from fighter jets and giant bombers are a lot more impersonal—and unrelatable to—than an up-close-and-personal massacre like that where women and girls were raped before being murdered, and children and infants were just plain murdered—a la Colonel Chivington's racist, genocidal, Sand Creek Massacre philosophy of "Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice."

Fuck-a-rocket-launcher!—but did Coppola, in Apocalypse Now, ever hit that absurdity-mine right on its detonator when he has Kurtz say something to the effect that the commanders wouldn't let the airmen write FUCK on their airplanes because it was obscene, but it was okay for them use those airplanes to drop napalm on helpless women and children. And doing so, not only to incinerate them into unrecognizable heaps of barbequed flesh and charred bones, but so the eponymous, boots-in-the-bloody-muck, Colonel Kilgore, could enjoy "the smell of it in the morning."

And sure, most of that war-shit made the Six O'clock News—eventually. And it did so in unusually dramatic and gut-wrenching footage shown to Americans when they were trying to choke down their TV dinners along with the latest "body-count" statistics, but as John often pointed out about that, experiencing the true reality of combat through television or movie footage is like experiencing the slaughter and butchering of a steer or hog by looking at the plastic-wrapped steaks or chops on sale in a grocery store.

And of course, it was all slanted so that the footage they showed of long, grotesque lines—or even more grotesque piles—of Viet Cong or North Vietnamese corpses, was a good thing, (like they were slaughtered rats and not human beings!) especially since the military—and the White House—was trying to propagandize into the mostly-empty heads of those American viewers—the mindless mobs of MAGA-hatters didn't yet exist, but they times did have Nixon's great silent majority, which was just as mindless—the notion since only one American was dying to ten or twenty Vietnamese, that victory was inevitable—and might even be "just around the corner!" (John more than once expressed his contempt for that notion that high, enemy body-count numbers represented a measure of victory, saying that military victories were always about the taking and holding of territory, and that by that kind of "corpse-counting" lunacy, since many millions more Russians soldiers died during World War II than did Germans soldiers, Germany should have been declared the winner of that war!)

So though the "corpse-count" ratio—of soldiers, not civilians—during that debacle was 58, 000 American versus around 1,000,000 million Vietnamese, the Fascist States of America still lost that war. Fuck-a-B-52-bomber!—but those numbers are grotesque! If you factor in the 300,000, or so, civilians killed (a number that makes the 500 slaughtered at My Lai look like a footnote!) you get a number of 1.3 million Vietnamese slaughtered out of a population of 33 million, while on the American side, .058 million Americans who were killed out of a population of 200 million. Those grotesquely imbalanced numbers show that a very tiny David defeated a very humongous Goliath! And though all of the .058 million Americans got their names inscribed on a special wall erected as a memorial to them in Washington, it would take a wall as long as the Ho Chi Minh trail to record the names of all those dead Vietnamese.

But even those numbers, horrific as they are, are just useless abstractions that are totally impotent when it comes to really counting or cataloguing the Grand Canyons of fear and terror, the Pacific Oceans of tears, and the Sahara Deserts of sand-grains of heart-quakes of grief caused by those 1.3 million deaths. But oh yeah, like Stalin said: A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is statistic. And of course, that mere statistic of 1.3 million dead Vietnamese is tempered by that fact that those were non-Caucasian peoples being killed, which means they were endemically incapable of feeling much fear and terror during that war, didn't shed all the tears for their dead infants and children and relatives that Caucasians would have shed, didn't get their psyches rocked by all those heart-quakes of grief that would have devastated Caucasians, and most importantly, since most weren't even remotely affluent and didn't own much—no Cadillac(s) or even Chevrolet(s) in the driveway, but a bicycle or small motorcycle if they lived in cities, and a water buffalo and some shovels and hoes if they were rice paddy-peasants—their deaths, in the grand scheme of the world economy, counted for very little! Nothing at all, really!

Shit-on-chop-stick!—but I'm ranting on here like my draft-dodgin', Shagginwaggen-drivin', cocksman, Groucho! Though now that he again pops up in this addled and agitated mind of mine, I do have to say that though he hadn't had a very long rope attached to his philosophy-well bucket, he more than once pointed out the fact that the attitude of the Fascist States of America to the death and suffering and grief it was causing in Viet Nam was no different than its Manifest Destiny attitude to the death and suffering and grief it caused to its own Indians—or its Afro-Americans, for that matter—justifying it all with the notion that since they weren't Caucasian Christians, they weren't really human beings anyway, so they didn't have the same feelings about death and tragedy that Christian Caucasian—and thus truly human!—folks do.

And worse, because they weren't materially affluent, their lives were basically worthless and thus so were their deaths. (And I sure do wonder what Professor Shagginwaggen-Groucho would have to say about Mad King Donald, and his grotesquely popular, fascist, Neo-Manifest Destiny political platform and his cult following of MAGA-hatters with their hardly hidden battle cry of: FUCK EVERYBODY NOT SMART ENOUGH TO BE BORN WHITE AND RICH—AND AMERICAN!)

(Fuck-a-mailed fist!—but my head has just flare-exploded with and actual insight—launched into the empty black cavern of my head by who-the-fuck-knows-what because of my short "fuckship" with "Groucho" and my long friendship with John—that insight being that there exists a very obvious similarity between the institutions of Constantine's Imperial Abomination—which John so loathed!—and the a-bomb-ination (a-bomb-a-nation?) that is the Fascist States of America—that Groucho equally loathed!—in that both are really good at being able to "Hollywood" themselves to the world—and most particularly their members/citizens, their "mindless, credulous sheep" and their "mindless, credulous MAGA-hatters"—as "good institutions," as purveyors of light and benevolence, when, underneath that "Hollywood-facade" there exists in each of them a deep darkness that in its essence, is malicious, fascist, oppressive and very violent.

In taking a metaphor from the Lord of the Rings movies, you could call them the Twin Towers of Sauron's Mordor and Saruman's Isengard, Hollywood-masquerading as something good and benevolent to this "Upper Earth"—one as a paragon of spirituality, the other as a paragon of liberal democracy—while being as bad for it as Sauron and Saruman were for Tolkien's Middle Earth. Both, in their essence, are paragons of malice, fascism, oppression, violence—and hypocrisy!(And the whacky thought just splashed down into the loon-pond of my head that if John had been alive in 2002, he would have said it was very likely an omen that only months after the 'twin towers' came so disastrously crashing down, the Lord of the Ring movie, The Two Towers (the "Two Evil Towers") was released—but of course, Dear Reader, you just know I am too rational (LOL) to believe in all that irrational omen nonsense! I mean, face it, the idea that those two paragons of power-abuse, the secular "tower" of the Fascist States of America, and the sacred "tower" of Constantine's Imperial Abomination, could both come crashing down, is as absurd as the notion that each is exactly what it presents itself to the world—and its mindless sheep-flocks of "MAGA-hatters"—as being!)

And fuck-a-Humvee!—but that was a ridiculously long sidetrack into the a-bomb-inable military misadventures of the Fascist States of America and now I again have to scroll back and find out what the topic was that I had, Dear Reader, been boring the hell out of you with . . . . . . Ahh, yes—I was keyboard-babbling—blogging!—about the media covering all the human misery afflicting this world, a black, festering iceberg that has, at its most visible tip, wars and war-related massacres and genocides, not to forget to mention those too-many out-of-the-blue massacres by civilians with assault rifles—especially in the NRA's, armed-for-Armageddon, Fascist States of America, but elsewhere as well—and those rare but odious, malevolent, and incomprehensible serial killers, but where the coverage tends to fail—or must be uselessly shallow—is in the areas of marital and family violence, and the pervasive suffering, evil and violence expressed daily through the dark side of our sexuality.

Of course, in one sense, that is understandable because we are still—even after those lubricious 60s—still living in a basically Puritan culture dominated by those three, hypocrisy-monkeys: see-no-sex, hear-no-sex, speak-no-sex. Or in the family, anyway. Which is a conundrum worth cutting into by mind-knives infinitely sharper than mine, because just about everything outside of the family is as saturated with either overt sex or sexual innuendo, particularly the Internet and all the advertising on all the media venues, as rainforests are with the color green, while within most families, the topic is usually verboten. The amount of catastrophic misery created by this phenomena is astronomical, though hell, what does it matter—it's usually only happening to girls and women, anyway! To this patriarchal world's second—and third and fourth—class citizens!

Yet statistics say that one in four girls will be molested by someone, usually a relative, before they become adults! Not many stories about that in the media, and especially not about the lifetime of misery, shame, depression, and potential for suicide that lifelong ensues after those one-in-four abuse-victims But again, most of those victims are girls, and, like non-whites—and poor people—in the Fascist States of America, they sure don't count for a hell of a lot!

Then there's that world of patriarchal sexual politics expressed through rape, which is probably a lot more prevalent in our Western affluent countries than ever gets written up about, except when it is used as an oppressive, controlling, patriarchal tool in war zones by soldiers who now seem to be as assiduously trained in using their organic weapons (no pun intended) to intimidate and put girls and women in their "proper patriarchal place" as they are in the use of their inorganic weapons for killing just about everyone—women and children included—that they don't like the look of. Or who look at them sideways!

And though for centuries, the deep, vast, dark, putrid, and absolutely evil part of that black iceberg, the sexual acts perpetrated—usually against children, both male and female—by all levels of the clergy of Constantine's Imperial Pedophile Factory, was kept safely underwater and out of sight by the frantic, passionate, clever, and legal efforts of that monstrous, wealthy, very political institution, it is now finally floating to the surface and filling the media—and our moral noses—with its foul, choking stench. A few years ago that brilliant movie, Spotlight, explored the decades of abuse perpetrated by scores of pedophile priests on hundreds of victims in Boston, a moral debacle that went on for decades because the police, the Church, and local politicians played at being the three hypocrisy-monkeys about it. (Nobody wanted to "rock the boat," as if a few people jumping up and down on the flight deck of an aircraft carried can cause it to "rock!")

Though of course, right now as I have been so manically and crazily keyboard-babbling this poor excuse of a "Preface" into existence, the world news—if you can believe it!—its dripping and reeking with the explosive diarrhea revealed the Grand Jury report about acts of sexual abuse perpetrated by Catholic clergy in Pennsylvania over seven decades and consistently and assiduously covered-up by that Church's political, ass-covering hierarchy. The Grand Jury report catalogues up to three hundred priests sexually molesting over a thousand (known-about!) victims over just those seven decades alone—all made possible by bishops and archbishops—and surely the pope—bended-knees worshipping those three hypocrisy-monkeys and seeing-hearing-speaking nothing about it.

Well, I'm wrong there, aren't I!—because they were seeing and hearing about it, just not speaking or doing anything about it. In fact, in many cases, they were not only actively covering it up, (the report said the Abomination had a "playbook" for dealing with, and covering-up, abuse cases) but equally actively facilitating it! Facilitating it through the practice of when reports of the malevolent activities of pedophile priests came to their attention through victim-complaints in one diocese, they'd move the offenders to a new dioceses.

Constantine's Imperial Clergy have been portrayed by that abominable institution as shepherds looking after their flocks of lambs and sheep, but in this case, they weren't behaving like shepherds, but like wolves! And when the lambs of one diocesan meadow bleated too loudly about the predatory activities of their shepherd-cum-wolf (pun intended!), the bishop or archbishop would move them to a fresh meadow with a fresh flock of lambs to ravage!

And some of the specifics cited by that Grand Jury are beyond horrific. In one case it reported that a priest molested five girls in the same family and collected samples of their "urine, pubic hair, and menstrual blood." (POL—Puke Out Loud!) In another, a priest impregnated a 17 year old girl, faked a pastor's signature on a marriage certificate, the a few months later divorced her. He got away with this and remained a priest by finding a "benevolent" bishop to handle the problem. Then there's my "most horrific" example—that "clerical-collared representative of Christ" who raped a seven—yup, seven-7-SEVEN!—year-old girl (Puke Out Loud) when she was in the hospital having her tonsils removed. (A great two-fer-one'r that was: she got rid of her festering tonsils and her virginity for one cheap price!)

Though my absolute favorite of those gag-till-you-puke-out-loud stories is the one about that ring of pedophile priests in Pittsburg (alliteration not intended!) who not only sexually abused their altar boy-victims, and not only whipped and beat and raped them, and not only took pornographic pictures of them that they lustfully shared, but gifted them with large, golden crosses that identified them to all the pedophile priests in this malevolent ring as "pre-abused" and thus "desensitized" to abuse. Like some food inspection agency's stamp of approval.

Fuck-a-popemobile!—if there actually existed a Christ, he'd be ripping himself off his cross and doing to those pernicious priests what he supposedly did to the money-lenders in the temple, who, compared to those priests, would have been saints—had Judaism had such an exalted category for their mythical "holy men!"

But the horror of this very brief description of the putrid—POL!—evils elucidated in the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report, obvious though it might be, cannot even begin to portray, not only the depths of the even more putrid evil perpetrated by the upper echelons of Constantine's Imperial Abomination in their efforts to cover it up—thus encouraging that evil to persist and spread—but the unfathomable amounts of unmitigated human misery created by it. Not just the unmitigated misery created in the subsequent adult lives that were inevitably deformed and ruined by those horrific childhood abuses—at the pounding pricks, probing hands, and licking/sucking/lying mouths of an endemically trusted, and supposedly holy, clergy, but the subsequent other childhoods and adult lives deformed and ruined by those very same victims when the evil perpetrated by those pernicious, predatory, pedophile priests turned some of those victims into sexual predators themselves. (Another, darker, more malicious version of "the gift that keeps on giving!")

And there has been nothing to suggest that there is something unusual in the water or the air of Pennsylvania—or Boston—to suggest those rare factors as the direct cause of this outbreak of priest-pedophilia and unrestrained—and too often Church-unpunished lechery!—so there is also nothing to suggest that these few, thoroughly investigated cases aren't just the snout of the monstrous, voracious, insatiable crocodile of predatory evil gliding through the swamp waters of the pestilential norm for priest-pedophilia and lechery in all Catholic dioceses around the world. (Check out the egregious abuse situation in Chile! Or just ask the Irish! Or watch the 2006 documentary, Delivery Us From Evil, which explores and exposes the pedophilic—POL!—evil perpetrated by Father Oliver O'Grady in California in the 70s—and covered up and facilitated by Cardinal—then bishop—Roger Mahony! It's a tough watch—but worth it.)

If there truly existed an all-knowing Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy-deity who was intent on living down the "Nasty Ol'" part of his moniker, and in thus truly existing, actually gave a nun's-fart about this vile and villainous issue, only he—in his putative omniscience!—would know the complexity and extent of that dark web of unrestrained evil created by it. (I can't help but think about what my father missed out on in his failure to become a priest—his vile pedophilic and lecherous needs would have been safely satisfied with a lot more variety as a priest with merely the appellation of "Father," than what he got as a real father from little ol' available-and-accommodating daughter-me!)

But infinitely worse than just those foul deeds themselves, are—as already mentioned!—all the lives of those victims fundamentally destroyed, not only by their abject sense of a cruel and devastating conundrum of their betrayal at the hands of the revered and trusted clergy of a religious institution they'd been taught—indoctrinated!—from birth to be both a representative institution of their Lord God Almighty and the only path to, after death, sit as their Lord God Almighty's side throughout all of eternity through salvation from the very sins they were being forced by its revered and powerful clergy to partake in, and by their shame and depression and mangled and deformed self-esteem, which in turn, as they dysfunctionally raise their families they subsequently may or may not create, would become another dark web of abuse in its own right.

That is, for those victims of that evil that did not cope with it by going insane or committing suicide, and as everyone who has a family member commit suicide knows, that act has dark, horrific and long-lasting repercussions few want to think about, let alone chart!

And staying with that theme of charting the depths and putridity of that misery-well created by our culture's puritanical attitude to sex dominated by those three hypocrisy-monkeys, how can one not mention that multi-billion dollar industry today thriving on the Internet—pornography. And so pervasive is it on that ubiquitous medium that sometimes when typing in what you think are innocuous requests into your browser, you get bombarded with pornographic sites. Some of it, to be sure, is pretty tame, but not all of it. If you are so inclined as to like child pornography—even if you are not a Catholic priest!—that horrific stuff is not that hard to find. And it can be horrific. Beyond horrific, even! A few weeks ago there was an item on the news about a police officer who was commenting on the job-trauma of having to watch hours and hours of horrifying child pornography in an effort to identify both the perps and the victims, with some of those being videos of six-month-old infant girls being raped. SIX FUCKING GODFORSAKEN MONTHS OLD! I can't even begin to imagine the evil of some "man"—demon!—perpetrating such an absolutely demonic act, or the unmitigated horror of having to watch a movie of some demon perpetrating such an utterly invidious act!

And yes, if you find that statement utterly POL-unbelievable, I don't blame you your refusal to believe it, because believing in the reality of such utterly evil acts throws your poor mind into a state of cognitive dissonance because your brain and sensibilities lack all ability to rationally—or any other way!—process it. And then of course there is that animal-involved stuff that can only be arousing to someone with very sick, sexual tastes, but it's pretty tame compared to the ultimate in inconceivably sick and utterly evil pornography—murder-porn aka "snuff films," (like the lives being terminated in them are of no more value than the flame of a candle!) where a participant in the film—always, I assume, a woman!—is actually murdered by some very evil people so some equally evil, uber-psychopaths—sicker, and more psychopathic even, than the infant-rapers, if that's possible!—can get their "jollies" masturbating to it. Like John used to say, "There's nothing wrong with humanity that a head-on collision with a comet the size of the moon wouldn't cure!

And for whatever it is limitedly worth, it is my humble opinion that if our "culture's" attitude towards sex was altered to reflect even one third of what Wilhelm Reich advocated in The Function of the Orgasm—and for which he was likely incarcerated and "executed" by the fascist forces that dominated the Fascist State of America in the 50s—a lot of these problems with pornography wouldn't exist. Just like if Constantine's Imperial Abomination allowed its clergy to marry, it wouldn't attract—and groom!—all those pernicious pedophiles that its current, fundamentally unnatural policy, does! (And yes, years after Groucho gave me Reich's famous book, I finally did read it—John's copy!)

But( backtracking a bit) of course, the scope of Robert Taylor's book (remember my mentioning that book) did not allow him to get even close to the true reality of the suffering, the evil and the violence he covered with those three abstract words, and even if it had, would he have really gone into the nitty-gritty of it all, given that he was writing as an academic tome for an academic audience quite comfortably ensconced in the delusive La-Z-Boy-furnished Ivory Tower of exactly what he is writing against. (Jeez, I am getting as bold as John—or just expressing my insanity—daring to sing out, from my lowly perch, a negative song against a famous and respectable academic like Charles Taylor, given that should I have ever taken one of his university classes—at the first-rate university of McGill that I could never have gotten into!—I'd not even have been considered smart enough to polish his basket of desk-apples!)

But I mean, let's face it—if writers do an excellent job writing deep and satisfying books that appeal to our heads, or our hearts, or hopefully both, those books can be classed as great literature and graduate literature students can read them until their eyeballs turn to melting jelly and write enough PhD dissertations about them to swamp a modern container ship. But should those same writers, using the same level of writing expertise that bangs the gongs in our heads and strums the strings in our hearts, also takes us deep into the nitty-gritty of the minutiae and genesis of human violence and its effects on its victims, or worse, (by far) which pruriently strokes our groins, a la Henry Miller, then things have gone too far and get immediately censored.

Censored in a variety of ways. The Fascist States of America lives up to its name for all the books it has banned over the centuries, (Wiki that very Nazi-problem—if you dare!) the most ironic of the lot being the works of Wilhelm Reich. Six fuckin' goddamn tons of them were incinerated in a true, Nazi-orgy of book burning, many of the copies, most ironically being, I am sure, his The Mass Psychology Of Fascism! And then, of course, there's Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, banned in his home country from its publication in France in 1934 until 1961.

Though even when the censorship is not being done for political reasons by the prurient fascists in power, it is often done by that harshest of $tyle-Nazis: "good taste."Though of course, as far as I am concerned, that is just usually what tastes good to the palliative palate of the milquetoast majority! Fuck-a-philosophy-book!—but I'm starting to fuckin' sound like fuckin' Nietzsche here! Though why the fuck not, since though I cannot follow in his footsteps as a great philosopher, I certainly am doing so as a certifiable loon!

Just imagine if Flaubert and Tolstoy had not only not only rung our head-bells and strummed our heart-strings with "moral" failings and adulterous misadventures of Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, but had also stoked our imaginations and stroked our unmentionables with more explicit descriptions of their adulterous indiscretions? Yes, just!—for had they done so, those works would not have been published by any reputable firm, let alone had the opportunity to achieve the exalted literary cachet they now enjoy. They would not be well-bound books to be proudly displayed—maybe even after having actually been read—on the countless book shelves of aficionados of great literature, but would instead, if they got published at all, and then only by some seedy, back-alley publishing outfit with a purview for the salacious. And on being thus back-handedly published, they'd have been instantly and overtly denounced as unchristian—Satanic!—pornography while being surreptitiously bought, secretly read and masturbated to—probably by cathedrals full of priests and bishops!—then scrupulously hidden away—from the women and children—and nuns!—I guess, who were fair game for rape and no end of nefarious molestations, but not fit for reading such scandalous and tittilating writings.

And along that same line, another of my pet, hypocrisy-peeves along a similar line is that movies with a bit of sex in them—a bare fucking boob, even!—will be classified at Restricted to those over 17 or 18, yet many of the kids who aren't even close to the age of getting into theatres to watch such "dangerous-to-their-moral-fiber" movies, can go home after school and watch all the porn on the Web they want, and/or indulge in as much sex as they've got the stamina for until five minutes before their parents come home from work.

Ha!—it was John—who else?—who taught me that game of seeing-the-picture-too-long-on-the-wall-covering-the-crack hypocrisy" (in reference to the fact that if a picture hangs on a wall too long, no one really sees it anymore, no less than if a truth is covered up with a euphemism long enough, the euphemism becomes the reality, and the reality becomes something that no one even notices anymore) that we take so for granted in life that we are incapable of seeing the truth of it. His absolutely favorite hypocrisy-peeve (that's my phrase for them, while his was cultural myth-takes) is that word that so many members of the Big Three Monotheisms are so damned proud of—faith!

You hear it all the time from all Christians, but especially Catholics and Born-Agains, as they proudly shout from the steeple-tops to all who are willing to listen—and many who aren't!—about their great and wondrous and special faith. Like it is some kind of stupendous achievement akin to a one-legged nonagenarian climbing Mt. Everest or a shipwrecked sailor surviving for six months alone at sea with nothing to eat but the flying fish that landed in his raft and nothing to drink but rainwater. But as John so often said, "Those religidiots just don't see, just don't understand, that what they are lauding as their stupendous faith, is nothing more than their childish ability to credulously believe stupendously irrational fairy tales that no intelligent child over the age of five could take seriously. Their dumb-child ability to take myths—stories!—that teach about deep spiritual matters and degrade and destroy the spiritual importance and power of those stories by believing they are true historical events—which of course, turns them from myths into those ridiculous and unbelievable stories no intelligent child could believe to have any basis in reality! And face—faith?—it, heh, heh—Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy, no matter how many millions upon millions of mindless sheep so passionate believe in 'his' de facto existence, in essence, 'he' is still just a story. A story told to children and mindless-sheep adults to make them feel warm and fuzzy inside. And to give them a reason—another reason!—to go on very righteous and satisfying murder-sprees against fellow human beings!"

Another of John's favorite "myth-takes" was one he joked about often, that being the notion that the ancient Greek Oedipus myth that was so important to Freud is a morality tale about a man who murders his father and sleeps with mother because he hates his father and lusts after his mother, when a reading of the myth makes it obvious that, Oedipus, in a fit of rage, kills a man at a crossroads whom he does not know is his father and ends up marrying a widow whom he has absolutely no idea is his mother. Freud, he said, projected a lot of sub-conscious nonsense onto that myth that it does not deserve.

And the only reason Oedipus ended up doing those vile things was because his father, Laius, was stupid enough to try to have his fate revealed to him by consulting the Oracle at Delphi, then compounded his stupidity by paying attention to what the Oracle prophesied—that his yet unborn son would someday kill him and marry his wife, Jocasta. Laius tries to avert this "oracled" disaster by, on his son being born, attempting to kill him by handing him to servant with orders to first cripple the infant by piercing his ankles so he'd not even be able to crawl, then exposing him to the elements to die. (Sounds like that old Greek Laius was the model the Israelites used for their Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy!) But the a shepherd rescues the crippled infant Oedipus and gives him to another couple to raise as their own son, so he grows up not knowing who his real parents are. This catastrophic not-knowing sets him on a path to stumble into one situation where he fatefully and unwittingly kills his father, and into another where he fatefully and unwittingly marries his mother.

So, as far as John was concerned, the story is all about the folly of human beings consulting and listening to oracles in an effort to know their fate, and knowing it, change it to suit their own ends. In John's no-bullshit, cowboy philosophy, we, as human beings, can never know our fate or change it to suit own ends. Our fate, by its very nature, belongs to a higher order of powers—the Powers of Fate. Or the fuckin' Lords of Karma—or whatthefuckever! Our fate is really theirs and never our own, just like the fate of a rancher's cattle always belongs to the rancher.

Thus if Laius, in being foolish enough to consult that famous oracle, had been wise enough to react to its prophecy by making an extra effort to raise Oedipus to be a gentle, moral, and dutiful son, Oedipus would certainly both have known Laius was his father and most likely loved and respected him enough not to want to kill him, as no less he would have known Jocasta was his mother and with his father still alive, would have not been thrust into a situation that would have opened any fate-doors to him being able to marry her. Even he could even muster the desire to want to!

John was quite certain that Laius both set in motion his dark fate of being killed by his son Oedipus and that he deserved it! Both set it in motion and deserved it because he'd behaved in a very inhuman and un-fatherly fashion towards the infant Oedipus, first in having him cruelly mutilated, then in attempting to murder him through ordering to his servant to expose him.

John got very serious and thoughtful as he tried to talk about the elements of fate woven into that dark and tragic myth, for, as with all things concerning fate, there was an element of deep mystery to it that we could no more rationally understand than we could know our individual fates. In John's mind, trying to out-guess and out-flank fate was like trying to juggle vials of nitroglycerine—it was neither a predictable endeavor nor one highly likely to end well.

As far as he could see it, Laius either played into the machinations of fate or provoked fate's more malicious nature when he irrationally, mindlessly and egotistically listened to and acted on the fateful words of that Oracle, but had he behaved with reason and ignored the prophesy and then with mindfulness and compassion raised young Oedipus in a loving family-situation created by he and Jocasta, the tragedy would have been averted. John also laughing said Freud really corrupted and degraded the true teaching power of that myth for modern readers by literalizing it with all his obsessive, sexual nonsense about it.

And while John was telling me all of that I couldn't help think about W. Somerset Maugham's retelling of that Islamic tale, "The Appointment in Samarra," in which a servant is sent by his master to a Bagdad marketplace to buy provisions, gets spooked when jostled by Death, who then seems to give him a threatening gesture, and the servant then tries to escape his fate at the hands of Death, by fleeing to Samarra, where Death won't find him. When the master goes to the market to ask Death why he threatened his servant, Death said, "I didn't threaten him, I was just surprised to see him here in Bagdad, because I have an appointment tonight with him in Samarra." And when I related that story to John, he just smiled and said, "Ah, what a clever tale! Our fate—when reduced to just our death!—is not ours to see, nor to manipulate and escape—just to accept. Which of course, does not mean we can't make all those mindful, willful and meaningful choices between our fated birth and our fated death, that give us a meaningful life."

(So, Dear Reader, if you think I truly understood any of that above Oedipus-shit I just finished keyboard-babbling about, then you are a damn lot smarter than I am! And in our few conversations about that ancient Greek myth about Oedipus, I wondered why John took such an interest in it, and it was only while reading his memoirs, and the cruel, Laius-like role he played in the raising, alienating, and directly causing the death of his son, Johnny, that I finally understood it. Just as John more than once said Laius could have done a lot better by Oedipus, he did so knowing he, as a father, could have done a lot better by his own son, Johnny!)

And though John tended to pass that Oedipus "myth-take" off rather lightly, since, as he said, "It is, after all, only a myth!" he was more than serious about a common "myth-take" that had considerable more catastrophic implications. And that had to do with calling Part One of the World War, The Great War, thus giving it a patina of glory it didn't deserve, especially since, as he so often said, it wasn't a real war, but a BASS—a Bloody Awful Stupid Slaughter! He also said that myth-labeling it as a The Great War and not as just a Bloody Awful Stupid Slaughter, it encouraged our mad stumble into Part Two of the World War, as the next generation of way-too-young-and-glory-greedy men marched off to their own Great War to out-warrior and out-glory their fathers. Though he was also always quick to add, that Britain's and France's appeasement of Hitler—and refusal to take a tough stand against his re-arming his "Hun-Hordes"—played a big role in that.

He also like to point out that on a serious, but less catastrophic level—unless you were aboard!—was that "myth-take" of how we—history!—has come to so mindlessly accept that the Titanic was sunk by an iceberg, when it truly was sunk by the arrogance and hubris of Captain Smith! The iceberg was merely incidental—like the gun a murderer intentionally uses to kill his or her victim!

Captain Smith, in trying to break a record for the fastest Atlantic crossing, refused to slow down—or stop for the night, as other ships had—while going through those iceberg-filled waters in the dark. John was sure—as he was certain many others at the time also were!—that at half-speed, the Titanic's lookouts would have seen that iceberg in time to have changed course and avoided hitting it. Of course, reducing to half-speed for that "night-run through the bergs" would have wrecked Captain Smith's chances at capturing that record, so he risked wrecking his ship and killing its passengers instead. John was certain that had Captain Smith not gone down with his folly-wrecked Titanic, he'd likely have been tried and hanged as a mass murderer for his arrogant and hubristic mishandling of the situation and we ever after would have been speaking the truth about that easily avoidable tragedy!

I mean, let's face it—the blubbering drunk in the jail cell with his slaughtered family in the morgue may shout as loud as he slobbering wants about his certitude that that "damned big tree in the middle of that field" was the cause of the accident and his family's destruction, but no policeman, nor any judge, is going to buy that load of beer-soaked bullshit. Ironically, there's been several extremely high profile ship sinkings over the last decades, the Exxon Valdez and the Costa Concordia, the former due to its captain's drunkenness (and his arrogant hubris in allowing himself to do such a responsible job while in such a state), with the latter being caused by its captain—a total, albeit Italian, MAGA-hatter—who abandoned his sinking ship to save his yellow ass after intentionally sailing his ship off course and too close to an island, some saying he did this to show off to his mistress, who had boarded the ship as an non-paying passenger! Fuck-a-floating-dock!—but if that is true, that idiot must have been having an hallucination that he was operating a Jet Ski on a lake! (Or more likely just egotistically deluded enough to believe he could pull the insane stunt off!)

And John had no shortage of those picture-too-long-on-the-wall-covering-the-crack hypocrisies he loved to pontificate about. One of his favorite was this euphemism that powerful European nations colonized various parts of the world to make them productive parts of their benevolent and beneficent empires, when in fact all of those so-called colonizations were just outright armed invasions and oppressive occupations. England didn't colonize North America, it invaded and occupied it, given that it wasn't an empty land just awaiting some human habitation, but was already occupied by Native Americans who considered it their sacred land.

And after the 13 American colonies had solidified that invasion and occupation and were becoming self-sufficient, they rebelled against, and freed themselves from, English taxation and control, creating the United States. That new country then set about invading and occupying all the Native American-held land to the west. Lebensraum, or "living space" was the motivating—and justifying!—"cry" used by the Nazi rat-hordes when they invaded and occupied Europe, and Manifest Destiny was the motivating—and justifying!—"cry" used by the proto-Nazi rat-hordes of American soldiers and settlers when they set about invading and occupying those Native American-held lands. And committing genocide on the inhabitants to make that occupation easier and more profitable. (It doesn't take a brain the size of Stephen Hawking's to figure out that the Nazi's didn't do anything in Europe that they hadn't historically learned from the Fascist States of America.)

And then of course, there was that biggest of all the Big-Cons pulled off by the British when they invaded and occupied—and economically raped the hell out of—India, doing so under the bullshit rubric of colonization! Or whatever they called their economic exploits back then. Empirization, I guess! And even once they were finally, and righteously given the boot by the Indians under the inspirational genius of the avatar Gandhi, they left claiming they'd done India a big favor by both unifying it and covering it with railroads. Of course, it again doesn't take and Einstein or a Hawking to see that they didn't build those railroads so the Indians could easily and comfortably travel around their country visiting their relatives, but to facilitate their own ability to economically rape the shit out that vast land. And to quickly send soldiers to flash-points where the "natives" were getting "restless" and rising up against them in armed rebellion.

"And then, of course," I can remember John so sarcastically saying. "There was that malevolent British pay-back to the Indians for daring to kick them out and end their lucrative occupation of their land—the Partition. This partitioning of India into the countries of Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan was done in such a hasty, arbitrary, thoughtless and malicious fashion that it resulted in about 14 million people being displaced from their homes as refugees—and a whole lot of sectarian violence that led to two million deaths. The scars of that dark time still hang over that sub-continent! Don't ever be foolish enough to believe that the British Empire was an entity spreading the butter of beneficence and enlightenment on the bread of the world—it was a dedicated and very lucrative program of invasion, occupation, rape and pillage!

"And now it is the turn of the Americans to take up where the British left off, and though they don't claim they have an Empire, just ask the countries they have subverted and enslaved economically—and ones like the Philippines, which they once invaded and occupied. And ask some indigenous Hawaiian someday what they think about Hawaii being an American state—and how it ended up being so!"

Ironically, as I was writing those words about the British Empire, I had a sudden flash-back to my grade school days when one of our classrooms had a world map showing the countries of the British Commonwealth all in red, and a proud, Brit teacher saying, "The sun never sets on the British Commonwealth!" I can now see that it was most appropriate that the countries of that Empire were depicted in red—the apt metaphor for all the blood that was shed in Britain's invasion and occupation of them!)

Of course, I sure couldn't argue with John about that stuff. One of my favorite novels is Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which is all about the brutally dark and voracious "heart" behind Belgium's colonization—invasion, occupation and economic rape—of the Congo, while Coppola's Heart of Darkness-based, Apocalypse Now was about the Fascist States of America's continuance of France's murderous fight to maintain their very lucrative occupation—and economic raping of—Vietnam, which it invaded and conquered in the 1850s.

Ironically, Coppola's incentive to make Apocalypse Now was obviously to show the picture-too-long-on-the-wall-covering-the-crack hypocrisy of it, especially when it was being propagandized as a necessary and heroic stand against "evil Communism," but ended up just being an over-flowing cash-trough for the top hogs of the military-industrial complex to feed from. He sums of that stance perfectly when he has Kurtz ask Willard, "Are you an assassin?" And Willard says, " I'm a soldier." Which provokes Kurtz to sardonically reply, "You're neither. You're an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill."

Fuck-a-flagpole!—and wipe yourself afterwards with a Union Jack or Stars and Stripes! But I am suddenly hallucinating the potent sense that John is right now in the room with me, filling my head with a vivid vision of the Titanic striking an iceberg and starting to sink, along with the sense that there is a big, important metaphor in what I have been writing about that picture-too-long-on-the-wall-covering-the-crack hypocrisy of the explanation for it. With the reason for that vision being that Jupiter Jung's collective unconscious might, in those absurd and tragic, ship-sinking incidents, be giving us dramatic warnings that the Good Ship Earth is being mortally imperiled by those Captains of Industry and Politics who so delusively believe they can do as they recklessly "wish and will," with it! That they are as sight-blind to the implications of what they are doing as was Captain Smith of the Titanic, Captain Hazelwood of the Exxon Valdez, and Captain Shettino of the Costa Concordia!

### Chapter Thirty Six

I would keyboard-babble more on this subject but this poor "Preface" is already a berg-holed Titanic sinking fast into the North Atlantic depths of a length longer than a trans-Atlantic telephone cable, and as all over the place as the contents of a bombed hardware store, and John writes infinitely more about the subject—and infinitely more intelligently than I!—in Book Two of The Fire, though I will cut to the chase—aw jeez, not another cliché!—with his ideas on pornography, which was of little interest to him directly (which given his age when I knew him, was no surprise) but which he used to prove a point about the complex spiritual nature of the only really important trinity in our life: our physical body, our spirit-being, and our lower soul—which he called the energy body and which he said was what Freud labeled the id, except Freud did not understand it as the independent spiritual entity that it is and possessing a very deep, powerful and elemental consciousness of its own that that did not intimately "mesh"(interface would be the modern word) with our shallow, weak and personal ego-consciousness—with the latter two possessing what we call imagination but which really was just our necessary connection with the cosmic Imagination. (And no, Jerry, "weird old geezer that John might have been, I did not find, while cleaning out his house after his death, a single "skin mag," let alone a box of them!)

Often, in our discussions—as, Dear Reader, I surely have told you too many times!—I have a third-rate Bachelor's degree in English Lit with a minor in History and that aging cowboy, John, with pretty much no formal education, was always talking about serious books and deep, philosophical things that made me feel like I was the grade school drop-out, not him! And often he would deride the Darwinist view that human being are no more than highly evolved apes and that our spiritual nature was either a big, cynical, manipulative, and extremely lucrative sin-slinging-con being pulled on us by Constantine' Imperial Abomination—or just wishful thinking. He had many arguments for us human creatures, at our core, being spiritual beings—though, as you might have figured out by now, his ideas of exactly what comprised spirituality sure didn't jibe with those of any institutional religion—or priest, rabbi, or imam!

To John, the most important part of our human behavior came from our essentially spiritual nature, which naturally and necessarily is integrally ensconced in that Ocean of Spirit. And that included our sexual behaviors. As far as he was concerned, though our sexuality had a lot of powerful, physical, hormone-driven aspects to it, it also had a powerful second-chakra component, which meant the powerful, second-chakra, liquid "fire" of it actually manifested out of our fundamentally spiritual nature—and the lower levels/frequencies of the Ocean of Spirit. And he made that claim based on his observations—none very scientific, I am sure!—that the sexuality of animals differed greatly from our human sexuality.

He asserted that, unlike any animals he was familiar with, human beings could get highly aroused, not just by looking at people having sex, but looking at pictures or movies of them having it, and more astoundingly, they could get just as, or even more, aroused merely imagining themselves or other human being having sex—which is where all the power of pornography lay! He didn't laugh much, that somber old cowboy did not, but laugh uproariously he said, "Can you imagine some slobbering old St. Bernard getting aroused by imagining itself humping some dainty little Irish setter bitch, or by looking at pictures, or a movie of a horny Jack Russell trying to hump a German Shepherd bitch in the mortified, broom-wielding, Widow Wilson's front yard?

"For animals, as I see it, sex for them is all about what they hear and smell in the physical world, and if it is sexual, they are not even free not to respond to it. And whereas a male dog could stare for a week with complete indifference at a movie of other dogs humping, even the faintest sniff of a bitch in heat twenty miles away will set his balls on fire and send him running over a range of mountains for his share of the action!"

And he was then making a point that can hardly be gainsaid. Especially today! Much as the Internet was picking up steam in John's later years, he was never "connected"—he didn't even own a computer, though I wish to hell he would've had one so he could have typed out his memoirs and saved me years of work!—and had no interest in it, so he had no idea of the ever-increasing tsunami of pornography—of a nature so explicit and comprehensive that Victorian lechers would have sold their saintly old priss of a Queen to the highest bidding Indian rajah for a few gigs of access to it—that flooded through it and is available to young and old alike, whether they want it or not, with the click of a button. (John liked to peruse magazine racks for any magazine that caught his attention, and the number of "skin mags" available used to astound him.)

Hell, it is now so ubiquitous—an ubiquity fueled by demand—that John's favorite magazine, a former frontier history publication by the Hudson's Bay Company called The Beaver, had to be re-named because anyone punching the world Beaver into their browser would more likely end up on a porn site than on one dealing with that hardworking, dam-building rodent—or that history magazine. (Just for the hell of it I Googled the value of Internet porn and couldn't get a definitive modern answer because all the free porn available is skewing the numbers, but Forbes, in 2001, estimated the porn industry grossed fourteen billion dollars annually!)

And if you are one of those ostriches who doesn't want to believe, or acknowledge porn has gone mainstream in its reach and ubiquity—or that Constantine's Imperial Abomination is now a certified den of debauchery—a Canuck bishop, a few years ago, was in court for being caught with 150,000—yup, that about 1/6th of a million!—pornographic images on his computer, (he must have had an immensely huge hard drive! LOL!) a few hundred of them—the ones that landed him, not only in the national news, but deep into a cesspit full of legal and ecclesiastical doo-doo—were of the most pernicious, dark and despicable kind—kiddy-porn! (I wonder how much of it was put out there by that ring of pernicious pedophile priests in Pennsylvania who used to gift their victims with gold crosses so their fellow pedophiles could instantly know they were "easy pickin's" who were already well schooled in the arts of sexually pleasing pedophile priests!)(Pious and artful "little suckers" I guess they would have been known as!)

And writing that makes me wonder what that holy bishop, my Uncle Matthew, had on his computer when he went to Hell after crapping his way out of this world. (It was whispered around "the Clan" that he died on a toilet, the delightful sight of that fancy-robed creep "cashing it in" while "squeezing it out" reminds me of that clichéd taunt often hurled at us Cat-lickers by our Protestant tormenters as we walked to and from our respective schools: "Hey Cat-lickers—every time your Pope drops a big fat stinking turd, does he look in the toilet and shout, 'HOLY SHIT!'")(Of course, as next-to-pagan Protestants, they couldn't know that our demi-god Pope didn't shit stinky shit into his toilet, but delightfully scented and bow-wrapped packages of frankincense and myrrh!)

As I was writing the above bit about John and pornography I was wracking my brains out trying to remember how the hell John and I ever got onto that subject in the first place. Much as my brain was feeling as constipated as the grunting-to-his-death Bishop Matthew, the ex-lax of stopping to make a cup of coffee has freed up the mental movement and I finally, and embarrassingly remember how we got talking about as delicate a subject—between a niece and her great uncle!—as that one.

We got onto it because of me very Rachel-stupidly bringing it up in relation to having found a stash of "skin mags"—Penthouse, Playboy, Hustler, and a few others—under Jonathan's mattress when he was about fourteen or so. (Can you imagine the likes of me, being concerned about that? But I was wearing my Catholic-mother hypocrisy-hat, so, like all Catholic mothers when it comes to sex, I was as swamped in hypocrisy as Mad King Donald in his cornucopia of lies!)(If you want a demonstrable idea of how crazed Catholic Mothers can get, reference that that sex-crazed Catholic mother in that impossible-to-watch-more-than-once—no matter how much of a Tom 'the Hunk' Cruise fan you are!—Vietnam War movie, Born on the Fourth of July?)

So after coming across that salacious stash, I cretinously asked John if he thought that those magazines could be harmful to Jonathan. His reply was an instant and caustic, "In the first place, you should never have been snooping around Jonathan's private place to have found them, and second, masturbating to pictures of naked women is a hell of a lot less harmful to a young man than doing drugs . . . or going off to war . . . or driving around drunk . . . or getting clapped-up by a prostitute. Or joining a fascist political party! Or whatever of the million risky things teenage boys are compelled to do along those lines as they leap across the coulee that separates being a little boy being strangled by his mama's apron strings, to being a free and self-contained man with his gonads in charge of much of his life!

"But I am ashamed for you that you asked that question. And even more ashamed for you that you invaded the poor lad's space so that you had to! Mothers that do that should be locked in an outhouse for a week on a diet of rat droppings and wino piss so they can contemplate the fact that as mothers their job is to prepare their sons for life—and life, as you, of all people, should know, is a wheel that revolves around the hub of sex!—not protect or insulate them from it. Or at least, not once they have reached puberty!"

That embarrassing episode—not since he'd flung me, like a shovelful of shit onto that pile of piss-reeking horseshit!—had I felt John so vehemently disapprove of my actions, though that stupid and embarrassing question did open the door for him say what I have previously written that he said about pornography, and his contention that it was infinitely more about the power and nature of the human imagination and spirituality than it was about mundane sex. (To him, human sex was like a Swiss Army Knife with an incredible array of levels and purposes, the lowest and least interesting being procreation, with many purposes rising above that which had as much to do with power and self-expression as with pleasure, tension-release and dark alleys for the exploration and expression of psychological pathologies.)

And now that the memories have been provoked, I will add to this impossibly long streak of loon-shit of a "Preface," by adding that he felt the whole pornography problem was caused by several millennia of the Constantine's Imperial Abomination's active, often violent, repression of natural human sexuality. He said it was like those stories of pet baby alligators being discarded by flushing them down toilets and into sewers, where they didn't die but survived to grow into prowling, monsters existing where such monsters should not be. Though I still remember him stopping talking for a good bit after making that statement then finally going on, "No, no—it's more like a deformed and unwanted human baby being flung into a cesspit where it somehow survives—nurtured by shit-wolves?—and grows into a huge, deformed and enraged monster that is now crawling out from its excremental banishment and is feasting on us like we are corral full of fat shoats."

John used to love to love to quote Augustine's famous prayer, "Lord, grant me continence and chastity—but not yet . . ."(he called him the Hypocrite from Hippo) as a perfect example of canonized Catholic hypocrisy. With it, Augustine acknowledged, on one hand, the incredible pleasure, power and importance of sex, and then on the other denounced it as evil. As far as John was concerned, he took that as proof that the Hypocrite from Hippo was insane—insane in the manner of those Islamic fanatics who blow themselves up to kill infidels—for only an insane person could take something he valued as much as Augustine obviously had valued his sexuality—and his concubine of many years—and fling it into a cesspit of a church dogma where it was treated, not just like some vile turd, but as a consummate evil. I didn't know much about Augustine and certainly didn't care to increase that very limited knowledge, but he was obviously someone John had studied extensively and loathed as passionately.

(As already belabored, unlike what I consider to be my own, healthy, dismissive indifference to that abomination of a "church," for reasons that become abundantly clear in The Fire, John's relationship to that perfidious, fascist-political institution of Constantine's can best be summed up by that already mentioned Colville painting, Horse and Train. And I suppose now is a good time—since it pops into my head—to mention John's attitudes to all Catholic saints. Nothing got his blood pressure up like reading history books written by Protestants, by acknowledged atheists and agnostics, even Orientals, who, when writing about Catholic saints, called them Saint This and Saint That and Saint Whothefuckever, but as far as he was concerned, a so-called "saint" was only a saint within the confines of the insane and evil matrix of Constantine's Imperial Abomination, which on demoting all the Pagan gods and goddesses to demons, needed something to fill the gap, so they invented their vast host of godly "saints" to fill it.

But, as far as he was adamantly concerned, outside of the foul matrix of that evil institution, every church-monikered saint was just another human being who may or may not have had some historical significance and thus could be written about, but unless the writer was a Catholic who believed in that nonsense, he or she shouldn't—and shouldn't be obliged to—be calling them saints. John said that was just more evidence of the incredible brain-washing job that Constantine's Imperial Abomination has done, for to European history—and now to world history!

He then, in venting his contempt for all Catholic "saints," went on to recount a story he'd read about some fifth century Syrian ascetic named Simeon who lived on top of a tower and used to draw a big crowd every day to watch him touch his head to his feet a thousand times. "You can just imagine the intelligence level of that crowd of morons who somehow believed that living atop a tower and touching your head to your feet a thousand times every day was a great spiritual achievement . . . and of course, the level of 'intelligence' of the minions of the Constantine' Imperial Abomination that subsequently canonized him for it."

(At the time of his saying that, I had a hard time imagining such a mindless, moronic crowds being enthralled by something so obviously circus-clown idiotic, but today, while writing this, after viewing no end of Internet news stories of the mindless, moronic MAGA-hatted hordes that attend Mad King Donald's rallies, shouting "Lock her up!" about Hillary even as close associates of that Mad King are in the process of being convicted and locked up for felonious crimes committed while helping him get elected, I can very easily imagine it! Like that favorite quote of John's by Schiller, "Against stupidity even the gods struggle in vain!")

And when, trying to play Devil's Advocate—I personally didn't give a flea-fart about any of that shit!—I said, "Well, some of those people appear to have performed some very interesting and documented miracles—and it would take a lot of faith to live on top a tower in a desert, wouldn't it." His response to that was, "Bah, humbug!—there's thousands of fakirs and holy men all over India who have done infinitely more incredible stuff than that—and are still doing it even today!—so there's nothing particularly special about those so-called 'saints' doing what they did. Not that most of those stories can be believed, given the general level of stupidity and gullibility of most early Catholic Christians! . . . I mean, standing around in the hot sun all day to watch some deranged ascetic touch his head to his toes with his head a thousand times—how much more moronic can you get than that! And besides, every true spiritual teacher—the Buddha no exception—teaches followers that nothing interferes with—or outright stalls!—true spiritual growth like getting caught up in miracles and other such psychic manifestations. Not that touching your head to your feet like some lobotomized monkey qualifies as either of those!

"The fact that Constantine's Imperial Abomination makes such a big fuss about the so-called Christ's so-called miracles—and attributes their manifestation to that "Almighty Sin-slinger," Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy!—is not only evidence that it is a spiritually retarded institution on masquerading as religion, but masquerading as a religion designed to attract absolute morons, who of course, are not only easy to impress, but once impressed, even easier to intimidate, control and suck out of them money they can too often ill-afford to part with. And of course, to incite them to torture and murder fellow human beings who don't 'toe the party line'!"

He then launched his well-worn diatribe about Saint Helena, the mother of Constantine, finding "the true cross," three hundred years after it was supposedly used. That story really got a laugh out of him as he said, "You don't have to know much about wood to know that any piece of wood not kept indoors and out of the weather, is going to have a hard time lasting 30 years, let along 300! And then there's the even greater absurdity of finding—after 300 years—a particular cross used in a Roman crucifixion, given that in their efforts to quash the almost constant Jewish rebellions against their totalitarian rule, the Romans crucified thousands of Jews. And they did some very early 'clear-cutting' of scarce forests to pull off those oppressive, murderous efforts! So the notion that one particular cross out of those thousands would have been dragged into some safe, indoor location for historical preservation is as absurdly insane as believing that those four, scrambled-egg gospels, which were written almost a century after the supposed crucifixion of the very likely mythical Jesus the Christ, have more than a few specks of eggshells of truth in them!

"Though the biggest belly laugh of all comes from the fact that on the future Saint Helena bringing the miraculously preserved and even more miraculously found and miraculously identified—one out of thousands, remember!!—'true cross' back to Rome, it was chopped up into little pieces that were sent to churches all over the empire as sacred relics. Now, it has been said that if every relic of this 'true cross" was brought back to Rome, you could build Noah's ark with the collected lot of them! Those 'relics,' it would seem, breed like rabbits!

"Christ—anyone credulous enough to believe all that infantile nonsense will believe the moon is made out of cheese and inhabited by giant mice . . . or that at the stroke of midnight every Christmas Eve, one lone, single Santa Claus drops down millions of chimneys around the world with multi-millions of presents for all those millions of kids! The credulity of Catholics is only exceeded by their stupidity! And the bottomless depths of their gullibility and stupidity never ceases to both amaze and sicken me!"

Like I've said, I have no idea why he let nonsense like that raise his blood pressure the way it did, but then I guess that's like staring at Colville's Horse and Train and asking why the horse is running to its death against that train!(I wonder if Colville even knew!)

As much as John loathed Augustine's (and thus the Church's) attitude towards sex, he often literally fulminated against Augustine's role in crapping into that "over-flowing outhouse of the Abomination's dogshit-dogma" the utterly evil and insane notion of original sin, an aspect of dogma no Catholic parent can escape as they rush to get their new-born infants baptized lest they die and go straight to Hell.

And John had a sharp and pertinent point there, and I know for a fact that it is such a powerfully propagandized bit of dogma that I've known Catholic parents—I was one such fucking MAGA-hatter!—who only went near a church for weddings, funerals, and baptisms—but who would not fail to get their precious babies baptized to negate the power of that concept of original sin.

To John, it was either just an insane and evil notion of that insane Hypocrite from Hippo, or it was a blatant, cynical and malicious power-ploy by the Constantine's Imperial Abomination to get even more fascist, tyrannical—and money-making!—control over its flocks of credulous, brainless sheep. Though most likely, both!

As far as John was concerned, the notion that an infant could be born as a Hell-damned sinner needing the direct intervention of Constantine's Imperial Abomination to be saved from that damnation was as insane and absurd as the notion that the water of a mountain spring, because it came out of the ground and not a tap, was contaminated and poisonous and had to be treated with chemicals before it could be drunk.

Another facet of Church dogma that used to send his blood pressure into stroke range was that of the infallibility of the pope. He even laughing said, "It is like that old joke about that sign in the workplace listing the only two important rules concerning the boss—Rule One: the boss is always right. Rule Two: when the boss is wrong, see Rule One!"

To him, the notion that any very human and very political pope who had been elected to his position by a bunch of very human and political cardinals could be divinely infallible in his choices and decisions concerning church dogma, had as much common-sense, real-world validity as the notions, as he once put it, "Of clean shit, odorless farts, potable piss, humane generals, humble bishops, celibate priests—and intelligent Catholics!"

And still on that subject of pornography but in a more personal vein, (I'd be way too embarrassed—and circumspect (no pun intended!—to be telling this tale was I not so many miles off the Meds-Rez and lost in the deep, "loony-tunes" canyon I am presently wandering around in) I am now very thankful that the Web was not yet around in those wild Sixties, for in 1967, when I spent the "Summer of Love" in the "City on the Bay" (one of the only advantages of being the molested daughter of a status-obsessed Catholic father who sure did not want such a transgression made public, is it provided ample opportunities for extorting money out of the incestuous prick!) where my casual attitude to taking the pill—or insisting my many "lovers" used "rubbers," caught up with me and I ended up pregnant.

In order to pay for the abortion I starred in several F-grade 16 mm porno movies (that obviously weren't snuff films, though they well could have been!) that thankfully sank into the quicksand of oblivion. (I was offered triple money to do one with a donkey, but I guess the producer hadn't given me enough coke to get me "high enough to get down to it" for one look at the size of that randy creature's prick—it got a veritable fire hose of a hard-on just smelling me!—was enough to induce me to grab my clothes, flee that "studio" and earn the money I needed in a safer and saner fashion: climbing into cars—or slinking into piss-and-puke smell alleys—in order to suck the dicks of horny, middle aged businessmen whose wives had been raised to believe only whores—and maybe their young daughters—willingly sucked cocks.) Any girl or woman making such movies today would have to live with them existing forever on the Web.

Just talking about that "Summer of Lust" of '67 brings back too many memories of just how incredibly sexually wild I was in those days. And what an incredibly dark, self-destructive—and very often predatory—state I was in. I know I should keep this story to myself, but I just can't resist telling it. (As you have so far discovered, what the eff'n hell is there that I don't feel the need to dump (karma-dump?) into it while my meds-brakes are off! (Pirsig, who spent time in India studying Hindu spirituality, in his other book, Lila, defines karma as essentially being a garbage dump.)

So anyways, this dark incident in the history of my deranged, out-of-control, and very often predatory lust-life, was the time I got it into my head to save my sister's friend, Thomas, from what I considered a fate worse than death—his plan to enter the seminary and become a fuckin' Jesuit—of all the absurd fuckin' things! My response to that news, in the argot of the day, was, "A hunk like that!—like man, ya gotta . . . like . . . be fuckin' kiddin!'—What a fuckin' waste!"

This Thomas truly was a hunk! I'd gone through the same grades of grade school with him (until, cursed by my academic brilliance, the teachers conned my ego-stroked parents into allowing me to skip a grade) and though he and I went to the same schools all those years, we were like two ghosts haunting the same castle but very seldom gliding through each other. Ironically, though he never shared a class with my younger sister, Johanna, they ended up becoming good friends, she having gotten to know him at one of those over-chaperoned Catholic dances where, during a slow song, you had to somehow waltz with your partners without your bodies touching.

Ha!—it was so long ago I'd forgotten about that "good, pure, virginal Catholic" absurdity! It was called "leaving room for the Holy Ghost,"—Spooky!—between two healthy, horny bodies that had "minds" of their own and the only thing on both those physical "minds" was the quantum-magnetic urge to smash together into a lustful embrace (look up the Casimir-effect if you want a great metaphor for that!), and whenever I heard that absurd phrase, I always had the thought come into my head that this so-called "holy" ghost, must be a real sicko of a spook, hanging around Catholic dances and inserting itself between the over-heated groins of teenagers like that.

But now that I think of it, for teens with their minds 24-7 locked, like heat-guided missiles, onto their always-hot groins, trying to dance that way would be kinda like going to The Keg when you're real hungry, ordering a freshly grilled T-bone, (pun intended!) and after slobber-drooling-staring at that sizzling, nose-tingling hunk of meat until it cools and its fat congeals, calling the waiter over for the bill, paying it, then getting up and leaving!

Interestingly, when I Googled the Casimir-effect and was reading about it to make sure I got the metaphor right, I had come into my head something John once said about all Catholic parents sexually abusing their children and making the precociously sexual. When I countered with, "Christ John—you've got to be dead wrong with that statement! Sure, there's sexual creep-predators out there like my father—and enablers like my couldn't-say-shit-with-her-mouth-full-of it mother!—but not all Catholic parents are that . . . fucking evil!"

That put a deep frown on his face as he countered with, "You're forgetting that not all sexual abuse is physical—yet it is still abuse. The foundational tenet of Constantine's Imperial Abomination is that exists under the 'aegis' of Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy, this cosmos' most obsessive sin-slinger, which means that to Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy, we pathetically flawed human creations of his are not only born sinful, but fated to live out our lives in a nothing-but sinful fashion, with our numero uno sin being our sexuality. Catholic parents, right out of the gate, are always harping at their kids about 'sexual purity' even when those kids are at an age when sex is the last thing on their minds. . . . I'm sure you are familiar with being told by your parents not to unnecessarily touch or 'play with your privates' even at an age when about the only use you could see for them was their toilet functions. And maybe a bit of curiosity about what they were—especially once your parents had gone through so much trouble to draw your attention to them as something about yourself that was very 'special' and very 'dirty'—and to be ignored at all cost.

"I tend to think of that insane business as being analogous to that Bluebeard story where, on going on a trip, Bluebeard gives his latest wife a set of keys to all the rooms of his mansion, with the admonition that she can go into any of the rooms she want—except for the one in the basement. This guarantees that the only room she is going to be interested in going into is that one in the basement, which of course, on her opening the door, she discovers to be full blood and gore and the rotting corpses of all his previous wives hanging on hooks. And naturally, when Bluebeard returns, he knows she had opened that door and punishes her by making her the next corpse to hang on the wall and drip her blood on the floor."

He was too-right with that statement and I interrupted him with, "Yeah, you got a point with that, Uncle John! My mother was always harping on that shit—even going so far as always telling us at bedtime to 'sleep with our hands above the covers.' When I asked her about that she got all huffy and said, 'I've told you enough times—it's a terrible sin to be touching your privates!' Christ, it was like she assumed that at five years old we'd be masturbating ourselves to sleep every night . . . when about the only reason we'd be 'touching ourselves' would be because we were itchy! Or that we were putting our hands under the covers because we were cold. Though the irony of all that bullshit was that by the time I was nine, it was okay, in her twisted, hypocritical, 'see no evil' book, for my father to be touching my 'privates' any time he felt like it, but not me touching myself!"

"Sounds pretty typical for a 'good' Catholic family," answered John, with a grim smile on his face. "But I read in a psychology book that for parents to start drawing their children's attention to their sexual organs and their dormant sexuality at an inappropriately young age, is a severe form of sexual abuse. Especially when all that undue and inappropriate attention to their sexual organs and their dormant sexuality is so negative and damning! Like that basement room of Bluebeards'! When a 'good Catholic parent' tells a young child, whose interest in their sexual organs at that young age is usually nothing more than a fleet, swift-passing bit of curiosity about them, to never touch 'their privates' unnecessarily, and to 'sleep with their hands above the covers,' they are filling their heads—and sending them off to sleep with—an ever-deepening curiosity about their privates—and the sexual potentialities of them!—that they should not have.

"Couple that with all the crap the nuns and priests at their Catholic schools will be dumping on them about the evils of their sexuality—explicit or implicit!—and you end up with children entering puberty already obsessed with sex. Except not with the joy and wonder and pleasure . . . and naturalness . . . of sex, but with its evil, unnatural, Bluebeard's-basement-room filthiness! Small wonder so many young Catholic men get sucked into believing that the chaste, pure, celibate life of a priest is a natural and admirable—and maybe even inevitable!—one to devote their lives to.

"And why there are so many pedophile priests! Sick, half-men with stunted, damaged and deformed sexualities! The seeds of that field of poison ivy vines were sown in the pervasive sexual abuse of their childhoods. It's just too bad most Catholics—and certainly none of the clergy of Constantine's Imperial Abomination—can see the evil they are creating with that heinous attitude towards natural human sexuality."

That bit of "pontificating" by John gave me many hours of insightful and liberating thought about that subject—but back to Thomas and Johanna! Since Thomas wanted to be a priest and Johanna a nun (I don't know Thomas's ridiculous reasons for wanting to be a priest, but Johanna, in those days, wanted to be a nun because she was still lost in the codependent cesspit of trying to please—and make happy!—my badly married, chronically unhappy, religion-obsessed and utterly unpleasable mother who had been indoctrinated into believing happiness was just another mortal sin!) so the two of them had not only hit it off, but had no problem with that de rigueur "chaste-dancing" nonsense, which for me would have been impossible because once a teenage girl, who had years before had her sexual chakra blown wide open by her incestuous, pedophile of a "father," is into steaming up the windows of parked cars by helping ever-horny hunks "blow off" a hot, sticky blast of their inguinal "steam" with her more than expert "lip-dancing' , and putting her own red-hot inguinal stove to work setting shagginwaggens a rockin', such dances could only be viewed as absurdly adolescent—and, like I said, everything about Thomas screamed, ride'em-cowboy HUNK!

He was six-foot-two, with thick, reddish hair with enough of a kink to it that had he let it grow long, it would have been curly, bright green eyes, a broad, lightly freckled face, full, sensuous lips, a strong jaw, and being a junior hockey player good enough to have already been drafted by an NHL team (that alas, couldn't out-draft Team Constantine's Jesus Warriors!), a hard, lean, muscled body to match, I can't count the times I "creamed my jeans" just thinking about him, and the idea of him "chaste-dancing" with Johanna and planning to run off to become an fuckin' Jesuit priest, was, to use and expression I later learned from John, (though not in this sort of context, to be sure!) "Like using an expensive wood chisel to cut the head off a rust-frozen bolt."

Anyways, what transpired next happened at the end of August of the "Summer of Love" (obviously either an ironic or totally euphemistic name, because while it was a Jurassic Park full of the T-rexes of drugs and lust, there were only but a few chipmunks of love scampering around in the undergrowth) and I'd just returned from my wild sojourn (sexjourn?) in California to repeat my first year of university (I'd scuttled that year in late February, when, while suffering from the Big-3 Sicks—sick of home, sick of winter, sick of school—I'd fucked off to California with a handful (bed-full? . . . mouth-full? . . . cunt-full?) of hippie friends, doing so in an old, spirit-of-Neil-Young hearse—that we named Shag-ri-la!—so we could catch the Haight-action—sex 'n' drugs 'n' rock 'n' roll 'n' sex 'n' drugs to the nth power in 'Frisco, before heading south for the Monterey Pop Festival in June, which we figured no true lovers of rock 'n' roll in their right (meaning, stoned) fuckin' mind would want to miss!)

It was the day before Thomas was to take a train to his seminary and Johanna had invited him over for a goodbye visit and some milk and cookies. (Or tea and scones—who fuckin' knows? . . . or fuckin' cares?) Except that day Fate or Fortune (or whatthefuckever!) was in a particularly malicious—or playful mood—and wouldn't you just fucking know it but my father was beset with a kidney stone attack that upset everybody's plans for that day. Especially his!

Actually, we didn't know what it was at the time, save it was something serious enough that while he was belching and farting his way into the living room after that day's brunch of ox-tail soup and tuna sandwiches, and attracting a nasty, wish-you-were-fucking-dead-you-crude-asshole red-laser stare from me at his typical crudeness, he suddenly let out a window-rattling scream and fell to the floor writhing in pain and clutching the side of his bloated guts as he puked out those two bowls of ox-tail soup and three tuna sandwiches he'd just wolfed down.

The night before I'd dropped some acid with a some friends and I hadn't realized how much I was still tripping until I looked down at my writhing, screaming father and saw him, not as the now fat, staid, stalwart, sweater-wearing paterfamilias of our sick little household, but as some kind of giant green blob of a sci-fi alien that I'd just shot with my blinding red laser beam that had blasted out of my ferocious eyes. And to my great delight and satisfaction, that hideous green blob was slowly and agonizingly disintegrating, like a bowl of iridescent green jello dumped onto a red hot frying pan.

And while I thus open-mouthed stared at this fascinating green blob as it wriggled and writhed and screamed and melted while I "grooved" on my new-found and deadly powers, my mother and Johanna rushed over to him, their faces full of fear and gushing sympathy and concern as my mother screamed at me to call an ambulance, which, with a shake of my head I refused to do because as far as I was concerned, if that alien blob died and disintegrated, it was not only getting everything it deserved, but this world would be a better and safer place when it was destroyed.

After thus shaking my stoned-immaculate head—which weirdly made that blob instantly turn from its former iridescent green to the gross and dull green of snot!—and enraging my mother further, who now also looked like an even bigger snot-green blob-alien than my father, and whom I felt an urge to zap with my magical laser like I had my father, but I didn't because I knew we'd then all be orphans, I fled up to my bedroom. Fuck-an-escalator!—but I felt like I was floating up those stair! And once back in the safe lair of my bedroom, I immediately put Hendrix's Are You Experienced album on my record player and "grooved" to his colorful and entrancing array of living, writhing, throbbing guitar licks with a big, Cheshire-cat grin on my face, certain that somehow, with my new-found powers and that laser beam coming out of my eyes, I'd killed that malicious and nasty green alien and that I was now some kind of comic book heroine for having rid this world of such an evil entity.

Ten minutes later the ambulance, it's siren slashing through my closed window, through my room and into my stoned-open brain like a monstrous red scimitar, had arrived and five minutes after that I stood in my window, gloatingly watching two medics lift a gurney with a large, recumbent, snot-green-blob-alien strapped to it while the erect, snot-green-blob-alien that was my mother stood beside it and appeared to be worriedly looking down on it. (My sister Johanna was also there, on the other side of that gurney but she just looked like a really pale and super-worried version of her normal self.)

And when that ambulance, which now looked like a red and white flying saucer with a flashing red light atop it, finally whooshed out of the driveway, the big red scimitar of its siren slashing its way through the thick blue fog that was filling the street and only half-hiding all the giant, gargoyle-faced neighbors lining up to grotesquely gawk at it, I was hoping like hell that by the time it got to the hospital, that green-blob alien inside it would have shrunk down to the size of a little green gummy-bear that would then fall out of the gurney, and while the befuddled medics were looking for the big green-blob alien, one of them would inadvertently step on that tiny green gummy-bear. It would then attach to his shoe and spend the rest of its miserable existence stuck there, getting tromped flatter and flatter until, step by step, it completely wore off in small, snot-green smears on sidewalks and floors, until finally it disappeared forever.

(Now you know why I loved to do acid: it didn't connect me to the Great Mystic Hologram like it did Kesey, Leary, Huxley, et al, but was pretty much always—except when reading Castaneda—just one great, wild, unpredictable, and always entertaining cartoon sci-fi movie after another. Especially when I was listening to great, played-stoned-to-be-listened-to-stoned, acid-rock, of which Groucho once so wisely said, "This music was created by stoned stoners and if ya ain't a fellow stoner hearing it stoned—ya just ain't hearing it!")

### Chapter Thirty Seven

That whole hospital-bound lot had not been gone long before the doorbell rang, and hoping that word of my return from 'Frisco had gotten around enough to send some horny hippies to my door looking to ply me with dope and "get into my panties," (not that I ever wore any!) I went downstairs to answer it dressed about as provocatively as I could. Except the creature that was standing at my door sure was no long-haired, unwashed, balls-itchin', drug-totin' hippie, but the clean-as-a-whistle-and-straight-as-a-ray-of-sunshine, Thomas, (in my tripping state, he actually did seem to glow like the sun) who, when he saw me, had the look come over him of someone opening a chocolate box and finding, instead of the expected chocolates, a hissing cobra.

Having gone to both the same grade and high schools as had I (I'd had a crush on him since grade 2, been in love with him since grade 7, and he'd been terrified of me since grade 9) he knew my reputation—I mean, even the locker-scavenging rats knew my reputation at that place!—and though it was obvious he wanted to run off down the street like Frodo on his encounter with the king of the Nazguls, he managed to stay on the veranda and with a face that was at first whiter than tofu, then redder than raw beef, he stammered, "Hi, R . . . Rachel, is . . . Jo . . . Johanna home. Sh . . . she . . . inv . . . vited me over for a visit today. I'm go . . . going . . . away tomorrow . . . .(Can you believe his timidity!—I mean, this guy was a rough-tough hockey player who was a veritable "raging bull" along "the boards" and never backed down from a fight with other rough-tough hockey players, but the sight of scantily-clad little ol' me, totally discombobulated him!)

And there I am, standing in that doorway, looking at this tasty looking meat-man and thinking about, beside the obvious, inguinal things, the total ludicrousness of the situation—I mean, here was the young man who Johanna had proudly told me, on my return from 'Frisco, that he had been the valedictorian at his high school graduation, and who'd given a flawless speech to an auditorium full of a dozen or so proud, admiring, self-back-patting teachers, a whole horde of proud, admiring, self-back-patting parents, and three classes of totally bored and generally hostile peers, (no normal student likes the apple-polishing valedictorian who stands up at the already boring-as-geometry-class grad-ceremony mouthing platitudes about a great and successful world-changing future awaiting the graduates, most of whom just finished scratching their way through the four years of academics that allowed them four years of partying and sex and can't even remotely imagine such a stupendous future applying to them) yet he couldn't spit out one proper sentence to slutty, unimportant and anything-but-hostile ol' me!

Though of course, the fact that over the last two of my years at that high school I'd made it obvious to him—verbally and with unambiguous body-language—that I was crazy about him and wanted to get him between my legs and lips, and the fact that he was trying to repress his natural, potent, manly sexuality so he could become an unnatural, sexuality-repressing Jesuit warrior-priest, probably had something to do with his verbal ineptitude in front of a pretty girl whose whole persona was built on the sexuality he was trying to run away from.

Well, still full of the Californicating (what a great word—kudos to whoever came up with it!) High-jinx that had followed me home from that Golden State (of Lubricious Delights) and still capable of quick thinking (today my brain works like a fruit fly swimming in molasses, but back then, especially when it came to engineering sexual encounters, it worked like a mongoose fighting with a cobra! . . . That's one of John's similes, not mine!) I smiled, and after advising him that Johanna was upstairs and that I'd go up and get her, I told him to come in and grab a seat on the couch.

I then ran up the stairs, opened the door to Johanna's bedroom and loudly said to that neat, bright, frilly-curtained and very empty room, "Hey Jo, Thomas is here. He's in the living room waiting for you." and after thirty seconds or so, closed a door, went to the top of the stairs and shouted, "She said she'll be down in about five minutes, Thomas—she's busy helping my mother with a dress she is making. Put on a record if you want."

I then bolted into the bathroom for a quick shower and a teeth brush, and after dying off and applying a few judicious dabs of Tigress, a perfume I'd been heavily into before the inelegant world of hippiedom had drawn me into the rawer, muskier world of patchouli, I slipped into a simple, white cotton mini-dress that contrasted so well with my long, straight, butt-brushing black hair and my flawless brown skin. Cinnamon would be a more accurate description of its color, and never can I hear Neil Young's "Cinnamon Girl" without thinking of what I looked like in those days when I spent as much time as I could naked in the sun, and even more time narcissistically looking at myself dancing naked in my full length mirror.

So knowing that I looked like a fresh-baked cinnamon bun few red-blooded, sex-hungry teenage males could resist, I softly and silently went down the stairs and with a big smile on my face, floated into the living room where Thomas, ironically (synchronistically? auspiciously? diabolically?) was listening to my father's Dave Brubeck, Anything Goes album, and leafing through the latest National Geographic magazine (Fuck!—didn't he know those things were full of the dangerously unchristian land-mines of naked brown breasts!) and said, "Jo said to tell you she'd just be another couple of minutes." I then sat down beside him on the couch, giving him six inches of space he instantly and frantically widened to eighteen. (It would have been more but the armrest arrested his desperate retreat.)

I thought it was only in cartoons that peoples' eyes bulged out when seeing something they couldn't believe, and I swear that when Thomas looked, first up at me in that black hair and sexy, cinnamon-skin-highlighting little dress, then down the sagging, scooped front of it at my pert, round, brown and apple-sized breasts, (they are now veritable grocery bags full of adipose, and they haven't seen the sun in decades!) his eyes literally bulged out of his head. And since it was rare that I was not looking at men's crotches when around them, (and I'd say especially more so when intentionally tantalizing them, save I didn't just want to Eve-tantalize Thomas with my chest-apples, I wanted him, unlike the real and ever-cursed Tantalus, to grab them and take a bite!) it only took one brief glance at his crotch for me to notice it was bulging as much as his eyes, which not only put a blazing blowtorch to my crotch, but set me off smiling and licking my lips like Sylvester on discovering that Granny had gone shopping and left Tweety Bird's cage door open. (Hey, even after all these years of being an "adult," I can still, like some big fat brain-atrophied kid, enjoy an hour or two of those great old Looney Tunes—and bless the Web for providing them!)

Now Thomas may have been as sexually naïve as any serious, would-be recruit to General Jesus's Jesuit Warrior Army on his way to basic training, but he was not stupid and it didn't take him long to realize that neither Johanna nor my mother was at home, and that Johanna was not going to be coming down those stairs in two hundred minutes, let alone two, and that I had his utter moral downfall on my mind. His face, instantly redder than Arnold Schwarzenegger's while dead-lifting a Volkswagen, looked away from me and towards the door as he tried to jump up off that couch, but I was as slim, nimble and quick in those days as I was red-hot horny, and before he could get his scrumptious butt more than six inches off that couch, I had whipped that white dress off over my head, flung it on the floor, and straddled his lap that was by then delightfully tented out by his more than ample man-pole, drove him back into its soft, new cushions, and wrapping my arms around his neck and sticking my face close to his huskily said, "Johanna's at the hospital with my mother attending my sick father—we are all alone."

As fast as "alone" was out of my mouth, and before he could use his hanging-open mouth to say one single word, I ground my inflamed "tent" onto that deliciously long and stiff tent pole in his lap, clamped my arms tighter around his neck, and after super-gluing my lips to his, did my best to vacuum his tongue right out of his mouth.

Poor, virginal, Jesuit Warrior Army-bound Thomas—he wanted nothing more (ostensibly, anyway) than to push me off him, jump up and flee that house, regardless of whether it was through the act of opening the front door and running through it, or doing the cartoon thing of diving head-first through living room plate glass window and hitting the ground with his legs a cartoon blur, but in order to push me off him, he had to put his hands on my warm and very disturbingly bare, brown and electrifyingly alive flesh!

Oh yes, flesh, but not just any flesh—nubile female flesh, the ultimate bogyman of all Catholic—past, current, and would-be!—clergy. Needless to say, for a young man to disentangle himself from a naked, determined and writhing young woman with her arms clamped around his neck without using his hands is probably on par with doing the tango with no legs. But I had more interesting things than kissing on my lusty mind and still holding his neck tight in the clasp of my left arm, and while keeping my mouth welded to his, I shifted to my left as I reached down and deftly undid his pants, freeing up that hard, virginal tent pole of his so that I could wrap my hot little hand around it and guide it into that over-heated pottery-kiln between my legs.

Well, I guess poor Thomas had actually been taking that celibacy nonsense so seriously he'd not even been masturbating regularly like I had long ago learned all normal young men are naturally wont to do, ("at least twice a day and three times on Sunday!" as one young fellow put it) and barely had my fingers wrapped themselves around that hot, handsome, red-headed John Thomas (LOL!) than first he shouted "NO! NO! NO!", then he groaned loud enough to be heard on the dark side of the moon as he bucked his hips and geysered all over my hand and his lap.

But that did not deter me as I well knew the almost instant re-load time of a young man's gun and without letting go of that still-at-attention Corporal John Thomas (of Jesus' Jesuit Warrior Army!), and gently stroking it to keep it that way, deftly guided it into that my now even hotter cunt, (when I am on the Meds-Rez I hate that foul word, but when walkabout from it, that word always seems perfect!) thus, as it slid so naturally into its made-for-it home, officially ending his long, ridiculous tenure as a virgin.

Whooeeeee!—I'm getting a rare, almost-forgotten crotch-fire going remembering and writing this—I think I might take up writing trashy, pay-by-the-word masturbation-enhancers just for the lubricious fun of it! Of course, I'd have to stay off the Meds-Rez to do that, and I am one hundred percent certain that I am not going to be able to continue enjoying my constantly disintegrating walkabout-freedom much longer or I'll wind up in the Shrink-Klink for a hot date with the brain-lightning machine.)(No fuckin' LOL in that!)

At that point I not only had Thomas's standing-at-attention, Jesuit-Army, Corporal John Thomas right where it rightfully was meant to be, but I really had him in all ways. I think by the time I'd ridden up and down on that freed tent pole of his half a dozen times while sucking on his tongue with all the frustrated passion I'd felt for him for so many years, he'd totally forgotten about that crazy serve-General-Jesus-in-his-Jesuit-Army, Soldier-of-God, seminary shit, the stupidity of celibacy and the sadism of any God that would demand it from a young man, and was now moaning as he passionately tongue-sucked me back while frantically humping his hips in time with mine and feverishly running his hands all over as much of my body—particularly my tits and ass—as he could cover in as short as space of time as he could.

And as for me, well, I'd already ridden more tent poles than Barnum and Bailey had theretofore erected in their circuses, (both flesh and wood ones!) but I'd never experienced what I was experiencing with Thomas. (It might have been the acid, but I'd done as much screwing while tripping as straight, and never had it before matched what was then happening with Thomas!) There was a strange and potent heat radiating out of his prick that both enveloped and seemingly irradiated my cunt and made me feel—as I had body-wracking orgasm after body-wracking orgasm—like I was being shot out of a cannon and up through all seven of the Hindu heavens and that as I traversed each one, the hard, stupid little false little Rachel that daily lived my ridiculous life for me kept expanding into a bigger, wiser and realer Rachel.

I guess you could say that not only did "the Earth move" for me that day, but the heavens did too! For a second I wished it could last forever then just as instantly knew that forever was not a long time, but no time, and that it since I was experiencing a sense of no-time, it already truly was lasting forever. Then, alas but expectedly, Thomas was suddenly pulling his lips away from mine as he first started to moan, then as his hips bucked wildly, he broke into a loud prayer that I am sure all the neighbors easily heard, "OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! OH MYYYYYY GAWWWWWWD!" as he gushed with a geyser of come that would have made Old Faithful jealous, filling me up, not only with what felt like a gallon of seminary-saved semen, but with a veritable nuclear blast of that strange, potent heat that had been setting his Corporal John Thomas, not only to rigid attention, but veritably aflame, and which instantly re-launched me back up through those seven heavens in what felt like one, long eternal orgasm that I wished I could have died in the midst of, but which, I alas didn't, and when I came back to Earth and Castaneda's ordinary reality, both Thomas and I were panting like a pair of over-run race horses and I could feel his geysers of seminary-saved semen Niagaraing out of my tingling, veritably glowing cunt and soaking even more our already sodden groins. And worse, running down his still softly pumping thighs onto my mother's latest, (and too-long-waited-and-saved-for) prize possession—her brand new, light brown Eaton's couch.

(It's weird to think about what a prominent-in-our-lives institution that department store was back then, when it would put out—as did Simpson Sears—a monster catalogue I used to spend hours drooling my way through, and which dinosaur-died years ago. And as did that lumbering brontosaurus, Sears, more recently! I just wish Constantine's Imperial Abomination would follow their lead and dinosaur-depart from this planet in the same fashion. Ha, fat chance of that!—the Catholic faithful are too stupid and credulous to quit shopping at its sin-store, however filthy and outdated all its sex-sin-and-shame merchandise might be!)

As Thomas flopped back on that poor couch that had, like him, lost its virginity, moaning softly with his eyes closed as his hips continued to softly hump his still-hard prick inside my desperately gripping cunt while he breathed like a hockey player after a rink-long break-away, I, breathing just as hard, first held my forehead against his as I tried to get back to that seventh heaven I'd been far too briefly shot up to, but I could not hold onto it, so dismounted from his finally softening prick and proceeded to quickly clean up both our soaking wet crotches and what I could of the couch with my discarded dress and before he could collect his wits and bolt for the door—or through the window—I yanked his pants off from where they'd wound up around his ankles, knelt between his now-free legs and taking his almost-soft prick into my mouth, used every fellating trick my "good Catholic father" had taught me as a little girl in my efforts to effect an Easter Sunday resurrection after that stupendous, Good Friday petite mort, and true to his age and vitality, he was almost instantly resurrected and moaning softly as he held the back of my head and bucked his hips in his efforts to drive his prick as deep into my sucking, tongue-swirling mouth as he could.

Interestingly, since I had sucked more pricks in my young life than popsicles, I knew pricks, but I never knew a prick like Thomas's. And no, it wasn't the size of it, which was about as average as they come (LOL—good one, Rache!) but that strange and potent energy that seemed to surround and boil off of it, which had sent me off into those planes of heaven while it was in my cunt, and which was like nothing I'd ever encountered before, a phenomena that may have had as much to do with his silly attempts at celibacy, his basically high level of sexual energy, or the acid-altered state I was obviously in after my rocket flight through the seven heavens. (Or most likely, all three of the above.)

It took a little longer for him to come that third time than it did the second—the first took no time at all!—but once again, after bucking and moaning and shouting passionate prayers to his precious God again, he Old (Young?) Faithful'd for the third time. Helped along, I must confess, by an important "come-on" trick that my "good Catholic father" had taught his whore-daughter long before she even reached puberty—I stuck my middle finger up his ass! Works every time!

And when that provocative, skillful prodding of his prostrate caused him buck and moan and emit a stifled scream as he instantly filled my mouth with his warm, delicious geyserings, my head felt like it was being momentarily enveloped in an explosion of white and highly energized light that seemed to shoot down my spine and right into my cunt, giving me an instant and stupendous orgasm that sent me on one more delightful and way-too-short ballistic trajectory through those seven heavens.

(John once incomprehensibly told me that the human sexual organs, connected as they were to the second chakra, served as direct portals into the cosmic furnace from which flowed the élan vital, the life-force, the chi, or prana, or libido, or orgone, or whatever you wanted to call the essential energy that puts all the life in our lives. It took me many years to make sense of that statement that he passed off as nonchalantly as one slaps a mosquito, and it is only now, in writing this, that I connect it with that stupendous bout of lovemaking—given my long-standing feelings for Thomas, that is truly what it was!—that I'd "Jezebel'd" poor Thomas into.)

As they say, third time's the charm, and it was that third coming that brought back the old Thomas, who, on suddenly mentally waking up from la petite mort of both his first fuck and first blow-job and back into the insane, Catholic, sex-is-more-evil-than-murder implications of what had just happened, (I mean, how can something as stupendously otherworldly and pleasurable as what had just happened between two post-pubescent teens, be considered even remotely evil?) yanked his at-ease Corporal John Thomas out of my still sucking mouth—I was going for a forth!—threw me off him, jumped up, and red-faced screamed—as he hopped around the room while struggling into his pants—at me that I was a witch, and a whore, and a goddamn Jezebel and that he hated me with every molecule of his being and I'd surely rot forever in hell for what I'd just made him do.

And while I lay on the floor, still naked and with my legs unabashedly wide apart and my carefully trimmed black bush all wet and matted with his "manhood." I smiled up at him and said, as sexily as I could, "If you don't go into that damn seminary, we can do that as often as you want for as long as you want."

Then launching myself to my feet and moving towards him, my eyes, I am sure, just blazing with a hard-to-ignore, love-and-lust-light for him, softly said, "What we just did was more special for me than it has ever been. I mean . . . like . . . we were really making love! And from what I could easily tell . . . it was just as special for you! So why do you want to run off to a seminary to become priest and give up something as good as this? It makes no sense. I'm crazy about you. I've been crazy about you for years. I love you—I'm yours!" (I'd never before that, in all my sexually active years, told any boy or man that I loved them!)

Well, in my mind I may have been his for the taking, like delicious fruit hanging over the head of the thirsting, starving Tantalus, but in his mind, I was anathema! I was the evil Eve with the poisonous apple,(apples?) and he wanted to get away from me like I had Ebola, or leprosy—or both!—and looking first at his watch and muttering, "I hope Father Bigelow is at the rectory so I can confess this . . . this . . . abomination that I have committed with you! You . . . you slut! You whore! You harlot! You wanton! You . . . Jezebel!", he charged out the door and that was the last time, (alas, even to this day!) that I ever set eyes on him.

Fuck-a-fond-memory!—Just before going walkabout from the Meds-Rez, I had re-read Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, and resurrecting the memory of, and writing about, that long-forgotten episode of my life makes me think of that novice monk, Adso, in that novel, who stumbles into his first—and absolutely divine!—lust-fuck from a lovely and lascivious peasant girl, then five minutes later has reduced her to a slut and their fucking to a thing of evil that he has to immediately confess to his boss, the former Inquisitor, William of Baskerville. (William's role in the story is to play detective to a couple of murders at the monastery, and Eco very unsubtly names him, and portrays him, as a monkish Sherlock Holmes.) And boy-oh-boy, but can that demented Catholic obsession with sexual sin ever turn the vintage wine of sex into stale mare-piss faster than an atomic blast can turn the architecture of a living city into a pile of radioactive rubble—and its living inhabitants into pale shadows on a sidewalk!

Needless to say, it took me a good while and a good bit of frantic, anxious, cursory scrubbing to clean that mess we'd made of the couch. Though while frantically engaged in that labor, I got a momentary break from that anxiety when my mother called to explain my father's diagnosis—just the passing of an over-large kidney stone, (Fuck, I was hoping it was a heart attack and that he was dead!) and to inform me they'd not be back for a couple more hours. On hearing that good/bad news, I relaxed in my efforts to clean that couch, which allowed me to realize that I was going to have to come up (again, no pun intended!) with a somewhat reasonable explanation for how that stain got there.

My first thought was to just claim I'd spilt a glass of Coke, but as fast as that couch was being manhandled through our front door by two grunting delivery men, our mother had made it clear that there was to be ABSOLUTELY NO eating and drinking on it. From the tone of her voice as she let fly that Papal Bull, it was easy to assume that if she caught us committing such an heretical act, she'd call out of the basement the two Inquisitors she kept chained and fed down there so they could first torture a litany of screams out of us—then burn us alive! So in a rare, surprising flash of creative inspiration, I decided that there was no law against a young woman having her period start while sitting on her precious couch, so I got the package of paper-wrapped hamburger that was supposed to have been made into our dinner meatloaf, took it out of the paper, rolled it around on the stain, then rewrapped it and put it back in the fridge. The blood from that hamburger added the perfect red-tint to that come-stain, and once I'd scrubbed most of it out, a perfect, dull, rusty-red splotch remained that perfectly backed my contention that it had been caused by my "going menstrual" (LOL) while sitting there.

And once I'd cumpleted (sorry, I just couldn't resist that!) that clean-up job, I ran upstairs, had another shower and put on some jean shorts and a halter top, then, having the house to myself for a couple of hours, I rolled a couple of "doobies," grabbed the Doors, The Doors, Jimi's Axis and Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow from my collection and took them downstairs to full-blast them on the that big stereo (after taking off my father's Brubeck album—making sure I dragged the needle across it as I did so) and after lighting a handful of sticks of sandalwood incense, sat down on a dry part of the couch, smoked one of the joints and while listening to some real music—starting with that scrumptious god Jim singing about some unnamed red-hot "baby" lighting his fire—I masturbated three time as I vividly and desperately relived my lubricious and groin-incinerating encounter with Thomas while trying to recapture some of the subtler, more heavenly aspects of the experience.

Well, I was able to recapture, in those three self-induced orgasms, the physical joys of that lubricious encounter with Thomas' Colonel John Thomas, but the more heavenly aspects of that incredible and unforgettable experience seemed to have vanished from my mundane, "ordinary reality," as quickly and thoroughly as the smoke from those sticks of incense, leaving behind for me little else but a faint, sandalwood-memory of something too ephemeral to long hang onto.

Alas and alak, there was nothing ephemeral about the big, wet, reddish spot on my mother's precious new Eaton's couch, which she saw within seconds after walking in the door, doing so because that couch was always the first thing she so proudly looked at on walking in the door. So I laid my well-prepared explanation of it on her when she screamed out her question about what I'd done to "her couch," sincerely apologizing for it as I explained that I'd fallen asleep listening to music and waiting for some word from her about my father, and while I was sleeping, my period had started.

Her response to that was a typical, raging, ten-minute tirade that I tuned-out even as she was broadcasting it, followed by a week of relentless harping about my having damaged her "brand-new-and-darned-expensive" couch because of my nasty, very unchristian habit of not wearing underwear, which I also eyes-rolling tuned-out, having to turn away each time to hide the shit-eating (come-eating!) grin on my face that appeared whenever I thought about the nuclear—melt-me-into-a-shadow-on-the-wall—blast that would have exploded out of her if she had known the real reason. (I also had a hard time eating the meatloaf made out of that handy lump of hamburger, not because I was concerned that it had been "cum-taminated"—I'd by then swallowed enough gallons of come to know it wasn't the least bit toxic!—but because I had such a hard time not laughing at the thought of what my mother would do if she knew what that package of hamburger had "been through!")(And the fact of its complicity in putting a blood-stain in her precious couch that never completely came out—even after professional treatment!)

And explode, too, out of poor Johanna had she known, as she wondered for a week, why Thomas had not stopped in to say goodbye like he'd promised to. I mollified her by saying he may well have stopped by, but since I was playing my music loud and sleeping, I'd likely not have heard the doorbell and he'd given up and gone away.

Of course, every good story that ends as abruptly as this one did with Thomas charging out the door—at least he used the door and not the window, which I could not have easily explained away!—while calling me a slut, a whore, a harlot and a Jezebel, needs an epilogue, and the epilogue for this one is more interesting than you might have expected. (Or not.) Thomas, (surely only after finding Father Bigelow for his necessary, soul-saving shriving!) went off to the seminary so he could be duly inducted into Constantine's neo-Roman army, the Soldiers . . . or Warriors . . . for Christ . . . or God . . .or Whatthefuckever!

And if you get into the history about that powerful order of martial clerics, it was started by a wounded soldier, Ignatius of Loyola, and the opening lines of the founding document of the order goes, "Whoever desires to serve as a soldier of God. . . ." I learned that from John who once chuckling said about the issue, "One very petty, venal, violent and catastrophically impotent god that Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy surely must be, needing as he apparently does, mere human soldiers to fight his battles for him! Constantine's Imperial Abomination is always claiming Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy is omnipotent, but maybe that was before he exhausted—and maybe even herniated himself!—during those six, real busy construction-days of Creation! But still, he's not alone up there in his celestial palace—where's the Archangel Michel and his Angel Armies when they're needed for all that warrior crap!

"It's hard to believe any such an Almighty Divinity that could have created this vast, galaxy-filled universe in six short Earth-days would need mere human soldiers to force human beings, under the threat of being tortured and then burned to death—and the eternal damnation that would inevitably follow!—to believe that 'he' existed! And to pay close, sheep-compliant attention to his long compendium of Church-catalogued rules about all those sins he loved to sling around!"

Then he laughed quite loud as he added, "They say that those Jesuits are some of the smartest, best educated and most rational clergy in Constantine's Imperial Abomination, but if they can't see the blatant irrationality behind the historicizing of that obvious myth about their precious Christ, and the incredible Grand Canyon full of stupidity—and outright hypocrisy!—inherent in that notion of their so-called omnipotent, Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy needing human soldiers to torture and burn fellow human beings into properly believing in his existence and his sin-dripping rules, then they are either lobotomized cretins who have been drinking too many cases of communion wine for too long, or are so deluded that they are functionally insane and have utterly no idea what the hell they are thinking, believing and doing! I'd lay my money on the latter."

(John also said, a few more times than once, that he considered Catholicism to be lethal plague-virus that erupted out of the spiritual sewer of the debauched and disintegrating Roman Empire and was spread around the world by missionary-vectors—plague rats, he called them!—with the Jesuits being the most virulent strain of those rats! Rats, he said, that made the giant, aggressive, vicious and voracious corpse-rats that fed off both "the quick and the putrid" on the BASS battlefields, look like little white laboratory mice!)

So anyways, baaaaaaack to Thomas and that oxymoronic order of "Christian-clerical soldiers" that he was on the cusp of entering when I rescued him from his ridiculous virginity—from what I heard, he survived his basic training and became an ordained "corporal" (or lieutenant, or captain, or whatthefuckever ranks they use in that bizarre Army of Christ/God!) marching off to fight the righteous battles for the power and influence of Constantine's ruthless, voracious, tyrannical Imperial Abomination, and was sent to indoctrinate—or rape, if he was so inclined!—young boys at an all-boy Jesuit school in a prairie city.

And by chance, or "diabolical design," that school was located beside an all-girl Catholic school run by some order of nuns. Fortunately, I was never forced into attending one of those unnatural, sex-segregated schools, of which there were two such "elite" institutions the in the "Shitty" twenty miles away. The boys' version made its attendees wear suits—or at least sports coats and ties—and while the girls, in their hallowed institution, had to wear a standardized uniform with a pleated, plaid skirt that many of their wearers flounced about in, in a downright sexy and provocative fashion that likely gave middle aged men instant erections—and old men fond memories of erections that had flown south for the rest of their lives—along with a lot of very "unchristian" thoughts about those "virginal" girls! My mother often lamented that her dream was to have her all children attend one or the other of "Roman Catholic Deep Indoctrination Centers," but, with no school buses available to haul us into them, it was just too impractical—and expensive!—a dream.

But I have talked to people, both male and female, who have attended them, and it would seem that both the priests and nuns in the respective schools, were obsessed with the sexuality of their students and their major modus operandi—aside from matriculating them as future university students—was to steer their minds away from their burgeoning sexuality by keeping them busy in all sorts of sports and other programs. (Nothing makes a teen more horny than the fitness that comes (no pun intended!) with training for, and performing, lots of sports, so that was a case of typical, Catholic lunacy trying to fight fire with gasoline!)

And it would seem that some of those programs in those two unnatural schools in that prairie city overlapped, and in that overlapping, not only did a lot of uber-horny Catholic teenage boys get to interact with a lot of uber-horny Catholic teenage girls, but the good "Soldier of God"-Thomas met some good nun of some unknown name, the two fell in love and lust—though given they were both, to some degree, celibates, I'm sure the lust, like a roaring steam engine on an speeding express, came (no pun intended!) first!

But the upshot of that natural, meeting-of-the-opposite-sexes occurrence was that lust or love or passion (likely all three!) trumped all those ridiculous and inhuman vows of Constantine's Imperial Abomination—and certainly of that ridiculous Warrior Army of God/Christ!—and they both went AWOL from their respective units and did the natural thing of getting married to at least make their long-delayed inguinal (and oral!) pleasures legal in the eyes of the province, of Constantine's Imperial Abomination, and of Field Marshal Nobodaddy. In that order!

The last I heard, they'd had six kids, the oldest one of which has acquired some national fame being involved in an organization dealing with women's issues and badgering various levels of government to allocate more funds to help abused and battered and murdered Aboriginal women and girls. Now, if that's not a good case against the lunacy of celibacy, I don't know what it is! Though I did get into an argument with a priest-professor of a comparative religion class at university once, about the merits of celibacy who pompously said that if Hitler's mother had become a nun, we'd have avoided World War II, a statement I countered that with. "And if your mother had been a nun, this class might have a better, less-biased and Church-brainwashed teacher." He was not pleased with that and I can't believe I actually passed that class! Or survived his very unforgiving, unchristian hostility for its duration!

Anyways, I like to think that I played no small role in predisposing Lieutenant (or whatthefuckever rank he had) Thomas to have some respect for his Corporal John Thomas by going AWOL from his crazy Jesus Warrior Army and its unnatural requisite of celibacy and his eventual hooking up with a nun who also went AWOL from her nunnery, and they both traded the guaranteed lack of human joys attendant to celibacy, poverty and obedience, for the sometimes great joys of sex, human flourishing (as preached by Aristotle!) and self-determination, and of course, the joys, frustrations and sorrows of parenthood. But mostly joys!

And who knows, maybe in doing that I kept another frustrated, tired-of-masturbating priest from getting a bit of "real action" by becoming a child molester and saved—only Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy-knows!—how many young boys and girls (seven-year-olds having their tonsils removed in a hospital!) from having their lives ruined by the priest-pedophilia so rampant in the debauched and declining empire of Constantine's Imperial Abomination!

### Chapter Thirty Eight

Fuck-a-cell-tower!—but it just struck me how much my sexing-out behavior back then resembled—though obviously not on a similar, uber-moneyed, global, media-slobbering/gobbling scale!—the iGizmo-channeling antics of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Speers, and now Miley Cyrus, whom I was Web-following a few years ago—until, like the relentlessly ubiquitous news stories about Mad King Donald, it eventually gets as boring as watching newsprint turn yellow—with great interest. Following, not because I am a fan of hers—I'm a tad old for that, and when on the Meds-Rez, more than a tad sexually dead! But I was following it because I don't have a life, and because everything about Miley Cyrus is so extreme that she comes across less as a human being than as some sort of Pixar-animated comic book character created by some fucked-up artist who is perma-stoned on datura!

When I first noticed web-stumbled onto her antics,, I thought that Miley was just trying to bury her Hannah Montana persona in a deep, lewd hole then masturbating all over it, but what she was up to a couple of years ago—don't know what she's doing now, and don't care—bespeaks something of a whole other order: perhaps too much drugs, perhaps mental illness, perhaps a way-too-early, and likely inappropriate introduction to the entrancing, addictive, and eventually deranging, liquid-fire delights of the second chakra, which once blasted open when one is too young, ends up, like the dark side of the Force, dominating a person's life.

Or perhaps a combination of all three. Whatever its cause, I can see a crash-and-burn on the horizon that will make the demise of the Hindenburg zeppelin look like the flare of a match. (Trust me on that one!—you don't want an uncontrollable sexuality as a life-engine anymore than you want an untamed tiger for a pet or a ball of plutonium for a toy!)

Mmmmmmm—writing that bit of word-and-space wasting speculation about Miley Cyrus's overtly sexual antics does that Freudian, free-association thing and brings my sister Johanna's tragic story to mind. Try as hard as poor, ever-wanting-to-please-Mommy-and-Daddy Johanna did, she just couldn't fill the role of being my parents' perfect, sexless, God-obsessed, heading-for-the-nunnery daughter! It would seem her female hormones—or her female spirit—was stronger than her desire to please both Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy and my nasty pair-o-parents, and she never became the nun she intended to but ended up pregnant! OUT OF WEDLOCK-pregnant (what an accurate eff'n word that WedLOCK is!), a reality that upset my uber-hypocrite of a father (remember, hypocrite and Catholic are synonyms, especially with regards to proud, arrogant, lecherous and generally delusional and evil patres familias with daughters they consider sexual chattel) more than my not-very-shocked mother, and the two of them, in their infinite Catholic indoctrination and even more infinite Christian wisdom, love, compassion, charity—but mostly social paranoia—sent her to the "Big Shitty" south of here to a "home" for unwed mothers run by a pack of sin-obsessed nuns who should no more have been running such a "home" than Brer Fox, a chicken farm. (Check out "Baby Scoop Era" on Wiki—and deeper, if you dare!)

It was while at that so-called Christian "home," that after being subjected to no end of insults and harsh treatment by the "holy nuns" who ran what was basically a prison, while awaiting the birth of her "sin-child," when it was finally born it was literally stolen from her to be adopted, and subsequently, in what was likely a state of post-partum depression (I landed in one of those tar pits after the birth of Terry and it was the most brutal depression of my life from which I was saved by John's presence in my life: just imagine living in a black, energy-sucking fog while trying to care for an infant, a toddler, and an "twelve-year-old" husband!) compounded by having her baby ripped, first out of her womb, then out of her life, slashed her wrists and bled her way into an eternity where I am quite sure no frowning, leering, condemning monster of a Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy, or a crocodile tear-weeping, dutifully forgiving, Sonny-Boy Jesus, or finger-wagging, " Tik-tsk—you naughty slut!" admonishments from Virgin Mother Mary, awaited her at the gates of Heaven to spit in her face, sternly turn her away, and righteously condemn her to an eternity of hellfire and damnation for having so horribly betrayed Constantine's Imperial Abomination and her precious faith by willfully indulging in that heinous "S"-word—while OUT-OF-WEDLOCK

If you, Dear Reader, are a "modern secular" and have been fate-blessed to never have been, forced to become a duly baptized and lifelong indoctrinated member of Constantine's Imperial Abomination, you will not be able to appreciate that "church's" obsession with the "evil filthiness" of sex, which is so extreme that some recent pope pontificated that it was a mortal sin for a man to lust after his wife. A pontification, which, if you "rationally think" about it (like John always said: rational thought about Catholic dogma is as absurd a concept as dry water or hot ice!) really puts a Catholic man in a bind, because, if he feels all that sinful lust for his sexy, willing wife, the only way he can get rid of that lust without lustfully fucking her—which she'd surely lustfully and willingly respond to!—is to masturbate that lust away. Which of course, is a mortal sin, too! And this also opens that absurdity-door of the fact that if marriage doesn't make a good, satisfying, lustful fuck of a willing—and equally lustful!—spouse a non-sin in the eyes of that insane, fascist church and its sin-slinging sponsor, Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy, what's the point of getting married. Or being faithful to your spouse. If lustful married sex—as if there can be any other kind that functionally works?—is a damning, mortal sin, and pre-marital and extra-marital sex is the same sin, what then does marriage have to offer a couple besides a matrix to bring up their children—which then somehow have to be inconceivably (LOL) conceived during acts of platonic, non-lustful sex? (I think John would say that non-lustful sex ranks up there with dry water and hot ice!)

I mean, if you think about it—oh yeah, I forgot, if you are a Catholic you have been lifelong indoctrinated not to think!—nothing is more absurd than to have the priest pompously say at the end of the Catholic marriage ceremony, "Be fruitful and multiply," something that's just a little bit hard to do—well, a little bit hard might do it!—without some bedroom—or kitchen table, or back-seat-of-the car, or leafy clearing in a forest!—lust involved. Pure, holy, God-pleasing, hand-holding platonic love and the reading to each other reams of lofty, highfalutin poetry—or passages from the New Testament of the Bible! (sure as fuck not that lascivious, Song of Songs, of the OT!—just doesn't get the job done! Which of course, then just leaves artificial insemination as the only way to procreate without lust and sin—but I'm sure Constantine's Imperial Abomination has divined that Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy considers that a sin, too! Especially a sin, since the donor will likely have enjoyed—at least a little bit—masturbating his semen into a test tube—or whatthefuckever!—and the woman might get a tickle while having it inserted into her, ahem, privates. Like John always said: the concept of rational thought about the Abomination's dogshit-dogma is an oxymoron—and a surefire path to insanity if you persist in pursuing it!)

And worse—for poor Johanna, whom I'd been talking about—in her being so impertinent and unchristian as to kill herself—thus denying my parents the right to bury her on sanctified ground in a holy, Catholic cemetery with full, priestly honors and blessings!—over something as trivial as having her baby—with whom she'd been intimately bonding for only nine months!—stolen from her immediately after its birth. Though of course, from the sick and perverted POV of the Nazi Nuns running that home, it was a baby—niece or nephew of mine, I yet have no idea!—didn't deserve anyway because she'd conceived it in a heinous and lustful and mortally sinning act while out of "Holy Wedlock!"

And in Johanna having so sinfully conceived this "poor infant" under such evil and Nobodaddy-displeasing conditions, those "wise and holy nuns" just knew that no Nobodaddy-condemned, unmarried slut of a natural mother could ever do right by that "poor, sin-conceived infant," so immediately after it arrived in this world out of mother Joanna's womb, it was forthwith taken away from mother Joanna and given to a pair of upright, righteous, well-off, married Catholic parents who certainly better knew how to care and provide for "the poor, misbegotten dear" than that degenerate, fornicating, Nobodaddy-displeasing teen-slut in whose womb it had been conceived and who had carried and nurtured it in her body with her fluids and energies for nine months. (I will repeat: check out "Baby Scoop Era" on Wiki—and deeper, if you dare!)

Fuck-a-church-steeple!—but nothing shoots my off-the-Meds-Rez blood pressure up to the tip of the cross atop the Cologne Cathedral like thinking—and keyboard-babbling—about that damn Imperial Abomination of Constantine's and the rampaging armies of irrationalities that it has used over the centuries to lay waste to so many lives—and the history of this poor fuckin' world. Which for some utterly irrational reason (is there anything in this crazy, fucked-up "Preface" that is rational?) brings to mind Gregg Allman's autobiography, My Cross To Bear, (I wish John's auto-bio was as short, but John didn't have a publisher-in-waiting and an office full of $tyle-Nazis available to limit the length of what he was scribbling out!) which I found in my favorite used bookshop and couldn't resist paying the two bucks they were asking for it.

I mean, how could I resist?—I was an avid Allman Brothers fan from the first time I heard "Whipping Post" on Groucho's 8-track (I consider that one of the major theme songs of my life!), and I wept a veritable biblical flood the day I heard the tragic news that Duane had driven his motorcycle out of this world and crashed it through the gates of Rock 'n' Roll Heaven. (Though Gregg's death last year didn't affect me much at all, probably since it was no surprise, especially given his age, his problems with hep-C, and his liver transplant.) And I've been buying their music off-and-on ever since and have downloaded a number of their great Beacon concerts off YouTube. (Loved seeing the band on Clapton's 2013 Crossroads DVD, especially Gregg soulfully singing Neil Young's, great discourse on the suck-the-life-out-of-you-side of heroin, "The Needle and the Damage Done"!)(Which had another, deadly connotation in that it was the health problems caused by his hep-C that killed Gregg, a disease he was certain he caught from a dirty tattoo needle.)

Needle-less to say, (sorry about that groaner, Dear Reader!), reading the autobiography of a rock legend like Gregg whose been married five or six times—once to the Queen of the Face-Scalpel, Cher—and done enough drugs and booze to have followed his brother into Rock 'n' Roll Heaven, (which, given what is written about the lives and antics of living "rockers," must be a big, cosmic, groupie-swarming Woodstock!) as many times as he's been married, was a real "trip," but that's not what draws him into this crazy "Preface."

Actually, there's two things that brings dearly-departed-Gregg into this pathetic and very FUBAR "Preface," the first being the death of his father when Gregg was two (and Duane three) in one of those bizarre, fate-really-sucks-for-some-people stories in which his father is a WWII soldier who, unlike so many of his brothers-in-arms, survives the storming of the beaches of Normandy, the war, and a lot of Nazi bullets and bombs, then goes back to the Fascist State of America and immediately gets shot to death by a gun-wielding thief. (Wow, an American getting shot to death by a fellow American—now that doesn't happen very often, does it!)

And now a momentary meditation on the tragic death of Papa Allman: that event left his young wife a widow and his two very young sons to grow up without a father or the normal post-war, affluent family life that had, until that shooting, been "in the cards" for them. But one has to wonder if that hypothetical, normal, post-war family life would have produced the two wild and music-mad boys that started the Allman Brother Band, or inspired all the great songs that Gregg has written over the years. Now that's a philosophical "bone" that "old dog" John would have given a long chew on! (I am also meditating on the cruel vagaries of fate as I think of how different, and surely better, my non-life would have been had my father got himself shot by a benevolent-to-me robber shortly after mustering out of his non-combat stint in the Air Force.)

The other thing I wanted to mention concerning Gregg's book was that near the end of the book he gets kind of God-praising and smarmy religious (well, no bloody wonder, I guess, since he starts the thing off describing a "Code Blue" at the hospital that has something to do with his liver transplant and then his death and an OBE where he enters a beautiful scene with sweet scents and beautiful music and comes to a bridge with somebody that resembles his long-dead brother Duane on the far side telling him it was not yet time to cross) and I almost skipped that whole God-praising part but my eye was caught by the word, Catholicism, which induced me to read,

At one point I was going to convert to Catholicism, but they had so many rules. I have to say that the Catholic Church is very much about who has the nicest suit, the valet parking—too much about the money. I don't think you have to dress up or show God a bunch of gold for him to forgive you your sins, love you, and guide you. Then I went to an Episcopal church in Daytona, and it just felt right. The Episcopal Church isn't about gimme, gimme, gimme. The Episcopalians are like enlightened Catholics. They have faith but they are a little more open minded.

Right on, there Gregg! (except for the anthropomorphizing of Nobodaddy part)—I may know about as much about the Episcopalian Church as I do about quantum physics and the gut flora in cockroaches, but I know a hell of a lot more about the Catholic Church than is psychologically healthy for me, and which could but provoke me to ask why anyone with half a brain in their head would want to convert to that absolute abomination of a religion! It was bad enough being haplessly—fatefully!—born to Catholic parents, who, without consulting me, pretty much frog-marched [frog-christened?] the innocent little infant me into it through the absurd hocus-pocus of baptism!

Though I have been forced to ponder just how deeply Gregg explored Catholicism, beyond its historical, astronomical greed, especially with its obsession with sexual sins. I mean, can you imagine an aging rock star doing his First Confession. "Bless me, Father for I have committed numerous sins of the flesh." "How many, my son." (LOL—the priest is 25 and the confessor, 60!) "Oh, I'm not too sure—I have fornicated with a thousand . . . maybe more . . . willing women and girls." And quicker than lightning, the good Father's right hand slips into his cassock, (where's a fucking altar boy when you need one?) as he breathily says. "A thousand, my son—you will have to make many appointments to describe and be forgiven all of those transgressions against our Good Lord's prohibitions against sexual impurity—but you can get the first ten off your chest in this session."

Though of course, I still don't understand why any moron who converts to Constantine's Imperial Abomination needs to confess anything, because all those so-called sins that Catholics have to confess are only sins within the hermetic matrix of Catholic dogma. Roman Catholicism, as John more than once explained it, "Much as Constantine's Imperial Abomination so arrogantly and delusionally both believes and proclaims itself to be a UNIVERSAL religion—meaning encompassing the whole Universe and all its planes reality and being—is really just a totally human, parochially Earth-bound, historical and closed, self-defined system. If you enter and buy into the system, its reality subsumes you and you have to play by it ten million ridiculous and dogmatic rules if you want to remain part of it. But if you are not part of it, all of those dogmatic rules are irrelevant to you as any army's ten million martial rules to a civilian!"

And remembering those words also brings back vivid and very enjoyable memories of when Jonathan and Terry were young, and on some of his winter-afternoon visits, they shanghaied John into playing a few Monopoly games with them—which he always made sure to let them win, because he had a deal with them to, at the end of the game, buy their monopoly money off them at the rate of a penny on the dollar. That sure made the game fun for them!

Anyways, to have a point to that delightful anecdote, during one of our "conversations" have a game, we were talking about the totally manipulative and fascist-controlling system Constantine's Imperial Abomination had set up with its endless list of sins—particularly sexual ones—and John had laughed and said, "Yeah, that Abomination is like a big Monopoly game. Not only is it all about money and power, but all those colored bills you use in playing it are like all those sins that Church controls its members with. If you are in the game, they have 'value' and meaning and power, but if you have never been in the game—or as soon as you move out of it—they are worthless. You can't commit Christian-defined sins if you are not a game-playing—hocus-pocus baptized—member of the Christianity-game. And that is all it is, is a game!

"And one of the most evil aspects of that fundamentally evil "game," being played by that evil institution, is that has for 1700 years been sending missionaries outside of 'the game' to convince people who are not part of it—and thus cannot be sinners—that in being born human, they are part of it—but just haven't yet been apprised of the fact. Or sent a bill for it! And that all their piles of 'sin-bills' have a value, meaning, and power that they do not intrinsically have. Or only have if you are credulous enough to believe their clever, persuasive—and often violently coercive—propaganda about them having value, meaning, and power!

"Evil—just pure evil, is what it is! A fascist evil being perpetrated, ostensibly in the names of God and Jesus and salvation, but really and solely in that vile institution's fervent and bended-knees worship of Mammon and Cratus!" (I had to ask him who the hell Cratus was and he said, "The ancient Greek God of power—you know, every tyrant's favorite deity!")

But, in getting at least one wheel of this "Preface" back on the track of this narrative, Allman hit Catholicism right on its hypocritical head with the insight that all it seemed to be about was gimme, gimme, gimme, for as I just told you, John often said, "Whatever all that paragon of hypocrisy, Constantine's Imperial Abomination, propagandizes itself to be, there is as little real Christianity in it as there is silence in a locomotive repair shop. It's always been about the acquiring of power and wealth and the abuse of that power and the flaunting of that wealth as it is acquired!" Or, as Gregg so succinctly put it, it's seventeen hundred year history can be summed up in its true, "godly" trinity—gimme, gimme, gimme!

But what else could that fuckin' institution be? I mean, you don't have to be an expert on that self-called religion, with its very name of Roman Catholic Church, to realize it is but a multi-century extension of the Roman Empire (which, as I'm sure I've said way too many times, Constantine was trying to preserve by giving that particularly fascist sect of Christians all the power and influence attendant to being the official religion of the Empire) which, however much it revered and thus inadvertently preserved a lot a Greek culture, was always, and only ever, about sucking as much wealth out of the world around it as its mighty army allowed it to. (D'oh!—has any empire existed for any other reason—including the American Empire, which Mad Emperor Donald now reigns over like a Nero or a Caligula living in his gilded tower in the New-Rome-on-the-Hudson while "fiddling" every Playboy bunny and porn-star he can surreptitiously get his grubby little hands on in order to throw some sand on his ever-burning inguinal fires and some gasoline on his candle-guttering self-esteem.)

Shit-on-a-popsicle-stick!—that was one damn long, and eff'n groin-and-soul disturbing side-track! No, no!—not the Allman side-track. Or the Miley "the Twerk" Cyrus sidetrack. But the Thomas side-track that all those other ones side-tracked off of. Groin-disturbing, that Thomas sidetrack obviously was, because of that memorable—for me, anyway—"baptizing" of my mother's brand new Eaton's couch, but also very soul—spirit-being!—disturbing!

And for two reasons: one, that whole episode only happened because Thomas came to the house for a goodbye-visit with Joanna, whom I rarely, if ever, think about these drear days, probably because when I do chance to entertain a brief sequence of thoughts about her, they all center around how sweet and innocent and naive she was back then, and the fact that her OUT OF WEDLOCK pregnancy likely came about because she got talked into attending a party where she was peer-pressured into having a couple of drinks that she would have had no tolerance for, then dropping her panties for some slick, nether-scalp-hunting creep-shit in order to offer her virginity on the altar of his persuasive, conquistadorial lust, (or, more likely she was seduced or raped by some lecherous priest after confessing her very venial sins to him!) while ill-fatefully led to her getting pregnant, and because of her nasty, hypocritical and "Christian" Catholic parents and nasty, hypocritical and "Christian" government, (I'll harp on it again: check out "Baby Scoop Era" on Wiki—and deeper if you dare!) first gets banished from the only home she'd ever known and sent to live in shame with a bunch of nasty, judgmental and sex-obsessed nuns who'd have made the Greek Furies look like a troop of Florence Nightingales.

And while enduring what should have been the difficult—magical months—of her pregnancy at that "home," finally going through the trauma of giving birth to the tiny, ever-lovable infant that she had carried in her body—and her soul!—for nine months, after which that darling, infant was permanently ripped/stolen away from her by those Furies. In fact, in their filthy, demented minds, they were rescuing that infant from the vile clutches of an evil, sinning slut! The upshot of all that—the exhaustion of the pregnancy and the birthing process couple with the spiritual shock and horror of instantly losing the beloved creature she'd carried and nurtured inside her body and soul—dropped her into a Challenger Deep of depression that none of those wimple-wearing, black-robed and blacker-souled "Furies" gave a fuck about—because she was nothing but a fornicating, God-displeasing sinner—and she chose to self-terminate her young and vulnerable life. (Ironically, or perhaps synchronistically, the aging—and infinitely vital and interesting!—ex-prostitute, Sheila, in The Fire, tells the story of her early life to John and his young prostitute friend, Roxy, that is very similar story to Johanna's, but unlike Johanna, Sheila was tough enough to survive the soul-grinding ordeal. Plus her parents were dead so they weren't trying to "drown her!")

And the other soul-disturbing reason is that it brought to the surface the long-submerged memory of my long crush on, then my love for, Thomas, feelings I have life-long been certain he shared. If you can believe in the concept of soul mates, I think that is what he and I are. And I can't help but wondering if my father had not, quite literally, fucked me up as he had, and turned me into that always sexing-out, slut/whore/harlot/Jezebel Thomas thought of me as, perhaps that lifelong attraction between Thomas and I would have progressed naturally, the two of us becoming grade-school sweethearts, then high school lovers, and who knows, even married, for what is to gainsay that his decision to become a priest had something to do with his feelings for me that got deep-sixed by my outrageous slut/whore/harlot/Jezebel, father-induced behavior.

And that, I have to forcibly tell myself, is a heavy anchor of pure speculation that I definitely have to forthwith deep-six, for all thoughts of just how different my life would have been had my father been a real father with a real Christian soul in him and not a malicious, pedophilic pseudo-priest with a soul of shit, and had he given me the natural fatherly attentions and affections every young girl desires and needs from her father, but left my sexuality sacrosanct so it could develop at its natural pace and flower in its proper time, thus allowing me to live a reasonably normal and definitely sane, life, just makes me want to look for a wrist-slashing razor or head to the liquor store for an armful of "Texas mickeys" full of the only kind of spirits that soothe such dire soul-aches. (I said, reasonably normal life, because nothing is humanly "normal" in a Catholic household where the foul, sinful, God-displeasing intimations of sex hang like huge black bats in a guano-reeking cave.)

Though of course, one must factor in the reality that like the notion about Hitler's mother becoming a nun instead of a mother and subsequently saving the world from her son's world-conquering, Jew-exterminating ambitions, had I been allowed to grow up as a normal, healthy young girl, then transition into a normal, healthy adult woman, I doubt my relationship with John would have developed as it had—or existed at all—which would have negated my fate—my destiny?—of becoming his and Catherine' and little Johnny's memory-keeper, of being entrusted with "translating" his memoirs and making them available to a world that will likely have as much use for them as Rodin's Thinker for arsewipe.(And more importantly, for you, Dear Patient Reader, negated my writing of this outrageously long, blog-like, splashed-all-over-the-place-like-a-watermelon-dropped-from-the-CN Tower abomination of a "Preface!")

All of which takes us in the realms of Fate, Destiny and karma, and of course the purported "spiritual" agents behind them which I don't believe even exist, the whole damn barf-bag of which I very much do not have the youth, strength, intelligence, wisdom, genius, discipline—or fucking sanity!—to even begin tackling here!

Blog-like! Hey, (if I haven't mentioned this already) I like the sound of that. And off-hand as that phrase came to me—it sure fuckin' fits! Maybe I should take a break after getting this insane "Preface" and Book One of The Fire onto the Plains of Indifference of the eBook world, and start my own blog. I could call it Crazy Rachel's Blog: The Teachings of Cowboy John—A No Bullshit Way of Knowledge.)

Fuck-a-Mexican-desert!—I might even end up this century's new Castaneda, turn John into the new Don Juan (would you believe I only recently had it revealed to my sluggish, linguistically-challenged brain that Juan is Spanish for John—d'oh!), make millions, and start my own cult. (With a bevy of young and mindless boy-toys hanging off my every word. And my whale-blubber!) I could even ask Jonathan to contact my daughter, Terry, down in Australia on my behalf and get her to create some eye-catching artwork for it. I think she'd jump at the chance to depict me as the fat, crazy loon that she's come to know me as. And I can just see what she'd gleefully produce—a huge, fat, feather-disheveled loon with spiral-vortex eyes frantically wing-typing away at a keyboard covered in seaweed and dead fish!

Of course, the only problem with that whole stupid and absurd idea is that unlike Castaneda's likely fictional—or semi-fictional—Don Juan, who, if he was fictional, obviously couldn't write his own books, John was a real, flesh-and-blood human being who, though he did pound many of the railway spikes of his off-beat, no-bullshit ideas into the solid oak railway tie of my head, also put those ideas into writing (scribbling!), and did so with a lot more thought-clarity and explication than I am even remotely capable of doing. Getting his wisdom through me, Dear Reader, is like drinking a Starbucks Frappuccino after filtering it through a bale of moldy hay.

Jesus H. Fucking Goddamn Christ!—but once again I'm gone so far off track with this "crazy train" of memories . . . Oops—Cor-azy-vette road-trip of memories! Hey, last night I again watched Clapton's 2013 Crossroads DVD (the previous, woke-up-in-the-puke-and-piss watching didn't count because I was too drunk and stoned to really see and hear it!) and this time I really got into Andy Fairweather Low's "Spider Jiving," (written by Clapton and Low). And unlike other times hearing it, the lyrics really "jumped out at me" like never before, (is there such a thing as a "lyrics-angel"?) particularly with their pertinence, first to my hatred of spiders, then to me being walkabout from the Meds-Rez and writing this pathetic excuse of a "Preface" to the dead John's memoirs. And though I'd like to type the lyrics I don't want to get my gargantuan, hippo-ass sued off by the expensive-lawyered wrath of music industry moguls, so you'll just have to Google—or Bing, or Yahoo, or Whathefuckever!—them on your computer or iGizmo.

Have you fuckin' looked them up yet? . . . . . Well, why the fuck not?—get off your fat recumbent fundament and do so right fucking now! That way I can make the comment about how incredibly apropos the words of that song are—especially those about the angel of insanity not resting until it's got me driven into my grave! And hey, don't just look up the lyrics, grab a YouTube-view of Andy very energetically singing that song. Or better yet, buy the Crossroads DVD and you'll not only help a good charity while getting to listen to Andy's great song and his energetic performance of it, but will also get over four hours of the best blues and guitar music you'll ever hear! )

Now where the fuck was I in talking about the subject of this "Preface"—John and The Fire—before I went webbing off into that "Spider Jiving"? And Johanna! And Allman! And Thomas! And—oh yeah, I was talking about going so far off the track with this "crazy train" of memories (and mixed metaphors!) that I don't even know what direction to go in to get back to the mainline . . . which I'll have to scroll back a good goddamn long ways to figure out. Scroll . . . scroll . . . scroll . . . . . . Okay, found it! Yikes, it really was a long way back and if I had half a sane brain left in my lightning-fried, spider-jiving head, I'd highlight, then delete, everything I just backtracked through. Which I won't do now but which I will certainly do if I try to re-read, and play $tyle-Nazi, on this abomination (ablogination!) once Jonathan shows up to frog-march me back to the Meds-Rez!

### Chapter Thirty Nine

So anyways, somewhere waaaaaaaaay back I was babbling . . . blabbing . . . blogging? . . . babblogging! . . . (Ha!—I've just wordsmithed a word that defines what most babbloggers are really doing when they say they are blogging!) on about John's complex notions of just what the human mind/soul/being is and what that nebulous word spiritual means in the context of it. And given that for me, it is still something quite incomprehensible, I will disqualify myself from screwing it up any more than I am sure I already have and leave the rest of that to what he himself says about it in Book Two of The Fire. (Don't worry about ever having to read that for I'll not live long enough to get it out into the eWorld—though thank . . . Whatthefuckever . . . for the purported existence of the Akashic Records, where it is already safely—purportedly—installed for all Eternity! And Time—until Eternity swallows it back up! . . . Or at least that's what John once, when wearing his mystic-hat, said would someday happen; he also said not to quote him on that.)

Though I will try and make a point out of this digression by saying that to John, who, for reasons well-explained in The Fire, and who made it his later-life's work to do little else but think about these things, there was something about human sexuality and our imagination (as Blake knew it!) that we totally lacked—in our modern, left-brain dominated world—the imagination and courage to face and understand, and that because of that, we have not been able to deal with it in a frank and honest fashion in our literature and art or our psychology. (John said Freud started to approach the essence of human sexuality but he lost the foundational truth of it by trying to make it something that could be rationally explained and scientifically acceptable, which to John was like trying to build one of those mythical—and impossible—perpetual-motion machines! Or make rational sense of the Abominations' dogshit-dogma!)

And perhaps, worst of all, and most disastrously, academic thinkers—philosophizers, Pirsig called them!—however brilliant and "wise," (and however good the view from their student-warmed beds in their ivory towers) have not been able to adequately deal with it in that all-hallowed and generally-ignored-by-the-world hyper-academic discipline of Philosophy! (Like John loved to say, "Philosophers are regarded as the smartest people in the world, but what they truly know about everyday life—and what can be understood by everyday people!—could be written on the back of a postage stamp with a grease pencil!"

Many a "great" philosopher has written a table-breaking tome on epistemology—the field of mental masturbation that deals with our knowledge and how we know it, etc.—yet they tend, to a man—Freud misguidedly notwithstanding—to be Sphinx-silent on the true natures of evil and sex and why we get so powerfully, and too often irrepressibly horny and why the two so often get conflated, or why a father, as ostentatiously as "holy" as a Catholic as any bishop, (even one with a laptop full of kiddie-porn) who made a big show of herding his family into "Holy Mass" every Sunday morning where he sang the hymns like an angel and took the "Holy Host" with his eyes pious-closed, could then lead his now weekly-sanctified family flock home then spend those Sunday afternoons teaching his nine-year-old daughter to suck his "warm popsicle" ("Just suck, Ray-ray—no biting!") as he called it.

Personally, I think if more women would—could!—become philosophers, we'd have an infinitely more wise and balanced philosophical system available to us about the true nature of the human condition, but the Old Boy clique that dominates the hallowed bastions of Ivory Tower Philosophy would have as much use for that as "rain-forest slugs for partaking in a race across the Bonneville Salt Flats!" (That was Sprocket's favorite metaphor for how much use he had for his meds.)

And of course, it was that Old Boy bastion of the Constantine's Imperial Abomination that had Hypatia, who was probably the last truly great female philosopher in history, flayed alive for having the temerity to be a philosopher. And for being a Pagan! But probably mostly for being a woman philosopher! Or maybe just for being a woman. Period! Though of course, one must face here the fact that if she'd been a Christian and not a Pagan, those Old Boys of that uber-patriarchal Imperial Abomination of Constantine's would have long before blocked all avenues of access for her to have become a philosopher in the first place. And most likely would have sent her to some nunnery where thinking and talking were considered infinitely more heinous and Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy-displeasing sins than fucking—or blowing—priests in the confessional.

Or why, as I most horribly learned in watching a re-run of that hideous—already mentioned!—documentary, Deliver Us From Evil, which systematically and horrifically exposes the priests-will-be-priests (wink-wink/nod-nod) attitude of that supposedly holy and spiritual institution that is world-wide known as the Roman Catholic Church, towards pedophilia. In the case—but one of myriads extant in the annals of that infernal institution—covered by that very honest and well-made film, the higher-order minions of that abominable institution, first tolerated, then facilitated (by moving him from parish to parish as complaints came in), then covered-up the decades-long molestations of scores of California children by Oliver O'Grady, a pedophilic snake of a priest (my sincere apologies to the world of snakes) who in an interview for the documentary, explicitly gave off the sense that he really didn't believe he did anything very wrong (Puke Out Loud!) in molesting those children! (Wiki that hot, reeking splat of gull-shit—but have a barf-bucket handy!)

The California bishop—real name Roger Mahony, but I'll call him Bishop Enabler—who did all this facile facilitating and deftly contrived covering-up, was rewarded for his dutiful, face-and-reputation-saving services to Constantine's Imperial Abomination, by being promoted, first to Archbishop, then Cardinal! And while on this vomitous subject, how can I fail to again mention the currently-in-the-news Grand Jury report of the sexual—priests-will-be-priests!—shenanigans of all those randy-as-rutting-rams priests in Pennsylvania, and a few years before that, the Academy Award winning movie, Spotlight, which dealt with the same problem of predatory pedophilic priests in and around Boston in the 60s and 70s, and both the Church's need to cover up the nefarious issue, and the general Catholic congregation's—sheep flocks'—resentment at having the subject even explored, let alone exposed!

It would seem that the de rigueur, lay-Catholic attitude toward their predatory priests is: hey, they didn't do anything to me, or to my family (that I know about!) so we have to face the fact that our priests are priests, that they are holy men chosen, then given a personal call, by God to administer to us His holy sacraments, and they are as sacred to us as those sacraments, so it's okay with us if—once in awhile and in their being human—they "fuck with us" by fucking our children (as long as they are good, Catholic, zipper-mouthed, lamb-kids who hide that fact from us!) but it's not okay if you "fuck with them!" (AND THEY SAY I AM FUCKING INSANE!)

Fuck-an-altar boy's-tender-virginal-ass!—but can you imagine if some the likes of Mahony becomes Pope? Fuckin'-fornicatin'-hell!—he'll be issuing manuals called The Art of Child Molestation and How to Facilitate and Cover-up Necessary Sex with Minors, and re-affirming John's oft-expressed assertion that the black-and-white collar priests wear represents their membership in The Holy Catholic Brotherhood of Trained and Licensed Pedophiles, with its stated mission of ridding all children of their unnecessary innocence and virginity. (Kind of like the double-zero designation in a Bond movie representing the agent's license-to-kill.)

And, yeah, yeah—I know! John was over-generalizing in his comment about the meaning of that dog-collar, and for sure, not all priests are pedophiles and some might actually behave like Christians, but you have to look at it from his point of view, which in being brutally raped—over and over and over again!—by a priest at the young age he was, it was a lot like getting severely mauled by a pit bull as a child, then refusing, for the rest of your life, to accept the assertion that not all pit bulls are vicious maulers. (Our provincial government, after a few too many maulings by those thug-dogs, believes all pit bulls are thug-dogs and potential maulers and has outlawed them. Fuck!—wouldn't it be nice if some government—all governments!—had the balls to outlaw the Abomination and all its priests! And bishops and cardinals and pope!)

Since this "Preface" is already all over the map (clichés, Rachel, clichés!) and I probably lost my itsy-bitsy audience a few hundred pages back, another site-seeing diversionary flight will hardly matter. (Bits are cheap, and when one has got the "pedal-to-the-metal" of a mania-fueled Cor-azy-vette, so are words!) And as is obvious from the quotes of his I have been putting in here, John used to say the most outrageously negative things about the Constantine's Imperial Abomination—really, really outrageous and really negative! Even more negative than even I can think up—and express in this outrageous babblog!

As I've already told you way too many times, I was raised in a staunchly Catholic family reigned over by a Catholic paterfamilias as hypocritical as a Borgia pope, though it was John who always asserted that calling a Catholic a hypocrite was a redundancy. Jeeeezus. H. Fucking. Goddamn. Christ!—look at what I'm doing! It's always John-this and John-that! You'd think I don't have an fuckin' goddamn thinking mind of my fuckin' own! Or that he was my analyst—my Jupiter Jung!—and that I am still suffering from a bad case of transference!

And Jeeeezus H. again, but this total lack of focus, which seems to be getting worse by the word, (actually, more likely by the toke, given all of that I've been "mushing" my brain with to soothe my soul—my spirit-being—at the end of each painful, scriptorial session!) means that if I sincerely wanted to bring this damn thing to anything close to a sensible conclusion, I'd have to frog-march myself back to the Meds-Rez, but like I've probably told you too many times already, if I go back to that damn place, I'll end up feeling as bright and alive as a light bulb screwed into a dead duck's ass, and I'll take one look at this reeking pile of dog-barf of a "Preface" and forthwith use the delete button to hose it into the gutter of the Recycle bin where it belongs! So I guess I'll just have to manically—and maniacally!—press on with it using a damn-the-torpedoes/ full-speed-to-hell attitude. (And of course, alas for you, Dear Reader, the damn-the-Poor-Reader attitude implied in that!)

So anyways, since I've already bludgeoned your sensibilities with it uncountable times, it will hardly matter if I re-swing one more time the crucifix-cum-truncheon of the boring fact that I was raised a Catholic in a typically hypocritical Catholic household where I was fed all the typical Catholic fairy tales and hocus-pocus/dogshit-dogma right along with my mother's milk—and later, my father's—and like all intelligent children, right around the time the "virus" of my reasoning-capacity was infecting my brain (Constantine's Imperial Abomination, even after seventeen centuries and while being under the exalted and omnipotent aegis of Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy and the inspirations of Sonny Boy's Pigeon, still hasn't come up with a vaccine to prevent that from happening, though I guess the only thing that would really work would be a free, pre-frontal lobotomy administered along with the sacrament of First Communion) and I was using it to flush that first, fantasy-trinity of Santa Claus, Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy down the rationality toilet, I was also using it to get that second fantasy-trinity of Nobodaddy, Sonny Boy Jesus and his pet Pigeon into the same toilet, quite easily figuring out that most of the absurd fairy tales about Sonny Boy Jesus—walking on water, turning water into wine, feeding the multitudes on a few crusts and sardines, raising poor, flesh-rotting Lazarus from the dead, raising himself from the dead after three, flesh-rotting days!—that first my parents, then the nuns at my Catholic grade school, and the parish priest, were attempting to round-peg pound into the square holes of my reason-burgeoning mind were just that—fairy tales! And real boring and stupid ones to boot, given they didn't have any fairies—or pretty princesses and handsome princes and ugly, evil old witches!—in them!

But my square-holed, reason-burgeoning brain was a good enough tool for me to easily realize those stories were no-fun-to-listen-to, bed-time, pseudo-scare-you, lull-you-to-sleep, make-a-Disney-cartoon-movie-out-of, or even acknowledged-as-fairy-tales, fairy tales, but, because they tried to pass them off as real, historical events—real Cosmically important historical events!—came across to me as just really stupid lies that any intelligent, six-year-old child could not help but seriously question, at night, in bed—while fiddling with their "privates'—and also questioning what that was supposed to be all about.

(All Catholic children growing up in strict, punishing, sin-obsessed households where just about every fun thing they do is a punishable sin, very quickly learn to become instant and adept liars to avoid at least a few of those absurd and de rigueur punishments, so they get real good at instantly knowing the stench of a lie!)

And of course, any six-year-old intelligent and newly-rational enough to see through all those lies and silly stories being passed off as historical events—"reality TV" before "reality" TV!— would also be intelligent enough to know the importance of them to her obviously really-stupid-about-them parents, and not reveal to them that she thought they were really stupid and irrational stories and that her beloved parents were being equally stupid and irrational by believing them. Or saying they did! (Refer to the above about instantly knowing the stench of a lie!)

I mean, for a bit of perspective here: I grew up during the Cold War and the stories that were being told of Russian citizens being sent to camps—goo-lakes, as I remember what it sounded to me like them being called—or executed, by drowning in that goo-lake—for just saying one word against their precious Communist government, and I always had the feeling the same went on in my country with regards to the Catholic Church. Especially the way my parents always talked about it. So much so I sometimes feared that the pompous, fancy-robed priest, when he was sanctimoniously giving me my communion wafer, could read my thoughts and see my judgment of it all as a lot of lies and nonsense, and that some Sunday, soon after we got back from church and were just sitting down for our traditional Sunday brunch of homemade ox-tail soup and tuna sandwiches, a knock would come on our door and some flock of ugly old priests with stern, mean faces, hard, blazing eyes and wielding crucifixes the size of swords, would demand I be handed over to them so they could take me to a goo-lake and after torturing me to confess my doubts about their church, drown me in it.

(Hey, aren't children's imaginations a hoot? Which of course begs the asking of the question: where the fuck did mine go? Fuck a toilet plunger!—but I still laugh out loud whenever I remember back to when Jonathan was about three and he used to be terrified at the prospect of me—or his father, who was once-in-awhile around then—flushing the toilet when he was sitting on it because he was convinced that his turds disappeared from the bowl because a hand came up and pulled them down the drain—and he sure didn't want to get dragged down by that hand! . . . Sorry Jonathan—I just had to tell that priceless gem!)

So, as those grade school years progressed, any real serious questioning, or the voicing my doubts about, the Catholic Church and all the obviously irrational stories and beliefs being shove in my ears about Almighty God the Father and about the life and death of his sacrificing-himself-to-save-Christians, son Jesus Christ, became something as verboten to talk about as was talking about what my father was starting to do to me, which was always something that drove me into a painful state of both cognitive and moral dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance because they were sexual things and I was being taught that every sexual thing done outside of the sacrament of Holy Matrimony—and especially sexual things done with your mouth and with a relative!—was a mortal sin and not only very displeasing to the Holy Catholic Church, but to God the Father and his loving son, Jesus Christ. And especially so to the Virgin Mother Mary, who in being a virgin, obviously sure didn't like the terrible dirtiness of all sexual stuff, and though she wasn't part of the Almighty Trinity, still had "God's ear!" And yet, while my father sure did seem to think that all of life revolved around the Holy Catholic Church and God the Father and his son Jesus and the Virgin Mother Mary, he had treated my virginity like it was an ashtray full of cigarette butts, and was doing all those various sexual things with me while telling me it was not a sin and all completely okay because he was my father and I was his daughter and that he owned me and that made it okay for him to do those things.

Then there was that moral dissonance, because something deep inside me sure screamed at me that what my father was doing to me was WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! I mean, some of the things he was doing to my body—even a nine-year-old's small, hairless vagina can't resist giving a warm, tingling response to a hot, skillfully-licking tongue and a carefully probing finger!—sure did feel good. Damn good! Plus there was all that attention I was getting from my father, who was usually so self-absorbed he barely noticed the existence of his three "brats" as he often called us, and who suddenly took such a keen interest in me and kept telling me how special I was to him and that we always had to keep what we were doing a secret from everyone else, especially my mother!

And since even back then I was not getting along very well with my mother—in her estimation I was just a "willful little smarty-pants!"—so keeping such a secret from her felt extra good. And when I once told my father that I thought that what we were doing was a sin, and that God the Father wouldn't like it, he just smiled and said, "Oh, don't worry your little head about that, Ray-ray—I'm your father and your my special daughter so it's not a sin—and besides, God is a father himself so he understands!" (He would have made a great fuckin' Jesuit! . . . If he could have stuck with the program. The Warrior-for-Christ, basic-training!)

And though, you may wonder, Dear Reader, if children of that age have enough thinking capacity to experience something as esoteric as cognitive dissonance, then spend a bit of time thinking about your thoughts on that! Perhaps you can't remember that far back into your own life, but if you've ever spent time around a six-year-old whose capacity for rational thinking has just kicked in, you'd know just how both exhilarating and distressing the process can be to them. I remember only too well that my nickname back then was "Little Miss How Come" because there was a constant stream of "How come this?" and "How come that?" questions filling my brain and pouring out of my mouth. (My mother always responded to my "How come's?" by telling me to "Shush!", and my father just ignored me. It was a rare "snow-day in May" when I'd get answers to those questions.)

I'd discovered that this new-found power of my mind had the capacity to question and make rational sense out of so much, and thinking about such stuff was like eating bowl after bowl of Neapolitan ice cream and I couldn't get enough of it. Alas and alak though, it did have the effect of concomitantly stripping my life of its soothing, magical fantasies, which I equally "how come'd?" about—like how come Santa Claus was able to go down millions of chimneys at once at the stroke of midnight Christmas Eve; how come the Tooth Fairy is able to know when every one of millions of children loses a tooth and tucks it under a pillow? How come my brother has a handy little piddidle he can use to stand up and pee with, while I always have to sit down to pee because I only have a privates. (I once had the inspiration to stand in front of the toilet to pee, but all that got me was wet legs and a mess in front of the toilet I had to use half a roll of precious toilet paper mopping up!)

That question about why my brother had a piddidle and I only had a privates always embarrassed my mother, but the ones most irritating to my mother, were any "smarty-pants" questions about her precious Catholic faith, like how come Jesus Christ, who is the son of the Almighty God, the ruler of the whole universe, who lives in some faraway Heaven sitting always beside his Almighty God the Father, is able to take the time to pay attention to every swearword, every lie, every act of disobedience done by every one of millions of children around the whole big world . . . And how come he was also able to patiently listen to every single prayer being said by those millions and millions of children around the whole big world as they knelt beside their beds and asked him to forgive their swears and lies and acts of disobedience!

(Fuck-a-philosophy-book!—but I wish I was as smart today as I was back then!)

And by the time I'd reached puberty and high school, with, as John once explained, my "second chakra blasted wide open by my evil father and burning like a forest fire," I'd not only developed an out-of-control passion for committing the mortal sins of fornication and fellatio with every willing teenage boy I could draw into the quagmire of my teenage lust, I concomitantly developed the ability to sneak around my mother's dictats of going to Saturday confession and Sunday mass. I mean, let's face it—confession had already become a farce when I was ten years old and committing—however often my very skillful sophist of a father so Jesuitically explained otherwise!—what I was certain were terrible, hell-damning sins that I was committing with my father that I sure wasn't going to kneel down in no confessional and look up to tell any stern and judgmental priest about!

(I still wonder if he confessed those sin, though now knowing what I—and the world—now knows about the pervasive presence of pedophile priests in Constantine's Priapatic Abomination, I can just imagine that priest, not only understanding my father's actions with me, but masturbating into a handy hanky while he described them! Now you know why they wear those silly, ugly, stinking, never-dry-cleaned-often-enough, black dresses!) So with that, the whole issue of the Catholic Church's endless list of stern rules concerning sexual sins—and concomitantly, all sins!—lost all validity as a force in my life and became like the hole created by a missing chunk of concrete in the sidewalk down the street a bit from our house, which, once I knew it was there, I had no problem stepping or riding my bike around, or jumping over, it—even in the dark. (As you can imagine, I was a compulsive crack-stepper, because I willfully believed that neat old rhyme: step on a crack, break your mother's back!)

And I think that is how things would have lifelong remained for me and my attitudes towards that insane Church and its insane quagmire of utterly dogshit-dogma, had John not come into my life, and after physically throwing me into that stinking shit pile to metaphorically drive home to me just how shittily I was behaving, he then proceeded to metaphorically throw me into the Catholic quagmire for a true taste of the shittiness of it so I could face the real spiritual danger I was in from its shit-pile influence on me.

To John, Constantine's Imperial Abomination alternated between being a sinkhole full of the bubbling and roiling manure of outright lies and cynically manipulative dogma and propaganda, and a massive, raging boil on his cowboy arse that, daylong in the thinking-saddle that he never got out of, he could neither ignore nor find a Doctor of Philosophy to lance it for him. And he was a hundred percent certain that any adult who'd spent a childhood drowning in the poisonous, bubbling and roiling shit-pit of that very Imperial, very Roman Abomination's pernicious dogma—as forcibly taught by its vile priests—that poisonous ordure was not something one could easily cough out of one's spiritual lungs, vomit out of one's spiritual stomach, or wash off one's spiritual body and walk away from on escaping it. Or, on washing it off and walking away from it, ever get rid of the stench of it. (Yeah, something like the long-clinging stench of pregnant mare's piss!)

In fact, he once told me a most disturbing story—as the perfect metaphor for the poisonous nature of "the Abomination's" dogshit-dogma—he'd heard on the news one day. It was about some poor people in some South American country who kept body-and-soul more or less contiguous by scavenging in the huge landfill adjacent to a big city. One evening, while disassembling a machine that they didn't know had been used by a hospital for the radiation treatment of cancer, they came across a ball that glowed in the dark. To them, it was the most valuable—and most magical!—thing they'd ever scavenged! It had no bulb inside it and no batteries either—it just glowed! So they took it out of that dump, keeping it hidden in their clothes, and showed it only to their family and friends as they figured out how to sell it for the best price. They even let their kids play with it. Well, it didn't take long for all concerned with that ball to start getting really sick and dying, which brought it to the attention of the authorities, who, to their horror, discovered the thing was lethally radioactive.

John's reason for telling that horrible and tragic story was to drive home the point that the abominable dogma of Constantine's Imperial Abomination—especially its dogma about out endemically sinning nature, starting with being born into a state of original sin—is like that radioactive ball, and though, with the onset of the age of reason you can see all that dogma for the dangerous ball of radioactive lies that it is, it is too late! Even after the authorities had taken that lethally radioactive ball away from those ignorant and hapless scavengers, all who'd come into contact with it sickened and died from the effects of it, and no different is with all the "radioactive" lies and strong-armed, fascist, dogshit-dogma used by Constantine's Imperial Abomination to intimidate—irradiate!—and control it credulous flocks of sheep, which once that deadly "radiation" has been absorbed into a victim's psyche and soul, the damage is permanent. And often spiritually lethal! And though its nasty, radioactive effects can be ameliorated with a lot of true spiritual work, the damage can never be completely undone. "I mean," he said. "It would be interesting to do one of those polls . . . of apostate Catholics . . . and find out how many actually feel free of that Abomination, even after however many years they have walked away from it? Hell, I bet no small number of them—if they were being honest—would say they still often feel like hell-damned sinners for rejecting 'their faith". . . and not getting shriven or attending Mass once a week . . . and when the going gets rough, still pray to Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy for help—or wish they could pray to him! Like the lethal radiation from such a radioactive object, no true healing can ever take place. . . . In fact, you could say that all Catholic parents who take their born-innocent child to a priest for the hocus-pocus of baptism and a subsequent childhood of the dire, you-are-a-born-sinner indoctrinations into the Abomination's lethally radioactive dogshit-dogma, are abusive parents. Are parents who are likely committing the most heinous form of child abuse in the history of humanity! . . . And of course, if they pressure a son to become an altar boy and he ends up getting his ass raped off by some vile, pedophile priest, then the level of that abuse just got cubed!"

Needless to say, I was, on the one hand, horrified by that radioactive-ball story, especially since I was a mother of young children at the time and the idea of giving them a lethally radioactive ball to play with just wouldn't compute, but on the other, I sure could not see—or allow myself to see—that Catholic dogma, as toxic as I knew it to be, ranked up there for our spirit-being the way radioactivity did for our body. Of course, deep, deep down I intuitively knew John was right, but the implications of his being right were just too horrendous to face. And you, Dear Reader, already too well know the limits of my courage!

I mean, how could I live with any hope at all for my fucked-up life knowing that my lethally radio-active, Catholic upbringing had permanently harmed me, that I would always walk through this life full of "cancerous tumors" caused by that abominable institution's nefarious—and radioactive!—need to intimidate and control (spiritually cripple!) me—so in being my mother's daughter, well indoctrinated into The Three Monkeys Philosophy For Coping With The Unpleasant Side of Life, I didn't face it. I took a trip up that famous Egyptian river and ostriched my head into its silt by, in a mild fit of scorpion-paranoia, deflecting the issue back onto John by making a "wise and pompous" comment about how disturbing I found his obsessive hatred of the Catholic Church to be and how he found it possible to so passionately and pathologically maintain that obviously irrational hatred for so many years without letting it go.

His response to that was to smile and while doing a perfect imitation of my eye-rolling shtick, to let me know he knew exactly what I was so futilely trying to do, then let out a loud, derisive, chain-saw laugh as he answered my question by saying,

"It is likely because I am a reincarnation of Voltaire, who as you must surely know, hated the Church and its clergy even more than do I—if that's possible!"

And after saying that, he paused and awaited my typical negative response to any mention of reincarnation, and when it didn't come because I was busy trying to remember the little I had learned during my school years about Voltaire, he let out a another roar of a laughter and went on, "Which is absurd and impossible, because Voltaire was one of the smartest men in the history of the world—and a great writer—and his avatar of a spirit-being would never reincarnate into an illiterate manure-head like me! That would be like putting a Rolls Royce engine in my old truck!"

(And I still couldn't make any response because then I got lost in trying to fathom how John could still think of himself as an "illiterate manure-head" after all the years of his long life dedicated to reading and thinking himself into being the exact opposite, which then made me think of something he once off-handedly said about the fact that the self-image we have when we go through our most important membrane of destiny of puberty, is the self-image we carry with us for the rest of our life, no matter what else we might do with our life. That notion, if it was true, certainly could explain why he then still thought of himself as stupid and ignorant—and why I still think of myself as a filthy slut! As my father's handy ho! And of course, now that I reluctantly think of it, represents an absolutely terrible and radioactive reality for all Catholics, given that their transition through that membrane of destiny of puberty involves an inevitable obsession and involvement with a lot of sexual stuff that the Abomination would have deemed heinously sinful and mightily displeasing to Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy, which means that for the rest of their lives they could but have the self-image of a Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy-displeasing sinner! Even, like me, decades after having rejected the whole pernicious and radioactive insanity!)

But back to John's lifelong butt-boil, the subject of Constantine's Imperial Abomination—once he discovered how uncomfortable his comments about that outfit made me, he played the ass-nipping coyote trickster and never failed to make at least one uber-disturbing "ass-bite" on each of my visits, like I was some recalcitrant buffalo cow that he was trying to herd over a buffalo jump. A buffalo jump of an enlightenment I sure wasn't interest in "jumping to!"

Once even, when he made the comments that I will subsequently relate as they are the most outrageous of the lot, he asked me about my discomfort at talking negatively about an institution I obviously didn't like and for the most part had nothing to do with. And when I said I really didn't know, adding that it didn't bother me to think bad thoughts about the Church, but saying them out loud filled me with a most powerful and irrational fear.

I thought he'd laugh his head off at what I was sure he'd consider nothing more than a frivolous bit of women's irrationality, but it made him more serious than ever as he said, "Yes, yes!—that makes complete sense! I once read somewhere that the great terror of the Inquisition is still with us, if not overtly in practice, at least in what that old Swiss head-shrinker Jung called the collective unconscious. (John much preferred Pirsig's and Campbell's terms, Mythos or Blake's Imagination—and his own, Ocean of Spirit—to Jung's collective unconscious (always claiming that in it being super-conscious, us thinking of it as being unconscious was just plain erroneous—and dumb!) citing Blake's, "Eternity is in love with the productions of time" quote to underscore the notion that this world and the Mythos or Imagination or Ocean of Spirit or Whatthefuckever were in a state of constant and essential symbiotic growth)

"That writer . . . wish to hell I remember where I read it . . . claimed that the Inquisition filled, and still fills the Western world's collective psyche with a very black and frightening current of Inquisitorial terror that all Westerners—but most particularly Christians!—unconsciously tap into." He compared it to the instant and primordial discomfort many still feel today at the mention of the words, Hitler, Nazis and Gestapo! And the sight of that Sanskrit symbol for good luck—the swastika, which instantly sets one's guts cramping and churning. "Particularly," he added, "I would surmise, if you are Jewish . . . though any former soldier who fought against those hordes of demon-rats would feel it just as bad!

"But that Inquisitorial darkness is less like a current than it is a heavy, black, crushing and ever-hovering shroud that everyone in the West can still unconsciously feel the dark, heavy, oppressive effects of, though those effects are more potently—and often not so unconsciously!—felt by anyone indoctrinated into the 'nefarious cult of Constantinism' that calls itself the Roman Catholic Church! Anyone indoctrinated into Catholicism, and its dark, foul, sin-obsessed and hell-threatening dogma has been sensitized to the absolute terror of the Inquisition. And for those unfortunates so indoctrinated, the dark and looming shadow cast by that black and heavy Inquisitorial shroud tends to feel like it is a relentlessly marching army of torturing and murdering Inquisitors and the only natural reaction to that army is terror.

"Terror and a life-preserving, mouth-zipped silence about that powerful, fascist, murderous and utterly tyrannical institution created by Constantine's Imperial Abomination to maintain and enhance its dark and crushing imperial-fascist power and control. In fact, because it is so apropos, I can but restate that it is no different that our now instant and abhorrent reaction to the swastika, which was once an ancient and very benevolent, good luck sun-symbol used by many cultures around the world . . . hell, I was in a museum out west once where they had a display of Cree Indian clothing and artifacts that dated to the 1870s, one artifact of which was a drum that had, amongst other symbols, a swastika painted on it . . . until Hitler borrowed it and turned it into the symbol of his absolutely evil Third Reich, which is almost as dark a shroud hovering over our 'collective unconscious' as that of the Inquisition—but isn't because it, most fortunately, didn't last as long! (John once off-handedly commented on how much better a world we'd have today if Emperor Julian had lived long enough to totally re-establish Paganism as the Empire's official religion and had stamped out Constantine's Imperial Abomination as thoroughly as the allied armies had stamped out Hitler and his Nazis!)

"This very insightful writer even said that women, especially psychically sensitive ones, were more fearful in this regards than men because of all the tens of thousands of women—many of whom were psychically sensitive and often known as wise-ones—who had been tortured and burned to death as witches. Wise-ones, by the way, who were much better 'doctors'—healers!—than most of the quacks of the era who were passing themselves off as doctors of medicine, when in fact, they were just doctors of deception and greed."

He said their terror and pain still resonates through our 'collective unconscious' like, as he so well put it, "a deafening, unending and soul-searing scream. And since you are a very psychically sensitive woman, it fits with his theory that you would have a natural fear of saying anything aloud against that nefarious and murderous abomination of Constantine's! . . . And who knows, you might once even have been a wise-one burned as one of those 'witches'. That's not something any spirit-being would forget, no matter how many lifetimes it lived afterwards. "

Following that stunning, but intuitively and frighteningly true—to me!—revelation, I then proceeded to argue with him about my long-standing refusal to believe in reincarnation, to which, Star Wars fan that he was, (I practically had to put a ring through his nose and drag him into the theatre to watch it the first time, then you couldn't keep him away from it!) he did a perfect imitation of Obi Wan talking to Luke after Luke giving a bunch of excuses why he couldn't go on a journey to Alderaan with him, as he said, "That's your mother talking, Rachel."

And when that familiar argument finally ended with me running out of steam and him grinning at me like I was an irrational and stubborn child whom he knew would someday outgrow both my irrationality and stubbornness, I went on to vehemently deny that I was in any way psychically sensitive, which got a rare, thigh-slapping laugh out of him as he roared, "And I am a secret Inquisitor sent here to spy on you and trick you into revealing your lack of faith in my holy Church of Constantine! And that you are a practicing witch with a 'devil's mark' hidden under your clothes. And have a familiar—a cat!—that follows you from incarnation to incarnation and that you reveal to no one! Heh, heh! (He laughed at that because he knew I hated cats—or at least hated the fact that they shit in boxes of dirt that had to be regularly emptied!) Rachel, you are one of the most psychically sensitive human beings I have ever met. If you weren't, I doubt I'd ever have had enough to do with you for us to be having this conversation."

And when my response to that was a dumbfounded and frantic shaking of my head, he laughed again and almost shouted, "Why the hell do you think you are so vehement about denying the existence of the world of spirits? It's because you sense them everywhere around you all the time—and they scare the hell out of you . God, I'd love to see the shaman you could be if you weren't such a coward!"

He, as always, was, probably right, and often do I wonder what I could have done with my life—other than being a fuckin' bogyman shaman . . . a Carla Castaneda, for fuck's sake!—if I were I not such a coward, (and had possessed the courage to run out of the rec room screaming blue murder the first time my father pulled his big, red, smelly and grotesquely erect piddidle out of his pants and asked me, first to play with it, then stick it in my mouth—of all the goddamn things!) but I guess that's like wondering how good a pet a jackrabbit would make if, like the mythical Jackalope, it had antlers.

### Chapter Forty

So anyways, back to that rationally outrageous notion of John's about the Inquisition in some way still being "with us" after all these years, which, outrageous and irrational as it sounded to me, nonetheless sent a cold, slimy snake slithering down my spine and a jitterbugging porcupine into my guts that first time I heard him voice it, and which, even all these years later, still has a disturbing effect on me. As does another of his "whacky" notions, that one being that Hitler and the Nazis did absolutely nothing during their efforts to enslave the world during their reign of global. uber-terror—and of course, their unimaginably horrific and still-unbelievable, uber-evil Holocaust—that they did not learn from the Constantine's Imperial Abomination.

(I can't contemplate the Holocaust for more than a few minutes before what little sanity I have left swan dives off the edge of a Grand Canyon of cognitive dissonance so deep it feels like there is no coming back from it, my poor brain being utterly unable to cogitate the idea that human beings perpetrated such a grotesque travesty of everything that represents being human! Though as John once commented on that beyond-malignant event, "If there had been no Holocaust and someone in the 50s made a real bad, Sci-fi movie about evil aliens invading Earth and perpetrating the equivalent of that foul event, people would have laughed it out of the theatres as being too implausible! . . . Yet the only way I can make even a modicum of sense of it is that a race of very evil aliens did invade Earth by taking possession of Hitler and the German nation and the Nazis and through them, perpetrating that beyond-evil deed! And had the Nazi's not been stopped with a lot of 'blood, sweat, and tears' we'd now be globally ruled by those aliens."

Fuck-a-flying-saucer!—but for a normally level-head, practical, down-to-earth cowboy, John sure could get caught up in those alien-invasion conspiracy theories. I'm just glad he didn't take them very seriously—or expect me to take them even remotely seriously!)

And with the subject of that abominable Church as a very powerful and very fascist political institution now right before my eyes, I am beset with a memory of something he once said about all institutional religions that I found very disturbing as it had to do with those nefarious bogeymen, the Lords of Karma. He labeled all institutional religions, Politics Two, describing them as the half-tamed wolves under the big table of the medieval castle that fed on the scraps that fell to them from the feasts above. He said the first level of control of us by the Lords of Karma (or whatever those cosmic agents were who Charles Fort claimed kept us penned up like cattle on Rancho Mundo) was through Politics One, which is the politics of the king, the aristocracy, the tax man, and the army, (or their modern democratic equivalents) and what little scraps of our freedom were left over after the king and the aristocracy had finished feasting on us (to John a democracy was just an aristocracy where its serfs had the power to, at regular intervals, replace their old oppressors and exploiters with hopefully better—bur rarely—ones, and using the ballot box, instead of doing so irregularly with raging revolts, guillotines, executioner's axes, or firing squads!) was thrown to the under-table wolves of the institutional religions. Between those two political masters, we were like prisoners in a rat-infested dungeon hanging on a wet and moldy stone wall from our two, over-stretched and pain-screaming arms, our wrists clamped tight in the steel manacles of Politics One and Politics Two.

He then said that what made the Constantine's Imperial Roman Abomination so oppressive and evil was that through Constantine's intentions and machinations, it pretty much combined, for the darkest, foulest, most fascist millennia in human history, those manacles of Politics One and Two into one, totally oppressive, and utterly fascist, welded-steel collar around our collective neck. Or more like an iron-maiden! (If you don't know what that lovely contraption is, look it up!) And though today that "infernal institution" has lost much of its Politics One power, its Politics Two power, which though now waning in our secular, post-Enlightenment world, was so enhanced and refined by those almost two millennia of total fascist control and repression, that people still believe it yet continues to possess it.

Which, as far as he was concerned, given the powerful nature of such dark and pervasive conditioning, was no different than still having it. "When it comes to that kind of control by fear-and-terror—and guilt and shame!—the reality of the power behind such control is less important than the perception of it. Like the cruel dog owner that cruelly beats a dog into submission all through its puppyhood with a stick and a single, harsh word, then for the rest of that dog's adult life, totally controls it by just whispering that word.

"And the proof of that psychological reality", he added. "Lies in all the world-wide media attention the Pope gets, not only on his initial election—is there a bigger news story in the world media than the conclave-ending white smoke coming out of the chimney of the Sistine Chapel and that abated-breath waiting for word on the name of the new pope?—but on his official trips to his "Imperial Domains" in North and South America, Africa, Asia. And elsewhere. Catholics by no means make up anywhere near the majority of people on this planet, but the Pope is too often still regarded as, and treated like, the Emperor of the World that the medieval popes actually believed themselves to be."

And as proof of that, he pointed out that the Emperor Diocletian—Constantine's powerful, tyrannical predecessor—instituted the policy of requiring supplicants who had been lucky enough to be granted the favor of an audience with him, to belly-crawl up to him and kiss the hem of his robe, and even today, over a thousand years later, it is expected of "supplicants" to the Pope, who have been "blessed" with an audience, to symbolically "crawl up to his crowned and be-robed Imperial Eminence" and kiss his big fancy ring." Truly, he sarcastically said. "Not a substantively different act than the one instituted by Diocletian, and certainly not something one would think that the 'impoverished, humble carpenter from Nazareth,' whose teachings of humility, love, charity, and poverty that were ostensibly at the heart of that obviously Imperial religion, would have demanded—or been even remotely comfortable with anyone trying to do to him!"

As far as John was concerned, no pope living in the palace of that virtual kingdom of the Vatican, and dressing and acting like a be-crowned emperor, could truly call himself a representative of Christ until he quit living in the that palace; quit wearing a crown/mitre; quit wearing regal robes, quit wearing that supplicant-kissing ring; quit hanging out with all those aristocratic, power-obsessed, pope-wannabe cardinals; quit thinking and behaving like a Roman emperor, and started living and behaving more like the holy man they were pretending to be to a very stupid and child-credulous world. As far as John was concerned, the Dalai Lama was a perfect example of someone every pope should practice imitating.

Yeah, right!—and the day after that happens NASA is going to announce that the moon is indeed made out of cheese and all those moon rocks the astronauts brought back have to be kept refrigerated so they won't go moldy. Or get eaten by mice!

I mean, get-gang-raped-by-the-College-of-Cardinals!—but five or so years ago the "white smoke" announced that Jorge Mario Bergoglio had convinced that College Of Red-Robed Aristocrats (as John liked to call it, once going so far as to say he felt sorry for those beautiful red birds that were named after those power-mongering hypocrites) to elect him the new Emperor—Pontifex Maximus—of Constantine's Imperial Abomination, for which he took the name Pope Frank while promising to be a "breath of fresh, honesty-scented air" in that over-stale, never-ventilated institution, a promise he seemed to live up to at first, though his reputation is developing a bad case of lies-and-cover-up-halitosis as he fudges and fumbles with the world-wide pedophile-priest problem—and the pervasive and consistent cover-ups of it—that just won't "stay behind rectory doors" where he wishes it would!)(And more than his thousands of pedophilic priests can keep their peckers in their pants and out of the mouths and asses of altar boys! Or whatever-else under-age victim they get a hard-on for!)

But back to that earlier business where I was writing about his contention that Hitler and the Nazis didn't do anything in their reign of uber-terror that they hadn't learned from the Constantine's Imperial Abomination. I remember, on first hearing John make that outrageous assertion, gasping and after looking around the room, frantically whispered, "You shouldn't be even thinking something like that, Uncle John!" That got a laugh out of him as he said, "Relax Rache, I can one hundred percent guarantee you there are no Inquisitors on this farm—I've trained Gaucho (his dog at that time) to sniff out the stench of their malice and hypocrisy and bite off their cajones whenever they set foot on this farm."

After saying that, he launched into veritable lecture on that fact that the Constantine Roman Imperial Church was History's first, best fascist, Politics One and Two dictatorship, one that perfected the art of using the smoke screen of its mindless, superstitious doctrines to hide its relentless and insatiable fascist political ambitions. Insatiable ambitions for which it used war, torture and terror to make them possible. (He once told me that he didn't know if George Lucas had intended it to be that way, but he could never watch a Star Wars movie and that evil, megalomaniacal Emperor, without thinking of the Star Wars Empire as Constantine's Imperial Abomination, and the Emperor as one of its medieval or renaissance popes!)

He said Constantine's Roman Imperial Abomination's rise to such an incredible levels of both Politics One and Politics Two power was a masterful act of evil political genius the likes of which the world had never seen before and would never see again. Through brutal force and Machiavellian guile, it pulled off an ultimate Politics One—the total domination and control of the physical beings and social lives of all the hapless people who fell under its dark and evil dominion, while concomitantly mastering the ultimate Politics Two as well—the total domination and control of their minds and spirit-beings of those subjected peoples!

In its efforts to achieve this ultimate, totalitarian fascist domination, it invented the institutional use of propaganda that the later Nazis perfected and in adapting it to modern movie-making technologies, used so cunningly well. It also created and used, to great effect, the grandfather of the torturing, terrorizing and murdering Gestapo, that nasty and incredibly powerful institution of the Inquisition, an institution that attempted to achieve, for the "Third Reich of Christendom" the total compliance of its enslaved subjects through a reign of torture, murder and outright terror, that had been passionately and gleefully carried out by its ravening legions of very powerful, always sadistic, and indubitably psychopathic, Gestapo-Inquisitors.

And too, it institutionalized anti-Semitism, an important element of Church dogma that served its purpose of unifying and motivating all its credulous, cretinous sheep-subjects and which reached its most efficient heights in the ghettoizing those poor people so they could not only be contained, controlled, constantly humiliated and exploited by Christian mobs, but could be easily culled in convenient, Pope-sanctioned pogroms. (Boy, I would love to hear what John would have to say about Mad King Donald and his complicit toadies, the GOP, as he has pulled off the equivalent with his MAGA-agenda and its anti-any-group-that-isn't-white-stupid-racist-and-bigoted philosophy! And of course, it's uber-Nazi agenda of discouraging immigration by ripping children out of the arms of their immigrant parents and conveniently "losing" them in a labyrinth of punishment-camps!)

And here he laughed one of the most bitter, sardonic laughs I have ever heard come out of his mouth, "And you know the funniest thing about the pathetic 'excuse' Constantine's Imperial Abomination has been using for it centuries-long pogrom-program of ghettoizing and slaughtering Jews?"

But that was a question I had a ready answer for from my remembered Catholic school indoctrinations, "Yes," I eagerly replied, "Because they murdered Christ!" Which even sharpened that sardonic laugh as he asked, "But has not the Constantine's Imperial-and-Irrational Abomination decreed in its dogshit-dogma that Sonny Boy Jesus went through a resurrection that negated his death? That negated that 'murder?' Which can only mean he didn't really die—that he wasn't really murdered at all! And more importantly, doesn't it's dogshit-dogma state that Sonny Boy was destined to 'die' on that Roman cross—that he wanted to 'die' on that Roman cross—in order to 'save' humanity from its sinning ways? . . . Sinning ways, which, as we've discussed, it possessed solely because his Beloved Father, Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy, screwed up monumentally when he created them. In effect, building that egregious sinning-flaw right into them!

"This means that his 'death' was both sanctioned by Big Daddy Nobodaddy and planned by both of them—which could only mean those so-called 'murdering Jews' were just tools being used by Big Daddy Nobodaddy and Sonny Boy to allow Sonny Boy to fake his 'death' on that Roman cross and 'save' all of us sin-flawed human beings from the egregious mistakes that he, Big Daddy Nobodaddy, made in creating us. I mean, how crazy and irrational is all that . . . nonsense? Blaming the Jews for Sonny Boy's death—which wasn't really a death!—is so insanely irrational that just thinking about it can drive a person insane! . . . But the crazy absurdity of that doctrine doesn't end there, does it?"

And though I tried my best to think of an intelligent reply to that rant, before I could spit out a single word, he went on, "I mean, think of it—the craziest and most irrational aspect of that pernicious policy of Constantine's Imperial-And-Irrational Abomination, of that policy that for so many centuries blamed, then led to the punishing—and outright murdering!—of Jews for their having 'murdered' their precious Sonny Boy, Jesus, lies in the fact that it is a fundamental doctrine of that abominable institution that its Supreme Cosmic Creator Deity is a Trinity that it is comprised of Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy, Sonny Boy Jesus, and his pet Pigeon—all kneaded into one big dough-loaf (D'oh-loaf? LOL) of a God! So with all three—even Sonny Boy Jesus!—being equal ingredients of that one-and-only dough-loaf of a God, which is also the Supreme Creator and Master of this whole vast galaxy-blazing Universe, and in being all of that, is, by doctrinal definition, omnipotent, omniscient and eternal—how could there be anything even remotely resembling the murder of one of those three omnipotent, omniscient and eternal ingredients of that big dough-loaf of a God? It's as absurd as charging a jet pilot with murder for flying his aircraft through 'the heart' of a cloud!"

And after I'd first smiled—for the umpteenth time—at him—for the umpteenth time—calling the Holy Spirit, Sonny Boy Jesus's Pet Pigeon, I let out a sharp burst of laughter as I suddenly had a hilarious vision of the third—and equal—member of that silly trinity as but one mindless bird of a ravenous flock hanging around a park gobbling up popcorn thrown to it by little old ladies—and then flying around and crapping it onto their dowdy old hats!

And after I'd explained my fit of laughter to John, who'd reacted to it with a Spock-like, raised-eyebrow-look, he too laughed at my vision then went on to say, "Nothing is more risible than the literalizing—and thus trivializing—of cosmic powers, so your absurd vision ties in perfectly with what I was about to say, which is—how in hell can any mere human being—or any number of them, for that matter!—kill the all-powerful, all-knowing, eternal, creator of this Universe—which is what Constantine's Imperial-and-Irrational Abomination is claiming took place when . . . all that crucifixion nonsense supposedly happened?

And of course, he just had to laughing add, for the umpteenth time, his sarcastic assertion, "I mean, when you start thinking about all the Abomination's utterly nonsensical, dogshit-dogma with your neo-cortex in working order, it all turns into a big pile of dog-vomit irrationality so absurd that even irrationality is too weak and ineffectual a word to describe it. All of which too clearly proves that on being baptized, all card-carrying Catholics have to be lobotomized, morally castrated, and have their eyes gouged out so they can't see the Himalaya mountains of hypocrisy and utter irrationality that their 'precious Church' so abominably hides behind!"

And before I could think of anything to say on this subject, which, as far as I was concerned was a horse that we'd flogged to death so many times there wasn't enough of its hide left to make a hat for a mouse, he went on, "And of course, once one looks beyond that mountain range of hypocrisy and irrationality, one sees that it is all hypocrisy and not anything irrational at all, for there is a very rational, albeit cynical and evil, rationale behind it. Namely, that the whole Christ-on-a-cross story is just that—a story, a myth, and that Constantine's Imperial-and-Cynical Abomination has, for seventeen hundred years, been using the Jews for the same purpose Hitler used them: as a convenient drilling machine to bore down into the darkest, foulest, evilest depths of self-loathing in its "Christian" followers in order to unite and motivate them through the releasing, channeling and projecting their darkest, foulest, evilest emotions onto those Jews. It's Rule Number One in every demagogue's bamboozle-and-unite-the-mindless-sheep-flocks playbook. (As I typed out the above I couldn't help but think about Mad King Donald—I hate thinking about that mushroom-dicked asshole but he's always doing some crazy, narcissistic thing to inject himself into the news!—and how he rose to power doing the exact same thing with his mindless, very dark-souled and viciously bigoted sheep-flocks of MAGA-hatters!)

"Though of course, in comparing Hitler's murdering of the Jews to Constantine's Imperial Abomination's murdering of them—and over those seventeen centuries of pogroms that very abominable Abomination very likely murdered a lot more than Hitler was able to!—Hitler and his institution of fascist Nazis comes out looking the better because at least he and his Nazis didn't hide their endemic and demonic evil behind the incense smoke-screen of being a loving, Christian, God-serving religion.

"And if there is one thing that unites Hitler's short-lived Nazi Reich and that too-long-lived Reich of Constantine's, it is that both mastered the art of treating blatant irrationalities as incontrovertible truths and cleverly and persistently propagandizing their mindless sheep into believing them! (Just like Mad King Donald today with his sheep-flocks of mindless MAGA-hatters!)

"But I guess where the two really find a permanently fused identity is in the fact that Hitler behaved and thought of himself no differently than did any medieval or renaissance pope, with the only real difference between him and any of those popes being that no medieval pope had at his disposal the tanks, the airplanes, the rockets, the scientists and the genius generals that Hitler had—not that that lack didn't stop them from trying to Politics One conquer and rule the world with the armies they had. . . . And Politics Two conquer it with their well-armed battalions Gestapo-Inquisitors throwing their grenades of dogshit-dogma into every Catholic mind—non-mind!—while endeavoring to bamboozle and coerce those mindless sheep-flocks that all of its dogshit-dogma was Cosmic Truth revealed to it by the Supreme Creator and Master of this Whole Damn Universe!"

And with one final bitter laugh, he spit out, "Is it any surprise that Hitler was a Catholic? Or that the pope in Rome during Hitler's 'papal-reign' out of his "Vatican Bunker," didn't put much effort in denouncing him, or his pogrom-of-all-pogroms against those poor Jews?"

And when, white-faced I am sure, (I think I was overwhelmed with the sub-conscious certitude that a horde of Inquisitors was going to march out of the Akashic to burn me at a stake for even entertaining the notion that "the Church" could be even remotely compared to the Nazis!) softly asked John how he came up with such outrageous and provocative ideas, he laughed a soft, self-deprecating laugh as he said, "Me? Come up with those ideas? Never!—they are not mine! I'm no original thinker! No Nietzsche! Not by a long shot! . . . Hell, I can't even spell that guy's name! (Neither the fuck can I—thank Nobodaddy . . . Microsoft! . . . same difference . . . for Spell-Check!) All those ideas are just thought-burrs that the shaggy coat of my curiosity has picked up off various philosophical bushes over the years and I rip them off and throw them at you. They have been expressed by lots of thinkers over very many years, even by that Swiss humbug, Jung. (John's biggest beef against Jung was that he felt he was born to be a great shaman and prophet and he chose instead to attempt to present himself to the world as a scientist, as a lofty and exalted Priest of the Religion of Materialist Science!)

"Though now . . . now that I think back on it . . .I got those exact ideas about the Nazis from, of all places, one of those lunatic, street-corner prophets you sometimes find screaming their heads off on the downtown streets of Big Shitties. This old fellow—who really did look like a Biblical prophet—had long, filthy hair and a long, filthier mustache and beard that didn't quite hide his black and broken teeth, and he was wearing an old army blanket of a robe that looked like it hadn't been washed since the Somme . . . and smelled like he'd stolen it off a Somme corpse."

And here he stopped for a thoughtful few seconds before chuckling and going on, "Of course, the taped-up pair of spectacles that seemed to magnify his wild, blazing eyes . . . and were cock-eyed held to his face by a shoelace . . . kind of ruined the Old Testament-prophet look.

"But anyways, while screaming out a stream of words that I was paying no attention to, he shoved a pamphlet in my hand as I stumbled by him one night. I was so drunk at the time—and had been for years—that I had as much interest in hanging onto that pamphlet as I would have his rotten teeth had he spit them into my hand, and my first instinct was to drop it in the street as fast as he shoved it in my hand, but some strange compulsion made me shove it into a pocket, and later, in a park, after I'd begged enough money for a bottle of rotgut wine, I gave it as much of a read as my booze-addled mind was able to comprehend. And since I'd spend some pretty brutal years killing no small number of Nazis—and never quite killing enough of them, as far as I was concerned!—I found it so intriguing that I hung onto it and read it again when I was sober. More or less sober, because during that time of my life, I avoided sobriety the way all good Jesuits avoid all rational thoughts about the absurd irrationalities of that precious 'Nation of Their Credulity,' that "Fortress of their Faith' that they became 'Soldiers of God' to defend.

"I guess what caught my interest in it was that, as just said, I'd killed a damn lot of those Nazi cockroaches during the war and never once, in all of that righteous slaughter of those vermin, did I connect them in any way with that infernal Church—but the words in that pamphlet sure did make the connection and the whole idea of it exploded in my head like a small atomic bomb and I never saw the word Catholic, or pope in the same way again."

Dear Reader, I can assure you that when John made the comment about being drunk when he was handed that pamphlet, and that he had been drunk for years, I'd had not the slightest of inklings that he'd ever once had a serious drinking problem. (Though it did explain his absolute aversion to all alcohol.) John never thought anything of it when he mentioned it, and never mentioned his drinking again, and I think, like his war experiences, it had once been part of his life but no longer was and thus was not worth talking about! (Obviously quite unlike Constantine's Imperial Abomination!)

He does talk about that drinking problem though, and at great length, in what I have set apart as Book Two of The Fire, and quite a story that is in itself, the whole, sad, self-destructive business ending with what can only be described as a miracle of an hallucination so propitious that had it not occurred, he'd never have lived long enough for me to meet him. In fact, he would have died long before I was born. He, like me in that church the day of his funeral, had a DT's induced hallucination of Catherine and little Johnny that was so vivid and dramatic that it basically "stopped his world" for him. Stopped the whirling carousel of his being a self-destructive drunk and allowed him to step onto the path of sobriety that he was still on when I met him. Just as his heaving me into that piss-reeking pile of manure back in '69, "stopped my world" for me, stopped the whirling carousel of my being a self-destructive and predatory slut, and allowed me to step onto the path that has led me to the writing of this "Preface." (And yes, Dear Reader, I know you often—as you plow through this abomination of a "Preface"—wish John had left me on that carousel so I long ago would have whirled off—fucked-off, LOL—into my well-deserved oblivion!

And the last thing of note on this continent-spanning, totally off-the-rails sidetrack is that John somehow managed to hang onto that pamphlet over all the intervening years and left it lodged in with his scribbled memoirs—at the appropriate place. (It was, and still is, what appeared to be a plastic photograph sleeve that is now so yellowed and brittle it could well have been the original one he put it in.) It was a hand-printed piece with the printing done in what looks to be red fountain pen ink with incredibly small, neat printing, and with each of the many simple, declarative sentences set in what is now called the bullet-style with the bullet being a neat, black swastika.

The most immediately impressive thing about the pamphlet though, was the startling—in content and in expertise of execution—picture on the front of it. It was executed in black ink with a very fine pen, and depicts three large crosses with swastika arms extending out from the top and bottom of the vertical post and both ends of the cross beam. Each cross-swastika—crosstika?—was hanging, by what looked like normal chains, over the hill of Golgotha, which, quite literally, was a hill of skulls! A hill of intricately drawn skulls each with a tiny star of David drawn on it. (Makes me wonder if Groucho saw this "masterpiece of madness" before drawing the base for his Statue of Hypocrisy!—or maybe that Akashic realm is real after all!)

A close examination of the links of those chains reveals them, most appropriately, to be strung-together skulls. On the center, and larger, crosstika, with his arms outstretched and held in place, not by nails, but by the encircling arms of tiny, smiling angels, is a figure that was obviously Hitler with his little mustache, a smile on his face, and wearing the white robes, and the tall, pointed papal mitre (with a black, Nazi officer-hat visor, insignia and eagle, attached to it) and with a large crosstika hanging around his neck.

And hanging on each side of Hitler's big crosstika, are two considerably smaller crosstikas, these respectively sporting the grim and hatchet-faced Goebbels on his right, and on his left, the grinning and pince-nez'd Himmler, with his faint, Hitleresque mustache and prissy, school-master look, each dressed—and red-inked!—as Cardinals, and each wearing one of those silly red Cardinal hats with the three Mickey Mouse ears, each hat also with an Nazi officer-hat visor, insignia and eagle, attached. (And with crosstikas hanging around their necks.) All three also had haloes, created by alternating short and long straight lines made out of very tiny swastikas radiating out from their heads. (Without the magnifying glass I keep handy to aid my aging eyes, I'd never have picked out that those lines were created out of tiny swastikas!)

At the foot of Hitler's hovering crosstika stood the fat, smiling Goring—he too dressed as a red-inked cardinal with a visored and insignia'd triple-eared Mickey Mouse hat, but with his chest covered in military medals—using a long spear to hold up to Hitler's smiling face a huge sausage with the words, THE WORLD neatly, though minutely, printed on it. (Again, without that magnifying glass, I'd have had no idea what was printed on it.)

Standing on the hill and surrounding the three, hanging crosstikas and the sausage-offering Goring, is a throng of modernly dressed men, women, and children of all ages, all smiling big, bright smiles and giving the Heil Hitler salute, with each extended hand holding a tiny crosstika. The throng looks almost normal at first, though something doesn't seem right about the heads, which, on closer, magnifying glass-examination, reveals that the tops of the heads are missing and each head is brain-scooped empty. (I suspect that is why the mindless, MAGA-hatted sheep-flocks of rabid, Mad King Donald-followers wear those MAGA hats—to hide the fact that the heads holding up those hats have been brain-scooped!)

And since I haven't had a needless-to-say moment for awhile, needless to say, I still can't believe the detail in that thing and the utter madness—obviously!—of anyone who could put that kind of time and effort into the creation of something that he was going to give away just so it could be thrown away! (Though of course, in the fact that John—and who knows how many others—kept the demented thing, and that it has long outlasted its equally demented—and extraordinarily meticulous!—creator, there was obviously some prescience in his madness!)

And glad I am that my madness isn't so tediously and masochistically inclined—or driven, though you, Dear Patient and Long-Suffering Reader may disagree!—though given that the poor fellow handing them out may have been some Jew lucky enough—fated?—to have survived Dachau or Treblinka, maybe I should also be glad my madness was only caused by a daughter-diddling Daddy and not those unimaginably diabolical Demons of the Holocaust whose beyond-demonic actions during that absolute debacle of an "event" make what happened to me at the hands—and tongue and prick—of my father, seem like harmless, birthday party-games!

But back to the picture on that pamphlet: directly above those three crosstikas, and staring down at them, is a giant eye with dark clouds hovering above it, rays beaming down from it, and with a large red tear dripping out of its right-hand corner. Directly above the eye is the title, HITLER'S THOUSAND YEAR REICH HAS ALREADY BEEN WITH US FOR TWO THOUSAND YEARS!

The whole thing was, from cover to last word, a work of art that even after all these years gives off a strange and potent "vibe," and no small wonder it was that John had not been able to let go of it when it was thrust into his hand, why he acquired a protective sleeve for it and hung onto it for all these years. Of course, the reality of a skid-row derelict first keeping, then hanging on to, such a fragile thing as that pamphlet makes me doubt that John remembered his acquisition of it accurately. I seriously suspect he got it much later, after he'd miraculously climbed out of the open-ended coffin of his alcoholic suicide, and given all the things that happened in his life, which he wrote about (with probably very suspect remembrance and veracity) in his memoirs, such confusion can be understandable.

And on that subject I will digress no more, though I will say that if you are one of those dedicated, quick-to-kneel Catholics who are still in the mindless—skull-scooped?—thrall of that "pernicious cult of Constantine's" and if you haven't stopped reading by now, I recommend you abandon all inclinations to make even a tentative foray into The Fire, for there is nothing there for your unthinking, unquestioning and infantile mind but incitements to indignation, outrage, and righteous, retaliatory Inquisitorial torture and murder!

(As John, when feeling particularly contemptuous of the mindless and infantile credulity of Catholics, often put it:"If you believe the Vatican is a holy "shrine" built to honor and preserve the teachings of the Jew, Joshua, the son of a humble Nazareth carpenter, who chose the path of an impoverished mystical teacher dedicated to the spreading of love and charity in this world, and not a political one dedicated to human oppression, control, and world domination, then I am the proud owner of a magnificent steel tower on the Champ de Mars in Paris that I want to sell you—real cheap!"

Though sometimes he added, "And if you believe the be-crowned and regal-robed pope sporting his mitre-crown and the 'humble' title of Pontifex Maximus, is both a holy man and the holiest Catholic on Earth, and not just the most politically canny and ruthless of all those red-robed cardinals, who themselves, by nature, are nothing more than a rat-sack full of canny, cunning, cut-throat and power-greedy politicos, then I have a nice big piece of the 'True Cross,' found by Saint Helena herself and preserved through the centuries by a long succession of my very pious and honest ancestors that I am willing to sell for a most reasonable price! The line starts on the right . . . "

### Chapter Forty One

So, after that long slog through that quagmire of a diversion into the depressing and dangerously Akashic Inquisitor-provoking exercise of comparing Hitler's obviously evil Reich and its nefarious Gestapo to the rationally plausible—though emotionally unbelievable—multi-century evil of Constantine's Imperial Abomination and its proto-Nazi Reich with its proto-Gestapo Inquisitors, (though part of me knows it to be true, I don't have the guts to totally believe it!) I'll get back to that philosophical "high country of the mind" (as Pirsig called it) I was trying to take a mental hike up when I got sidetracked from whatever sidetrack of a sidetrack I was on. (Unlike Pirsig, who climbed really high philosophical "mountains" as well as really high real Montana mountains, my philosophical mountains are barely mole hills—and I do not climb real, low hills, let alone real mountains!)

Yeah, that "high country of the mind" known to most as the uber-elite academic discipline of Philosophy,(in ancient times—according to John and Pirsig—anyone with enough brainpower and courage to think for themselves about the nature of life, was considered a philosopher, a philo-sophia, a lover of wisdom, but today, if you have not been trained in the esoteric, academic, and jargon-drowning discipline of Philosophy—or philosophology, as Pirsig called it!—at some uber, top-line university like Harvard or Yale of Oxford or Cambridge—even McGill, I would guess!—you will be laughed off this planet if you dare call yourself a philosopher!) where the first thing you have to learn—after the code for accessing the elevator to the penthouse of your Ivory Tower!—is the fundamental difference between epistemology and ontology, (don't you just love those elitely academic words for knowledge and being?) after which you start masturbating the hell out of your Ivory Towered mind (innuendo intended!) to produce seminal ideas about the God of all philosophical thinking, Rationality, then using those copious spurts of seminal thought to first validate and enshrine that sole and supreme god, Rationality, after which you can confidently use them to explain everything worth rationally knowing about human nature, and human morality, human aesthetics, and a whole library full of other abstract subjects that are as pertinent to the lives of 99.9999% of humanity as a dogsled full of snowshoes to a tribe of Kalahari Bushmen. (That's one of John's favorite similies!)

In John's (obviously very skewed, limited, and prejudiced view) the real concerns of most—99.9999%—of the human inmates incarcerated in this Gulag Earth are not the esoteric and generally irrelevant and overly rational concerns of this elite fraternity of big-ego'd, Ivory Towered mentally masturbating philosophologists, but the schizophrenic, three-fingered concerns, (regardless of whether or not we "average inmates" want to admit to them!) in our modern, "totally Christianity-informed" world (as the Ivory Towered philosopher, Robert Taylor, defines it) of, on Finger One, "making our most advantaged way" in the secular, corporation-dominated, money-mad material reality around us; on Finger Two, of trying to understand and cope with—in our modern, secular age—our our deep-seated and powerful spiritual-religious impulses; and on Finger Three—yup, the infamous middle finger! (counting from the pinkie)— of trying to understand and cope with the millennia-long, Christianity endarkened, Christianity vilified, Christianity repressed, Christianity bedeviled, very living, very powerful and totally irrepressible foundational energy of our essential being—our sexuality!

According to John, the only reason that this absolutely foundational aspect of human nature is today so dark, hidden, repressed, and so rarely naturally and healthily expressed—and why it is obsessed and "pornographed" about instead of just expressed and enjoyed!—is because of seventeen hundred years of the pervasive, often violent, and always unnatural and unhealthy condemnation and repression of it by Constantine's Imperial Abomination and all of its plethora of post-Reformation off-shoots. (He sometimes mentioned those zillions of extreme, often-whacko Christian Fundamentalist sects south of the "Medicine Line," but only rarely because he found them to depressing to even ponder, let alone talk about. He one called what was going on down there, "biggest zoo of stupidity in the history of this world!"

And I can't stress those words unnatural and unhealthily enough, for as John liked to say, "Making sex a sin and deeming the inevitable indulging in it a 'foul, dirty, pernicious and Nobodaddy-displeasing' act, and loading down the donkey of that act with the giant anvils of guilt and shame and eternal damnation is as utterly insane as making the very human and necessary acts of eating, drinking, sleeping, and defecating mortal sins deserving of eternal damnation!

"Except of course, the real insanity of all that lay solely in the minds of the mindless, flocks credulous sheep that are stupid and gullible enough to believe that institution's pernicious, paranoid and lunatic assertion that something as powerful and irrepressible—and important!—as human sexuality could be a sin deserving of eternal damnation.

"I mean, face it—that Roman psychopath's—Constantine's—Imperial Abomination didn't make sex a heinous sin deserving of eternal damnation because it actually believed that it was a damnable sin, but did it solely as a canny and cynical ploy for the acquisition and wielding of enormous amounts of power and control over the mindless and credulous herds of sheep who allowed themselves to believe such irrational and unnatural nonsense and thus put themselves under that institution's violent political sway—and then allowed their poor, hapless children to be indoctrinated into that insanity right from birth so they had no chance to see the insanity and absurdity of it. Or believe anything to the contrary!

"Of course, there were no shortage of intelligent, thoughtful Pagans who saw that Christian nonsense for what it truly was—as a cynical, evil, manipulative power-ploy! But as the power of Constantine's Imperial Abomination grew in that over-expanded, de-vitalized and declining empire, and it was using more and more violent, fascist methods to preserve the power Constantine had given it while acquiring ever more and more of it, those intelligent-enough-to-know-which-way-the-fascist-political-winds-were-blowing Pagans learned to keep their mouths shut about what they were so intelligently thinking because their livelihoods—and their very lives!—depended on not drawing the attention of the mindless mobs of so-called Christians who were being riled to murderous violence by vile, cunning, manipulative, and power-greedy bishops, priests and monks.

"They had to pretend to buy into all that mindless, manipulative nonsense if they wanted to keep their jobs and social positions—and more importantly, keep their heads attached to their necks, their guts warmly inside their bodies, or the flaming faggots from literally making 'hot dogs' out of their feet—before getting the rest of their corporeal beings barbequed!"

John even once sardonically and obviously tongue-in-cheek said, "In a strange way, it's too bad Christians aren't cannibals because an awful lot of starving people could have been fed on all that human meat roasted by that psychopathic and murderous, Imperial Abomination of Constantine's over the centuries! (Most disturbingly, as I keyboard-babble—babblog!—about all the mindless violence that went on in the Roman Empire as Constantine's Imperial Abomination solidified its power and drove the Pagans—and their intelligence and their profound philosophical legacy—first into the shadows, then into the catastrophic extinction-event that spread over western Europe that shroud of sanctified, ecclesiastical fascism, ignorance and stupidity we call the Dark Ages, I can't help but think that something eerily similar is going on today in the Fascist States of America where Mad King Donald is trying to solidify and expand his "imperial" power-base by riling up, and mobilizing, his fanatical sheep-herds of moronic, MAGA-hatters to violently act against anyone and anything that smacks of intelligence and reason. And of compassion and tolerance! In the vast, stark and empty Plain of Lies of his self-proclaimed genius mind, its game-over for anyone who isn't white and male and rich—and born-in-America!

And I am sure Professor Groucho must have been shouting, "See, see—I'm right! That former country of mine is still totally fascist!" when the Internet news carried that story about the "plaid shirt guy," a high schooler who was standing behind Mad King Donald at one of his stoke-up-the-crazy-in-the-crazies rally in Montana, and unconsciously making disapproving faces in response to the absurdities spouting out of the Mad King's mouth, and was forthwith forcibly removed from that rally by the Secret Service, because, as he put it, "They said I wasn't being enthusiastic enough in my response to what Trump was saying!"

Fuck-a-fascist!—but if that doesn't sound like something that would have happened at one of Hitler's Nuremberg Rallies, I don't know what it is! (Well, at least the fascism in modern America is fascism-light and "plaid shirt guy" didn't wind up in front of a firing squad—or in jail like Wilhelm Reich, where he just might have had a convenient "heart attack"—or something lethally similar!)

And concerned too, was John, with the fundamental importance of the nature of women and their very powerful sexuality, for let's face it, the foundational existence of much of the higher forms of life on this planet begins with the sexuality of the females of their respective species, with this human species being no exception! And certainly our dark, damning and fundamentally deranged Judeo-Christian legacy plays a dark, damning and fundamentally deranged role in our dark, damning and fundamentally deranged inability to honestly face and accept this foundational truth about the power and importance of female sexuality! A refusal of acceptance, that of course has led to the dark, damning and fundamentally deranged process of it being feared, cursed, repressed, distorted and damned to a hell of degradation and "dirtiness" that has disastrously—and likely permanently—damaged it.

It is a long, on-going and utterly relentless "Christian" process that, as many insightful thinkers have be stating for far too long, it is the obvious source of our modern world's insane and overt acceptance of violence and murder and war—and violent pornography. And worse, our infinitely more insane—and downright evil!—glorification of it! Not so much the glorification of pornography, but the war and violence and murder—as our most popular TV shows and movies will amply prove! And as mentioned, John was ever quick to point out, ad nauseam, the incredible insanity of that "slaughter most glorious," that abattoir of the BASS, in which various so-called Christian nations spent four futile years slaughtering a whole generation of their best young men in mind-boggling numbers that almost match the hideous, mind-and-spirit-boggling—and machine-aided!—methods they used to effect that slaughter.

Ironically, I encountered a most apropos metaphor for the unnatural—and insane—repression of our sexuality in a documentary I recently watched on the invention of the steam engine with an anecdote in it about a driver of one of the first locomotives becoming annoyed with the noise of steam escaping from the pressure-releasing safety valve, so he solved the problem by wiring that valve shut. The upshot of this genius's few minutes of blissful silence was a subsequent eternity of it, for it didn't take long for the pressure to build up and blow the boiler apart, killing him.

And yes, you may be wondering why a female like me would be watching a male-oriented documentary about that uber-macho world of trains, but you should know that though I've never lived very far from mainline train tracks and the sound of trains blasting their horns at all hours, and though for many years my only interest in them has been to curse the hell out of them when they block that crossing to and from this farm. But that indifferent attitude changed as I read John's memoirs, for in them he describes spending some hard and dramatic time laboring on for the railroads on their track gangs, and a good deal more traveling back and forth across the country on trains. You could almost say that with the role trains—and their 'iron-horse' locomotives—played in his memoirs, they were almost as important to him as real horses had been in his ranching days. And of course, were still important right up to the last second of his life.

In fact, I'd not be surprised if a train locomotive—iron-horse—had been blowing its horn at the nearby crossing the exact instant John's spirit-being chose to gallop off to the Big Range in the Sky, leaving his aging body to fall at the feet of his three best friends—the dog and his very organic horse, and of course, the collection of nature spirits surrounding him!

In fact, in his memoirs, he tells a very dramatic story of a very dangerous and uncomfortable, two-day winter trek through forty below temperatures and deep snow his horse, from the town where Catherine and little Johnny were over-wintering in a boarding house (after their first summer on their not-yet established ranch) to the coal mine he was employed at during that winter, only to contrast it, a few years later, after a rail line to that mine had been built, with a comfortable ride over that same distance of only a few hours—in a wood-stove heated coach.

Which makes me suddenly think of that former uber-hunk of a folk singer Gordon Lightfoot (I guess he's as way too old to be a hunk now as it is for me to be a chick) who covered that issue—of the importance of trains to creating our modern culture as we know it—in his trilogy-song about the railroads—"Canadian Railroad Trilogy"—especially in his dramatic ending about all the dead men it took to build them. In fact, his covering of that stark reality in that song almost seems over-dramatic until you read of John's experiences with the relentless physical demands of the labor, the harsh crudeness of the conditions, and the brutal tyranny of the bosses, on those track gangs, at which point you realize Lightfoot, in his great song, likely understated it. (Though he certainly doesn't understate their role in turning our country from a vast, wild, pristine wilderness into a vast, tame, resource-raped industrial nation.)

And while still on the sidetrack of trains (no pun intended)—if you get through this crazy "Preface" and actually into The Fire itself, you should try to stick with it as far as his chilling (double entendre intended), horrific—and already-told-tale—about being trapped for a week with a garrulous drunk of an unusually intelligent, honest, and philosophical priest on a train snow-buried—to its roof!—in a prairie blizzard where cold, hunger, suffering, disease, childbirth and death (and over-filled toilets) create the dominant reality of the situation, and John plays the role of the reluctant hero as he treks out to a distant, snow-buried farm for enough food to keep people from starving, and then rips out and burns all of the seats and most of the interior wood of one of the coaches to keep people from freezing to death until the train is rescued.

And no, I am not mentioning that just to sell copies of The Fire, but because it is both an extraordinarily interesting episode in his life, and one that is extremely revealing about his very complex and contradictory character, where in one set of circumstances he can behave like a compassionate hero to a bunch of strangers on a train, then later, on his ranch, behave, with Catherine and little Johnny, his own wife and son, like an absolutely ignorant, arrogant and psychopathic prick! (Though of course, had he had the strength, breadth, depth, and consistency of character to have behaved with true compassion and enlightenment towards Catherine and little Johnny on that ranch, there would be no The Fire. And of course, this crazy babblogging "Preface" to it would not exist either!)(And I would have begun "pushing up daisies" in late '69 or early '70! Ahhhh, don't you wish, Dear Reader!)

Which—alas for you, Dear Reader!—brings to mind another sidetracking thought about something I once came across in Pirsig's second novel, Lila (not near as popular a work as was his ZAMM, this one taking place on a sail boat temporarily stalled on a river journey by the effects of a hurricane, and revolving around a young woman he calls Lila (not named by Pirsig for the Biblical Lila, but because of the word's resemblance to lilac, in reference to both its strong odor and hardiness of its bush) that woman, as the story progresses, turning out to be every bit as much of a fucked-up loon as . . .yup—yours truly!

The significance of this Lila sidetrack, is the quote from that book where Pirsig writes,

It is not the "nice" guys that bring about social change. "Nice" guys look nice because they are conforming. It is the "bad" guys who only look nice a hundred years later, that are the real dynamic force in our social evolution.

I guess the reason that those lines so "jumped out" at me when reading that book—it a real head-fuck of a philosophical read, but worth the effort (if you can find the book!)—was because when, as I have already stated too many times in this ridiculous narrative, I first met the 70-year-old John, he was one of the nicest men I'd ever met, only discovering, in reading and working with his memoirs, that fifty years before meeting this "nice old man," he was one absolutely horrific example of just the sort of "bad" guy that Pirsig is referring to in Lila.

Though of course, Pirsig was, in that quote, referring to famous and influential "bad" guys whose powerful personalities and consequential lives were capable of effecting dramatic social change, (like, I guess, that uber-bad guy, Mad King Donald, though I suspect all his social changes are going to be as negative for that American Empire and the world as were Nero's and Caligula's for the Roman Empire!) obviously not something that applies to John, who truly rode the horse of obscurity all the way through his long life as Cowboy Nobody, or, to use a movie reference to a character played by Clint Eastwood, whom Groucho thought John resembled, as "The Man With No Fame."

Though to be sure, he did have a dramatic effect on my life—but all I've amounted to so far on my almost-seventy years on this planet is Sweet Fuck All, playing as I have my role as big, fat, Crazy "Nobody" Rachel, and thus sure no agent of any social evolution either! But hey—we can't all be Mary Wollstonecrafts, Margaret Atwoods, or Hillary Clintons, can we? Or even Paris Hiltons, Brittney Spears or Miley Cyrus's! LOL!)

(And I can't even gain any fame for my propensity for the extreme bout of Keyboard Diarrhea that this babblog of "Preface" has unintentionally become, because the World Wide Web is now—amongst a plenitude of other, more nefarious things—a global outhouse full of the shit-covered webs of keyboard-dancing spiders suffering from severe cases of Blogging Dysentery, so I am not doing anything original or interesting enough to go even remotely viral!)

And before I move to far along in this chaotic steam of Keyboard Diarrhea, I should warn you that that very interesting episode aboard that blizzard-stuck train will not show up until very deep in The Fire, and that when I was struggling to "translate it," I found it so outrageous that I had enough serious doubts concerning the veracity of (it read like pure, demented fantasy!) that I had to get off my fat arse and out of my comfortable life, so I could then sit back down on that fat arse for a lot of hours taking a summer train trip out west, (I sure wouldn't want to get caught and buried in a blizzard for a week in one of our modern trains, for not only do they not have coal burning stoves in the coaches as they did in John's day, they are so full of plastic and metal there little in them to burn, and most of what would burn would be toxic as hell!) so I could do some historical investigating of the incident, which yielded almost no verification of it beyond the fact that way back in those typically bad-winter/pre-global warming days when the next-day forecast was divined with a careful and experienced look at the sky and the sticking of a wet finger up in the air in front of your face, a train buried in an unexpected prairie blizzard was hardly considered an exceptional, let alone newsworthy, event anywhere outside of the lives of those trapped on it.

Nor were any deaths in such a situation considered exceptional or newsworthy, since death—in an infinitude of guises—stalked those crude, hard times on those vast, harsh prairies in as untrammeled a fashion as once had the great herds of buffalo and Indians who lived off them. And it was especially so during blizzards which I learned from a few "Old Timers" I talked to, could easily blow unabated for four or five days, sported "coats" of cold in the minus 45 range—without factoring in the wind-chill—and which often racked up a body-count to rival a Schwarzenegger movie. And it was no rare thing to hear of a farmer getting lost trying to get from his house to his barn, or his barn to his house, and freezing to death a yard or two from either safe haven. (Or even more recently, hapless motorists who ended up in a ditch during a blizzard, and who froze to death while the storm covered their tomb-car with a snowdrift, and whose bodies were not found until those drifts melted in the spring!) And John himself even treats the incident in the same, deprecatory fashion, so that I decided it might have enough truth in it to keep it as part of his memoirs—not that it was really ever in my purview as memory-keeper to make that judgment and not include it!

But now waaaaaaaaay back to the topic of human sexuality and the disastrous, explosive, violent repercussions of that neophyte, idiot-trainman's decision to find some tranquility on his run by wiring shut the locomotive's steam-pressure safety valve: Make love, not war was a favorite slogan of those lubricious, second-chakra Sixties, and what red-blooded young male busy servicing the needs and desires of a host of willing, eager, nubile young goddesses—however father-fucked and fucked-up they may have been!—wants to abandon that seraglio, (look what Cleopatra did to that uber-warrior, Anthony!) don a uniform, live in a barracks with a bunch of other strutting, posturing, crude, farting, masturbating males, and after months of grueling, sadistic training, march off to war to main and kill—and be maimed and killed by—a bunch of other strutting, posturing, crude, farting, masturbating males who bear no personal grudge against him or his country? Yeah, Politics One at its most evil!

And that Sixties-dominating war—the mini, "hot" version(and not just because of all the napalm!) of the maxi, Cold War!—was an easy war to hate and protest against for it was not only so far away and utterly pointless and only had meaning to any American with a hate-on for anything that even hinted of the "evil plague" of communism, and who—more importantly!—still believed in "that old conceit of Manifest Destiny and the God-sanctioned validity of White America's God-sanctioned imperialism against the brown-skins!" (Groucho's words!) but it owned the headlines and the Six O'clock News for a decade, though it was but a long skirmish (unless you were the Vietnamese suffering through it) compared to the endless and brutally violent war that was—and still is!—being waged against women in the guises of seemingly ubiquitous marital violence all around the world—most brutally and ubiquitously: the rape of many women and girls in most of the world's many war zones—all done under the rubric of being used as a tool, a privilege and a reward to the "warrior" men fighting them.

And that's not to mention all the young girls and women in too many places being sold into sexual slavery or worse, being used as sex toys by their fathers, uncles, brothers, etc. And then, there's the already mentioned infant-and-child rapes by a horrifying Web-clique of video-taping monsters. And systematic gang rapes of girls and women in India. And even more incomprehensible, young girls like Malala Yousafzai being shot in the head by Taliban psychotics—whose "MAGA-hatter" brainlessness was exceeded only by their malice!—for her daring, as a girl, to go to school! (I sure hope the America's MAGA-hatters don't ever get the inspiration to start Taliban-behave that way towards any American who isn't white, rich and male!)(Not that all those many thousands of infamous lynching of Blacks weren't being done by MAGA-hatters who hadn't yet acquired that crimson-moniker—and empty head cover!)

Nor can I fail to mention the too numerous incidents where jars of powerful acid have been thrown into young girls' and women's faces in many Muslim countries to punish them for—being women? And if that isn't sadistic enough for you then there's the forced clitorectomies of young girls and women in Africa, (I wince, cross my fat legs, lock my swollen ankles, put both my hands—metaphorically—over my privates, and want to weep while just writing about that one!) a very nasty way some very insecure and even more dementedly malicious "men" have of controlling the sexuality of women.

All of which takes me back full circle to one of but many of John's good reasons for his boundless hatred for Constantine's Imperial Abomination, that being its adoption of the Jewish Torah which contained that much older Babylonian/Sumerian myth of Adam and Eve and the serpent and the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil," a story which too many totally moronic and usually sex-obsessed—MAGA-hatted?—readers take as literal history and in so doing, interpret it as a blaming of Eve—and thus all women—for the "fall" of Adam, and thus the whole of MANkind.

And for that same bunch of utterly moronic, lobotomized men, they use the miniscule remnants of their vile and filthy minds to also blame Eve—and thus all women—for driving them to be groin-inflamed sex maniacs, and that without her—and all women's—rampant and evil sexuality, they would all be free of their own, groin-inflamed sexuality and could lives as the "morally pure" and Nobodaddy/Allah-pleasing men they aspire to be.

John used to roar with laughter as he talked about envisioning a ridiculously literal Garden of Eden in which Adam as Eve, in being healthy human adults with nothing else to do but wander around naked day after boring day, and not just naturally "jumping all over each other" a half dozen times a day—and thinking, after each lubricious bout of "erotic wrestling," that it was all great, harmless fun. Eve would have no more have had to have "tempted" Adam to want to have sex with her than the ground would have had to "tempt" a real apple to fall down to it when it was ripe.

"As to whatever the hell that mythical Eve, at the instigation of the mythical Serpent, actually did tempt the mythical Adam to do in that 'garden' that day, it sure—as many scholars have expounded on to no end—had a lot more to do with trying to get him to wake up out of his dream-like mystical 'slumbers' and do some conscious thinking with the head on his shoulders, rather than all that unconscious 'unthinking' he'd been doing with that head on the end of that "hot stick" between his legs, which given all the harmless fun they were having "wrestling" with each other that often ended up with that "hot stick," quite on its own, finding its way into Eve's equally "hot hole," could in no logical, intelligent way be regarded as evil!"

He then went on to expound—pontificate!—on what he considered his absolutely irrelevant, totally unprofessional, and thus not to be quoted—wink, wink!—"take" on these ridiculous scriptures, with that "take" being that a bunch of dirty-minded, sexually repressed men who had developed a hatred for women because of the natural and necessary sexual power women had over them, expressed that hatred in those stories that were subsequently elevated to "holy scriptures."

(John loathed no book more than the Bible, taken as it has been, in his "book" too literally and way too seriously by too many "faithful," for too many centuries, the "infernal thing" being too-often too full, he said, of the too-often ridiculous, more than too-often utterly stupid, and sometimes even insane and psychopathic mental masturbations of a group of smelly, verminous, ancient tribal, Levantine goat-herders who, if they showed up, en masse, for Sunday mass at the door of any Christian church today, would not only not be let in, but would provoke an instant call by the resident clergyman to the police demanding they send a SWAT team to clear them—and their goats!—off the premises!)

"Right from the get-go," he said. "Women have been put on the defensive in that book. First, Eve is considered the evil one for getting Adam booted from the Garden of Eden where prior to that disastrous event, all he had to do was eat the fruit that dropped from all the trees but one, and watch football games all day. And then she and her female descendents were considered to be, not the equals of Adam and his male descendants, but their intrinsic inferiors and forever helpers. And this attitude was never better summed up than in that infamous, Hebrew prayer, 'Thank you, God, for not making me a dog, a gentile, or a woman.' Alas, many of those abominable, women-as-no-more-human-than-dogs attitudes are still extant today, probably to some extent everywhere, but nowhere more obviously than in the world of the Mohammedans, where in some of those damn hot countries the men force their women to walk around wearing the equivalent of a hot black tent so no other man can see their desirous flesh and have evil, lustful thoughts about them.

"So here we have, deep within our natures, this powerful, living, creative force designed, not only to vitalize us, but to ensure that we individually procreate and collectively survive and thrive as a species, which manifests itself, most necessarily, most powerfully, through women, and which some very either demented and stupid or cynical and manipulative males class as evil. This is as stupid and insane as a major river declaring that the water that makes it a river is evil!".

And as he several times angrily said, "And if those ignorant-as-their-goats ancient Hebrews misinterpreted that considerably more ancient Babylonian . . . or Sumerian . . . or whatever!. . . myth about mankind becoming self-conscious, which they cast in the allegory of a primordial couple, Adam and Eve, living in a mystically blissful and unconscious 'Garden of Eden' state, and Eve getting them booted out of it because, first she 'woke up'—meaning: had the spiritual experience—got booted through the membrane of destiny!—of becoming self-conscious, then she jabbed the ever-sleeping Adam in the ribs and told him to 'wake up!' and become self-conscious too!

"Now, that ancient tale, taken as the allegory it is for human beings achieving gnosis, for" them 'waking up' out of what Gurdjieff lamented as our natural human tendency to live in a state of robotic sleep, is one thing, and by its allegorical nature, both instructive and very spiritual. But once those ancient Hebrews, and worse, those demented, cynical, manipulative, and power-greedy 'Founding Fathers' of Constantine's Imperial Abomination got hold of those ancient, allegorical stories, elevated them to holy, God-dictated scriptures, and then literalized that gnostic allegory about humanity awakening into self-consciousness so that it was no longer about consciousness at all, but about human sexuality and the shame they attached to it, they turned Eve—and thus with their self-sanctified, male-serving, idiot-logic—all women and all human sexuality into an evil that had no equal.

"And women—and our very necessary, human sexuality!—have been taking a big damning and degrading 'hit' from that damn Abomination of Constantine's with its sex-obsessed, dirty-as-dogshit-dogma and it's army of demented and sex-obsessed clergy ever since! A ridiculous and pernicious state of affairs that has cost humanity—and this planet!—dearly over the last two millennia and is still costing us—and this planet!—dearly!"

When I pointed out to John that I'd read similar stuff elsewhere and that I was not only sure he wasn't saying anything original, (to which he instantly did a Rachel eye-roll as he nodded his head) but that he wasn't presenting things exactly accurately, especially with his take on the Babylonian provenance of some of those Biblical tales and what they were really all about. "Like I've told you many times before, I'm not Plato or Aristotle or Nietzsche, so I am incapable of having original ideas, but I am a shaggy old dog of a reader who picks up the burrs of many ideas as he through the bushes of his books . . . and of course, in not being the smart breed of dog on this planet, I may not have it right about those stupid Biblical fairy-tales," he smiling said. "Because every damn self-proclaimed academic 'expert' has a different pontification about them, and then of course, you have the Jewish god-babblers (As likely pointed out before, god-babbler was John's quite literal, colloquial-English translation of the ancient Greek word theo-logian) saying they mean absolutely this, and you have the Christian god-babblers saying they mean absolutely that, and the atheist academics saying they are just over-exalted fairytales that don't mean any damn thing at all—so you'll have to forgive me if I don't have it exactly right, for though I've sent numerous, certified letters to both Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy and Sonny Boy Jesus—and a few to Allah, but I wrote them in English, not Arabic, so I doubt he was able to read them!—begging them for a clarification of the issue, I'm still awaiting a reply.

"And for sure, as I just said—I'm not saying anything original! I'm too stupid and uneducated—and catastrophically unimaginative!—to saying anything original about this business! It's all just stuff I've read here and there, some of which interests me and sticks, as just said, to the shaggy dog-coat of my brain like burdock burrs. . . . You know, those tenacious little 'stickers' that became the inspiration for that nifty Velcro stuff you see everywhere nowadays! Hell, when I read stuff I'm like one of those sticky lint-rollers that I've seen you use to get my dog's hair off your sweaters—I pick up a lot more than I can ever sort out. Or totally understand! So it's no surprise you've read it too! But where the big surprise—and issue!—comes in, is that all this . . . stuff . . . is out there for anyone to read and put into their thinking-pipes for a good thoughtful smoke—but few bother to take the time or make the effort, to do that!

"With all that is truly known about just how nonsensical and hypocritical and socially dangerous all this ridiculous, divisive and contradictory Biblical crap is when it is taken literally and not allegorically . . . hell, didn't Shakespeare say something about the Devil being able to use it for his own purposes . . . there shouldn't be a practicing Catholic left in the world! But of course, like we've talked about too often already, Catholics, from baptismal-infancy on, are thoroughly indoctrinated into being nothing more than the serfs of Constantine's Imperial Kingdom who are only ever-too-ready to bow down to, and abjectly serve its King Pope through its Lords-of-the-the-Parish, priests?

"And indoctrinated to be absolutely credulous and uncritical about everything their parents and those priest-lords say—or do—to them, particularly anything concerning that institution's utterly ridiculous and totally irrational dogma. But it's not a subtle indoctrination by any stretch! Most of it is pretty damn ham-fisted and coercive, with those "Lord Priests" threatening them with eternities of hellfire and damnation over the committing of no end of 'mortal' sins—as if those 'sins' are going to instantly kill you!—which will land them on Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy's shit-list. A real vitriol-bath of a shit-list which, if you don't get off it through a bout of abasement and contrition in a confessional where you pour out your list of heinous transgression to one of those priest-lords, your serf-soul will end up spending eternity in Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy's devil-tended barbeque.

"And if you do something really foul and heinous—like read, or encourage other 'faithful' to read books that have been banned because they threaten 'THE FAITH,' then you will face excommunication from the Church, which one hundred percent guarantees you will end up burning forever in Nobodaddy's devil-tended barbeque because then you can't get on your humble knees in a confessional and be absolved of those sins because you will no longer be a member of THE FAITH and no priest can ever hear your confession of absolve you of your Nobodaddy-displeasing sins!

"It's a completely welded-shut, hermetically-sealed, utterly insane and totally pernicious oil barrel of a system that has inured itself utterly against anything that even hints at being intelligent and rational. And as well, inured itself against any questions that can be the least bit threatening to that sacrosanct and reeking pile of dogshit it calls its sacred, Nobodaddy-decreed dogma! The only institution that comes close to rivaling it in that mindless, tyrannical, self-protective and essentially insane regard is just about any nation's army—all of which are pretty much modeled on the Roman army!—where the hatred for any sort of active intelligence or intelligent questioning is superseded only by a lethal loathing for lower-rank insubordination. In fact, that abominable institution of Constantine's is run exactly like an army, with the priests being the non-commissioned officers and the bishops, archbishops, and cardinals being the commissioned officers. And the pope, of course, being the ribbon-and-medal-bedecked Field Marshal/Emperor!"

And then of course, as John too often felt the need to point out, there arose out of all that ancient, patriarchal and tribal Levantine religio-politics with their many tribal gods, a contempt for, and hostility and violence against, history's subsequent millions of "Eves." And those violent, often genocidal, patriarchal religio-political ideas and customs were picked up and amplified by Constantine's Imperial Abomination. "Even a hog that's been reduced to three strips of bacon can see there's not even a hint of a goddess in that 'divine' Trinity!" John once said with a chainsaw of sarcasm roaring in his voice."It's got at its apex, big, bad, Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy, at it left angle, Sonny Boy Jesus, then at its right, the Pigeon—or maybe it's the other way around!—but no Goddess!

"The Greeks and Romans, tough, violent, and patriarchal as they so violently were, knew the power and importance of feminine energies and filled their pantheons with goddesses. Some like Daddy's Girl, Athena, and Artemis, valued their virginity, but their unnatural love of being sexless was well balanced out by the very natural, Aphrodite, the Goddess of Lust, and Hera, the Goddess of Marriage. And with Hera being Zeus' wife, she was not in any way considered 'outside' the Olympian power-loop! Not like the 'Virgin Mary' who is what? A minor goddess . . . of sorts? Or just an elevated angel . . . of sorts? A minor goddess to whom so many credulous sheep pray their Nobodaddy-beseeching prayers so she can whisper-relay them into Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy's ears—during his post-prandial nap, I presume!—and hope for the best as to what that patriarchal, psychopathic, self-absorbed old prick is going to do about them!

"Speaking of whispering, of course, lots of sweet, whispering 'lip-service' is paid to Virgin 'Mother' Mary, but she is neither part of the divine Trinity—the power of the Universe!—nor is she really even feminine, given that she is portrayed as a perpetual virgin, and virginity, as far as I am concerned, is to true femininity and womanhood as silence is to song. The essence of being a woman is being a powerful and essential creative force, of being the creative force behind the thriving of every physical, Earthbound species, and panegyrizing virginity negates that powerful and essential force as surely as vows of silence in a nunnery negates singing! It is so absurdly irrational and unnatural that it can't really even be intelligently discussed, for how can you talk intelligently about anything that is such an unnatural absurdity?

"Which means . . . in my book . . . and for what the hell ever it is worth—there is nothing divine or divinely inspired about this denigration of the feminine in Constantine's Imperial Abomination, but it is, at its foundation, nothing more than the absolutely blatant misogyny practiced by those ancient, tribal, patriarchal Levantine goat-herders, and the just-as-adamantly-patriarchal-and-misogynistic Greeks and Romans! A misogyny spawned out of a deep-seated masculine inferiority-and-irrelevancy complex that engendered a deep-seated fear of, and hatred for, everything even remotely smacking of the feminine humanity!

"And though the Roman males didn't appear to have a problem with the sexuality of women—as long as it was subservient to them—those patriarchal, goat-herding Levantine louts sure as hell did! In fact, you get the sense that every time they felt their groins burst aflame with the liquid fire of lust for a woman, it was the woman's fault for provoking it in them and it had nothing to do with their own biological energies and needs!

"And I, like many thinkers much more intelligent and enlightened than me, I conflate the feminine and the sexual, because, when you get down to the nitty-gritty of this human species, the sexuality of the female has to be stronger, given that we are a species, a living, vital, biological species, whose continued existence and thriving on this planet is totally dependent on our sexuality and fecundity, which of course as in so many other biological species—especially mammalian—centers around first, the sexuality, then the fecundity, then the nurturing abilities, and then the strength, of the females. We, in foremost being a mammalian species, are as integral to Mother Nature as all the other species, and if we can consciously or unconsciously acknowledge the importance of the feminine in nature with that very common term, Mother Nature, can we then not acknowledge—and honor!—the importance of the feminine—the Mother—in our own species?

"Actually, though the term Mother Nature .is used as often as another common term, 'the Almighty Buck,' our ancient, tribal, patriarchal legacy has driven us—especially in our quest for 'the Almighty Buck'—to treat Mother Nature—the very planet that gives us the totality of our physical, species-existence—no differently than patriarchal cultures treat their women. I mean, how open does anyone's eyes have to be to very obviously see that capitalism is a euphemism of institutionalized greed, and that the industrial violence, the industrial rape, the industrial pillaging, the industrial murder—under that euphemism of capitalism—being unchecked and daily perpetrated against this very absolutely feminine planet—the living goddess Gaia!—which no differently than any mammalian mother, exists to give life and nurturance to all her children. Even to us, this child-species-human, born with broad, ugly streaks of self-destructiveness, greed, and maliciousness in our nature that know no limits and which we are still not mature enough to self-check!

"The essential metaphor for what we are doing to this planet is that of a brood of stupid and deranged wolf pups satisfying our immediate—capitalistic!—hunger by impatiently and permanently gnawing our mother's teats off her body—instead of patiently sucking the renewable milk out of them, thus obviously and insanely ensuring our eventual and inevitable extinction."

Fuck-a-fighter-jet!—but I hope that zooming flight of addled remembering came out somewhat lucid? I've really over-extended my walkabout from the Meds-Rez with this fuckin' turgid abomination of a very FUBAR "Preface" that is taking fuckin' weeks longer to complete than I'd planned. I know from experience that a short walkabout—two weeks, max!—doesn't do me much harm and that I don't have to be long back on the Meds-Rez for the head-techs to get my internal chemicals in balance again.

But I've been on this Cor-azy-vette road trip babblogging this demented "Preface" into existence for almost two fucking months now, and that's waaaaaaay to fucking long! I'm barely sleeping! I'm eating like a "home-alone" eight-year-old—but alas, unlike most eight-year-olds, I am drinking too much booze and smoking too much hash and weed for any average adult!

In fact, I'm going to have to restrain myself from $tyle-Naziing this abomination once I've been frog-marched back onto the Meds-Rez (after a short walkabout, I can easily force myself back to it, but after this long, Cor-azy-vette road trip, I am ending up bereft of all capacity for that level of self-control and motivation) and I again have to be head-lightning and meds-reduced to a "reasonably rational," light-bulb-in-a-dead-duck's-ass "human being" who is again sleeping properly (like, about twelve fuckin' hours a fuckin' day!) and off the booze and dope, because I am one hundred percent certain that once I have had the "world of this crazy carousel" I have been on, head-lightninged "stopped," and I am back on that Meds-Rez and in that "reasonably rational" state, the whole of this turgid pile of reeking dog-barf of a FUBAR "Preface" is going to come across to that "sane me" as just that—a totally unreadable pile of reeking dog-barf nonsense that forthwith should be "delete-hosed" out of" my computer! (Fuck, I hope, Dear Reader, you were a little bit able to follow that above paragraph!)

Anyways, in-for-a-penny/in-for-a-pounding, I will now attempt—most feebly, to be sure!—regain some semblance of control of my manic-muse, force myself—my assemblage point!—out of its erratic and unpredictable Saint Vitus Dance, and get on with this thing. Or maybe not, for I can feel the shadowy presence of an idea lurking at the edge of my very addled consciousness . . . but I can't quite grab it by its neck and drag it into view. . . . Though I can sense it has some sort of Star Trek connotation . . .

And yes, Dear Reader, as I likely have already informed you more times than you can remember but I cannot, I am a Trekkie, Spock is my all-time favorite character, and Ben Sisko my favorite captain because, Afro-American though he may be, he reminds me so much of John with his rugged good looks, his reticence, and ironically, his relationship with those "wormhole-aliens," the Prophets to the Bajorans, who picked him to be their Emissary, which so reminds of John and those damn non-existent spirits he was always going on about like they were as real and fundamental to life as death, taxes and rolls of perforated toilet paper.

Ahhhhh . . . . that presence is getting closer . . . and . . . closer . . . but I still can't grab it by the neck . . . And yeah, Trek fans, I know Deep Space Nine was the more or less neglected orphan of the Star Trek family, but it ended up my favorite of all those series. I mean, who couldn't find some charm in that greedy little fuck of a Ferengi, Quark, (Hey, you had to love him in the "Little Green Men" episode when he dumbfoundedly responded to Nog's assertion that there was radiation in Earth's atmosphere in the 20th century because the human governments were openly testing their atom bombs, with "They irradiated their own planet?")(I also recently, and humorously learned in some book I was reading, that the word "quark" is a German word for a particularly foul-smelling curd-cheese—how appropriate!)

Or the brilliant but unlucky-in-love Bashir who spent six seasons with a futile hard-on for the beautiful and boisterous—nothing-fires-up-her-nether-oven-like-bad-boy-Klingons—Jadzia Dax, who never ceased to enthrall my ego because she looked so damn much like what I'd looked like—except I was shorter, with jet black eyes—when I was young, and slim, and had long, butt-brushing, jet black hair, and was over-sexed enough that I could, without even batting my long black eyelashes, attract boys and men—both good and bad—like a Serengeti watering hole wildebeests during a drought. And I probably would have got it on with a Klingon if one had come on to me, though I guess I came close to that when I got it on with a few Hell's Angels—eight to be exact—in a gang-bang that fortunately I was too deliciously stoned on some very good, heroin-laced coke to remember little of, and care even less. (Those troglodytes are about the closest thing we have to Klingons on this planet, though those fictional Klingons live by a code of warrior-honor, while most very real bikers honor nothing but their limitless lusts and greeds—kinda a lot like that paragon of the American Dream-cum-Nightmare, Mad King Donald, I guess.)

Jonathan was a DS9 fan and, as he still lived in the city then, used to come over and watch DS9 episodes with me for a visit and always called Jadzia, "Plastic Woman" because she looked too perfect to be a real flesh and blood human being, and because her acting was more than a little bit plastic as well. Ahhhhh, fuck-a-Klingon-biker!—or a gang of them!—but I've got that lurking presence by the throat and can finally get a good look at it! I knew there was something in this DS9 sidetrack-of-a-sidetrack that had to do with John!

He wasn't much for watching any television program that wasn't a documentary, but I did get him to watch a few DS9 episodes (he was well into his 90s then and somewhat amenable to putting his aging brain in neutral and watching a show like DS9) and did so more as a joke than anything over that Symbiont/Trill business going on with Jadzia, where the Symbiont Dax (a grotesque little slug of a creature with a power, personality, and intelligence that had nothing to do with its looks or size) was physically implanted into successive Trill hosts, carried its personality and memories with it, and was the dominant partner in the symbiosis.

After watching a Jadzia/Dax episode in which some of the true nature of that symbiosis came out while I explained the rest, I jokingly asked John if he thought that was a good metaphor for his notions of spirit-beings and reincarnation. His response was to show a little—accent on the word little—more excitement and interest than I usually saw him display for TV shows as he more or less said, "Yes . . . and no . . . A little yes, because that Dax-being moving from Trill host to Trill host is very much in line with our spirit-being, through reincarnation, moving from human host to human host. But a big NO, because those Trill hosts were socially and spiritually indoctrinated to consciously accept the Dax being as the superior being, and they lived to serve its wisdom and needs.

"But very few human beings, once past seven years old, have any sense of their symbiotic relationship with their spirit-beings, and infinitely fewer yet, once past puberty, have the humility to acknowledge its spiritual wisdom and practically none, once onto the ego roller-coaster of adulthood, are even remotely interested in consciously serving its needs. Our goddamn self-obsessed and self-serving human egos are no Trills, that's for sure! . . . But oh, as I daily wish!—what a splendorous world we'd have if even just a few more were! But like I've said before: if wishes were horses, humanity would long ago have vanished under a global-glacier of manure!"

Now back to the DS9 series—not because it's apropos to John, but because its caught my feeble attention and has to do with my mother, so I feel like babblogging about it—where there was that brilliantly irritating Louis Fletcher (she Oscar-aced that villainous tyrant, Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest ) playing that hypocritical Vedec, Winn Adami who waaaaaaaaaaaaay too damn much resembled my mother in waaaaaaaaaaaaay too many ways, not just with her thick and solid mental stolidity, but with her obsession with a host of religious matters she was never courageous or intellectual enough to question (teachers, like priests, by nature and career necessity, learn to never seriously question the reigning paradigm they are paid to propagate) or even open her eyes in a wide enough slit to see that her precious, neat, clean, Catholic household with its walls covered in crucifixes and smarmy, heart-wringing pictures of Jesus, Mary and a whole rogue-gallery of various saints, that she so masterfully and obsessively ruled with her velvet-gloved, passive-aggressive fist (yeah, I had two passive-aggressive parents so no wonder I was always in an invisible double-bind that drove me bonkers) was in truth a veritable Mexican bordello of hypocrisy, sexual license, and fuckin' goddamned misery.

And of course, in wasting your precious reading time with all this irrelevant DS9 nonsense, how can I leave out that super-sleazy Vorta clone, Weyoun, (yeah, I know—you aren't a Trekkie, haven't seen the series, and have no clue what the fuck I am Trek-babbling about, so skim or skip it! Or check it out on the Web!) who so much looked, acted like, and almost out-Uriah Heeped my father that I once threw a plate of spaghetti at the TV when he was uttering his mealy-mouthed lines to that murderous Queen Bitch of the Founders.

Shit-on-a-remote-control!—look what I've done! I express the intention of dropping out of manic warp and getting this poor "Preface" at least into impulse-drive, and with the microbe-fart of a distraction of that lurking, and generally irrelevant presence, I go warping off on a Trek tangent. If I wasn't so fat, lazy and totally incapable of doing so, I'd stand up and kick my own ass! But to be truthful, it's a good thing I can't, because if I could, I'd likely get my foot stuck in the Grand Canyon of my ass-crack, fall flat on my face, and be stuck in that hideously ignominious position till I starved to death!

So even though my legs are bloated, purple-veined sausages barely capable of propelling me across the room—obviously not when I'm too drunk and stoned!—let alone of performing the feat of kicking my own ass, I will make an effort to get this circum-galactic diversion under control and get back to I actually had hovering in my mind to babblog about before falling into the worm-hole of that Trek-distraction, which had to do with my intentions to do some $tyle-Naziing to The Fire by bowdlerizing it "just a bit." (At least, I think that is what had been on my mind—but don't quote me on that!) Most particularly, by removing—or at least modifying—some of the more graphic, disturbing, and titillating sexual passages in it.

Alas and alack, that silly and misguided attempt to play Rachel Bowdler did not last long when, for while in the midst of a judicious excision of its first, over-described sex scene, my computer crashed. This old relic had done that enough times before that I had followed Jonathan's sage advice about setting my auto-save to do its auto-thing every five minutes, and I had also followed his advice to back up my working file by making a newly-dated version of it every day (well, most . . . some days!), so all I really lost in that crash was my attempts at bowdlerizing the manuscript.

Thus I thought nothing of that crash and once this "old trouper" had rebooted, I continued on with my surgery. Within seconds, the light bulb overhead went out with a brilliant flash. Obviously that too had happened before but having it happen so soon after the computer crash did spook me more than a little.

But obviously not enough! For after changing the bulb, I continued on with my righteous job of highlighting and deleting and reworking John's memorial efforts. For about ten seconds that new bulb flickered just enough to catch my attention, and while staring up at it, it exploded with a blinding flash and a loud POP! Miraculously, none of the gazillion shards of glass that went zipping all over the room wound up in my (fortunately) spectacles-covered eyes—though a half dozen of those tiny sharps stuck in my cheeks, forehead, neck and arms. And I remember thinking back to a Grade 6 science class where I was most boringly informed that incandescent light bulbs had vacuums inside them, and that when they broke, they were supposed to implode and not explode!

And that really got me wondering as I raced to the bathroom to stare in the mirror and use a pair of tweezers to remove all the thin sharp slivers of that exploded light bulb from my face, neck and arms. Then, the next day, when I finally re-entered that spooky room, I first put on my shoes—I'm usually barefoot in the house—then dug the upright out of its cobwebbed repose in the closet, attached the hose to it, and spent close to an hour assiduously vacuuming up as many of the thin, sharp, potentially-skin-puncturing slivers as I could find. (Those infernal slivers kept showing up in the oddest of places and it was weeks before I got what I hoped to be most of them!)

But just as I was finishing vacuuming up all I could find that day, the room suddenly seemed to both darken and fill up, first with the black, overwhelming sense of John's raging-bear anger—which I'd most palpably become familiar with on that embarrassing day when he'd most righteously heaved me into the mare-piss soaked manure pile!—and then, when that had faded as fast as it had appeared, the room filled with the unmistakable scent of the Old Spice aftershave that John had always used. I barely took the time to turn off that screaming vacuum before once again bailing out of that room like some fighter pilot his shot-down jet!

As you, Dear Patient Reader, must be aware of by now, I don't believe believe in the existence of spirits, but since John's death, and especially since his funeral when Catherine "manifested," I've always had the feeling that either she, or John, and often both, were around me,(my capacious "gut" told me their spirits were around me, but my rational mind always dismissed them as hallucinations!) but their "putative presences" had always been so subtle that I had been able to more or less ignore and deny them—until lately when I have been working on this FUBAR "Preface." In truth, I suspect it is more Catherine—though maybe the two together—who are the ones writing this, and not really me at all, for it writes a lot easier than do things I usually write, and with more imaginative—though sometimes cruder—phrases and metaphors. (Well, of course, that would definitely be my hallucination of John and not my hallucination of Catherine, wouldn't it?)

And as you are equally waaaaaaay too aware of by now, John had often talked to me about a realm of spirits that he seemed to take as for granted as the air he breathed while I just as often so freaked out at the mention of them that it was one of the few things that could really get him laughing, so I will leave it up to you, Dear Patient Reader, to decide whether it is the spirits of John and Catherine playing tag-inspiration with this FUBAR "Preface," or it is all just the chaotic manifestations of bi-polar hallucinatory derangement caused by me being too-far and too-long off the Meds-Rez on this Cor-azy-vette road trip!

So anyways, with regards to that exploding light bulb—not since reading Castaneda's first book while acid-stoned had I been so fundamentally and foundationally terrified. Like a chipmunk reacting to a leaping cat, I fled that room, slammed the door, and after tweezering all the glass-shrapnel out of my white, adipose-stretched skin—the blood dripping from each made them easy to spot—I then spent more than half the night hyper-ventilating and trying to keep cool my over-heating brain by distracting myself from thinking about the inconceivably "occult" events surrounding to my attempts to bowdlerize John's memoirs by toking myself halfway to Planet Oblivion and drinking myself halfway to Hades while watching the Crossroads 2010 concert, so delightfully MC'd by Bill Murray, and so soothing to my assaulted and troubled soul.

Though to be sure, there is a somber aspect to that concert because, for the Blues greats, Hubert Sumlin and Johnny Winter—both looking sick and frail and performing on pure willpower—it was to be their last Crossroads before getting their parole from this Gulag Earth and being sent on up to play their guitars in Blues Heaven!

And help though that Crossroads concert—and the hash and booze!—did calm me down, distract, and soothe me enough that night that I could sleep for a couple of hours (or what I call sleep when I am as manic as I now am!) it was another two days before, under a compulsion that was both as uncomfortable as it was irresistible, (and best described by Coleridge's Ancient Mariner in his lines, Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched/With a woeful agony,/Which forced me to begin my tale . . . And then it left me free. Or in my crazy case—continue my tale with my heart full of the hope that when I completed it I would be free—to die, and be done with this cruel Gulag!

### Chapter Forty Two

If some day a few readers bumble into purchasing The Fire and are sitting in front of their computers, or staring at their iPads, Kobos or Kindles—or whatever half-dozen other eBook-reading gizmos get Borg-manifested and marketed to the "assimilated" masses by then!—as they ride the bus or subway or train home from work, they will have to face the fact that John's Muse—aka, Catherine, it would seem!—seems to have inspired the writing of this work in such as fashion as to separate that cruise ship of readers that read for escape and pleasure from the half-empty dingy of them that read for edification and enlightenment.

Or, in the case of most narrative poetry, read that drear stuff solely for some masochistically motivated form of self-punishment. And to my dying day—which I most blessedly get the feeling, given the damage I am doing to myself with this Cor-azy-vette, off-the-Meds-Rez-road trip, ain't that far away!—I'll never understand why John wrote his over-filled dumpster of questionable memories and probable fabrications, as poetry.

Fuck-a-goose-quill!—but I remember trying to write some poetry when I was at university and it was what I could only describe with a cycling term Sprocket used a lot to describe his life, that being that is up-hill-and-against-the-wind writing all the way. Steep up-hill and stiff wind writing! I mean, even for a professional writer, decent prose is a hard write—which is why there are so many over-paid $tyle-Nazis in the publishing business!—but that infernal poetry is in a class by itself. Though to be sure, judging by the nature of the obviously speedy scribbling John did to write his poetic narrative, it couldn't have been "up-hill" writing for him at all. In fact, he seemed to scribble it out like it was a down-hill, with-the-wind effort. (Sprocket once said that all he wanted out of life was one measly day of down-hill-with-the-wind living, but I doubt he ever got even that!) Of course, my poetic efforts weren't in any way Muse-inspired, as John's memoirs seem to have consistently been, so perhaps I will never know what it was like for him to so obviously effortlessly scribble them out.

SO ENOUGH ALREADY!—on that subject of John scribbling out his memoirs—The Fire—in a form that guaranteed he'd not only not have a half-full dingy of serious readers interested in slogging through it, but would be lucky if he got life-preserver full. (LOL) And especially so when, even as I am "peddling out" these flat-road-without-a-wind prose words, I can't help but thinking back to the depths John—or more likely, his putative Muse, Catherine, I guess—took things. Even with something that usually isn't considered deep at all—except by Freud!—sex.

John, as I may have mentioned an artillery barrage of times already, put some brutally frank and unrestrained sexual descriptions in The Fire, and as I think on that fact—especially in the light of the fact that during all our visits during the time he was writing his memoirs, he sure didn't strike me as being in the least bit obsessed with sex!—I am blinded by the insight-flash that the metaphor of fire is often associated with enlightenment. And what else can ever be the purpose of any one of those many "Hero's journeys" talked about so often by Joseph Campbell and which a reading of The Fire will definitely affirm that John had been on for most of his life, with "the boon" of that long journey being his memoirs—The Fire—and the ideas and enlightenment they contain.

But fire is a metaphor for many things, and certainly very accurately and dramatically for what the ancient Greeks called—and actually knew enough about to not only not repress, but actually honor—Eros, which Freud, in calling it libido, being the first modern, Christian-world philosopher of any real fame (yeah, I know he was a Jew, but Vienna was (I presume) full of sexually uptight Christians that he was dealing with and writing for!) to stress its importance and warn us that we suppress and deform it at our personal and social—our neurotic and psychotic!—peril.

And getting closer to home, there was a lot of extreme suppressing and deforming of Eros, of our Freudian libido, for the last several hundred years in this basically puritanical North American culture. And though it was more extreme south of the "Medicine Line"—as John always called it—than north of it, this "Great White North" is not exempt from that pernicious, unnatural and unhealthy philosophy! But south of that "Medicine Line" is where important, world-shaping powers play their most serious games, and the lunacy of that puritanical, Eros-repressing philosophy reached its chilly nadir in President "Ike's" neo-fascist (according to Groucho!) uber-unreal, uber-ridiculous, uber-paranoid, conformity-obsessed, Cold War-frozen "Fifties" which started to thaw, not with an ever-threatening, world-destroying nuclear holocaust, but the inguinal heat and just-as-hot music of Afro-Americans, in their creation, first of Rhythm and Blues and then of course, groin-grindin' Rock 'n' Roll (which Groucho often defined as, "Fuckin' great music all about fuckin'!") which got picked up by white performers and subsequently spread around the world like a benevolent cloud of Erotic fallout—anti-fallout, I guess you could call it!

With the explosion of Rock 'n' Roll in the "Sixties," that hypocritical puritanical ice sheet that had been crushing all the true life out of Ike's American "culture" melted away to varying degrees in varying parts of the country—especially in Californica!—making room for the direct artistic expression of Eros as the inguinal heat, as the fire, it truly is, probably no more famously that with The Doors panegyric of it in their hit song, "Light My Fire," the same subject Springsteen so understatedly—all-smoke/no-flame—sang about in his 80s' hit about adulterous lust, "I'm On Fire," (can you imagine Zep or The Who super-charging that song!) and which Bob Seger covered in a raw and unsubtle fashion in his "The Fire Down Below," and later, somewhat more delicately, in, "The Fire Inside." (One of my favorite, Eros-panegyrics is B.B. King's version of "Rock Me Baby," which he performed during the 2007 Crossroads with enough passion that even though he was 82 and as over-weight as me, he gave the impression he could still rock "all night long.")

Needless to say, the first thing every erstwhile child discovers on passing through that tumultuous, long-awaited, eagerly-anticipated membrane of destiny of puberty, (allowing the subject of sex to finally become deliciously inguinal and not just interestingly mental-imaginative!) is that his or hers once generally quiescent groin is now anything but quiescent and is pretty much always either smoldering or outright aflame with that delightful and delicious—though too often deleterious!—liquid fire of Eros.(In that bogyman chakra system, which John thought to be the ultimate wisdom about our human nature, sexuality is of the second chakra, whose symbolic element is water!)

And needless to say, the ancient Romans wouldn't recognize their god of love, Cupid, as he is always portrayed today on modern Valentine's cards—as a cute, impish little fellow shooting his harmless little arrows into lover's hearts. But I am sure those macho, lubricious Romans would more easily recognize one of their favorite gods if he was depicted as John once said he was truly meant to be: a leering imp with an erect, over-sized ding-dong shooting flaming arrows into lover's groins! (As many of the murals in the recovered ruins of Pompeii showed, the Roman's weren't shy about their "ding-dongs!")

I mean, face it, cupid is from the Latin cupere, meaning desire! And as John once patiently explained during one of our "arguments" about the difference between love and lust, love, by its very heart-chakra genesis and nature, does not desire to possess, so when two people are deeply in love and in the irresistible thrall of the need to possess each other, that is lust combining with love. Of which he also said, "Is a lot like the two halves of a critical mass of plutonium smashing together to create the blast of the most atomic sex two human beings can experience . . . and definitely a super-mortal sin in Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy's 'sin-ledger!'"

Since I had had my share of problems with human lust and too often had a hard time not thinking of it as something as evil as it was powerful and fun, I could not too easily accept that there necessarily had to be a lust component to two people falling deeply "in love." John just laughed at that and said, "Remove the lust from a 'falling in love' scenario and you end up with something completely different—and infinitely less . . . passionate! You end up with what some philosophers call Platonic love, what the Hellenes called agape, or brotherly love . . . or what you feel for your children . . . or a good friend . . . or what exists between you and me. Pure heart chakra stuff without the powerful sense of desire engendered by lust.

"When two lovers 'fall into love' . . . or as Joseph Campbell and the troubadours put it, into amour. . . and can't keep their imaginations—and hands if they get too close!—off each other, that is the result of the second and forth chakras combining to create a powerful, psycho-physical explosion that rockets them up to the seventh chakra—like two halves of a chunk of bomb-grade uranium being blasted together to create an atomic explosion."

Regardless that his explanation was totally copacetic with what I'd experience with Thomas on that couch-staining day when I—very embarrassingly to me by then!—became a sexual predator and stole his precious virginity, John's explanation of that most mysterious of subjects left me as unsatisfied as it did incapable of any further argument, so I dropped it, but today I can easily see that the Greeks' concept of Eros as a powerful god—and the Roman's version of him, Cupid—made a mockery of the "puppy love" portrayed on those silly Valentine's cards that children so meaninglessly pass out by the dozens to their school mates on that ridiculous day! (And our word cupidity sure doesn't mean cupid-cute or love-struck, it means downright fucking, Mad King Donald-greedy! Greedy for all things low and nasty!)

And yes, though I may be an obese and flatulent, bi-polar sexagenarian grandmother with the libido of a stuffed dog—it's the fuckin' meds when I'm on them, and the booze and hash when I'm not!—and the same number of men in my life as my goldfish (which died three years ago) has antennas for its television, I can still take mental strolls down "lusty-lane" that bring smiles to my face and as you already know too well, I still enjoy a toke or two—or twenty!—while listening to my beloved Rock 'n' Roll—or at least the stuff with a vintage older than '85! And though some rare times I catch a song or two of the "modern stuff" that rings with a smidgen of Rock 'n' Roll truth, most of the stuff I hear on the radio—unless it's a Classic Rock station—is uninspired, manufactured-for-mindless-kids shit that I call—or may have already called!—puke-and-die music, because whenever I hear it, all I want to do is puke and then die!

And with one, slick-as-semen, used-car-salesman peddler of that shit being that waaaaaaaaaaaaay-over-exposed, acting-out, hermaphroditic, pre-teen heart-flutterer and butch-lesbian crotch-monsooner, Justin Bieber, who whenever I "encounter" him—way too fuckin' often!—in any media, I wish I was still having my "monthlies" and knew him personally so I could use him for the tampon he reminds me of! (Fortunately, I don't encounter his irritating, masculinity-challenged, milquetoast image as often now as I did a few years ago.)

Please, Dear Reader, believe me when I say that's not me that wrote that line about using Bean Curd Bieber as a tampon, but the disease! Well, ya—it is me! But me under the influence of the disease! (Hey, if alcoholics can use the disease of their alcoholism as an excuse for all sorts of bad behaviors, why not us loons?) But I mean, think of it!—Bieber's goddamn effeminate face—which is even more devoid of masculine character than a bowl full of tofu!—has been endorsed by so many companies pandering their over-priced shit to mindless, pre-pubescent girls (funded by their over-indulging parents) that a few years ago it was damn near impossible to go shopping without being constantly reminded, by big-ostentatious-display-after-big-ostentatious-display, of that obnoxious little rat-fart's existence. So much so that I remember passionately wishing that some enterprising company would sell toilet paper with that inhumanly bland face on each square so I could add some real character to it every time . . . you get the picture! (The satisfaction would more than offset the exorbitant cost!)

But getting back to the real subject of this FUBAR "Preface"—namely Uncle John and his memoirs which I turned into The Fire. Of course, there may well be, amongst that crowd of readers filling that life preserver, one or two over-educated and self-consciously refined souls who will, while removing their monocle from their right eye—or their pince-nez from both of them—want to pompously assert that a true poet would have been able to write the Eros angle into The Fire with essentially subtle and adequately circumspect innuendoes. And, having long ago majored in English Literature at my third-rate university, I agree, for what they would be looking for would be a literary work that is as a fine, expensive, vintage and properly chilled wine that all their upscale dinner guests would approve of, and not the jug of room-temperature hooch—fire-water! (LOL)—that is The Fire.

Of course, true poetry is written by real poets who write, from the clichéd get-go, with a poetic, philosophical and literary agenda and with either specific or general audiences in mind. And much as I have come to believe John's Muse had an agenda, at once poetic and philosophical—as did those hypothetical Forces of Fate/Destiny that hypothetically "wrote" the script for, and "directed" the over-flowing dumpster of the movie of his life that eventually became his poetic memoirs—John certainly did not have any sort of agenda—or audience—in mind at all.

And, as I stated waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay to far back at the beginning of this FUBAR mess, he was only writing down the regiments of memories—and/or fantasies—that marched through his head on their way home from the relentless battle that seemed to be "the job" (Destiny!) of his life before coming back here to "retire" from it—and then write about it. Ha!—in a sense he was like Joseph Conrad, in middle age, leaving his beloved sea and all his great sailing adventures on it, so he could then live the sedate and boring literary life from which he created his great and interesting novels that subsequently allowed us—his Dear Readers—to get an intelligent glimpse of, and vicariously live, those sailing adventures. Novels, that needless to say, not a one of which would exist if he's spent his whole life on the sea, perhaps then being forced by Fate—or Destiny—to intentionally sail off into the Ocean of Spirit like that venerable, going-blind old ship captain, Captain Whalley, in the pathos-filled, The End of the Tether.

In truth, the major battle of John's life was his attempts to cope with the caustic cauldron of remorse he was boiling himself alive in over how he'd lethally mistreated his wife Catherine and their son Johnny. And yeah, that's a "spoiler alert," but his story isn't a plot-driven murder mystery that depends on a last-chapter revelation and tying-up to give it meaning, so I'll leave it up to him, in his memoirs, to get that Titanic off his chest. And flush out of his guts the vat of sulfuric acid, of his own version of the story of the absolutely unnecessary and malicious misery he brought to both Catherine's and sweet little Johnny's lives. Though I dare say that the dominant themes of Catherine's life on that very isolated ranch with him seems to have been her chronically fatiguing over-exposure to a lot of hard, dawn-to-dusk work she wasn't suited for, being ripped away from her music and her powerful capacity for creative expression through that music—and her great and crushing loneliness.

Though of course, given that prior to John frog-marching her and their young son out to all the isolation, hard work, and loneliness on that wilderness ranch, she'd lifelong been a "city girl" who'd loved her city, her city life and all the social and cultural perks it offered. And, as I just tried to say, she was also a most passionate and accomplished pianist—a veritable Clara Schumann, I would hazard to surmise—with as much of a musical career ahead of her as the times would have allowed, so there would have been a fundamental element of chronic dissatisfaction—and eventually despair—attached to all that fatigue and loneliness.

And most interesting it is to "compare and contrast" (hey, can't you tell I was an English major at university!) the young, testosterone-driven John that poor Catherine was fated/cursed to encounter, fall in lust-and-love with, and get tangled up with—"for better or worse," but mostly worse!—as a wife, with the old, mellowed, tragedy-tempered, and (mostly) mystically quiescent Uncle John I was fated/blessed to encounter and relate to as a great-niece.

I mean, by the time I got to know John, he was the greatest uncle/friend/mentor anyone FUBAR-babe like me could have imagined, but then I only knew him after he'd progressed a long way along his Campbellean "Hero's journey" and had stepped through a good number of membranes of destiny along that journey, each membrane representing a transformative stage of a long, involved and progressive gnosis.

But the John one encounters—and who he unabashedly portrays!—in his memoirs, The Fire, was, to say the least, anything but a mellowed old mystic, and certainly not an easy or amenable person to be around back then, and was, until the end of Book One, about as gnostically enlightened as a mound of T-rex coprolites. He was, to put it bluntly, an untamed and untrammeled force of nature—a rage-and-testosterone driven Category 5 human-hurricane—and that, by definition, means something to hide from when one can—and run like hell from when one can't! (Poor Catherine, in the throes of the twin tsunamis of lust and love created by her strict Catholic upbringing—according to John's portrayal of her, she was one "hot chick"—and too many years of being a virgin—her mother had been a crazed, Italian version of my malicious French mother!—ran into that hurricane instead of away from it!)

With regards to the theme of Catherine's devastating loneliness that runs through the latter stages of Book One of The Fire, as I have likely over-mentioned already—too much hash really fucks up my already fucked up memory, long- and short-term both!—John may have had the empathy of a coprolite—or Mad King Donald!—back then on that ranch, but that sure had changed by the time he became a big part of my life—as the following anecdote shows

As likely already related, he had a habit of showing up at my place when my psyche had stumbled down into a very dark place and I was basically—but barely—treading water in a very thick, black and voracious Charybdis in that Fifth Dimension—and I had a great need of some company and comfort, and that is exactly what happened one day. He, out of the blue (the blues?) showed up one day when I most direly needed him to, except he arrived at the door while I was in the bathroom and Janis Joplin—my soul-mate in the surfing those blacker (bluer?) waves of the putative Ocean of Spirit—was blasting away on the stereo, so one or the other of the kids had to let him in, but neither of them had the sense to turn down the stereo, which in pretty much always being on—and loud, especially when I was depressed—was just a normal situation to them.

When I came out of the bathroom I was both shocked to see him sitting in the living room and horrified that he was being subjected to Janis's screamings. (Terry, when she got older and could make such judgments, couldn't stand her, and used to deprecatingly, though possibly insightfully, say that she sounded like a screeching, dying seagull!)

As usual, Janis was ripping out her throat and her heart, this time giving her soulful rendering of "A Woman Left Lonely" when I charged into that living room to turn the stereo off, shouting my apologies to poor John, but he paid no attention to me as he was totally focused on the music, rivulets of tears trickling down his tough and leathery old cheeks. To say I was shocked is an understatement for I was certain those wise old eyes of his had never, and would never, shed a single tear. As I went to turn off that machine while looking at him and giving him that apology, he just gave several subtle shakes of his head and loudly said, "No, just leave it, Rache." Only when the song was over did he nod at me to turn it off.

As soon as it was quiet enough to talk, he unabashedly wiped his eyes and face on the blue-checkered handkerchief he kept in the back pocket of his jeans and said, "Who was singing that? She sure knows what loneliness is." To which I could but reply, "Janis . . . Joplin, of course," my mind momentarily unable to wrap itself around the reality that someone could not recognize a Janis Joplin song. And when he said, "Is she a black woman—she sure sings like one." I had to process the reality that he truly did have no idea who she was, and I said, "No, she was white." And to that he said, "Was, eh—so she is dead then?" And on my saying, "Oh yes, she died in 1970 . . . when she was only 27. She died of a heroin overdose." (I didn't mention it was but a handful of days after my hero, Jimi, had died, as John would have had no idea who he had been either.)

And shocked I was when, while looking out the window and wiping more tears from his eyes, softly said, "I'm not surprised—that much loneliness can easily kill a woman. The heroin was probably incidental." And nod gently he did when I added. "Yeah, you're probably right—she was more rich and famous than I can even imagine someone being, yet she died alone . . . in a hotel room." With his reply to that being, "Money sure can never be as good as a good friend. And fame . . . well, I can't comment on that."

(John also once said, "Money can't buy you happiness, but it sure can buy a lot of very temporary distractions from your unhappiness." And hey, Dear Reader, here's a Tear-Jerker Challenge for you!—go to YouTube and pull up a video of Janis soul-searing her way through "A Woman Left Lonely," and while listening to it meditate on the fact that she died alone in a motel room when she was 27 years old! Twenty fucking goddamn seven! Still basically just a fucking kid, for Chrissakes! If that song and your meditation on her sad, lonely and early death doesn't bring a tear to your eye, then you are either dead, a Star Trek Vulcan, some kind of psychopath—or that uber-narcissistic, coprolite-loon, Mad King Donald, the reigning regent of the Kingdom of Cloud-Cuckoo-land south of the "Medicine Line!" (Or, as Groucho would likely today put it: Mad King Donald's Fascist Kingdom of America!)

As, needless to say I have likely pummeled your awareness with umpteen times already, you will discover, on reading The Fire, that the firebox-inferno heating the steam in the locomotive roaring and racing along the tracks of John's early, life-narrative, comes from the death of Catherine and the loneliness he caused her that contributed to her death, so he certainly—with his too-late-acquired empathy!—knew what Janis had been singing about. And though I try my best not to believe in ghosts, I would not find it totally unbelievable that Catherine, whom I suspect has never been far from John from the moment of her death—John, in his memoirs, says as much—had been sitting with him listening to Janis, not missing the chance to remind him, in whatever way "ghosts" can, of just how terrible she'd felt during too many of her relatively few years with him.

### SHIT! FUCK! DAMN! SONOVAGODDAMN BITCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Pardon my French, but I just got off the phone after having a short and strained conversation with an obviously very pissed Jonathan. He's flying in to the city airport late tomorrow night, renting a car, getting a hotel room, and will be driving out to the farm the next day with the express purpose of hauling me off to the Shrink-Klink in order to have me frog-marched back onto the Meds Rez! And SHIT! FUCK! DAMN! SONOVAGODDAMN BITCH-redux!—I just knew I should have controlled myself in that damn grocery store the other day!

And SHIT! FUCK! DAMN! SONOVAGODDAMN BITCH-double-redux!—I just know I should have paid closer attention—that very day!—to what John would have called at very distinct omen, but which I just took as a sad—and utterly irrelevant—incident in that day full more interesting incidents. While on my way to that grocery store and the ridiculous debacle that ensued, just before turning right onto the main highway from my rural road and a few yards from the bridge over the creek, a sad sight caught my attention. It was a dead, fly-swarming male mallard lying face down on the gravel of the road, its head turned to the right, its wings tucked under its body, and its legs and webbed-feet-splayed out behind it. It had the exact appearance of the image I'd always imagined when Sprocket used that term, "like a light bulb screwed into a dead duck's ass." Minus, of course, the light bulb!

All that keeping that poor, dead duck from completely matching my "vision" of it was the cartoon "x" instead of an open, fly-crawling eye, some squiggly, cartoon "stink-lines" rising up from it, and of course, as mentioned, a light bulb screwed into its sky-pointing ass. And if I was capable of accepting a worldview with spirits in it, like John had, I'd known it was an omen they were sending me forewarning me that I was soon going to be getting hauled back to the Meds Rez and would too soon end up feeling like a "light bulb screwed into a dead duck's ass!" But of course, such a spirit-filled worldview is too big and frightening for me, so all I saw on the road on my way to that "grocery store debacle" was the fly-buzzing corpse of a duck whose death made me feel sad.

Yeah, I know!—I know what I am talking about, Dear Reader, when I say, "grocery store debacle," but you don't, do you? Guess I better tell you. (Yeah, I know—as if I could not fuckin' tell you, compulsive babblogger that I am!) I went shopping for groceries Monday afternoon, and having avoided doing so for a good long while, ended up with that small, sit-the-kid area of the grocery cart half full of real food, and the whole of the big part full of every dedicated toker's de rigueur requirements—munchie-junk! While I was standing in line at the only open till—and had been for a good bit longer than my agitated, manic and paranoid—scorpion!—state could easily endure—my turn came up and I was just starting to load my stuff on the belt when this tall punk of a teen carrying a 2 liter bottle of Coke and a bag of Doritos crashed past me and slammed my cart into my not inconsiderable and tender gut as he gave me a "Fuck you, Bitch" glare while ostentatiously plunking his junk down on the belt in front of mine.

And I think you might know the type! He was one of those pits-reeking, stinking-like-an-ashtray half-men, with a pimpled face and a peach-fuzz, wannabe mustache. His closely-cropped, peanut-shaped head was holding up a filthy, ass-backwards baseball hat and his thin, white neck sported a bunch of black, ugly, badly-executed, jail-house tats, while the upside-down letters F U C K and Y O U had been crudely tattooed on his knuckles. He was wearing an old, faded and tattered blue jean jacket with a huge crest of Metallica's KILL 'EM ALL album cover crudely sewn on the back of it, and loose, faded, tattered baggy jeans that hung halfway down his skinny ass, which fortunately was covered with a pair of loose blue boxer shorts with white Playboy rabbits on them so I didn't have to get a close-up view of his ass-crack.

I'd seen the asshole in there before and always doing the same thing, though this was the first time he'd done it to me. Well, needless to say, with my modicum off-the-Meds-Rez patience pretty much boiled away by the long wait, my temper on a barely-controlled simmer, and the tail-raised scorpion of my paranoia growing larger by the second, my reaction to this was to shout, "HEY ASSHOLE!—GET TO THE BACK OF THE FUCKING LINE WHERE YA BELONG!"

His reaction was to turn to me and while giving me a big smile-snarl—smarl?—with his thin lips and "flipping me the bird" with his left hand, mockingly breathed a blast of his cigarette-breath into may face as he said, "Fuck you, Fat Cunt!"

Well, like I said, my temper was already on its perpetual, off-the-Meds-Rez boil when I was out in "the world," and the tail-raised scorpion of paranoia was just itching for a swift, hard, stinging strike, so that was all it took to cause "all hell to break loose!". Shouting, "No, FUCK YOU, punk!" I knocked his bottle of Coke and bag of Doritos onto the floor as I reached up, grabbed the collar of his jean jacket, and yanking it for all I was worth, tried to haul him away from the till, except with him being so tall and me so short, I ended up yanking more down than away and ended up sending him sprawling on his back on the floor, half wrecking the gum and candy bar display beside us and sending the people behind us scurrying back in a flurry.

Then—and believe me, this was not planned!—when I went to walk around him to take my rightful place at the till, I stepped on something—a cello-bag of candy, I think—that instantly slid along the floor that had been made slippery by coke fizzing from the cracked plastic bottle, causing me to fall face-first towards it. Except it wasn't the floor that I was falling towards, but that dip-shit punk, and my gargantuan gut landed on his skinny chest, causing all the air to blast out of his lungs with a short, loud whoosh and right into my face, almost suffocating me with his teeth-brushed-last-year halitosis and the remnants of stale smoke still lingering somewhere in the befouled depths of his lungs.

Now, when you are as obese as I am, falling on your face—even if the landing is softened by a skinny asshole of a punk—is no small matter, because getting up again is a real big deal. I mean, the fatter you get, the meaner gravity gets! (After a point, to us Obesiods, Earth-gravity starts to feel like Jupiter-gravity and if I could move to the moon and shed a couple hundred pounds that way, I would do it tomorrow!)

So, needless to fucking say, I was really pissed by this "tumble" of events, and though I made a frantic effort to get off that ugly streak of dog-shit I'd fallen onto, it was anything but an easy process since there was no room, because of the narrowness of the check-out aisle, for me to roll onto my back so I could sit up and get the people behind me to give me a hand to get to me feet. Thus all I could do was push down with my hands on Punk's skinny chest to try and lever myself to my knees, and though prior to my doing that, hardly any sounds had escaped from his snarling, hate-distorted, halitosis-hole because he didn't have an ounce of air left in his lungs to make any, when I did press down—with most of my not inconsiderable weight—he found enough residual air to let out a low, pitiful groan that, as quickly as he could suck some air back into his lungs, transmogrified into a very loud and pained one.

After that loud, eerie groan, all was strangely silent for a moment save for the hissing of coke fizzing and foaming out of a crack in his bottle of Coke, then the people behind me started cheering and clapping, with several of them willingly grabbing me under my armpits and let out a few loud grunts as they helped me launch my bulk off that skinny sack of shit and back on my feet. (They should have over-head cranes in grocery stores for contingencies like that!)

On my finally removing my corpus obesus from his chest, Punk was able to drag in three or four long and desperate gasps of air, each accompanied by a low moan, after which he woozily struggled to his feet, and after catching a few more obviously painful breaths, "flipped a bird" on each hand—the F U C K Y O U ! on his knuckles now right-side up—then shoved both into my face as he spit-spewing groan-screamed, "FUCK YOU, YOU FAT CUNT!—I'LL FUCKIN' GET YOU FOR THIS!"

While all this was going on, the cashier had paged the manager, and he very quickly rushed out of the back to deal with this melee. His name was Serge Belanger and was a second or third cousin of mine (with John's/my family having been so damn big, I had no end of cousins of varying degrees in that area) so he not only knew about me as Crazy Rachel, but actually knew me—kinda—and he dumbfounded stared for a good few seconds at the scene of the tipped-over candy shelf, with packages of gum and chocolate bars all over the floor, half of them swimming in the Coke that was still squirting and foaming out of that bottle, before finally putting on his manager-hat and ordering the cashier to move over to the other till, but not before paging the stock boy to get out there with a pail and mop to clean things up.

After doing that, he turned, not to me as I expected, but directly to Punk, who'd still had his "birds" in my face and was repetitively spitting, from his pain-racked face, a rat-swarm of "FUCK YOU, FAT CUNT's" into my fat, scowling face as I contemplated grabbing those "birds" and snapping them off his up-jerking hands. I guess Serge intuited—or just plain telepathically sensed that I was about to go scorpion-ballistic and do something really violent to Punk, he stepped between us and shouted at him to calm down and shut up.

When Punk finally shut his big ugly halitosis-hole full as it was of nicotine-stained and half-rotted teeth and all was silent save for the hissing of that Coke bottle, Serge asked what the fracas (he actually used that word) was all about, and when I said I'd been standing in line for "I don't know how goddamn long when this piece-of-shit punk rudely pushed his way in front of me! Who the hell does he think he is!"

On my saying that, several of the people behind me piped up and said, "Yeah, he did—he's always doing that!" Punk, meanwhile had been standing there holding his left hand to his left rib cage and painfully trying to catch his breath, but his response to my words was to reach his arm around Serge so he could jam a right-hand "bird" as close to face as he could get it without actually touching me, and shouted, "Gimme a fuckin' break, ya fat ol' Cunt!—All I got is two fuckin' things and you got a whole fuckin' cart full!"

Ironically, if he'd asked me if he could go ahead with his two things instead of barging in front of me—as he also had the three or four behind me—and shoving my cart into my gut, I would have let him without even thinking about it because I was busy loading all my stuff on the belt and his paying for those two items while I was doing that would have made no difference to me! But punk is as punk does! (Just as crazy is as crazy scorpion-reacts to punk's punk-doing!)

Serge's response was to again sternly tell Punk to shut up, and when that asshole finally complied, he sternly said to him, "I've talked to you before about this, Paul, and the last time I did, I said the next time would be the last time you were allowed in this store. Get out! Right now!—and if you are seen in this store again, we'll be calling the police!" Punk Paul's reaction to that was to take a deep, painful breath then flip his twin "birds" into Serge's face and shout, "AH, FUCK YOU TOO, ASSHOLE!", at which point he turned and bolted away from that checkout counter and towards the door, holding his left arm to his left rib cage while using his right to shove the cashier—who'd come out from behind the counter—aside so violently she stumbled into the plate glass window hard enough to send a loud CRAAAAACK! resounding through the store and a huge spider web of cracks arcing through the glass, which fortunately for the poor stunned clerk, did not break.

Serge's response was an instant angry, "Shit! Are you okay, Marie?" And when Marie, after carefully backing away from, then looking at the cracked window and slowly nodding her head in amazement as she slowly fathomed what had almost—and perhaps lethally—happened, she then shuddered and while continuing to nod, said, "Yeah . . . I . . . guess . . .so."

"Thank God you didn't go through that window or you might have been killed! You go to the back for a break and send Sophie out here—and when you're back there, call the police. Paul will be going back to the can where he belongs for that!" After which he turned to all the mouth-gaping customers who were clustered around the front of the store, and said, "Sorry about all this folks. I usually like to keep the express line open but sometimes it gets too quiet for too long and it just isn't needed."

He didn't say anything to me but gave me a long, penetrating look—and probably a long, subtle sniff!—that traveled from my filthy sweat-pants to my equally filthy sweat-top and up to my rat's-nest of hair before finally settling for a few seconds of my fat, pasty, not-exactly-freshly-scrubbed face. And while he was obviously so judgmentally doing that, my paranoia-scorpion was aquiver with the need to take a vicious at him if he said anything to me about my been at fault for what happened—but he didn't say a word as he nodded to me while smiling the most forced smile I'd ever seen on any human being's face in my life, before looking away and stepping over to give the stock boy a hand up-righting the candy stand. And I sure didn't need to be a Betazoid telepath to know exactly what was going through his mind with that look.

By the time I'd got my groceries checked out by a white-faced, hand-trembling Sophie and was pushing my cart through the door, two intimidating, black-and-white, police "Hog-in-waggins" (as Groucho always called them) were pulling up to the front of the store. Not wanting to talk to the oinking likes of them, (you can tell how scorpion-paranoid I was by my thinking of them that way!) I waddle-stomped as fast as I could to my van, loaded in my single bag of groceries and about ten bags of "munchie-junk," squeezed myself behind the high-as-it-would-tilt steering wheel, and "spun wheels" for home and hearth.

Not that my rapid exit from the 'scene of the crime" saved me from a snout-to-snout with "the Pigs," because less than an hour later they were at my door, snorting and snuffling their way into my kitchen so they could root out the truffles of my version of events, (while making sure to keep the door open and obviously trying to not too deeply snuffle in the stench of the place!) with the distaff side of the pair—as young and mean-looking as she was pretty and "built,"—sternly and threateningly asking me if I'd intentionally jumped on Punk.(She called him Paul and I didn't know who the hell she was talking about at first.)

Well, as the scorpion of my paranoia rapidly grew in size and tail-raised ferocity, I was totally flummoxed by the question and just sat uncomprehendingly on my kitchen chair and scorpion-stared up at her until her pig-partner said that Punk—he also called him Paul—had several broken ribs from our encounter, and that if I'd intentionally jumped on him, they would have to charge me with assault.

Well, needless to say, after giving that a few seconds of thought, I let out the loudest guffaw I'd let out in years as I practically howled at her, "Gimme a fuckin' break, will ya! Look at me! I probably weigh half a ton over three hundred fuckin' pounds and I do not fuckin' jump anymore, believe-you-me! And the only time I want to leave my achin' fuckin' feet is to let myself down real fuckin' gently onto a fuckin' couch or a chair . . . or better yet, a fuckin' bed—and sure not to do no fuckin' jumping on no dumb fuckin' punk lying on the fuckin' floor!

"Do you know how fuckin' hard it was for me to fuckin' get up off that stinkin' pile of shit? I fuckin' slipped on some damn thing and fell on that asshole when I was tryin' ta get around him, is what happened! . . . And besides, it is me who should be pressing assault charges against him for ramming my grocery cart into my gut the way he did when he butted into line!"

Needless to say, the trained-to-be-a-paranoid-scorpion who would instantly sting-with-her-pistol-at-the-slightest-provocation, Ms. Piggy, sure did not like my attitude or volume or tone of voice, and sure not all those hostile fuckin's I was so disrespectful-of-her-exalted-Pigginess throwing at her, that she gave me one of her well-practiced, I'M-GONNA-GET-YOU-NOW-ASSHOLE, Colt 45-Dirty Harry stares as she reached for what looked like her taser, but her partner—a patient, and actually nice, middle-aged member of the "Serve and Protect" brigade named Brent, who'd had more than his share of very patient encounters with me over the years—loudly cleared his throat and when he finally got Ms. Piggy's laser-focused, taser-itching attention away from me (I guess she thought this over-blubbered Jabba the Hut was going to turn into a Yoda and take a flying, ten-foot Jedi-leap across that room and squash her like a shoat under a horse's hoof!) and onto him, he subtly shook his head as he frowned as he gave his chin a subtle jerk towards the door, at which point he stood up and said that Paul had said I'd intentionally jumped on him, but he was more than willing to give me the benefit of the doubt that it had been an accidental fall.

And while Ms. Piggy gave me a look that clearly showed her disappointment at not being able to taser the shit—and the life!—out of me after Officer Brent both thanked me for my co-operation and gently suggested I collect up all the old pizza boxes (that were strewn helter-skelter everywhere) and recycle them because they were obviously a serious fire hazard, then the two of them left my house and got back into their Hog-in-waggin. I can just imagine the oink-fest that ensued between nice Kermit Brent and nasty Ms. Piggy as they drove back to the highway and he filled her in on my history.(Please believe me, Dear Patient Reader—it is only my off-the-Meds-Rez scorpion-paranoia that is inducing me to think—and babblog!—so disrespectfully about the police—I mean, no "Sixties-head" ever thought of them in a positive way!—for I am more than cognizant of the fact that without them, we'd be living in a totally dystopian, Mad Max-world of anarchy and mayhem! Actually, a world dominated by the likes of Punk and his anarchic ilk!)

I, the meanwhile, after taking a good look around my kitchen "through their eyes," realized, for the first time in months, what a fucking veritable landfill it had turned into. Half-rotted and moldy food-junk fought for space with empty boxes and chip and nacho—and other junk-ilk—bags, but what really dominated that poor kitchen that John had always kept so clean and tidy, was an uncountable number of pizza boxes and booze bottle strewn just about everywhere.

I was so stunned that I hadn't even realized it had become such an "after-the-hurricane" mess until seeing it through the eyes of those two "pigs!" I guess that whole fuckin' kitchen had become like "the picture that hangs on the wall too long!" The thought of even making the slightest of efforts to undertake the gargantuan clean-up that poor place needed, stressed and depressed me so badly I had to pour myself a glass full of that magical "Russian potato water" in order to calm myself down, and after performing my long-perfected, down-the-hatch-in-one-gulp magical trick, I spent more than a few minutes in a real bad, scorpion-paranoid state shaking like a badly built building during an 8.0 quake and thinking about how Ms. Piggy had reacted to me, while too-vividly remembering a not-too-many-years-ago incident in the "Big Shitty" south of here that really got a lot of news coverage after the mentally discombobulated teen—Sammy Yatim—had been on a street car and had threatened some real scorpion-paranoid Pig with an itty-bitty knife (Jeez kid, whaddaya doin', bringin' a fuckin' knife to a fuckin' gunfight?)—at about twenty feet!—with that scorpion-paranoid Pig then proceeding to righteously scorpion-sting the poor kid nine times—9—fuckin' times with his automatic pistol!

### BANG!

### BANG!

### BANG!

### BANG!

### BANG!

### BANG!

### BANG!

### BANG!

### BANG!

If you can fuckin' believe that! Fuck, he could have killed a whole pack of raging timber wolves with that barrage! (Aw, right!—he must have thought that poor kid was a monstrous, knife-wielding saber-toothed cat with nine lives that he had to successively snuff out before he could feel safe!) And with hollow-point bullets, each single one of them capable of killing a fucking grizzly bear, and then when the kid was surely as dead as JFK, a second, scorpion-paranoid Pig ran up and tasered his cooling corpse—just to make sure! Though make sure of what, I truly am not even remotely sure! Maybe he just wanted his share of the credit for that impromptu execution. (Jus' doin' ma share a th' job, Boss!) Or maybe he knew the pathologists at the morgue prefer to have their "meat" partially cooked before it gets sent to them! (AND THEY SAY I'M FUCKIN' CRAZY!)

But if you are at all tuned into world events you will only too well know exactly what our modern, scorpion-paranoid, psychopathic Pigs are like in our current—and for the most part cunningly camouflaged!—affluent, western "police states," where they are outfitted with enough body armor to make a Roman soldier look like he's naked, enough weapons to make a WW2 combat soldier look like a Buddhist monk, and where they get no-end of training, not only in being in a constant state of fear and scorpion-paranoia, but in the Sith-arts of proficiently and oppressively using of all those weapons in order to intimidate and control the civilian populace with fear and paranoia.

To them, anyone who ain't one of them, is a potential, unpredictable and lethal enemy in need of intimidation and control, and thus they are ever-ready—and more than willing-and-able!—to maim and kill us sub-human, civilian vermin who don't wear blue uniforms, carry intimidating, authoritarian badges, and are always carrying a hidden array of weapons in our sweats and Ts, and of course, are just itching to act-out on the wrong side of the law. (Fuck, I feel like I'm channeling that "draft-dodgin' hippie Groucho right now—though I am sure that now he is Professor Groucho, his ideas about the "Pigs" has done a one-eighty and he now sees them as stalwart defenders of his cherished, up-statused, ivory-towered, professorial way of life!)

And of course, those poor, over-trained scorpion-pigs, just don't get near enough excuses to use all those deliciously lethal weapons and all that expertly instilled scorpion-paranoia and hard training—so they invent them! I mean, shit!—if that pig who executed poor Sammy Yatim had had the courage of an eight-year-old school girl, he would have walked up to the door of that street car with his empty hands in full view and said, "Calm down, son—and put that knife on the floor then have a sit-down in one of those seats so we can talk this problem through before it gets out of hand."

But of course, when you've been trained to be a frightened, over-armored, over-armed coward whose job description is to be constantly scorpion-paranoid, the stinger of your automatic pistol speaks infinitely more authoritatively than conciliatory and calming words.

And needless to say, this brings to mind that poem long ago written by John's soldier friend and somewhere way back already presented:

A man is a man,

And a gun is a gun,

But a man with a gun

Is not a man and a gun,

But a gunman.

Well sure, I know all this shit I'm writing is just my walkabout-from-the-Meds-Rez, real fucking crazy me so manically babblogging my fat fingers off, but fuck!—there was a recent run of items on my Web-news "nose-bag" about an off-duty, white Ms. Piggy in Texas who waltzed into the wrong apartment—allegedly claiming she thought it was her own, which was one floor down—and shot the black male resident of it because, as she scorpion-paranoid claimed, he was a "looming shadow" that "threatened" her. (I will give her credit: she only used 2 "stings" to scorpion-execute that poor guy, not nine like Sammy's executioner!) It looks like that "Lethal Symbiosis" applies to gunwomen as much to gunmen. Though fuck-a-warm-gun-barrel!—but from the look of her mug shot, she was one very scorpion-paranoid and stinger-mean Ms. Piggy who probably slept with her gun between her legs—and a spare clip stored up her . . . ahem, privates!)

But back to Sammy Yatim's sad and tragic execution! In John's worldview—but not necessarily so in mine—and as expressed in that poem, the instant that cowardly and scorpion-paranoid Pig drew his very lethal gun for a situation that clearly demanded no such extreme an action, he ceased to be a human being and symbiotically morphed into a machine-human hybrid with the preponderance of that dark symbiosis belonging to the machine, to the gun side, so poor discombobulated Sammy with his silly knife was no longer a human being deserving of some human compassion, some human understanding, and some human patience, just a terrifying, law-breaking, disturber-of-peace-and-order problem that needed some expedient, machine-assisted and machine-dictated solving: BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!: "Problem solved, Partner! Let's move on to the next problem. I'll re-load along the way."

Interestingly, "Constable Nine-Shots" had his trial a couple of years ago for his execution of poor Sammy and—surprise! surprise!—he actually got convicted! But for—get this, Dear Reader!—attempted murder! Now fuck-a-discharging-taser!—but I am not the most legal-savvy person on this Gulag Earth, but when one of our Gulag Guards pumps nine hollow-point rounds into a kid brandishing an itty-bitty knife on an empty street-car, likely killing him deader than Jimmy Hoffa with the first shot, and gets convicted of attempted murder, what would one of those Dirty Harrys have to do to get convicted of murder—perform the video-taped, assault-rifle slaughter of a day-care full of toddlers. Or a parliament full of fat-cat politicos? But as Charles Dickens said, "The law is an ass!" (AND THEY SAY I'M FUCKING CRAZY!)

And while I'm "ridin'-the-rocket" of this off-the-Meds-Rez, anti-Pig rant, how can I now make a "The law is an ass!" comment about those twelve, future MAGA-hatter-jurors who found that herd of video-taped Pigs who battered Rodney King almost to death, not guilty. Though of course, endemic cretinism—personally, I think the nouns cretin, moron, imbecile, dimwit, blockhead, ignoramus, etc should be retired and replaced with the blanket-term, MAGA-hatters—might have had nothing to do with that absurd judgment on the blatantly criminal actions of those King-battering Pigs, but more likely they were actually quite smart as they rightfully felt extremely intimidated by, and fearful of a bout of truncheon-retaliation from, the rampantly racist and out-of-control LA Boarforce to even come close to being able to dispense justice.

I mean, can you just imagine their fates had they had the temerity to rightfully convict that sounder of Swine, that passel of Hogs, that herd of over-testosteroned LAPD Boars caught on video giving that "black bastard" King his "just desserts"—they'd all have had to forthwith change their names, get Hollywood face-jobs and then flee to Vladivostok—or Easter Island!—to feel even remotely safe from the inevitable tsunami of "Blue Revenge" that would have crashed over them and have made Mr. King's beating look like a therapeutic massage! (Most apropos: when I was looking up the bio of that trigger-happy Boar who executed poor Sammy, I discovered that though he is a Canuck, he got some "law-and-order" schooling at the "justice program" offered by the East Los Angeles College in Monterey Park, California—from which I am sure he graduated with honors! 'Nuff said about that!)

So needless to say, I'd done a fair bit of 8.0 quake-shakin' as I most magically made four glasses of that enchanting "Moscow Mineral Water" and scorpion-paranoia wondered how close I'd come to getting my "Righteous and Deserved 9" from that very equally scorpion-paranoid Ms. Piggy. Good damn thing her partner knew me—and was older and hadn't been trained to the same modern level of shoot-the-vermin-first-so-you-don't-have-to-ask-any-questions-later, Boar-State paranoia of his young partner. (Pigner?) And I'll fuckin' tell ya this, Dear Reader—straight-shootin' (LOL) and with no sophistry—when those two over-armed and over-armored Pigs were in my kitchen, they surely did take up a lot of space—both physical and psychic!—and everything about them roared (roinked?) INTIMIDATE and COERCE, with the only sense of Serve and Protect I got from them was Ms. Piggy's very paranoid and assiduously trained need to SERVE and PROTECT their precious image of INTIMIDATE and COERCE! I truly did, for that very scorpion-paranoid period of time, get a glimmer of a sense of what all those unfortunate Jews must have felt like in the presence of Hitler's Gestapo!

Like I've likely already told you, Dear Reader—when I'm passively ensconced behind the chemical-fence of the Meds Rez, I have a great deal of respect for that "Serve and Protect" crew, (actually, they are like Constantine's Imperial Abomination to me—totally not on my law-abiding radar at all!) but since it's been too long now since I climbed into my Cor-azy-vette and took this "Preface"-blogging road trip from "the Rez," and have been doing all this manic, power-driving along this endless, Loon Lane, by keeping my soul hydrated on gallons of "Moscow Mineral Water" and in loon-flight with a few "bales"—I wish!—of "hippie-fescue" purchased at my favorite "street-corner farmer's market." And though I have, more than a few times, been tempted to give myself a super-boost by doing some "deep breathing exercises" with the NASA (Not Always a Sane Assist) rocket-fuel, aka, cocaine, that was left over from my last Meds-Rez-walkabout-adventure, and which I have been storing in the freezer but been reluctant to indulge in because cold-turkeying off that nasty shit always drop-kicks me into a black hole of depression as big as the Andromeda galaxy!

I mean, no hipsters who liked their "fescue"—or their protest marches—in those days had anything but a scorpion-paranoid view of "the Pigs" with their "INTIMIDATE and COERCE" attitude that was so accurately summed up by Stephen Stills in his great song with Buffalo Springfield about Pig-State paranoia and violence, "For What It's Worth," with the line, "You step out of line, the man come and take you away." Except times have changed, the line is being drawn in an ever tighter and tighter circle around us, and "the man" now includes "the woman," every last one of whom is, I am sure, as well trained in the Boar-arts of intimidating, coercing, baton-bashing, tasering, and 9-shot-executing us citizen-vermin, as the men! (Google the story of the infamous, perma-PMS, Officer 728, if you don't believe the scorpion-paranoid Ms. Piggies on our modern Boarforces can be as violently boarish as their male counterparts!)

But hey, while on the very pertinent subject of police-state-paranoia and brutality, Wiki and YouTube the unbelievably excessive display—like it was Russia or Egypt, for fuck's sake!—of Boarforce violence used at the 2010 G20 summit in the "Big Shitty" south of here, and if you want to take an Alice-fall into a real dark and totally absurd Boar Wonderland, check out the Robert Dziekanski debacle at the airport in our beautiful, west coast "Big Shitty," in which four of our brave and stalwart, "always-get-their-man," National Horsemen—hey, at least try to imagine four over-armed and over-armored boars riding their four apocalyptic horses into this uber-dangerous airport situation!—tasered the poor tired and confused, spikky-no-Angielski Polish traveler to death for having threatened them with a 50-shot . . . stapler! (They must have thought they were frail pictures of boars and not tough-and-trained-and-armed-and-armored real ones!)

But of course—again, while I'm ridin' this ant-boar "rant-rocket!"—how can we forget the absolute "Mother" of all dark and utterly mind-blowing falls into Boar Wonderland and boar-brutality that Springsteen's so aptly captured in his great song, "American Skin (41 Shots)!" A great, consciousness-raising song inspired by the truly bizarre and inconceivable NYC incident where four super-scorpion-paranoid boars fired 41 shots at an unarmed black man—and if you don't know the story behind it, Google it. Yup, forty one fuckin' shots to kill a young man—Amadou Diallo—who, though he'd been unarmed, had nonetheless committed not one, but three heinous crimes to set off and justify his execution: ONE, he'd 23 years before been unwise enough to have been born black in Guinea; TWO he'd subsequently been even more unwise, in his unalterable blackness, to have emigrated to the WFSA (White Fascist States of America); And THREE, he'd threatened the lives and the sacrosanct power of four utterly gutless, powerful, scorpion-paranoid NYPD boars by reaching into his pocket for his . . . wallet! Not just an uber-lethal, 50-shot stapler in this case, but an infinitely more lethal wallet! (As everyone knows—those damn credit cards really are dangerous!)

So that herd of scorpion-paranoid boars with the collective courage of a ten-year-old school girl—or boy!—really had no choice but to go all Dirty Harry on this terrifying, wallet-wielding miscreant and let him have his 41 "just deserts,"

### BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

### BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

### BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

### BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

### BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG

### BANG!

But shit—didn't those boars just know that a mere 9 would have done the job just fine! Oh yeah, I forgot, he was a black man, so that meant at least another 9 was needed just to release some righteous racial hostility! But 41???? Fuck, that's not just over-kill—that's the making of human hamburger! Though of course, I am forgetting "only" 19 of those shots,

### BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

### BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

### BANG! BANG! BANG!

fired by that "gang-that-couldn't-shoot-straight" (school-girl fear really affects the capacity to aim an automatic pistol!) actually hit the hapless and likely-dead-after-the-first-shot Amadou—they sure weren't Dirty Harrys!—so I guess he was only turned into partially-ground hamburger. And I do just have to wonder—in but another wild and whacky flight of loon-thought—if one of those psychopathic boars ran up and tasered that bleeding heap of partially-ground hamburger after the smoke had cleared? Just to be sure he and his deadly wallet—those credit cards, ya know!—no longer constituted a lethal threat to their school-kid safety!

And of course, those four near-sighted, hand-trembling, wild-shooting. school-kid-frightened, scorpion-paranoid boars (it's a wonder a half dozen other innocent "civilian vermin" weren't slaughtered by those 22 errant bullets!) were ACQUITTED of all charges by a jury, every Big Apple citizen-slice of which was savvy enough to know they that they'd have been turned into packages of pre-wrapped hamburger distributed to a few dozen NYC corner grocery stores by the New York Boarforce if they'd convicted their "Brothers-in-Blue," and that in being ordinary citizens—and not close associates of the future, Mad Kind Donald—they couldn't afford face-jobs and the necessary panicked relocations of themselves and their families to Outer Mongolia, Vladivostok, the Falkland Islands, or Moose Jaw, to keep that from happening.

And once again, because it seems so damn accurate and apropos, I'll copy-and-paste for your bored and weary eyes and souls that poem by John's soldier friend,

A man is a man,

And a gun is a gun,

But a man with a gun

Is not a man and a gun,

But a gunman.

Except in this case, it would seem it was four powerful guns over-powering and totally controlling four very weak and cowardly human psyches, creating such a collective and overpowering gun-dominated symbiosis that poor, hapless Amadou's "hamburger" fate was instantly "cello-wrapped and heat-sealed" (LOL) the moment those four powerful guns were grasped by the obviously trembling hands of those four weak and cowardly NYC boars. (Nay—shoats!) Or at least—once again!—that's the way John would have seen things, because—once again—I'm not quite so certain and accepting of that eerie, mystical worldview of his that he was so damn certain and accepting of. (A head-fucking worldview where inanimate things like guns can have distinct and powerful consciousnesses that can affect, even direct, our human consciousnesses.)

Fuck-a-warm-gun!—but I just had the horrifying thought that someday a Boar or two might, by some strike-of-lightning chance, read that above mystical explanation for the uncontrolled and unnecessary Boar-shooting of us civilian vermin, and after the next horrific execution, use "the gun made me do it!" defense at their trail. But of course, since I am not writing this in Pig-Latin (LOL), none of them will be able to read it anyway . . . and of course (redux)—since so few of them ever get convicted by any jury savvy enough to know what's good for them, they don't need any such sort of defense anyway. (All they have to do is say, "I felt threatened" and that both justifies and ends the matter right there! But fuck-a-warm-assault-rifle!—I wonder how many of those gutless-wonders have 9-shot their own shadows while walking from their Hog-in-waggin into a crime scene!)

And yeah, yeah, yeah—I fuckin' know, Dear Put-Upon Reader, I'm waaaaaaaay outta line with all this anti-Boar shit, especially since most Pigs do actually behave more like human beings than like rabid boars, and actually do, do a good bit of Serving and Protecting of us civilians, but sometimes those people hired to protect our society from devolving into Mad Max-chaos, themselves become agents of Mad Max-chaos. Which would be a lot more acceptable if our legal systems held them accountable for their Mad Max-behaviors . . . though of course, they then wouldn't be Mad Max behaviors, would they? But, as you too damn fuckin' well know, I'm severely walkabout—Cor-azy-vette road-trip!—from my Meds-Rez and crazy-writes-as-crazy-is, so suck it up! Or skip it! Or skim it! Or delete this whole fuckin' pile of dog-barf of a FUBAR "Preface!"

And yeah, yeah!—I also fuckin' know I shouldn't be wasting the precious little babblogging time I have left before Sheriff Jonathan arrives at this "El Rancho Loco" to lasso his wayward, escaped-from-the meds-pasture loon-cow of a mother and haul her off to the Shrink-Corral for a couple of sledge-hammer blows of brain-mushing head-lightning! And just as importantly, obviously, wasting all your precious reading-time with all this real smelly and irrelevant Pig shit because 99% of it has absolutely nothing to do with the theme of this FUBAR "Preface," which was supposed to be a lot about my Uncle John (LOL) and his strange and interesting life and his even more strange and sometimes even interesting, "philosophical" ideas—while being just a little bit about me as the "memory-keeper" of his life and those ideas—but which has ended up way too much about me! And about the irrelevant-to-this-"Preface" loon-lake that I have been swimming in since John died—and especially since voluntarily taking my loon-flight from the Meds-Marsh I'd been confined to on that Loon Lake, which has engendered all of the hundreds of irrelevant, off-the-fucking-topic-by-a-parsec loon-flights, but my rampant, out-of-the-Meds-Marsh mania is a veritable Charybdis of self-absorption that always pulls me into its roiling, paranoid, self-absorbed depths, so, if you want to sail the crazy, Missinggttheppoint river-boat of this "Preface" to its rapidly approaching delta-terminal on the Gulf of Stark Raving Madness, you'll just have to suck that up too!

Suck it up because what I am caught in here—besides that Charybdis of my self-absorption!—is the a real nasty wolf-trap of a Catch 22, the nature of which, as I'm sure I've said too many times already, is such that if I hadn't loon-flown out of my confining Meds-Marsh I'd not be capable of writing diddly-squat about anything at all. So in order to write this anything-at-all "Preface," I've had to fly out of the confinement of that Meds-Marsh, which of course, has not only allowed me to write this damn long FUBAR "Preface" (a few paragraphs of which might actually make sense!) but also allowed (induced?) me to make enough of a chaotic mess of my "life" that poor dear Jonathan is being forced to take an unwanted hiatus from his distant, busy life in order to very expensively fly across the country to sort things—and me—out. (Actually, once I get back to the Meds-Marsh and straighten out my FUBAR finances, I'll reimburse him for his expenses. Not that that even matters, since when I make my final, spirit-being flight out of that Meds-Marsh, seventy percent of everything I own will belong to him.)(I'd split it 50-50 between him and Terry, but he's done a lot more for me than she has—and I doubt she even wants a nickel from me anyway!)

And the reason Sheriff Jonathan is riding to the rescue of his FUBAR loon of a mother, is that a few years ago, after my last ridiculous, too-long-a-loon-flight-away-from-the-Meds-Marsh romp that had driven me into a deep psychosis—and the Shrink-Klink for . . . Ohhhhhh, this is a story worth telling.

I'd been on my loads-of-fun loon-flight out of my Meds-Marsh for a good while at that time and was keeping up "appearances of sanity" as best I was able until I went to the local tavern one Saturday night after "deep-breathing" several lines of that NASA rocket-fuel to get head-blasted and soul-obliterated drunk while minding my business sitting a dark, far corner of the room listening to a not-half-bad Bob Seeger tribute band trying not quite hard enough to not mangle his great songs into unrecognizability, when a drunken, truck-driver (truck-driver was my then contemptuous epithet for any stupid, asshole male who wore a curved-brim baseball hat—this was before MAGA-hatter became more appropriate and descriptive!—so he may or may not have been a truck driver) spied me sitting there, lurched over and tried to pick me up with the truly "great" line of, "Whale, hello dthere, Shubby! . . . Ya knows sumpthin'? . . . Ya looks lots jus' like thadt TV star, Roshanne. . . . I'm ah real big fan a hersh—if ya gets ma drifdt! . . . Ya wanna get it on? Fadt women really git my nodt-so-liddul, 'liddul red rooshster' up an' crowin'!"

Well suck-the-head-off-any-sized-little-red-"rooshter!"—maybe a normal "fat woman" might have been dick-desperate enough to have taken being compared to Rosanne a compliment and suddenly developed enough of a crotch-monsoon to want to give that ugly drunken fuck-wad of a "truck driver" a bed-mashing tumble, but not this crazy coked, toked and drunk, "fat woman," who was only in that bar for the booze and the music and, to paraphrase the wise Ben Kenobi, totally uninterested in any "inguinal entanglements."

So, in an instantly-erupting, absolutely nuclear red-rage—very likely turbo-charged by that NASA rocket-fuel—I scorpion-responded to that "great" pick-up line with a vicious grab of his "little red rooshter" and the two eggs it had been spending a lifetime vainly trying to hatch, and squeezed them with all the manic, red-raged, scorpion-rearing strength I could focus into my fat fingers, and while he instantly doubled over so his face was inches from mine, he opened wide his cigarette-and-booze reeking maw of a mouth and let fly a dragon of a scream that swooped in and out of every ear in that whole fuckin' bar—even over that amply-amplified music being played by that not-half-bad band humping its way through "The Fire Down Below." And when his lack of breath caused that dragon of a scream to run out of steam, it was my turn to dragon-scream every curse word I knew into his inches-from-mine-and-eyes-bulging-face.

And when I got tired of cursing, I screamed at him that I wished he wasn't wearing that filthy pair of Levis because I wanted to rip his dirty junk off and eat it! Literally! (And though I have no memory of doing so, I was later told by a head-tech at the Shrink-Klink—not my old friend, Doc Booger, who, alas, is no longer there!—that it would seem that in my uncontrollable, NASA rocket-fueled rage, and since I couldn't get my incisors into his "junk," I grabbed his hair with my left hand, dragged his face to my mouth, and bit a chunk out of his cheek, chewed it, and then—POL!—swallowed it!)(Yeah, I fucking know—I want to barf myself just writing about that truly insane incident!)

Needless to say, I didn't hear the rest of that band's sets that night, nor did I sleep off my T-Rex of a hangover in my own bed as I was forthwith shrink-wrapped in that "long-white-bathrobe-with-no-arms then ambulanced to the shrink-clink, injected with enough tranquilizers to drop a rhino, and strapped to a bed until Sheriff Jonathan arrived and signed the papers for me to be head-lightninged a half-dozen times—and again have my "loon wings" chemically clipped so I could be kept safely and predictably confined in my Med-Marsh. Or Meds-Rez, if you prefer that metaphor! Not that the metaphors matter, because the net result is always the simile I hate the most, those poisonous chemicals always making me feel like Sprocket's "light bulb screwed into a dead duck's ass!"

So after having to fly across the country at a real bad time in his normally good life far, far away from me, in order to get me "back on the Meds-Marsh/Rez, he wanted to make sure that if I went walkabout from that rez again, that the situation never got left so long, or got that bad, (he was less than thrilled to know he had a fuckin' cannibal for a mother!) so he'd left both his cell and home phone numbers—and email address—with various businesses in town—particularly the bar!—and had asked them to call him as soon as they noticed me acting even a little bit like I was off my meds—or in the case of the bar, if I showed up in there even once!—so it was no surprise that Serge very quickly gave him a heads-up about that incident in his grocery store. (I was surprised Bev hadn't called him about that incident in the liquor store, but that's likely only because she'd lost his number—or didn't really give a flyin' fuck!

Though I know he'd be really, really pissed if he knew about another incident—though I guess crazy-confrontation would be a more accurate term—that I set in motion only the day after that grocery store debacle. And there should be no surprise, Dear Reader, at it happening so quickly after the other incident because an off-the-Meds-Marsh loon-slide into the chaos of uncontrollable insanity is like a slide off a steep roof: the farther you slide the faster you go and the more inevitable the disastrous outcome! But I won't tell you about that incident because it really is on the crazy side.

Well . . . maybe I will—just so you can get an idea of how crazy, crazy can be! I mean, most normal people who don't work with us "loons" have no idea of the nature of the lake of absurdities we strange birds swim in, so to get to the nitty-pissy of this next incident, I'll fast forward to the very next afternoon and those same two Pigs, nice Kermit and scorpion-paranoid Ms. Piggy, again parking their Hog-in-waggin in front of my little-wooden-house-that-John-gave-me and again—very shallowly!—snorting and snuffling their INTIMIDATE and COERCE-way into my kitchen, this time really intent on taking up space and looking to root up a whole lot of truffles of trouble.

And I guess after getting "loony tuned-in" by Kermit about my mental issues after their previous visit, Ms. Piggy remained silent and did her level best to not make eye-contact with me as she assiduously looked around the veritable landfill—pig sty!—that my kitchen had become. (Like many normal people, she likely not only found the idea of me being crazy very disturbing, but also seemed frightfully convinced my insanity was as contagious and dangerous as Ebola or leprosy, and that if she got to close to me, she might catch it!) Kermit, meanwhile, patiently talked to me about the reason they were again visiting me.

This had to do with an incident that had happened that morning when I'd gone to the liquor store to replenish my supply of magical "Moscow Mineral Water," my absolutely one hundred percent essential off-the-Meds-Marsh brain-balm and soul-lubricant, and after Gollum-careful putting the box containing a half-dozen of my "Preciouses" on the passenger seat, had responded to my dire need to take a piss by squatting down in the parking lot beside my van and giving the pavement a long golden shower. (I'd decided to wear one of my long, loose-fitting skirts that day instead of those filthy sweats of the day before, and one of the advantages of wearing a such a skirt and no underpants—or thong (LOL!)—is one—as a woman!—can easily do things like that!)

I hadn't thought to check if anyone was looking, but it turned out some old couple with their grandkids in tow saw the incident and phoned the local Pig Sty to report it, giving them my license plate number to seal the deal. Kermit didn't use the word piss, but the more professional, urinated, and I had to laugh as I heard that ever-so-proper word—so much like vagina instead of cunt!—and laugh even harder I did as I said, while giving my skirt a couple of sedate fluffs, "What was their fuckin' problem? I was wearing this long skirt . . . and it completely covered what I was doing, so nobody saw a damn thing! And sure not my fat ugly ol' ass!"

I could see Kermit was trying to keep a smile off his well-shaven, trying-for-a-friendly-look frog-pig face as he sternly said, "Rachel, we are not here over an issue of indecent exposure, but just to talk to you about that fact that a public parking lot is not a public toilet and it is neither lawful nor healthy to use it as one."

Now my immediate, and ready-to-erupt reaction was to go scorpion-paranoid-Vesuvius on him and let him have an lava-blast of righteous Mt. Rachel-rage (wow, is that ever a fucked up metaphor!)—just for the insane sake of doing so—but I first suddenly and unmistakably smelled—more like hallucinated that I smelled!—the room fill up with the scent of Old Spice aftershave, then I felt—or hallucinated that I felt!—a familiar and room-filling presence manifest beside me on that kitchen chair—then move right into me!—and very forcibly calm me down, first with its presence, then with one simple word, "RACHEL!", though of course, it was less the hearing—or the hallucinating!—of my name, and more, the roar of John's stern, pissed-off-grizzly-bear voice that had the effect of giving me the incentive to use every last tiny bit of willpower I possessed—and perhaps a good bit of his!—to calm myself down, thus preventing a disastrous—cuff-the-fat-fuckin'-loon-and-call-for-the-straight-jacket-crew!—escalation of that incident.

I was sure that I was not the only one that had smelled that scent of Old Spice, or had felt John's presence and had heard—or had hallucinated!—John's suddenly bear-roar of my name, but almost as fast as I heard and responded to it, I could see that both Kermit and Ms. Piggy were flaring their nostrils and taking short sniffs, then both their faces displaying puzzled looks, as if they'd not only smelled the scent of that aftershave that was suddenly, and most blessedly, overpowering both the stench of the long-unwashed and un-laundered me, and of the over-flowing landfill that kitchen had devolved into, but also sensed that something "unusual" had just happened in that kitchen—centering around me.

And on my so suddenly and most unexpectedly and inexplicably—to them!—calming down and saying, in as affable a manner as I could muster, "Yes, yes, Officers, you are right—it was a very silly thing for me to do. I don't know what came over me. But I sure won't do it again!—I can promise you that!" they very quickly got up to leave. And while a visibly shaken—her face a very Procol Harum "whiter shade of pale"—Ms. Piggy, her hands white-knuckled gripping her thick, black loaded-for-bear-with-every-conceivable-weapon belt, strode to the door, while Kermit, his face not quite so pasty, gave me a somewhat bewildered look as he said, "Thank you for your co-operation, Rachel. . . . And I hope we don't have to come back out here tomorrow to discuss another . . . 'incident'."

And on me giving him as friendly a smile as I could muster under the circumstances, along with the heartfelt assurance that they definitely would not have to be back for a third visit, he followed his fleeing partner out the door. Ms. Piggy was driving and she actually "spun-wheels" out of my yard so hastily that their Hog-in-waggin shot a clattering barrage of gravel onto my steps and door.

And I can say that it was most fortunate that I had hallucinated all that stuff concerning John and his displeasure with my very, loon-escaped-from-the-Meds-Marsh behavior, but it was most unfortunate that Kind Kermit and Mean Ms. Piggy had also hallucinated it, especially since they aren't' certifiable loons—or I assume they are not—which kind of intimates—but does not definitely prove!—that what happened in the kitchen at that most precarious of moments, was not a shared hallucination—a folie a deux—but a bona fide manifestation of what that creep Castaneda would have called, non-ordinary reality!

So though with the—perhaps/maybe—non-ordinary help of John, I dodged a real nasty ketamine-bullet (or maybe even nine, lead, hollow-points!) with that incident resolving itself as amicably as it had. I mean, just before I hallucino-smelled that kitchen filling up with that scent of Old Spice, and I hallucino-heard that single shout of my name (I assume I was the only one to hear it!) I could feel some real big, nasty and raging scorpion-demons about to break loose from my psyche and sting-swarm all over those two very reasonable Pigs, which possibly would have led to me being righteously nine-shot by Ms. Piggy, or at the very least, given a half-dozen jolts of body-lightning—tazering!—then once I'd dropped to the floor, have my fat arms violently "Pig-handled" behind my back and roughly cuffed—if the things would've even fit around my fat wrists!—then after a few kicks in my fat gut and blubber-protected ribs to let me know how pissed they were (and who truly was the boss!) pig-marched into their Hog-in-waggin for a most uncomfortable trip to the Shrink-Klink. Though given that their double-dose of body-lightning would have likely caused me to both piss and shit myself, they would most likely have left me lying on the floor in my filth, and while Ms. Piggy kept her spit-polished boot planted firmly on my neck, Kermit would have called the Shrink-Klink to have an ambulance dispatched with a couple of ex-linebacker "attendants" in it who had the strength, aggression, drugs and the straight-jacket needed to control me for that twenty-some mile trip.

And of course, if that had happened, this crazy, FUBAR "Preface" would have got terminated a handful of paragraphed back and likely deleted by Sheriff Jonathan when, on briefly perusing it, would inevitably decide it was all just a lot of my loon-off-the-Meds-Marsh ravings. And you, Dear Patient Reader, without a brief, loon-yodel of doubt, knows that he would have been absolutely fucking right!

Hey, I fuckin' heard that! . . . And yeah, I know this FUBAR "Preface" would be better if I'd been shipped off to the head-shop for a tune-up after the first couple of paragraphs, but since—I assume—there ain't no fuckin' scorpion-paranoid, Blue-Uniformed Oinker with a twitchy finger holding no 9-shot automatic to yer fuckin' heads and forcin' ya ta read it, you could have just stopped after the first couple of pages just as easily as Mad King Donald tells a lie. Or a hundred! (Shit, all this writing about pigs is giving me a real gut-growling craving for some . . . bacon!—yeah, some hot, sizzlin', odiferous, grease-dripping bacon! I think it's time to go fry up a pound of that delicious stuff—which I actually had the wisdom to buy four pounds of the on-sale stuff yesterday during that grocery store debacle—so I can have a righteously deserved grease-feast!

Now—burp . . . burp—dear Reader—burp . . . burp! Damn, I way-too-fast wolf-devoured that whole scrumptelicious pound of bacon—and half a loaf of bread even more scrumpteliciously fried in the fat from it—and now I need a bottle of TUMS to survive that unrestrained wolf-feast! . . . But now that I know I am writing on "borrowed fuckin' time," I better try—for at least for a few lucid sentences!—get back to what I started this FUBAR debacle of a "Preface" for, that being to babblog about Uncle John and his memoirs, The Fire, and his unabashedly crude and poetical writing of it. (Though to be sure, nothing he wrote even comes close to the dog-barf mess that this FUBAR "Preface" obviously has been, but then, he wasn't a certifiable loon on a long flight off the Meds-Marsh!)

Right to the very core of John's uber-manly being, he had about as much use for the educated, the up-scale and the effete as he had as for spending a day on the porch of this farmhouse riding a rocking horse and sucking his thumb. Or, for a better—and maybe an already used metaphor!—he had lifelong been a jug of 190 proof-hooch that was about as far from a bottle of fine, vintage wine as a stick of dynamite is from a firecracker. If you want refined poetry written by a true poet and full of subtle and sophisticated allegories, then I can but refer you to Edmund Spenser's giant bottle of bedtime Ambien, The Faerie Queene, which he considered fine and refined enough to vainly present his beloved queen, Elizabeth I. (Needless to say, nothing makes me laugh more blubber-jiggling uproariously than the idea of John leaving instructions for me in that old wooden box, to send a copy of The Fire to ancient ol' Queen Betty II!)

### Chapter Forty Three

Whew! I've just gotten back from a fast-waddling, floor-shakin' visit to the "throne room" where I, knees-on-the-tiles very violently barfed up all of that delicious bacon—and half bottle of TUMS!—I'd just wolfed down. It sure as fuck didn't taste as fuckin' good comin' up as it did goin' down, I can fuckin' tell ya that! (Yeah, I know—waaaaaaaaaaay TMI!) Must be the stress of Jonathan's impending visit that has me "off my grits" because usually I have a digestive system that can out-garburate the best garburator, and a pound of bacon would usually present it with barely a hiccup!

And, Dear Reader, while on my way back from that big barf-up, I did some "deep-breathing exercises" with a quarter of my remaining supply of "Columbian rocket-fuel" so my writing engine is ablaze and I'm really ready to fly! Like I said, I haven't been using that long-saved stuff at all on this off-the-Meds-Marsh loon-flight, not only because it totally fucks with my appetite and I so do love to eat —which is why I love my "hippie fescue" so much—but mostly because going off it flushes me down the big black toilet of depression that I knew would really have interfered with my writing of this FUBAR "Preface!"

But doing it now is okay because I have enough to last until Sherriff Jonathan arrives and since I'll be heading straight into the corral of the Shrink-Klink and likely more than a few bouts of head-lightening and a veritable cornucopia of meds, the cold-turkey depression-effects of going off that NASA rocket-fuel won't matter. Nor will all the other crazy—literally—shit it does to me, particularly with regards to blowing up my paranoia-scorpion to the size and ferociousness of a fuckin' T-rex! (Just ask that bite-scarred "truck driver" about that!)

So, like I said a ways back, Sheriff Jonathan is less than two of days away from "ridin' inta Dodge" to play the stern Marshal Dillon to the outlaw of his escaped-the-Meds-Jailhouse Mom, (obviously because Serge had dutifully called him after that incident with Punk in the grocery store) and when he arrives, I think he may less be a phlegmatic and friendly Marshall Dillon than a harsh and very pissed-off Little Bill Daggett (you know—that nasty sheriff played by Gene Hackman in Unforgiven) intent on bullwhipping—for one last fuckin' time!—his crazy, jail-breakin' mother into the "Big House" of the sanitarium so she can get her manic and maniacally walkabout assemblage point returned to the jail cell of almost-normal with a few storm-blasts of head-lightning, then have it welded there with a nasty Love Canal-cocktail of head-meds so she can once again start behaving like a reasonably mature, banal and boring simulacrum of a human being.

A mature, banal and boring Rachel-doppelganger that he can ignore so he can get on with his busy life, instead an outrageously crazy and unpredictable one that puts too many unnecessary and undeserved (he's a damn nice guy, Jonathan is!) demands on that life.

That means this bloated abomination—Jabblogger the Hutt!—of a woman has less than a day to get this bloated abomination of babblogged, FUBAR "Preface" wrapped up and "in the can," as the movie-makers like to say. Yeah, yeah, I know! I can hear all of you shouting, "Hooray for Jonathan!" for it means that an end is in sight to this "literary" tapeworm that seems to have no discernible or logical end, but it also means I am not going to have time to go over it and do a very necessary $tyle-Naziing to it.

I mean, Dear Patient and Long-Suffering Reader, I had been hoping/planning to shorten and compress it by about forty percent to make it at least a little bit readable for you—but that sure ain't gonna fuckin' happen now! Though given that I've just augmented my already out-of-control mania with some of that NASA rocket-fuel"—and plan to use up the rest of my supply before Jonathan arrives!—if I tried to $tyle-Nazi this deranged abomination of a "Preface" while rocket-fueled manic, I'd only end up filling it with more crazy shit and making it forty percent longer!

Though, given the fact that Kipling's wild boy Mowgli could count all of this "Preface's" prospective readers on his fingers and toes, it probably hardly matters. A gazillion-copy-selling $tephen King novel it sure ain't never gonna ever be! But shit!—it's outrageous and chaotic length is going to make it almost impossible to read for even that fingers-and-toes few, so I think I am going to have to take the time and make the effort to at least break it up into chapters, an act that I am only deciding to initiate right this minute . . . . . . . . . .

SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!—but that took almost two eff'n hours of skimming this long streak of elephant guts and very arbitrarily—and likely irrationally—chopping it into various, sausage-sized segments of inconsistent lengths . . . though of course, Dear Reader, you have been aware that I have done that chapter-chopping right from the beginning, haven't you?. (That "time-travel" shit kinda fucks with the head a bit, don't it? Or at least it does mine! . . . Not that a fruit fly buzzing past my ear right now wouldn't totally fuck with this totally addled pile of coke-stoned garbage sitting atop the Devil's Tower of my neck!)

And of course, if you are one of those fingers-and-toes few reading this, and while reading it have sometimes wondered why some of those section-breaks didn't really seem to make any sense, you now know why: the breaks were created hurriedly, arbitrarily and very much after-the-writing-fact, so to speak, but worse: the one creating the sections is a coke-stoned, certifiable loon in possession of neither a great deal of time to do the job, nor in possessions of the tool of her rationality to do it with!

So enough about me and my problems—for a few paragraphs anyway!—and back to The Fire, which is what this damn FUBAR "Preface" is supposed to be about! When I had finally finished John's memoir and had become so intimately acquainted with it, rough and rambling as it was, I made some attempts to $tyle-Nazi out some of its unimportant verbiage, while at the same time polishing the poetry a bit to make it more readable, and though no light bulbs exploded over that labor, I got no farther than polishing up the Prologue before the boulder of the realization came smashing down on my strained eyes and weary soul that I would have to live till I was about two hundred to get all the way through even just Book One! (This "Preface," outrageously long as it is, is as but a Tweet compared to the totality of The Fire.)

And I swear, that on making that decision, I hallucina-heard John's soft, understanding laughter, so I knew I was on the right track in just leaving The Fire as I'd "translated" from his "scribble." Though I must pat myself on the back and say that I did come up with and add names where John just left blank lines in lieu of names, which he did either because he did not want to name names, or because he'd forgotten them—or both.

It was with great curiosity that I noticed that not only were the names of John's Indian friends and acquaintances all there, but that he seemed to have a profound affinity for the Indians that he met and often instantly befriended. In a story centering around a real, off-the-Navajo-Rez Indian, told by the prostitute Sheila, who is an aging, street-hardened "mentor" of the young prostitute, Roxie,(whom he befriends-and-befucks after killing her pimp and setting in motion the fate-events that "frog-marched" him into the army, and with whom the two of them spend a few hours with in Sheila's real greasy, "greasy spoon," before he had to catch his train that will take him to army training camp) there are intimations that he might well have been an Indian—that Indian in Sheila's story—in another lifetime!

But, needless to say, since I don't believe in that reincarnation shit, I had to find another, more prosaic explanation for his obvious affinity for Indians—well sorry, Dear Sensitive Readers, I guess I should be a little more PC here and write call them Aboriginals or Native Americans—and I began to wonder if perhaps he'd had some Aboriginal blood in him. I mean, often, when I was young, and my hair was black and long and my dark eyes were bright and my skin a soft, delightful cinnamon, I used to wonder if I was part Indian. (It was okay back then to used the word Indian!)

So one day when while visiting my Mimi at her high-care "home", which she never failed to call her prison. (John, on my once asking him why he kept himself so fit, said it was to keep from falling into a state of such physical disrepair that he'd be forced to live out his final years in one of those places, which he alternately called Geriatric Ghettos or Geriatric Gulags, [Goo-lakes?] adding that they were Geri-hells-on-wheels that rolled you pell-mell down the hill of old age and straight into the gaping maw of an inevitable decrepitude and an intolerable death.)(And though he didn't say it, he didn't have to—there is no way such places would allow him to keep a dog and a horse—two things he absolutely knew he could not live without!)

Needless to say, Mimi hated it intensely because, as she said, (in intuiting it as a geriatric ghetto) "I don't like it here, Rachel—there's too many old people!" But her mental discombobulation and plethora of nonagenarian health problems made it absolutely necessary for her to be there, and during a lull in our all-over-the-map conversation that had been trying to accommodate her short, Brer-Rabbit-hopping-through-the-bramble-of-the-years attention span (she often called me Lisette and angrily wanted to know why I abandoned the family to become a nun . . . and why wasn't I wearing my habit!) I asked her if she knew if there were any Indians in our family tree.

She responded to that question like some evil wizard had just turned her into a really pissed-off scorpion, and with her thin, pale, lined and flaccid face suddenly turning both red and animated, she venomously spit at me, "Who told you we were related to those dreadful . . . Indians!" And when, utterly surprised by that outburst, all I could do was dumbfounded stare at her, then shrug and say, "I dunno, I was just wondering . . . because sometimes I got the feeling Uncle John was more like an Indian than a white person."

On hearing that, she momentarily got even more angry, so much so I thought she was going to have a stroke, as she gull-screeched, "Damn that stupid horrible man for coming back here and stirring up so much trouble!"And on my giving her a stunned and questioning look as I said, "What trouble? He had nothing to do with anyone—except me! So how can you say he caused trouble?" She instantly spat, "Exactly!"

And while I was trying to figure out the senile logic of that strange exchange, she suddenly slumped back onto her pillows and stared up at the ceiling as in a weary, faraway voice, said, "I guess . . . it doesn't matter. Not now . . . when nobody really . . . cares! . . . And it was so long, long ago. . . But . . . our grand-pere, Nicolet—Maman's . . . Papa. . . . He was one of those wild and sinful . . . coureurs de bois! And when he was a young man he . . . ran off west . . . for . . . I don't know—ten . . . fifteen . . . maybe more . . .years. And when he came back he was married to . . . to . . . a . . . squaw!

"And that devil of a man brought . . . that . . . heathen squaw . . . here! Can you just—imagine! My tante Sophie . . . she was one of that devil Nicolet's younger sisters . . . told me that even the priest said it was a sacrilege. . . . That was the Father Boudreau . . . who she said was a good priest . . . and too handsome to be a priest . . . I think she was . . . in love with him . . . but he died in a blizzard . . . . on his way to give Last Rites to a young girl . . . Bernadette Trottier . . . on the farm beside ours . . . she was dying of the . . . diphtheria . . .

"There was lots of priests in those days . . . not like now . . . scarce as hen's teeth, they are . . . I've only had one visit from Father . . . oh, I don't even remember his name . . . but he was in such a hurry . . . and he wouldn't even take my confession . . . said I was well past committing sins anymore. . . . He just blessed me . . . and scootled off! Like a little black . . . lapin! . . . But back in . . . those days . . . as fast as one priest left . . . or died . . . there was another. Most of them . . . I think . . . were good. But there was some real . . . bad apples . . . like that fat pig of a priest that was around when . . . . when Johnny . . . then Lisette . . . . ran away! We all hated him . . . even Maman, too! . . . But Papa sure liked him."

(That "fat pig of a priest," as John way-too-vividly describes in his memoirs, is the one who regularly raped him when he was an altar boy—and that wasn't the worst of his evil behaviors! My poor Mimi sure would not have wanted to have read about what that very bad apple did to her big brother, John! And to her big sister, "holy" Lisette! )

"So grand-pere Nicolet's marriage to that . . . squaw . . . it wasn't even . . . a real Catholic marriage! How could it be . . . when she was a heathen . . . not a Christian! How could grand-pere have . . . done that? . . . Marry a heathen Indian . . . a squaw? . . . And she wasn't even named after a holy saint . . . she had a heathen name that meant . . . some kind of . . . flower! Just imagine . . . what our good Lord Jesus thought . . . of that! Maman said that grand-pere said she'd been baptized . . . and was now a real Christian woman with . . . with the name Marie. But everyone just knows—you can't turn a Indian heathen squaw . . . into . . . into a real Christian woman . . .with just a baptism—and a new name!"

With my head on fire, as much with that unexpected revelation as with Mimi's vituperative and irrational bigotry, this Aboriginal Marie, this great-great Mimi of mine, was suddenly of great interest to me and I asked Mimi if she remembered her very well and what she had been like.

"We didn't see grand-pere Nicolet and . . . and his . . . squaw . . . Marie . . .very much . . . because . . . because grand-pere Nicolet did not get on with Papa! . . . In fact, he hated Papa! . . . Of course he hated Papa . . . Papa was always drunk on . . . his homemade liquor . . . and beating Maman . . . and poor Johnny! Mon Dieu!—but the way he beat poor Johnny! No wonder he had to . . . flee . . . the farm. Papa would have beat him . . . to death! Nobody knows why he . . . hated . . . Johnny so much . . . or why Johnny came back here after all those years. To . . . haunt us! . . . And treat us like it was us . . . that beat him so much!

"And Papa hated grand-pere Nicolet because . . . once . . . after Papa beat Maman . . . almost to death! . . . that's what Maman's sister, tante Louise, once told me . . .Grand-pere Nicolet came here and beat Papa real bad . . . with a whip! And took Maman and little Lisette and Johnny to stay with him and . . . Marie. But the priest came . . . he was a bad . . . a real mean one, tante Louise said . . . and told Maman it was her duty to go back to Papa . . . and nurse him . . . and obey and love him—even if he beat her sometimes . . . which he said she probably deserved anyway! A wife must always stay with and obey her husband, he said. Tante Louise said she . . . lost her faith . . . because of that bad mean priest doing that. . . . She could not accept that God would have so little . . . respect . . . for women . . . that he would want a priest to force her poor sister to go back living with a . . . monster . . . like Papa was! . . . So Maman went back to Papa—with little Lisette and Johnny—to nurse him . . . and get lots more beatings from him. And lots more beatings for poor Johnny, too. Tante Louise said Papa would probably have died if Maman had not gone back and nursed him. She said she was really sorry that that bad mean priest made Maman go back to Papa, because it would have been better if Papa had died. Mon Dieu, but she hated that man so much! . . . Not very Christian, was she . . . but of course, she had . . . lost her faith . . . and she no longer was a real Christian, was she?

"And though they did not live far away. Well, . . . now with good roads and cars it is not a long way . . . but back then . . . it was a long way! . . . A real long way! . . . On those roads! . . . On a horse! . . . Or in a wagon. Especially in the winter! . . . Even on a sleigh . . . no matter how many blankets you had! . . . So much snow back then! So much! . . . And so cold! . . . So they only visited us a few times. And only when they knew Papa would be away.

"Grand-mere Marie was . . . was . . . was always real . . . kind and . . . real sweet with us kids—like a . . a ange . .. actually. But she was still a squaw! A damned Indian! A heathen! You can't be a heathen and a...a ange, can you? . . . She used to bring us presents—real pretty Indian things . . . made of real soft deer skin . . . and decorated with beads . . . and colored porcupine quills. And feathers. All things that she made special for us—but we had to hide them from Papa when he came home or he'd . . . take them away from us. And burn them. And beat us for having them! . . . And beat Maman for letting grand-pere Nicolet and grand-mere Marie visit when he was gone!

"And because grand-pere Nicolet was married to that . . . that heathen squaw-woman, Papa—and lots others!—called him . . . L'homme de squaw! Squaw man! So embarrassing that . . . that had been for poor Maman! And for us . . . when we started going to school. And most the other kids would . . . mock . . . us for it! . . . But Grand-pere Nicolet . . . he . . . he was just so . . . so crazy in love . . . with his . . ."précieux Marie" . . . he always called her! And he sure did not . . . care . . . what anyone thought! Or care that it embarrassed us! Or caused us trouble at school!

"Just you stop and imagine how you would think about me . . . if I was one of those . . . one of those . . . red-skinned . . . heathens . . . whose heathen name was real strange! And ridiculous. . . . I can't remember what grand-mere Marie's . . . heathen name was—but she came from one of those wild . . . prairie . . . buffalo tribes called . . . Oh, I can't remember! Bloodfoot . . . or some such silly name! All their names are so damned . . . silly! And so unchristian! So heathen! But . . . who cares now! . . . Why haven't they brought my lunch yet—those damned nurses are so lazy! Always smoking and gossiping and picking their long, busy-body noses and not doing their jobs proper!"

There was no clock in the room and no watch on her wrist, and as scrambled as Mimi's present thoughts and short-term memories could be, her inner clock was right on time, for within twenty seconds of her uttering those words, her lunch arrived, and that was the end of all talk about the old days and, horror-of-horrors, our unequally shared, part-Aboriginal ancestry.

Ironically, if you ever get around to reading The Fire—sure won't blame you if you don't!—you will discover, in John's way too many way too vivid descriptions of life on that farm, that Mimi's Papa had been every bit as much of the psychopathic monster that Mimi's grand-tante Louise had said he was. And, it would seem, as much of a monster as her grand-mere Marie appeared to have been a kind and sweet ange of a woman, but at least to Mimi, her obviously cruel, corrupt, debauched, totally narcissistic and psychopathic Papa (he kind of sounds like Mad King Donald, don't he!) was a white and Christian monster (according to John's take on the "man," that word monster is not near harsh enough a word to describe him!) and not a brown-skinned, heathen Indian, so that made him infinitely more acceptable to her harsh, white, Catholic bigotry than poor aboriginal Marie—however sweet and kind an ange she might have been! (No differently than is that amoral abomination, Mad King Donald, infinitely more acceptable to staunch, Christian Fundamentalist MAGA-hatters than had been that "evil," brown-skinned Obama who'd preceded him!)

My head instantly filled up with thoughts about the—fated?. . . of the destined?—irony that if my great-grandmere Agathe had not been bullied by that "bad mean" priest to return to that hell-hole of a farm in order to nurse that devil, great-grandpere Peter (he was a Russian, so it would have been Pyotr) back to life—and get the shit regularly beaten out of her for her dutiful, wifely efforts!—John's (Ha!—I can't even begin to imagine him as a little Johnny!) life would have been dramatically—and sanely!—different and Mimi would not have been born, (she followed Lisette and John in the family order, though given the fact that poor great-grandmere Agathe was always pregnant, Mimi was likely on the way during that pivotal period), and thus my mother would not have been born either, and —hurrah!—I would not exist. Whooee!—what a delightful thought that is!

Though equally rapidly, I also couldn't help but think about John said about fate and destiny—that so much could often pivot on so little, and that the spirits—or us, for that matter!—didn't have to make really big changes at any one point in our lives in order to effect monster changes later on. "Like," he once said. "A billiard ball that is deflected—even just a slight bit— right after it is shot, from its intended path by a grain of sand, but which, by the time it reaches the end of the table, strikes a dramatically different spot than the shooter intended. Which is why if we make even small, but conscious . . . and wise . . . and intentional choices at any point in our lives, we can end up, a few year on—or at the 'far end of the table'—with a dramatically different—and better!—life than if all our choices are made unconsciously—and thus often unwisely . . . even foolishly. And fatefully!"

I finished off that enlightening visit by feeding Mimi her lunch, which she appreciated as I had the time to feed it to her slowly while the over-worked staff tended to shovel it into her as fast as they could so they could get on to their next hungry, impatient charge. And as I silently fed her the mush on her plate that had to pass as a reasonable facsimile for her lunch, I thought about her comments on her reluctantly-faced aboriginal heritage: I'd never heard of any western tribe called the Bloodfoot, but I had heard of the Blackfoot tribe, although a quick Googling of them once I got home that day informed me that they were renowned as natural mystics, excellent horsemen, buffalo hunters and even more so, as warriors who could be as cruel and fierce as they had been brave and wild. Unfortunately, that article also informed me not to confuse the Blackfoot tribe that lived in the Rocky Mountains along the border between Montana and Alberta, with the Blackfeet tribe, which was located solely in Montana and part of the Lakota-Sioux nation. This means I have no idea if my great-grandmere "Marie" had been a member of the Blackfoot or Blackfeet tribes—and it doesn't matter a pocket full of porcupine quills!

And while lost in that mush-spooning meditation, after wondering what my great grandmother Marie's aboriginal name might have been—surely something infinitely more poetic than Marie!—I sudden realized how "cool" it was that I had some small amount of wild Blackfeet/foot blood running in my veins—and perhaps in my psyche—and though not as much as John or my Mimi had, it seemed to have been enough to have given me my jet black hair, my equally black eyes, and my skin's ability to "cinnamon" so nicely after only a small amount of time in the sun. But what sure didn't get passed on to me was any of that nature mysticism, however often and passionately John asserted I had it—and about which, for reasons he couldn't fathom, I wanted nothing to do with.

(Interestingly, I suddenly have a memory-bubble erupt on the surface of my current brain-sludge—of more than once, when we were really acid-stoned together, Harpo would go all weird on me and say that he was having a vision of me as an important Indian princess with powerful Indian spirit-guides looking after me. Once, one of those visions had been so vivid and powerful, and those spirit-guides felt so real and present to him, that he'd quit fucking me mid-stroke because, as he put it, those spirits had "scared the wood right out of his pecker!" He used to call me Pocahontas at those times and say there was something truly astrally-awesome about me. At the time I just passed it all off as more of his typically inane acid-babble! But now, in light of Mimi's revelation—I'm not so sure! . . .Actually I am sure!—IT'S ALL BULLSHIT! It has to be! It has to be! It has to be! . . . )

And too, as I mentally gummed those "Indian thoughts" while Mimi gummed her mush, I was able to finally understand so much of John's essential character, not only his affinity for Indians, horses, his ranch, and his otherwise incomprehensible nature-mysticism, but as well the natural, tough, fierce, and fearless warrior that he had been. Those last three aspects of his character really dominated his early life and thus equally dominated Book One of The Fire, validating Heraclitus' "A man's character is his fate."

And not the least, do I finally understand why those spirits he was so sure existed had led—though more like dragged him—along the road of the essentially lifelong spirit journey that an ancient relic of an Indian with the unlikely name of Moses, (not his real, Indian name, but one a white missionary gave him) had called "the Medicine Trail," a term which John subsequently uses in his memoirs to describe his long and arduous—and many membrane of destiny traversing!—Campbellean hero's/shamanic journey he at first wanted no part of, but which became the dominant theme of Book Two.

And with my mind being the flighty thing it always is when I'm a hobbit-riding on the back of the giant eagle of my mania, I can't stop that eagle from swooping through some sudden and unexpected thought-clouds about the movie Thunderheart, (not my usual fare, but I rented a tape of it after getting a "crush" on Val Kilmer in The Saint.) that I didn't discover until after John had died, which was too bad because he sure would have found it interesting. Less, I'm sure, for the overt, violent theme of the greedy white men taking advantage of the majority of the Indians with the help of a few corrupt Indians, but more so for the spiritual, sister-theme of the half-Indian Kilmer character, who, over the course of the movie, is forced into reluctant contact with, and acceptance of, his half-Indian heritage and the hard-to-accept world and worldview of powerful, vision-inducing, event-manipulating Indian spirits, then finally, at the end, accepting both his Indian heritage and the power and influence of those spirits.

And doing so with the sometimes hilarious help, on the one hand, of a an old trade-you-your-Ray Bans-for-a-rock trickster of a shaman, Grandpa Reaches—played perfectly by Chief Ted Thin Elk and his stupendously memorable face with more cracks and crevices in it than the badlands his character lived near—and on the other, the motorcycle-riding, bird-flipping, wind-listening, show-stealing Walter Crow Horse, played to Academy Award-deserving perfection by the Canuck-Iroquois from the Six Nations Reserve a couple hundred miles south of here, Graham Greene—of Dances With Wolves fame.

Needless to say, I would love to have found out what both John and Joe Campbell thought of that movie, for the Kilmer character goes on a classic, Campbellean Hero's journey, but that wish is vain since neither of them saw it, John because he didn't know about it, and Joe because he didn't live long enough—not that he'd have been talking about it with mad, nobody-me even if he had!

But back to John—I get the sense from his soft-hovering presence (did I actually write that delusional assertion?) that any reader's problems with his spirit dominated/guided tale are like my problems with the spirits he talked about, of which he often said that they could care less if I believed in them or not, for my non-belief was solely my problem, and that their existence, value and power was hardly dependent on that belief. And as he'd said that to me, I remembered that Shakespeare had expressed that same sentiment in As You Like It, when he had Jaques so self-centeredly say to Orlando (of Rosalind, the love of Orlando's life), "I do not like her name." to which Orlando insightfully replied, "There was no thought of pleasing you when she was christened."

With the point of that seemingly utterly irrelevant aside being that all solipsistic delusions can but lead to ignorance and folly. And likewise for John's tale—if it is not easy reading and anything but great poetry, there is not only nothing I can do about that, but nothing I have to even try to do about it, for, from John's perspective, the process of writing of it out of his soul (or, as he more crudely put it, vomiting it out—like a wolf vomiting out poisoned meat) was more important than anyone's future reading and judgment of it, so the last person who would care would be him. He may have done a whole lot of writing in telling the narrative of The Fire, but he sure never for a minute thought of himself as a writer. And certainly not a poet!

Ironically, in reference to my persistent and passionate resistance to that realm of spirits that was so important to John and what he calls in his Book Two narrative, "the Medicine Trail," I may—or may not, depending on how I feel—include at the end of Book One of The Fire, a short poem—not really short by modern poetic standards, but short compared to The Fire—that he included in the envelope taped to the lid of that plywood box, along with the scribbled explanation that he wrote it for me, though he must have been stoned out of his gourd on some really strong acid when he wrote it because the so-called me in it may look a lot like I might have looked then, but her character is to my character (more like lack of it!) as a diamond is to a lump of rain-dissolving dog shit.

He actually gave the poem a name, Song for Rachel, and it is all about his vain efforts to induce me into accepting the world as a much bigger, and more spirit-riddled (enchanted) place, than I ever had the courage to face it being. John constantly mocked me for my lack of courage to open my mind up to a bigger world and worldview, but I once came across the quote by Suzanne Langer that pretty much sums up my fearful attitude on that account: "Our greatest fear is of a collapse into chaos should our ideation fail us."

Off course, it's more than ironic that our worldview, our personal "ideation" on reality, is essentially created in our minds by a host of unexamined and unquestioned authority-and-experience dictated assumptions about the world and its fundamental reality, assumptions that some people would rather march off to war to murderously protect and perpetrate—and die for!—than spend a few minutes seriously thinking about and questioning. Or expanding! Or discarding!

Which drives home John's oft re-quoting of Socrates' famous saying: the unexamined life is not worth living, with his take on its meaning being that our culturally indoctrinated assumptions become the thick stone walls of a very small dungeon of our life, a dungeon we are lifelong forced to live in unless we escape it by seriously thinking about, and ripping down, those stone walls. And as far as John was concerned, the thickest, hardest blocks of granite forming that so-small dungeon were those mortared into our minds and stacked around our spirit-beings by Constantine's Imperial Abomination—and its subsequent "Christian" off-shoots—with its fascist, tyrannical, violence-enforced dogshit-dogma that it has, for so many centuries, coerced so many into taking "on blind faith," (as already too often said, that word "faith" to him was not something to laud in people, but just a euphemism for a blind, stupid, infantile credulity about the historicity of myths that reduced them to utterly ridiculous stories only a child under five could believe) and that anyone who didn't have the courage to take a close, critical look at, and then take a courageous and critical jackhammer to those hard, stout stone walls, had as much of a chance of attaining spiritual freedom as a dinosaur embryo embedded in a fossilized egg had of attaining life. (Yeah, I know, I'm mixing metaphors there, but I'm also mixing drugs and booze as I write this, so I have an excuse!)

The whole of Book One of The Fire is nothing if it is not the story of John's totally un-gnostic, sound-asleep-at-the-wheel-of-life folly, which becomes, unbeknownst to him at the time, the prelude, the preparation, for the Campbellean hero's journey—Medicine Trail-trek?—to a profound gnosis that will consume the rest of his very long life, become his lifelong quest to continually and effortfully jackhammer to shards the stone walls of each successively enlarging jail cell—Garden of Eden?—of unknowing and mindless ignorance, until at its end, he was probably the most free human beings one could image! But you'll have to read both Books of The Fire to truly experience the story of that bifurcated life, the first half lived in totally unexamined darkness and ignorance, with and the second half being a true, Campbellean, Hero's journey—a trekking of the Medicine Trail—of a relentless and courageously honest process of self-and-life-examination that led to an inevitable process of constant growth and ever expanding degrees of spiritual freedom, of gnosis, for you to understand what I mean by that statement!

I, on the other hand, coward that I unabashedly am, have a safe, comfortable, and very limited set of ideas and assumptions about what the world is and what it should be—especially, as you already too-well know, with regards to that sharpest of stones in John's philosophical shoe, Constantine's Imperial Abomination, which to me is like Mt. Everest, in as much as it may be the tallest mountain in the world which kills a lot of egomaniacs whose egos demand they climb it to prove their worth, but that sure as fuck doesn't mean _I_ have to.

I mean, fuck-a-tabernacle!—but Constantine's Imperial Abomination may well be history's most powerful, most corrupt, and most evilly hypocritical and fascist institution on this planet that's been pumping its malice, control and propaganda into "Western civilization" since "fuckin' near forever," and will be around for "fuckin' near forever-more," which I cannot fight or change and which I cope with by totally fucking ignoring, for, as I learned during that acid-high while reading that first book of Castaneda's, if I find my safe, small set of reality-assumptions being the least bit threatened, I then feel like I am Humpty Dumpty, falling, not just off a wall and into a crack-up, but into a blender to be whirled into an omelet! So I don't sit on no fucking walls!

I also have most depressingly learned that it is easier for a quadriplegic to win a gold medal in figure skating at the Olympics than for an incurable coward to find a gram of the gold of courage needed to face the chaos of a shattered worldview. (Wow! That imaginative analogy just landed in my head out of . . . absolutely . . . fuckin' . . . nowhere! Too bad I am going to lose contact with that imaginative nowhere as soon as I get frog-marched back onto that small, dull, predictable, utterly unimaginative, inspiration-barren Meds-Rez and have to start feeling, while on it, like Sprocket's even better metaphor—a light bulb in a dead duck's ass!

I know I shouldn't go of on another crazy solipsistic tangent, but, as you have learned, I am just like any junkie always planning to most definitely to quit—right after this next hit!—and it has to do with that word enchanted, that I used in the last paragraph. It is word for a certain worldview that John got from an early 80's book called, The Reenchantment Of The World by Morris Berman which he gave me to read and which is full of a load of spirit-sinking stats about all the drugs—both illicit and prescribed!—and alcohol that American adults and children consume in startling quantities in order to numb the pain and meaninglessness inherent in living in our rational, mechanistic and very unenchanted modern world. (Again back to that quote of his: "Money can't buy you happiness, but it sure can buy a lot of very temporary distractions from your unhappiness."

It wasn't too hard a book for me to read when he first gave it to me, but lately, on trying to re-read it, I found it anything but easy, my brain obviously having taken a nasty "hit" with all that brain-lightning I got zapped with after his death and my mental collapse, especially when Berman gets into talking about the writings of Gregory Bateson on holism, as expressed in his book, Steps To An Ecology of Mind, and the parallel ideas of the psychiatrist R.D. Laing (who co-wrote a book with a title that really rang some deep, dark, bonging bells for me: Sanity, Madness and the Family) that pertain to schizophrenia, and his controversial assertion that schizophrenia is not caused by a mere chemical imbalance in the sufferer's body, but by their psyche being forced into what Bateson and Laing called a double-bind, or, in the vernacular of the hoi-polloi, a damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don't situation that they cannot physically escape, so they spiritually escape it by loosing themselves in fantasy worlds that they create.

(Joanne Greenberg's absolutely brutal read—for me, anyway!—I Never Promised You A Rose Garden is a very popular exposition of the dark side of that process of escaping an intolerable "real" reality, for what seems like at first, an infinitely more tolerable "fantasy""reality that, at some dark point in the process—for some unfortunate people, anyway—turns on the escapee and becomes an infinitely more dangerous and intolerable "reality" than what they were initially trying to escape.)

Which of course ties in with all those ideas of John's about the Fifth Dimension, that Ocean of Spirit, which is also Lucas's Force, Blake's Imagination, and Campbell's Mythos, each representing the same, higher-level reality that contains within it the fundamental and essentially complementary realms of light and darkness, of vitality and lethargy, of positive and negative, of freedom and enslavement . . . and who knows, maybe even angels and demons! NOT!

During my too-many visits to the Shrink-Shop, the noggin-mechanics were pretty adamant about telling me that my head-motor is "out of tune" and in a state of "disrepair" because of chemical imbalances in my body, or because I refuse to "grow up" and let myself "get past", and thus forgive both my parents: my father for having used me as a sex toy at a time of my life when I should have been playing with Barbie dolls and not his stinking prick; and my mother for her inability to face the cognitive dissonance inherent in being the matriarch of a "good and holy Catholic family" where the "good and holy" was nothing more than the flimsy, toilet paper wrapping of hypocrisy around an over-flowing Porta-potty at an outdoor rock concert. Or because I did way too many drugs and indulged in too much promiscuous sex "back in the day," blah, blah . . . barf!

I could never totally buy into any of that "gotta get past it" shit, (especially since I'd been functionally fine the whole time John had been in my life!) but I pretended to "go along to get along," (I think I loathe that cliché every bit as much as my brother loon, Nietzsche, would have!) until I read Berman's book containing Batson's and Laing's contention that much schizophrenia is the result of toxic family dynamics that create a totally irrational and equally inescapable double-bind for the victim. HEAR! HEAR!

And too—and apropos!—John once made the off-hand comment during one of our many palavers (Stephen King uses that world a lot in his Gunslinger books, and I just love it!) that the term mental illness was a totally inaccurate term because that which we call an illness of the mind is really an illness of the spirit-being—an imprisoned and tortured spirit-being!—and that comment certainly fits in well with the thesis of Batson's and Laing's which was covered by Berman in his book.

And it certainly fits in with the conundrum of why I was so spiritually tortured and imprisoned, so suicidally deep in the throes of a serious spiritual illness when I met John, a spiritual illness he snapped me out of with that absolutely inspired spanking and heave-ho into the shit-pile that momentous day, a spiritual illness he helped me keep at bay for the duration of his bright and comforting years in my life and which instantly returned when he died, because he—his spirit-being!—had been both a bright beacon of spirit-light that kept my light-hating demons at bay, and a necessary balm—and soul-mate!—for my tortured and damaged spirit-being.

That quote of Horace Walpole's that I put waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back at the beginning of this FUBAR "Preface" sums up perfectly what John was to me,

The most wonderful of all things in life, I believe, is the discovery of another human being with whom one's relationship has a glowing depth, beauty, and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvelous thing, it cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it. It is sort of a Divine accident.

But of course, our modern scientific medicine is founded on a worldview—which unfortunately I can't get past!—that only allows for the existence of the body and brain, and can no more conceive of us as being, in our essence, spirit-beings, than it can conceive of clouds as giant marshmallows or the moon as cheese, so my illness is an illness of chemical imbalances in my body and brain-mind and thus can only be treated/controlled with powerful drugs and intimate sessions with the head-lightning machine.

Unfortunately, being the coward I am, my fate as a loon is being dictated by that cowardice because I am in a constant state of ambivalence about all that spirit-being shit that John was so absolutely certain about, and had I the courage to truly accept his teachings about it and thus face and work with my essential spiritual nature, my spirit-being, (that I often intuitively sense I am, but which my reason absolutely refuses to accept) I'd likely be as healthy and contented as I had been when John was alive.

Though that of course raises that damn big bugaboo of a question about fate and destiny, for had I remained sane when John died, I'd have continued on with my career as a teacher, maybe even started dating again, especially since "the kids" had left home, and not have had the time or the "freedom" to spend all those years in my loonar-isolation on this farm "translating" John's utterly unreadable scribble-mess memoirs into the somewhat orderly and readable The Fire, and of course, Dear Reader, I'd never have been able to have written this long streak of loon-shit of a very FUBAR "Preface" and we would not have entered into this sane-reader/loonar-author relationship.

### Chapter Forty Four

Aw, fuck-the-fickle-finger-of-fate!—I sure don't have time for it, with the sword of Damocles of Jonathan's Marshall Dillon-intervention hanging over my soon-to-be-lighting-struck head and mania-addled mind, I feel a great compulsion to get deeper into all the head-fucking shit of Laing and Bateson's that I found in Berman's book—about insanity often being created by dark family dynamics and a double-bind situation which the victim-child can't escape. And how—surprise! surprise!—it applied to me!

So this is the way I see it developing: there I was, a young and innocent little Catholic girl being taught by my parents and teachers and priests and nuns—a whole fucking village of authority figures right out of Grant Wood's bleak and severe, "American Gothic" painting—right down to the fucking pitchfork—of the vile, evil and God-displeasing hideousness of every human capacity for fun and joy and joie de vivre, most especially anything to do with sexuality and sexual activity, especially sexual activity outside the sacred sacrament of marriage, and most especially the most horrible, God-displeasing sin of all—incest!

So there I was, that very young and innocent Catholic girl being forced to have sex with my Catholic father while I was sure my very Catholic mother knew about it and pretended nothing untoward was going on. (And in knowing about and doing nothing, obviously not only condoning what my father was doing to me, but telling me that to her, I was a worthless piece of shit for whom such abuse was, if not deserved, at least irrelevant to the grander schemes of her good Catholic matriarchy!)

Needless to say, to my young and innocent and still-developing mind and psyche, the teachings of that almighty and powerful and life- and family-dominating Catholic Church were telling me that sex outside of marriage, and especially sex with a family member, was a heinous and very mortal, hell-damning sin, yet at the same time I was being existentially taught, first by my father in his debauched and criminal and incestuous abuse of me, and second, by my mother in her criminal, fuck-you-daughter-mine-Rachel condoning of it, stretched the e-string on the guitar of my poor young mind and psyche to a breaking point in a cruel and inescapable double-bind that I could only cope with by snapping—and going insane and acting-out that insanity with the most outrageous of sexual behaviors.

And truly, in the grip of that insanity, when I was barely seventeen and barely half finished my first year of university, I took off to California—Californica!—to get into "the Haight" sex-drugs-and-rock 'n' roll scene in San Francisco, then to attend the Monterey Pop Festival and ramp up my sexual acting-out right into the stratosphere of deified sluthood by being a rock-groupie, and earning money, whenever I needed it, as a "go-go" dancer, as a prostitute, and as a porn "actress," a dark and debauching behavior that probably took me a lot closer to my death than I wanted to think about at the time. A behavior that got progressively worse after I'd returned "home," until I was so insane and so drowning in the thick, slippery waters of my blasted-open second chakra, that it seemed quite natural to try to seduce my 70-year-old great-uncle, who responded to my insanity by giving my over-fucked butt a much needed paddling, after which he heaved me into that reeking pile of manure that was the perfect metaphor for my life at that time, an action that stopped my world for me, snapped me out of my spiraling descent to an inevitable suicide, and delayed, until his death twenty six years later, what appears to have been my inevitable—without him!—collapse into insanity. (Yeah, I know, I've bored the snot out of your weary head with all that shit already, but I figured a short, Castaneda-like recapitulation was in order.)

Morris Berman quotes Gregory Bateson extensively on how the double-bind drives its victim into insanity, giving a five-step program of how it operates. I won't quote all if it here, but some of it goes like this:

1) Two or more persons must be involved, one of whom is forced to play the role of victim.

2) The double-bind structure goes on repeatedly. It is not a matter of great traumatic shock, but of a regular and habitual way of experiencing the world.

5) However, the double bind is not merely a "a damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. In and of itself, a no-win situation cannot drive someone crazy. The crucial element is not being able to leave the field, or point out the contradiction; and children often find themselves in just such a situation.

Thus Laing sums up the double-bind predicament as:

Rule A: Don't.

Rule A.1: Rule A does not exist.

Rule A.2: Do not discuss the existence or nonexistence of Rules A, A.1, or A.2. (Italics and bolding are mine.)

(Apropos to the above: I have a memory suddenly surface of years ago being in Chapters and having the "bookstore angel" point out to me a very bizarre non-fiction book proposing the outlandish theory that extraterrestrial beings—Advanced Beings, the author called them—have always been part of human history—and really fucking around with us in a big way! And while very skeptically leafing through it, found my attention being drawn to a particular page with a passage in it that really jumped out at me, where some noggin-mechanic, in a personal email to the author—both names un-remembered—said all highly dysfunctional families were ruled by two rules: rule one was that no one in the family talked about the dysfunction; and rule two was no one talked about rule one. I also have a memory of watching a Brit murder mystery where the term mokita came up, which is a New Guinea word meaning: the truth we know but agree not to talk about. It looks like New Guineans spend as much time floundering around in the deep waters of that Egyptian river as the rest of us!

It would seem the contents of that email from that noggin-mechanic got into that book about extra-terrestrials because its succinct—and accurate!—summation of the dynamics of every really fucked-up family applied to the whole of the "humanity-family" in our relationship with those putative advanced beings and their putative use and abuse of us—as a species. Though as I babblog this aside, my head is filled with the blinding flare of an inspiration that Constantine's Imperial Abomination has been abusing its baa-bleating sheep flocks—and pretty much the whole of Europe and its history—since the collapse of the Roman Empire, and those same two rules apply to it. As most appropriately does that word, MOKITA! Everyone with even a tenth of their frontal lobes functioning knows that that infernal abomination has been fundamentally and maliciously abusive in its dogshit-dogma and fascist politics for well over a millennia—the bloody and brutal "antics" of the Inquisition alone, are proof-positive of that!— and not only do they very passionately not want to face and talk about the fact of that malicious abuse, they just as passionately don't want to talk about the fact that they don't want to talk about it.

Truly a FUBAR situation that allows it, century-after-drear-and-abusive-and-oppressive-century, to continue to perpetrate its abuse and control of it faithful/credulous sheep flock all over this FUBAR world. And to get full measure of that dark and awesome power even today, talk to some fallen-away-Catholics—maybe you are one!—who though they want nothing to do with that infernal abomination, still have their lives affected by their from-birth indoctrinations into its fascist power and dogshit-dogma. So much so that they will have their innocent infants baptized in order to save them from Augustine's "original sin" that they are 99.99% certain the "sweet innocent dear" is not afflicted with, but that 1% of doubt sends them running to a church with the tiny, swaddled, fresh-from-the-womb innocent for that necessary and "original sin washing" and "saving" splash of water and some priest-prattling hocus-pocus!

But back to Laing's—and that noggin-mechanic's—mokita-rules for badly fucked-up families, which absolutely was the don't-discuss-fuck-all situation in our good, Catholic house, and it kind of went like:

1) We are a good Catholic household so we consider all sex inherently filthy, evil, and God-displeasing, but most especially sex outside of a Church-sanctioned marriage, which is the only thing that keeps that always filthy and diabolical act from being a mortal sin; and we most especially consider incest to be the most terrible, diabolical and heinous of mortal sexual sins!

2) We are good Catholics so we not only accept the Church's dogma that all sex is inherently evil, but we DO NOT indulge in any sex until we are married—and never commit the evil of incest.

"But Mommy, Daddy's fucking me and making me suck his big dirty piddidle and isn't that sex and incest and a mortal sin?"

"No Sweetie!—that's not the kind of sex and incest that is a mortal sin. All Daddies own their daughters and can do anything with them that pleases them, so it's okay."

"But Mommy, I don't like it when Daddy sticks his big dirty piddidle in my mouth and almost chokes me on that yucky white stuff that comes out of it! . . . And he really makes my poor little privates hurt lots when he sticks his big piddidle in there!"

"Your Daddy is a good Catholic man so shut up, quit telling silly and malicious tales, and go clean your room or I'll wash your mouth out with soap!"

"But I already do that after every time Daddy makes me suck that yucky white stuff out of his big dirty piddidle!"

Or, more like, as I eventually learned from Doc Booger about my mother's POV, what she was really saying was: "Your Daddy is a dirty, evil pervert but I can't face the shame of having been stupid enough to marry, and cowardly enough to keep living with, such a dirty, evil man who does those dirty, evil thing to a daughter of mine, so shut up—and go insane!"

And that, of course, is what I had no choice but do, and why I am as FUBAR as this poor, insane mess of a very FUBAR "Preface"!

And now, with that finally flushed out of my I-Never-Promised-You-A-Cesspit-But-You-Got-One-Anyway memory-sewer, and since I know this manic express train of scriptorial lunacy must, like the train in that 70s Richard Pryor/ Gene Wilder comic hoot, The Silver Streak, come to a station-crashing end with Jonathan's imminent arrival, I will try and sum things up a bit by saying that in my typically undisciplined, bi-polar reading habits—selections from John's library as well as books that the "library angel" has "drawn me" (or distinctly, crashing-to-the-floor) pointed out in book stores, I have come across Gurdjieff's statement, "Consciousness cannot evolve unconsciously," the meaning of which—as John incomprehensibly explained to me once—is patently obvious to those who have reached a certain, threshold-level of consciousness, and is cretin-gibberish to those existing below it, which bring us to the question of how one's consciousness first approaches, then breaks through, that consciousness-threshold, that Point of Know Return, as shown on the rock group, Kansas, album cover) especially in the face of the conundrum that anyone functioning with a consciousness below that threshold-level is too unconscious to understand anything about consciousness. (Like that old joke about the cost of a Rolls Royce—if you have to ask what one costs, you can't afford it.)

And truly it does present a conundrum of the first order! According to John—and to the ancient Gnostics—we purportedly, as spirit-beings, incarnate into this living dream/nightmare/gulag of Space and Time, instantly losing, at the moment of incarnation, all sense of our innate consciousness so we can then, over the course of our life, struggle, not only to regain that innate sense of consciousness, but during the course of that struggle—and a whole lot of suffering that goes along with it!—enhance, to whatever degree we can, that level of consciousness we lost consciousness of during our instant of incarnating into Space and Time in our very physical and very frail and very instinct-and-hormone driven, human body. (If that sentence doesn't fuck your head all to hell, then you've just been skimming it and haven't been really reading it and trying to understand it!)

John, back in the days when I was endemically and willfully unconscious—even in the face of my many acid-trips that should have woken me up—used to compare living at a low level of consciousness to people living in a valley near the ocean but with a range of mountains between them and it, and that for those who lifelong lived in the valley and never climbed the mountains even just to take a curiosity-satisfying, look-see at where all the morning fog was coming from, the ocean did not exist.

Whereas for those intrepid souls who did climb it, the ocean was as obvious a fact as had been the effort to climb the mountain. But as obvious a fact as that ocean instantly was for those seeing it, it would often be impossible to convince the staid, practical, skeptical, imagination-challenged valley dwellers,(cf. that husband and wife in Grant Wood's "American Gothic" painting!) of its existence. And of course, if any mountain-climbing/ocean-viewing fool was intemperate enough to press the issue with those staid and self-satisfied valley-dwellers, they could easily get themselves banished, or crucified—or a pitchfork shoved deep into their butt-cheeks!—for their vain and foolish efforts.

That, of course, raises the question of how one moves from unconsciousness to consciousness, or, in John's analogy, climbs a mountain they have no interest in climbing to discover the ocean they not only have never heard about, or have no interest in even if they have, until they are induced or driven to climb that mountain and discover its existence. And for that John had an answer too, for he said that wise men—especially those damn, know-it-fucking-all Greeks!—had been saying since time-out-of-mind, that suffering was the fire that powered the steam-driven funicular up the mountain of consciousness, and that ultimately, " . . . the whole damn simple, answer to the question of the meaning of human existence and all its seemingly stupid, pointless suffering, was that it drove/hauled—or tried to!—each of us up that "mountain" to higher levels of consciousness, with each individual—and enhanced!—consciousness automatically adding to our species' collective consciousness, a spiritual reality that provoked Teilhard de Chardin to posit the existence of this planet's noosphere, and Jung, his collective unconscious. . . . But I don't like that term, collective unconscious, because though I am one hundred percent that it—and de Chardin's noosphere—are one and the same very powerful field, it is about as unconscious as my left foot is my right eye!"

Though of course, that is such a gross oversimplification of what he'd so often so vainly tried to convey to me, that it has likely been reduced to a lie—but it is the best my addled, manic and very weary mind can do with that way-too-fucking-deep-for-me subject.

Well, I don't know if my fellow loonar, Nietzsche, was one of the wise men John was thinking about when he said that, but that infinitely-smarter-than-me loon was pretty unequivocal about it when he said,

"The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far?"

Of course, Joe Campbell, in his PBS Power of Myth discussions with Bill Moyers, (I have several of Joe's video series, the other being Mythos, which I watch when I am feeling particularly lonely and at my wits' end because I get a similar, soothing and comforting, feeling to "being with" Joe on those videos as I used to get from being with John.) quotes the Eskimo shaman, Igjugarjuk when he told his European visitors that the only true wisdom,

"...lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and can be reached only through suffering. Privation and suffering alone open the mind to all that is hidden to others."

"Out in the great loneliness . . . " What a goddamn crushing phrase! But then, only so, I guess, to those who have been out there experiencing it. (If you've seen that movie Gravity, you could get a sense of that "great loneliness" as you empathize with that astronaut—played by George Clooney—when his tether to the space station snaps and he fatally drifts off, helpless and alone, into the consuming vastness of endless space and a slow, inevitable, suffocating and very lonely death. And yes, Dear Reader, I know—that scene in Gravity was plagiarized from an almost identical scene in that famous, head-fuck of a movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its very alive, very psychopathic, very inorganic being-possessed HAL driving the action. And the head-fucking!)

And then there's that, " . . . to all that is hidden to others." part of that quote, which of course, is one of the great, cursing conundrums of human life where wisdom and consciousness is always hidden from 99.99% of human others, a fact instrumental in driving those who must become wise and conscious, out into the great loneliness! And likely more often than we care to know about, into a Nietzschean insanity! And in their being too often crucified on their return from that great loneliness by the 99.99% of humanity who sure don't like their worldviews—and their sacrosanct egos!—being threatened by whatever "boon" those "heroes" bring back from their "Campbellean journeys" into that "great loneliness."

And perhaps no one more poetically tackled the theme of the "Hero's journey"—and the abject loneliness of it!—than that poetic giant of the Romantic era, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with his strange-journeying Ancient Mariner, who twice laments his great loneliness during his long, harrowing, spirit-dominated, penance-serving and very shamanic tale that he self-initiated with his utterly mindless, "sound-asleep" act of killing "the harmless Albatross" that was loved by "the Polar Spirit," a tale he is forcing the hapless, and totally-in-his-power, Wedding Guest to listen to, first with:

Alone, alone, all, all alone,

Alone on a wide, wide sea!

And never a saint took pity on

My soul in agony.

Then right at the end:

O Wedding Guest! this soul hath been

Alone on a wide wide sea:

So lonely 'twas that God himself

Scarce seeméd there to be.

A long and lonely and terrifying and shamanic ordeal that eventually teaches him the essence of that most universal of all spiritual lessons—that Constantine's Imperial and Intolerant and Violent Abomination could sure do with learning!—universal compassion!

He prayeth well, who loveth well

Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things both great and small.

(I am so familiar with that poem because on one of my incarcerations in the Shrink-Klink, I found—the "library angel" pointed out?—a poetry anthology in the library with that poem in it, which I got so powerfully drawn to—and so much comfort from—that I must have read it about twenty times, inadvertently memorizing it in the process.)

Ironically, as John futilely pointed out to me so many times, if you read the Christ/crucifixion story as the very wise and essential Gnostic myth it is—and not the stupid, infantile, and impossible history that Constantine's Imperial Abomination passes it off as!—you will discover that it is all about those rare people with the courage to allow their spirit-beings to journey into "the great loneliness" on a Campbellean "hero's journey" so they can capture and return with the necessary "boon" of higher consciousness.

John never mentioned either of those quotes by Nietzsche or Igjugarjuk—though he is familiar with Coleridge's Ancient Mariner because, as he wrote in his memoirs, Catherine most omen-ously, in an effort to open him up to the magic of poetry, introduced him to it early in their marriage!—but he was most certainly familiar with the essential truth of them, though he did, on the subject, one day say on that subject of suffering, "Of course, Don Juan already said the same thing when he said that you had to reach—and always with great difficulty and work . . . and often terror—a certain level of personal power to understand power, which means that the answer to that universal question about the meaning of life is only meaningful to those who have suffered enough, or been put through a terrifying and generally unpleasant shamanic ordeal, to allow them to reach the level of consciousness needed to understand it. At which Aha point, of course, it would be blatantly obvious and they would not be asking that "price of a Rolls Royce" question anyway!"

Actually now that I think about it, that "price of a Rolls Royce" joke is the perfect metaphor for this consciousness-conundrum! The corollary of that joke is: no one gets interested in buying a Rolls Royce until long after they can easily afford one, which then possibly explains all the seemingly pointless suffering that human being have endured over the course of human history, with pointless suffering appearing to be the dominant theme of humanity's stupid tenure on this planet! Suffering that, according to John, is caused by the dark, lower-level forces—the Lords of Karma, or Fate, or Whatthefuckever!—that own us and our ego-lives like we are cattle that they torture and kill for their Shakespearean sport, a situation that is apparently/possibly allowed to happen by the putative higher spiritual powers John assumed existed, because it aids our putative, Earth-incarnate spirit-beings in their necessary quests to become ever more and more conscious.

(And which makes a lot more sense than all that dogshit-dogma of Constantine's Imperial Abomination that tries to so manipulatively con it flocks of credulous sheep into believing it is all God's will and represents his loving (LOL—to the nth degree!) efforts to challenge and test our faith (mindless childish credulity!) in him—and our faith (mindless childish credulity!) in his "Holy Church's" (LOL-redux—to the nth degree!) dogshit-dogma!

And though I've likely babblogged about this before, John kept trying to pound into my solid-oak tie of a head the railway spike of, "If you are interested in achieving salvation from the consuming hell that is membership in Constantine's Imperial Abomination, whenever you see or hear the word faith—that so damn many of those damn morons are so damn proud about having!—understand it is a dark euphemism for mindless infantile credulity! A very moronic and dangerous and utterly mindless credulity concerning the literalization of a very inconsistently told Jewish version of the very ancient, mythical tales about a dying-and-resurrecting godman that seems to have started in Ancient Egypt with the god Osiris, and has had an infinitude of "incarnations" in various locales of the Near- and Middle Easts down through the millennia. It is that infantile and utterly mindless credulity of the masses of "Christianity" concerning the absurd and intelligence-insulting literalizing and historicizing of that otherwise meaningful ancient myth of the dying-and-resurrecting-godman, that has given that very nefarious and very political institution of Constantine's so much fascist, tyrannical power for so many dark and violent centuries!"

And though I sure wish John was around to see and comment on it, if you want to witness the horrible and mindless power of that credulity over Church dogma, watch that already mentioned, Academy Award winning movie, Spotlight, which tells the dark, depressing and evil story about so many Catholic faithful—Catholic credulous!—in Boston, who were so willing to make a never-ending journey up that famous Egyptian river while turning a Nelson-eye to the heinous fact that more than two hundred and fifty pedophile priests in their midst were persistently molesting more than a thousand of their innocent children (that's considered a very low-ball number created by the ones who were brave enough come forward and talk about their "holy abuse!") over several decades, and about the even darker, more depressing and infinitely more evil story about the vile fact that villainous, totally unchristian, high ranking members of the very politically savvy, ass-covering clergy of Constantine's Imperial Abomination put infinitely more resources into villainously covering up, than into stopping the carnage by reigning in those criminals and consigning them to the secular justice system. (Ha! Can you just see those malicious, dog-collared perverts in a jail run by a bunch of Catholic guards—they'd be treated like royalty! And likely have no small number of young boys snuck in to make their stays more comfortable—and priestly!)

And suck-a-priest's-piddidle!—not only did those powerful and clever ecclesiastical functionaries very arduously cover-the-sacred-gilded-butt of that grotesquely wealthy and powerful institution of Constantine's by suppressing reports of that abuse, but they—lick-a-bishop's-blue balls"!—condoned and facilitated it by moving offending—complained about!—priests to new parishes. (Like a shepherd who instead of killing the wolf that been preying on his sheep, cages it and then secretly transports it to a neighbor's pasture!) All of this absolutely evil clerical facilitating costing Constantine's Imperial Abomination a lot of time and resources that it instead could have put to infinitely more compassionate and Christian use by helping the hapless victims of all that abuse. And instituting counseling programs that would have helped their pedophile priest deal with their pedophilia—or at least paid to have the debauched fuckers castrated!

Though naturally, such a compassionate and Christian course of action would have involved acknowledging that something truly evil was going on within Constantine's Imperial Abomination and that "men of God" were very often behaving like debauched and debauching devils. All again, part of that covering-the-sacred-gilded-butt process so important to those clerical functionaries that ensured that not only would all that absolutely evil abuse continue to go unabated, but ensuring that the ignored—and often denied and derided!—victims of it would get no acknowledgement of their abuse, no help, no necessary counseling, thus virtually forcing them down the dark and brambled path into very fucked-up, usually alcohol-and-substance addicted lives.

Totally fucked-up lives that some would cope with by—heaven forbid!—themselves becoming priests—inevitably abusing priests—or just "civilian" (lay) sexual predators who, most thankfully, would not have the sanctuary of "the Church" to unrestrainedly ply their "trade" in, nor the protection from "the law" provided by "the Church" that their priestly counterparts have! (It is sickening to think of how rightfully harshly and intolerably such vile, sexual predators of the young, innocent and vulnerable are treated by most countries' legal systems—and self-policed penitentiary "systems"—and how tolerated and outright protected and mollycoddled they are by the upper levels of Constantine's Imperial Abomination!)

And with way too many of those priest-diddled victims being so badly and permanently damaged and crippled that they can never find their way clear of the sexual, psychological, and legal brambles of their lives and they end up only finding peace in the refuge of insanity—or suicide! Or both!

Whew, writing that has moon-rocketed my blood pressure up into the stratosphere of what John always called "stroke range," so I'll get away from it by swinging back to John's train metaphor about suffering being the fire that powers the steam-driven funicular up the mountain of consciousness, I can momentarily climb out the thimble of my spirit-bereft worldview and my cowardly need for safe, limited, rational, and left-brained literal thinking and traipse through my right brain long enough state that likely the ultimate meaning of the metaphor of the mall fire that inspired his writing of his memoirs, is that of the fire of suffering that powered his poor abused wife, Catherine, to higher levels of consciousness before her untimely death, an event which frog-marched John through a most important membrane of destiny, the first doorway of gnosis, that woke him up just enough to his human/spirit-being nature to ignite the slow-burning forest fire of his own suffering that then sets him on a rest-of-his-life, Campbellean "Hero's journey" to ever higher and higher levels of consciousness. There is absolutely no doubt, , when/if anyone reads The Fire, they will see that John started out his life at about the same level of consciousness as a sun-dried pile of moose pellets—stubbornly so!—and that the whole story of his life is a two-part-tragedy of him living his life in a state of absolute and destructive unconsciousness—like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner!—then after being cannon-shot through his most important two membranes of destiny—the deaths of Catherine and Johnny—then down into what Campbell called "the underworld," to begin a relentless and necessary "Hero's journey" of adversity, suffering, and finally—redemption. The redemption of becoming conscious!!

It was a long and arduous journey driven and guided by some very clever—and for me, putative—spiritual "powers"—which were much like that Polar Spirit in Coleridge's poem, which drives the Mariner's long, penitential journey to consciousness!—with the single-intentioned purpose of forcing him to collect and put into a heap, those dried, moose pellets of his initial, totally unconsciousness actions, then with his regrets and suffering, set them afire so they'd burn with the necessary light of an infinitely—and theretofore unimagined and unimaginable—higher level of consciousness.

In truth, as I am sure I have mentioned a few too many times already, John was obviously living out, to a T,(whatever the hell that phrase really means!) Joseph Campbell's famous Hero's Journey, with John returning to this area after a very long and arduous, "underworld" journey that only a true hero—or one rawhide-tough masochist!—could have survived (read The Fire, and decide for yourself) and that the writing of his memoirs about it represented the Campbellean "boon" that he unwillingly and unwittingly was forced to acquire on that very forced journey along what that old Indian, Moses, called the "Medicine Trail."

And then, once the spiritual essence of that "boon" was acquired, and in total opposition to his tough, active, ride'em-cowboy, dumb-as-a-pile-of-manure persona, he sat down at his humble wooden kitchen table in this humble, isolated farmhouse, and with lots cheap Bic pens and sheets of various kinds of paper—some lined, many not—scribbled the spiritual essence of that "boon" into a vivid and detailed "literary" reality in a weirdly archaic, poetic fashion that this modern world is going to have absolutely no fucking use for. (Fuck-a-box-of-Bic-pens, John!—why the fuck weren't you clairvoyant enough to know that only a "boon" the length of a Tweet—or at most, a 3-minute, bland-as-pap, pop song sung by that tampon, Bieber!—could make its way in this modern, ADHD world!)

And truly, if you read Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces, (published, ironically, the year I was born) before or after reading The Fire, there exist many points of contiguity, especially when Campbell covers the subject of the "Refusal of the Return," where the Hero spends too much time in the "Underworld" and does not want to return (or sees little point in doing so) with his "boon." (Which to him may not seem like any sort of "boon "at all, just a fucking heavy and unwanted shit-in-a-sack, burden.). I am sure John's return to this area to buy a small farm to isolate himself from pretty much everyone in the world but me, and even his adamant refusal to talk to me about his prior life, represented a true "Refusal of Return."

Though of course, perhaps, if you can—unlike me!—unequivocally accept the existence of those fucking spirits and their guidance and manipulation of John's life, then there was no refusal in that, just the fact—as the length, breadth and depth of The Fire will demonstrate—that the "boon" resulting from his journey, like the very journey itself, was so big and complex it could only be transmitted in the form of The Fire.

Of course, when/if you someday read The Fire, you will see how his witnessing of that mall fire is the essential spark that sets to blazing the uber-dry tinder of distant memories that started him scribbling—in that uselessly archaic, poetic form!—the memoirs that became The Fire, with all those stored-up and very forcibly repressed memories being like a desiccated forest during an abnormally hot and dry summer that just might have made it intact to the fall rains and cooler weather had that spark not set it aflame. (Or maybe Coleridge more poetically and succinctly conveys the essence of the above paragraph with that single stanza where he has the Mariner say, Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched/With a woeful agony,/Which forced me to begin my tale:/And then it left me free.)

And the forest fire metaphor is apt for I live in the boreal forest and there have been dry, droughty summers where thousands of square miles of sap-filled evergreen trees have stood poised to burst into flame with the careless flicking of a cigarette butt, or an unlucky lightning strike, and with everybody with half a brain and the consciousness of the mosquitoes and blackflies of which there are way too damn many around here, being most anxiously aware of the danger. In fact, the boreal forest outside my door is so huge that usually every such droughty summer, some luckless areas burst into flame—and some towns burn—and the smoke from those fires will easily travel for a thousand miles—just to remind us how precarious things can be.

And of course, if anyone in California, with its multi-year drought and millions of acres of tinder-dry forest and grasslands—some of which are uncontrollably burning even as I write this!—ever chances to reading this, they know all there is to know about such fires! And how hot and fast they can burn and in doing that, catch many hapless people—and whole cities!—off-guard. And of course, since this abomination—and The Fire—is going to be available worldwide through the Web, then I guess I should include Australians in that, for if anyone knows a lot more than they want to about the volatile dangers of bush fires, it is them!

That John was aware of this problem—of being on a kind of Campbellean, boon-seeking journey—is only too obvious in the fact that his copy of The Hero With A Thousand Faces (which I have read several times and which I now have in front of me) is full of underlinings and annotations, this passage having been double underlined, once in pencil and again with a red pen.

This brings us to the final crisis of the round, to which the whole miraculous excursion has been but a prelude—that, namely, of the paradoxical, supremely difficult threshold-crossing of the hero's return from the mystic realm into the land of common day. Whether rescued from without, driven from within, or gently carried along by the guiding divinities, he has yet to confront society with is ego-shattering, life-redeeming elixir, and take the return blow of reasonable queries, hard resentment and good people at a loss to comprehend.

The above sounds a lot like what happens to anyone who sees a UFO and is silly/courageous/reckless enough to tell anyone about it. But given John's expressed shame over his life in general, a shame expressed by the fact that even after that story had been seemingly been forced out of him in his writing of his memoirs, he responded to it with enough shame to locked it away in a highly symbolic, ugly old box with a stout lid he screwed shut with twelve very long screws, and which he hid in a filthy, ugly "cave" of a place where it either wouldn't be very easily found, or would more likely, as it "almost was," hauled off to an ignominious fate in the town dump.(Saved only by my capacity for off-the-Meds-Rez hallucinations!) If the story of his life is the "boon" he was pushed/lured on a Campbellean journey into the Underworld to capture and return with, it was always to him something too shameful to be considered a real "boon," and certainly something too shameful to want to reveal to the world while he was still alive.

Though as I re-read the last line of that Campbell quote, "...and take the return blow of reasonable queries, hard resentment, and good people at a loss to comprehend." I can see that the "reasonable queries, hard resentment...etc." was a moot point because he was living well away from the banks of the river of normal sociality long before he wrote a single word about his life, and when he was finished writing what might well be over a million and a half words about that life-journey, he was way too old to give much a of damn about what anybody thought of him, not that he gave much of that even when I first met him.

But I suspect that, along with his shame over the life that led/dragged him to the wisdom he eventually acquired, (cf. that famous Roman saying: those whom the fates can't lead, they drag) was the sense that because it happened to an utterly banal nobody like he saw himself to be, it was too mundane a tale to be of interest to anybody, so just kept it too himself.

Though of course there lies the glaring fact that the only way for him to reveal his "boon" to the world would be through writing about, then publishing it, and I am one hundred percent sure the idea for John of being a published writer was as absurd (when you read his recounting of his school days and his dyslexic difficulties in even learning to read, you'll see what I mean!) as would be the idea for me, now a senior citizen packing enough pounds of lard on my five-foot- two frame, to take up ballet dancing. (Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!—I can't stop laughing as I suddenly have leaping through my head that scene from Fantasia where a hippopotamus in a pink tutu is dancing, except if that hippo was me, I'd end up completing my first leap by falling flat on my fat, ugly, zit-ravaged face (all those meat-lover's pizzas and trans-fatty junky food!) and fat bloated gut, as dead as Isadora Duncan—of a heart\- not a scarf-attack—before all my lard even finished quivering!)

And as I mentioned before, John once said that the reason he came back here was because he was sent back by his (putative!) spirit-guides to meet, and have a relationship, with me (a statement that I took at the time to be as facetious as it was absurd!!) and perhaps when he said that he'd intuited—or had been outright told by his (putative!) spirit-guides—that I had some important role to play in his destiny, but at that time, since the mall fire that provoked the writing of his memoirs was yet ten years in the future, he had not even a glimmer of an idea what that role would be. He had an irritating way of trusting both his intuition and those (putative!) spirits to an extent most rational materialists would define as either pathetically childish or patently insane, and I am sure that if he'd intuited, or had a vision of The Fire, as I am trying to fix it up for release to the world, he'd have dismissed both the intuition and the vision as either incomprehensible or impossible.

Of course, claiming that The Fire is most definitely the "boon" from his Campbellean "underworld" journey and that, once it is released to the world, it will have great cultural importance, is probably as absurd as me believing that my too-many junk-food farts (or even a month's worth of them!) are catastrophically polluting this Earth's atmosphere. For, as I have already said too damn many times, the readership of The Fire will, at best, be miniscule—though more likely non-existent, since I have no intention of putting any money or effort into advertising it!—and certainly, if by pure, bizarre chance, it does get read by anyone, it will at best become a perversely cultish thing, due to the twin facts of, 1) Campbell's last reason for the "Refusal to Return, "...and good people at a loss to comprehend." And 2) that The Fire is poetry and, as I have pointed out too many times already, poetry is as popular with today's left-brained prose lovers with Tweet-corrupted attention spans, as would be the reading—and understanding the symbolic importance of—of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby to Mad King Donald! Or is that now Mad King "Mushroom-dick" Donald? (LOL, to the nth degree!)

And bless you Stormy, for that revelation, which, for many normal people, was, I am sure, just a "little bit too much information," (about not very much!)(LOL) and the fact that your life-path was somewhat dictated by you being molested by an unnamed adult male when you were nine years old. I just wish I'd possessed your mental and spiritual strength and turned the lemons of my similar abuse into the lemonade of a successful "adult film" acting and directing career like you did. (Instead of winding up this hippo-obese, pug-ugly and uber-pathetic loonatic!) Not that I would have wanted to have included a "fuck 'n' suck-fest" with Mad King "Mushroom-dick" Donald in that CV. Of course, had I been free to follow a life path similar to yours, I'd have missed my wonderful relationship with John, and missed as well, my putatively spirit-driven destiny to be this "memory-keeper" of the "boon" of his Campbellean, "underworld" journey. So I guess it's all moot.

### Chapter Forty Five

So now that that sidetrack into the world of Joseph Campbell's "thousand-faced hero" has been traversed, I'll reverse the train and try to get back to one of the main sidetracks of this FUBAR "Preface," (I no longer have even the slightest idea of what or where the main line is, nor do I have the time to care!) which, as I scroll back, I see I sidetracked while talking about how the raising of consciousness in a human being was achieved by unusual amounts of suffering, (which, with that bizarre, spiritual logic, means that Hitler, with all the suffering he directly created with that evil Holocaust, did more to indirectly raise humanity's collective consciousness than any other human being!) and it is plain to see how true that was for John, for however Homer Simpson-unconscious John might have been when he first fled his family farm to go fight in the BASS, (from his perspective, he was so dumb he made Homer look like Isaac Newton!) he was definitely burning bright with consciousness more than half a century later when he returned to the general vicinity of it.

(Just in case you give a flea-fart!—the location of his natal farm is about fifteen miles from here, but there is no farm there anymore, just a few piles of collapsed buildings marring a big beautiful field of wildflowers and bushes and birds and butterflies in the process of slowly and relentlessly being reclaimed by that ever-patient boreal forest that his father originally "stole" it from over a hundred and forty years ago in order to grow wheat on it.)

And I know he returned burning with consciousness as bright and hot as a phosphorus flare with the same certainty that I know I'll burn my butt if I sit on a red hot stove element, for in my too-short relationship with John (forever would have been too short!) there occurred a few rare (fortunately rare, because as Campbell said, in his The Power of Myth, "It is a terrifying experience to have your consciousness transformed.") simpatico and telepathic moments when my dim and puny consciousness got swallowed up by John's bright and giant one, and it was like I went from stumbling around in a deep cave lit solely by the light of a single, guttering candle to suddenly having a dozen Klieg lights turned on in my face.

It was during those absolutely short but overwhelming moments, when I could suddenly see and feel and sense the world around me so indescribably acutely, clearly, and even clairvoyantly, as he surely must have seen, felt, and sensed the world around him all the time, (it was like taking a massive dose of super strong acid!) that I understood his adamantine need for isolation, solitude and silence, and that for him to interact with our normal busy, noisy, modern mechanical world populated by noisy hordes of utterly mindless, ego-driven automatons—MAGA-hatters without hats!—who called themselves Homo Sapiens Sapiens,(while being anything but!) was akin to a tortoise without a shell leaving its burrow during a hail storm. (And why he had no desire to interact with the world at an intimate enough level to present to it his "boon"—not that he could have lived long enough to type it out!—which to him, like I said, was no "boon" at all, just a sack-of-shit burden and a curse. Or as he once put it, "A load of poisoned meat in the gut of a wolf that it has to vomit out to save its life!)

And now, with Jonathan's arrival looming on the horizon like a big black nuclear mushroom cloud and heralding my return to a simulacrum of "normalcy," a "normalcy" to be indubitably induced with a head-lightning storm, followed with a personality-poisoning "Love Canal" concoction of anti-psychotic "meds," breathing down my neck in a fashion captured well by Coleridge in this stanza from his "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,"

Like one that on a lonesome road,

Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turned round walks on,

And turns no more his head;

Because he knows a frightful fiend,

Doth close behind him tread.

Yeah, right on, Mr. Coleridge!—for if you, Dear Reader(s) are fortunate enough to have thus far survived your lives with enough undamaged spiritual stability to have escaped the soul-destroying gulags run by our modern, Psychological KGB with their storm cloud-banks of personality-obliterating brain-lightning machines and their Love Canals of personality-poisoning chemical concoctions, count yourself blessed, for I doubt a more "frightful fiend" could ever "close behind" anyone "tread!"

But of course, the purported purpose of this "Preface," Dear Reader, was not to drag you into the cesspit of my life at all—the way I sure as fuck have done!—but to solely inform you about my uncle John and his memoirs about his long, hard life and long, hard "Hero's Journey" to both a necessary gnosis and the concomitant acquiring of a Campbellean "boon" that to him was always nothing more than a sack-of-shit burden. Needless to say, I did not intend, on setting out to write this FUBAR "Preface," did not intend to frog-march you deep into the shit-pit of my life, but as that wise proverb (used too often by too many priests who too seldom practice it) goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions—so I hope you have learned something from my hell of a life (besides the obvious fact that it drove me insane!) that I have—quite unintentionally!—given you a Dante-tour of.

And just one last thing about The Fire—so I can get the fleeting feeling, as I close this document, that I wrote something objective about it. John begins his "boon tale" with his immediate reaction—on driving back into that mall parking lot that February-frigid Saturday evening after visiting me and the kids for the afternoon—to witnessing the astounding and devastating fact that what he'd assumed at the time to be a small, inconsequential fire that apparently started right around the time of his stopping there to do a bit of shopping, had, during his brief, afternoon visit with me and the kids, burned the whole place out of existence.

I could be but stunned!—

As I drove off the highway;

The dark, snow-banked highway,

And saw the devastation that lay before me.

I could feel but numbed!—

As I stopped my truck;

My ancient, rattle-weary friend,

To watch the hoar-rimed firemen spraying

Arcing streams of water into that burning pit.

I could but shudder!—

As alone I sat, sat

So very, very alone, staring at

Those flames that danced and whirled

Like crazed and ecstatic dervishes.

And stunned—and maybe shuddering numb—you will be forced to feel by almost everything that follows those first three stanza. (Which weren't exactly like that, with what you just read being my early, quickly abandoned, attempts at $tyle-Naziing the thing to make it more "poetically" literate!). So stunned you may well be, that I believe The Fire, however much of it is real and however much of it is a product of his aging imagination as he struggled to fill in the natural memory-gaps (believe me when I tell you that if you do read it, you will surely not be able to accept that all of it is true!) will live up to this very appropriate quote of Franz Kafka's that I came across on the BAN (the Borg Assimilation Network, aka, the Web):

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into a forest far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.

Though, in keeping with the title of the book I have been for so long "running off at the keyboard" (babblogging!) about, I will paraphrase the penultimate sentence of that quote, to: This book is a blowtorch that will melt the frozen sea within you.

Sheriff Jonathan hasn't "ridden into Dodge" yet, so I can get back to what I do best when I have manically—and maniac-ally!—flown out of my legal chemical cage and am high-soaring on the hawk-wings of that criminalized chemical, cocaine, which is to compulsively make this thing longer as I describe a very interesting thing that just happened. On my way back up the stairs from the garbage dump of my kitchen to grab a bag of snacks to munch on—and dirty up my keyboard with!—I got drawn to one of my bookshelves were a book of John's fish-hooked my attention. (That damn "library angel" again!) It is called Alternative Realities: The Paranormal, The Mystic and the Transcendent in Human Experience, by Leonard George, Ph.D.

And when I let it open up to where it was wont, lo and behold, it was at a page with the essay titled, mania, on it. Very early on in the essay, Dr. George writes that,

. . . the Greeks believed in two kinds of madness: mundane and divine. Mundane madness was often thought to be due to assault or POSSESSION (capitalized to show it refers to an essay titled, possession) by hostile spirits. Such cases would often be viewed with awe, because the sufferers had been touched, however destructively, by supernatural forces. . . .

Divine madness was potentially valuable as an avenue of contact with the gods. Socrates is quoted by Plato in the Phaedrus as saying: "Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness, provided the madness is given us by divine gift." Socrates goes on to provide a fourfold classification of divines madness: prophetic, telestic, poetic and erotic. . . .

I had to look up the meaning of telestic, and it means: pertaining to religious mysteries. I will leave it up to you, Dear Reader, to decide—by what I've done with this poor "Preface!"—if my madness is mundane or divine. And I can't help you with that decision because I am too mad, mentally discombobulated and coke-stoned to make a rational judgment, though as I write this, the room is filling up with a sense of a powerful presence . . . and the delightful, room-permeating scent of fresh blooming lilacs (a sweet and entrancing scent that overpowers the house-wide reek of rotting garbage wafting up the stairs from my kitchen, the stale hash-and-grass smoke clinging to every hard surface and permeating every porous one, unwashed bed sheets and clothes, and my own body odor, which, after a couple of months without a shower, is too likely right off the "Richter Scale" of abominable stenches!)(For some totally irrational reason, Dear Nose-holding Reader, when I'm "walkabout from the Meds Rez" and riding the magic carpet of my mania, I am extremely hydrophobic!) which means that it is Catherine—or more likely an hallucination of her!—who has made an appearance. (The crazier I get, the more real my hallucinations of her start to seem to me!)

And the instant I realize it is her, I can feel the multitude of discombobulation-waves riling the lake of what remains of my mind suddenly being stilled, as if a thick, lilac-scented oil has been poured over the surface of it, and Catherine's sweet, soft, wind-chime voice informs me, with great authority and certitude, "Your madness, sweet Rachel—at least with regards to this "Preface!"—is divine and falls under the classification of poetic!"

But remember, I'm as mad as a fucking hatter—not a fucking mindless MAGA-hatter, just a normal, hatter!—right now and that sure as fuck could just be a wishful-thinking hallucination, so don't fucking quote me on it—especially since I don't consider this FUBAR "Preface" to be a creative work at all.

I mean, from the day I went "walkabout from the Meds-Rez" to write it, my sole intention has been to write purely factual stuff about John and my interactions with him. And even when I so often go off the rails of that initial intention and write too much crap about my own shit-pit of a life, I am still, within the matrix of my madness—divine or not—trying to be factual!

Though as I finished typing out that word factual, I felt a soft, cooling breeze redolent with the sweet scent of out-of-season lilacs swirl around me, and another soft, bright breeze of inspiration blow through the fucked-up landfill of my mind, telling me that my decision to go "walkabout from the Meds Rez" in order to write this thing, was inspired, and that the impetus to keep writing it in the face of my Nietzschean-like, disintegrating mental health, was also inspired!

And when I responded to that inspiring breeze by saying aloud, "So Catherine—it is you who are writing this!", my very vivid hallucination of her instantly replied, in her sweet, soft, wind-chime voice, "No Rachel—it is we who are writing it. You and me, both! I am not corporeal and can only inspire—I need you to do the actual writing." Then I heard a soft, sweet, wind-chime chuckle, after which she went on, "Believe me, Sweet Rachel—if I was writing this "Preface" on my own, I not only would not be in the deranged state that your tragic life and terrible experiences with your father drove you into, and I would not be filling it with all those foul expletives you are so comfortable using. Or the crude metaphors! Or the crass and provocative sexual descriptions! But of course, my short life, as hard as it was, was not as hard or sexually deformed and degraded as yours—and it did not drive me mad. And also of course, if you were not who you are, and your destiny had not been unfolding as it was decreed, you would have had a much more normal, socially engaged life, and would not have been able to become our memory-keeper. So be at peace with what you have done with this work. It is anything but perfect, but it exists—and that is all that really counts, for it will more than serve its purpose of drawing people's attention to that great work, The Fire, that you created out of John's mess of a memoirs—which I had no more of an easy time inspiring him to write than he did writing them—and which are 'the memories' of our tragic life together. True, on the surface it was a very small and mundane tragic life, but it was all we had and it was important to us, but because it was a life directed by Higher Powers, it has a deeper, symbolic and universal aspect to it that makes it important—and why it has become your destiny to be the very important 'keeper' of it. . . . And always remember, Sweet Rachel, that we have something in common—we both shared the company of that powerful avatar's—John's!—company for a number of years, and as his memoirs showed, not all of them for me were bad! . . . In fact, some were indescribably glorious! But you already know that from your long years of very hard labor on The Fire!"

Goddamn!—when those soft, wind-chime words of Catherine's that had been "silently" filling my head ended and the potent sense of her sweet, lilac-scented presence vanished from that room, I suddenly started weeping like a child whose mother has just died. While I was hallucinating her to be in the room with me, I felt every bit as good . . . and loved . . . and as whole, as I used to feel when spending time in John's presence. When she left, it was like I'd been Star Trek-transported out of a lush, cool forest-glade and onto a sun-baked dune in the Sahara Desert! I have never felt so . . . fucking goddamn abandoned . . . since John died!

Though as I was whipping through my last roll of toilet paper—my tissue supply was long gone!—trying to soak up those rivers of tears coursing down my fat cheeks, I felt a normal "little bird of inspiration" chirping in my mind, bringing into a memory a quote of Jupiter Jung's that for some reason John had taped to the inside of the lid of that ugly wooden box he'd hidden his memoirs in. (I suspect he came across it in some book he was reading after his memoirs were done, thought it appropriate, and didn't know what else to do with it.) It had struck me important enough that, on finding it, I'd taped it to the wall over my desk and it is still there, and readable, however yellowed the paper he wrote it on and faded the ink he wrote it with.

"In the last analysis, every life is the realization of a whole, that is, of a self, for which reason this realization can be called 'individuation.' All life is bound to individual carriers who realize it, and it is simply inconceivable without them. But every carrier is charged with an individual destiny and destination, and the realization of this alone makes sense of life."

As I was typing out those words, I was first filled with the realization that that long quote of Jung's was saying the exact same thing as that short quote of somebody's that Joseph Chilton Pierce, in his "Cosmic Egg" books loved so much—there is no being except in a mode of being. And then I was filled with the sense that John had taped that quote to the lid of the box—and I had subsequently taped it to my wall—just for this moment! Just so I could feel some very necessary encouragement at a very, very dark and crushing and crucial time in the process of writing out this FUBAR "Preface"—which must be more important than I am able to judge, or believe, it to be! And in re-reading it right now, I am getting a sense of validation for what I sacrificed—and for the hell I am putting poor Jonathan through!—to get it written into its catastrophically imperfect existence. It was as if Catherine drew my attention to it—it had been on the wall so long, it had become invisible to me!—to drive home that "every carrier is charged with an individual destiny," and that my destiny was to "create" The Fire out of John's mess of a memoirs, and to babbleblog this FUBAR "Preface" into existence in order to explain its existence, the realization of the importance of which would both make sense of, and validate, the whole of my FUBAR life!

Goddamn!—trying to get back on the mainline after all these sidetracks in both exhausting and depressing. WHO THE FUCK KEEPS THROWING THOSE GODDAMN SWITCHES? . . . Anyways, back to Dr. George's book, Alternative Realities (maybe that's what I should call this "Preface!") and his essay on mania, where he elucidates that third type of divine madness, poetic, with,

The third type of divine madness, the poetic mania, was the domain of the Muses. These beings were held to be responsible for creative ideas that appear in a person's mind. . . . The involuntary aspects of creativity are well-explained by this belief. Inspiration often does not come as the result of a logical train of thought, but "out of the blue," so it is well-labeled as a type of madness. Most artists have experience being "gripped" by an idea, and feeling almost compelled to develop it; here the mad quality of the Muses' interventions is most evident.

Well, that passage sure throws a bright and interesting spotlight on the "fact" of Catherine so delightfully showing up as she just did for a chat with me, (Yeah, I know, she was just an elaborate, manic-schizoid hallucination, but it gives me no end of necessary comfort to believe she was as really there as she really felt like she was!) and as well, thrown a spotlight on a lot that has happened over the years. On the one hand, it's a good explanation for why I couldn't become the novelist I wanted to become—I couldn't attract the attention of a creative Muse. Or else, my normal, run-of-the-mill, speeding-to-a-crash "Crazy Train"—my ever-suppurating mind-wound-derailers that drove me off the rails!—just wouldn't slow down enough to let any creative Muse slip aboard.

I mean, powerful Muse that I hallucino-sense Catherine to be, I just know she'd have had no interest in manifesting in my fucked up life in order to hallucino-inspire/help me to write the shallow, derivative, fucked-up, self-absorbed, auto-biographical shit I just know I would have written back then! And, yeah!—I know I've just been babblogging a lot of really fucked-up, self-absorbed, auto-biographical shit into this FUBAR "Preface," but it's part of a much bigger story—and it sure as fuck ain't very derivative! (I mean, if you've ever read anything even remotely similar, please don't hesitate to send me an email to fucking let me know! Ya kin reach me at, Rachel@dontgiveafuck.com)

And on the other hand, it sure explains a lot about John. Not just for his incredible compulsion to write his memoirs in a poetic form, which perhaps was/might-have-been Catherine's (who else could it have been?) way of unequivocally demonstrating that there was a divine element to his writing of them. Though maybe not even that, but just to express her individuality and range of passions as a Muse, an individuality and range of passions that John most powerfully and evocatively brings to life in his memoirs, her five most dominating passions being her deep and profound love for John—even at his worst!—followed by her deep and profound love for their son, Johnny, and then her lesser—but not by much—passions for music, nature and poetry.

And it also explains all those over-the-left-field-wall and very bizarre or obsessive ideas that possessed him over the years that I knew him, and which he filled the tiny hollow in the coconut of my head with. And what better example of an over-the-left-field-wall (old hag/young woman optical illusion) idea than that utterly bizarre and insane—inspired?—one that our machine/technology-world represents an alien invasion! An invasion by organic energy-feeding inorganic beings, for fuck's sake! (I can't even imagine what such beings could be like!) Thus reducing this present civilization, that we so arrogantly and hubristically consider humanity's ultimate one—based almost solely on rapid and amazing developments of technological wizardry and mastery!—to nothing more than the complete invasion and occupation of our planet by this clever, hiding-in-our-machines-and-corrupting-us-into-decrepit-slaves race of beings possessing a nature we cannot even begin to fathom, let alone understand! (Except maybe by watching all the Star Trek episodes with those nefarious Borg in them!)

A total and complete invasion and occupation that, not only are we—most of us!—not aware of, but an invasion and occupation that has systematically turned us into mindless—and too-often willing!—machine-building slaves who are only too willing to aid and abet our invading, occupying "masters," not only in "their" efforts to totally and absolutely dominate us and this planet, but to further their own evolution. In effect, that off-the-fucking-wall idea postulates that planet Earth and humanity have become, to these invading, occupying inorganic beings, like 19th century India and its residents, to the invading, occupying, and exploiting, British Empire! (I desperately hope he was wrong about that totally crazy, way-too-far-off-the-left-field-wall/old-hag—and absolutely terrifying and depressing for me—idea!)

And for sure, for the roughly twenty seven years that I knew him, John was very "gripped" by his very negative ideas about "Constantine's Imperial Church/Crutch/Abomination," which sure was never far from the top of his conscious mind. Though in most aspects of his personality and behavior, I could flat-out say he was the most un-manic person I knew, but when it came to that dark—and what he idée fixe, considered the "most evil institution to ever dominate and control humanity and its history," he truly was gripped with a very manic obsession with it.

Again, on that subject, I refer you to Colville's already-mentioned painting, the bleak and disturbing, "Horse and Train." I mean, what else but divine, Muse-inspired, poetic madness could explain his (later-life) obsession with running down the rails of fate—his destiny?—for a lethal head-on with that black, speeding, intractable monster of a train being operated by this world's most powerful and evil "railroad"—the CIA. (Nope, not the third-most evil institution/railroad ever to dominate humanity and its history, the Central Intelligence Agency, which serves the dark and evil needs of the second-most evil "railroad," that one being Mad King Donald's Fascist Kingdom of America—but Constantine's Imperial Abomination!)

Interestingly, and most apropos, given that a "library angel" inspired me to pick up Alternative Realities, I discovered Dr. George had put four quotes at the beginning of it, one of them, by Sir Francis Bacon, surely being most appropriately applicable to John and his philosophy of life—at least during the years that I knew him:

Let the mind be enlarged, according to its capacity, to the grandeur of the mysteries, and not the mysteries contracted to the narrowness of the mind.

Alas, though John—who most naturally lived the spirit of the first part of that quote!—spent almost all the way-too-short time we had together trying to get me to live it as well, but I could not follow it! Ever most passionate and desperate was I to be a Procrustes obsessed with cutting of the legs off any and all mysteries I encountered so they would comfortably fit the tiny, iron bed of my FUBAR, left-brained mind and worldview! (Not that I am alone in this world in that regard, because that is pretty much the overall thesis-description of all PhD aspirants, and any academic that doesn't toe that party line soon finds themselves looking for a job as a night-shift manager at their local McDonalds!)

But now the room again is flooded with that sweet, delightful scent of fresh-blooming lilacs as Catherine fills my intuition with the definite sense that time is rapidly running out and that I have to wrap this FUBAR mess up because Sheriff Jonathan is not far away—in space or in time! And as I try to muster the intent to do just that, I glance down at the bottom of my computer screen and see that this long, abominable and manic stream of scriptorial diarrhea is almost 325,000 words long! (WHERE'S A FUCKING $TYLE-NAZI WHEN YOU NEED ONE?)

Fuck-a-two-mile-long-freight-train!—that's longer than lots of fuckin' novels! And double fuck-a-too-fucking-long-freight-train!—for if this abomination had been fictional, and if it had a proper story-arc to it, I could at least lay claim, before I died, to being an artist—a novelist!—of sorts. (Actually, as you know the Crazy Rachel-me through your plowing through the sun-baked gumbo of this field of scriptorial lunacy, I am very likely—too likely!—going to "die" very soon after Sheriff Jonathan arrives and hauls me off to the Shrink-Klink for my head-lightning "execution" of all that is truly human in me, so I can be returned to being a well-behaved and predictably zombie who will be content to live out the rest of her zombie-life on the Meds Rez.

Ironically, just writing that term, story-arc brings to mind a book the "library angel" pointed out—and inspired/induced—me to buy during a visit to Chapters just a couple of years after John died. It is The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers, by Christopher Vogler, and it is based on Joe Campbell's theory of the monomyth that he explicates so eruditely in The Hero With A Thousand Faces. It is because of reading both those books that I was able to recognize the "Hero" story running through John's long and tumultuous life, a story that drives The Fire, and I only wish that this FUBAR "Preface"—and my equally FUBAR life!—had a meaning-imbued, Campbellean "Hero" story-arc to it. Well, like John always said about wishes being horses and humanity being crushed to extinction under a global glacier of manure because of them . . .

So this FUBAR abomination—regardless that my putative, "Muse-Catherine," is doing her best to both inspire it and push it to its very necessary conclusion (WHY THE FUCK DIDN'T SHE TRY HARDER TO DO THAT TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND WORDS AGO?!?) I am not fulfilling my necessary, intelligent and rational, role in the co-creative process, (remember what Nietzsche said about the nature of art being intuition tempered by reason!) and thus, because of my deficiencies as a babblogger,(I won't provoke the wrath of the gods by indulging in the hubris of calling myself a writer!) it cannot be blessed with the hallowed designation of ART. Instead, those very glaring deficiencies of mine have reduced to an often inane, always insane, abominably long, off-the-Meds-Rez-blog-rant that is trying its ineffectual best be a real (LOL) Preface to my Uncle John's poetic memoirs, The Fire.

And of course, this whole damn, "Crazy Train" ride—oh yeah, I forgot: as well as being a ride on a "Crazy Train," it's a road trip in a Cor-azy-vette!—that started. Dear Diligent Reader, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back three hundred and twenty five thousand fucking words ago, with my too-keen awareness of the fact that for reasons utterly incomprehensible to my over-literal mind, John, while perhaps in some delusional fantasy of being a Homer or a Virgil, wrote out his memoirs in that utterly archaic form of writing familiar to only an esoteric few today, known as poetry. Of course, my very convenient hallucinations of Catherine's recent "visits" have given me a convenient understanding of the raison d'être for the poetic nature of his memoirs that I hadn't possessed the whole time I was creating The Fire out of the scribble-mess of his memoirs—or even when I started babblogging this abomination!

I mean, while working on those memoirs and trying to make that damn, scribble-mess of poetry into something readable, I could but compare his bizarre and rationally incomprehensible compulsion to scribble them out in that archaic form of writing, the equivalent of James Cameron filming his clichéd epic, Avatar, as a black-and-white film Or Disney originally making Fantasia a silent movie! It was a bizarre and rationally incomprehensible compulsion/inspiration on his part which meant those memoirs, by their very nature, were going to attract about as big an audience as a birth-control film being shown at an old folks home. (Yeah, that term is likely not PC anymore, but I don't give a fuck right now!)

Actually, now that I think of it, reading the poetry of The Fire is, in its own way, much like the situation that develops for modern, color-addicted movie viewers who decide to watch that venerable classic, Casablanca, filmed as it had to be, in that archaic, black-and-white format, which they sure find to a big turn-off at first, yet once they get ten minutes into it, they cease noticing that it is not in color, and at the end of it, are quite willing to acknowledge that it was an absolutely enthralling movie experience that had in no way been degraded by it having been filmed in black-and white.

So anyways, back to the initial, raison d'être for this not-initially-intended-to-be-a-FUBAR Preface, "Preface." I mean, fuck-a-monomyth!—but I'd just spent a big chunk of my life laboring over a basically unreadable, scribbled-out mess of a memoirs that had a very definite, Campbellean, "Hero's journey" story-arc to it, that had been written by a reclusive old man about his very dark and abusive childhood and the dark, driven, obsessive and often violent early years of his life, and I wanted at least a handful of people to read it, but with me being me—Crazy Rachel—with a high tendency towards indulging in high levels of scorpion-paranoia, I was paranoid that absolutely no one would want to read it because it was written in that utterly archaic form of never-read-by-anybody-anymore writing called poetry.

So I figured I better write a short preface to The Fire, explaining just enough about it to attract the attention of at least a few readers—despite the fact it was written as no-one-wants-to-read-it, right-brained shit called poetry and not in the modernly-demanded, left-brained prose. prose.

Well, as that old saw goes about what paves "the road to hell," this abomination that I have be writing—and you, Dear Reader, have been reading—for the last way-too-many weeks is anything but short—or a preface! In fact, what started out—to switch to a surfing metaphor!—as my attempt to help a few prospective readers paddle out past the raging surf of The Fire being written in as poetry instead of prose, I have inadvertently—and very crazily—with this FUBAR" Preface," through its length, its loonatic expression, its spaghetti-tangled complexity, and persistent discombobulation, I have created but another incoming surf-wave that prospective readers have to paddle past in order to get to the wave of the poetic nature of The Fire.

And for that, Dear Reader, I sincerely and whole-heartedly APOLOGIZE—to the nth fucking degree! But if you have kept a steady board and paddled this far through my "crazy wave" you can make it to the other side of it, and if you've had the strength and perseverance—or just plain masochism!—to do that, you can surely handle the surf that is the archaic poetry of The Fire.

And if the "crazy wave" of this FUBAR Preface" achieves that purpose, then my decision to go walkabout from the Meds Rez and in doing that, inevitably getting so profoundly lost in the badlands of this psychosis I am obviously in, that it is making it necessary for the poor, really-pissed Sheriff Jonathan to travel three quarters of the way across this huge country to "ride into Dodge" to deal with the problems caused by it, then that decision will have been worth it.

(Hey, fuck-a-muscle-car!—I wonder if he's going to get unconsciously sucked into hallucina-metaphor about him and his role of being Sheriff Jonathan, and rent a Mustang to "gallop" out here in?)

So after that, yet another "Crazy Train" sidetrack—a "Crazy Train" running on the high-grade "coal" of low-grade "coke!"—I am going to waste some more of my little remaining and very precious babblogging time trying to get back to where I sidetracked off from—which I believe was my discovering that this utterly unfixable FUBAR "Preface" is now an outrageous and insane, 325,000-plus words long, which instantly and powerfully provoked the geysering of a thick, black column of pure, Le Brea Tar Pit depression into my psyche on my facing—at a time when I can do sweet-fuck-all about it!—the realization of just how totally I have fucked the thing up (I mean, what the fuck don't I fuck up in my insane, FUBAR life?) by making it both so insanely long and such a spaghetti-tangled mess, and I have to marshal every micro-erg of coke-fueled mania-power I possess to keep from closing the document and pushing the delete button!

(Hey, fuck-an-aging-rock-star!—if someone ever made a movie (LOL!) of my reeking streak of loon-shit of a life, (POL!) it's title—and theme song!—could only be Neil Young's great song "Fuckin' Up"!)

I mean, what a fucking waste! A waste of my own wacky, self-destructive, walkabout from the Meds Rez—time. I mean, fuck-a-rolled-up-road-map!—but I could have thrown a mattress in the back of my fucking van (No—get your mind out of the gutter: not to turn it into a Shagginwaggen!) and gone on an interesting, road-trip odyssey to some debauched Mexican beach resort where I could rented a cottage and have spent that time getting drunk, stoned, sunburned, and hell—maybe even laid! Laid by some desperate-for-cash, blind Mexican gigolo . . .or a sighted one with a supply of those heavy-duty, yard-waste bags to jam over my flab-ugly mug!)

And worse yet, a waste of poor, good "Sheriff Jonathan's" time and money in his having to take time off work so he could fly all the way here to lasso me off my ever-accelerating "Crazy Train" and drag me to the Shrink-Klink for a few, "stop-my-crazy-world" bouts of head-lightning, that would then ready me to be safely strapped into a comfortable seat on the :"Meds-Rez-Milk-Train" for a rest-of-my-life/boring-as-watching-paint-fade/light-bulb-in-a-dead-duck's-ass/ slow-drag-ride to the fire—of the crematorium!

I mean, all this effort and lunacy can't be anything but a waste, because NO ONE is going to want paddle through the incoming surf of a 325,000-plus word preface to a book that isn't even fucking published yet! In any form! And I mean, face it, Dear Reader, if I come out of this next head-lightning storm too severely head-damaged, I may never have the wits and mental wherewithal to get The Fire out to the world. From my own experiences with those nasty and abusive "brain storms" I know they are damaging and addling to my brain, but you don't have to take just my addled, brain-damaged word for it. Back in 2012, Huffpost ran an article by a Peter Breggin MD, about the subject in which he writes,

Using a functional MRI in nine patients, the authors of the study conclude, "Our results show that ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) has lasting effects on the functional architecture of the brain." The result of these lasting effects is "decrease in functional connectivity" with other parts of the brain. In other words, the frontal lobes are cut off from the rest of the brain. The authors call this "disconnectivity." Does this sound familiar. It is a "lasting" frontal lobotomy.

Fuck-an-functionalMRI!—but I didn't need to read the scientific testimony of those experts to know that! When I Wiki'd frontal lobes I got this depressing bit of information,

The frontal lobe contains most of the dopamine sensitive neurons in the cerebral cortex. The dopaminergic system is associated with reward, attention, short-term memory tasks, planning, and motivation. Dopamine tends to limit and select sensory information arriving from the thalmus to the forebrain.

So there you have it!—Dear Reader! I've already—too many fucking times!—been electrically lobotomized! I've been frog-marched through enough head-lightning storms to know that each one had the effect of scrambling—a little more each time!—the dodo-egg of my brain, which sure explains and justifies the scrambled-egg mess—or is it a train-wreck mess!—that this FUBAR "Preface," has ended up becoming. (Fuck, I desperately need a reference book title, How To Keep Metaphor Eggs From Getting Scrambled!)

And suddenly, a flash of inspiration lights up that scrambled-egg/train-wreck mess, making it alarmingly clear to me the one of the reasons I keep making the bad and stupid decision to go walkabout from the Meds Rez, is because those bouts of head-lighting have scrambled the hell out of the very part of my brain that would induce/allow me to be judicious enough to make the decisions—and do the planning and have the motivation—to stay on that Meds-Rez so that my life would continue to sail along on an even, boring, predictable keel. (Yeah, I know—that's a real fucking dumbly scrambled-up metaphor-egg!)

It's obviously a vicious, downward spiral, and I think I am right in warning you that this insane, 325,000-plus word babbleblog about The Fire, may be totally in vain because neither I, nor the Dr. Frankensteins that are going to wire me up to, then dispassionately—or gleefully!—flip the switch, of that head-lightning machine for the umpteenth time, can guarantee that the gurney-strapped Rachel who will be wheeled out of that storm-room after enduring that head-lightning, will even be the same Rachel who got rolled into it (Remember: a very different Robert Pirsig emerged from his bouts with those head-lightning storms!) or will possess the wherewithal to go through the complex process of Smashwords-publishing, first this FUBAR "Preface" and then The Fire—or even remember either of them exists! (Well, D'OH!—I guess if you are reading this, I fucking didn't . . . get head-lightninged into oblivion, did I! . . . Though from my present POV, and "Time's Arrow" being what it fucking is—I don't right fucking now fucking know that! Do I?)

And needless to say, the thoughts that provoked the above paragraph—and the Le Brea Tar Pit depression accompanying it!—have me very seriously thinking that the most intelligent (if such a laudatory adjective can be applied to me right now!) thing I could do with this FUBAR, and very depression-deepening-on-contemplating-it abomination of a "Preface," is delete the whole damn fucking mess of a thing from my computer. Sure would be fucking easy! And probably the only reason I am not at this moment initiating what would probably be the only sane (sic) thing I've done since beginning this abomination, is I am getting the powerful, intuitive—and surely hallucinatory!—sense that both John and Catherine are right now in this fucking room with me—I can alternately smell the distinctive scents of Old Spice aftershave and fresh blooming lilacs!—and preventing me from doing so.

And barely had I finished typing the last words of that previous paragraph, than the scent of Old Spice grows stronger and I hallucino-hear a soft whisper in my mind, "Flip a coin, Rachel."

Hey!—great fucking idea! That's what I have always done when I get into my too-often, Monk-like fits of paralyzing, OCD indecision. I assign my discombobulating choices to the two sides of a coin, and flip it three time, thus forcing fate or destiny—or whatthefuckever!—to make my choice for me through the process of whatever side of that coin turns up two or three times. Kind of like a deeply depressed person in possession of a revolver playing Russian roulette each morning to see if Fate is going to give him—or her—another day in this Gulag Earth! Good fucking thing I don't own a revolver! OR NOT!

So that is just what I will fucking do! (Even if I get two-of-a-kind on the first two flips, I flip it a third time—just for the fuck of it!) If the coin lands two heads, this abomination will continue to exist in my computer while I am at the shrink-klink for my bouts of head lightning which, most apropos, will themselves represent "coin-flips" concerning my continued existence as Rachel. And if it lands two tails, I first punch CTRL-A, then Delete. And fucking poof!—all this discombobulated shit that's been pouring out of the rectum of my mind like a reeking stream of loon diarrhea, will vanish like a puppy-puff of fog-breath in a January blizzard. But first I've got to go downstairs to the landfill that my kitchen has turned into, root through the garbage to find my purse, then root through it to find a coin. . . . .

I'm now—puff! puff! puff!—back , and most appropriately with—a fuckin' Loony! (If you, Dear Reader, are not a Canuck, and have never been to Canuckistan, a Loony is a one-dollar Canuckistan coin, created twenty or so years ago to replace the one dollar bill—which our political-poobahs determined wore out too quickly and were damned expensive to constantly replace . . . which of course was before they came up with plastic fucking bills that don't wear out as fast as the paper ones!) So here fucking gooooooooes . . .

Well, obviously, Dear Exasperated Reader, if you are reading this you already know the results of two of the next three flips! But for me—right fucking now!—during this flipping process that I am interrupting to type out this shit—I do not know how those flips are going to turn out! So, in being a coked-up loonatic with a Loony in my fat little hand and a flair for the dramatic when flying high over the Meds-Rez in the F18 of my coke-turbocharged, manic loonacy, I will take the time to bore you with the unnecessary details.

Flip one . . . tails. Whoopee—I'm one more tails-flip away from saving the world—and myself!—from this tornado-ravaged trailer park of a "Preface!"

Flip two...shit, I didn't catch the damn thing in my fat, coke-trembling hand, and it's now under the desk and I have to pry my fat ass from between the armrests of this creaking, moaning chair, get down on my hands and knees in order to crawl under my desk to find it. . . . Found it!—and a lot of fuckin' dust, dirt, used Kleenexes, bits and chunks of food (so dried up and deformed I have no idea what they once were,) several Bic pens, the two halves of a pencil I broke about a month ago in a fit of rage over some forgotten incident, and one big mother of a spider (now a brown streak on the wall . . . and the Kleenex I used to execute it!) tending her web—and it landed . . . fuck-a-bad-flip!—heads!

Let me fuckin' tell ya—was it ever fucking hard to get back up from under there! Good thing I had the chair for support. And fuck again, because that horrendous bout of exercise just drove home to me that I must have gained about fifty pounds since riding my "Crazy Horse" off the Meds Rez! Well, naturally—given that every second evening I order in an extra-large, double-sausage, meat-lovers pizza from the nearby Pizza Hut, plus with all that "Mary-Jane" and "Henrietta-Hash" I've been smoking—and baking "Henrietta" into super-yummy brownies overloaded with dark chocolate, butter, eggs and brown sugar!—which of course, gives me a constant case of gut-devouring munchies that demands that every day I "great white shark," not only more of those "swimmers" of yummy brownies, but a whole, hot-July-day beach full of the "swimmers" of cold pizza slices and whatever junk food comes to hand—and mouth! (You could say I am suffering from a severe case of hand-and-mouth disease—I can't keep my hands from jamming food into my mouth!)

Now for flip three! This is the decisive one, so I am going to perform on to my desk. Here goes . . . and it is . . . ta-da—heads! (But you, Dear Patient Reader, very obviously already fucking knew that!) Damn! Shit! Fuck-a-bad-flip!—the fates—or spirits—have decreed that this toilet bowl full of mental and spiritual diarrhea will not get its deserved flush that I was hoping it would get, and that was intended/fated/destined to be read . . . by you, Dear Reader. POOR FUCKING YOU!

But of course, as I already mentioned, you knew the outcome of that flip from the second you started reading this FUBAR "Preface," which, if you think about it, is exactly what life would feel like if we lived outside Einstein's mind-fuck of a space-time continuum the way those so-called spirit-powers John so totally believed in, seem to. (And in so doing, know ahead of time all the details of our choices, unfolding lives and ultimate fates.) Though of course, that takes us back to John's assertion that "Life for us is—has to be!—a conjurer's trick that wouldn't 'work for us' if we could see how it worked . . . if we knew what the hell was really going on!"

And yeah, fuck-a-five-pound-philosophy-book!—if you think about that, our lives would, as John once described it, lifelong feel as enthralling as watching a movie shot by a second bank of cameras set back from the main bank, so that you always saw that the action that was taking place—and being filmed by that first bank of cameras!—was all done on sets by people who were obviously actors being bossed around and harassed by the director.

And of course, you'd also likely get to witness all the actors and actresses who were not being filmed by that first bank of camera, in various states of costume dress and undress, standing around between takes, yikking and yakking, gossiping and backbiting, moaning and complaining, yawning and stretching, scratching their asses, picking their noses, maybe even fornicating and fondling each other—or what the hell all goes on, on those sets!—and our lives would then be as pointless and boring and utterly unlivable as would such a weirdly filmed movie be unwatchable. (Except for the sex going on between the actors and actresses . . . or actors and actors . . . or actresses and actresses! Hollywood, ya know!)

And of course, be just as pointless and utterly undramatic as was my effort at being dramatic in the describing those three Loony flips that determined the fate of this damn, FUBAR "Preface."

I don't like to think about it because it brings on a migraine—as if the poor, scrambled, dodo-egg in my skull doesn't have enough problems!—but John used to love to "amuse" himself thinking about this Einsteinium, space-time mind-fuck we are trapped in, particularly the illusion of "Time's arrow," which he said is what made life, life for us. He was absolutely certain, as he too often loved to incomprehensibly tell me, that the space-time continuum (just trying to fathom how they might be connected makes me feel so MAGA-hatter stupid I just want to take off my MAGA hat, unzip the top of my head and throw my scrambled, dodo-egg brain on the floor so the dog I don't have could eat it!) was just a big bubble—like a soap bubble, except this was a time bubble—full of a dream-scenario of infinite, swirling, never-resting possibilities that the otherwise timeless and spaceless and unchanging Mythos (the fifth dimension/ Ocean of Spirit/Mythos, etc) has blown itself into so it would have the space and time to manifest some of those infinite possibilities—and change and grow on them.

(Ohhhhhhh damn!—that makes my poor head feel like it is being crushed in the jaws of an alligator! And I'm out of fucking Migranal and Tylenol 3's—both of which I can't get a prescription for anymore because of my blood pressure and because of its possible contraindications with those damn "meds" I'm supposed to be taking!)

Another metaphor John liked to use for that head-fucking business (no, he wasn't talking about fucking migraines!) was that the Ocean of Spirit, the Mythos, the Whatthefuckever, in existing in its natural realm outside of space and time, was, in one way of looking at it, like a deck of playing cards compressed into one card, and when it wanted to amuse—and alter!—its bored-to-a-state-of-creativity Cosmic Self by playing games of solitaire, which it obviously could not do as one card, so it created the table of space-time on which it spread itself out as the deck of 52 cards, which then allowed it to play out as many "games" of solitaire as it felt like. One of those "games" of solitaire is this universe that our planet is a microscopic part off, and which we—trapped as we are in the ink of one of those cards (the Joker, LOL!) observe as the time-illusioned events that take place on this illusory table of space.

ARRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGG! And as the kids today would say, I SO DO NOT FUCKING UNDERSTAND!

It has just occurred to me, Dear Reader(s), as I bring this long streak of loon-diarrhea (someone should invent the literary equivalent of Imodium for keyboard-incontinent loons like me!) to its long-awaited end, that the chances of any of you being certified loons like me is so slim that you will likely have no real idea of what awaits me tomorrow when "Sheriff Jonathan" gallops into my "deranged Dodge" on his Mustang (maybe), to lasso me (no maybe there!) and drag me off to the corral of the Shrink Klink. (Call me the Metaphor Bartender—I just love mixin' 'em!)

In effect, unpredictable courses of events will play out. Because Jonathan is my legal guardian (ya, I know, that's fucked up—but so-the-fuck-am-I!) and because my going walkabout from the Meds Rez is a recurring problem for me—and Jonathan!—he will already have made an application for my involuntary admission/incarceration in that Shrink-Klink, and given my history, he will have been forthwith granted it. Depending on how I feel—and how much control I have over that quick-to-rage scorpion of my paranoia—I will willingly acquiesce to "Sheriff Jonathan" driving me—in his maybe-Mustang—to the Shrink-Kling twenty miles away (it's not too intimidating a place, surrounded as it is by nice grounds, and it's real close to a big lake and I just love it if I get a room with a view of the water) and willingly submit to a brief interview with an admitting-nurse and then, if I am still behaving myself, be admitted to a room for my mandatory, 24-hour detention until I am examined by a professional Head-Mechanic who will determine if I should be kept in that "bay" for "repairs" or allowed to go home. Of course, once I willingly tell that Shrink that I have been off my meds for a couple of months, (not that he won't know that just by looking at—and smelling—me!) it becomes a slam-dunk that I won't' be coming back to this cozy little "landfill" of a home any time soon!

But IF this migraine worsens and that goddamn coked-up scorpion of my raging paranoia takes me over—no guarantees that I will be able to control it, given all the damage done to my frontal lobes by previous bouts of head-lightning—then I am going to view poor Jonathan as my mortal enemy and his attempts to take me to the Shrink-Klink, not as a loving son's efforts to help his fucked-up mother, but as an enemy's attempts to destroy me.

And I will then do my raging, coked-up scorpion best to defend myself and thwart those efforts. It's happened before and it sure ain't fuckin' pretty, because when I get coke-up scorpion-fucking paranoid and unpredictable and violent—like that cannibal-episode in the bar that last time!—and then it involves the police and an ambulance containing strong and savvy paramedics who possess syringes full of that powerful, Mike Tyson-in-a-bad-mood sedative, ketamine, in them (that nasty shit gives me excruciatingly painful muscle cramps and makes me puke my guts out! . . . and yeah, I do have a few functioning muscles underneath all this hippo-flab!) that they will jab into the flab of my gargantuan ass, and deliver a knock-my-head-to-the-moon punch that will keep me quiescent until I am driven—strapped tight to a gurney—to that Shrink-Klink. And things will only get fuckin' worse from there! Lots and lots and lots fuckin' worse, especially when coming down off my coke-high and swan diving into a La Brea Tar Pit of depression! (I could clearly hear Jim Morrison belting out "Riders on the Storm" as I wrote that!)

So I've got my fat fuckin' fingers crossed (no, not fuckin' literally, obviously, because then I'd not be able to be fuckin' typing this, would I!) hoping I will possess the luck—but mostly the willpower—I will need to stay in control. But no fuckin' guarantees on that!

And if my fat fuckin' fingers, however tightly—figuratively!—crossed, can't keep that coke-fueled paranoia-scorpion demon—and the psychotic, rage-and-riot state that it induces when it gets too powerful!—at bay, and my ride to the Shrink-Klink ends up being in an ambulance while Mike Tyson-KO'd with ketamine and strapped to a gurney, then it becomes almost inevitable that I will do my riotous, coke-withdrawal swan dive into that La Brea depression which I will end up getting snapped out of by a few storm-bouts with that fuckin' head-lightning machine.

And—as already fuckin' stated too many times!—the outcome of those storm-bouts could well be moot. I may come through them in a reasonably okay state with most of this Rachel-me intact, but then again, I may not. For all I know, those "treatments"—as happened to Robert Pirsig!—may end up executing me right out of existence, leaving behind a fat, ugly blob of . . . semi-conscious adipose . . . that has no fucking idea of it is—or ever fucking was!

And even if this Rachel-me survives those head-lightning storms, I will be put back on that boring-as-watching-newsprint-yellow "Meds-Milktrain," and spend the rest of my very predictable, well-behaved, chemically-strapped-to-my-seat life in that light-bulb-in-a-dead-duck's-ass state.

As I have surely already over-informed you, over the last "325,000-plus words of all this lunatic babblogging, I have gone through those necessary bouts of head-lightning more than a few times already, and every time the original me, the original, daddy-diddled-and-lifelong-fucked-up Rachel, has never been completely "rubbed out" in those nefarious processes, but like playing Russian roulette—ya still never fucking know. (And like any Russian roulette player who never knows—never hears the bang!—when they pull the trigger on the loaded chamber, if I get "rubbed out" by that head-lightning machine, I will never know it!)

Ah, great analogy, Rache! Perfect, actually! Just as any deranged player of Russian roulette only knows about the hammer-clicks on the empty chambers, so also will I only know about a bout of head-lightning that doesn't execute this Rachel out of existence.

But this will have to be my last, Crazy Rachel-bout of Russian roulette head-lightning, because this obese, never-exercised, poorly nourished (not quantity\- but quality-wise!) almost-seventy-year-old body is now way too fuckin' old and too fuckin' tired and too fuckin' unhealthy for what those violent, unpredictable "treatments" put it through—especially the often over-administered Mike-Tyson-ketamine haymakers that precede them!

And just as importantly, my poor, dear, long-suffering and way-too-patient-with-me-for-way-too-long son, Jonathan, (I don't really think of that lovely and loving "boy" as Sheriff Jonathan!) lives too far away and is too busy trying to raise his own family while making his difficult way in this difficult world, to in any way deserves having to disrupt his busy life in order to fly across this big country to keep rescuing me from these "walkabout from the Meds-Rez" episodes!

So this will be it! (Or, to use one of John's oft expressed aphorisms when it came to ending an addiction or any bad habit, "A gunfighter fights his last fight by walking away from the next one.")

Thus there will not—CANNOT!—be any more of these self-induced episodes of Meds-Rez-walkabout! There will not—CANNOT!—be any more Lazarus-resurrections from that Meds Grave! There will not—CANNOT!—be any more of my manic, not-entertaining-for-anybody renditions of my version of the Bee Gees "Stayin' Alive," and this Crazy Rachel you have come to know through this long, crazy, FUBAR "Preface" has got to go back to, and stay on, her Meds-Rez, has got to go back to her much deserved, light-bulb-in-a-dead-duck's-ass "grave."

So in saying that, and before I type the final words of this doesn't-want-to-die-either abomination of a FUBAR "Preface," I can but encourage you, Dear Reader, to, in some hopefully not too distant future, keep an eye out for my Uncle John's very interesting memoirs, The Fire, which hopefully I will be able to Smashwords out into the eWorld once I am hopefully back—as fucking me—on the Meds Rez.

So with that, I will bid you adieu (in case ya don't know—that's French for good-fuckin'-bye!) and finally end this absolutely insane and insanely long babbleblog, close the file, put it on a memory-stick which I will put in a safe place—that I hope I will fuckin' remember!—so I can spend what left of my last night as Crazy—off-the-Meds-Rez—Rachel stoning myself "immaculate" on the last of my cherished supply of coke and "hash-tagged" brownies and watching concert vids at a speaker-shredding volume (kinda like that "Blown-away Man" in that iconic, late-70s Maxell ad! ) while eating enough munchie-junk to choke a crocodile.

It's been a blast.(For me, anyway!)

Rachel _________

P.S.

Hey!—can you have a post script to a 325,000-plus word babbleblog? Well, I guess in something as off-the-sanity-wall wild as this long babbling, babblogging mess of a FUBAR "Preface," you can end up with anything imaginable! And unimaginable too, if you could fuckin' imagine that! LOL!

Anyways, you are not going to fucking believe this, (not that I should have the hubris to assume you've been able to believe any damn thing I've so far written into this abomination!) but last night—possibly my last night as me, as this Rachel you've gotten to know for the last 300,000-plus word of this insane babblog!—I did as I above said I would do, and ate enough "hash-tagged" brownies to stone myself "immaculate" while watching and listening to Stevie Ray Vaughn play at Monteux in 1982 and '85 (yeah, that '82 concert is the one where the moronic—MAGA-hatter!—audience practically booed him off the stage!) and, most unexpectedly (for being in my uber-manic, coke-turbocharged, off-the Meds-Rez state and watching and listening to that guitar-playing tornado, Stevie Ray) I fell asleep and started dreaming about . . . about building something . . . of using a saw to cut boards and hammer nails into them . . . to make something . . . something . . . important . . . something that would protect me . . . though from what I can't' remember . . . and then the dream morphs into me being at Woodstock, of all the fucking things, (no naughty allusion intended!) . . . I mean, I can fucking hear—real loud and clear and truly awesomely—Santana playing "Soul Sacrifice," and while I am absolutely "grooving" on that song—especially its great drum solo—there is the sudden jarring sound of loud cracks of thunder that snap me wide awake, except I don't wake up in my living room . . . on the couch . . . or on the floor . . . but outside, on the edge of the farm where the bush-trails start!

And while I am trying to figure out how in fuck's name I got there, I hear another loud crack of thunder right over my head, followed by the whinnying of a horse, and when I turn around, there's my Uncle John up on his favorite horse, smiling down at me while in the process of curling up his bullwhip, which confuses the shit out of me until I realize that I'd woken up from the Woodstock dream right into another dream, and as fast as I realized I was still dreaming, John jerked his head in the direction of a familiar mare behind him, which whinnied again as soon as I spotted her, obviously signaling for me to get on her. And once I was in the saddle—believe-you-me, it was not this current, huge-hippo-assed-me who got on that horse (not only would I not have been able to climb onto her, but I would have broken her back if I had!) and we set out for a ride, along one of the trails, with John in the lead.

And not far did we go in that dream ride before we were on a long, rarely-used and half-overgrown road that led up to what remained of a small copper mine that had opened at the turn of the century and been shut down in the 1920s, and suddenly that dream ride turned into a very vivid memory-ride of a long ago ride that I'd utterly forgotten about during all that memory-dredging I'd been doing in writing this crazy FUBAR "Preface."

Though no, Dear Reader, not completely forgotten about, because I remember having a flash-memory of it during that debacle of a funeral event for John. But except for that brief "resurrection memory," that ride had completely left my head. Left it like that fraud Castaneda used to describe happening to him when his fictional teacher, Don Juan, gave him teaching in a severely altered state of mind that he called, "the second attention," teachings he would never remember afterwards—or at least not without a lot of work! (Obviously, Dear Keen-Minded Reader, at some point that fraud had to "remember" those ersatz teachings or he couldn't have written about them!)

And as fast as in that dream I realized that I was riding into a totally forgotten memory of a real ride the two of us—and the dog!—had taken one bright, warm October Sunday over 30 years ago along a twisting, almost over-grown road lined with bright yellow aspens and the occasional brown-leafed oaks, up to that abandoned mine site, John turned around in his saddle and said, "This ride and what we talked about is very important, Rachel." Though at that point, his previously clear speech slipped into low, incomprehensible mumble—John never mumbled! "And you'll have to write it down. And right away, because you don't have a lot of time before Jonathan gets here!"

And with that he tipped his hat, smiled and said, "Goodbye, Rachel—I won't be far away, and I will be helping you remember that forgotten ride!" And then he turned his horse and galloped up the road, and though I dug me heels into my horse's side and screamed at her to follow him, she would only amble along at a too-nice-a-day-for-that-kind-of-exertion pace that sure wasn't keeping up, and as he disappeared around a bend in the distance, I was furiously kicking my heels into that horse's ribs while crying and screaming his name and shouting at him to come back, and that is when I woke up from that second dream, flopped on the bare wooden floor—which should have had his Navajo blanket/rug on it but didn't because I haven't gotten around to getting it back from the cleaners yet—in front of my couch, my heart beating like an Indian war drum and missing him like a such a drum its skin while crying my eyes out.

Crying . . . and crying . . . and crying . . . as my poor, drum-pounding heart felt like it was being eaten out of my blubber-bloated chest by a grizzly bear, and I think I would have kept on crying for hours had not John's voice hallucina-shouted in my head sternly and loudly saying, "PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER, RACHEL! YOU DO NOT HAVE A LOT OF TIME!"

Well, on waking up from that jumbled-up mess of dream-memories that got messier with each passing second after I woke up, I looked out the window, and though the grey dawn was just beginning to brighten things up out there, it was doing so just enough to let me see that a thick fog had rolled in during the night. It was so thick that I couldn't even my van which was parked only about ten feet from the living room window. At first the sight of that fog gave me a glimmer of hope that Jonathan might be delayed for a good bit, but I knew from experience those fogs usually burned off real quick once the sun rose even a bit high, so I also knew I couldn't expect much of a reprieve.

Alas, my poor "hash-tagged" head felt like that fog is as much—and even thicker!—inside of it, than it is outside that window, but John's and Catherine's presences—and the scents of Old Spice and fresh lilacs—hallucina-wafted around this room, and I could but think they must be there to remind me that I yet have work to do on this already way-overworked "Preface." Real important work recording what John told me on that long-ago—and weirdly forgotten and just as weirdly suddenly remembered!—ride to that abandoned mine-site, except as I forced myself to stiffly wheeze-waddle up the stairs to the bathroom where I did my "morning necessaries, I could not, for the life of me, remember what we talked about on that ride.

Though, for some strange reason, I could suddenly and very vividly remember the beauty of that lovely, sun-bright and blue-sky October day—if the "second attention," as Humbug Castaneda claimed, is a state of heightened awareness, they I guess I could use that to understand the strange and unexpected vividness of that memory!—and the fact that the maples had weeks before painted the hills with startlingly bright crimson swathes of color, and that, sadly, by then, those early-turning leaves were all lying on the ground, quickly having lost their bright colors and creating that easily recognizable, pungent-in-damp-places, very organic, rotting-leaves scent so endemic to a forest in autumn. But the aspens and birches had turned to various bright hues of yellow and gold and were gilding the hillsides and trail with their autumn raiment, creating a scene so beautiful I can remember John responding to it by softly chanting—as he'd often done on other rides—his version of what he'd called the Navajo Beauty Prayer,

In beauty we ride . . .

With beauty before us we ride . . .

With beauty behind us we ride . . .

With beauty around us we ride . . .

All has become beauty again for us . . .

All has become beauty again for us . . .

All has become beauty again for us . . ."

And as always, his soft-chanted words of that lovely prayer had the effect of making me pay more attention to all the incredible, natural beauty that was before, behind, and around me, though a bit depressing it was that along the trail so few wildflowers yet bloomed save for sporadic clumps of white and purple asters and even more rare clumps of late-blooming goldenrods and chicory. (I know something strange was going on with that ride because I didn't normally notice things like the trees and wildflowers when outside, even on those rides, because I was usually too self-absorbed to do that.)Though there were more than a very dramatic clumps of sumac with their hanging, bright red leaves and erect, darker red, flowers—which, for some reason, I couldn't help remembering that as kids we called them "witches candles." I even saw one tall, straggly white sweet clover plant with some of those usually deliciously scented white flowers on it—but I caught no whiff of their scent that can be so strong and delightful on a warm, humid summer eve.

And while wishing that in that dream John hadn't started mumbling just when he was supposed to be reminding me what we'd talked about, I made the mistake of looking in the mirror at my bloodshot, demon-eyes with their two, huge thundercloud "bags" under them, which were demon-staring at me out of fat and flaccid, lump-of-bread-dough face, with the rat's-nest of too-long-unwashed-and-unbrushed hair overtop it, a sight that got a loud yelp out of me and induced me—for Jonathan's sake—first to vainly try and brush a bit of order into that mess atop my head, and after giving that up as a cause as lost as turning this FUBAR "Preface" into a real one, to then slap a layer of powder all over that grotesque apparition that I knew had to be my face, after which I put some rouge—too much, I know!—in the area where I thought my cheekbones might be and some bright red lipstick on my dry, cracked lips—applying it, more or less, in the general area of them. (Well, at least I kept it off my nose and my chin!)

I then planned to go down to the kitchen to make myself a pot of extra-strong coffee to flush away some of that hash-fog filling my head, but I was abruptly over-whelmed with a gut-grinding panic-attack that screamed at me that I don't have time for that kind of shit, so instead of risking a trundle down that ever-steepening flight of stairs in order to go into the kitchen for a hundred-pound-weakling pot of Columbian coffee, I instead did a couple of snow-up-the-schnoz, "deep breathing" exercises that consumed the last of my stronger-than-Starbucks, Columbian "brain-turbocharger." And after that head-buzzing, mania-boosting exercise, I stiff-legged and wheeze-waddled straight to my computer desk, where, much to my delight, I discovered I'd left more than half of the extra-large meat-lovers that I'd been stuffing into my pizza-hole the evening before while working on this thing! And three of the six cans of Pepsi I'd ordered along with it—so I was confident I had enough fuel available to do the writing I knew I had to do that morning!

And after spending a precious five minutes remembering—while shoving a piece of cold pizza into my pizzapie-hole—where I'd hidden the memory-stick containing this FUBAR "Preface," then retrieving it from its ridiculous hiding place—at the bottom of an over-filled pen caddy crammed full of pens I hardly ever used—sat down in my groaning chair, plugged it into the computer which I'd not thought to turn on while hunting for that memory-stick, and impatiently waited for it to do its always slow, "booting thing,"—it's slowness this morning REALLY FUCKING PISSING ME OFF!—so I could record what John had told me on that long-ago ride, hoping that the memory of it would magically come back to me once I got into the file. (Ha!—wouldn't it be nice if lost memories were as easy to find as lost memory-stick! . . . Or maybe not!—The Fire is one long toxic-waste stream of memories about the folly-filled first third of his life which John had spent most of the next third trying to forget—and the last third memoir-izing!)

Ah, finally—program lift-off! . . . Time to start babblogging again! Except here I am, with this FUBAR fucking "Preface" file wide open in front of me and with the damn thing impatiently—I can feel its FUCKING IMPATIENCE and its really sending me into a RIGHTEOUS RAGE!—demanding that I babbleblog into it all that I can remember about that long-ago ride with John. Except I CAN'T REMEMBER A GODDAMN FUCKING THING that he said on that GODDAMN FUCKING RIDE. Not a FUCKING GODDAMN SINGLE THING! (All I can remember is all the beautiful nature around us and him chanting his version of that lovely Navajo Beauty Prayer!)

And that's really starting to PISS ME THE FUCK OFF and REALLY FUCKING RILE UP the SCORPION OF MY PARANOIA! Especially since I just know I HAVE TO GET IT REMEMBERED AND WRITTEN OUT before Jonathan arrives, because once he does, as the famous saying goes, THAT WILL BE ALL SHE FUCKIN' WROTE!

Then just as my PARANOIA SCORPION was raising its giant tail and filling my psyche with a LAVA-BUBBLING RAGE that was SCREAMING AT ME to pick up that computer monitor and FLING IT THROUGH THE FUCKIN' WINDOW, there was a loud buzzing that started in my ears but quickly enveloped my whole body, followed by what sounded like a real loud version of the popping/crackling sounds that Maryjane seeds make when they burn up in a joint made from third-rate grass, then John's voice in the center of my FUBAR head shouting "SLP!" followed "CONFESSION!"

And then the complete memory of that whole, long ride came rushing into my discombobulated mind with a sound and fury similar to the half-deafening sound I remembered hearing as a very young child when a truck load of coal was being dumped down the steel chute into our basement bin. (Minus all the fucking dust that used to drive my clean-freak mother insane!)

For reasons that I don't remember, John, on that ride, felt inspired to pontificate on two subjects that he considered to be related but which I didn't because I didn't understand one of them. Those subjects being SLPs and Constantine's Imperial Abomination's sacrament of confession. . . . Oh yeah, now I suddenly remember why he got to preaching about that incomprehensible-to-me SLP-shit and the absolutely boring-as-a-barking-dog subject of confession that day—I'd real stupidly asked him what he thought about it! About confession.

It truly was a real fucking stupid goddamn question because he'd expressed his very negative opinions about it many times over the years, but I'd just needed some reassurances about it because of a rage-inducing incident that had transpired that very morning when my mother had visited me and the kids for the first time in six months, and though it was an innocuous visit—for her!—I'd not perceived it as innocuous because I loathe the sight and sound of her and it brought back bad and vivid memories of her visit six months previously.

That visit had occurred because Jonathan had reached the age where, if I had been a good, practicing-Catholic mother (I was always insecure about my mothering skills, which I too often based on doing the exact opposite of what my fucking mother had done!) I would have been getting him ready for all that First Confession and First Communion nonsense. This had given my mother the impetus for one of her rare visits—my overt hostility made her visiting a bit of a storming-the-beaches-of-Normandy-thing for her—because of her concern that I wasn't doing the "Good Catholic Mother" thing with her precious grandson, especially concerning his not receiving First Confession, because if he died in an accident or of an illness, he could end up going "straight to hell for all eternity"—or if not that, spend a very long time in purgatory.

That of course, provoked two violent reactions out of me: the first being the horrific thought of that sweet little boy dying of an accident or illness; then the ludicrous one of the notion that if that sweet little boy did die in an accident or of an illness, that he'd committed enough serious sins in his short, innocent years to end up in either of those ridiculous places for two seconds, let alone an eternity! I mean, the single most memorable thing about Jonathan's childhood was that he was a sweet, good natured little boy who wouldn't hurt a fly if it was crawling up his nose!

So all that sin and confession and death and hell and purgatory shit so enraged me that I told my mother to get the fuck out of my house! And when she didn't do it fast enough, I grabbed her by the lapels of her coat, hauled her out of the chair she'd been so pope-pompous pontificating from, and when I got her to the door, opened it for her and pushed her through it. Her response, to that was to calmly adjust her skewed coat, and—if you can fuckin' believe this!—then calmly say, "Good Dear God in Heaven, Rachel—where ever did you learn to be so violent. I was never that way with you! . . . Oh, don't worry, I know—it's all because of that evil influence your great-uncle John, has over you! And I also know what goes on between you and that evil . . . fallen-from-the-faith man! . . . But remember, I'm your mother, and our good, loving God's fifth holy commandment says you are supposed to honor me. And you certainly shouldn't be using that . . . that miner language with me! You will burn for all eternity in hell . . . right beside that horrible, unchristian John!—for treating me—your mother—this way! . . . I hope you get to confession before that can happen!"

To which I replied, "Fuck you!—Uncle John's got more Christianity in his little finger than you do in your whole goddamned body! And I'd rather spend an eternity burning in hell with him than another five minutes standing here with the fuckin' likes of you! And all that stupid, Church-shit you are always throwing at me!"

And I don't know what her reply to that was because I slammed the door in her face, stormed into the living room and cranked up the stereo full blast. Led Zep IV was on the turntable and I set it to play the final song of the side, "When the Levee Breaks," so Bonham's great, booming, driving drum solo at the beginning of it could serve as a soothing anodyne to that horrible woman's religio-lunacy—and her malicious animosity towards John.

So now you know why it was a full half year before she came back for another visit. What a great fucking six months that was! And too bad that "levee" that broke inside me hadn't washed her away forever!

So that is what set the real John off on what my current hallucination of him seemed to be telling me was important enough to get it into this FUBAR "Preface," because after spewing out—venting!—as concise a rendering as I could manage concerning that erstwhile encounter with my Darth Moeder, (I had to look up the Dutch word for mother.) including what she'd said about him.

That provoked him to effortlessly and skillfully induce his horse to rear up as he removed his Stetson, held it above his head, and laughing shout, "Hee-yaa!" This in turn induces that dog to run around our horses several times, yipping its head off, and my horse to snort and back away, and when his horse again had all four of its hooves on the ground, the dog had settled down, and that Stetson was back on his head, John laughing said, "As long as people like your mother hate me, I know I am living honestly!"

I ended my venting with, "What I can't fucking figure out, is why I put up with that fucking shit from her! I hate that old bitch, I never visit her, and I hate it when she visits me because every visit sooner or later turns to absolute shit! And when she comes over, I keep letting her into my goddamn space and I keep talking—arguing!—with her! . . . And I can't fucking figure out why!"

John made no response to my fuming, excremental explosion but just rode on for a bit before saying, "Because you are in an SLP relationship with her, that's why."

At first I couldn't make sense of what he said because it had been a delayed response to my question of why I persisted in seeing my mother even though I hated her and all she did was manipulate me into rages, and then on realizing that, still couldn't make sense of it because I had no idea what the hell a "SLP relationship" was.

And when I finally asked him, John said, "A SLP relationship . . . with SLP standing for Shitty Little Paranoiac . . . is the name I—or likely the spirits!—give to a very common, dark, and unequal power-relationship between people that causes much damage but which no one really sees. . . . Like in that quote of Jung's . . . at least I think it was him . . . that went along the line of, 'No mouse knows when it's been eaten by a lion.' "

Of course, all I could do with that was parrot him and say, "Shitty Little Paranoiac? What the hell does that mean? And what the hell does it have to do with mice and lions?"

"Well, what the shitty means is that the main agenda of these oppressive shits is to make their victims feel shitty through the dumping of their own shittiness on them—thus allowing them to feel good. For a little while, anyway. The little comes from the fact that these shits—deep down!—are real small little shits of people. And paranoiacs because that is their dominant state of psychological being—paranoia. Their relationship to the world and all other people in it is always a paranoid, us-and-them relationship. They are absolutely self-centered and self-absorbed and they interpret all of reality as something that is hostile to their frail and beloved and exalted self and which they not only must guard themselves from, but constantly fight against. That means that they are as incapable of love as a gallon of black paint is incapable of brightening a room, and that everyone in their circle of influence is perceived as an enemy of sorts that they very defensively must constantly defend themselves against through manipulation and control. Wife, husband, children, 'lovers'—they are all perceived as enemies! If not consciously, then certainly unconsciously!

"As to what SLPs have to do with mice and lions—in as much as there is a big size and power difference between a mouse and a lion, so basically does the SLP-victim relationship always involve a grotesque inequality of power, where the dominant partner is a predatory lion—basically someone in a dark and nasty and paranoid state of mind . . . state of spirit!—that makes them feel shitty! Make them feel really bad! . . . Makes them feel really bad with a sense of failure, with insecurities, with self-doubts, with self-loathings—with guilts and shames!—over any number of heinous actions and perceived failings. This is something they obviously don't like feeling . . . and just as often don't want to face feeling. So they find a mouse victim to have a relationship with . . . a victim onto whom they can project . . . onto whom they can dump all that nasty negativity . . . all that shittiness!

"Which then allows them to feel good about themselves. For a little while anyway! But always just a little while because they are basically living in a dark and shitty reality—in effect, always drinking out of a well that is really a poisonous, spiritual cesspool!—that always very quickly fills them back up with a feelings of paranoia and shittiness. That's why I call them SLPs—because they are shitty . . . they are small . . . and they are endemically paranoid, and the very raison d'être of their whole life is to first find, then ensnare, then control a victim so totally that they are then able to dump—actively project, is, I believe, the psychological term for that process—all their shittiness on them, thus making that ensnared victim feel very shitty and very small about themselves! And paranoid, too! While they of course, after that act of projection, after that act of dumping, are then left feeling clean and good! Temporarily, anyway! And oh yeah, I've discovered a victim has only one truly effective defense against their SLP oppressor, and that is a thousand miles."

To that I could be say, "A thousand miles? What the hell does that mean, Uncle John. You're talking in riddles again."

That got a chuckle out of him as he said, "What I'm trying to say is that a victim's only defense against an SLP oppressor is to get a thousand miles away from them—or as far away as they can!—and have absolutely nothing to do with them! . . . Remember those great books you had for Jonathan and Terry when they were kids . . . and which they were always getting me to read for them? About Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox and a bunch of other cleverly anthropomorphized animals?"

That got a laugh out of me as I said, "Yeah! They sure weren't very PC . . . so I don't know if you can even buy them anymore. But they loved those books so much they wore them out. I've still got them packed away somewhere—just in case I ever have any grandkids to read them to."

"Well, there was one story that I found very intriguing and very apropos to this SLP business."

That got a chuckle out of me as I said, "Most of them were pretty damn silly stories, so I can't even imagine that! . . . Though now that I think of it, like Aesop's stories, some did have apropos . . . messages . . . in them."

"Not as silly as you think," he said with a chuckle. "That tar-baby story is a really wise one with a great message in it that totally relates to this SLP business."

I was silent for a moment as I tried to remember the story, but he reminded me of its theme with, "You know, that one where Brer Fox sets a trap for Brer Rabbit by making a baby out of tar and dressing it up and setting it on the side of the road and when that ego-maniac Brer Rabbit passes by it and says a nice friendly "Hello," the Tar-baby doesn't respond and Brer Rabbit, being the self-important egoist he is, and not having been taught any civility by Papa Rabbit or manners by Maman Rabbit, gets mad at it and gives it a punch on the nose. And when his fist sticks to Tar-baby's nose, Brer Rabbit gets even madder at it and starts kicking and punching it until his hands and feet are all stuck in the tar."

I couldn't help but laugh as I remembered that story, and I also couldn't help but tell John about Jonathan more than once asking me, when I was reading it to him and Terry, why Brer Rabbit got so mad at a baby that he would be mean enough to punch it . . . and with Terry always sarcastically saying, "Because he's a stupid boy rabbit, silly!" (A future MAGA-hatter, I guess!)

Needless to say, John laughed at that and said, "Yeah, Jonathan sure was a sensitive little fella, wasn't he. Still is, far as I can tell. . . . But that Tar-baby story is a perfect metaphor for dealing with SLPs. If you fight back against them, their paranoia and manipulative abilities guarantee that you will only get even more tangled up in their tar-sticky webs—and end up even more stuck to them. Like stupid Brer Rabbit with that lump of tar. So the only effective way to deal with them is to break off all contact—but never tell them you are breaking off contact because that will just throw gasoline on the fire of their paranoia and make their 'tar' even more sticky!—then to get as far away from them as possible and for the rest of your life have absolutely nothing to do with them. Kind of like an alcoholic getting away from alcohol! It's always a life-and-death situation and there is never the tiniest bit of room for 'just-one-little-drink-to-calm-the-nerves' kind of crap!"

As John was saying that I couldn't help but think about my relationship with my shit of a husband and how his taking off out west and getting so totally out of my life was such a blessing. I also suddenly thought about that song of Van Morrison's, "You Make Me Feel So Free," in which, in one line he is singing about needing a place to dump all his negativity, then in the next telling his "baby" that she makes him feel so free. I hadn't really thought much about those lines but I suddenly got the strong intuitive sense that they likely related exactly to what John was talking about! That "Van the Man" was singing about his precious, psychological—and spiritual—freedom being achieved at the expense of his "baby's" enslavement to his conveniently dumped negativity, but as always, I was never good at transmuting intuitive thoughts into words, so I didn't mention my thoughts about Van Morrison's song to John, (he had no idea who the hell he was anyway!) but just vented on.

(And as I babbleblog all this shit into the over-flowing Porta Potty of your poor ears, Dear Reader, I can't help but think about Terry fleeing to Australia—ten thousand miles—to get away from me, and what was likely my tendency to fulfill Auden's dictum about abused children turning into abusers, and thus doing my unconscious best to do to her what my mother had been lifelong doing to me. Consciously—though more likely just intuitively!—she knew everything she had to know about John's SLP thesis, knew me for a predatory SLP looking for a convenient victim—a lion looking for a mouse!—and fled half-way around the world to protect herself from me. And all my nasty, SLP shit! I suspect there's a damn lot of John in that plucky girl!)

"Well, that's very . . . apropos! . . . Because I can tell you, whenever I'm around my fucking Tar-baby of a mother, I feel like the only fucking damn thing on her shitty little mind is the need to spew her goddamn sticky black tar all over me . . . to manipulate and control me . . . and make me feel angry and shitty! Feel tarred! With no feathers needed! And she sure is goddamn good at making me feel real . . . shitty . . . and small . . . and usually pretty damn paranoid! Though mostly fucking angry! Real fucking angry!"

That got a sardonic chuckle out of him as he said, "Jeez, I'd never have guessed! . . . But that's exactly the way she wants . . . actually, no—the way she has to make you feel! Don't you see? That's the way she always feels herself! That's her dominant reality! And when all that shit that's filling up the cesspool of her reality—all her self-loathing and self-recriminations and shames and guilts!—gets too overwhelming for her, she needs a victim to dump it on, and that most convenient victim is you. And not just because you are her daughter, but because she has, over the years of your relationship with her, programmed you to accept that shit from her! Haven't I been telling you for years now to stay away from her—that she is absolutely no good for you! That she's pure locoweed for you!"

"Yeah, well...you have...Uncle John . . . ad nauseam . . . but she is my mother! . . . So it's not . . . so . . . easy!"

"Ha!—just the fact of her being your mother has nothing to do with it. Lots of people know enough to stay away from toxic parents. (As I've already bored you with, Dear Reader, Terry knows enough to stay very safely far away—half this fucking planet!—from her very toxic-to-her mother!) No adult needs a parent any more than a bird needs the eggshell it hatched out of. Or a butterfly, its cocoon! Only young children really need parents!

"Oh sure, if the relationship is a healthy and balanced one, it's hardly a bad thing for adult 'children' to maintain a relationship with their parents—especially if there are young grandchildren involved. And as long as the parent is willing to acknowledge their 'child' is now an autonomous adult—and equal—and they treat them like one. But if it is a toxic relationship—like yours is with your mother—it absolutely must be terminated and discarded. Must be excised—like a lethal cancer! . . . It's like women I've seen in the news who've had a breast—or both!—removed because they are cancerous. I don't imagine there is a woman alive who wants to have her breasts cut off, but for most of them who have such a cancer, they consider it better to lose one or both of their breasts than their life!

"So no different with a toxic, SLP parent! Or parents! And most especially so—as in your case—if it is an SLP relationship where the dominant one has the self-awareness and compassion of a stoat and has enough power over their victim to weasel-manipulate them into remaining in that relationship, not only when they are way too old for it, but when they know it is toxic for them. But the need of SLPs to dump all of their negativity—their self-loathing—on their victims can be so powerful that they use all the power they possess—and all the weasel-manipulations and tricks and wiles they know!—to keep hold of a victim once they have found it. And that is the case between you and your mother!

"You don't keep interacting with your mother because she is your mother, you keep interacting with her because you are her victim and she is your master! Because she is a lion and you are her mouse and she has totally swallowed you up. Because she has mastered you so totally that she has the power to keep you allowing her into your life even when you'd rather be giving yourself a colonoscopy with a red hot poker!"

John was always coming up with hilariously crude—but apt—metaphors like that and this one, like most of the others, got a good—and this time, necessary—laugh out of me. And when I'd stopped laughing, he grinning went on, though what he was saying was more grim than grinable

"If you can't someday totally break free of her . . . if you can't quit being her convenient victim and shit-dump . . . her spiritual privy!—she will destroy you. She will keep dumping all her insane and nasty shit on you until you drown in it—commit suicide or going insane yourself—and she will greet the new day feeling like a morning glory at dawn . . . and go looking for a new victim when she feels all shitty again! It's a damn nasty—and intolerable—situation, believe me!" (I doubt if he had any idea of how clairvoyant he was being about that insane part!)

Needless to say, his words rang some pretty big and loud truth-bells in my psyche that "bonged" me deep into some pretty damn serious and disturbing thoughts, and I didn't say anything for a good long while as those two horses steadily clomped along the half-overgrown ruts of that old road with all its stunningly beautiful scenery. Finally, after I'd sorted things out a bit in my pretty much "revelation-bombed" brain, I said, "You know, I think you are right about that, Uncle John! I don't know where you came up that . . . notion . . . of the SLP—Shitty Little Paranoiac—relationship thing, but it sure seems to fit. In fact, it brings to mind something I was reading about in a Psychology Today magazine a while back, called gaslighting."

That got a chuckle out of John as he said, "I remember the days of gas lighting very well, but I sure can't imagine how it got talked about in a psychology magazine."

That in turn got a laugh out of me as I replied, "Well, it's not about gas lighting, per se, but gas lighting as a metaphor. I just skimmed the article so I didn't understand it completely, but it seems that gaslighting is all about when one person manipulates and controls . . . and destroys another person's confidence and self-esteem—by subtly making them doubt their own perceptions of reality. Even by dictating an alternate reality to them. The term comes from a famous old movie called Gaslight—it had Ingrid Bergman in it, I think—where she plays the role of a woman whose abusive asshole of a husband really fucks with her head by constantly turning down the gaslights, and then when she comments on the fact, he tells her they haven't been turned down and that as far as he is concerned, they are the same as they ever were. Or something like that. . . . I guess you could say it's a subtle form of brainwashing. Non-governmental! . . . Kind of a form of non-corporate advertising!"

John's response to that was to say, "Yeah, that sounds a little bit like this SLP business. Which I think is so damn common . . . and has been going on since . . . 'Adam' convinced 'Eve' that their 'fall' was totally her fault for tempting him with that damn apple from that god-forbidden tree . . . that I sure can't be the first person to notice it. It would be a real stupid world if I was! . . . Though from the sounds of it, I think that gaslighting business might refer to manipulations that are overt and conscious—like government propaganda and corporate advertising—done for totally malicious and advantageous reasons!—while this SLP business I am talking about seems . . . very often, anyway! . . . to be quite unconscious. Though of course, no less malicious and manipulatively effective!"

"But if it's unconscious, how does it come about, Uncle John? . . . Why does it come about? . . .It seems...so...diabolical...to me! . . . And how did you . . . notice . . . and get a handle on it?"

"Believe me I didn't . . . 'get a handle' . . . on it very easy, I can tell you that! It took a lot of time . . . and work . . . and carefully watching and analyzing . . . situations . . . for the spirits to point it out to me! . . . Maybe if I was more of a magazine reader they'd have guided me to that psychology magazine and that article on gaslighting . . . but since this SLP business seems a good bit different, maybe they didn't want to do that. And they had to point it out over and over again in real-life situations until—until I got it. And I didn't 'get it' very easy, because it, by its very nature, is one of those really common and obvious truths . . . that we've talked about before . . . that are always so capable of hiding in plain sight just because they are so obvious and common. Like a huge and grimy and smoke-smudged old painting that has been hanging on a grimy, smoke-smudged wall so long it becomes just . . . a part of that wall . . . like its grimy, smudgy paint . . . and nobody really sees it anymore.

"Essentially, SLPs are small-souled—or more likely, no-souled!—little shits who live in a small, mean and paranoid world and worldview that is only comfortable for them as long as it remains small and familiar. They live their lives very egotistically demanding of themselves that they be the tallest tree in the forest, but they, by nature, don't channel their living energies into striving to grow to be the tallest tree, but very often put those energies into chain-sawing the trees around them down to a lesser size than themselves. And even when they have achieved something of note with their lives, even when have risen up above the forest canopy, so to speak, their paranoia constantly provokes them to feel the need to cut others down to a lesser size so they can seem to stand even taller.

"They compulsively have to trim those around them down to a lesser size because they pose a threat to their need to always be seen and superior and more worthy of attention and accolades. And power! They are never content with what they are or have, and their minds never stray from this self-absorption with their self-importance, because what they are . . . in their own minds! . . . and what they have, is never enough for their voracious egos. Their paranoia and greed is always demanding more. More and more and ever more! They live the totality of their lives in a state of paranoid comparison and competition with everyone around them. Often even their own children. Contentment and satisfaction is as alien to them as icicles to an active volcano. And compassion and charity are even more alien! They are, to the shitty little cores of their always paranoid and always shitty little beings, Shitty Little Paranoiacs! Like I said—they are no-souled . . . creatures . . . that are no more human beings than is a sneak-fart a hurricane!" (Fuck! Does typing that out ever too clearly remind me of Mad King Donald!)

That got a chuckle out of me because it was the first time I'd heard him use that expression and it immediately reminded me of my mother, whom I never once heard let out a fart—unlike my father, who was very proud of his usually very active, always blasting, nether horn!—yet who used to be very adept at most intolerably stinking up a room. And then finding an excuse to get the hell out of it while everyone gasped for breath and ran to open a window.

But my chuckle didn't slow John down as he spurred his pontification-pony on, "And much as the SLP relationship can—and certainly does—occur between adults, it always seems to get its genesis between a parent and a child. The SLP thing is really, at its foundation, a . . . power-dynamic . . . a power relationship . . . so it begins with a parent being in a very negative state of mind . . . in a dark and depressing—and always self-loathing!—mental and spiritual state, which they cannot tolerate, and which they find they can alleviate by dumping all their inner shit, all their negativity, all that depression and self-loathing on a conveniently available child whom, in being that child's parent, they have almost total control over to begin with.

"And of course, one of the most common and effective SLP shit-dumping methods is their compulsion to relentlessly criticize the child over every damn little things that poor child does. And it sure as hell doesn't have to be egregious mistakes or blunders that the child makes! There's many different ways to do just about anything effectively, with most ways neither right nor wrong, but some just more convenient or effective than other—or perceived differently by different people—but the SLP shit-slinger will arbitrarily designate one way—always, of course, their way!—as the absolutely right way, then judge—and criticize!—all other ways as wrong.

"In fact, an SLP shit-slinger in a really dark frame of mind will always arbitrarily label one way the right way and all other ways the wrong ways, with their right way, of course, always being the way that the child did not chose—however effective and efficient the child's own way might have been. They are masterful adepts at creating damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don't . . . or more like damned-no-matter-what-you-do situations for their victim. This, obviously, over a period of time, totally devours and child's confidence and self-esteem, thus making them, of course, all the more pliable and compliant as shit-dump victims—for the rest of their lives! . . . I also suspect—but sure as hell don't go quoting me on this!—that it is this SLP dynamic that creates self-destructive people. . . . I'm not totally clear on this issue, but I had a brief insight once that when the mouse-victim of an SLP-lion gets devoured in that SLP-lion's dark gut and can't save themselves—or doesn't want to save themselves—by, in their turn, likewise finding a victim to dump all their darkness on, they then turn on themselves. They become a kind of very deformed mouse-lion who can't help but devour their self."

Having no small amount of my own self-destructive issues before John had snapped me out of them with his brilliant, throw-the-dumb-slut-in-the-horse-shit action—and a few milder ones since!—I found his proposition very "quotable"—at least to myself!—and could but say, "I like that as a thesis, John—it makes a lot of sense. But I'm having trouble seeing the . . . mechanism . . . of it.

He rode on in silence for a few minutes, at one point reaching down and grabbing the tall, arching head of a sere stem of grass and yanking it free, stuck the end in his mouth in a true, "Farmer John" pose, and after chewing on it for a bit, took it out and said, "Yeah, it's one thing to get an intuitive . . . flash about something . . . and quite another to rationally explain it, isn't it? . . . Well, as far as I can see . . . into . . . this self-destructive . . . business—and again, don't quote me on it because I could be off chasing butterflies with it!—I would say that what happens is any seriously endarkened SLP victim who can't find their own victim to dump their inner shit on—like the kid who needs to kick the crap out of his little brother—or the dog—after getting a whupping from his father!—ends up, not only boiling away in that over-flowing cesspit of darkness that they've been flung into . . . usually by one—or both—parents . . . not only internalizes that cesspit of darkness, but internalizes their SLP-oppressor's power and personality as well.

"I guess I have to go back to that lion and mouse metaphor again, such that the 'mouse'—which unlike a real mouse in a real lion, doesn't die and get digested into the oblivion of a lump of lion shit—but is forced to consciously live on in that lion's 'gut,' and in doing that, cannot consciously separate their mouse identity from the identity of that devouring lion. They become, in their own minds, nothing more than an extension of that devouring, SLP-lion. But it doesn't feel right for them! It doesn't feel good! In fact, it feels downright shitty! So they end up hating that SLP-lion with every fiber of their being, and constantly want to hurt that lion, to 'get back' at it. And in their dark reality two things are going on: one, they know that oppressive and hated SLP-lion is too big and too powerful to strike at and hurt directly; and two, in perceiving themselves to be an integral and inseparable part of that oppressive and hated SLP-lion, they sub-consciously know that if they hurt themselves, they are also hurting that hated and oppressing, SLP-lion. . . . Of course, all of this goes on quite unconsciously, which is why it can have so much power. And why it can pick up so much momentum."

What he was saying made so damn much sense I couldn't comment on it as I thought things through, seeing that process in myself during my most self-destructive period and seeing it in other people. Not just friends, but famous people. Janis Joplin had always had a simpatico place in my heart and if nothing else, the story of her tragic life is a story of wanton self-destructiveness. It had been years since I'd read her biography, Buried Alive, but I remembered enough about it to know that she'd entered her "adulthood"—if young famous rock stars can ever really become adults!—carrying a lot of real negative baggage out of her childhood and teens, baggage that left her with a totally negative and self-loathing self-image, baggage she never seemed to have been able to SLP-dump onto any convenient victim. Except herself!

My long silence not only allowed our horses to plod along a good stretch of that ancient road—and the dog to race in and out of the bush on both sides of it—but it allowed John's "pontification pony" to trot away from that topic of self-destructiveness and take him farther down the "trail" of what he'd been originally pontificating about.

"Another very effective shit-dumping method," he finally broke the horse-plodding "silence" with. "Is for the SLP to always twist things around so they are not only always seen in the best light in innocuous situations, but in cock-ups and blunders—or acts of outright maliciousness! They always twist perceptions and explanations of a situation so they are never seen to be in the wrong even when they obviously are. Hell, an SLP in a room with nobody else but his or her victim, could let loose a ripping loud fart rank enough to strip the enamel off a toilet, then immediately turn to their victim—who is holding their breath for dear life!—and give them a verbal blast . . . right after that rectal one! . . . for being so rude as to stink up the room the way they have. And the victim would then apologize, somehow believing they were the one who'd let loose that fart! . . . Or else that nasty farter will somehow very maliciously and effectively insinuate that their victim was somehow responsible for making it necessary for them to let loose that nasty fart. Like, 'Well it was you—was it not?—who cooked up that damn pot of beans that was so good I just had to wolf down three helpings of it!'"

That, of course, got a good long—and necessary!—laugh out of me—not that I should have been laughing given that that was what my nether-horn blasting asshole of a hubby used to do!—at the end of which John said, "Though of course, that example, in being so facetious, belittles a problem and a dark process that should never be belittled because of its dark effects on this world. Perhaps a better—and way-too-common example is that of the way-too-many men who regularly beat the crap out of their wives then when the deed is done—and they've sobered up . . . if they were even drunk in the first place . . . then not only act pleadingly and pathetically remorseful, but manage all convince their bruised and battered—and sometimes hospitalized wife—that they are never going to lose control again . . . are never going to hurt them again . . . 'But gee-whiz, Dear—you do sometimes go out of your way to provoke me, don't you?'

"Not only does this type of SLP-asshole pound the worst of his intolerable darkness and self-loathing into his wife's face and body, but he then dumps whatever remains into her psyche in the form of manipulations and insinuations that leave her quite convinced that she's somehow responsible for her beatings, that she is somehow an endemically bad person who deserves everything she gets from her abuser—who deep down is a good person who has been provoked by her . . . badness . . . by her failings . . . by her limitations . . . to behave so violently towards her. (In his memoirs, John reveals that he was more than once physically violent with both Catherine and Johnny, though in no way does he reveal that he felt he had to twist the truth so it was either of their faults—he, back then, just seemed to very patriarchally assume that as a man, as a husband, and as a father, it was his right and privilege to treat his "chattel" however he felt like—and however he felt like they deserved when he felt they deserved it. Different, rougher, most patriarchal times, obviously!)

"So in that very common situation there's two levels of SLP action—the first being that very nasty process of very cleverly and compulsively twisting the truth of any situation so the victim always feels responsible and blameworthy. . . . In fact, this likely one of the most pernicious and powerful weapons . . . weapons of self destruction . . . in the SLPs arsenal, precisely because it is often so subtle!. . . Though I guess the most pernicious and powerful weapons of an SLP is, as just mentioned with that wife-beating business, physical intimidation and violence. Which of course, always starts when the victim was a child.

"Up until recently—or so I notice in the news—it was absolutely normal for parents to be as physically rough with their children as they felt like as long as their roughness didn't send the kid to the hospital. Hands, fists, belts, straps, switches, wooden spoons—whatever came to hand when the parent was pissed and disciplining!—was deemed acceptable. Hell, even the schools used physical violence on students without a second thought. Strappings, whuppings, whippings—all part of the spare-the-switch/ spoil-the-student philosophy of education. Absolute authority and control had to be established and maintained, and nothing establishes authority and control like physical violence. The non-coms preparing us recruits for the BASS sure knew the truth of that bit of wisdom! By the time they were through with us, we were glad to get a break from them and go fight the Hun!

"That childhood of violence, of course, became the true beginning of the lion-mouse relationship. The mouse-child, in such situations, has no choice but fear and kow-tow to their big, violent, beating lion-parent. Dominance and authority is regularly established by the parent and submission and compliance is trained into the child. Submit-and-comply to survive-and-thrive! And of course, since that kind of violent dominance-and-submission dynamic is started when the child is very young and vulnerable and impressionable, that young and vulnerable and impressionable child, in being such a 'wee little beastie' of a mouse being eaten alive by this big black violent lion of a parent, has no idea it that it has been victimized—eaten!—and that it subsequently living its life in that lion's dark gut. It becomes a totally normal situation to it!"

With that I couldn't help but interrupt his pontification, "I dunno, John. Neither of my parents used physical violence to intimidate and control us, but both were masterful . . . adepts . . . at subtly manipulating us kids. Manipulating us with guilts and shames . . . and insinuations! All of our childhoods were unending ordeals of control by through subtle insinuations . . . guiltings and shamings! I've often thought my childhood would have been way healthier if they would have . . . 'whupped' . . . me—like you like to say!—once in a while . . . instead of all those subtle and malicious manipulations! . . . A kid can get mad at . . . feel offended by . . . a parent who whups them, but being controlled through subtle manipulations . . . doesn't allow that!"

That got a good, long, and very sardonic chuckle out of John as he said, "You've got a good point there! I missed that because my father was dyed-in-the-wool whupper and had about as much use for discipline and control through manipulation as he did for sobriety and self-control! And for drinking water to get drunk and violent! . . . And yeah, if anyone can understand that aspect of it, it you—your dark, failed-priest of a father . . . your Darth Vader—just like too damn many real priests!—was smart and sneaky enough to be a masterful manipulator and blame-projector and obviously in the grip of, and being driven by, a very dark and demonic force when he started sexually abusing you—and you still likely question why you didn't fight against it harder, but the dark, lion-mouse dynamic for it was set up when you were very young and you had no memory of when the time-out-of-mind process of that dynamic had been established.

"So it wasn't just sexual abuse that that foul non-man perpetrated upon you because it had a very definite, third chakra, power and dominance element to it! It very much involved his total control over you—so total a control that he even controlled and thwarted your ability to realize you were being controlled and abused and thus tell anyone about it and get him in trouble over it! . . . Assuming of course, that you could have convinced anyone to believe you! . . . A control that facilitated his continued and convenient dumping into you all that shit and darkness he was feeling. . . . No differently than so damn many priests who do all the nasty pedophilic shit they do, not just because they are in a totally dark place and under the control of demonic and malicious entities, but because Constantine's Imperial Abomination gives them so much power . . . and support . . . and cover . . . that they know it is tacitly acceptable behavior for a priest and that they will always get away with it—the same kind of power every member of Hitler's Gestapo knew it had . . . and the same kind of power every . . . Darth Vader . . . of a father has over a child.

"And here things get tricky for you because there is a good—and very likely!—possibility that you were already . . . primed . . . for your father's abuse of you, not only by your victim-relationship with your SLP of a mother, but . . . now that I suddenly think about it . . . very likely by Constantine's Imperial Abomination, as well."

Needless to say, that got a harsh laugh and an eye-roll out of me as I practically shouted, "Christ, John—here we go again! You just have to bring that infernal outfit into just about everything we talk about, don't you. Can't you give that a break!"

That got a saw-edged chuckle out of him as he said, "That is because . . . I've just had the sudden insight the by its very nature, that 'infernal outfit' is this world's biggest and baddest—and more powerful!—SLP! And it has been dominating your life since you got your tiny infant head splashed with 'silly water' and had some pedo-priest mumble some mumbo-jumbo over you while doing it."

John truly was in an inspired state because I'd never heard him use the very appropriate term "silly water" for the "infernal outfit's" so-called holy water, which even as a kid I thought to be something totally ridiculous. Nothing in my rational mind could explain how water could be made "holy." It always just looked like ordinary water to me—though it always smelled foully stale and "churchy." And I thought it especially ridiculous since I could very obviously see that most adults, on dipping their fingers into the "silly water" fountain and crossing themselves with their dripping fingers, did it so routinely and mindlessly that the act had about as much spirituality to it as them brushing a lock of hair off their foreheads. But those people sure didn't irritate me as much as those wannabe-saints who'd dip their fingers into that fountain in a real slow and super-serious and saint-holy way, then super-seriously, superciliously, and saint-holily bow their heads while super-seriously, superciliously, and saint-holily crossing themselves on the way into church, everything about their actions—to me, anyway!—seeming to me to be obviously ostentatious, to be nothing more than a see-how-holy-and-superior-I-am bit of church-entering theatre. Good thing I hadn't thought of it as "silly water" as a kid or I'd have been laughing my head off every time I watched people do that, especially my father, who really got-into that real ostentatious—and crassly hypocritical—see-how-holy-and-superior-I-am, supercilious shtick!

But barely had those thoughts flashed through my mind and put a grim grin on my face, than John pontificated one, "I hadn't connected that SLP business with that 'infernal outfit' before, but it sure fits. Human reality for that so-called spiritual religion is fundamentally dark and shitty. And about as spiritual as an arse-wiped piece of shit-paper! In its foul worldview, all human beings are born as shit-souled, sin-begrimed infants who must have that shit, that grimy sin washed off of them with a splash of 'silly-water' and some arcane, pedo-priest mumbo-jumbo, but that initial, 'silly-water'-shower and arcane mumbo-jumbo isn't—most conveniently!—capable of permanently washing clean our foul, shit-covered, sin-loving infant souls, which means Constantine's Imperial Abomination had to remain firmly entrenched in our lives so its pedo-priests could keep saving—and re-saving!—us from endemically shitty and sinning selves.

"Of course, looking at it this way, it is hard to see whether that foul and evil 'infernal outfit' was SLPing or . . . gaslighting . . . it's flocks of mindless, credulous, baa-bleating sheep. I imagine it's a bit of both. I sure that in the early days of that 'infernal outfit' a lot of Christian . . . evangelicalists . . . Christian . . . sin-slingers! . . . actually did believe they were born as foul and doomed human souls. . . . That they lived in a dark, foul, shit-stinking and endemically sinning world populated with nothing but dark, foul, and endemically sinning creatures who were always in need of saving, so they would have been natural SLPs, always in need of finding new victims to dump all their foul sin-shit on so they could feel good about themselves!

"But then as Constantine's Imperial Abomination dominated the so-called 'Christian realm' . . . that then, as now, was always splitting into competing factions . . . and instituted its very 'Christian' program of so murderously wiping all is Christian competition, its officer-class—its bishops—very quickly figured out that the path to obtaining—and retaining!—ever more and more of that very Roman and very temporal power Constantine had bequeathed to it with his big 'spiritual' con, was to very intentionally gaslight—as you and the psych-experts call it!—their mindless, baa-bleating sheep-flocks . . . to gaslight-blacken and weigh them down with heaped and reeking wagons loaded with the manures of guilts and shames and sins! Weigh them down with the intrinsic belief that they were all born as 'black sheep' who as such could never get into Heaven an baa-bleating flock around Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy and Sonny Boy Jesus, and who, as such foul 'black sheep,' could but inevitably lead damned and sin-blackening lives, and that they could only be saved from the endemic sinfulness and damnation, could only be 'whitened' under the aegis of that 'infernal outfit,' Constantine's Imperial Abomination, and the hocus-pocus actions of its even more infernal and power-corrupt pedo-priests!

"In fact, you could say—if you believed a single word of what I am babbling on about!—that the whole of Christendom, for the last seventeen hundred years, has been SLP'd/gaslighted into a very dark and evil and obviously very violent psychological and spiritual state. Into a permanent psychological and spiritual pathology so pervasive and so accepted that it is virtually invisible. . . . Invisible to most, but certainly not all, people." (Writing this reminds me of a quote about Christianity by the famous Buddhist scholar, D.T. Suzuki, that I once came across in a book I was reading: "God against Man. Man against God. Man against nature. Nature against man. Nature against God. God against nature. Very funny religion." Except not the kind of funny that makes people laugh—or even smile. Though since it's the kind of funny that tends to provoke a lot of torture and murder, likely what he really wanted to say was, "Very crazy and evil religion!")

It didn't take me long to see and accept the truth of that brilliant and accurate insight that seemed to have lightning-blasted into John's head (without setting his precious Stetson aflame! LOL) as our horses were plodding along that over-grown old trail on that lovely, so vividly beautiful, autumn Sunday, and I could but say "Christ, I think your onto something there, Uncle John! That bears a lot of . . . thinking about! I'm going to have to spend some time this week doing that."

That got a chuckle of him as he said, "You and me, both! . . . So if that sudden insight is as true as it . . . feels . . . the fact of your growing up with two SLP parents who were so obsessively enmeshed in that fundamentally SLP—and gaslighting!—pseudo-religion' of Constantine's whose modus operandi was to convince every member of its mindless, baa-bleating sheep-flocks that they were born as foul and damned sinner-infants, that they were doomed to live out their lives as foul, shit-covered and ever-damned sinner-adults weighed down by loads of guilt and shame and self-loathing unless those dark and crushing loads were removed by the intervention of its pedo-priest minions, thus very cunningly and effectively reducing them to compliant and easily controllable and exploitable, SLP'd—or gaslighted!—victims, then that made it inevitable that you, in being raised in such a foul cesspit, would end up burdened and befouled with guilt and shame and self-loathing and be ever-ready to willingly play the compliant and silent victim—mouse!—with your father when he chose to play the predatory lion and swallow you whole into the dark and foul gut of his pedophilia."

What John was saying made a ton of sense to me, but I was stunned, not only that he could think so clearly and simply about such a deep and complex psychological and spiritual problem, but that he could so clearly and insightfully know all about me and my family situation, given how little time he had spent around my mother. Either parents, for that matter! And I could but interrupt him with, "As far as I am concerned you are absolutely right about this . . . this dark shit . . . Uncle John, but how do you know it? You've spent so little time around my parents . . . lucky damn you!"

That got a chuckle out of John as he replied, "You're right—I've spent as little time around those two stoats . . . those two weaselly hypocrites as I can manage, but I've been cursed with an ability to . . . to instantly . . . know . . . stuff . . . about people and situations, whether I want to know it or not. And it is a curse, believe-you-me! Your 'bogeyman' Castaneda wrote about it in his books and said that Don Juan called this kind of . . . knowing . . . silent knowledge. It's an . . . ancient way of knowing . . . stuff . . . that doesn't involve the use of thinking . . . of reasoning things out. . . . . Though it's not totally ancient because tribal peoples still live in the realm of . . . silent knowledge. Especially when they are tracking animals! You just have to enter . . . or look at . . . a situation in a certain state of mind—of spirit, more like it!—and you instantly just know what's going on.

"Don Juan also called this form of knowledge seeing, and it was always real frustrating for Castaneda because he was obsessed with obtaining from Don Juan a rational explanation for its processes. . . . And of course, there aren't any . . . any rational explanations. It's totally non-rational and intuitive. Totally beyond the very limited powers of rationality! . . . Kind of like those really brilliant nuclear scientists trying to find a rational explanation for how an electron zipping around an atom can suddenly make a 'quantum leap' from one level to another—with no intermediary process visible or deductively discernible!"

Because I was like Castaneda in that respect and always demanded a rational explanation for things—like Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the whole damn Jesus fairytale!—I couldn't agree with all that silent knowledge and seeing shit of Castaneda's—anymore than I could understand the quantum leap shit of those nuclear physicists!—but I also couldn't gainsay the fact that over the years John had displayed an uncanny ability to know, and see into, situations that was sometimes downright frightening.
Finally, I said, "Do you think my mother is a natural . . . SLP, Uncle John?"

That got a sharp, saw-edge laugh out of him as he said, "I think it was inevitable that your mother would end up an SLP given that her mother is likely one of the most powerful SLPs I have ever met."

That forced the instant response out of me, "Her mother? . . . You mean . . . my Mimi? . . . You can't be serious, Uncle John!"

Again came that sharp, saw-edged laugh as he said, "Oh yes, your precious Mimi! Sure, sure!—I know you two get along like cake and icing . . . like a couple of real close sisters, (If John's assertion that I was a reincarnation of his sister Lisette, then that is exactly what Mimi and I would have been. Fucking IF!) but she grew up in one of the darkest and foulest familial situations on this planet and it is inevitable that she carried that darkness into the family she created. She's real nice and tolerant with you, but you are only her granddaughter . . . someone who she has a spiritual affinity with, but she's a perfect, Castanedean petty tyrant with her immediate family.

"There's a lot of my father in her . . . though she's a lot more subtle with her tyranny than he was. His tyranny was sledgehammer and hers is a stiletto—but it's still there! And still very deadly and destructive. And I'm damned sure that once your grandfather got killed, it got exponentially worse. I imagine she made the lives of your mother—and all her siblings—an absolute hell. . . . And it's understandable, given that when, first me, then Lisette, fled that shit-pit of a farm, your future 'beloved Mimi' suddenly became the oldest child, and took the brunt of that brutally abusive situation." (I wouldn't find out till reading Uncle John's memoirs that the term shit-pit was an extremely euphemistic misnomer for that farm, and no small amount of the 'brunt of that brutally abusive situation' would have been, for my poor, dear Mimi, no small amount of sexual abuse at the hands—and prick!—of her father. So no small wonder she had such an affinity for me—and was so understanding and tolerant of my egregious, sexing-out behavior!)

Again, all I could do was ride on in silence, finding relief from some of the anxiety induced by the direction of our conversation by first rubbing my horse's warm and smooth neck and finger-combing her mane, after which I looked up at the pristine and scintillating blue of the sky and then around at the vividly bright and colorful beauty of the autumn scenery we were plodding through. But none of that could stop my racing thoughts concerning the truth of what John had said. He was right on about my Mimi being a relentless and indomitable petty tyrant, as he called her, but since I loved her—and got along so well with her!—see that aspect of her though I often did, I always conveniently chose to ignore it. (Yeah, you are absolutely fucking right, Dear Reader—I took the same boat trip up that famous Egyptian over my precious Mimi's petty tyranny as my mother did over my father's incestuous pedophilia! Runs in the family, obviously!)

And in finally forcing myself to see her for what she truly and obviously was, I began to get an inkling of the dark, petty tyrant-controlled world my mother had been raised in, especially since there was already six in that family when my grandfather died, a situation that would not only have darkened poor Mimi's life even more—depending, I guess, on how nice my grandfather may or may not have been to her, though I have heard from more than one aunt and uncle that however tough a miner he might have been at work, he was a kind and gentle man at home!—but have darkened the lives of all six of those suddenly fatherless children. And of course, thrown that household into financial dire straits, which Mimi coped with by using the tiny amount of insurance money from his death to put a down payment on a small marina on the wide, lake-like part of the river that ran through the area to the southeast of my hometown. (Same river, actually, that up-river ran past John's farm!) It not only had docks for the boats of the camp owners on that river, but had a half dozen run-down summer rental cabins as well, which she refurbished and converted to year-round residency. It also had a small convenience store that she enlarged and of course ran with petty tyrant efficiency and profitably!

Since I wasn't saying anything, John kept riding his two horses, the real, flesh-and-fart one under his butt that he was very fond of, and the "pontification pony" in his head that he was absolutely crazy about, going on with, "So right from the get-go you were your mother's prime, SLP victim . . . your older brother should have been that victim but you, in being born as her first daughter, came into this world with a target on your psyche . . . and as I think about this, I can easily see that she was doubtlessly already playing the role of being your father's main, SLP-victim, and when his perverted sexuality made turn away from her and lamprey-latch onto you—not just as a sexual victim, but as a shit-dump!—she was glad for that little bit of freedom from his malice and his control . . . and his shit! . . . that it provided! Which could very well explain why though she knew what he was doing to you, she did nothing to stop it, because that would have brought all his SLP-shit back onto her shoulders. Except tripled in weight and darkness!"

For some reason that term "lamprey-latch" strummed a deep chord in my being and I had to grab the reins of his "pontification pony" and stop him long enough to ask, "I've heard that word lamprey before but I can't place it. What does it mean?"

That got a long pause then a delighted chuckle out of John as he said, "Ha, thank you, Rache, for bringing that to my attention. Lamprey refers to the name of a nasty little eel-like fish that attaches to larger fish in the Great Lakes and like a giant leech, slowly sucks the life out of that fish. They are a very, very nasty, invasive species in the Great Lakes and a have been having very negative effects on fish populations! Especially lake trout. Soon after getting my I first insights into this SLP business I watched a documentary on TV about those lamprey and how they attach themselves to a lake trout and slowly suck all the life out of it—and how that poor victim-fish can't shake them off. I was instantly inspired to see those nasty, leech-fish as a perfect metaphor for SLPs—but I had completely forgotten about it until the word just popped out of my mouth and you keyed on it. And I sure don't know why I'd forgotten to, since it is the perfect metaphor to describe a nasty ol' life-sucking leech of an SLP! Guess I'm just getting old and forgetful!"

And while I was silently riding beside him, imaging myself as a lake trout with the two nasty, lamprey leech-fish of my parents attached to me, John dug his mental spurs into his "pontification pony" and trotted on, "But the net effect of that utterly dark and malicious SLP-dynamics of your lamprey-swarming family situation, was that your mother could only have but found herself permanently lodged in a very dark and shitty place—especially so, since she damn well knew the dark depths of her malicious complicity in what he was continuing to do to you! I can't even begin to imagine the level—and darkness!—of that SLP situation, of the cesspit of Catholic guilt and shame she must have felt over that! A shameful, caustic darkness from which she couldn't escape. . . . Especially given the reality that though your father had turned much of his lamprey-attack onto you, he still, to some degree, would have been lamprey-attached to her!. And of course, as your beloved Mimi's youngest daughter, she would already have had a very fat and voracious Mimi-lamprey attached and sucking the life out of her, so she was doubly doomed and very deeply enmeshed in a shameful and caustic darkness that not only swallowed up the whole of her young life, but which she still can't escape! (Actually, John was being disingenuous with the assertion that he could not even "begin to imagine" the dark and foul cesspit of my mother's SLP situation, because, as his memoirs would someday show me, he had lived through an even worse bout of shameful, caustic darkness over the SLP-role he played in the deaths of Catherine and Johnny!)

"So your mother in being doubly lamprey-attached, doubly SLP-victimized herself, is then being crushed under a relentless and caustic load of guilt and shame and malice and self-loathing and she only gets some necessary relief from all that foul, dark shit by off-loading some of it onto a convenient victim—you! By herself becoming a nasty leech-fish and latching onto you! She lamprey-latched onto you when you were a young child and, since you continue to have a relationship . . . of sorts . . . with her, she continues the process. And because that ever-reeking dog-turd of a father of yours is getting old and is not well, she is more desperate than ever to unload that shit on you, because she knows she hasn't faced the truth of what has gone on concerning him, that reeking pile of dog-shit, that . . . non-man, nor either has faced the horrendous and grotesque fact that he is a manipulative and vile little stoat hardly worthy of the name, man! (It is accepted psycho-knowledge that daughters tend to marry their fathers, but my father so little resembled the man that I'd heard my grand-father had been before he died, that I was quite confused until I realized that my mother hadn't married her father in marrying my father—she probably hadn't really known him that well before he died—but had married her mother, had married Mimi—that sly and effective manipulator, that "mistress of the stiletto" as John often called her.)

"And in not truly and honestly facing that dark truth, she obviously hasn't yet confronted him with it! And if she doesn't outright know it, she at least intuits the reality that once he is so blessedly dead, she will never be able to face it—or ever confront him with it. Remember, we've talked about this before—any issues a 'child' has concerning their abusive parents that they don't work out before the parent dies, can never be worked out. If it was hard to face the abuse-issue when that parent was alive, that parent's death—and the guilt all adult 'children' feel at thinking badly of a dead parent—guarantees it will never be faced! The whole thing will become like a hornet trapped forever in amber. And as hard as it is for your mother to face in herself what your father did to you—and confront him with it!—it is equally easy for her to lamprey-attach to you and SLP all that dark, caustic guilt and shame onto your psyche because she is a more-than-competent SLP and you've been long . . .primed . . . to play the role of just such a victim. To being her convenient shit-dump!"

"Primed? Primed by my father, you mean? . . . Do you think he did that intentionally? Or did it just . . . happen?"

John's response to that was a dark, pensive, face-scrunching, "Hmmmmm...." that would have done Yoda proud, after which he said, "Well, I've pretty much just finished saying that all Catholics, by the very dark and SLPing/gaslighting nature of Constantine's Imperial Abomination, from that 'silly-water' splashing and hocus-pocus mumbling of baptism on, are being indoctrinated—brainwashed!—into being SLP victims—I mean, that's how that abomination has maintained its great and oppressive and very fascist power over so much of the world for so many centuries!—much as I know you don't want to hear this, I suspect there are two other aspects to this. The first being a . . . reincarnation . . . a previous life aspect to it, and the second being those dark forces . . . those . . . . Lords of Karma or Fate . . . which manifest through our egos and dominate our lives on an exponential curve of how egotistically we live . . . "

I had no choice but interrupt him at that point with, "You know, Uncle John, how much I hate you talking about that . . . dark forces . . . that Lords of Karma . . . of Fate . . . shit! I really don't believe they exist . . . and you talking about them really upsets me!"

That elicited a long, low chuckle out of him as he said, "Yeah, I know, Rache—I know you passionately wish such . . . dark . . . forces . . . did not exist in this universe and were thus not capable of manifesting their existence and malicious intentions through the portal of our human ego in their attempts to manipulate and coerce human behavior, but you know what I've said about wishes and horses. For anyone with their eyes open even a slit, the existence of these . . . dark forces . . . is obvious, and especially so with this SLP business, which truly, at its foundation is a direct and obvious intrusion of those dark forces—those cosmic lampreys!—into human live with the sole purposes of sucking all the vitality out of it and curtailing all spiritual freedom and growth. And of course, of turning as many people as they are able into vitality-sucking, life-destroying human lampreys!

"So, getting back to what I was trying to say—as far as I can tell, the victim aspect of the SLP relationship has a really big spiritual element to it. . . .There is something fundamentally spiritual going on in it. Something fundamentally karmic! . . . . Karmic and fateful! Such that each victim brings a propensity . . . a susceptibly . . . or a karmic debt . . . or whatever mysterious criteria fate manifests its incomprehensible and unpredictable machinations from . . . to it from previous lifetimes. It seems . . . from a karmic perspective, anyway . . . to be something they, as spirit-beings, have to . . . to work out . . . for their spiritual growth. It is a situation they must be in, in order for them to fulfill their spiritual destiny to suffer and grow. A situation in which they must face off against—must wrestle with!—those dark forces, those Lords of Karma . . . or of Fate . . . . Or maybe they are just the . . . Lords of Malice . . . maybe just fundamentally negative and malicious entities who exist solely to fill this human world with their controlling, their crushing, and their life-destroying malice, and we, as conscious and free-willed individuals, must either find the strength and willpower to oppose and 'defeat' them . . . and spiritually grow from that 'wrestling match,' or be defeated by them. And in being defeated by them, have our incarnation swamped—and lost!—in a lot of very dark and often evil . . . and egotistical . . . and malicious . . . shit!

"Once the spirits had revealed the SLP relationship to me . . . . Actually, one of the ways they did that was by inducing me to read that dark play by Shakespeare, Othello, with that odious little shit of a malice-channeling character, Iago, in it. And I know they wanted me to read it because the 'library angel' drew my attention to it in a synchronistically powerful way . . . and which I was reading right at the time your redoubtable Mimi came over for one of her rare, but always intrusive, irritating, and very guilt-slinging, SLP, 'why-don't-you-interact-with-your-family-more' visits.

"Your 'dear Mimi' has a lot of Iago in her, whether you are willing to see it or not. . . . And never in my reading-life has a fictional character got under my skin like that malicious little stoat, Iago! Though that is probably because he not only reminded me of your meddling, SLP Mimi, but also of your SLP father! Iago, in that play, was malice incarnate! He was always intrusive and always malevolently meddling—and for no bigger reason than the perverse satisfaction of meddling . . . of meddle-injecting malice into this world in order to create chaos and negate life. And destroy . . . or more like contaminate . . . love!

"And as I was meditating on Shakespeare's brilliant representation of that far-too-common and SLP-archetypal Iago—and how consummately malicious Shakespeare had rendered his far-too-common nature—and no damn pleasant meditation that was, I can tell you!—a flash-bulb went off in my head and I was suddenly able to see Iago-manifestations everywhere—and all manner of people! See instances of pure malice—which in that Star Wars world you like so much, would be the dark side of that Force—pouring into this world through no end of human agencies! And common, manipulative and controlling human behaviors! And in all cases, there was always an active and malicious perpetrator and a passive, helpless, and malice-absorbing victim. A big fat malicious spider and a hapless fly that had gotten entranced and ensnared in that web of malice.

(John was long dead by the time Lucas brought out Revenge of the Sith, in which stupid, gullible, raised-fatherless Anakin plays the role of the pathetic little fly who gets so totally—and for the audience, very painfully!—trapped in the Emperor's obvious—to the audience!—malicious and manipulative paternalistic webs that end up turning him from the most promising of Jedi Knights into the Emperor's evil puppet, Darth Vader, or he'd have been using that as a perfect example of a most deleterious SLP relationship! In fact, after watching that movie I couldn't help but think of how much my mother resembled the Emperor, so I thenceforth always thought of her as, the Empress!)(And after this SLP talk with John, I started to see how my beloved Mimi even more resembled the Emperor, but I always quickly and violently pushed that very unpleasant seeing out of my mind! She, after all, was still my precious, Mimi!)

"Now I am one hundred percent certain that our expert psychologists and psychiatrists and psychoanalysts—and psych-whatnots!—have explored and written about this nasty and too-common, SLP-phenomenon in no end of learned textbooks—having given it and its perpetrators a infinitely more erudite and highfalutin names than the manipulative and shit-dumping SLPing of a nasty bunch of Shitty Little Paranoiacs!—so it can be taught to no end of way-brighter-than-me psychology students, but I'm not smart enough . . . nor well enough educated . . . to read such erudite tomes, so the spirits had to point it out to me in their own synchronistic fashion. And inspire me with a simple but descriptive name for it. And point out as well—much to your irritation, I am sure, heh, heh!—that there was both a reincarnational and a . . . . Lords of Karma . . . or Malice . . . or Fate . . . element to that process and that those malicious, Iago-spiders were always spirituality-bereft, ego-dominated people living in the dark crevices and cracks of life, while their fly-victims always seem to have a great deal of . . . of spiritual depth. And vitality!

"At first I thought it was the suffering inherent in the relationship that gave them that spiritual depth, then one day, after lots of prodding in that direction by the spirits, and after another flashbulb went off with regards to the situation and I was able to see that many SLP-victims were deep . . .'old-soul' . . . spirit-beings who very likely had willingly incarnated into such situations in order to use those dark situations to enhance . . . to facilitate . . . their spiritual growth.

(Because I was riding beside John and he wasn't looking at me, he couldn't see me rolling my eyes, and if he heard my soft, exasperated groan, he ignored it. Just as he always ignored my objections and expressions of exasperation and contempt for anything and everything he said about that Eastern, mumbo-jumbo reincarnation shit—and especially those goddamn Lords of Karma—or Malice or Fate—all three of those names for them always instantly frightening me! And though I often pressed John to explain them better—so I could better, Scully-rationally reduce, deconstruct and dismiss them!—he always just said, "They are part of the 'magician's trick' of human life and I am sure that no living genius of a human being—let alone this non-genius that I am!—will ever be allowed to truly know what they are and what they are about. . . . any more than even the most genius of priests of our Religion of Materialist Science will figure out what gravity is.")

"Of course, in Othello, because Shakespeare wrote the story the way he did to both horrify shock us awake while creating an entertaining tragedy, all our interaction with Othello as a character ends with his escape-the-the-shame-and-pain suicide, so we can only surmise what sort of spiritual growth he would have gone through had he not short-circuited his shame and pain that way. . . . But of course, even in real life, every death terminates whatever spiritual growth is going on for any spirit-being in that particular life, and only the spirit-being itself—and certainly never the ego during that life!—when it gets back to its home realm, knows what it incarnated to spiritually achieve in that incarnation—and what it actually achieved. Or, as is the most likely case, given the difficult nature of a human incarnation, didn't achieve! Thus necessitating another incarnation—or hundreds!—to get it right!"

Being a sane and rational Skeptical-Scully, I ignored John's essentially loco, Mulder-blather on all that reincarnation mumbo-jumbo, but being an English major with more than a passing familiarity with Othello and that weasel-shit-of-all-weasel-shits, Iago, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as I suddenly realized just how perceptive John could be. I am sure he'd only spent, all told, no more than a couple of hours in either of my parents' company, yet he somehow very easily seemed to know both of them for the Iago-weasels that they were. Especially how Iago-like my father had been and how accurately John's explanations of the manipulative, twist-all-things-all-around-in-all-ways-so-as-to-never-be-in-the-wrong modus operandi of SLPs fit him, for when I got old enough to express the opinion that I didn't think was he was doing with me was exactly Catholic-kosher—or Jewish-kosher, for that matter!—and he would instantly, deftly and maliciously—in true, Jesuit-SLP fashion—twist the situation around so that it was suddenly all my fault that he was sexually abusing me. In his mind, I was a horny little bitch who was "just begging" to have sex with him—at nine fucking years old?—and because of that, whenever I was alone with him I behaved like a precocious and taunting little flirt . . . blah, blah, gag, gag, barf, barf! (This was the late Fifties when the Internet wasn't even manifesting its ubiquitous self in any pornographer's wet dreams yet, and there was absolutely nothing on TV that could role-model any nine-year-old girl on how to behave like a "precocious ho"—or even a taunting little flirt. I Love Lucy??? Lassie??? The Three Stooges??? Looney Tunes??? Tom and Jerry??? Leave It To Beaver???)

Or some such similar shit! And much as at first what he was saying created in me a sense of cognitive dissonance—not that I'd even have understood that highfalutin philosophical term back then!—I very quickly ended up believing his malicious assertions. Believing them almost as if they were very powerful and absolute truths that I then carried into my adult life, and which I know I still carry with me! Like some kind of psychological—spiritual?—scar!

And after thinking those dark and instantly depressing thoughts, I could but briefly meditate on the fact—as too-often already mentioned!—that though I normally had as much use for John's reincarnation mumbo-jumbo as I did for a case of bleeding hemorrhoids—scratched with a wire brush!—his reincarnation-POV on things did seem to throw a bit of intuitive light on the situation.

Though much as I hated the very idea of those spirits John seemed to take for granted, and I always found immensely irritating his "spinning" a spiritual aspect into just about everything we talked about, in all truth, I couldn't even begin to imagine the me—who got on so well with this very wise and special John—even existing without my having gone through what I had with my horny stoat of a father, and my gargantuan struggle to drive that Darth Vader completely out of my life just to save my life. And too, of course, my inability to do the same with my fucking SLP of a Darth Moeder and her relentless Iago-manipulations and Iago-malice.

It was like without all that, I could never have had the spiritual depth—I guess you could call it, though I sure don't feel very spiritually fucking deep!—to have wanted to stay in a relationship with an eccentric old shaman of an uncle who felt so compelled, whenever we were together, to pour so much irrational Mulder-nonsense into my poor, sensitive, rationality-obsessed Scully-ears.

And of course, as I thought about it, I realized I'd also very predictably and lifelong primed for the fundamentally SLP relationship that I ended up in with my husband, which was a huge shit-pit in its own right requiring a righteous and exhausting struggle to break out of and put behind me. (If criticisms and sarcastic put-downs were British gold sovereigns, I'd be as richer than all the Beatles combined!)

And though I could see that doing the same with my Darth Moeder as I'd done with my uber-darth, "diddling Daddy" would provide me, not only with more ego-freedom but with more freedom for spiritual growth—I always instantly and very depressingly sensed that in her being my mother and me being her daughter, that very nasty and debilitating SLP relationship was going to be the hardest one to escape.

And somehow, I also very instantly and intuitively just knew, it was not only going to be the hardest one to escape, but the most important one—that the whole meaning of my life lay in me finding the power and the will to stand up to my mother and escape her malicious, Iago-influence! No less, I guess, than was all the meaning in Luke Skywalker's journey to becoming a Jedi tied up in his ability to first transcend the practical, conservative, farmer-limitations of his uncle, and then later resist his "Dark Father's" powerful injunction to join him in the use of his ready access to the Force to "defeat the Emperor and rule the galaxy," and then the Emperor's even more powerful coercion to help him in his already well-established program of ruling that galaxy. With such an archetypal, Campbellean Hero's journey, of course, never being easy and the outcome of such a difficult journey never predictable—or pre-ordained to being successful.

And on breaking out of that long, dark and disturbing reverie and returning to the real world of that lovely, vividly beautiful, October-day ride, I could but ask John, "But why?—why is it this way? Why does it have to be so . . . goddamned . . . hard? And so...dangerous? . . . I mean, a person . . . a victim of this SLP . . . shit . . . this . . . 'dark forces' . . . malice . . . can lose actually their life. I'm sure more than a few people have committed suicide to escape an otherwise inescapable SLP and their goddamn manipulations . . . and malice! And if not going to that extreme, then likely very often losing all the potential of their life! Being forced to live lives—their existences!—in that dreary, pointless mode that Thoreau so depressingly labeled, 'lives of quiet desperation.' It doesn't seem . . . right!"

That got an ironic chuckle out of him as he said, "Well, for one, I'm not the historically famous and clear-thinking Thoreau with a mentor and friend like the great Emerson to talk things over with. And my old woodland farm sure ain't no Walden pond! I'm just this . . . old Nobody John. Nobodybody John—and sure not Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy, heh, heh! And in just being Nobodybody John and not the mighty and powerful, Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy, so I sure didn't write the rules of this universe. Hell, I wasn't even consulted! But I have seen . . . and learned enough over the years . . . to know that nothing valuable comes out of anything easy. Every infant bird has to fight its way out of its egg. If it can do that first and most important of tasks, it gets strength from that fight and that strength helps it in its subsequent life—which will be one long fight for survival. First it has to go through food-fights with its siblings . . . it's got to clamber over them to get its wide-open beak as close to its Mama's or Papa's beak when they are disgorging food to the brood. And if it can't hold its own—if it is too weak and too timid—it starves to death. Which probably meant it wouldn't have had the strength to live much of an out-of-nest life anyway. Or not for long.

"Same with a butterfly fighting its way out of a cocoon. I've read that the butterfly's fight out of that cocoon is the first important step of its butterfly life. I watched a documentary on TV where a scientist did a study on this and found that if he helped butterflies out of their cocoons—cut the cocoons open for them—those butterflies ended up as weak , malformed and useless butterflies. And it's no different with plants! I recently read a book about that plant breeding genius, Luther Burbank, who could instantly spot—and would ruthlessly rip out—seedlings that he knew were weak and he didn't want degrading his breeding programs. (The book was The Secret Life Of Plants, which he gave me to read but I couldn't get through all the absurd and irrational and too often mystical mumbo-jumbo in it! It was like the damn thing was written by Fox Mulder!)

"And it's no different with mammalian infants, who have to begin their tenures on this planet by going through the always traumatic experience of birth. Hell, you've given birth twice now so you have a damn good idea what your poor infant children went through in the process of going from your big, dark, warm, wet and roomy womb, through that anything-but-roomy birth canal, and into this bright, cold, dry world. Such a traumatic and difficult birth process is every infant's first and hardest life-test!"

And of course, in being a mother twice over, a harsh flood of labor-and-birth memories flooded over me and I could but add, "Hey, it's no damn fun for the mother, either—I can tell you that!"

John's reply to that was a bit of a surprise as he said, "Yes, but you were an adult with a tough adult body and access to adult willpower consciously going through the experience while in a familiar-to-you environment, not a barely-conscious infant with a frail body and inchoate will going from a warm, safe, water-world that it didn't even have to breathe or eat in, to a chill and harsh air-world that it immediately had to start trying to stay warm . . . and breathing . . . and eating in! A damn big change—and challenge—that surely is for all infants! Probably the biggest of our life! (I was wondering why that sort of natal—and very female—stuff was even on John's radar, until in working on his memoirs I came across a very harrowing—for poor Catherine!—second-hand account of the birth-death of their second child, a daughter that Catherine had named Emma. It was an event that John missed—and had to hear about second-hand—because he was away working in a coal mine, but which had a dark and dramatic effect on his and Catherine's life together. In fact, it basically—with the help of a malicious and meddling Abominationist priest—destroyed their marriage, a sad state of affairs that eventually led to Catherine's and Johnny's deaths, and started the fires of guilt and shame in John that set burning the blaze of The Fire! It also threw gasoline on already blazing hatred from Constantine's Imperial Abomination and all its foul, priest-minions!)

"But you'll get no argument from me over how unpleasant—even downright lethally dangerous—the process of birthing can be for the mother! Hell, the Ancient Greeks considered a woman's giving birth an experience of equivalent danger to a man going off to battle. Modern medicine has made the process relatively safe today in our affluent societies, but I suspect back in those days—and even but sixty . . . seventy years ago in this country!—a woman dying in childbirth was not considered front-page news. (There is a brief scene in The Fire where John witnesses a young girl giving birth on that blizzard-buried train and dying from the experience—and though all concerned with it thought it both sad and tragic, not a one thought it unusual!)

"But back to the value of a good fight in creating strength . . . and value! It's like those sporting events that people today get so involved in. By the time a long season is over and a championship game is played, both teams—or in the case of boxing, each fighter!—have gone through a rigorous, survival-of-the-fittest selection process so that they each know their opponent is a worthy one. They know their opponent is one that is not only worth fighting or playing against, but just as importantly, one that will make the victory meaningful. There would be no interest in playing, or satisfaction in winning, a championship against an obviously inferior opponent—and it sure would be a boring match to watch! So it would seem nothing truly good and valuable ever comes out of something that is easy.

"And the spiritual world, as I so limitedly see it, is no different than that the sports world in that regard. The world of spirit seems to have rules written into it—and not by Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy, that's for sure!—that demand that all spiritual growth can only be achieved through the price of a great struggle. Well, inner pain and a great struggle! A painful struggle, I would suggest, akin, to the price an ordinary chunk of steel has to pay to become an extraordinary sword—which is a lot of painful tempering!

"I mean, if you think about it, if that chunk of sword-shaped steel would be allowed to voice its opinion, I'd bet it would adamantly assert that it would rather not have to go through all the repeated heatings and poundings—and foldings and re-foldings if it is a Japanese Samurai sword!—of the tempering process, but in escaping the pain of that process, it wouldn't become a sword. It would remain just a useless chunk of steel and during its first clash in battle, it would break and be discarded. Well, of course, that's a bad analogy due to the fact no warrior—no Samurai!—worthy of the appellation would be stupid enough to take an untempered sword into battle in the first place! (John had been a real fan of that famous mini-series Shogun, which I'd not long before gifted him a set of video tapes of—and which I'd tried watching with him but regardless of how delicious a chunk of eye-candy Richard Chamberlain was, I found the thing too head-lopping violent for my sensitivities!—so that is why he was bringing in those Samurai references.)

"So I guess, in a sense, as spirit-beings who have incarnated into these human bodies in this human . . . condition . . . we are potential swords—or at least some spirit-beings are! . . . Though don't get me wrong—I'm only using that sword metaphor for its tempered and toughness aspects, not its killing power! So, I guess you could say those nasty little Iago-stoat SLPs—who obviously have no spirit-beings at all, or more likely, have their heart chakras so tightly closed that their spirit-beings can exert no influence over their actions and they totally live their dark and compassionless lives within the dark and driven confines of their egos, always manifesting the spiritually antithetical drives and compulsions of their lower three chakras—security, sex, and dominance. And that, of course, is how they end up playing the role of being forges for the spirit-beings of their victims, who have moved . . . or are compelled to move by the painful heat of that forge. . . up into their heart chakra, which represents the first step, the gateway to all further spiritual growth. In fact, I read somewhere that the number 3½ is an important number in some spiritual systems because it represents the half way point between the 3rd and 4th chakras, between the lower being driven by security, lust and power, and the and the higher being entranced compassion and the spiritual powers and vistas that compassion opens one's life up to.

"So, I guess you could say certain spirit-beings who want to undergo spiritual growth, intentionally incarnate into life-situations that metaphorically plunge them into SLP forges . . . into heating and tempering situations full of fire and pounding and spiritual pain . . . willingly doing so in order to be heated and pounded—and pained—into something spiritually bigger and stronger than they incarnated into it as. Into something spiritually big and strong enough to effect a . . . quantum leap . . . up to another level of spiritual functioning that they cannot even imagine—or approach!—until they pass that tempering test. And take that quantum leap!

"So, the way I see it—and sure don't go quoting me on this, heh, heh!—from a spiritual perspective these SLPs, these dark and malicious little Iago-spiders, who have the dark power to ensnare in their vile webs, then constrain and vex and torture some spirit-beings so viciously that a few—or maybe, many!—are driven insane . . . and some, I am sure, like pathetic Othello, even driven to first commit murder then suicide to escape their vile and oppressive webs, are a necessary negative phenomena—a necessary spiritual forge!—in human life! Necessary . . . like my mixing and mangling—web-tangling!—these poor metaphors! . . . so that certain, self-choosing spirit-being 'flies' can first get victim-trapped in their controlling, twisting, shit-dumping malice-webs, then fight the good and necessary fight to escape those Iago-spiders and their nasty, evil webs and transcend whatever level of consciousness they incarnated at.

"And that escape and transcending part is important! Very important! Because if those spirit-beings cannot see all that SLP nastiness, see that SLP-tempering forge for what it truly is—a blazing and tempering forge of control, oppression and evil created by the dark forces, the Lords of Karma . . . or Fate or Malice—and factor the very essential spiritual component into it, then all their suffering and pain and frustrations . . . and lost lives!—gets wasted. For only with an understanding of that very essential spiritual component of it can they then understand, escape, and then transcend that darkness and malice. And of course, if they fail to understand, escape and then transcend it, that failure then inevitably sets them on the dark path of themselves then being reduced to, and becoming, predatory SLPs. Of themselves becoming malicious, web-spinning and life-negating Iago-spiders. They just naturally and inevitably end up becoming dark and malicious predators full of an intolerable and caustic darkness who are ever on the lookout for victims to dump that intolerable and caustic darkness and malice on—the way your beloved Mimi and your insidious father did to your mother—and which she, in turn, is still inevitably doing to you!

"It's a situation expressed so aptly in that famous bit a poem by some poet whose name I don't remember, but the essence of which I can't forget because it is so apropos. It goes, I and the public know what all school children learn—those to whom evil is done, do evil in return."

(That, as I am sure you know, Dear Reader, is from W. H. Auden's poem "September 1, 1939")

And almost without thought or volition I found myself saying, "That makes . . . some

sense . . .Uncle John—my mother's behavior sure fits with what you have been saying about that . . . that SLP process . . .and about her—and most depressingly, the fact that she may have learned it all from my Mimi! But I still can't figure out why she still, after all these years that I have been an adult, seems to have so much of that . . . that SLP power over me. And most especially now that I'm not a fucking kid! I don't live at home! I'm not in any way dependent on her! I get nothing from her . . . but—her shit! I mean, fuck, I was able to fight myself free of my father—or at least I like to think I have! And my asshole of a husband—but not her! Why does she have so much damn . . . power . . . over me! It makes no goddamn sense!"

After riding in silence for a few minutes—save for the plodding of our horses' hooves on the trail and the distant, rat-tat-tat-tat of a woodpecker, we suddenly heard the equally distant and insistent yipping of the dog. This induced John to rein his horse to a halt and putting his finger and thumb in his mouth, let blast two of his shrill, ear-raping "dog-calling" whistles, after which he laughing said, "That dog sounds too damn far away for my comfort—if he's gotten tangled up with a skunk our porcupine, this ride is going to be well and truly ruined!"

But within minutes the dog came crashing and panting out of the brown, autumn-dry underbrush and tongue-lolling stood beside John's horse, a look on its face that seemed to question why John had had the temerity to ruin his fun, whatever it had been. John's response to take a few deep, sniffing breaths while looking down at the dog, then finally say, "Whew—not a skunk or porcupine this time! He was likely chasing a deer. . . . . They always give him a good run! . . . Well, he'll surely sleep good tonight. . . . Not that he doesn't every night—lucky devil!"

And with that he set his horse in motion and as I did the same with mine, he went on with his "pontification" like there'd been no interruption—doggeruption?—"Well, as far as I'm concerned—and again, please don't ever go quoting me on this!—I'm sure a big part of your mother's power over you is because of the mother-daughter relationship you two can't avoid having. Which, of course, in being a mere man, I cannot even begin to fathom—much as over the years I have observed its power in numerous relationships.

"It's strange, you know, but when a boy reaches manhood, his father wants him out of his life as badly as a cowboy wants a thorn out of his butt or burrs out of his socks. So badly, in fact, he usually drives him away. And for obvious reasons! It's no different than the fact that two stallions—or two bulls!—cannot share the same field or pasture without getting into . . . into testosterone battles with each other over the mares or cows. It's just the natural way of things. Testosterone and dominance go together like fire and heat. . . . As no differently does testosterone and stupidity! (John often called testosterone the stupid-hormone.)

"But with women . . . it seems almost the opposite. Mothers seem to want . . . . seem to need . . . to keep their daughters around them. For support? For companionship? For security? . . . Well, that's way too damn big a question for my puny—and never very smart to begin with!—male mind, and it's so far outside my male experience that you will have to work that aspect out for yourself."

(Now, I don't know if he had observed it in numerous relationships "over the years," but as he very explicitly writes in his memoirs, he sure had observed it between Catherine and her mother, the Italian "princess," Carlotta. And what a totally, nasty, toxic, web-spinning and paranoid SLP-spider of a woman that Carlotta had been! She always most derisively called John "the Cassock" and was a hundred percent, paranoid-certain that the only reason a crass, Russian bumpkin like him could have for wanting to marry her very "upscale" daughter, was to get a chunk of her precious money! Regardless that Catherine was madly in love with him and pretty much—in her own subtle ways—pursued and "captured" him, while he, only too cognizant the Grand Canyon full of cacti spanning their social stations, wanted nothing to do with her, regardless of how incredibly beautiful and sexually attractive she was. But that is a classic beautiful-estrogen-flower-wants-to-be-pollinated-by-the-big-bad-testosterone-bee story full of bizarre synchronicities that belongs in, and is integral to, The Fire, so I'll say no more about it here!)

"But there is another aspect to it that I can see and perhaps explain at bit, and it as to do with both of you being members of that infernal abomination of Constantine's . . ."

My response to that was a loud, despairing—and shrieking!—burst of laughter that brought the dog running over to investigate, after which I could but derisively say, "Christ, John—what the hell could that have to do with it? I can't see any connection there at all! I mean, don't you think it's a bit ridiculous that you find a way to bring that damn . . . abomination . . . into just about . . . everything . . . we talk about! Don't you think you are being just a little fucking bit . . . obsessive about it!"

With that he lifted his Stetson off his head with his left hand, bowed his head to his chin, and while beating his chest with is right fist, loudly said, "Mea culpa! Mea culpa!" Then leaning over and giving my hand a gentle pat, went on, "I'm not just a 'little fucking bit obsessive about it'—I'm a whole lot obsessive about it! But the only reason you doubt the value of my obsessiveness with it is because you are an itty bitty little mouse who long ago was gobbled up by the great big lion of that abomination so you have no idea what has really happened to you. Actually, the whole of Western civilization is nothing if not an unsuspecting 'little' mouse that has been gobbled up by the great big lion of that consummately evil, Lords of Karma . . . or more likely . . . Lords of Malice-dominated, SLP-institution of Constantine's. And you sure don't yet really understand that consummately evil institution the way I've been forced to get to know . . . and understand . . . it! . . . Or I guess, from your perspective, the way I think I know and understand it.

"You see, from . . . my . . . personal and very biased perspective . . . that infernal abomination of Constantine's, by its very nature, is a great big paranoid and evil lion of an SLP institution! Or a gargantuan and very ugly and vicious—and paranoid and evil!—spider of an institution—if you like that metaphor better . . . Actually, I personally like the spider metaphor more—few people have lions in their life but everyone encounters—and most people hate—spiders. And they encounter them way more often that most want to! (He had that right, I can tell you!)

"I don't like either metaphor, Uncle John. You know how much I hate even thinking about that infernal outfit, let alone talking about it! Which is about as much as I like encountering fucking spiders!"

"Right you are, Little Miss Muffet! Just as no one likes a spider to join them at the breakfast table when they are eating their 'cornflakes and milk,' so no mouse likes to face the fact it has been gobbled up by a lion and is in the process of being digested into a lump of lion poop by it. . . . Or more appropriately to this metaphor—just as no fly likes to face the reality that it has flown into a spider's web and that the vibrations it feels in the web are caused by the approach of a great big spider who is intent on first stinging and paralyzing it, then setting it aside for an evening snack! But the bare-arsed fact must be faced—at least, from my limited perspective it must be faced!—that right down to its very dark and vile core, Constantine's Imperial Abomination represents pure, unadulterated, institutionalized paranoia and malice! Pure, active evil! In my obviously worthless opinion, it is the spiritual equivalent of that utterly pernicious Spanish Flu virus that so lethally swept around the world right after the BASS—except human beings very quickly developed an immunity to it and it went away. Unlike that pernicious virus of Constantine's Imperial Abomination which just keep infecting and spreading and infecting spreading . . . and so lethally—from a spiritual perspective!—infecting generation after generation. . . . In a sense you could call all that passionately active and aggressive—and often violent!—missionary work of the Abomination's minions the equivalent of the sneezes of a flu victim spreading their debilitating—and often deadly!—flu virus 'hither, thither and yon!'

"Which means, I guess, we should really be calling it and SBP institution—Shitty Big Paranoiac! . . . except however gargantuan a lion it is, however grotesque a giant spider it is, however lethal a virus it is, it's agenda is still nothing more or less than that of all SLPs—to be a lion and swallow its victim into its gut of control and malice and make them feel not only shitty, but very small—small and thus easily controllable! . . . Or, if you prefer—being a fly that has lucklessly and fatally flown into the giant and very sticky web of a giant spider that traps its fly-victims in that web of malice and makes them feel very small and helpless—and renders them totally defenseless and digestible!"

And at that point I got really—and incomprehensibly!—agitated and almost shouted at him, "Really, John?—you've got to be fucking kidding! It's not really . . . it can't be really . . all of that! I think you've gone too fucking far with all this mouse . . . and lion . . . and fly . . . and spider . . . and flu virus . . . and fucking active evil . . . SHIT!"

With that he angled his horse over to mine and reaching out, patted my hand while laughing and saying, "Language, language, Rachel—those poor horses have ears, you know! And they are very sensitive creatures! And so is the poor dog! You have to think about him, too! . . . And that squirrel up in that tree over there that's chattering it's head off at him. We have no idea how young and impressionable it is. Hell, pretty soon all the squirrels around here will be swearing their heads off and scandalizing all the other animals!"

That got me laughing and mentally kicking myself for taking all his "pontifi-babbling" so seriously—something that always got a laugh out of him because as he often pointed out, he was just babbling on about this "stuff-and-nonsense"—as he liked to call it—solely to amuse himself, and he never meant for me to take it seriously!—and just as he finished saying that, a large black bird with a bright red head abruptly and startlingly flew out of the woods from behind John while letting out three or four loud, rich kleeeyaaahs that practically made me jump out of the saddle. It quickly flew past us and landed high up in a pine tree towering above the forest in front and to the left of us, provoking from John a loud laugh as he added, "And see—Mr. Pileated Woodpecker agrees with me!"

My reaction to that was to say, "That was a woodpecker? . . . That bird was as big as a . . . a raven! Shit, I didn't think woodpeckers got that big!"

And as if to answer my question for me itself, that huge bird began hammering away at a bright, raw spot on that tree with a loud series of THOCK! THOCK! THOCKS! And as chunks of bright, raw pine went flying off that tree, John let out a sardonic chuckle and said, "I can't believe you grew up around these forests and have no knowledge of the Pileated woodpecker! You can see its bright red head from here? . . . And he's sure pounding the crap out of that poor pine. Next big storm the top of that tree is going to break off where he is digging into it! . . . Did you even go into the woods at all as a girl? Surely your parents must have taken you for walks in it once in awhile . . . if for no other reason than to pick blueberries!"

"Fuck, John!" I practically shouted at him. "The 'woods' . . . as you call the fucking things, are full of nothing but bugs and bears. My brother used to disappear into them all the time—summer and winter!—but my sister and I . . . and both my parents . . . thought of them as fucking nightmares to stay out of. I went blueberry picking once with Mimi and Tante Germaine, and when we found this really nice patch—the whole area looked absolutely blue! . . . like a goddamn pond!—Mimi pointed to a big ugly pile of . . . mashed up blueberries . . . slopped all over a part of that patch and said, 'Oh, oh—bear poop! We'll have to keep an eye out for bears! I bet we just scared one off from this great patch!' I took one look at that mess while imagining some great big black bear charging out of the trees, gobbling me up, and crapping me onto a blueberry patch, and screamed my Goldilocks fucking head off as I ran all the way back to the car! . . . And when Mimi and Tante Germaine caught up with me there, they were both breathless, as much from their attempts to run after me as from laughing their heads off, and when she could finally speak, Tante Germaine said, 'Well, with all this screaming this big peureuse . . . this scaredy-cat . . . is doing, that bear will have ensauver! It will be miles away before it stops, so we can pick real safe now.'

"So they unlocked the car, rolled the windows down and left me in it for the whole afternoon while they went back to that patch and picked six baskets of those damn blueberries. It was boring as hell sitting in that car—and damn hot because I had to keep the windows rolled up most of the way to keep the deer flies out!—but at least I was safe from bears! And that was pretty much my only fucking foray into the woods until I started going into them with you! So no fucking 'nature girl' am I, I can fucking tell you that!" (Actually, now that I think of it, I can't believe I endured the crudely bucolic Woodstock! . . . though of course, there were no bears there . . . and lots and lots of drugs . . . and lots and lots of great music . . . and, most importantly, lots and lots and lots of really horny boys, some of whom, though they wanted to "eat me," not a one of which wanted to devour me.)

Again, he put a mock-grimace on his face as he again said, "Language, language, Rache! What's Ma Squirrel going to say when her precious little boy goes home today saying, 'Fuck-uck-uck-uck-ucker!' instead of 'chat-at-at-at-atter?' She'll be absolutely scandalized! And that big ol' Pileated Woodpecker—who knows what it's going to be calling out from now on!"

Well, needless to say, his humorous reaction to my very "unladylike"—miner-language, as he always laughing called it!—calmed me down enough to have a good long laugh with him, and I know he didn't actually mind it because he once said he found it—my feistiness, he called it—very refreshing! And not only very me but refreshingly unCatholic! In fact, he once chuckling commented that he'd never heard a single Catholic priest swear, but too damn many of them molested altar boys and other children, and things would be infinitely better if the opposite were true.

A statement that he then instantly followed with the most harshly bitter comment I ever heard him utter, "In fact, it can be said no Catholic priest is so 'unholy' as to say that foul, unholy word, fuck—even when he is lustfully ramming his prick into some altar boy's tender arse! (In Part 2 of The Fire, John gives a more than vivid description of what it is like to be a young altar boy whose "tender arse" was too often on the wrong end of a "good priest's" prick, something I hardly expected to discover in those scribbles but which certainly explained one of the reasons we got on so well, for whereas I had begun my sexual "education" in a way-too-young a fashion on the wrong end of a failed-priest's prick, he'd begun his, equally young, on a "successful" priest's. It also explained his intense and undying hatred for all things about Constantine's Imperial Abomination—especially its pedo-priests!)(In his mind, all priests were pedophiles.)

And when that bit of profanity-levity was over, he went on to say, "You say that I'm being obsessive about Constantine's Imperial Abomination because that huge and voracious lion has eaten you and you don't know it. But think about it!—the first thing that infernal institution does to turn you into a tame and compliant lamb of a Catholic, is baptize you. And it baptizes you because as far as it is concerned—or at least that Hypocrite from Hippo, Augustine was!—you, as a newborn infant, are born in the state of original sin . . . in a state of moral filthiness and decrepitude that is so offensive to Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy's tender sensitivities that he will damn you to an eternity of hellfire for it unless you get all that filthiness and decrepitude washed off you through the intermediating agency of his abominable institution!

"Which is a polite way of saying you are born covered in a thick layer of vile and immoral shit that makes the baptism absolutely necessary in order to hose it off of you with that 'silly water' because if you die—even as a one-second-old infant!—with all that sin-shit on you, your soul immediately get flushed down one of the many millions of conveniently located 'cosmic toilets' and straight into that big cesspit that is forever aflame with hellfire!

"So this baptism . . . this mumbo-jumbo, 'silly water' hose-job—in more ways than one!—is designed to turn you from a foul and filthy lump of heathen shit who can only go to hell and be pitchforked for all Eternity by 'the Devil,' into a nice clean Christian baby who now has a chance to make it to heaven and spend its eternity basking in the blissful gaze of Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy and Sonny Boy Jesus! Christ, the absolute insanity of such a notion! I can't even begin to imagine how Augustine, that sick old Hypocrite from Hypo came up with it!—he must have had a bad fever and been totally out of his dirty little mind! . . .Well, actually, totally in his dirty little mind!"

For some reason I suddenly had vague memories of some shallow studies of Augustine coming back to me from a Platonic philosophy course I'd taken, and I couldn't help but interject here, "You know, John—Augustine was no fool! He got pretty deep into Platonic philosophy . . . even before he became a Christian . . . I think . . . and then he very cleverly . . . I seem to remember . . . conflated Platonic and Christian philosophy."

He just laughed at that and said, "Hey, I didn't say he was a fool—or that he was stupid! I said he was an evil lunatic! Hell, if he'd been a bona fide fool he'd have had no historical impact at all! No, believe me—there is nothing more dangerous than a clever lunatic. Like that Nietzsche fellow who unintentionally ended up being an inspiration for the Nazis with his ubermensch ideas! And as far as I am concerned, that is what the old Hypocrite from Hippo was! And evil lunatic! . . . But of course, don't quote me on that because absolutely no . . . Christian . . . will agree with it. As to his conflating of Platonic and Christian philosophy—if you can call anything as infantile and irrational as Christian 'ideas,' philosophy!

"Ha! As far as I am concerned the phrase Christian philosophy is an oxymoron! . . . What comes to mind concerning the Hypocrite from Hippo's mixing of Platonic and Christian 'philosophy' is some guy who wants to paint his living room a nice bright white but needs a whole gallon of white paint to do it. Except he only has three quarters of a gallon of white . . . and he's a bit of a miser . . . and he doesn't want to have to spend any more money buying additional paint. So he mixes in a quarter gallon of black paint that he has on hand to stretch that white paint. You don't need much of an imagination to know just how bright and white his living room winds up! Or how black . . . and downright evil . . . that 'philosophical' notion of original sin is! But you already know exactly what I think of all formal philosophy and philosophers anyway!"

And on saying that he suddenly made a very uncharacteristically gross gesture that he'd made once before concerning the subject, which was to contemptuously move his curled fist up and down in front of him in that classic gesture of male masturbation—a gesture often used by some men to derogatorily deem something someone—usually a woman—has said, to be totally irrelevant—but which I'd only seen John use once before. And that time too, in expressing his contempt for philosophy, which he did so by saying that he was sure that all most philosophers were doing with their highfalutin and usually incomprehensible-to-most people, over-rational philosophical pontifications, was the equivalent of them " sticking of a broom-handle between their legs and masturbating the hell out of it while the deluding themselves into believing that if they did it long enough, they'd have an orgasm—and say something seminal!"

And now that that memory comes back to me, so does the memory of what provoked that observation, which was that I'd told him, during one of our conversations on philosophical matters, that I considered him my favorite philosopher. I'd assumed he would be flattered by that, but he got downright upset and unusually harshly told me to never again call him a philosopher. It was at that point he gave that "masturbating the broomstick" metaphor, after which he said, "I am no philosopher! I consider myself too down-to-earth and too practical to be one of those mental masturbators! Most of that garbage that gets the highfalutin name of philosophy is just the clever, rationality-obsessed chopping up of everything up into no end of arbitrary categories with either meaningless on utterly confounding names . . . like epistemology . . . and ontology . . . and material realism . . . and monistic idealism...and no end of other abstruse jargons, thus 'explaining' and 'explicating' every damn thing under the sun with no end of fancy, abstract words to make fancy, abstract arguments in fancy abstract logical ways in their efforts to explain a very unabstract universe and a very unabstract human condition that very often is anything but logical! And certainly never the least bit abstract when you are living it! All of which pretty much only proves that all any particular philosopher knows is lots and lots of fancy, abstract philosophical categories, and fancy, abstract words and the fancy and clever and abstract rules of logic so that they can use to make lots of fancy, abstract, logical—and very academically abstract and impressive!—arguments.

"But most of it has any real, practical, human value because to the real people of this world . . . you know, the farmers that grow the food that keeps body and soul together so our philosophers don't starve to death and fall out of their ivory towers . . . and the carpenters that build, not only those ivory towers, but the houses those philosophers live in when they tire of the view from their towers . . . and of course, the lumberjacks who cut the trees and the mill workers who turn those trees into lumber so the carpenters can build these essential structures. And of course, the mechanics not only fix all the machines needed to keep all those very practical, resource-extraction processes going on, but who fix the fancy and expensive European cars owned by those philosophical elites so they can drive in style from their fancy, carpenter-built houses to their fancy, carpenter-and-stone mason-built 'ivory towers!' . . . And of course, we can't leave out the miners who mine the metals that the factory workers use to build those cars in the first place. And even the cooks and waiters who staff the fancy restaurants they dine out at with their fellow denizens of those ivory towers—you get the picture! The world we live in does not rest on a foundation of fancy and logical abstractions that philosophers in ivory towers can figure out and explain using fancy abstract categories and words and logical explanations and arguments.

"No, we live in a world that on one hand, only exists and functions because a lot of down-to-earth toilers—who have no interest at all in their fancy philosophical abstractions!—sweat their butts off to make it exist and keep it functioning. A world which, too often, is as irrational as it is crude and cruel! And though in the early days of modern, materialist Science, this physical universe gave the impression of being totally governed by logical, explainable and absolutely predictable Newtonian laws, that impression was so limited it was really a lie. And I guess our modern world was so 'governed' by that complex and impressive tissue of lies for a couple hundred very philosophically comfortable years! But then those pesky quantum physicists with their 'irrational' thinking and totally whacky ideas about the nature of our Universe came along and booted Newton out of the main tent and relegated him to a sideshow when they proved that deep down, at a quantum level, this universe is anything but logical and explainable—and definitely not predictable.

(Remembering all that also provoked a memory of John once making a bit of a fool out me one visit when we were having a discussion about status, and he very seriously asked me whom I thought were the most important people in our society were. And after not much thought, I smugly said, "Well, obviously politicians! And doctors! . . . And lawyers! . . . And scientists!. . . I donno—take your pick!" He just laughed and said, "You couldn't be more damn wrong! The most important people in any society are farmers And ranchers! How the hell long do you think any of those politicians . . . and doctors . . . and lawyers . . . and scientists—or any of us, for that matter!—us would survive on this so-called civilization if the farmers and ranchers weren't filling up our big fancy grocery marts with all that mundane food they grow or raise!

"Always keep in mind, the bare-arsed fact that if the fancy top of any pyramid doesn't have its grounded base, it is on the ground! Or in this case, in the ground." It had been, of course, a trick question, where I took—as he knew I would—important to mean, of high status, while he'd reduced the word to its base, functional level. And to good effect—I've never again looked at, or thought about, farmers, as dismissively as I had before that. Especially during my many summer visits to our local farmer's market—staffed by some very tired-looking, rough-dressed and well-tanned farmers—where I could pick up some really fresh and good-tasting veggies—and healthy, free-range eggs. And I could only just imagine what he'd have thought of Ayn Rand's turgid, ridiculous bore of a uber right-wing, capitalist-propaganda/romance novel, Atlas Shrugged, had he wasted his time reading it—which I know he didn't because he'd rather have spent his time reading the Bible in Urdu than reading a novel with any serious level of romance in it!)(Or being a young altar boy getting fucked in his tender ass by the raging prick of what he always, in his memoirs, called "the good priest!")

"And of course, it is even more so when you move from the physical realm to the human! Sure, human beings—some human beings!—are capable of training themselves to become dispassionate, rational and logical, but no matter how hard they try, they never can stay that way for long because, unless they castrate themselves and fill their stomachs with cement, the split-second they let their mind out of the narrow stall of their rationality, it romps off into the paddock of thoughts about sex or food! And power and dominance. And security and . . . tenure! All that lower-three chakra stuff. And I don't suppose anything disturbs any ivory-towered philosopher more than finding that one of his comely young students with her sweet, white-toothed smile, her entranced-with-him gaze and ripe-peach Aphrodite body, fills his mind with infinitely sweeter and more alluring thoughts than does the study of . . . ontology . . . or epistemology . . . or logic . . . or utilitarianism . . . or reductionism . . . or existentialism . . . or the categorical imperative—unless of course he has the libido of a stuffed dog and the imagination of . . . of a philosopher!

"And of course, the minute these highfalutin clowns gain any fame with their rationality and logic and their highfalutin pontifications, that fame not only sends no end of seductive young, ripe-peach Aphrodites knocking on their office doors, but puffs them up with a sense of superiority, pride, arrogance and delusions of grandeur, not only over all the eager, ripe-peach Aphrodites that they have attracted and bedded, but over whatever they have accomplished with their dispassionate, rational and logical efforts. And of course, as well, over the fact that they have trained themselves to be so dispassionately rational and logical. Even when lustily putting their polished oak 'wood' to one of those eager, young, ripe-peach Aphrodites on their polished, oak-wood desk! . . . Or cherry-wood—as the case may be, heh, heh!

At this point, after letting out a soft laugh over his—unusually lubricious, for him—'cherry' pun, I could but put on my devil's advocated hat and interject with, "Aw, come on, John—don't you think you are . . . negative . . . generalizing just a bit too much about philosophers? There have been no small number over the years whose ideas have altered history. Look at how the Renaissance basically became . . . the Renaissance . . . because the works of the philosophers Plato and Aristotle were again available to European minds, thus ending that thousand years of darkness and ignorance of the Dark and Middle ages! And all those great philosophers of the Enlightenment! Philosophers of the likes of . . . of Voltaire . . . of Montesquieu . . . Diderot in France! And Kant in Germany. . . . And Mill . . . and Bentham . . . in England. And Jefferson and . . . Paine . . . in the U.S. Christ, I can't remember them all, there were so many. And they all . . . to some degree influenced that age. As did Fichte and . . . Hegel . . . and that grumpy old Schopenhauer . . . to but name a few of the giants who had a big influence over a lot of very famous poets and novelists and musicians during the Romantic era! . . . So I think you should . . . re-think what you have been saying, Uncle John!"

John's response to that was to suddenly lean back in his saddle and say, "Thunk!" after which he mimed pulling an arrow—or a spear— out of his chest, after which he mimed giving it a careful, sour look and saying, "Good shot, Rache! I truly didn't think you were paying that much attention! And you are absolutely right, there have been many philosophers who have shaped an age with their ideas. . . . And like Victor Hugo so wisely—and philosophically—said, 'There's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.' Which to me means that it is very likely that the realm of spirits shapes and guides human history and destiny through the timely intrusion of ideas into the world . . . using certain very . . . rare . . . and great philosophers as . . . agents of their agenda."

That got an immediate and loud groan—and dramatic eye-roll—out of me, but it didn't stop him from going on with, " . . . so from that perspective, some philosophers are very important. Very important tools of those spirits! And many scientists, too—especially scientists in our modern world!—whose ideas elicit powerful responses and shape our world. Hell, no one thinks of Darwin as a philosophers, but his ideas about evolution—many of which have been proven downright wrong, or just not proven at all, by the way!—has shaped our modern world in a really big way. And really irritated a lot of mindless, baa-bleating Christian sheep—especially those fundamentalist evangelicals south of the 'Medicine Line' of which it would take a thousand to make up half a chipmunk's brain!

"But still, however influential all of those philosophers have most definitely been, their ideas, for the most part are too rational, too abstract, to get even close to the real truths about the fundamental human condition . . . fundamental truths that, as far as I am concerned—and for what little that is worth!—the Hindu chakra system explains marvelously well! But hell, even the least educated of bumpkins knows that greed and lust and violence are three of the most powerful driving forces of the fundamental human condition and they are about as rational as epistemology is interesting . . . and ontology is exciting . . . and plate of skillfully prepared categorical imperative is edible . . . and those strived-so-hard-for sensations of academic superiority, of pride and of status-climbing arrogance are very dark emotions that are anything but dispassionate, rational and logical. And as to that crowd of fanatical hangers-on, the delusions of grandeur that always accompany academic superiority, pride, and arrogance, why—they are little else but a bona fide and consuming lunacy that convinces them they, in their great dispassionate, rational and logical superiority, have found ultimate truths and not just little fragments of truth. But all fragments of truth, when taken to be Ultimate Truth, get reduced to pernicious lies that cause more harm than good. . . . Something like the harm that spiritual myths do when cynically and profitably turned into flesh-and-mortality history!

"Though of course, long before most of these academically over-achieving self-deluders ever achieve any fame from their pursuit of dispassionate rationality and cold, hard logic, they have acquired a succession of highfalutin university degrees designed to prove to the world just how superior they are! Degrees that I am sure they are more than just a little emotionally proud—and too often equally emotionally arrogant!—about, especially when they represent a ticket of admittance to the crow's nests of those university ivory towers! Crow's nests around which no end of Aphrodite-doves constantly flutter and from which too many of them too often too loudly caw out—when not busy plucking one of those Aphrodite-doves out of the air and devouring her in his bed!—their deluded notions but how rational and explainable and predictable and controllable both this Universe and humanity are. . . . When of course, both this Universe and humanity, are about as rationally explainable as quantum physics and as predictable and controllable as a bull in a stall with a heifer in estrus tied outside it!

"And much as most academics and scientist will, from the top of their ivory tower of university status and from the flagpole of their rational worldview, very emotionally and vehemently and adamantly deny the very irrational-to-their-limited-worldview plethora of facts and observations, that to anyone who looks at them with their indoctrination-blinders removed, demonstrates that this Universe and human reality is ruled by forces and constrained by rules that are infinitely more mysterious and chaotic and unpredictable than they are rational and explicable and predictable!

"And as humanity has no less proven itself—over and over and over again!—to be 99% of the time ruled by all the dark emotions of the lower three chakras, by the powerful and driven needs for security, sex and power, which manifest in an infinite variety of ways, but which too often are achieved through the very predictable and irrational means of force and violence! (Needless to say, Dear Reader, I was quite shocked at John's level of understanding of the dark, lusty, power-abusing side of the very male, academic world, a world he'd never been closer to than the moon! But of course, he'd been such an eclectic reader—especially of library books!—he could have picked up that knowledge in any number of books that I knew nothing about. Hell, maybe even Roberson Davies' Cornish Trilogy!)

"And I suspect nothing drives that home more than—as I am sure you know!—that though, in the original meaning of the word—from ancient Greek times—a philosopher was a philo-sophia, a lover of wisdom, was anyone who had a genuine passion for thinking up, or just plain thinking about, a broad range of ideas concerning a broad range of subjects. While today it seems to be too often applied only to over-educated people who make a career out of playing around with a very limited range of other people's ideas—like the toddlers of millionaires who will only play with gold and silver blocks! Which of course, logically means that given all the ideas in Mein Kampf—however sick and reprehensible they are—it qualifies Hitler to be considered a philosopher. Or at least considered a philosopher by those readers of that foul book with shit-fouled souls who had a sympathetic reaction to his foul and fascist ideas!

"In fact, one of his most important, and famous ideas is that the bigger the lie, the more believable it is . . . This insight coming to him, as far as I remember it, in the guise of the belief that since everybody tells many smalls lies in their need to get by in life, that any really huge lie is so outside the scope of what they think of as lying, that they assume it must be the truth. (If John was alive today, he'd be factoring Mad King Donald into his diatribe, for I doubt Hitler could have even imagined a liar as compulsive, proficient, and passionate as the Fascist States of America's modern, Mad King Donald, for whom the stench of his constant fart-stream of lies has become, like the stench of an old woman's over-used perfume to her own inured-to-it nose, functionally unsmellable!)

"And though if Hitler had done nothing else with his life but write Mein Kampf, he would be in the history books as a philosopher . . . a minor crank of a philosopher, to be sure . . . and evil monster of an SLP to anyone who wasn't a dyed-in-the-wool fascist!—but still a philosopher! A purveyor of dark, fascist and racist ideas with a not totally insignificant following, if I know the dark side of human nature for what it truly is!

"But he was canny enough to know that most minor philosophers are as important to the mindless, teeming masses of this world as arse-wipe to migrating geese, while political power was the sphere of reality where all the truly important stuff happens. I mean, just think about it—hundreds of thousands of those poor Jews that Hitler either outright gassed or had worked and starved to death in his war-machine labor camps, were considerably more intelligent, better educated—and a damn lot wealthier!—than was he. Many had been brilliant and successful doctors, dentists, lawyers, professors, financiers, bank presidents, et cetera.

"But all their intelligence and education and brilliance and wealth wasn't worth a flea fart in the face of his dark and malicious political power. In the card came of life, as even our modern political events proves, power always trumps intelligence and education! And double-trumps good sense! Hell, as that war in Vietnam proved, it sweeps those cards right off the damn table! (Ha, if he could only have known how prescient he was being with that trump word, as all the intelligence, education and good sense in the Fascist States of America is presently being well and truly double-trumped by the utterly irrational, beyond corrupt, and absolutely emotional and paranoid aspects of its most politically powerful, tantrum-throwing toddler!)

"Though, hey—I once had the bizarre thought that it was a 'good thing'—and bear in mind I am saying this facetiously!—that Hitler was induced by higher spirits to be obsessed with murdering all those Jews because if he'd left them alone, if he had incorporated them into his Reich, and used all the intelligence, education and other mental and trade-skills resources they represented at all levels, he'd have been virtually unstoppable in his quest to conquer this world, and most of the world today would be part of that thousand-year Reich of his. Of course, that crazy—and very facetious!—thought was made moot by the fact that one of the things that help him gain his political power in the first place was his anti-Semitism! (Ditto with Mad King Donald and his overt racism . . . and obvious love for neo-Nazis and Hitler-like demagogues, which of course, is so appealing to the powerful undercurrents of stupidity, racism and fascism that course so violently through the psyches of so many American fascists! So many mindless MAGA-hatters!)

"And of course, Hitler was also canny enough to know that nothing achieves and maintains political power faster and more efficiently than that crucial lesson he learned from Constantine's Imperial Abomination, which is that nothing is more effective than great big lies expressed in a Simple-Simon fashion which are repeated like a holy mantra and backed up by brutal, intimidating—and murderous!—violence! Those who loved him, equally loved his big, Simple-Simon lie and his crass bullying, and those who hated and disapproved of him and dared to expressed that hate and disapproval, ended up with exactly the same dark fate at the hands of his psychopathic Gestapo that those who dared question Catholic dogma once did at the hands of the Abomination's psychopathic Inquisitors.

"And I am 100% certain he learned those lessons—not just about the general appeal of anti-Semitism and the flies-to-rotting-meat attraction of a colossal lie, but the use of torture and murder to obtain and maintain political power—by studying the long, bloody, tortuous, murderous and fascist-efficient history of Constantine's Imperial Abomination. I mean, that infernal institution is nothing if it is not an endemically anti-Semitic, violent, and oppressive—and very SLP!—political institution built around two of the most colossal, extensively believed, and fundamentally evil lies in the history of the human race. The first Big Lie being that the 'only begotten son' of the Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy, the Supreme Ruling Deity of this whole damn Universe, in the 'person' of the immortal Sonny Boy Jesus, was somehow murdered by a handful of very mortal Jews who were nothing more than Roman lapdogs!

"And the second Big Lie being that all the millions and millions of human beings—infants, children and adults!—everywhere on the whole of planet Earth who had lived for all those millennia prior to the 'murder' of the historical and human incarnation of one of 'the aspects' of the infantilely anthropomorphized 'Creator of this whole damn vast Universe,' Sonny Boy Jesus, on a crude and common-as-dust Roman execution device in a crude and common-as-dust Roman execution event that took place on a no-account hill outside of an insignificant town in the Levant, were damned to eternal hellfire due to the ancient original sin of the rebellious Adam—whom 99.9999 percent of all humanity all over this vast planet had never heard a word about!—because this historical incarnation . . . and death . . . and revivication . . . of the Creator of the whole damn Universe in the human body of Sonny Boy Jesus had not yet happened to save them from their being damned to eternal hellfire by that original sin committed by that ancient Adam whom they knew nothing about, and even after that disastrously long-delayed 'saving' event, only those who both very child-credulously believed that that death of one aspect of the Creator of our Universe, Sonny Boy Jesus, on that mundane Roman cross on a no-account hill outside that insignificant Levantine town, and his subsequent resurrection from his certified death, could save them from this ancient, original sin-debt created by that naughty, over-grown child, Adam and his 'humanized, multi-limbed, and hungry rib,' that apple-loving Eve, and then got baptized into Constantine's Imperial Abomination, would they actually be saved! Saved from having to pay with an eternity of intolerable suffering in hellfire that would be their 'just deserts' for the part they somehow play in that ancient, 'apple-eating' act perpetrated by those two—hitherto mindless!—Nobodaddy-enraging 'kids,' Adam and Eve.

"But of course, that catastrophically absurd and insane lie . . . which no intelligent child over the age of five can willingly believe . . . and it's bosom-buddy absurd and insane lie spouted by that pernicious hypocrite from Hippo concerning the original sin created by that absurd, 'apple-eating' act, with this absurdly unbelievable original sin of that old hypocrite being that for all the subsequent millennia of human history following that absurd, 'apple incident,' every single human infant born into this world would be naturally befouled by that foul, heinous, hell-damning original sin created by that simple, 'apple incident!'

"And worse, that original sin of that ancient, apple-munching Adam cursed all subsequent human beings with an utterly irresistible compulsion to do little else with our live but commit foul, Nobodaddy-displeasing and hell-dooming sins! From my perspective, this is the biggest, foulest, most cynical, most manipulative, and most evil SLP-con in the whole history of this planet. It is blatantly irrational! It is blatantly infantile! It is blatantly cynical! It is blatantly manipulative! And it is as catastrophic as it is blatantly evil! And as far as I am concerned, the big reason that European history has been so martially murderous and destructive—from the feudal chaos of the Dark Ages, through those murderous Crusades and all the way to the slaughterfields of the Thirty Years War and the BASS—parts One and Two—and of course, this insane, nerve-and-spirit grinding Cold War with its two giant, super-paranoid, nuclear Rottweilers at each other's throats and threatening to destroy this whole world in order for one to have the ego-satisfaction of dominating the other! . . . In fact, they each respectively seem to have the psychopathic 'philosophy' of that infamous quote that pretty much defined the whole Vietnam war: 'We had to destroy the village to save it,' except now it's been most evilly transformed into, 'We have to destroy this world to save it.' The Communists are passionately murderous about saving it from Capitalism and the Capitalists passionately murderous about saving it from Communism! . . . And the Devil take the hindmost!

"Those dark and foul lies . . . lies about 'the fall' . . . lies about our basic, human nature being endemically befouled with that cynical old hypocrite's original sin . . . lies about Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy dooming every 'unsaved' human being to eternal hellfire for that absurd, 'apple eating' act of Adam's . . . all those cynical and manipulative lies that have been . . . shat . . . by that infernal institution of Constantine's! . . . upon the fundamentally mindless and hapless baa-bleating sheep-flocks of humanity, have created this dark and vile and violence-worshipping and war-dominated spiritual wasteland that has been oppressing us for so many centuries that it has became regarded as normal . . . as reality! Like the way things are right now is the only way things can ever be because human nature can't be any different. Can't be anything better!

"Thus we, as this doomed and naturally sinning species, seemed to be fatefully trapped in this 'normal reality' that had, for too many centuries, spawned one bloody 'normal' European war after another at intervals just long enough for all of its 'farmer-mothers' to 'grow' a new crop of combatants, the whole long and dark and 'fated' process finally culminating in the BASS—parts One and Two—in which somewhere around 60 or 70 million mostly Christian warriors and civilians were slaughtered by mostly Christian warriors and their ever-evolving war machines—and whole vast cities obliterated! Reduced to corpse-filled piles of rubble!

"And now we are in the middle of this so-called Cold War that threatens to reduce to corpse-filled rubble decorated with millions of 'nuclear shadows,' hundreds of cities and cause the deaths of uncountable millions of hapless human beings, and in the process pretty much outright destroy—or long-term deform!—all the remaining organic life on this whole planet with a gargantuan, radioactive-for-millennia nuclear holocaust! And way too few people on this planet truly fathom just how truly and absolutely insane a situation that is, because in the hideous spiritual wasteland created by Constantine's Imperial Abomination, and its passionate, and often lethally violent, promulgation of those colossal lies, it is all just . . . quite . . . normal!"

John's "pontification pony" had transmogrified into an Arabian thoroughbred and was now galloping along in full lather even as our horses were placidly plodding along that beautiful, over-grown, "golden tunnel" of leaf-changed aspens winding its way to the mine site under that pristine blue October sky, and though I had ideas and questions I wanted to express, I couldn't quite seem to find the willpower to rein him in with a feeble interruption, so on-and-on he "galloped!"

"I long ago read a poem by some female poet whose name escapes me that went along the line of, The lovely flowers of peace and flourishing grow in the sunlight and rain of human spirituality, while the rank weeds of war and desolation grow in the dark lies and women-oppressing agendas of this world's patriarchal religions, which are nothing but armies involved in preaching wars against peace, good sense and women, while all armies are intrinsically patriarchal religions involved in real wars against peace, good sense and women.

"Or something like that. And she definitely said it a good deal more poetically—and cleverly! But who the hell pays attention to poets anymore—female or male? It's the scientists and academics who have the soap-boxes now . . . soap boxes lodged atop their ivory towers where they do their bellowing-best to impress and bamboozle the credulous sheep grazing at the bases of those ivory towers . . . while also very vainly trying to exert their influences over the political bullies of the day, who of course, as since . . . forever . . . live in their fortress towers and have—and greedily hoard and maliciously wield!—all the power.

"Those self-important scientists and academics, from their sacrosanct, ivory-tower penthouse, blather on and on to no mindless end, that 'War is just part of human nature so we have to accept it! And deal with it! . . . Until we can figure out which gene or hormone is causing it! And then figure out a way to scientifically control that gene—or that hormone!' But however high their ivory-tower penthouses might be, not a one of them is high enough to elevate them above the dark clouds of those two colossal, pictures-hanging-too-long-on-a-wall Big Lies in order to get even a glimpse of the light of the truth of things, so they are always still bellowing their fool heads of from inside that drear and colossal insanity—from inside the gut of that huge, SLP-lion that has swallowed most of humanity whole!"

At this point I did manage to lasso John's "pontification pony-cum-Arabian thoroughbred" and slow it down enough to interject, "Fucking hell, John!—you're confusing the crap out of me with all those sliced-and-diced metaphors! And this anti-church shit. Can't we just . . . enjoy . . . this ride . . . and this day . . . without all this dark and dreary goddamn . . . pontificating!"

That got a loud laugh out of him as he immediately took off his Stetson, put it in front of his mouth, and somewhat muffled said, "You know I am, as usual, just 'talking through my hat' . . . mouth-farting through it more like! . . . so you know you don't have to pay the slightest bit of attention to it . . . or take it the slightest bit seriously. . . . And like I've explained before, whenever you and I are together I feel an irresistible compulsion to pontificate all this . . . shit . . . as you put it, into your poor ears. It's those damn spirits that you don't want to believe in, I'm sure of it—they fill my head with all this . . . shit . . . when I am alone, then fill me with the powerful compulsion to pass it on to you when we are together. There must be some method to their lunacy, but I can't see it."

And with that he put his Stetson back on his head just as I couldn't resist saying, "I think you've gone all Flip Wilson on me and its 'the devil making you do it!' Just to fuck-over my poor head, ruin this lovely ride, and wreck my sleep for the next few weeks!"

On my saying that, he chuckled and said. "The Devil? Christ!—if I could believe in that favorite, Big Bad Bogyman of Constantine's Imperial Abomination, I'd say you were absolutely right! It would make more sense!" (I once asked John what the difference was between "the Devil" of Constantine's Imperial Abomination and those Lords of Karma, or Malice, or whatever, that he was always talking about, and he just laughed and said, "Compared to the . . . dragon . . . of those Lords of . . . Malice, the Abomination's 'Devil' is little more than the coyote-trickster of the Indians!" I can't say I in any way liked that answer!)

And then digging his metaphorical spurs into his metaphorical "pontification horse," he galloped on, "Thus those, oh-so-smart but oh-so-blind scientists and academics are utterly incapable of seeing the black and devastated spiritual wasteland that has been bequeathed to the whole of this modern world by Constantine's very dark and very fascist . . . and very SLP . . . and always very political 'church'! This inability to both see and understand this spiritual wasteland for what it is, has denied this 'spiritual wasteland of a world' from any chance of a very necessary, self-transformation . . . and self-renewal! From even the remotest chance of a more than necessary, embracement of the light and freedom—and peace—of true spirituality!

"We, as a modern, global culture, are drowning in the toxic, SLP-sludge of all that sin and damnation spewing forth from that artesian spring of Lords of Karma . . . or Malice! . . . darkness and control and oppression that had found its most pernicious and voluminous debouchment into this world through the very deep and very wide and very fascist irrigation canal of Constantine's Imperial Abomination and its two most dark and powerful, sin-slinging Big Lies! Though I guess I should say its three most powerful Big Lies, with the first and most important—and most Hitlerean!—Big Lie, being that Abomination's historicizing of the Christ myth.

"A Hitlerean Big Lie, that, by the way, was freely acknowledged by Pope Leo the . . . tenth . . . I think . . . when he said, 'It has served us well, this myth of Christ.' And indeed it has! It has served Constantine's fascist Imperial Abomination and its tyrannical quest for world hegemony more than well, but serve this sad-sack herd of mindless, baa-bleating sheep of humanity—and this modern, spiritually-devastated world created by that herd of mindless sheep—it has not!

(I sure wish the fuck I could portray exactly how John spoke the above words, but the whole subject is very complex and my memory of that ride seems to keep going in and out of focus even as it seems to be rocketing through my poor, manic, coke-and-fatigue-addled head like a ballistic missile through a dense cloud! And too, I sure wish I could capture the stream of smoking hot battery-acid of sarcasm that accompanied John's voice when he voiced his ideas on this dear-to-him subject!)

"No wonder anyone who has 'sane'd-up' enough to truly fathom what is going on . . . who somehow crawls free of the monstrous, SLP-lion's black, devouring gut and truly seen the truth of those grotesque and devouring . . . Big Hitlerean Lies . . . winds up in an asylum where they are pumped full of drugs and given shock treatments designed to turn them back into passive, credulous, baa-bleating sheep ever willing to lifelong wear the blinders that prevent them from ever having to see such a disturbing truth. And which thus allows them, when their period of re-indoctrination is over, to be sent back into that monstrous, SLP-lion's gut where they unquestioningly accept their 'lot in life' with equanimity—like all credulous, baa-bleating sheep are supposed to!

"So, much as Hitler was an evil genius of a philosopher with no shortage of evil ideas and colossal whoppers of lies, he sure could not come up with an SLP-lion of a lie to match that world-and-light swallowing beast that is Constantine's Imperial Abomination and which has been feeding off of humanity for so long! And getting so damn big and strong and powerful with the ease of all that rich fare of vast flocks of passive, credulous, baa-bleating sheep it has been feeding on!

"And again, I sincerely apologize for all this 'pontificating' on such a lovely day and during such a beautiful ride, for much as I know my sluicing of all these crazy ideas into your poor, resisting ears just irritates and wearies you, they come to me, when I am alone, like bees buzzing out of a giant hive and zooming into the weed-flowering meadow of my head, where they do their nectar-gathering and pollinating business, then just buzz useless around until we are together, at which time they swarm out of my head through this . . . stupid-hole . . . in my face, and zoom into your ever-resisting ears. And resist them you are completely free to do, for though I don't know many things in this life for certain, I for certain know that I am not a world-famous, over-educated and ivory-towered philosopher, which means you are completely free to let this bee-swarm of ideas buzz in one ear and out the other and this world will not be the lesser for it. Any more than it would be the more for it if you took them seriously enough to spend your precious time letting them swarm around in the flower garden of your head while examining each one and trying to decide if it is a worker bee or a useless drones—or even an evil hornet masquerading as a bee!"

At that point John's pontification pony-cum-Arabian thoroughbred seemed to run out of wind and we rode along in a delicious, day-and-ride-enjoying silence for a good number of minutes, the first few of which I allowed myself to savor until I slowly felt the tongue of my mind again begin poking at the broken tooth of my recent run-in with my mother and the business of Jonathan's First Communion and First confession, and I just had to go ruin that delightful silence by saying, "I still can't seem to get that last run-in with my mother over Jonathan's First Confession and First Communion. My rational mind keeps saying it's a lot of . . . of what you once called horse feathers . . . but some other part of me keeps bugging me with the notion that his getting those sacraments are important. What's your take on this . . . horse feather business?"

"Horse feathers!" said John with a chuckle. "I haven't used that term in a good while . . . and I don't know if I used it as a euphemism for horse shit or as a term for the patently absurd and impossible, like . . . hen's teeth . . . or good priest!"

That in turn got a laugh out of me as I said, "As I remember it, you used it as a euphemism for horse shit. . . . When you were talking to Mimi about something."

"Yeah, she goes all . . . saintly . . . when she hears swear words, doesn't she? She wouldn't, as the saying goes, say shit with her mouth full of the stuff! And she goes totally Inquisitor-righteous if you say anything against her precious church! Christ, if 'the Abomination' was taking job applications for Inquisitors, she'd put in a hundred of them! . . . But on to your question. What you are dealing with over this First Communion and Confession business, is your reason in a life-and-death battle of your reason with your indoctrination. Especially with that Communion . . . horse feathers! Heh, heh!"

And of course, with that "life-and-death" battle going on inside of me, my Righteous Indoctrination Knight took a charge at John with his lance of, "But is the sacrament of Communion really all that bad? . . . I mean it is the center of the Mass . . . and a lot of Catholics think its real important. . . . Well, the ones who have gone to confession and can partake, that is."

That got an unmuffled chain-saw of a laugh out of him as he sarcastically said, "Center of the mass of a lot of . . . horse feathers! Since I haven't taken any catechism class for . . . neigh on eighty years . . . and I had no interest in the damn things when they were being shoved up my tender butt . . . don't you dare ever go quoting me on this, heh, heh, but I agree with those philosophers who call that act of Communion nothing but ritualized cannibalism. An ancient Pagan practice that had symbolic meaning to the Pagans who partook of it, but which has been reduced to . . . horse feathers . . . by Constantine's Abomination in its attempt to claim that in eating that piece of stale bread devoid of the vitality if the yeast that makes bread, bread, that you are, de facto, eating the body of Jesus Christ himself! . . . And I think in some churches you get a sip of wine which is claimed to be his blood. A very, very Pagan practice . . . and all total horse feathers within the context of an institution built on the foundation of all the skulls of the Pagans slaughtered in its name!

"But in my mind . . . for what it's worth! . . . this notion of eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ is just a cynically absurd ritual designed to make a bunch of empty-headed and child-credulous sheep feel like they are involved in something important. . . . And not being dumped into a great big pile of gilded and incense-scented . . . horse feathers! I mean, face it—what can be more absurd than some cynical outfit like Constantine's Abomination, on the one hand, teaching its empty-headed and child-credulous sheep flocks that Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy's Sonny Boy Jesus is important to them because he is every bit as much GOD as Ol' Nasty himself, and thus not just another damn sinning human being like the rest of us. In effect, it teaches that Sonny Boy is divine, not human, then it stupidly and absurdly turns around and says that the ritualized eating of his human body and drinking his human blood, is somehow supposed to be a spiritual act. That's as absurd as would be the practice of surgeons pissing on their hands before an operation instead of sterilizing them!

"So yeah, no wonder you are in a state of . . . what's that highfalutin psychological term you love to use instead of . . . plain old mental confusion . . . ?"

It took me a few seconds of thought before finally coming up with "You mean . . . cognitive dissonance?"

"Yeah, that's the one! Cognitive dissonance! Sure sounds a lot more . . . educated . . . than plain old . . . mental confusion! So what's putting you in a state of cognitive dissonance is that your reason is telling you that the raison d'être of the Abomination's precious Mass is about as absurd as a horse covered in feathers—hell, I don't think even Pegasus was ever portrayed with feathers!—while your infantile and well-indoctrinated emotions are telling you that it is very important. But it is only important if you want to be a bona fide member of that mindless flock of baa-bleating sheep who so proudly call themselves Catholics. And not only is that flock of sheep mindless, it is fundamentally materialistic, just like Constantine's Imperial Abomination!"

I was having a hard time following him as a lot of my "Abomination-indoctrination" was flooding my head and psyche and causing an unusual amount of cognitive dissonance, so all I could do to inject myself into the "conversation" was say, ""Materialistic? . . . I'm not following you, Uncle John."

"Sure, materialistic! I mean, can you partake in an ancient Pagan ritual that was meant to be symbolic but which Constantine's Abomination claims is the de facto—and very cannibalistic!—act of eating the actual body and blood of Sonny Boy Jesus, and not be involved in something fundamentally materialistic? How goddamn stupid can those Catholic sheep flocks be, in believing that the cannibalistic act of eating the flesh and blood of a fellow human being is a spiritual act? It's absurd! It's . . . horse feathers! Millions upon millions of Catholics sheep-troop into their churches and cathedrals every Sunday morning to quite mindlessly partake in this absurd and mindless ritual and you can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number who are spiritually changed by the experience."

I instantly got my wooden nickel's worth in by saying, "Well, I know for a fact a lot of Catholics feel . . . real good . . . after receiving Communion, Uncle John. I kinda remember feeling pretty good after my First Communion . . . and for a few communions after that!"

"Oh sure, I have no doubt it gives people a—self-induced—warm, fuzzy feeling inside to go to church each Sunday and rub shoulders with fellow Catholics as they all pray and sing and then line up, first to show that they have gone to confession and are thus pure and sinless in the eyes of Ol' Nobodaddy and Sonny Boy, then to get that piece of ritual bread placed ritually placed on their tongue by some 'good priest' as he ritually mumbles his mumbo-jumbo, but that warm, fuzzy feeling is just the feeling of their ego patting itself on the back, and has absolutely nothing spiritual about it.

"Like I've bored you to hell and back with before, true spirituality is always hard work and always about difficult inner growth and inner change. About the constant struggle to be a bigger . . . and more compassionate . . . and more tolerant human being. And in you years of partaking in all that ancient, ritualistic . . . horse feathers . . . that goes on in Catholic churches during Mass, were you able to discern any real spiritual growth and changing going on in those Catholics around you who were so ritualistically partaking?"

I rode on in silence for a few moments, suddenly and most enjoyably—and all too briefly!—seeming to meld with the spirit of that mare, and as I did so, feeling, in that flash of melding, more primal peace and contentment than I'd ever felt in my life, but it too swiftly passed and, after thinking for a moment about what John had just said, I replied, "No . . . not really. . . . Oh sure, people seemed to feel good on leaving the church . . . even my parents did . . . sometimes I got the feeling that for a few minutes afterward they even liked each other . . . a little bit . . . but it never lasted. And yeah, for sure—nobody really changed from week to week. The next Sunday most of the same people would troop into the church for Sunday mass all dressed up in their 'Sunday best' while playing the same ego games as the week before. You know, acting holier-than-the-pope crossing themselves at the 'silly water' fountain, singing the hymns real loud and ostentatious, reciting the prayers superciliously-serious and saint-holy like. . . . And likely after a week of the business men of the 'Catholic community' figuratively screwing their customers as thoroughly as they could while likely literally screwing their secretaries as often as they could get away with. . . . And their stuck-at-home wives screwing the mailman when she got the chance. . . . And the fathers to diddle and doodle their daughters . . . and the priest to doodle and diddle a vulnerable altar boy or two. Or if not a pedophile, screw a housewife with a lousy lover of a mailman! And then all troop to the soul-wash confessional on Saturday afternoon to get all those necessary and pleasurable sins conveniently washed off. Christ, it's all enough . . . horse feathers . . . to make a person barf, actually. Or at least wish they were a practicing atheist!"

My unexpected little diatribe got a loud chuckle out of John and provoked him to respond with, "My goodness gracious, Rache—I never took you to be such a bitter cynic. Especially about your holy Church and her holier-than-thou sheep . . . who too often, I agree, behave a lot more like rabbits . . . and goats, than sheep, heh, heh! . . . So okay, you obviously know what I mean. And what I really mean is that there truly is a spiritual message in those very Gnostic teachings of Christ that the Abomination gives lip-service—very tight lip-service!—to, but all true spirituality revolves around acknowledging the existence of our spirit-being within our psyche and our life and our opening up to—and communing with—it! Communing with it through the conscious and willful opening of our heart to compassion . . . and forgiveness . . . and trust. And most importantly, to tolerance! . . . Which I guess we are not showing a hell of a lot of here as we deal with all these examples of blatant, Catholic hypocrisy!

"And much as I philosophically do not agree with the existence of Buddhism as an institutional religion, it certainly, I certainly agree with its philosophy, and the fact that its core, is infinitely more Christian than anything the Abomination has to offer. Particularly with its focus on, and understanding of, the important role the human heart chakra plays in all true, spiritual practices! Catholicism—or whatever that hypocritical crap peddled by the Abomination should be called!—is all about salvation . . . salvation from a state of sin that it SLP-invented and SLP-slapped on everyone not wearing a 'Teflon suit' that could effectively resist it! A salvation to an ersatz damnation achieved solely through a blind and mindless faith in . . . horse feather . . . stories about Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy and Sonny Boy Jesus! While Buddhism is about the hour-by-hour striving to live a less ego-and-malice dominated life while at the same time constantly striving to live a more heart-chakra oriented—and thus truly spiritual!—life!

"The original, Sanskrit symbol for the heart chakra, for that essential seat of our true spirituality—the doorway to our spirit-being!—is that beautiful flower, the lotus. The lotus was chosen as the perfect symbol of human spirituality because, though it begins its growth deep in thick, black swamp-muck, it manifests on the surface of the waters above that muck as a beautiful flower. Thus it's a perfect symbol for the process of our spirit-being—the source of all our true spirituality—struggling to manifest itself out of the swamp-muck of the natural, physical, and usually overwhelming dominance of our lower three chakras in our human lives.

"You could call all acts of true spirituality the act of embracing the lotus! Of opening up to, and living in, the heart! Of being courageous enough to endure the vulnerability of opening up the heart chakra and allowing it to fill our psyches and lives with compassion and forgiveness and trust . . . and tolerance. And of course, spiritual growth! And as far as I am concerned, all the proof you need that the Abomination is anything but a spiritual institution, is that just about everything about it panders to the lower three chakras . . . the chakras of security, sex, and power.

"And in the case of that Abomination of Constantine's, especially power! . . . Hell, I doubt anything proves that more than the fact—as I remember my history—of the Crusader-armies being sent off to their totally heartless, slaughter-rape-and-pillage missions with an en masse shriving, followed by a 'holy' Mass' and 'holy' Communion!—and the blessings of the Pope . . . or his bishop or priest proxies! And of course, stern admonitions from whatever ecclesiastical authority was on hand, to keep their swords sharp, make sure as many Mohammedan—and Jewish!—throats got slit as they could manage, while making sure to keep their heart-chakras as closed . . . and covered in chain mail as their cross-blazoned chests! "

With that I could be let out a loud sigh and say, "Enough with that . . . Eastern . . . chakra shit, Uncle John. I can't deal with that . . . mystical . . . shit today! Christ, I can't believe all we've talked about since I brought up that bit about my fucking mother pressuring me to get Jonathan ready for his First Confession and his First Communion. And I still can't see what that damn confession business still sits in my gut like a red-hot stone. Again, rationally I think it's totally nonsense, yet deep down . . . I worry. . . . I worry that if I don't allow Jonathan access to those sacraments, I might be . . . dooming him. . . . Though dooming him to what, I sure as fuck don't fucking know, because I sure as fuck don't believe he's ever going to end up in no fucking hell. Like my fucking mother is so fucking worried about!"

And on my letting loose that expletive-rich diatribe, John leaned forward and pretending to hold his hands over his horse's ears, laughing said, "Rachel! Rachel! Rachel! Such language! God forbid your precious Mimi should hear you! Hell, even your miner of a grandfather must be rolling over in his grave hearing all that miner language coming from his granddaughter! And these poor horses! I'll have to give them extra oats tonight to make it up to them! And the dog . . . well, it's a good thing he off somewhere . . . and out of range of all that cursing!

"Obviously this business with little Jonathan and his First Confession and First Communion . . . who I agree, likely needs to go to confession about as bad as the average politician needs to take university courses in lying and corruption. . . . or priests to learn the pedophilic arts at their seminaries . . . is really weighing on you—but I can't see why. You have as much use for that damn Abomination of Constantine's as politicians for courses in lying . . . and pedo-priest compassion for their victims . . . so just walk away from it and forget all about it.

"Yeah, I fucking know! 'Just walk away and forget about it!' I keep telling myself! But it's not so damn fucking easy as it fucking sounds! What the hell could there be about that confession and communion business that is so . . . powerful? So damn compelling? Even when I don't really even believe in any of it? I know it's all crap, and yet . . . "

That got a long, thoughtful sigh out of John as our horses plodded along that lovely old road and a red squirrel in an overhanging branch broke the silence with a long bout of machinegun- like chattering, with him, after giving his left armpit a good long scratching, finally saying, "Well, first of all," he started out saying. "You are dealing with the effects of having spent the whole of your childhood pretty much drowning in the cesspit of the Abomination's powerful indoctrinations. . . . And never, never underestimated the power of clever, cynical and malicious indoctrination techniques, of which Constantine's Abomination is such a master it taught the Nazi's everything they had to know to become as powerful—and cynical and malicious!—as they did! In many ways, clever and malicious and persistent indoctrination like that is no different than the mold that the bronze of a statue is poured into, such that once that bronze has cooled, its fate is to forever be that shape.

"In effect, you, as a child and in the fluid state all children are in, were molded to react to that First Confession and First Communion stuff the way you have been struggling with, so you have no choice but feel that way towards it."

That really irritated me as I practically shouted, "So are you saying, Uncle John, that I'm just . . . just a pathetic little . . . statue . . . or more like a fuckin' hand puppet . . . in the face of this . . . fucking indoctrination shit? That I am able to have no true freedom in the face of it?"

That outburst caused John to turn and give me a long, strange look before finally, and very seriously saying, "Do you really believe a word of what you just said, Rache? . . . We've talked about this issue before—have I not more than once said that the exact split-second you become conscious of a problem is the exact same second you possess the power to master it!"

To that basically rhetorical question, I could but blush and sheepishly nod my head, a response that allowed him to quickly go on, "Indoctrinations only have power when the indoctrinated victim is unconscious of the fact that they have been indoctrinated into a system and that it is controlling their thoughts . . . and choices and actions. The second you can identify something as an indoctrination by an outside agency, is the same second that you can resist and thwart and subvert it.

"You know that all that First Confession and First Communion nonsense of that infernal Abomination is just that—manipulative indoctrination, which means, in that knowing, you have the cleared path out of the thick forest of it. You just have find the willpower to take that path. And of course, in doing so, be willing to disappoint your mother . . . and your redoubtable Mimi, if she's been in on the issue. . . . Though you haven't mentioned her in this context so I suspect she'd been keeping her big, sharp, Pileated Woodpecker beak out of it. . . . Though I more likely suspect she is the one pressuring your mother to badger you with the issue, which would be more along the line of her clever, SLP-machinations. . . . If I know my sister at all!"

And since I just rode on in silence, suddenly depressed by the fact that I sensed John might have been right-on about my beloved Mimi, SLP that I reluctantly knew she was, doing her SLP-machinations on my mother in order to get her to then do her persistent SLP-machinations on me—without taking any of the blame!—and intrude into my business even at the risk of my certain wrath, John went on, "But I can certainly understand what you are up against with that Abomination's indoctrination—above and beyond what I am sure is your Mimi's SLP pressure on your mother to proxy-meddle in the situation!—especially concerning confession!

"You have to learn to see that all the sacraments of Constantine's Imperial Abomination are just institutional . . . power-grabs! . . . Just ways for that infernal institution and its functionaries to exercise power over its huge flock of ignorant, credulous, baa-bleating sheep. I mean—like I am certain I've said too many times before!—that institution is the embodiment of the Roman Empire and all the Roman Empire was ever about was power and bureaucratic control through the exercise and abuse of that power! The Romans were likely this world's greatest and most passionate organizers and bureaucratic administrators—as well as its most passionate and greedy and effective conquerors and enslavers and economic exploiters—until the Brits created their empire and tried their best to out-conquer, out-exploit, and out-greed those Romans! . . . An agenda the Americans have lately more than mastered!

"So at the foundational level of that very Roman institution of Constantine' is the shield-beating heart of Roman power and bureaucratic control and economic exploitation which it once expressed as martially viciously as once did the ancient Romans, but which it now just exercises through its absurd, dark, sin-based and extraordinarily manipulative and coercive, dogshit-dogma—and its well-trained to be manipulative and coercive, dogshit-dogma-wielding clergy!

"And whereas the Roman Empire built its vast power on its incredible army and it tough, well-trained soldiers, Constantine's Imperial Abomination built its vast power on its cynical, masterful, and utterly SLP-ability to convince every single one of its cretinous, credulous, baa-bleating sheep that they are natural-born, hell-bound sinners and that all that can save them from that eternity of hellfire, is Constantine's Imperial Abomination, it's self-proclaimed, Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy-sanctioned sacraments, and the administration of those sacraments by its vast armies of well-trained-to-be-manipulative-and- coercive, minion-clergy!

"In effect, all of Constantine's Imperial Abomination's very great, very Roman and very Romanly abused power rests on its ability to totally SLP-bamboozle—or maybe its gaslight!—its credulous flocks into believing that they are nothing but pathetic, sinning, hell-bound, baa-bleating sheep and that all that stands between them and that hideous eternity of sin-deserving hellfire, is the institutional power and authority of that Abomination . . . and its equally abominable clergy . . . and its Roman genius for bureaucratic organization that keeps those baa-bleating sheep bureaucratically intimidated, compliant—and well fleeced! . . . No pun intended, heh, heh!

"And as I have said before, Constantine's Imperial Abomination's whole clever and nefarious money-and-power-sucking business model is based on using its well-honed SLP . . . gaslighting? . . . powers to convince its flocks of ignorant, credulous sheep that they are born as hell-bound sinners who can only be saved through its Nobodaddy-bequeathed authority and the efforts—and mumbo-jumbo!—of its clergy, with this business model, of course, being the template for the Mafia's very lucrative, if-you-pay-us-the-fire-insurance-we-demand-we-won't-burn-down-your-shop extortion racket that it uses on a lot of hapless shopkeepers. And from what I have read, the Chinese Triads use the same ancient and lucrative business model with Chinese merchants.

"But back to your problems with your mother and the First Communion and First Confession issue—I consider all that confession nonsense to be the most heinous of all of that infernal Abominations, fleece-the-sheep 'sacraments!' By far the most heinous because it is totally an SLP intrusion into the lives of the Abomination's mindless, baa-bleating flocks! It is a massive, psychic sluice-gate that the Abomination the opened into the psyches of millions so that the Lords of Karma . . . of Malice, more like . . . can channel their paranoia and malice into this world. Sluice-gates that you could say were opened their widest during the Inquisition when the whole of Catholic Christendom became a veritable toxic waste dump of paranoia and malice—and torture and murder!"

And here I could but interrupt him, not only to keep him from galloping off on a pontification-romp about his favorite bugaboo, the Inquisition, and to play devil's advocate by saying, "But John—doesn't going to confession make people feel better about themselves . . . about the sins they have committed? Isn't it important . . . and good . . . for that reason alone? You know, getting stuff like that 'off their chest,' so to speak. . . . And getting the chance to feel contrite . . . and making the promise to do better in the future . . .then being absolved by the priest for those sins so they can have a feeling of atonement . . . of rightness . . . with their God?"

Since John knew only too well how closely my antipathy to all things connected to Constantine's Imperial Abomination matched—if not in intensity and depth, but in general feeling—his own, he just laughed and said, "Ah, Rache—you are so transparent. Anything to keep me from galloping off . . . 'in all directions,' like Leacock's hilarious character . . . chasing after phantom Inquisitors! But again, we are back into that realm of the Mafia extortion racket! The only reason people feel bad about themselves in the first place . . . the only reason they feel like they are sinners in the 'eyes' of their Supreme Deity . . . is because they have, first, been—too credulously, I might add!—coercively hoodwinked into believing in the existence of a humanly personalized 'Supreme Deity' that possesses enough of a very humanly petty and humanly vindictive ego to constantly monitor—and give a very human damn about!—what they, as utterly insignificant-to-this-Cosmos human creatures, personally do with their cosmically insignificant and very human lives!

"And second, they are SLP-hoodwinked into believing that there actually exist human actions that will have enough Cosmic significance that they can be judged as serious transgressions—as sins—by that very humanly egotistical and humanly petty and humanly vindictive Supreme Deity! Sins that will send their very imperfectly 'designed' souls—'very imperfectly designed,' by the way, by this very humanly egotistical, humanly petty, and humanly vindictive 'Supreme Deity' in the first place—to eternal damnation and hellfire if they don't confess those sins and gain forgiveness for them from that offended 'Supreme Deity'—a forgiveness that must be intermediated—always for a price!—by a functionary of Constantine's Very Rich And Very Powerful Imperial Abomination!

"Like I said before, there has never been a more pervasive, heinous, successful, and lucrative con-job—SLP/gaslighting-job—played upon human beings than that which Constantine's Very Roman and Very Imperial Abomination has pulled off for the last seventeen hundred years. It is a masterful and well-executed plan of catastrophic and evil extortion. Plain and simple Mafia-style extortion! And the whole damn con-job is based on SLP-coercing a bunch of infantile and credulous, baa-bleating sheep into believing, first, the idea of a personal, Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy-'Supreme Being' who, in 'his' human personalized definition, is nothing but human ego—vain, violent, paranoid, petty, vindictive, quick to judgment and anger and retribution—who, with the whole vast Cosmos on his dinner table, for some insane and compulsive reason, focuses exclusively on this dust speck of a planet clinging to the underside of his butter knife, and while focusing on it, takes a keen interest in the existence and actions and choices of every single human microbe on this cosmically insignificant dust-speck-on-his-butter-knife planet.

"And second, that some . . . many . . . most! . . . . of our human actions and choices are displeasing . . . are sins . . . in the 'eyes' of this very humanly vain, very humanly paranoid, very humanly violent, very humanly petty, very humanly vindictive, very humanly quick to judgment, anger and retribution Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy-Supreme Deity with his cosmically gargantuan, out-of-control and very human ego. (Christ!—as I am typing out those long-ago words of John's, I would swear he was right now in this room with me, describing today's Mad King Donald!)

"Then; third, that in the 'eyes' of this very human and darkly egomaniacal Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy-'Supreme Being,' our many—and very inevitable—sins are serious enough transgressions against that very cosmically gargantuan but yet very human ego of his, that he will damn our eternal and imperfectly designed—designed by him!—souls to atoning for those transgressions, those sins, with an eternity of torment and suffering in the fires of hell!

"Unless, of course—fourth—we duly confess those sins to, and get absolution from, a functionary of the only institution on this cosmically insignificant dust speck of a planet that this humanly vain, humanly paranoid, humanly violent, humanly petty, humanly vindictive and very humanly egomaniacal Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy-'Supreme Deity' has granted the cosmically exclusive license to hear our confessions of those sins and pass on his 'loving,' hell-saving forgiveness for them—for a price!

"If that ain't the biggest, canniest, most SLPing, most gaslighting, most lucrative and most perniciously extortive Mafia con-job in the whole of human history, I don't know what the hell else can even come close to competing with it!" (I'm afraid, Dear Weary Reader, that I am getting a vague sense that I have babblogged all this shit already somewhere in the FUBAR "Preface," and if I have, please forgive this weary, aging, exhausted, coke-addled brain for its failings!)

By this point our patiently plodding horses had carried us to that old mine site and a fascinating—and eerie—place it was. The leveled, graveled area on which it stood was still in the process of being reclaimed by the boreal forest surrounding it, and it was covered with sporadic growths of brown- and yellow-leafed bushes and trees. And with swaths and clumps of various kinds of brown grasses of various heights, as well as dead, sear and seed-headed wildflowers—save for a few clumps of delightfully yet-blooming purple asters and the red-leafed sumacs. And spot I even did, sporadic eruptions of tall, yellowed milkweed plants, some with their seed-pods already burst open while most were looking to be on the cusp of doing so. And what struck me most about the place, was how intrepid Ma Nature was at reclaiming what had once been hers—in spite of that obviously thick layer of gravel that had been spread there to thwart her efforts! (I can't believe I am remembering those details so vividly, because it was never in my self-obsessed nature to take them in, in the first place!)

And of course, there were all sorts of rusting hulks of abandoned machinery helter-skelter scattered amongst those sparse trees and swaths and clumps of grasses, wildflowers and bushes. There were, as well, various concrete foundations with desiccated wildflowers and brown grasses growing along their edges spaced in an irregular pattern around the area. Concrete foundations that surely once had supported wooden structures that had before been scavenged for their lumber—or just plain rotted away.

What had once been the sheet-metal-covered headframe (having grown up in the center of a large mining area, I knew what headframes were) had been reduced to a towering, rusting, looking-ready-to-collapse-any-minute steel skeleton rising up from its rust-stained concrete foundation, and leading up to it, across that graveled area, was a short stretch of almost-rusted-away rails laying over almost-totally-rotted ties, while between and beside those rusted rails was a string of rusty ore-cars with V-shaped bodies that swiveled over for dumping. (Tipple-cars, John called them.) A few of those V-shaped bodies were still upright, most were in their dumping positions, while two were laying on their sides and looking a lot like giant iron beasts that someone had shot. And most especially looking like shot-beasts because they, like all the others, had ragged holes of varying shapes rusted through them. The title of Neil Young's great, Rust Never Sleeps album immediately came to mind as I gazed at those slain, rust-rotted beasts.

After dismounting our horses, and while the dog raced off chasing squirrels and chipmunks—or anything else that caught his attention, which hopefully wouldn't be a skunk!—and while I massaged my supremely sore butt, we walked through the ancient, rusting rubble for a bit, and while we did so I couldn't resist breaking off a few milkweed pods and cracking them open so what little breeze there was could waft the hundreds of silky white seed-parachutes either high into the blue of the sky or immediately down to the ground, with the dog coming back and yipping like crazy as it chased and snapped at the low ones. I'd always loved doing that as a little girl and I found it still a thrill to do it. There was something truly magical about it, and when I mentioned that to John, who had stood there watching me with a smile on his face, he said, "I'm thrilled to see you still have enough of the 'little girl' inside you to enjoy doing that. One of the richest things about childhood is that children can get so much delight from such simple and natural things! . . . I feel sorry for kids that don't get to outside into Nature enough to do things like that—and for adults that think they are too old to enjoy it."

And with that he picked a few himself and breaking them open, blew on the erupting parachutes to send them billowing skyward. "I have a vague memory of doing this with my sister Lise when I was very young. It was always great fun doing stuff like that with Lise. . . . She had a great imagination and was always doing stuff like . . . that . . . and making up stories about what we were doing. She called these 'God plants' and said each little parachute was like a holy soul that God was casting to its fate on the wind of life. She could go on for half an hour about all the places those 'souls' could end up going. And if I remember correctly, according to her wisdom, more than a few would inevitably make it to the moon! . . . But we had to be careful our father didn't catch us doing something like that, or he'd beat the hell out of us!"

"Beat the hell out of you for doing that! What in heaven's name for? That doesn't make any sense!"

"Well, he'd beat Lise because she was outside playing and not inside helping our mother. And he'd beat me because . . . because . . . he liked beating me . . . and because . . . I was his oldest son and he wanted to toughen me up. 'Get me ready for the world,' he'd say. . . . Though I am sure it was mostly that he just liked beating the hell out of me. . . . And he'd then beat the hell out of our mother for her letting Lise go out to play when there was work to be done. . . . Fortunately, he wasn't around all that much so we did get to go outside and play . . . like the kids we were . . . once in awhile."

I was shocked by that reply, not only because it revealed the sadistic nature of his father—my great-grandfather and my Mimi's father—but because John chose to reveal a very small facet of the black diamond that had been his childhood, and though I wanted to say that his father sounded like he'd been a sadistic prick, I just said, "Your father sounds like he wasn't a very nice man!"

That got a low, bitter, idling-chainsaw laugh out of John as he replied, "Believe me—my father didn't have a nice . . . cell . . . anywhere in his body! In fact, he would have made a Nazi death camp commandant look like Father Christmas."

I wanted to pursue that a bit further but just his thinking about his father made a dark, red, lava-bubbling rage roil and waft off John and it was making me so instantly uncomfortable that I immediately dropped the subject—as did he! (Though I will insert here that if you ever read what he has to say about his father in The Fire, you will discover his dark, red, lava-bubbling-rage against that absolutely one-dimensionally evil monster of a man—even after all the intervening decades!—was more than warranted.)

When our delightful bit of "childish" milkweed fun was over—and no raging revenant of a great-grandfather of mine had leaped out of the bushes and ran across the clearing with a pick-handle to beat the crap out of us!—John walked over to his horse to retrieve his big, metal thermos, two enameled, metal mugs, and an erstwhile margarine container full of homemade oatmeal cookies—and an old red blanket—then after he'd spread the blanket out on a smooth section of the concrete foundation of some long-gone building, we sat down. After that long ride and all the head-straining "pontifications" in it, I was more than a little hungry for some of those cookies and eager for a cup of his strong, dark coffee, which smelled downright heavenly as he poured its steaming contents out of that battered old thermos and into the outstretched mug I was holding.

And after polishing off two of the cookies about as fast as the dog had gulp down his two—it had zipped over as soon as it heard John opening the lid of that container and launched into his big-eyed, soft-whining begging routine—and taking my first sips of that delicious and much needed "Joe," I couldn't help but look around and—very uncharacteristically, to be sure!—take in the incredible beauty of that fall day. The sun, October-low as it was, was nonetheless delightfully warm as it so brightly shone out of the pristine blue of the sky, and the surrounding birch and aspen trees looking so beautiful in their gold raiment, and especially when contrasting with the dark green clumps of pines and spruces growing amongst them, that I couldn't think of a better thing to be doing that day than having gone on that ride and being there with John.

Directly in front of us was a huge, rusting steel drum with a monstrous, beer-bottle littered pile of thick, rusting cable coiled up around it, while just beyond the cable was a huge, rusting steel wheel with rusted-thin spokes lying on its side, and I felt compelled to ask John what all that was.

"That big thing," he said, pointing at the rusting steel drum. "Is the hoist drum. And the cable is what was once wound around it and which was ran up to the top of the headframe and hauled the cage and the skip and down the shaft. And that big wheel behind it is the wheel that the cable ran over atop the headframe."

"Why was all this stuff just left here like this? Didn't it have some value?"

"Maybe . . . a bit . . . I guess. But usually not. Once a mine has run out, it has likely made back to its investors—many times over!—the money they put into developing it, so it is rarely worth their efforts at salvaging anything. Though it does look like someone had planned to salvage the hoist equipment and cable . . . maybe use it at another mine . . . or sell it for scrap . . . but then changed their mind for some reason. Probably just too much trouble and expense to haul it out. . . . Of course today, no mining company would be allowed to just leave a mess behind like this. They'd have to clean it up. But back in those days . . . "

Fuck-a-headframe!—I've got so little time left before I'm frog-marched off to the Shrink-Klink and here I'm writing about that irrelevant shit instead of what John had talked about concerning confession. Who gives a speck of flea shit about a mine that closed down and was abandoned a hundred years ago? GET WITH THE FUCKING PROGRAM, RACHEL!

SO BACK TO THE FUCKING TOPIC! (For as long as I can fucking STAY ON IT!)

I'm not hundred percent sure if it was at that old mine site or not, but at some point during that ride John stated that there was two really evil aspects to Constantine's Imperial Abomination's "sacrament" of confession. He first 'pontificated' that what that vile and abominable institution called "sacraments," was just its euphemism for the tentacles of its 'octopus of control' of it credulous sheep—the first evil inherent in that "octopus arm of confession" being that it SLP/gaslight propagandized all its credulous, baa-bleating sheep into believing that they truly had been born as sinners and that they were lifelong doomed to live as sinners! I remember him laughing as he said, "And that Abomination sure does not press the dark point implicit in that proposition by reminding those baa-bleating sheep that their precious and worshipful Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy, either intentionally because he was a malicious bastard or unintentionally because he was as inept as he was malicious!—created them to be natural sinners!" (I remember being thrilled to no end that John had incorporated that gaslighting concept that I'd mentioned, into his "pontification"!)

The second evil inherent in confession was that, after having so vilely SLP/gaslight-convinced its credulous, baa-bleating sheep that they were all natural-born sinners doomed to live sinning lives, it gave those confessing, credulous sheep an easy license to indulge their natural-born sinning natures to their hearts content! Each credulous sheep that accepted being a member of the flock of that foul institution—after first being SLP/gaslight programmed to believe they were natural-born as sinners and natural-doomed to commit sins—was then given permission to commit all the "sinful" mayhem they felt inclined—by their natural-sinful natures!—to commit, knowing that they could, immediately after committing whatever trivial or heinous sin-deed they felt inclined to commit, could run off, find a priest, confess their mayhem, feel "spiritually cleansed," and be back in Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy's "good book"—until they did the same shit again days—even hours!—later.

And while he said that, all I could do was nod my grimacing head and try to quell my churning guts and sky-rocketing blood pressure as I thought about all the many terrible things my father had done to me over and over again, and which, on afterwards perhaps feeling some small bit of guilt and remorse over, surely confessed to some "avid-eared" priest, yet felt very little incentive to stop himself from continuing to do those terrible things to me—over-and-fucking-over-again!—once his vile and ever-resurrecting lust overrode his perhaps sense of guilt and remorse for having done those terrible things to me. Truly, his confessions—to him!—were just a convenient license to commit rape and incest!

"The Buddhist attitude towards bad and evil behavior is much better!" John had said. "'In that system, you—and only you!—are always totally responsible for your actions, which are not Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy-offending sins that can be forgiven and wiped away, but just plain bad, evil actions that you are always responsible doing, which have serious karmic consequences, and which you are equally responsible for acknowledging to be bad and evil then stopping the doing of them—and then striving your damnedest to no longer do them! If you keep doing them, you are a bad person in a deep load of karmic shit, and if you stop doing them, you are a good person who can start negating that bad karma! Simple as that!

"So it is always incumbent upon you to stop doing those bad things if you sense you want to be a good person! At no time do you have to believe you are a natural-born sinner lifelong doomed to do nothing but commit those bad, sinning deeds, nor do you have to believe that when you behave badly that you have mightily displeased any Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy with those bad actions . . . or that if you don't run off to a functionary of Constantine's Imperial Abomination and confess those bad deeds and get them 'made right with Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy,' before you die, that your 'sinning soul' will spend eternity in hellfire and damnation. In a system like Buddhism, your bad actions are first and always yours! Yours to personally become conscious of, then personally feel responsible for, and finally, personally make an effort to cease doing! And as to the bad karma created by the doing of those bad things, well, the Lords of Karma . . . as I understand them . . . they don't sit in judgment of you over your bad deeds, they are just . . . cosmic accountants . . . who dispassionately record them in their . . . cosmic ledger . . . and at the end of your life, present your spirit-being with a statement outlining what you karmically owe for your deeds. And of course, they just as dispassionate set about, in your subsequent lifetimes, dispassionately ensuring that you pay what you owe."

With that I interrupted with, "Fuck John—I hate it when you talk about those fucking . . . Lords of fucking Karma! They scare the shit out of me. And are they the same as those Lords of fucking Malice you sometimes mention? The idea of those creeps scares me even more!"

That got a laugh out of John as he bent down, picked up a stone, and flung it at a beer bottle whose label had long before weathered off—hitting and breaking it!—before finally saying, "Sorry, Rache—I can't answer that. . . . I just don't know. Sometimes when I'm thinking about this stuff, I get the sense they are separate . . . powers . . . and other times, the same. I suspect they are not . . . not the same. . . . I also suspect that no living human being can know for sure what is going on with regards to those . . . powers . . . beyond the certainty that the more mindlessly ego-obsessed and ego-serving we are, the more we play into the machinations of those . . . Lords of Malice! . . . Which of course, is exactly what all true spiritual teachings over human history have been about—avoiding the sticky and entrapping SLP-webs of those . . . spiders of malice!

"But in getting back to what I'd been saying about the important differences between Buddhism's and the Abomination's attitudes towards bad behavior. With that insane system of Constantine's Imperial Abomination, you—in being your eternal soul—are not only born a sinner in the 'eyes' of that Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy, but are lifelong doomed, by a built-in flaw in the make-up of your eternal soul, to lifelong commit terrible sins—terrible and displeasing transgressions against Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy. Transgression that you need the functionaries of that infernal Abomination, to, through the 'octopus arm' of the 'sacrament' of confession, to forgive and absolve you of in the eyes of your 'beloved' creator, Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy!

And here John let out a sardonic chuckle as he went on, "You know, I've often thought that even the dumbest car factory owner would be smart enough to know that if all of the cars of one particular model coming off his factory's assembly line had a serious flaw in their steering system that caused them all to go out of control and crash during their first drive, then he'd scrap that model and design a new one! But it would seem that however 'sinning-flawed' that 'our Creator,' Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy created us human beings, he has just stuck with that flawed-creation . . . just kept allowing us to catastrophically multiply and over-populate this planet with our 'naturally flawed,' with our 'manufactured-to-crash' selves. Over-populate this poor planet with our 'naturally crashing behaviors' that are intrinsically caused by his design flaw! That sounds to me like a really dumb situation that could only have been created by a really dumb god!"

At that point I laughing interrupted John with, "Hey, Uncle John! I just had something pop into my head that I think you'll get a kick out of! If you make an acronym out of Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy, you get NON! . . . Which of course, in English, is a prefix meaning not! And which is a perfect definition of Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy. Ol' NOT. Ol' does-not-exist. . . . And what is even better is non in French means no . . . And of course, his whole moral code for us—his human fuck-ups!—is a non code . . . for if I am not mistaken, 9 out of his 10 commandments are non statements. Hell, the only one that isn't is the one ordering us to honor our parents, but it doesn't say for how long and whether we should withhold that honoring if they are behaving like total assholes! Or incestuous and monstrous pedophile creeps! So I most definitely say non to that sick, obsessive life-negator, ol' non-obsessed NON!"

That got a good hearty laugh and a loud bout of clapping out of John that startled the horses as he said, "Ha! Non to ol' non-obsessed NON! . . . Commandment Number One: thou shalt not worship gods who negate life! Good one, Rache! Great one! I love it when you catch an inspiration like that. NON instead of God—I love it . . . every bit as much as I hate the word God . . . for all its asinine anthropomorphized connotations! And it's perfect, in as much as it pretty much means, does not exist, which makes it the most appropriate name for Christianity's anthropomorphized ego-projection of a fantasy-deity! It's as brilliant as Homer having Odysseus tell that nasty Polyphemus that his name is Nobody, then when ol' One-Eye became No-Eye at Odysseus' hands, he shouted to his friends that nobody had gouged out his eye and they thus felt no need to go to his aid! Same with Christianity—Ol' NON-Nobody is on the celestial throne!

"But as I was saying . . . I think nothing proves how really dumb Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy—NON—is as a 'god,' than that silly story of 'the Flood' and Noah and his preposterous ark! . . . I mean, according to that silly fable, at some point, Ol' NON realizes he has screwed up real bad in his design of us human creatures, creatures who obviously have this terrible flaw built into us that just makes it so damned natural—and inevitable—that we behave badly, that we behave sinfully. So, after a lot of dithering and obsessing over the cost of scraping his flawed model and designing a better one . . . like a reluctant Ford trying to decide what to do about its questionably-safe Pinto!—of a very flawed car model, he finally acknowledges that he screwed up and decides to take that flawed model out of circulation with a catastrophic flood that was designed to kill every badly-designed, naturally-flawed—sin-loving!—human creature on this planet. A truly nasty solution since that flood is not only going to get rid of that very flawed model that—in his malicious mind!—very definitely needs getting rid of, but it is going to wipe out every other living creature—and plant!—on this poor planet as well!"

And here John chuckled again before going on, "I hate like hell using the Bible to demonstrate any idea and especially that super-ridiculous Noah story with its preposterous, save-all-the-creatures-of-the-world-in-a-wooden-ark story that makes even less logical sense than that beyond-illogical Adam and Eve nonsense, and then dips into negative-rationality when you consider Noah was not told how to capture a whole lot of wild animals that sure would not have wanted to be caught, nor told to include the carrying of a vast array of plants on that ridiculous ark. Hell, you don't need to be a Newton to know that next to gravity . . . and water . . . plants are the most important thing on this planet. I mean, without plants, absolutely no living thing on this planet survives! Hell, the first foundational lesson every new rancher learns is that 'all flesh is grass,' that his prospective wealth doesn't lie in his cattle, but in his grass! If he doesn't look after his grass, he loses his cattle and then his bank account and then his ranch—simple as that! That's what hundreds of thousands of farmers learned in a big way during the dust-bowl droughts of the 'Dirty Thirties! when all the green abandoned the prairie farm-and-ranch lands! . . . And of course as well, if every rancher—and dairy farmer, too, for that matter!—instantly learns that if he doesn't store up enough hay—grass—to feed his cattle over a long winter, they die and he loses his ranch! Or his farm!

"But anyways, I didn't bring up that Noah nonsense to belabor its 'little' logical and logistical absurdities, but to point out the one major flaw in the whole scheme—that flaw being that Ol' NON wreaked terrible havoc on this planet in order to get rid of that very flawed and naturally-sinning model of humanity that he himself had first designed and manufactured—then given it the capacity to manufacture itself—but he then makes the totally irrational choice to save one family of this very flawed, naturally-sinning model! I mean, you can't get any dumber than that! Hell, it makes those infamous dodoes look flocks of Einsteins!

"My first thought about that silly story was that Noah's family ended up being the most incestuous family in the history of this world . . . in fact, I often wonder what geneticists have to say about that?. . . and the second was that all the naturally-sinning flaws that Ol' NON had himself initially built into his very badly conceived and manufactured 'human-model,' flaws that eventually induced him to scrap that model with 'the flood' in the first place, were still contained—and perpetrated!—in Noah and his necessarily incestuous family.

"In my book, that wasn't a situation in which Ol' NON even remotely solved his problem concerning that flawed, naturally-sinning model of humanity that he'd designed and which he'd manufactured, but was just an example of him behaving like a sadistic, psychopathic monster who got his jollies watching millions of his very flawed, human creations, die horrible deaths! He was, in effect, nothing more exalted than some vicious and malicious child pouring buckets of water in an ant-hill just for the fun of watching the ants drown!

"Or else him just being so absolutely dodo-dumb that he believed that his very flawed, naturally-sinning creation would be so cowed by that impressive flood-punishment that he'd inflicted upon it, that it would cease behaving sinfully. But it was, by his own creative failure, an endemically flawed creation that had no choice but to keep behaving in exactly the way it was designed—sinfully!

"So there we human beings are—very flawed, naturally-sinning creatures created by a really dumb, sadistic and psychopathic 'Supreme Dodo Deity' whom he punishes for his design-flaws, instead of assuming responsibility himself. . . . I mean, you can't get anything more SLP—or maybe gaslighting!—than that! Instead of Ol' NON rightfully taking responsibly for the mess he made of his creation of us, he SLPs the blame onto us—for behaving exactly as he designed us to behave. Or maybe he gaslighted the blame onto us! (Again, I was thrilled that John was using my acronym, NON, for his Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy, just as I am sure that if the "spirit" of William Blake was around, it would be thrilled with his use of Nobodaddy!)

"So, in true, SLP fashion, he cleverly and maliciously Iago-twists everything around so it is our fault that he made us such sinning screw-ups—no pun intended!—when designing us, and thus feels justified in punishing us for our design-flaw bad behavior with a terrible flood that he insanely negates by saving the a family of that design-flawed model, the naturally flawed and naturally-sinning Noah and his just-as-flawed, naturally-sinning—and necessarily incestuous!—family. And after thus ensuring that this poor planet was again going to eventually be over-run with that very flawed-model of his . . . a model made even more flawed by all the necessary and inevitable inter-breeding! . . . and after sending a rainbow—an as-common-as-dog-shit-in-a-park rainbow, of all the silly things!—as his big, cosmic promise to that yet-still-as-flawed-and-natural-sinning—and necessarily incestuous!—Noah-remnant, as a promise that he'd never again en masse slaughter us with catastrophic floods.

"And thus with all future, punishing floods off the table—however effective they might be!—he then tries to negate the natural behaviors resulting from our flawed, naturally-sinning nature, by starting up a truly monstrous, proto-Nazi program of sending our flawed, naturally-sinning, created-by-him souls to a truly malicious and sadistic eternity of suffering in a created-by-him pit of hellfire as our punishment for committing those heinous sins that our created-flawed-by-him souls are just naturally going to induce us to commit over our lifetimes! That is, unless we don't first confess all those 'sin-flaws' to a 'chosen-by-him' functionary-priest of that Imperial Roman Abomination that he induced Constantine to create!

"And oh yeah, I forgot—that nasty, malicious Kosmosfuehrer, NON, really upped the ante on that sadistic, sin-and-punishment game by deeming that every created-flawed-by-him soul that had just incarnated into a human infant was such a born-flawed abomination in his eyes, that unless that born-flawed soul was cleansed of its 'original sin' by a functionary of Constantine's Imperial Abomination through the act of that functionary of his dumping some . . . silly-water . . . over that howling—and innocent!—infant's head while mumbling some arcane mumbo-jumbo, an act that would not only 'cleanse' that design-flawed and 'sin-filthy' infant-soul, but would concomitantly lifelong induct it into that Imperial Cult of Constantine's.

"And if that design-flawed and 'sin-filthy' infant was fated to die before going through that essential 'silly-water cleansing' and induction ritual, that infant's vile, born-flawed and created-sinful-by-NON soul would be instantly consigned to an eternity in that pit of hellfire! I mean, that . . . shit . . . is so . . . so irrational . . . and so malevolently and sadistically insane! . . . and so mindlessly, baa-bleating accepted by the sheep-flocks of that Abomination—that malevolent cult of Constantine's!—that just thinking about it makes my head want to burst into . . . hellfire!"

Then letting out a loud guffaw, he lifted his Stetson off his head and giving it a long, admiring look before putting it back on, added, "And I'd sure hate for that to happen because it would ruin a real good hat!"

At this point I just had to interrupt John and say, "Jesus Christ, John!—why do you waste so much of your time thinking about all this . . . fucking shit! This fucking . . . nonsense? Nobody—absolutely nobody!—takes that . . . Noah nonsense . . . or that original sin crap . . . or that hellfire lunacy . . . seriously anymore! Nobody!"

Again another sardonic chuckle erupted out of him as he said, "If you were right—as I wish you were!—then Constantine's Imperial Abomination would have no real power or influence anymore. But it still has lots of power. Way too damning much power! Not only that, all this pernicious, natural-born-sinner dogshit-dogma baggage of Constantine's Imperial Abomination ended up getting loaded onto the various trains of all the Protestant sects that fled Vatican Station during the Reformation. It affects, burdens . . . and sin-stains every single Christian on this planet! Every single Christian has been cursed by this evil and viciously manipulative and controlling SLP/gaslighting-dogma of that Abomination of Constantine's to SLP/gaslighted-feel like a naturally flawed, naturally sinning and naturally hell-bound reprobate that can only be saved by the intervention of whatever particular Christian church it has been indoctrinated into!

"And sure, I don't know if any intelligent, even remotely rational child can take that Noah-nonsense seriously, but every Catholic—and all other Christians—take that SLP/gaslighting, natural-born-sinner dogshit-dogma of that evil institution very seriously—or that institution . . . all Christian religious institutions for that matter . . . would have ceased to exist. Or cease to exist as the obviously very powerful and influential SLP-institutions that they still are in this world today! But most particularly that vile abomination of Constantine's, that still has a lot of baa-bleating, very credulous sheep totally ensnared in its dark, fascist thrall as they have been SLP'd –or gaslighted!—into believing that they are foul, natural-born, ol' NON-displeasing sinners bound for an eternity of damnation and hellfire unless they get all the sins that they just naturally are going to commit—because they were NON-created as natural-born sinners!—confessed and absolved by its dog collar-wearing functionaries!

"And I think the point I am so ineffectually trying to make here, is that even though all members of Constantine's Imperial Abomination just know that they were created—by their precious and holy 'Supreme Deity,' NON—to be naturally sinful, and just can't, on their own, be strong and willful and quit doing those natural, bad and sinning things, they don't have to be concerned about that, because their 'precious Church' has lifelong taught them that it has NON-bequeathed power to absolve them of all those sins that they are lifelong and naturally and inevitably going to commit, by the simple act of again—and again and again and again—confessing them to one of its black-robed, dog collar-wearing functionaries."

And again, my head was again filled with a rare inspiration and I got so excited by it that I again interrupted John, "Wow—I just had another great—for usually uninspired me, anyway!—inspiration, that those functionaries of the Abomination always wear all that depressing and oppressing black and demand to be called Father, then we should be calling them Darth Vaders. . . . Especially since, as you have often pointed out, that Abomination that they toil so hard for sure does resemble Lucas' Star Wars Empire . . . and the Pope its evil Emperor!"

That got another bout of clapping out of John as he said, "You're out-doing yourself with inspirations today, Rache! Perfect! I think that henceforth, whenever I think of one of the Abomination's black robed—and usually sin-obsessed and black-hearted minions—I will think Darth Vader! . . . And if I ever have to address one—not that I expect I ever will . . . in this lifetime! . . . I will do so as just Darth Vader . . . instead of Father . . . Functionary! . . . So back to what I was blathering on about . . . which I think was that during the act of confession, all each contrite, baa-bleating sheep must do, when kneeling in that box and mumbling out his or her NON-displeasing sins to that mighty Darth Vader in there—who regards himself as a direct and very important and powerful agent of NON on this Earth!—is feel dutifully remorseful for allowing his NON-created flaws to dictate and dominate his behavior, while after each such confession, then mumble out a few silly prayers as penance for having done those NON-displeasing deeds!

"Since they are never made to feel totally responsible for having committed those sins—for which, they are not really responsible, since those sins are the result a serious and very natural design-flaw built into them by a really dumb and klutzy and malicious ol' NON!—there is no real incentive for them to develop the character and willpower to not behave badly, because the consequences of behaving badly can be so easily wiped away!

"In effect, through that 'sacrament' of confession, the Abomination reduces each of its baa-bleating sheep—whatever their age!—to nothing more than a child of really permissive parents who never develops any character because those parents are always shielding him from any negative repercussions from his bad actions. . . . Until he gets old enough that those bad actions involve the police and the courts, and his parents. . . . Unless, of course, those parents are really wealthy and powerful and they can always pull the right strings to save his ass!

(Or, of course, as is so much dominating our news today, if any particular character-deficient miscreant is a wealthy and influential adult who is also a close associate of Mad King Donald's, he will be guaranteed a regal pardon for his rich-boys-will-be-rich-boys, "crimes and misdemeanors!")

"I remember long ago having a long talk with a drunken Irish priest about just this subject (It was while he was on that stalled and blizzard-buried train and it's a very interesting part of his memoirs, believe me! . . . So damn interesting I'm still not sure I can believe most of it!) where he pointed out the 'absurdity of the confessional,' as he called it, when the idea of it was pushed to its logical extreme. The example he used was of two corrupt and malicious priests who could travel around the world committing the most heinous of crimes—the most serious of 'mortal sins'—each day, then each night hearing each other's confessions, professing their individual contriteness, saying their piddly penance-prayers, then going to bed each night—with their altar boy of choice!—in a state of pristine grace so that the next morning they could get up and recommence the doing all the evil deeds they felt like!

"And if I remember correctly, what provoked him to think along those lines was the fact that when he was a young priest in Ireland, he had the job of being the confessor to a group of fellow priests who were working at an orphanage, and who were confessing to him their abuses of the children in it—over and over and over again! Nothing would change with those confessions each week, however sincerely contrite they professed to be while in that confessional! They'd fill his ears each Saturday with reeking load of absolutely vile behaviors while weeping their regrets over their weaknesses that allowed them to do those heinous things, then a week later they'd be back confessing a new batch of the same evil acts! To him, it was as if confession was just a license to commit those evil acts with impunity!

"I also seem to remember that the reason he was in this country was because he went to his bishop and complained about these evil, pedophile priests . . . Darth Vaders! . . . and when the bishop learned he was revealing to him what he learned about their behavior in the confessional, he was punished by being 'exiled' from his beloved Ireland and sent over to this 'vast wasteland of a country where it was always either always too cold or too hot!' A situation he coped with, he said, 'By doing the typical Irish thing of feeling sorry for myself too much and drinking too damn much whiskey to forget my sorrows!'

"Speaking of those pedophile priests . . . those true Darth Vaders! . . . hell, I often wonder if there are very many of them who aren't pedophiles! . . .that priest also made me aware of something about the confessional, which, in not being a priest, I'd never have thought about. That was the fact that it is very hard on most priests . . . no pun intended! . . . who are hearing confessions. In effect, the priest, through the hearing of confessions, basically becomes the parish dumpster. Or more like its out-house. . . or in today's lingo, its construction-site Porta-Potty!

"And it makes sense! This priest said that people bring the worst—the most excremental—aspects of themselves and their actions into the confessional and dump—defecate!—them into the confessor's ears and soul. And if that is not bad enough in itself, an even worse aspect of it is that these priests start out as young men with normal sexual drives . . . I mean, like that Irish priest said, 'We become priests through a few short years of study in the seminary, then going through the ritual of ordination, not through the operation of castration!' . . . who immediately on going out into the world as a bona fide priest, has to start listening to his parishioners of both sexes—and fellow priests . . . of all ages! . . . telling them their most intimate and too often, very foul sins, most of which, by the cunning and manipulative dogshit-dogma of Constantine's Imperial Abomination, are those 'sins of the flesh' no human being can help but commit.

"I mean, face it—Constantine's Imperial Abomination, invented that whole we-are-natural-born-sinners . . . 'sin business!' . . . though of course, always SLPing/gaslighting the blame onto that most convenient of fictions, ol' NON!—as just that—a business! A Mafia-like business designed to intimidate and control and fleece its flocks of infantile, credulous baa-bleating sheep, and though most of us human beings can find the willpower to control, to some degree, our urges to lie, steal, rob, curse and murder, the controlling our sexual needs and urges is a whole other kettle of very big, hungry sharks!

"As far as I am concerned . . . and for what the hell ever it is worth! . . .it's like controlling our needs and urges to urinate and defecate. I mean, face it—immediately after either event, it is easy to promise ourselves that we will never again do either of those 'filthy and foul' acts, but a few hours later, whether we are paying attention or not, if we have been eating and drinking, our body is then very naturally busy doing its necessary functional things and . . .'Hell—we just gotta go again!"

At that point I stood up and said, "Well, speaking of 'gotta going,' that coffee has done it's magic and I gotta go!"

That got a chuckle out of John as he stood up and said, "Same for me . . . this dang ol' body! It just keeps doin' it's . . . business. I'll head off into the bushes . . . with the dog . . . and you can go behind that hoist drum." And with that he whistled for the dog and the two of them headed into the bush while I took the shorter and easier trip behind the hoist drum.

After we'd both responded to our bodies' natural needs, we sat back down on that old blanket on that ancient foundation in that blessedly warm October sun, and while the dog lay at John's feet and made himself comfortable for a snooze, John continued on with what he'd been pontificating about before we'd responded to our respective necessaries.

"Well, our sexuality is no different than our other natural bodily needs and processes. Though our sexuality has—I am a hundred percent certain!—a non-physical component to it through the necessary channeling and concentrating, on a high spiritual level, the kundalini /shakti energy that rises up from the base of our spine and activates all of our chakras, and, on a somewhat lower spiritual level, that essential and vitalizing energy known to the Chinese as chi, and the Hindus as prana . . . essential and vitalizing energies that necessarily course through both our energy and our physical bodies, and almost always without our conscious awareness of the process.

(John believed in some bizarre and arcane shamanic system—the Hawaiian, huna system, I believe it was—that postulated that we had three bodies: our physical body, our energy body, and our spirit body, with our physical body needing and thriving on organic food, our energy body needing and thriving on chi/prana, and our spirit-body needing and thriving on kundalini/shakti, and though he seemed to understand all that esoteric mumbo-jumbo, I sure as fuck didn't! And still sure as fuck don't!)

"Like I said, this chi/prana energy is our fundamental vitalizing energy, and if we aren't going to study the ancient Chinese practices of tai chi and chi kung and whatnot for enhancing its flow, then we at least have to get regular exercise so we can use up what's in us and induce fresh stuff to energy to flow in. In fact, nothing is unhealthier than lack of exercise because persistent inactivity allows the chi that is in us to go stale, even putrid—like stale water in a cattle trough—and when that happens, we feel like crap and our health goes to hell. And a lot of very demonic 'mosquitoes' tend to breed in it!

(I'm sure John threw that in there because he knew I liked exercising about as much as I once liked having my father ram his prick into my mouth—or into my not-ready-for it, nine-year-old cunt! Not that I ever used that comparison around him, usually, when the subject came up, I'd just parrot my favorite quote of Churchill's, "Whenever I feel the need to exercise, I lie down until it passes." To which John would always reply with his bad pun, "Ah yes, that perfect recipe for the pound cake of obesity!" And if he was alive today he'd take one look at me and say, "Rache, you've been eating too much of that pound cake of your aversion to exercise." And no, John was certainly not a compulsive punner! In fact, he so rarely came up with them that each one was memorable.)

"At its lowest, most primal—and powerful!—chi/prana-expression level, our sexuality is really no different than our bodily functions of urinating and defecating. Our body takes in drink and food and, if everything is in working order, duly processes each for what it needs then excretes the rest. And one of the important things created in our food-and-water processing systems is our body's ability to generate that chi/prana that so necessarily vitalizes us. . . . And which, by the way, inorganic beings cannot self-generate!

"When that chi/prana builds up in children it makes them necessarily active and rambunctious—actually, it makes them children!—and when it builds up enough in adults, it not only induces us to be active—and in some cases, rambunctious—it also manifests its powerful presence to us through our sexuality.

(Ha!—I just remembered one of the few humorous aphorisms—of the little of the whole damn bunch I actually have read—John scribbled into his mess of "scribbles," which is right along that rambunctious line—When children play, they tend to make a lot of noise; when adults play, they tend to make a lot of children.)

"The essence of our aging process is the dropping off of our ability to process the food we ingest into chi/prana, and when you compare the vitality levels of almost all twenty-year-olds and most people in their seventies and eighties, you can get a real good idea of what chi/prana truly is. And its importance in our lives. We start out our lives as babies with a glowing excess of the stuff then progress through the spectrum of it, until we end up as dull corpses with absolutely none!

"Which means—in my book, anyway!—that our chi/prana is a natural energy absolutely necessary for our being alive and vital, and it was a real cunning, manipulative and malice-driven SLP/gaslighting ploy on the part of those early psychopaths running Constantine's Imperial Abomination—not that the current lot are any less so, given their passion to maintain the status quo!—who, in a most clever, cynical and utterly malicious SLP/gaslighting-ploy for almost total control of their mindless, credulous, baa-bleating sheep, deemed all of our human sexual expressions—our expressions of that necessary and vitalizing chi/prana energy—that weren't acts of straightforward, missionary-position, procreative sex between spouses, to be major, ol' NON-displeasing and hell-damning sins.

"And worse, if I am not mistaken!—that Abomination even made all sexual thoughts and daydreams . . . thoughts and daydreams created by that chi/prana in its need to express itself!—into major, hell-damning, NON-displeasing sins! If that wasn't an utterly cynical, manipulative and catastrophically evil SLP/gaslighting ploy by Constantine's Imperial Abomination for total control of its vast flocks of really stupid, really infantile, really mindless, really credulous, baa-bleating sheep, I don't know how else to describe it."

Well, not wanting to just sit there on that hard, concrete "bench"—that the blanket barely softened!—under that bright, blue, October sky behaving like a running tape recorder, I got in my Rachel-bit by saying, "So, Uncle John, are you saying that because of the nature of our sexuality, that we can't control it? That it is uncontrollable? That we have to just give into it and let it do what 'it' wants?"

With that John gave me a quizzical, eye-brows raised look that immediately made me realize how forced and stupid that question was. I mean, fuck-a-fool!—when he met me my sexuality was totally out of control and after stopping my world for me so that disastrous, out-of-control situation could cease, he taught me how to understand and control it, and all I could then do was blush and sheepishly say, "Sorry—real dumb question!"

With that he laughed a hearty laugh as he threw a stick for the dog which had decided it was too nice a day for snoozing and had just dropped at his feet, and said, "A dumb question for you, maybe—but still a valid question! . . . For some mindless, credulous, baa-bleating, Catholic sheep! And it revolves around something we've talked about before and which relates to the very humanly natural and physical nature of our sexuality, and the fact that it has a very powerful energy—chi/prana!—component . . . and at the highest spiritual level, the kundalini component! . . . to it which cannot be denied or repressed. Oh sure, many wise and omniscient materialist scientists will tell us that our sexuality is nothing but our body's automatic responses to the release of very physical—and powerful!—hormones into it, but that sure can't be the whole story!

"To me, many of those hormones are just switches for activating the flow of that energy. Like the electricity that goes to my farm and makes my life so easy and comfortable. Too easy and too comfortable, I sometimes think! There are wires that have been strung from the main hydro line to my farm, but unless the big breaker-switch at the mainline junction is in the 'flow' position, my lights sure aren't going to work. The electricity is always—or almost always—in the main hydro line, but its natural flow to my farm can be stopped—or initiated—by the flipping of that big breaker-switch.
"Every soldier . . . and athlete . . . in fact, every human being who has had the shit scared out of them by something, knows the power of the adrenaline hormone. It induces changes in the human body that allows a person to become highly energized and stronger and often able to do incredible things they'd not otherwise be able to do. But—as far as I can limitedly tell!—the adrenaline is not the energy that does all that energizing—it is just the switch that allows the body to change from a normally energized state to an "adrenal-energized" state—and do it.

"And every human being who has gone through—or is going through—puberty, first hand knows that their formerly sexually quiescent body is suddenly supercharged with a very powerful—and seemingly conscious!—sexual energy that suddenly dominates their lives. A formerly 'off' breaker-switch has been 'thrown' and KAZAAM—they are suddenly horny as hell and the members of the opposite sex—or same sex, if they are queerly inclined!—whom they once found annoying—or just amusing—suddenly become as important to them as the air they are breathing!"

(As you surely know by now, John knew—and cared—about political correctness about as much as he did about what went on—or more like, didn't!—in that insufferable "soap," Days of Our Lives! . . . And though I more than once tried to teach him that it was no longer acceptable to call homosexuals, 'queers,' and 'poofs' and that they wanted to be known as 'gays,' he always laughed and winked and said, "Why should being a queer make them feel more gay than I can feel by not being queer?")

At this point I had to interrupt him to say, "But what about the fact that normal, unmolested pre-pubescent children have a pretty keen interest in sex, Uncle John. I can remember when I was five or six and my best girlfriend and I used to sometimes hang around with my brother and a few of his friends and we'd sometimes—very avidly, I might add!—play 'doctor'! And we did that more than a few times, if I remember correctly. There must be something to that!"

That got a real sardonic laugh of him as he said, "You're damn right there's something to that. But you're not going to like my 'take' on why all kids like to play 'doctor,' as you call it."

"Try me!"

"Well, I'd say a small part of it is what I'm sure we've talked about before—that because Catholic parents are so obsessed with sex and sin and equally obsessed with driving into their children's innocent heads what a horrible, hell-damning sin sex is, that Catholic kids have no choice but to take a precocious interest in the subject. I mean, it's no different than the kids of some famous car racer developing an extraordinary interest in cars at a young age. Or the kids of some famous musician developing a precocious interest in music. . . . Like little Mozart did, his father Leopold having been a prominent musician of his day!

"But there is another component to children's natural interest in sex, and I am certain that has to do with reincarnation and the fact that most people die as sexual adults and carry a vague memory of that very delightful activity into their next life. It vivifies their already powerful imaginations—but of course, before puberty . . . or before they've had their second chakra unnaturally opened by sexual abuse! . . . it's all just . . . imaginative . . . play. That chi/prana energy needed to drive any sexual acts—and cause children to obsess about sex all the time—just isn't yet available. I am quite sure that after your episodes of 'playing doctor,' the subject quite left your head. Did it not?"

"Yeah . . . now that I think about it, there was always more interesting things to do. . . . I mean, at first it was real fascinating to look at . . . and touch . . . some boys' soft little . . . piddidles . . . and show them my hairless little . . . privates . . . and have them touch it and stick their fingers in it."

And here I had to laugh at the memory of it as I said, "I remember them always bugging me to let them put their little piddidles in my mouth, but all I knew at that time about those interesting little things—that I sure wished I would have had instead of my silly little privates . . . my hole—was that they were for peeing out of, and I was certain they wanted to pee in my mouth. . . . Though even if I would have done what they wanted, nothing would have happened anyway. . . But they—even at that age—knew there was something important about getting their piddidles—inoperative as they yet were!—into a girl's mouth.

"So your reincarnation . . . shit, may explain that, a bit. . . . But 'playing doctor' did get real boring real quick—there was always more interesting things to move onto. . . Like playing on the swings in the park . . . or hiding in some bushes and teasing ol' Mrs. Crabtree's stupid little dog until it barked itself into a fury and she had to drag it inside—never figuring out what was setting it off like that! . . . Though now that I think of it, she surely must have known what we were up to because we were always giggling so loud."

And at that point I let out a bitter, shriek of laugh that had John give me a startled, quizzical look as I very compulsively—and stupidly!—said, "Christ!—it wasn't but a couple of years after that, that my father was sticking his very operative and anything-but-a-soft-and- _little_ piddidle in my mouth and teaching me there really was something real serious about that kind of sexual 'play'. And gaggingly messy, too!"

I could feel a monstrous red tsunami of anger roll off John at my mention of what my father had done to me. In fact, that red tsunami always raged out of him under those circumstance, so I rarely mentioned what my father had done to me, and I instantly regretted letting those stupid rat-words scamper out of my mouth and ruin that beautiful day and our great ride by having done so, but that tsunami soon rolled off into the surrounding forest—which, if it was as alive and conscious as John claimed it to be, probably didn't like it any more than had I!—and John said nothing about it, instead going back to pontificating on the subject of the sex play of children.

"My point exactly! For children, it's all just harmless, casual play! Play that perhaps harkens back to distant, previous-life memories of when there was a lot more to it than just that! And casual, harmless play it usually is . . . until some sin-obsessed parent catches them at it and makes a big, memorable deal out of it! . . . And certainly until comes along the inevitable and powerful bodily and hormonal changes of puberty. That breaker-switch in the body is thrown by some time-sensitive mechanism and the suddenly the erstwhile child who has been enjoying his sojourn on the sidetrack of childhood, is shunted onto the mainline of life and fate, and that play is suddenly neither casual—or harmless!—anymore. In fact, it becomes an 'electrifying'—and sometimes destructive—life-dominator for the next fifty years or so.

"And sure, being the uneducated, backwoods 'philoso-yakker' that I am, this 'philoso-yakker living in this western, materialist science-dominated world, I'll never convince any 'hard-headed' Priest of the Religion of Materialist Science—or even you, for that matter!—about the important roles that chi, that prana . . . and kundalini . . . play in the various levels of our sexuality, but the Chinese and Hindu sages have known about it for millennia. And so did the Ancient Greeks! Their god Eros and goddess Aphrodite were no minor deities to them!"

And here he let out another sardonic laugh as he said, "I mean, the most famous work in the history of all our literature is The Iliad, and that whole dark tale starts out because of the irresistible and trouble-making machinations of Aphrodite! Those wise Greeks knew that our sexuality was a lot more than just hormones coursing through our physical bodies—that it had a powerful and essential spiritual dimension to it—and that it had to be respected and channeled, never repressed or denied! Which is what Constantine's Imperial—and Insane and Evil and SLPing—Abomination has been doing since Constantine gave it all its very undeserved, Roman Imperial power!

"And that was something that that poor, alcoholic Irish priest really stressed: that our sexual energy was just that—a very powerful energy that had to be channeled and controlled, but never repressed and dammed! And certainly never damned! . . . D-a-m-n-e-d! To him, it was absolutely absurd—evil even!—that Constantine's Imperial Abomination . . . which he seemed to both love and hate at the same time! . . . made just about every human sexual activity a Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy . . . a NON-displeasing, hell-damning sin. And what was especially absurd to him was it making the utterly harmless acts of sexual fantasizing and of masturbation hell-damning, NON-enraging sins!

"At the time I met him he was taking a sabbatical from his job as a teaching priest at some all-male Catholic boarding school out in some isolated town on the prairies . . . where, as I think he said of it: 'The most interesting thing to do was take a walk down to the nearby grain elevator to watch the trains roar by. And in between trains, watch flocks of fat pigeons gobble up spilled wheat at the base of that elevator then fly up and crap it all over the roof!' . . . In fact, he found that place was so boring and oppressive that when I met him on that train he was on his way to some special camp created by some priest who wasn't just a priest, but one of those black-robed, Darth Vader papal functionaries who had been promoted to the lowest level of the 'officer class' . . . a rank between priest and bishop . . . but can't remember the name of it off hand."

"Monsignor!" I piped in. "Shit, I can remember when Uncle Matthew became a monsignor and the whole Clan—especially my mother—went absolutely bananas over it. Christ, you woulda thought he'd been elected pope! She didn't like it when I informed her that becoming a monsignor didn't really mean anything. It was just an honorific title of some sort and didn't carry any real status or power in the Church."

And here I let out a cynical shriek of a laugh as I said, "Hell, I can remember at the time thinking he'd been awarded that honor for all the altar boys he molested—in the name of Christ! God damn, but that . . . darth vader . . . was a real Darth Vader—and one of the creepiest creeps I have ever met! Even creepier than that arch-creep of my father!"

My mentioning of Uncle Matthew—by then Bishop Matthew!—set that red tsunami rolling out of John again and I regretted bring him up, but he made no effort to comment about his "illustrious" brother.

(You'll find him telling some very interesting tales about that creepy little shit of a brother of his in The Fire—tales I won't even hint at so as not to spoil the 'surprise' you'll feel on reading them. If you ever do!)

"Monsignor. . . .Yeah, that's what the guy was. For some reason I don't fully understand, he had been ordained a . . . Darth Vader . . . late in life and had come over here from England with a fair bit of money that he somehow managed to slip past whatever Inquisitors enforce the poverty-vow of that abomination of Constantine's, and which he used to set up a special 'camp' for troubled priests. Those . . . Darth Vaders—I just love your way of seeing those black-robed, black-souled minions of the Abomination!—would go there for some kind of . . . retreat . . . where they would meditate on their sins and foibles. Their darthness! Heh, heh. And maybe get counseling. Or just try—like this sad, bibulous, exiled-to-a-prairie-hell, Irish priest—and 'get on the wagon!'"

"Interesting," I said. "That camp sounds like something that damn Abomination should have sprinkled all over the world! No surprise that this 'camp' had been set up privately by some Darth Vader who managed to—very incongruously, for sure!—have some private money available for it, because it sure sounds way to enlightened for something the Abomination would officially do to deal the darthness in its Vaders!"

"Yeah, you've got a good point there! Something like that would cost the Abomination money and not earn it any! . . . And worse, it would be an acknowledgement that their mighty, saintly priests—their Darth Vader-minions—are too often a lot more darth than they are mighty . . .or even remotely saintly—and that they have a lot of problems because of the insane and generally thankless job they are lifelong expected to do for chipmunk wages . . . basically peanuts . . . as I think the saying goes! And the very inhuman—very anti-human conditions they have to do it under!

"So anyways, this poor priest had to hear the regular confession of all those healthy young teenage boys who'd been sent to that tough, Darth Vader-run school by their wealthy Catholic parents in order that those darth Jesuits make fine, upstanding Catholic men out of them, and of course, with that school being an all-male institution and as isolated as it was, none of them had any sins to confess besides the fact that they all sexually fantasized and masturbated regularly."

At this point John let out a raucous laugh as he said, "I remember him saying that there were few girls in the area and the local farmers were all savvy enough to keep their daughters—and wives!—'under lock and key'—and keep a shotgun handy to ward off those 'good Catholic dogs,' who came sniffing around in a state of permanent randiness. So about all that was left for a sexual outlet for these healthy and ever-randy and sexually fantasizing young fellows was the few cows and sheep in the area—or masturbation. Most he said, naturally had to opt for the masturbation outlet . . . though one or two of the more aggressive and enterprising ones did seduce a farmer's daughter—and wife—or two, while only one—that confessed, anyway—had his randy way with a heifer. . . . Actually, I think he said it was four or five of them who snuck out one night and took advantage of that four-legged virgin—but only one confessed!"

I didn't know whether to laugh or puke on hearing that so I just rolled my eyes and said, "Yech—how gross! And disgusting!"

That in turn got a loud laugh out of John as he said, "Don't be too judgmental, Rache! Lots of farm boys have their first sexual experiences with animals. Sex and farms go together like peanut butter and jam. And with many farms being as isolated at they are—especially on those vast and lonely prairies!—there's not a lot of human outlets for it. (There's no bestiality in John's memoirs, but there is enough "Noah-family" incest to make up for it!)

"He said the situation was so ridiculous he felt like putting up a sign over the confessional: MASTURBATION IS NOT A SIN SO DON'T WASTE MY TIME WITH IT! Of course, like he said, 'I couldn't openly gainsay the 'wisdom and dogma' of the ancient and venerable Roman Catholic Church and keep my position there—God only knows where I'd have been exiled to for that! Likely some Eskimo village as far north of the Arctic Circle as they could find one, I suspect! So I had to sit there, hour after hour, listening to these young lads tell me they were committing this terrible sin—sometimes three and four times a day—by doing what every healthy and normal human male has to do with his healthy and normal sexual energy.'"

Again I interrupted his rather interesting tales about that priest—I got the impression he rather liked the fellow, which surely made him the only Darth Vader that he did like!—pontification with a statement that actually meant something to me, "Well, girls and women masturbate too, Uncle John—but it sure isn't as satisfying as sex! And I don't think you can compare it to those natural functions of urinating and defecating . . . I mean, we don't fill up with sperm the way men do and have the need to ejaculate it to make us feel better. So it must be . . . different?"

To that John gently threw up his hands in a gesture of mock despair as he first took in a long deep breath, and while slowly letting it out, said, "Like I've been trying to say today . . . and I'm sure I've said before . . .that human sexuality is as much . . . no, I'd say it is less . . . about its physical, hormonal nature and more about the flow . . .and play . . . of that bright, very alive, very conscious, very vitalizing chi/prana energy in and through our bodies and psyches. . . . which correlates with—and at a higher level of reality—is, our breath. . . . In fact, at that higher level, our breath—our breathing in and out of that chi, that prana, does for our energy body what the air we suck into our lungs does for our bodies! So though a woman doesn't ejaculate the way a man does, her orgasm represents a flow—a flushing!—of that chi/prana energy through her body!

"But I guess what you're not grasping too well is that this chi, this prana energy is not just very powerful, but it is very alive and very conscious, and when it is filling up our physical bodies—and more importantly, our energy bodies!—it is also consciously affecting our minds and spirit-beings . . . and thus our imaginations! The most powerful aspect of our sexuality is that chi, that prana, which our bodies both generate to charge up our energy bodies . . . and which our energy bodies—as I see it—also absorb from the . . . "ether'. . . . from the field of it that constantly surrounds us.

"And what makes having sex so powerful and pleasurable is that the sex act sets that chi, that prana, flowing through our physical and energetic bodies . . . and sends that kundalini flowing through our spirit-being . . . our spirit body. , and spiritual. Well . . . at least some kinds of sex set those energies flowing through all three—and that is going to be the sex that generated that saying about 'the earth moving!' Lots of sex doesn't rise up to anywhere near that level. Like sex with an indifferent prostitute . . . or a bored spouse—or masturbation. But whatever level of sex we experience, it is always related to the chi, the prana . . . and the kundalini—which may be a different energy that chi/prana or just a more refined version of it—which always manifests and expresses itself, not only through our urges to have sex, but through our visions and fantasies about having sex! Thus it has the power to fill our physical bodies and energy bodies—and spirit-beings . . . our imaginations—with powerful sexual thoughts and desires and visions designed to drive us to express and fulfill it.

"So of course women masturbate. And likely have to masturbate if they want to stay healthy and sane when they can't have all the sex they want! Living women, like living men, are organic beings who generate, in their organic livingness, chi/prana! It is a living energy that builds up in the physical and energetic bodies, and like all energies, loathes stagnation. So the act of masturbation sets it moving, flushes it out.

"And of course sex with a partner is way better than masturbation because it not only gets each person's chi flowing, but flowing into and through the other person. Like the electricity of a battery flowing from its negative pole to its positive pole—and lighting a light or spinning a motor or running a car—in the process! It is this energy flow that is so important and pleasurable—and what Wilhelm Reich so wisely claimed to be so important. Except he called it orgone and not chi or prana—but a 'rose by any other name,' you know!

"So see it this way, it is ridiculous to think of the act of masturbation as being something terrible and shameful and dirty—and sure as hell not as no ol NON-displeasing sin! It is just a very natural movement of excess chi/prana energy—organic electricity, as it were!—through the 'wires' of our physical and energy bodies. 'Wires,' by the way, that the wise Chinese acupuncturists millennia ago mapped! And with that flow being no different than the acts of urination and defecation, which are the natural movement of excess urine and feces first through, then out of, our physical bodies. And maybe instead of it being condemned and discouraged, it should be encouraged as something healthy—like regular bowel movements. Particularly in women . . . who as I understand it, don't take to masturbating as easily as young men, whose rapid build-up of excess of semen pretty much demands it."

That statement kind of surprised me, and much as I knew all about the joys and necessities of masturbating due to that putative wide-open-second-chakra situation created by my pedo-creep of a father, I could but interrupt John and say, "That's a very . . . interesting . . . proposal there, John—encouraging women to masturbate. My mother would surely set the Inquisitors on you—if she could!—for saying something as . . . heretical . . . and paganish . . . and Reichean! . . .as that! Especially to a daughter of hers! Not that I disagree with you, but I am curious as to why you'd say that."

He just shrugged and laughing said, "Your mother would like to sic the Inquisitors on me because she has convinced herself I am responsible for your lapses as a 'good Catholic daughter,' and she can't accept that you long ago made up your own mind about that infernal Abomination, its Darth Vader minions, and its Vatican-kennel over-flowing with dogshit-dogma. But as to my notion that more women should be more willing to masturbate more often, is that perhaps it would be better than having too much sex.

"And though the notion of too much sex sounds like an oxymoron—especially to a teenager!—you already know only too well what happens when the second chakra gets too open and too active. And becomes like a pot of honey on a hot day that attracts swarms of the 'flies' of men who want to dive into it! Dive into and drown in it! I've been reading about celebrities who have to go into special 'rehabilitation clinics' in order to deal with their sexual addictions . . . which of course are caused by their too-open and too-life dominating second chakras! . . . That problem, of course, is facilitated by their wealth, celebrityhood and leisure time that allows them to swim as much as they want, not only in the backyard swimming pools of their opulent mansions, but in the warm, sticky, honey-pools of their own—and others—second chakras!

"It's quite a human conundrum created by the fact that when puberty grabs us by our genitals and starts whipping us around like dog whips a snake in its jaws, we think that having all the sex we could ever want would be the greatest thing in the world. Matter of fact, we are certain we know that! Yet many celebrities get rich and famous enough to do just that—have all the sex they could possibly want whenever they want with whomever they desire—but too quickly discover that too much sex is like too much food or alcohol and creates a whole mess of problems of its own.

"The dominant problem—as much as I have been able to figure out!—being that they can't have a stable relationship with any member of the opposite—or same—sex, and, as this sexual addiction stuff drives home, that gets real wearisome when their whole life ends up constantly and compulsively revolving around shallow and unsatisfying sexual encounters. When it becomes nothing more than an endless—and generally unsatisfying—parade of sexual partners. With the big problem with that, from what I could glean, is that after awhile all those 'exciting' sexual partners end up having the same face . . . and genitals. Heh, heh. Thus those easily available sexual acts end up having the same passionless, low-energy level, unenchanted feel to them, and since each sexual encounter is so brief and shallow, it offers no lasting satisfaction."

And here he let out a sardonic chuckle as he said, "It would be a lot like going to one of those all-you-can-eat Chinese food places, filling your tray with all kinds of delicious, exotic dishes, then only allowing yourself to lick each dish before getting up and leaving! . . . And maybe in a way, too, like reading. I can remember when I had a real hard time reading. It would take me months to get through a book, but when I finally finished it, I felt real thrilled and satisfied. Now I can gobble up a book like that in two or three days and doing so is pretty much . . . a non-event! And certainly a non-achievement."

As he said that, I couldn't help think about my own time of sexual addiction that John snapped me out of with that spank-her-bare-butt-and-heave-the-slut-in-the-shit event that stopped that crazy, out-of-control carousel and allowed me to get off. And not only how incredibly shallow and unsatisfying—like licking a dish of cashew chicken or ginger beef instead of gorging on a plate of it!—those encounters had all ended up becoming—except that absolutely stupendous, light-my-magnesium-flare one with the seminary-bound Thomas!—but how incredibly small and oppressive it had been making my life! I mean, it was so bad that my only interests back in those dark, crazy days could succinctly summed up in that old cliché of the age—sex, drugs an' rock 'n 'roll! With the heaviest emphasis on the sex!

And even when doing a lot of the dope I did do, it was mostly done while imagining—and obsessing about!—my next sexual encounter, and the hope of enhancing my next sexual encounter with that dope. And if I was going through my moonthly, and no sexual encounter was on the horizon, I'd get "stoned immaculate" and masturbated myself sore to my beloved rock 'n' roll while imagining "getting it on" with whatever rock star was performing on the album.

Of course, I did have to spend a bit of time and energy procuring the money for that dope and those albums, but I was most masterful at guilt-extorting most of the money I needed from my pedo-creep of father. (We sure weren't living on the cliff edge of "poverty row' the way our mother made us believe we were!) And when that wasn't enough, I could get it out of the long line-up of guys just drooling—from their lips and ever-hard piddidles—to get some quick and efficient "head" from the ever semen-thirsty "Wild Thing!" To say the least, it was a "lifestyle" that all my thoughts about today makes me want to puke-and-die, not only with shame, but with a realization of how limited and life-constricting—and fucking goddamn self-destructive!—that whole time period had been. And the importance of John "stopping my world" the way he so wisely and dramatically had—so I could escape it. And save my life! But back to what John was saying.

"That chi, that prana, from what I can tell, manifests itself a lot more powerfully through women than it does through men, and it fills them—fills their very vital energy bodies!—with desires for expression and fulfillment just as much as it fills them with powerful fantasies about ways to express and fulfill those desires."

"I still don't really understand that 'energy body' stuff, Uncle John. . . . What exactly is our energy body?"

That just got a frown and a mock groan out of him as he said, "Rachel, Dear Rachel—every time I mention the 'energy body,' you ask the same question! As I've told you umpteen times already, the 'energy body' is what some spiritual systems would call either our 'soul,' or our 'lower soul'—a powerful and very conscious being in its own right that is separate from—though intimately amalgamated with—both our physical body and our 'higher soul,' or what I like to call our spirit-being. It is what gives us the vitality we need to . . . vitally . . . live our lives!"

"But what—exactly—is this 'energy body'? I can't quite wrap my head around it . . . which is likely why I so stupidly keep asking you what it is each time you mention it!"

"Well, don't feel bad if you can't quite 'wrap your head around' what it exactly is—besides a concentration of very conscious and intention-driven energy—because neither can I! I'm neither smart nor wise enough to know that for sure! But I can sense its presence and power—and I've read that certain spiritual . . . and shamanic . . . traditions takes its existence for granted! And all I can say is that our energy bodies are conscious . . . and elemental, in a sense . . . beings—of varying degrees of strength and energy—that are totally of this living Earth and take up residence in a human body at its moment of conception and . . . I would assume . . . goes back to the Earth at the death of the body.

"I often suspect our energy body is an incarnate nature spirit of some sort—but please, don't quote me on that! I often get the sense that its consciousness is very limited and that it is an endemically lazy—energy-hoarding!—being, and that is very suggestible! . . . I suspect it is that part of us that can be hypnotized into doing incredible feats of strength . . . particularly to the obsessions of our ego. And very certain I am that it is what absorbs, channels, expresses and thrives on that chi, that prana, and that it most powerfully manifests its existence in the totality of our being through our sexuality.

"Though that's not completely true, for very certain I also am, that our energy body had a predilection for all things pleasurable, and it is what creates the psychological aspect of all our most powerful addictions. And don't quote me on that either because our modern, scientist-priests have already enshrined the dogma that our addictions are solely pleasurable physical events related to electro-chemical processes in our brain . . . with that pleasure being created by the pleasure-stimulating organic compound called dopamine. . . . Or more, I think, the way it works is that dopamine stuff is released by our brain in anticipation of indulging in whatever addiction has put a ring through our nose and is leading us wherever it is wont to! . . . Usually, of course, always somewhere pleasurable but rarely anywhere long-term salubrious! But I'm not sure I've got it completely right, so look it up if it interests you.

(Until today I have never "quoted him" on that, and I didn't bother to look it up back then when the lack of Google made such things a chore, but I have subsequently done so—Googled it!—and as well read about it when I wasn't looking for it. And he more or less had it right. Needless to say I find the dopamine theory of scientists easier to swallow than John's energy body one—at least they can prove dopamine exists!)

Well, my poor, endemically limited, Rachel-brain wasn't up to dealing with that level of stuff on that lovely Sunday ride, so, as usual, I let it fly over my head like the flock of small birds that had flown over earlier—chickadees, I'm sure they were—and so I made an interruption that reduced that conversation to something I could understand.

"So then what really is masturbation, Uncle John?" (As I so manically babblog this, I can't believe how comfortable John and I had become with each other that we could talk about such an intimate subject with absolutely no reservations! I can't even imagine doing so—back then!—with even my closest girlfriends!)(Today I have no friends, female or male!)

That got a laugh and a mock-weary head-shake out of him as he said, "We've been through all this before, but I'll say it again—to my way of looking at the issue . . . so don't ever go quoting me on this, heh, heh!—masturbation is nothing more—and nothing less!—than our way of responding to the desire and the intent of that conscious and living chi, of that conscious and living prana, that it express itself whenever it reaches a certain level of excess—and moving it though and flushing it out of our system. And here I stress excess, because the first and most important job of that chi, that prana, is to vitalize us enough to allow us to perform our survival and . . . thrival . . . if I may coin a word . . . functions within our species and on this planet, and when there is an excess of it . . . when there is some left over after that energy has helped us survive and thrive, the excess goes into our sexuality.

"And I stress that business about there needing to be an excess of it after we've looked after both our surviving and our thriving needs! And we do not always have an excess of it! . . . I'm sure you've had periods when you've been really sick—or in a period of recovery from a serious illness—when about the last thing on your mind was sex. When absolutely nothing at any level of your being had the slightest interest in it! Sexual stimuli could be all around you and they'd be like a pasture full of plastic flowers to cow."

On his saying that, all I could do was chuckle and say, "Yeah, bin there, done that! But not only after an illness—I felt that way for months after each of my children were born!"

"Right! I ever never gone through that, obviously, but I have been sick—and injured in accidents; and deep into my period of alcohol addiction . . . and there was always a period when my sexuality vanished from my life like I'd been returned to a pre-pubescent state. And as much as I can figure out, that is because all my chi, my prana, was being used up by my physical body to fight the illness or mend the damage caused by the accident. I had no excess of it to spare, and thus my sexuality went dormant.

"The same would apply for a woman who has been ill or injured and especially so if she has just had a baby . . . though I suspect that is because she is not only in a state of energy-recovery from having the baby, but because she'd be channeling all the chi she had to spare—and likely lots she didn't!—into her newborn, which would need that energy as much as it needed her milk! Actually, from the way I see things—and again, don't quote me on this!—all children, all the way up to puberty, as much as they need physical care from their mother—both parents, actually—also need their parents' energy, their chi, their prana, to grow on. . . . And maybe more importantly, that kundalini! Which is why parenting can be so exhausting—especially to the mother, who usually ends up being the prime source of chi, of prana . . . of kundalini . . . for her children.

"And again, don't quote me on this, but I am a hundred percent certain that when young kids are 'acting out' all the time, and when they get older, sometimes inexplicably 'go bad,' it is because they were forced to grow up in a chi\- or kundalini-deficient environment. A human environment that is the equivalent to a plant growing in a light-deficient situation that inevitably renders it dwarfed and misshapen! Often the very disappointed and puzzled parents of those misbehaving kids will whine and lament, 'But I loved them . . . and gave them everything!', meaning, they felt a 'warm, fuzzy feeling' whenever they weren't around and they gave them a stray thought, and that 'warm, fuzzy feeling' induced them to give them 'everything,' give them a lot of physical, of material stuff—stuff that was real easy to give!—but they were real chintzy with their chi. And maybe even chintzier with their kundalini!"

And here I had no choice but interject, "But John, what you are talking about is love, not this chi . . . or kundalini . . . shit—is it not! And all parents just naturally love their children—I don't think they have a choice in the matter!"

That put a smirk on his face and induced him to give me a long, sideways-beneath-his-Stetson-brim glance as he replied, "I think you could read a thousand real deep and profound philosophy and psychology books and still not find one author with a decent definition of what love is. Am I not right?"

To that I could but shrug, roll my eyes, and reluctantly nod before he went on, "And though I am not sure about much in this life, I am sure that love is an energy that human beings can project out of their heart chakras and focus on the object of 'their love'—and if I am right and it is an energy, why can't it be that chi . . . or that kundalini energy, which, when it is processed through the heart chakra, we sense it as what we call love. Of course, this gets us into too deep a level of philosophical thinking for this lovely fall day . . . thinking that has to incorporate and explore that kundalini issue—which is a real bugaboo for our Priests of the Religion of Materialist Science—and the question of whether or not kundalini and the chi are just different manifestations of the same energy. And that's a question—think lots about though I have!—I sure ain't smart enough—or well-read enough—to answer!

"So there you have a situation where some parents are so self-absorbed that they hoard their chi, their kundalini, their love, like misers and gave their kids, either way to little—or none!—of it! And of course, that chi, that love, is given to children through the mechanism of the parent's attention to them . . . I'm sure you've heard that saying: where attention goes, energy flows . . . , which is why kids are always demanding so much of it. It is the 'milk' their energy bodies and spirit-beings need to grow and thrive on. . . . I guess you could say that to the energy body, this energy is chi, while to the spirit-being, it is . . . kundalini . . . or love. . . . I suspect it is all the same energy but just . . . different frequencies of it. And as far as I can figure things out—but again, don't quote me on this!—for any child the worst form of abuse—next to the two absolutely worst forms of abuse, physical and sexual—is a lack of directed attention from its parents. A deficiency of a directed flow of chi/prana for the energy body and love/kundalini for the spirit-being!"

All I could do was nod and nod and nod as he spoke those words, finally adding, "You know there is a big 'acting-out-kids' issue making a lot of noise lately that the experts have labeled ADHD—Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and for which they dispense mood-controlling drugs like they are PEZ! It would seem these kids display a severe incapacity to pay attention to anything for very long because they are so hyperactive—always acting out!—but in light of what you are talking about—which makes a lot of sense because I sure do know about all the energy that Jonathan and Terry sucked out of me when they were little!—the major 'attention deficit' expressed in the name of that disorder is the deficit of real attention . . . of that chi . . . that kundalini . . . shit—of love! We seem to be living in a time where modern middle class values—excessive conspicuous consumption and status—dominate our society, and parents measure out their . . . love . . . for their children in all the expensive material things—and status!—they give them. (It's strange, but John does not mention those bogeymen, inorganic beings in this context, which likely means that topic hadn't yet stuck its ugly lizard-head into our "conversations," but I could certainly see that if they did exist, and if they did live and thrive on our putative, chi/kundalini energy, all the machines in our modern lives would be sucking it out of the parents and they'd have that much less to give their kids. But don't go fuckin' quoting me on that, eh!)

"And what really drives home the truth of that . . . chi . . . or kundalini . . . or love-as-energy . . . stuff you've been talking about, and my very unexpected insight into the real nature of the attention deficit-disorder afflicting modern kids . . . is that the problem really seems to have only shown up when it got real common for both parents to be working and both were too tired at the end of their workdays to pay much attention to the kids. To give them much . . . energy . . . much chi . . . or kundalini . . . or love! And with both of them working so much, they not only don't have much of that energy to give, but they are not around the kids very much to give those kids the chance suck out of them what little chi . . . kundalini . . . love . . . that they can—even if their parents aren't too interested in actively giving it.

"I'm sure that when mothers were 'stay-at-homes' it was easy for kids to suck out of them what they needed—even when their mothers nothing to spare! Believe me—I know this! . . . But when their mother is away at work—it sure can't happen! And then when both parents come home from their exhausting jobs in a totally stressed and exhausted state, they sure don't want to be giving what little energy they have left to their energy-demanding kids, so they send their kids off to their rooms to watch TV or play video games . . . or listen to their music. Or they give them money to go to the mall and buy stuff—and get into trouble. Or they enroll them in hockey or soccer or dance where various coaches can be paid to give them some attention . . . some energy—anything that doesn't involve them spending time with those energy-sucking kids!"

John smiled and nodded in agreement to all that, and said, "Yeah—I can't experientially know what level of energy . . . love . . . transfer that should so fundamentally exist between a mother and her young children, but I've witnessed its importance. And its effects! So much so I'm sometimes tempted to utter that famous Jewish prayer thanking ol' NON for not being so nasty towards me as to have made me a woman! . . . So back to the basics of this . . . chi shit . . . as you like to call it. And its importance to our vitality and our life! It's vital importance to our life being a living life—and not just a drudge-trudge from 'the womb to the tomb.'

"So, in our paying attention to those times in our lives when our chi, our prana, has dropped below the threshold where it can fire up our sexuality, we can then perhaps get a bit of a grasp of what that chi, that prana, is—and its importance to both our vitality and our sexuality. And its ability to heal us! . . . And not everybody is born with equal energy bodies. It doesn't take much observation—even amongst children—to see that some people are born with powerful energy bodies while others have weak ones. And it doesn't take much deep thinking to realize that our western culture, in more primitive times—and all tribal cultures at all times—would have very few—or none!—of those people with their weak energy bodies in them, because they would not have survived into adulthood. Natural—and 'unnatural'—selection would have very quickly weeded them out. I mean, can you even imagine a Viking with a weak energy body? I'm sure that boys and girls with weak energy bodies lasted about as long in a Viking village as weak, timid eaglets in an eagle nest! And too, just like the brutal basic training in the armed forces that 'weeds out' the 'wimps' . . . as you call them—though usually not terminally!. . . It saves that fate for the ones with the powerful energy bodies who 'make the grade'. . . . And then must embrace their fate in the fusillade!"

Again, just wanting to get my "two-wooden-nickels worth" of this "conversation," I said, "Give me an example, Uncle John!"

"Well, that would be easy to see if you spend any time at all watching kids in a school yard. Some are as aggressive and rambunctious as old holy hell, while others pathetically devitalized and passive. And often as not, the rambunctious ones amuse themselves bullying the hell out of the passive ones. The energy in their energy bodies almost seems to demand it! . . . It's as if those with too little energy are an insult . . . are anathema . . . to those with lots of it. And though I don't remember seeing it so much in girls, that could be because when I was young, the only school I went to was run by nuns—Darth Moeders, heh, heh (John knew a lot of Dutch words because he'd fought in Holland during WW2)—and those nasty wretches were hell-bent on teaching girls to constantly contain their natural energies. Like it was some big, NON-displeasing sin for a girl to act like she was . . . alive! I think that has changed now." (In his memoirs John gives some pretty vivid descriptions of one such Darth Zuster who taught him for the brief time he was in school. Sister Knucklebuster she had been called, because of her love for always carrying a heavy wooden yardstick and "busting" boys across their knuckles when they were not paying attention to her boring lectures or acting out. And across their faces when the knuckle-busting didn't work. Which, from the sounds of it, was all the time, given that every one of those boys had been a very vital and rambunctious farm boy who found sitting still in a classroom all day and paying attention to the boring crap coming out of Sister Knucklebuster's trap was the perfect definition of hell.)

That made me laugh as I said, "Yeah, that power-dynamic runs all through the school years. By high school it becomes the big divide between the sexually precious jocks and the shy nerds . . . or geeks. And the jocks sure do love to lord their 'jockiness' over the nerds . . . and show it off to the girls. . . . A few of whom found it annoying and while most . . . the ones with the potent energy bodies, I guess—really responded to it. . . . And yeah, girls today are being taught to revel in their energy and not contain it. Some get downright aggressive and bullying . . . and downright mean with it—like the jocks. And of course, lots of them are now into athletics in a big way.

"And I guess I guess that . . . difference . . . can be seen between Jonathan and Terry. Jonathan isn't a nerd by any stretch, but he sure is no jock . . . I think he could be, but he's too intelligent . . . and imaginative . . . and sensitive . . . and just plain likes school stuff . . . for him to take all that silly . . . jock-posturing . . . very seriously. And though he could do okay in sports, they didn't really attract him. He sure wasn't like his hockey-jock of a father in that regard! But Terry is! She's a natural athlete who just loves sports. Hell, she's been the top scorer on her ringette team for the last two years. She lives to play that game! . . . . Well, you know that, don't you—you've watched more than a few of her games with me!"

That got a chuckle out of John as he said, "There—you didn't have to look very hard to see perfect examples of what I'm talking about right in your own backyard. And you are right about both your children. Jonathan obviously is no . . . nerd . . . as you call them, but I do think his intelligence and imagination . . . and his love for . . . academic stuff . . . gets in the way of being one of those 'jocks.' And Terry certainly is one hell of an athlete! Lots and lots of energy in her energy body! Energy that attracts lots of boys . . . and just demands to be expressed and used in sports. And sex! Girls are lucky today to have those sports that they can play in. And have sex without being vilified for it—like in my day. I don't know what such girls did in the old days when they had to . . . contain . . . all that energy! Like bloody . . . Darth Zusters!"

That gave me my turn for a laugh as I said, "I took a class at university about women in Victorian England and I can tell you exactly what women like Terry did with all their energy in those days—they were either 'proper' middle class women who went completely neurotic and/or bonkers trying to bottle up that energy, or they were lower class ones who ended up becoming outrageous bawds as they let it fly all over the place! Though of course, the women of 'the gentry' got to ride horses and chase foxes, while there was some lawn tennis and croquet for middle class women, but I don't think either of those were pursued in any sort of fashion that would have caused an unladylike 'sweat' to break out. Pardon me, an unladylike 'perspiration!'"

That got a frowning chuckle out of John as he said, "Yeah, those Victorian's sure did take their restrictive 'social behaviors' seriously, as no less than did they subscribe to that sex-is-a-heinous-sin doctrine of Constantine's Imperial Abomination—even though most of them weren't even Catholics—and push it to an absolute extreme. And believe me, long after Queen Vic was most embarrassingly allowing her rotting flesh to stink up her coffin, this 'better' classes in this country were still glued to her era's tight-corseted values and behaviors. They could be real irritating to have to deal with—even just cursorily.

(Unfortunately, for John, as The Fire will show, he had to deal with those Victorian-wannabes of this country a lot more intimately than 'cursorily,' for Catherine came from just such a family in the "Big Shitty" south of here, and though her British father had died before John came into her life, and her Italian mother's—Carlotta's!—haughty and contemptuous behavior towards John—she used to contemptuously call him "the Cossack"—gave him the kick-in-the-pants he needed to drag poor Catherine west to start up that nefarious ranch. And believe me, his meeting and getting involved with Catherine—and her real "buttoned-down" and almost-Victorian younger sister!—is one strange, complex and synchronicity-riddled tale I won't even try to summarize here!)

"But that likely had a big up-side for the British Empire as it induced a lot of randy and rowdy young men to willingly take rough postings in crude, foreign lands where the sexual mores were a hell of a lot looser. I mean, it didn't happen in Victorian times but those first British sailors that went on those long voyages to Hawaii and Tahiti sure reaped the sexual benefits of those considerably less sexually repressed cultures—if they didn't catch scurvy and die before they got to those 'lascivious' islands, which were teeming with healthy girls and women who hadn't been brain-washed from birth into believing their very natural sexuality was something evil and shameful to some Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy god that has to constantly be 'corseted.'

"But an important thing to understand about this chi and energy body stuff is that everybody, when young and healthy, has a decent—even if varied—reserve of chi vitalizing their energy body, but it is something that must be cared for and nourished as a person gets older or it will leech away. And I'm not just talking about the natural depletion of its production that occurs in old age. . . . I mean, if you want a dramatic example of what I am talking about, sometime during the hockey season . . . which is starting right about now . . . drive over the arena in that 'Shitty' you live in and watch the young hockey players enter it before a game and observe all the vitality that is pours out of them like lava out of a volcano. Then take a walk—not by yourself, of course!—to that park beside that arena where the chronic alcoholics and drug addicts hang out and observe the devitalized, shambling wrecks they have allowed themselves to become.

"To change the metaphor, those hockey players are veritable artesian springs of chi/prana, while those alkies and druggies are bone-dry arroyos! And however old most of those alkies and druggies look, they aren't nearly old enough to be manifesting the inevitable chi-depletion of natural old age—they've just allowed their addictions—and their self-destructive lifestyles—to very unnaturally leech it away.

"But I doubt you have to waste your time doing that! As a vital young woman you would have no choice but know that your energy body is a lot more ready to respond to men with powerful energy bodies—like athletes—than men with weak ones . . . like accountants. Whether your conscious, rational mind knew the power—or lack of it—of those men's energy bodies or not, your own energy body sure knew the power—or lack of it—of them."

He had that right! Back in my "Wild Thing" days—and for sure even to the day of that ride!—I had all sorts of boys and men coming on to me, and some I sexually responded to like a woodpecker to a petrified tree, while others—especially the athletes—set my sexuality aflame like it was a dried up balsam just itching to burst into flame. Or more like gasoline! So I had no trouble grasping what he was talking about.

I mean, fuck-a-bad-decision!—I married my ever-randy asshole of a husband—who, in fact, had been a hockey player—because, as John would put it, he must have had a very powerful energy body, and up until Jonathan was born, he kept my sexuality constantly and ragingly inflamed! And temporarily doused! It was quite a wild fuckin' time, I can fuckin' tell ya! In fact, I think we completely trashed a brand new bed during our the first year we were married! And wrecked a perfectly good, second-hand couch! And broke a damn good kitchen table! Which also explains, ever-randy stallion that he was, why he went looking for fresher mares in greener pastures when Terry was born and my sexuality vanished like a line of coke up a rock star's schnoz! Which I kinda . . . mighta . . . maybe . . . woulda . . . coulda . . . put up with—if two of those "mares" hadn't been my two best friends!

"When we are sick," John went on, "Or are caring for an infant, all our chi, our prana, our vitality goes into healing us—or nurturing that infant!—and thus it gets so severely depleted that our sexuality vanishes. This should be a good indication to anyone who cares to look at things that way, that our sexuality is totally dependent on us having an excess of that chi, that prana to power it as it fills up and flows through both our energy and our physical bodies. And as it does so affecting our minds and psyches by filling the former with entrancing sexual fantasies and the latter with potent sexual needs and desires! And as well, as it climbs up the chakra-ladder, it allows—induces!—our spirit-beings to 'fall in love!'

"So, if you can accept—something I am sure very few rational Priest of our Religion of Materialist Science will!—that our sexuality fundamentally is that chi, that prana, which is filling up both our energy and physical bodies, and because it is a potently conscious energy, it has needs and desires for natural flow and natural expression and thus, as it floods and flows through our energy and physical bodies, it also fills our psyches—and thus also our spirit-beings—both with fantasies and desires for fulfillment through the acts of sexual engagement with other people who are likewise all charged-up with that conscious, flowing chi, that prana.

"And when a sexual partner isn't available, that very conscious energy drives us, through persistent daydreams and powerful desires—and to the looking at pornographic images and videos which go straight to the imagination and which have the power to trigger a powerful flow of chi/prana, first through the energy body then our physical body And it is able to do that because, as I limitedly understand that energy body, it has a hard time differentiating between physical reality and imaginative reality. Or maybe it is easily able to differentiate between the two, but some peoples' energy bodies . . . for some reason . . . just prefer the imaginative realm. And it would seem that for those energy bodies that do prefer the imaginative realm, they get very addicted to the pornography—which by-passes 'reality' and goes straight to the imagination. . . . And I say 'reality' that way because as a shaman and a mystic, I am quite convinced that our most real reality, is not what the average materialist labels 'reality,' but what poets—and mystics and shamans—absolutely know to be our real reality—the imagination. Just ask William Blake!"

"Yeah . . . I've heard all that Blakean imagination-shit before, and not being a poet . . . or a mystic or a shaman . . . it makes absolutely zero sense to me. Less than zero, in fact! But I do know that pornography can be very powerful and addictive. I mean, years ago that porn movie Deep Throat almost went mainstream as a movie—so much so that a few years later when the term was used as a code name for the Whitehouse leaker who helped those two reporters bring down that Nixon crook, everyone was already familiar with it. Though for the life of me, much as you have explained it to me as thoroughly as you can, I can't figure out why anyone would prefer masturbating to pictures and movies rather than indulging in the real thing. It makes no sense to me at all."

That got a bit of a sarcastic chuckle out of John as he said, "Yeah, well that has a lot to do with something we've discussed before—your very repressed . . . or just plain AWOL . . . imagination. You can't imagine some people preferring imaginatively provoked sex to real sex because you lack the imaginative power to even begin to understand the power—and reality—of the products of the imagination! You're like a thirsty desert traveler who comes across a pump that will only pump water out of the well if it is first primed . . . primed with water that you don't have! So you are constantly dying of thirst even in the midst of no end of well and pumps.

"You've more than once complained that you wanted to be a novelist but lacked the imagination to be one, so this is closely related. This pornography thing—and its power—is something you are never going to understand because it has an imaginative basis and you lack the imaginative power to both respond to pornography and to understand its imaginative power.

"To change the metaphor, it is like Nelson at the Battle of Copenhagen who, when informed about a signal from his superiors to discontinue his navel action, put his telescope to the patch over his missing eye and said, 'I see no such signal,' after which he pressed on to win the battle. Your 'imaginative-eye,' as you have often lamented, is as blind as Nelson's missing eye.

"And remember too, it's a lot easier for a lot of men to acquire and masturbate to pornography than it is for them to find women for real sex. Especially if they are married men with frigid wives—or wives they lack the power to arouse!—and 'screwing around' is just too much risk and trouble for them. And it's a similar situation in logging and mining camps . . . and war situations. You'd not believe how popular 'French postcards' were with the troops during the BASS, and by today's standards, most of those things were just barely pornographic. And it is a good thing they were made out of cardboard because they got passed around a lot . . . and under some very wet and muddy conditions! No pun intended!

"But they served their purpose . . . though not everybody found them to their taste. Some men had powerful religious objections to them—and would destroy them if they got a hold of them!—and others would get downright addicted to them. It would seem that for . . . imaginative reason . . . many men's energy bodies find pornography highly arousing and addictive. But really all any pornography is about is its ability to make masturbation more intense and pleasurable. And all that's really about is about is giving a person's physical and energy body a much desired—and according to Wilhelm Reich—a much needed and healthy orgasm—a movement of the chi/prana, first through both bodies—physical and energetic—then an ecstatic flush out of them! And according to Reich, an orgasm has a very important function . . . which is why he named his famous book, The Function of the Orgasm!—is nothing more—or less!—than the important . . . and necessary . . . and healthy . . . explosive flush of that built-up orgone energy. Or as the Eastern philosophies call it, the chi, the prana.

"And as far as I am concerned, it is very just a very natural and living process, a process that, crude as this sounds, is really not a lot different—and certainly no less natural—than us urinating and defecating when our bladder fills up with excess urine and our bowels with excess excrement. Which drives home two very important points concerning Constantine's Imperial Abomination and its pernicious, dogshit-dogma about sex: the first being that it is downright insane—though more like maliciously cynical and manipulative!—for it to make fantasizing about sex . . . and masturbation . . . and of course, sex between consenting adults any sort of ol' NON-displeasing sin; and the second being the depth and malice of the very serious sexual sickness afflicting pedophile priests—all pedophiles, for that matter!—whose chi, whose prana, whose orgone, through being too long unnaturally repressed and unnaturally deformed, takes over the imagination, fantasizes about, and seeks to find an outlet, with, young victims whose chi, whose prana, whose orgone, has not reached a similar and responsive state of sexual expression.

"The way I see it—and again, don't ever be foolish enough to quote me on this!—it is like the chi/prana/orgone of those pedophile priests, because of Constantine's Imperial Abomination's cruel and unnatural demand that they be celibate, at some point becomes stagnant, then poisonously . . . debased . . . and degraded . . . and deformed . . . so that in being thus debased, degraded, deformed and poisonous, it drives them—because it cannot flow in a natural way between two equal and willing partners!—to express itself in demonic ways! Like, I guess, the over-flowing waters of a dammed river that, instead of flowing along the natural bed of the river, flows in places it wasn't meant to—like through the streets of a city on the shore of the reservoir. That unnatural damming process—both damming and damning . . . with an 'n'!—drives them have become demonic predators who are only looking to very maliciously defile . . . or destroy . . . an innocent victim! . . . If that makes any sense to you."

Having spent the most formative years of my life as the victim of a pedophile father who seemed to have very little interest in having sex with the adult woman who was my mother—or perhaps she had little interest in having sex with him—and who lost most of his interest in having sex with me once I reached puberty, I could—kinda—see what John was talking about with all that Eastern, chi/prana shit, but I was not in the mood to comment on it.

Instantly sensing why I didn't answer him, he quickly went on. "And in performing that act we call masturbation, we should be acknowledging the existence and importance of that very conscious and very intentional and fundamentally vitalizing energy, that chi, that prana, that orgone as Reich called it . . . that élan vital as the philosopher Bergson called it . . . that both fills and flows through our physical and energy bodies—like air in and out of our lungs!—and thus, because everything is a unity, through our psyches and our spirit-beings.

"And, in a healthy, non-Christian . . . meaning, non-puritanical, non-sexuality-is-dirty-and-evil, repressive religious and philosophical system—like it seems those Mohammedans also have!—we would be able to indulge in sex—and masturbate, if we so wanted and needed to!—without censure, sin, or shame while concomitantly knowing and acknowledging that this absolutely essential chi/prana/orgone energy is what makes us alive and vital—and that to repress and dam it up, can only lead to it going stale, going rancid, to it in some energetic way, putrefying, and thus turning us into some kind of twisted . . . and deformed . . . creature—like a pedophile! And especially a pedophile . . . Darth Vader, something as likely to be created by Constantine's Imperial Abomination's essentially psyche-crippling vow of chastity as the crippled feet the Chinese once created when they bound the feet of infant girls to keep them small and make them more 'beautiful!'

"And also in such a system, we would, on reaching puberty, be taught to understand that you cannot ever block the flow of that essential and vitalizing energy—that chi, that prana, that orgone—but only channel it. And channel it into healthy personal and social channels. Interestingly, water is the element of the second chakra, of that level of expression of the kundalini/shakti energy—which, as I think I said, I often suspect is a more refined, concentrated and powerful manifestation of that chi/prana energy—and as every hydrologist and flood-victim knows, water has a will and way of its own. It always to move, to flow, and, to use a pertinent expression, 'come hell or high water' it will move, it will flow, and that if that flow is dammed up, two things will happen. One, it will go stagnant and promote the growth of dark, putrefying organisms that can be lethal to us human beings who drink and bathe in it; and two, if it builds up too much, if it creates too much pressure and over-stresses the dam, it will destroy that dam and break loose with violent and destructive consequences. Every dam has the potential to breech, and when some inevitably do, the results are always catastrophic.

"So no different is it with that kundalini-shakti/chi-prana energy—believe me, I'm not smart and wise enough to completely understand all that ancient, Vedic stuff!—with the 'water-energy' of our second chakra! We dam it up at our peril! That kundalini-shakti/chi/prana energy not only desires to flow and express itself—not only, of course, through our sexuality, but through our feelings!—but if it is to remain a healthy energy, it must flow and express itself, and it is our job to channel that expression of it, not thwart it, not dam it! William Blake got it dead-right when he wrote that 'energy is eternal delight.'

(I just looked that partial quote of Blake's up and found it was from his book, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—with its delightfully erotic, self-painted cover!—with the whole of that quote that is pertinent to what John had been talking about, being:

Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound

or outward circumference of Energy.

Energy is Eternal Delight. )

"And masturbation," John went on. "Is, as far as I am concerned, just some wise 'hydrological engineer,' who on noticing that the water behind a dam is getting dangerously high to the point where it might destroy the dam, opens a sluice and allows the excess water to flow downstream, thus averting a potential disaster. . . . And in this type of sexual dam-release, preventing an unwise sexual encounter with a fellow adult. . . . Or a rape! . . . Or the rape or molestation of a child!"

"That's what I consider masturbation to be—and again, don't quote me on this!—and for any religion to make it any sort of sin at all, is either being dangerously unwise and grotesquely insane, or, more like in the case of Constantine's Imperial Abomination, is very cynically and maliciously manipulating and controlling its infantile, credulous, baa-bleating sheep. That infernal Abomination both labels and convinces those moronic, credulous, baa-bleating sheep, that not only is any 'lustful' sex outside of the 'holy sacrament' of marriage and not performed solely to 'fruitfully multiply,' is a heinous sin, but so is sexual fantasizing and masturbation just as heinous sin against ol' NON—ol' Does Not Exist . . . and also categorizes it as an important spiritual issue, but that's just a clever con perpetrated to gain control—and lots and lots of power and wealth!

"To anyone with even a limited capacity to think reasonably, masturbation—or any sexual act between two consenting adults—could no more be a 'sin' against any sort of god—except an imagined god imagined as that grotesque human ego-projection known to Christian, baa-bleating sheep as Almighty God . . . and to us as ol. NON—Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy—who has been imagined and defined by a bunch cynical and malicious lunatics as the Great Negator of almost everything about humanity that is human, especially our sexuality, with almost all expressions of our sexuality being considered by 'him' to be serious and hell-damning sins! And that is regardless, as I've so crudely put it before, that our sexuality is no less natural and human than our needs to urinate and defecate. . . .Though I have absolutely no doubt that Constantine's Imperial Abomination has some dogshit-dogma concerning those essential activities, such that if we, as good . . . Abominationists . . . were to get any physical pleasure at all out of peeing and pooing, we'd then be grievously offending ol' NON—and committing a serious, hell-damning sin! Hell, I bet that according to Abominationist dogma, the pleasure experienced at the letting out a big, gut-ache-relieving fart, would be considered by ol' NON to be a mortal sin!"

Then while I chuckled at that too-likely and too-accurate absurdity, he paused for a moment as he gave the dog, which had been patiently sitting at his feet for about five minutes awaiting some more cookies, another one and as well, a good long ear-scratching, which the dog obviously enjoyed. And when it had had enough of that, it gave backed away and gave itself a good, long, sighing-shake and then with a sharp yip, shot off across the graveled clearing to chase after something it had heard in the bush on the far side of it.

After the dog had had its cookie and its rub and got the attention it wanted and gone off to do its dog-thing, John laughed and said, "I wonder if there is some Snarling Ol' Nobodoggy up there in Canine-heaven recording in his sin-ledger that border collie 284015 just committed the most heinous, hell-damning sin of enjoying an ear-rub from his master?"

That got a laugh out of me as I said, "Yeah, and I wonder what doggy-hell is like for those heinous sinners."

To which John chuckling replied, "I'm sure it doesn't involve any hellfire . . . so likely it's just a small, cramped kennel in a vast cave full of dog-spirits eternally howling and barking and whining—and dreaming of racing in packs through green fields full of rabbits—and taking breaks for quick leaks or to sniff each others' arses! Or maybe for male dogs it's an eternal, Tantalus-torture of smelling bitches in heat on the other side of a twenty-foot high fence, and for those bitches in heat, dreams of packs of randy dogs howling their horny heads off—and fighting amongst themselves!—on the wrong side of a twenty-foot high fence!"

And then pouring us each another cup of coffee from that thermos and eating another cookie, he went on, "But enough of that . . . 'doggerel' . . . and back to what I was . . . pontificating . . . as you like to put it when I go on too long on a subject that is boring the dye out of your hair, heh, heh (I was going through a period back then when I was changing my hair color every three months or so!) . . . about the fact that it makes no natural, human sense to attempt to dam up our sexual energy, our chi/prana, than it does to dam up our urine and excrement, but there's a less . . . offensive . . . metaphor for this process than that excremental one . . . . Have you ever been around a big transport truck and heard a loud, shrill release of air from underneath it?"

Surprised by the sudden shift of the topic from something so deep to something so mundane, it took me a half minute of thinking before I finally replied, "Yeah . . . lots of times . . . in parking lots . . . and when those trucks are beside me in traffic. . . . Sometimes I get the feeling those asshole truckers are doing that just to startle—and half-deafen!—me. Because I'm a woman!"

That got a laugh out of John as he said, "Paranoia, paranoia, Rachel—those truckers have no control over that at all. The brake systems of those trucks work on air being compressed in a tank to keep the brakes in the off position, thus allowing the truck to motor down the highway, and since the compressor runs all the time that the motor is running, when the pressure reaches a pre-set point in the tank, a valve automatically opens and releases the excess air. If it didn't do that regularly, the tank would blow up—with some pretty serious consequences.

"So as I see it, masturbation is the intentional opening of a pressure release valve for excess chi, excess prana—or the kundalini-shakti, if that's what it really is—in our energy bodies and psyches when it isn't being all used up for its intended purposes—like living and surviving and thriving—and having sex. And in any materially affluent society where serious survival issues do not come into play, and where most people are well fed and healthy, there is enough of that vitalizing energy in those people that the bouts of intercourse—and an infinitude of other sexual play!—between them would become so frequent and ubiquitous it would be ludicrous. And very socially disruptive. All that sexual activity would blast open everyone's second chakras and life would devolve into a massive, endless orgy and all the hard, disciplined work that made that culture well-fed and healthy would cease. All play and no work makes Jack and Jill hungry 'children.' And if Jill is a mother with kids to feed, that's no small matter!

"So wise societies—tribal and otherwise!—quickly instituted a whole range of sexual restrictions and mores to deal with that problem, which of course led to sexual frustrations and the build-up of excesses of kundalini-shakti/chi-prana in people. Now, I to some degree agree with Freud that a little bit of sexual containment and frustration goes a long way towards creating a civilization, but too much of it can very quickly produce a very sick civilization. And a lot of other problems as well.

"As I—very limitedly, believe me!—see it, if a person—especially a young and healthy person . . . of either sex!—doesn't release that excess kundalini-shakti/chi-prana energy intentionally, all manner of erotic dreaming will occur in sleep to induce orgasms and unintentionally release it. And, if you can expand your worldview to include them, attract Succubi and Incubi who manifest in and through our dreams and nightmares to feast on that energy."

To that I could but interject, "I fucking don't and I won't! I don't believe in fucking medieval shit like that and I won't expand my worldview and allow myself to believe in it!"

But John just laughed at my predictable—and likely expected—outburst, and went on, "Like the pressure-release valve on those trucks. . . . . One way or the other, that energy will have its way. It must find release and expression! . . . And of course, if a culture . . . if a 'civilization' . . . has too many too strict sexual restrictions and mores, then that kundalini-shakti/chi-prana energy, instead of getting released and manifested in lubricious, second-chakra activities, gets forcibly channeled up into the third chakra, the power chakra, and that society gets extremely violent and battle-hungry.

"I'm sure—but don't quite me on this!—that there existed a direct correlation between all the ridiculous and paranoid sexual repressions and frustrations of the Victorian era and the willingness of those crazy Brits to so willingly march onto boats while singing "It's a Long Way to Tipperary," then get shipped over to France like brain-dead cattle in order to 'manly fight' and get 'gloriously slaughtered' in a futile and pointless war that really didn't concern them all that much. I think in a sexually healthier, less sexually repressed society, most of those young men would have seen past all that Victorian, 'for King and Country,' Kiplingesque Imperialism, and outright refused to be turned into 'glorious cannon fodder' and shipped to France to be 'gloriously slaughtered' like worthless, diseased cattle! . . . And please excuse the scrambling of that last metaphor."

To that I could but acknowledge his wisdom—and marvel at how open and honest he was being about a subject that is always so taboo and shameful to Catholics!—and say to him, "Jesus, if what you're saying is true . . . then there is really something wrong that we don't know this stuff. Why don't we?"

That got a real harsh laugh out of him as he said, "Our ignorance about this living and conscious energy that is absolutely fundamental to our being alive and being human, is due solely to our Judeo-Christian religious heritage—our ol' NON-heritage—and most particularly the dark, controlling and very evil and very fascist and totalitarian machinations of Constantine's Imperial Abomination over the last seventeen hundred years! The Chinese and the Hindus have know about the existence and importance of the chi, the prana, for millennia.

"And the Greeks and Romans weren't exactly ignorant of it either—as their pantheons show. I mean, I doubt many ancient Greeks thought of Zeus, who was likely every bit as much of an imaginative human projection as our ol' NON!—as Nasty Ol' Zeus, but as the myths show, they sure thought of him as Randy Ol' Zeus! Its' pretty hard to think negatively about sex when your 'Big-Guy-In-The-Sky' ego-projection is very humanly obsessed with screwing every screwable female . . . human or goddess or nymph or whatever . . . he can get his hands on. With or without wife Hera knowing about it! Though in being a powerful goddess, she always knew! Freud knew this energy as libido, but he didn't think of it as a naturally good thing needing expression and channeling the way the Chinese and Hindus—and Greeks and Romans—did. In fact, as I limitedly understand the man and his philosophies, he just saw it as a kind of 'necessary nuisance' that had to be repressed and in being repressed, caused neuroses!

"But when a follower of his psychoanalysis philosophy, Reich, called it orgone and tried to teach the Christian world about its fundamental importance to all aspects of our lives—and how to store and channel it in a specially constructed box—he was thrown into jail by a bunch of puritanical American fascists. Where he ended up dying. . . . Truly not a nice ending for a brilliant, genius like he was . . . but of course, that fate was infinitely less painful than the auto-da-fé that Bruno got from the Constantine's Imperial Abomination's proto-Gestapo Inquisitors for his genius pronouncements . . . about their being many worlds like our own with similar, sentient beings inhabiting them! . . . Though I am sure he was forced—as the faggots at his feet were set aflame—to recant his assertion that there were any sentient beings on this planet, however many other planets might have them!

"But you don't have to by any fancy-pants psychoanalyst to see the obvious evidence for the existence and nature of this chi, this prana, this libido, this orgone—young people are the young and vital creatures they are because that chi, that prana, powerfully grows, flows and rages through their bodies, vitalizing them and driving their dreams and visions and desires and actions and choices, while old people become old and feeble and devoid of all vitality—and dreams and visions and desires and actions—once that formerly powerful, raging chi-flow has dwindled to a pathetic and useless trickle.

"The Chinese know lots about this—and have known about it for millennia!—and some very old tai chi and chi kung practitioners who have spent their lives learning about, and practicing those chi-arts, keep that chi flowing easily throughout their bodies and thus remain very alive and vital until the day they die! And of course, just as their doctors have known for centuries about its value and use their very ancient and effective acupuncture arts to activate and control its flow—and cure diseases. And just as the Hindus' with their yoga and prana-breathing do the same. (John sometimes would have spells of back problems which he always got quickly cured by going to an acupuncturist for treatments that he claimed worked "like bloody magic!" And though he never talked about doing so, I am a hundred percent certain he regularly practiced some form of tai chi—along with the yoga that he did talk about—which is why he remained so vital and active until the day he died at the very advanced age he did!)

"I guess one major problem you are having with this topic—and accepting the importance of this chi/prana energy!—is that that consummately evil institution, Constantine's Imperial Abomination—and of course, its virulent, self-appointed proxy, your mother!—has indoctrinated . . . SLP/gaslighted! . . . you into believing that your sexual energy—your essential chi, your prana!—and its very necessary expression through your very natural sexuality, is something that is unnatural . . . and vile and evil and inherently displeasing to that ol'—Does Not Exist—NON, which it makes so much money—and accumulates so much power—claiming to be this whole vast Universe's sole representative!

"And to me, that's as insane as saying that the food and water we ingest to keep ourselves alive, healthy and vital is inherently evil and ol' NON-displeasing because it makes us do those foul 'bathroom things,' and that if we want to stay in ol' NON's good book and out of hell, we must figure out a way to exist without ingesting them!"

And with that he let of a soft laugh as he went on, "Hell, that's one of the most important themes in the tales of the Buddha. He did the asceticism thing . . . starving himself, as he said, 'until when I touched my stomach I could grab my backbone,' and when those extreme practices only allowed him to reach a limited enlightenment, he decided asceticism did not represent the path to total enlightenment, so he abandoned it. Or something like that! . . . Which, extreme as his description of starving himself so thin he could 'grab his backbone,' was, it was not as extreme and unusual as it sounds to our western ears. I've seen documentaries about ascetic practices in India that showed ascetics who looked exactly like what the Buddha described about himself—all skin and bones . . . and looking a damn lot like they were victims in a Nazi death camp just barely clinging to life! . . . And to this day I haven't decided if they were extremely spiritual men or just lunatics . . . like that crazed Christian monk who spent decades atop a tower doing absurd austerities and attracting crowds of cretins with his ability to touch his head to his feet a thousand times a day. Or so the 'saintly fable' goes! . . . I mean, if there is one thing I've learned, it is that Darth Vader Butler's dreary and propagandist Lives of the Saints is no less fanciful—but a hell of a lot less believable and enjoyable!—than that delightful compendium of Arabic fables, A Thousand and One Nights! (John revealed in his memoirs that he actually travelled to India, so there is a good chance that what he was describing about those ascetics was something he actually witnessed firsthand!)

"But back to that poor Irish priest and his problems with the confessional and it basically being a dumping process . . . a process of dumping all the mostly sexual . . . garbage . . . of his parishioners into his ears and spirit. I can't even begin to imagine the horrors of that process. I mean, think of it—you have young man who gets ordained a priest with a very limited level of life-experience and an equally limited—and extraordinarily narrow—set of ideas about life and human nature and suddenly he has to start hearing the darkest and foulest secret-shenanigans and thoughts and desires and fantasies of his parishioners. Rapes and incest and child molestations and wife beatings and lots and lots of pre- and extra-marital sex. And murders, even! The whole dark gamut.

"But those aren't just mere words that poor fellow is hearing—there's a definite psychic . . . spiritual . . . component to all this. People go into that infernal box in a state of psychic turmoil and profound psychic darkness—of evil, even!—and then proceed to verbally and psychically dump all that shit into the ears and spirit of that . . . dumpster . . . of a priest. I mean, if that moronic functionary of the Abomination was a mere Darth Vader before hearing any confessions, he would certainly be a super-shitty Darth Vader after hearing a few years of them! It doesn't sound like even a remotely fun and healthy thing to me! Though of course, if an Abomination's Darth Vader is so bent . . . or gets bent to it . . . he may relish his darth times as a confessor! The hearing all those dark and violent and lubricious stories about the actions and fantasies of his sheep-flock may feed into his own darkness and lubriciousness—like alcohol into an alcoholic! It may be as much a delicious fare to his own darth desires and fantasies as road kill to a vulture! Personally, I think I'd rather be back in the BASS spending a week in a mud-and-rat filled trench under heavy artillery fire than an hour in a confessional! Matter of fact, I know I would!

"And too, as that Irish priest mentioned—besides all that interesting, nasty and lubricous stuff, there would be a lot of stuff dumped into his ears that would be mind-numbingly trivial and boring. And as irritatingly repetitive as the pounding of a jackhammer on a metal roof."

And with that I had to laugh and interject, "Yeah!—I remember when I used to go to confession to so very seriously tell the priest all my seriously venal sins . . . about how many times I disobeyed my mother—or even had bad thoughts about her—or how many times I got mad at my brother . . . or was mean to my sister . . . or said swears . . . or the nickel I stole from my father's night table to buy candy. God, all that kind of trivial crap—coming from dozens of kids—must have bored that poor guy crazy! Though of course, I'm sure there were a few kids who, unlike me, were willing to confess the foul sexual things a parent or some other adult was making them do! And I wonder how many adults spent his time recounting equally trivial and boring 'sins' . . . I used to see a lot of perfume-reeking 'little old ladies' in line for the confessional ahead of me and I really used to get my bloomers in a knot trying to figure out what kind of sins they could be committing at that age! I'm surprised I didn't hear the priest snoring his head off in there!"

John laughed at that and said, "Yeah—the idea of troops of children going into that dark stuffy old sin-box to confess their trivial 'sins' to that powerful and intimidating Darth Vader, is too damn absurd—too damn sick!—to even think about, but it's all about indoctrination—SLPing/gaslighting!—and you have to start with the impressionable lambs if you want to end up with great big flocks of compliant, baa-bleating sheep! Like any modern nation that has its children sing the national anthem at school every morning while lovingly and hands-to-heart gazing at the flag so that when they are just barely adults and the flag flies and the anthem sings and the bugle calls them to war, they willingly and mindlessly march off to fight and die in it. Or, like Tennyson wrote about the mindless, 'suicidal six hundred' of the Light Brigade who charged off to die in it—Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do and die. Except in the BASS, it was not a mere six hundred, but millions! Indoctrination—SLPing/gaslighting—really works! And works really goddamn lethally well!

"And as to those over-perfumed 'little old ladies' . . . funny you mention that perfume problem, because sometimes I'd swear they bathe in that infernal stuff! . . . lining up at the sin-box to confess their non-existent sins . . . though more like just have some man to talk to for a few minutes! . . . but maybe you'd be surprised at the sexual desires and fantasies of some of those 'little old ladies.' If there is even a few hayseeds of truth at all to the bullcrap-tales my 'coffee-buddies' like to bull-blabber on about at the coffee shop—the rare times I have the patience to spend with them!—some of those 'old gals' are randier than teenagers."

On hearing him say that I couldn't resist jabbing him in the ribs with my elbow and saying, "Hey, Uncle John—if that true, maybe you should spice up your life a bit by getting in on some of that 'action'!"

He let loose a long, low laugh at that suggestion, finally saying, "Good Lord, what a depressing thought! The sex might be fun once in a while—a rare while, at my age!—but then I'd have to spend a bit of time talking to those lonely—over-perfumed!—old gals, and from the little I've discovered about 'old gals' by being around my sisters, most of them live in tiny little ghetto-worlds enclosed by fences of mind-numbing triviality—those asinine TV soaps, and the like!—that would drive me insane! . . . Unless it was someone like your Mimi, whose hours are spent, when not cleaning and re-cleaning her spotlessly clean house, reading and re-reading the Bible for the hundredth time and meditating on all the foul sins she is certain her relatives and neighbors are committing! Especially her apostate older brother! . . . And my ideas—as you can well imagine!—if I bothered to express them to any of those 'old gals,' would either give them strokes and heart attacks or send them tottering out the room screaming blue murder. Or trying to commit suicide by drowning themselves in a bottle of perfume! I'm sure I could have deeper conversations with my dog. . . . And yeah, I'm sure that any Darth Vader listening to the confessions of most of those 'little old ladies' would have to be like a soldier on guard duty at night who has learned to snooze with his eyes open! And not to snore while doing it! . . . Unless the 'old gal' in there was your redoubtable Mimi, then he'd be wide awake and enduring a lecture concerning all the sins being committed in his Sodom of a parish that he wasn't doing enough about!"

That got a giggle out of me, because he was so right-on with his description of my dear old Mimi, who believed it was a mortal sin to have something out of place in her precious house, or a speck of dust sullying one of her knick-knacks—or crucifixes or Jesus pictures. And who was a hundred percent certain that her Dear Lord God Almighty had directly dictated every word of her precious Bible just as it was printed, and that nothing brought her closer to her Dear Lord God Almighty than studying that infernal thing—in her neat, clean, and dust-free house.

"But I'm sure that learning to deal with the trivialities and boredom of the confessional was the least of any darth Vader's concerns. According to that Irish fellow, they would have to deal with a lot of very sexually alive . . . and often very frustrated single young women—and very sexually alive and frustrated wives!—going into that dark booth to tell their 'confessor' about all their 'sinful' sexual activities . . . And if not their activities, their wildest--but just-as-sinful!—desires and fantasies! Not a single one of which would, in any sane and human system, be any sort of ol' NON-displeasing sin that need to be dumped into the ears and spirit of any darth vader confessor!

"And like I seem to remember him saying—can you imagine what it would then be like to stand in the pulpit on the Sunday morning following those Saturday confessions, trying to give a serious and righteous sermon while looking down on all those comely—and not necessarily chastely dressed—women . . . and 'girls' . . . while knowing their most intimate sexual activities . . . and secret sexual fantasies and desires. Some of those Darth Vaders . . . hell, I think most of them! . . . would feel like they were the 'all-knowing,' ol' NON himself, while the less egotistical . . . and more sensitive ones . . . if such Darths can even exist . . . would just plain feel embarrassed. Like the parish's peeping Tom!"

At this point I couldn't restrain myself from saying, even though I barely believed in the validity of what I was about to say, "But I know for a fact, Uncle John, that a lot of Catholics . . . Abominationists, as you like to call them . . . really like going to confession. They feel they need it! They feel lots better after doing it! I'm not sure it would be a good thing to take that away from them. In fact, I think it is fundamental to all . . . Abominationists . . . faith!"

With that, John took off his Stetson and started rapping himself real hard on the top of his head with his knuckles. He was doing it so hard I could hear each rap a lot more clearly—and comfortably!—than I wanted to.

"STOP THAT, UNCLE JOHN! What are you doing that for? It's . . . disturbing . . . "

On my shouting that, he immediately stopped and said, "Whew!—does that ever feel good to stop!"

And when I could but give him a quizzical stare, he said, "First of all, my ideas about confession aren't going to do anything but rapidly cycle in and out of your ears, and thus they certainly won't stop confessions being heard . . . or one, single, super-sinning. over-perfumed 'little old lady' from indulging in them and saving herself from eternal damnation and hellfire! And second, the going to confession is like me stopping that rapping of my thick skull with my knuckles! Sure it felt good to stop! But everything that made it feel so good was my stopping what I was very arbitrarily doing! And what I was doing with that rapping was as artificial, arbitrary, and unnecessary as someone feeling SLP/gaslighted-convinced that they are foul, NON-displeasing sinners merely for behaving like the human being they were created to be.

"And likewise for that momentary sense of feeling good after kneeling down in a big wooden box and dumping all that artificial, arbitrary, and unnecessary darkness into some Darth Vader's ears and psyche! I mean, face it!—first, that infernal Abomination of Constantine's SLP/gaslights—brainwashes!—its catastrophically brainless, baa-bleating sheep into believing that just about everything even remotely natural and human about themselves and their lives . . . natural and human things that they just can't seem to keep from doing . . . are horrible, ol' NON-displeasing sins, which, as designed by the clever and cynical Darth Minions of the Abomination, makes them feel sinful and filthy . . . makes them feel shameful and guilty—makes them feel like they are repeatedly and painfully rapping their 'spiritual skull' with the 'knuckles' of their shame and guilt and remorse—until they can get to a Darth Vader, confess those sins, and through his absolution of those sins, obtain permission from him to quit rapping their 'spiritual skull' with the 'knuckles' of their remorse and shame and start feeling 'good' again.

"But of course, Constantine's Imperial Abomination really upped the ante in that crazy, strip-the-moronic-sheep-of-all-autonomy poker game, by not just making the confessing of all 'sins' a release from the remorse and shame over having committed those foul, NON-displeasing sins, but it makes that confessing process—and subsequent Darth Vader-applied salve of salvation—a cosmically important ritual that saves them from an eternity of unfathomably painful hellfire should they die without having confessed them—and received that NON-placating absolution! Again, it's back to all that really cynical and malicious stuff being like that extortion racket of those Mafia thugs who intentionally burn down shops unless the shopkeepers pay them the 'fire insurance' they are demanding to prevent them from burning those shops down!" (Writing the above brings back a sudden memory of an incident in Sylvia Fraser's Rope In The Water book where during her travels through the ubiquitous Indian crowds, she is stopped by a young man who tells her she "has some shit on her shoe," and when she looks down, sure enough she does. He then proceeded to very deftly clean it off for her, after which he held out his hand for his due recompense. Which she gladly paid. I don't remember the incident terribly well, but it would seem that when it happened a second time, she realized she'd, quite literally, "stumbled" into a "real shitty" con where one intrepid entrepreneur surreptitiously dabbed some shit on her shoe that his partner then offered to clean off—for a price. I wonder if those intrepid entrepreneurs realized that with their harmless, dab-a-bit-of-shit-on-clean-shoe con they were replicating a far-from-harmless, shovel-a-load-of-shit-on-infant-soul con perfected by Constantine's Imperial Abomination over a thousand years earlier!)

That demonstration and explanation got a loud, long, head-nodding laugh out of me that put a smile on John's previously serious face, before he went on,

"Remember Rache, no Protestant sects—as far as I know—have the confessional—or at least don't make such a big deal out of it that Constantine's Imperial Abomination does! Nor do the Mohammedans . . . or Hindus . . . or Chinese . . . And as far as I know, no tribal Indians or tribal Africans . . . or tribal South Americans . . . either . . . though I have read that some have communal rituals where they all get together to get their misdeeds off their chests—and they all get along just fine without it! Always keep in mind that all utterly moronic, baa-bleating Abominationist sheep have life-long been sheep-conditioned by Constantine's Imperial Abomination to believe that in ol' NON's eyes, they are born as vile, shit-covered infant sinners, and will inevitably live out their lives as vile, shit-accumulating sinners, and that they absolutely need, first the one-off, 'silly water' sacrament of 'original sin cleansing' baptism, then the constantly repeated sacrament of confession as the only way they can be absolved for all the vile and shitty transgressions they have—and will!—perpetrate against ol' NON—Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy!—during their lives. This of course means, that humanity's terminal cancer that Constantine's Imperial Abomination surely and essentially is—like all non-metaphorical terminal cancers—ain't going into remission . . . or at least not in any foreseeable time! . . . so neither is the confessional box and the need for baa-bleating Abominationist sheep to dump their sin-shit into some Darth Vader's ears and psyche, going anywhere! At least not till humanity gets totally eradicated from this poor planet! Though I don't know if that blessed eradication is going to be by our own, insane, thermonuclear idiocy . . . or by a comet-strike . . . or even by another planetary flood. This time, hopefully, with no Noah and his incestuous family left alive to start all this human folly over again!

"But what really gets my goat—and pumps my blood pressure sky-high!—is why that infernal Abomination can't be just a little bit logical and humane about that whole damn sin-confessing business. I mean, since its dark inception, Constantine's Imperial Abomination has been SLPing/gaslighting—brainwashing!—its brainless . . . yeah, I know: how do you 'brainwash' the brainless? . . . baa-bleating sheep into believing that ol'—Does Not Exist—NON is omnipresent and omniscient, which means, if you have even a functioning, one-cylinder brain in your sheep-head, that you have to know that you then don't need any damn Darth Vader sitting in that dark old 'sin box' box to hear those confessions. Ol' NON—Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy!—in being omnipresent and omniscient, absolutely has to already know all about all your sins. Hell, as far as some really delusional god-babblers—NON-yakkers . . . theo-logians—believe, ol' NON knew about your sins an eternity before you were even conceived! Which means that all that the Abomination's brainless, baa-bleating sheep really have to do about all those NON-displeasing sins that they have been fated—by their very human natures to commit!—is regretfully think about those sins for a micro-second, then baa or bleat out their request for ol' NON's forgiveness of them—anywhere and at anytime!

"And with that micro-second confession—right directly into ol' NON's monstrous, cosmic, omni-audient ears—the problem should be resolved. Hell, if ol' NON is everything that the Abomination's god-babblers claim he is, since he is capable of hearing a chickadee's sigh when dies and falls out of a tree on a frigid winter's night—or a mouse fart in it den!—then surely 'he' can hear all the confessions of all the sinning Abominationists of this cosmically tiny planet! And if those sinning Abominationists are truly and regretfully contrite about having so humanly—and inevitably—offended ol' NON with their transgressions against 'him,' then for sure, that omniscient and omni-audient ol' sin-slinger would know! And his forgiveness would have to be given—whether that nasty old Cosmic Fart wanted to give it or not!

"And of course, if those heinous, foul-sinning, ol' NON-displeasing Abominationist wretches still felt a need to most unnecessarily baa-bleat out their list of sins, regardless that the omniscient and omni-audient ol' NON already knew about them—and catalogued in his Big Black Book an eternity before they were even conceived!—they could just as easily do it into their shoe . . . or a toilet . . . as into the ears of one of the Abomination's black-robed, Darth Vader-functionaries while kneeling down in that silly sin-box!"

The images of millions of Catholics—Abominationists, as I was coming to love thinking of them as!—mumbling their sins into their shoes—and especially into their toilets!—got a laugh out of me and provoked me to say, "That idea of confessing a lot of 'shitty' sins into a toilet is perfect, because it could then be followed by an appropriately symbolic flush! Hell, I know for a fact there's a lot of 'party animals' out there who are already good at kneeling down in front of the 'great white throne' and vomiting out their alcoholic 'sins' anyway! . . . But I also know that people just . . . feel better . . . going into that . . . sin-box in order to talk to an understanding, forgiving . . . Darth Vader-priest, and getting all their sins off their chest. I know my mother sure does—sometimes she'd even come back from her Saturday confession in a rare good mood!"

"Yeah, I know—you have a point! Stupid, mindless, baa-bleating sheep-people do love their rituals . . . Well, why not keep that stupid sin-box and remove the Darth Vader from the equation. Put a soundproof divider in the center of the box where the priest usually sits and let people go in there and dump out all their garbage—or pump out their sewage holding-tanks if you like that image better—into the empty chamber, which of course, is never really empty because ol' NON, in being defined by the god-babblers as being omnipresent, obviously has to be in there! . . . And in being omni-audient, that nasty old super-snoop of a spy has no choice but to hear every confession, however trivial or malicious. And for those Abominationists who have totally internalized their SLP/gaslighting indoctrinations and feel they deserve to be punished for their 'sins,' a framed list can be put up on the confessional wall cataloguing all the possible human sins and the penances that must be performed before that nasty cosmic spy, ol' NON, will absolve them. Hell, the big-time sinners could even save a lot of time if they were allowed to write out all their sins beforehand on a piece of paper and shove it through a slot. And at the end of every day, a Darth Vader could gather them up and burn them. Or flush them down a toilet . . . or if he's a 'sick 'un,' he could get his jollies reading them!"

That ludicrous image also got a laugh out of me as I said, "Perfect as that would be, I can't imagine it ever happening! I doubt there is a more hide-bound, history-chained institution on the face of this earth than that Roman Catholic . . . Abomination! Shit—if it possessed one gram of progressiveness, it would have got rid of that Roman part of its name centuries ago!"

At that point a huge shadow approached us along the ground from our left and shaded the sun for a second, prompting John to snap his head up and intently gaze at the large, gliding bird with white undersides that had something dangling from its talons. It then most surprisingly landed on the topmost beam of that rusted skeleton of a headframe and proceeded to eat whatever it had caught. John stared at it for almost a minute before finally saying "Ahhhh, this day . . . this ride . . . is blessed! Absolutely blessed! It is rare that I come out into these woods without seeing that lovely, Broad-winged hawk. In fact, I swear it knows me! And knows I love seeing it! And never do I see it without getting the sense that I am in a very . . . holy . . . space! . . . But this is the first time I've been blessed to witness it eating its kill! . . . That looks like a squirrel it caught!"

And for about ten minutes we both silently watched it methodically rip that creature into small pieces that it patiently devoured, and when it was finished, it let drop what it didn't want of it—mostly the tail, it looked like—after which it spread its huge wings and silently glided back into the forest. I, like John, and most strangely for usually squeamish me, felt like we'd been "blessed" to witness an event so natural if felt holy. Or maybe it was just John who felt that way and I "picked up" his mood—a contact-high, so to speak!—something I was most disturbingly wont to do while in his presence—however adamantly I disbelieved in the telepathy shit that would make such a phenomenon possible. (That famous sham-man, Castaneda would say that John, in being a powerful nagual, always moved my assemblage point when I was in his presence.)

But when he was on one of his pontification-ponies, John's thoughts never strayed long from the topic, and once his beloved hawk had glided back into the forest, he was quick to get back into the saddle of what we'd been talking about.

"Nah, neither can I! I can't even remotely imagine that infernal abomination taking the all-ears Darth Vader out of the confessional and letting people talked to an empty—pardonez moi, a NON-filled!—sin-box! And can less imagine it finally acknowledging that basically, the confessional is nothing more than a psychological Porta-Potty and that you don't need a Darth Vader in there with you to flush away your sins for you! Hell, you're more likely to see the silly-water fountains in churches full of free-for-the-taking condoms than Constantine's Imperial Abomination doing that with its precious, sheep-bamboozling money-maker of a sacrament! I mean, face it—that powerful, greedy, SLPing/gaslighting Abomination gets a lot of power and control—and thus wealth—out of that ugly, Porta Potty-box and its dump-all-your-inner-shit-and-garbage-on-the-Darth-Vader-ritual! . . . Especially since I've always figured that the whole confession process was created in the first place so that very Roman Church could acquire and exercise a lot of very Roman control over its flocks of very mindless, willless, baa-bleating sheep!"

Having often wondered about that myself—or been provoked to wonder about it by forgotten "conversations" with John—I played the devil's advocate and said, "Well, you know, Uncle John—priests . . . Darth Vaders . . . are forbidden to ever reveal what they hear in that confessional!"

"Sure, sure!—that's what that infernal Abomination is always propagandizing at its flocks of mindless, credulous, baa-bleating, life-propagandized sheep. But how really true is it? After all, that's a very powerful and political institution and we know what kind of bedfellows politics and truth make! . . . I mean, if it truly was a spiritual institution—if such a thing could exist!—would its leader behave like an emperor? Would he wear gilded robes? And a tall hat that sure looks like a crown? And wear a huge ring in his finger that he expects people to kneel down and kiss? And most regal of all—would he live in a huge and opulent palace? . . . I'm mean, you have that old saying, 'If it walks like a duck, if it quacks like a duck . . .', so following that basic bit of logic, Constantine's Imperial Abomination is very much the imperial institution Constantine created it to be seventeen hundred years ago. It is likely wealthier than the Roman Empire was in its heyday; it is ruled by a be-crowned and fancy robe-wearing and very powerful emperor; and very thoroughly controlled by a 'family' of self-important, power-greedy and power-abusing politicos wearing regal red robes! And real stupid hats!

"But even if a big-eared Darth Vader never utter a single peep concerning what he heard in that Porta-Potty of a confessional, he would still end up knowing just about everything that is going on with the members of his parishes. Or at least concerning the lives the pathetic sheep who have been conned into believing they need to go to confession and baa-bleat out their 'sins'! And all those baa-bleating sheep know he knows everything about who they are and all the terrible, ol' NON-displeasing things they do! And lascivious, ol' NON-displeasing thoughts and fantasies they indulge in. And that gives that Darth Vader-priest—and that abominable institution he represents!—a lot of power over them. And worse, in their eyes, it elevates that Darth Vader to the level of being a proxy-NON! To being 'Godfather'—heh, heh!—Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy's very powerful underboss. Not quite omnipotent and omniscient, but too damn close for comfort. And not just for the comfort of those bended-knees baa-bleating sheep, but his comfort as well, because that kind of power is historically and socially famous for driving all human beings who channel it, first to the heights of hubris . . . ever met a Darth Vader who wasn't egregiously proud of being one of ol' NON's proxies? . . . then totally insane! . . . Though of course, as I've said before, as far as I'm concerned, every single Darth Vader who believes he has been called by, and is directly serving the needs and wishes of the Supreme Ruling Deity of this whole damn Cosmos—with its uncountable galaxies full of even-more-impossible-to-count species more sentient than this barely sentient human one!—is so delusional he is functionally insane anyway!

"And sure, those confessing, baa-bleating sheep may, on the surface, believe the darth vader so patiently and all-ears sitting behind the screen in that stuffy old sin-box, will not judge them over those very intimate revelations that they are dumping/baa-bleated into his ears and psyche, or tell single living soul—even his bishop!—or even ever use it against them, but deep down they can never be sure! And that knowledge, like all knowledge, is, to some degree, power! And though I never thought of it this way before, I've just had the inspiration that that infernal confessional may very well be—likely is!—the locus of the incredible power that Constantine's Imperial Abomination has been wielding over its vast flocks of hundreds of millions of infantile and credulous baa-bleating sheep for the last seventeen centuries! It's like the hub of a giant bicycle wheel of power that all the spokes of that power radiate out of."

At this point, several blue jays flew out of the wood beside us and glided back into it behind us, breaking the spell of that particular "pontification" with their loud and irritating –jayyy-jayyy . . . jayyy-jayyy, doing so right about the same time that some—most appropriate!—high, mare's tail clouds were fanning out across the previously pristine blue of the sky and partially occluding that depressingly low, October sun, and causing the day to chill a bit.

And since both the horses and dog were getting restless, we knew it was time to leave, so after John had stowed the empty thermos, mugs, and half-empty container of cookies in his left-hand saddlebag, we climbed back into our respective saddles and started our ride back. Though just as we were leaving the graveled area of the mine-site, we were both startled by a short, sharp keeeyahhh coming from close over our left shoulders, and glancing up I was startled to again see that hawk flat-winged-soaring so low over our heads that I could have counted the white feathers on the underside of its wings, after which it angled upward and landed in what remained of a dead pine tree that looked like it had been struck by lightning.

As it sat there, not fifteen feet from us, settling its flight-ruffled feathers as it stared down at us, John stared back at it while softly saying, "Holy! Holy! Holy!—we are definitely witnessing an important omen today, Rache! Seeing two different hawks in such a short span of time—and this beautiful creature up so close. I've never had a hawk fly so low over my head . . . or land so close to me. It is the spirits telling us that there is something very important about this ride today—and what we've been talking about! . . . Though I can't imagine why—all of this stuff we're yakking about is stale porridge to both of us."

Though on my responding with, "Well, not all of it, Uncle John—that last bit of . . . inspired thinking . . . about the confessional being the hub of the big bicycle wheel of power of that horrible abomination of a church, was definitely something new. . . . Or new in you seeing it that way! . . . I don't know it is something you once said to me . . . or that I read . . . but it was about the incredible level of truly malicious power the Church exercised over its flocks with its threat of excommunication for recalcitrant heretics and the fact that anyone who was excommunicated couldn't be shriven by a Darth Vader-priest and would thus inevitably go to hell when they died. . . . Christ, my mother lived in total fear of that excommunication threat. Shit, whenever we kids got into trouble in the neighborhood—and when we got older and started ducking Sunday masses!—she'd scream at us that we were going to get her excommunicated from 'her Church' for being a bad Catholic parent! She seemed to have the idea that priests were some sort of cops carrying around books of excommunication-tickets that they were just itching to issue to bad Catholics! I bet she'd have faced a double mastectomy—without anesthesia!—with less trepidation than the idea of being excommunicated from her precious church!"

That set John off on a long, loud laugh after which he chortling said, "Yeah, I can see your mother behaving that way. But she's not that unusual—there's lots of baa-bleating . . . Abominationists . . . who are equally fanatically mindless about that infernal 'religion' and fearful of—terrified by!—the incredible power they perceive it to have. . . . Like it still has ravening packs of Inquisitor-wolves roaming the dioceses sniffing out heresy and torturing and devouring alive those heretics! But they don't just mindlessly and credulously believe the Abomination has so much power over them as compliant, baa-bleating sheep, but over the whole damn Universe!

"In fact, nothing amuses me more—though I guess it should sadden me—when I think about how so many of the baa-bleating sheep of that infernal Abomination actually believe that when one of its black-robed, Darth Vader-functionaries dumps some 'silly water' over their heads and mumbles some arcane, mumbo-jumbo, that they, at some deep, cosmic level, have been somehow turned into indentured serfs of that infernal abomination of Constantine's for all eternity, and that no power in the universe—except official, institutional excommunication—can free them of it. . . . Though as I very limitedly understand the process . . . mainly because I don't give a damn about it! . . . excommunication doesn't kick you out of the church, but as the name, ex-communion indicates, it prevents you from taking communion . . . and going to confession . . . and thus damns you to an eternity in ol' NON's fiery basement!

"I once had an arrogant, jackanapes of a not-very-old, Darth Vader-Joe Priest very officiously inform me that since I had been baptized into his infernal Church, that I would, for all eternity, be a member of it . . . a lifetime-indentured member, in his mind, I suspect . . . and that I couldn't just walk away from 'being a Catholic' when I felt like it. . . . And that every Sunday that I didn't attend mass represented another mortal sin darkening my soul and guaranteeing an eternity of hellfire for me if I didn't scurry back into the arms of 'Mother Church' and get those heinous sins confessed and shriven by one of her Darth Vaders!

"Actually, your redoubtable and beloved Mimi has the same attitude—in her books I will always be a Catholic, albeit a 'fallen away' and hell-bound sinning one, and never the non-Catholic that I claim myself to be! But I kinda like that 'young' sister of mine—much as she's got a mind as straight and narrow as a ten-foot length of half-inch copper tubing, she's also got so damn much spunk . . . and she's as clairvoyant as any once-burned-at-a-stake witch—so I put up with such nonsense from her without letting it bother me!

"But I sure did not like that particular Darth Vader-priest!"

And here I could but let out a shrill laugh and say, "Christ, John—could there be any Darth Vader-priest that you'd like. . . . Besides that Irish priest you mentioned—who must be long dead by now!"

And to that he chuckling replied, "Yeah, you got a point. To me they're all nothing but bleeding hemorrhoids on the arse of humanity. But what incredible, delusional arrogance that young sod possessed! He barely knew me and he was still willing to bombard me with that nonsensical, indoctrinating, SLPing/gaslighting crap! Like I was some callow kid whose cojones had not yet dropped! And I didn't even try to argue with him about it because I knew it would be easier to argue with a snorting, stomping bull with a lust-on for a nearby, in-estrus heifer than argue with that, arrogant, god-addled, newly-neutered ecclesiastical steer!

"I doubt that in a thousand years and with a billion words that I could have made him see the truth of the situation—that that 'silly water'-dumping ritual with its accompanying Darth Vader-mumbo-jumbo had no more cosmic significance for any baby being subjected to it, than did it's mother giving it a bath before heading to the church for that event. And if it involved one of those adults stupid and credulous enough to voluntarily want to become part of that insane abomination, that ritual had no more cosmic significance than that person washing their hands after going for a crap just before—or after—the event!

"And I sure would not have been able to convince that by-then apoplectic Darth Vader-priest, who would have had righteous plumes of smoke billowing from his ears—and have been wishing that the Inquisition still existed so he could have me burned alive for those blasphemous statements—that Constantine's Imperial and Abominable Corporation, for which he had signed up . . . had been indentured into . . . to lifelong labor for as an unpaid serf, was just that, a very human, a very artificial, and a very temporal corporation, and a person would be part of it only if they willingly—and sheep-credulously!—subjected themselves to its influence and power.

"Which of course meant that the instant they no longer wanted to be under its very black and light-blocking umbrella of power, and walked away from it—walked out into the light from it!—they were no more part of it than is some miner part of a mining company he has resigned from. And permanently come up from underground to spend the rest of his life working in the light!. . . Now of course, I am talking about modern times, not Inquisitorial times when any indentured, serf-parishioner trying to 'quit' the fiefdom of 'the Corporation' would get them a session with some very sadistic and psychopathic Inquisitors—and then they'd be righteously 'Bruno'd' at a stake!

"And that sure just goes to show you the incredible indoctrination and intimidation—SLPing/gaslighting!—skills of its Darth Vader-priests . . . and its darther bishops . . . which can have its baa-bleating, sheep-credulous 'faithful' so totally believing such outright nonsense as that! Shit, it reminds me of that very wise fairy tale about the emperor who was conned by clever tailors into believing he was wearing special clothes that were invisible to cretins and incompetents, and, since he himself couldn't see them, and not wanting to admit he was an incompetent cretin, he then strolled around his kingdom in his newly tailored 'birthday suit,' with no single adult in his whole kingdom being willing to tell him that he was naked because they also didn't want to admit to being incompetent cretins—until some 'impertinent kid' who hadn't yet been indoctrinated—SLP'd/gaslighted!—into the communal lunacy . . . or was as yet too young and innocent to understand regal protocols . . . shouted out the truth about the emperor's very obvious nakedness.

"What this world needs . . . it would direly seem!—is some 'impertinent genius of a kid' who hasn't yet been properly indoctrinated/SLP'd/gaslighted into the 'ways of the world' and 'Imperial protocols' and who thus can—and is willing to see and decry, as Voltaire once so adroitly did, all the grotesque lies and hypocrisies endemic to Constantine's Imperial and Abominable Corporation! Not that it would make a flea-fart of a difference. Few in this world were as brilliant as Voltaire or hated and spoke out against the Abomination like he did, and it has made not a flea-booger of a difference! Millions of people already know that infernal Abomination for the abomination that it truly is—and is Christianly not!—but that hasn't stopped—or even remotely slowed down!—its vast, baa-bleating sheep-flocks of credulous 'faithful' from their sheep-belief in its ol' NON-sanctioned, cosmic validity, and are totally and stubbornly—and utterly mindlessly!—resistant to actually hearing anything negative about it at all!

"Very few true, free-and-honest thinking individuals in those baa-bleating sheep flocks have 'the ears to hear' that their 'precious Church' is a big, nasty, greedy, murderous, corporate sham! And not only a nasty sham, but one that sham-wears a very nasty suit of armor and wields some very terrible, medieval weaponry! Or, to up the power and size of the metaphor—that it is a very powerful and very destructive battleship of a corporation passing itself off as a benevolent hospital ship while hiding behind the white paint and big red cross of its paint-thin spirituality.

"I mean, Christ taught that foundational and enlightened teaching of, 'love thy neighbor as thyself,' but then Constantine's Imperial and Abominable Corporation very quickly changed it to, 'love they neighbor as thyself as long as he is a proper-behaving, proper-believing, proper-professing, proper-dogma following, properly-Caucasian, non-Jewish, non-Mohammedan, non-Buddhist, non-Confucius, non-Protestant, non-Pagan, non-whatthehellever, and paid-up member of The Corporation,' with its very violent corollary, 'and if he is not a proper-everything member of 'the Corporation,' kill, torture and burn alive that miscreant, that heretic, that infidel, that Jew—as you will!'

"Like I've said too often before, everything that is 'Christian' about institutional 'Christianity,' about that black battleship of Constantine's Imperial Abomination, is nothing but a very thin and very deceptive coat of white, 'hospital-ship' paint, and, to change the metaphor, Nazism and the Holocaust was just the poisonous, holly-berry wine of Constantine's Imperial Catholicism distilled by that Master Distiller of Hate, Hitler, into an infinitely more powerful and poisonous hooch and poured into 'a new wineskin!'"

At that point my butt was getting more than a little "saddle-sore' and I was feeling just a little bit discomfited by it. And as well, I was getting just a little bit bored with John's desire to keep watching that hawk up in that dead pine tree that just as equally—and eerily!—was watching us, so to get my mind off my aching butt—and that spooky hawk!—I interrupted his pontification with, "Yeah, you have said that before—and every time I think about it, it seems so evilly true that it gives me the willies! And now that I think more about that excommunication stuff, it must have been you who talked to me about the incredible power of that infernal . . . Abomination . . . to cow its sheep . . . ha!—can cows intimidate sheep, Uncle John? As a rancher, you should know."

That got a single, loud guffaw out of him as he said, "A pissed off Bossy can intimidate just about any animal she puts her mind—and her horns!—to. But sheep? Well, they are rarely in the same fields with cows and even if they were, I doubt most cows would pay much attention to them. They're too . . . sheepish . . . and would naturally stay away from cattle. Which is why sheep is the perfect metaphor for Catholics and their relationship to their precious Church and its herding packs of vicious, Darth Vader collie-clergy!"

"So okay then Uncle John, I'm not out in the 'back forty' by saying the Church has been cowing its sheep with the excommunication threat, and I definitely now remember it was you who told me that . . . because I can suddenly 'hear' your real sarcastic voice commenting that 'being excommunicated from Constantine's Imperial Abomination would, to anyone with a quarter of a brain, be a blessing, because then all that vile institution's dogshit-dogma wouldn't apply anymore and they thus couldn't commit any sins or go to hell when they died.'

"I now remember you also saying that hell would then be as 'off the table' as ol NON—Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy!—himself and his ten zillion rules for proper human behavior! . . . And his ten zillion sins for breaking those rules! I think the way you put it was, 'it's like being part of any club—if you are part of it and want to remain part of it, it's rules and regulations have an intrinsic power over you, but as soon as you leave—or are kicked out—of that club, those rules no longer have any meaning, and more importantly, no longer have any power over you!'"

And on my uttering the word, "you!", that hawk spread its giant wings, and letting out a sharp, long keeeeeeyaaaaaah, launched itself from its perch and flew directly towards us, swooping over the two of us in a sharp, descending arc that reached its nadir directly over my head. Its right wing tip came so soft-whooshing close to me that I could have reached up and touched it had I not been so startled that I reflexively shrieked, ducked my head, and leaped down off my horse. And when I finally looked up, it had completed its giant circle and was already gliding over the tree it had launched from, at which point it flapped its absolutely giant wings a few times and displaying its bright white undersides, soared off over the forest in the direction of John's farm.

When I looked over at John he was starting at that disappearing hawk with his mouth open and a rapturous look on his face, and when it disappeared, he closed his mouth, looked over at me and said, "That . . . was . . . incredible! I've never seen the likes! Seeing two different hawks in such a short period of time! And the way that second hawk flew over you and tried to touch you with its wingtip! That is an . . . omen . . . of a . . . clarity . . . and literalness! . . . I've never witnessed before. The spirits were very dramatically pointing you out as someone very important to them! . . . Or maybe it was pointing out your reminding me of the not-newness of that inspiration about the confessional being the locus of all the power that's been SLP/gaslight wielded—and so disastrously and murderously abused—by that abomination of Constantine's for so many centuries. . . . Well, whatever it was about, you should feel blessed, Rachel!"

Well, needless t say, I didn't feel blessed at all, but just goddamn fucking terrified! And fucking spooked! And desperately wanting to get the subject away from John's favorite passion of the fucking spirits and their fucking omens, I changed the subject with, "You mean . . . that wasn't the same hawk we saw before?"

"Rachel!" he said, still longingly staring in the directing of that now-gone hawk, "Don't tell me you couldn't see that that hawk was a lot bigger than the other one! And see that red spot on its tail as it was soaring away. The first one we saw was a Broad-winged hawk, an accipiter . . . a woodland hawk, while this one is a red-tailed hawk, a buteo—which one usually only sees soaring over open fields. Or sitting on a telephone or hydro pole beside a field waiting for some careless rodent to invite it to dinner. A hawk like that shouldn't even be this deep in the forest—it can't hunt amongst trees, like an accipiter can. It's way too big! It's huge wings aren't designed for dodging between trees!

"That's why I know our seeing it—and having it fly so low over our heads—especially over you—like it just did—was an omen. A very important omen! The spirits are telling us that either your reminding me that my inspiration about the confessional being the locus of power of that infernal abomination of Constantine's is real important . . . or that you are really important to them! Or both! . . . And my intuition also is screaming at me that this ride . . . and everything that we have been talking about is very important too! Though I am baffled as to why, since like I've just said, everything but that bit about the confessional—that stuffy old sin-box—being the locus of the Abomination's power is nothing but a pot of way over-cooked porridge to us!"

And once again wanting to distract him from talk about all that spooky and irrational spirits and omens shit, I said, "You know, all that stuff you were saying . . . about confession and the confessional . . . and the fact it has that . . . SLP . . . and gaslighting . . . component to it, has been very interesting. I haven't gone to confession for so long that I don't remember my last visit to that 'sin-box,' but I still remember the shame I felt at having to do it. . . . And back then . . . and even now—until you brought this up!—it never entered my head that the hearing of confessions might also be an unpleasant experience for the Darth Vader-priest. . . . Or that it might be psychologically . . . or spiritually . . . harmful to him!

"I was raised—indoctrinated, I guess you'd say!—to see those priests as actual . . . agents of God . . . I mean, how goddamn absurd! . . . And I think all Catholics . . . all Abominationist sheep . . . are indoctrinated—gaslighted!—like this! . . . To see those damn . . . Darth Vaders . . . as special men . . . as extraordinary men . . . as bona fide spiritual men who had been given a 'a call'—right from God himself!—and in answering that 'call' and going through the process of becoming a priest, they had somehow, through that process . . . through their special years at the seminary . . . been turned into very spiritual . . . supermen! That they had somehow . . . magically . . . or through divine grace! . . . been transformed into . . . true agents of God who . . . 'walked with the angels' . . . who were superhuman! . . . But I guess . . . after now that I think of it . . . and everything I now know—and what we've been talking about!—that was really childish thinking! . . . Really magical thinking! And that all those . . . Darth Vaders . . . really are . . . and can only be . . . is just ordinary . . . 'Joes' . . . just ordinary 'Father Joes' . . . Darth Vader Joes . . . and, also in light of what we've been talking about, supremely deluded and egotistical 'Father Joes!'

"I mean . . . Christ—it takes someone with a really, really super-bloated ego—a bloated to derangement ego!—for them to believe they are so cosmically special that God—the Supreme Creator and Ruler of this whole damn Universe!—has picked them out of the huge, multi-billion strong flock of humanity, has given them the 'divine call' to personally serve as his agent on this Earth! And do it through abjectly serving his one-and-only-true-church on this planet! Grotesquely delusional and egotistical! To the point—I'm certain!—of insanity!

"So it was not just stupid, childish, gullible me who'd been brought up—SLP'd . . . gaslighted . . . indoctrinated!—into believing that those Darth Vader-priests were extraordinarily spiritual human beings who had been specially chosen by God, were supermen who 'walked with the angels,' but lots of other unthinking Catholics—not that I am sure there is any other kind!—who believe that same silly nonsense about those Darth Vader, 'Father Joes!' That believe they are born special, are God's chosen and called agents doing his divine work for him. When all that they are really are is very ordinary men—though most often likely less than ordinary men!—who applied for a really stupid, non-paying job with a monstrous, very greedy, and very humanly corrupt and humanly greedy corporation that was officially and very Romanly incorporated, as you are always drilling into me, by the Roman Emperor Constantine at Nicaea in 325.

"And once those very ordinary men had been accepted for that non-paying job after somehow proving that they'd been singled out—out of billions! Been chosen—out of billions! Been called—out of billions! By the Supreme Creator and Ruler of the Universe to serve 'his' one-and-only-in-the-whole-Universe, abomination of a Church, then taking those three, what I consider, absolutely dehumanizing vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, they then spend the rest of their pathetically and hubristically delusional and dehumanized lives doing a lot of very mundane . . . corporate . . . institutional . . . money-making work for that damned abomination of a Church!"

I think John was as surprised by my sudden and unexpected—maybe even inspired!—outburst of very John-like "pontificating," and that got an obviously delighted laugh out of him, (he loved it when I—too-rarely for him!—added something—anything!—to our "conversations!") as he said, "You got that right! They definitely are not special human beings—however egomaniacally and very hubristically deluded they might be about that 'call from God' they've somehow very deludedly convinced themselves they got—but just very ordinary 'Darth Vader Joes' who most ego-conveniently convinced themselves they were so special that they could have been singled out—out of billions, as you pointed out!—to receive a 'divine call' from the Creator-deity of this whole damn, vast-beyond-imagining Universe, in order to serve his 'holy and divine' agenda, not realizing that they were really nothing more 'cosmically remarkable' than just self-chosen functionaries . . . minions . . . of an infernally greedy, very human, and often murderous corporation! Mundane functionaries and Darth Vader-minions self-chosen—they Abomination-affirmed!—to serve that very greedy, human, and murderous corporation, with I-A-M of this whole damn big Universe having nothing to do with the process, the whole things set in motion solely by their own delusional and power-greedy egos.(That I-A-M is what John sometimes called "the 'Big M' Mystery that is this Universe, and though at first I thought he was calling it the I AM, a directed reference to all that "God" shit he was always trying to get away from, he said no, I-A-M meant Ineffable Awesome Mystery, a term he came up with to remind himself that everything this Universe—from the smallest speck of mouse dandruff to the biggest galactic super-cluster—was a Mystery that was both Awesome and Ineffable—as far beyond mere human words and concepts—all human mentation!—as any galactic super-cluster is beyond mouse dandruff.)(This I-A-M concept of his is why he had such absolute contempt for the Abomination's god-babblers/theo-logians, who, as far as he was concerned, were so insanely hubristic they actually believed they could know and understand anything about the I-A-M and theo-babble it to the credulous, baa-bleating sheep that gave the Abomination all its power and wealth!)

Egos that certain knew what they were about when they chose to become Darth Vader-minions of that abominable corporation, for we must always keep in mind that those Darth Vader minions-priests of Constantine's Imperial Corporation, by proxy, wield portions of the incredible power accrued and hoarded by that very Roman abomination of Constantine's, which, if you look at it at all honestly, is nothing more—or less!—than a very long extension of that dark and brutal and oppressive . . . and Mediterranean-world raping . . . Roman Empire of Constantine's. So if you can see and accept that, it is real easy to see that for its Darth Vader minion-priests—no different than the ancient Roman consuls, and their lesser, bureaucratic ilk—to fall into the delusional swamp of believing that it is their own power they wield, and not the dark and brutal and oppressive . . . and world-raping . . . Abomination's power!

"So you have these very ordinary, but supremely delusional and supremely egotistical 'Joes' applying for a really bad—but power-deluding—job with Constantine's Imperial Corporation, and who get accepted and trained by it to be very efficient, Darth Vader priest-functionaries in the doing of mundane, corporate jobs for this world's biggest and, if not the most powerful, then certainly the most pervasive and spiritually oppressive, corporation.

"And I must add—this world's most cynical and clever and exploitative corporation, because, as you so astutely—and inspiredly!—pointed out, through that clever and cynical scam that it so pompously labeled the 'holy vows' of poverty and obedience,' they suck all their 'employee-functionaries' into spending the totality of their wretched lives working for nothing more than room-and-board—and cigarette and booze money! . . . Suck 'em in by calling it a divinely ordained vocation instead of, as you pointed out, just a pathetic, toil-till-you-drop corporate job slave-toiling for that good-at-making-tons-of-money-and-accruing-and-abusing-tons-of-power corporation that it really is!

"Though I guess that means that those Darth Vader . . . minion-shepherds . . . of all the Abominable Corporation's baa-bleating sheep-flocks, those unpaid corporate functionaries—those darth and pathetic 'Vader Joes'—are more mindless and credulous than the baa-bleating sheep-flocks they are supposed to be shepherding, so willingly working as they do for one of the world's powerful and wealthy corporations for no wages! They really are nothing more than serfs. Serfs who channel all the power and prestige of that infernal corporation of Constantine's while deludedly believing the power and prestige is their own.

"But a serf is just another name for a slave who always serves an exploiting master—however much of that master's wealth and power and status their pathetic and deluded serf-ego-attaches itself to! I've read stories about the slaves of ancient Greece and Rome who attached themselves to the status of their owner, with the ones who served the richest and most powerful owners strutting about amongst the other slaves in the market places and acting like they were superior—but they were still slaves! And the same damn thing with those kapos, those Jewish 'straw bosses' in the Nazi concentration camps to whom the clever and malicious Nazis gave a little bit of power and privilege—and a bit of extra food!—so they would bully and control . . . and often beat to death!—their fellow Jewish prisoners for them. But those kapos were still themselves prisoners and most of them eventually wound up in the gas chambers and ovens—same as their fellow Jews whom they were 'straw bossing' around for the Nazis. For basically 'peanuts' . . . and pathetic and pitiable 'privileges!'

"So really, no damn different with those . . . Darth Vader Joes—damn, Rache, but I love that term you so inspiredly came up with!—are low-level slaves of Constantine's Imperial Corporation—and the bishop or archbishop above them, who is also just a glorified, be-robed and be-knighted, administrative slave as well! Though of course, a slave with a monstrous and bloated zeppelin of an ego to match his exalted title—and the fancy, gilded robes and silly hat that goes with it!

"But at least the baa-bleating sheep that those Darth Vader serf-shepherds are shepherding are materially free! . . . Or relatively so, given no human being is very free, sentenced as we all are to this Gulag Earth and dominated and controlled by the temporal institutions—governments, militaries, religions, corporations—that we can see, and by the dark forces of Fate . . . and Karma . . . we cannot! . . . So anyways, they are at least free enough have all the sex they want and can get, and raise families . . . and they are allowed to get decent jobs and careers, often with those government, military and corporate institutions and earn decent pay—sometimes grotesque amounts of pay!——and partake in the nasty, back-stabbing and ego-exalting hierarchical power-games endemic to all institutions, to the point where they can become presidents and prime ministers of powerful countries, generals and admirals of giant armies and navies, and extremely powerful CEOs of giant corporations!

"Christ—just think of the billions of dollars—and other world currencies!—that that fundamentally evil corporation of Constantine's has saved over the last seventeen hundred years with its extraordinarily clever and cynical scam of those three dehumanizing—as you so aptly defined them!—vows! No wonder that vile corporation has been able to afford to build the monstrous churches and cathedrals it has! I mean, it's a corporation that is so wealthy that it not only likely owns more land than the governments of Germany and France and Italy combined, but it owns its own bank. A bank, by the way, which at the end of the war—or so I read—is reputed to have helped wealthy Nazi war criminals escape to havens in South America with their plundered-from-the-Jews money, so they could live out their final years in safety—and very 'popish' luxury. . . . Of course, that's no damn surprise, since the Emperor Pope who reigned during the Holocaust, Pius XII, was an anti-Semite and pro-Nazi who didn't go out of his way to denounce the Nazi's Final Solution because he considered it a Perfect Solution for the Abomination's need to everlastingly punish those 'infernal Jews' for murdering its precious founder, the Lord Jesus Christ—regardless that Christ was supposed to be one of the three 'aspects' of an omniscient, omnipotent and eternal God who and was about as murderable as water is wetable!

"And then there is the fact that the Vatican is a monstrous Imperial palace! A monstrous and extraordinarily opulent Imperial palace crammed full of priceless treasures and works of art and books, most of which that Constantine' Abominable Corporation is more than happy to display to a mindless and admiring world as not only the domicile of 'the Pope,' of Pontifex Maximus, this world's all-powerful and infallible, Imperial proxy of ol NON—Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy—himself, whether or not all this world's peoples yet know, or accept that fact! Or accept the fact that as bona fide proof that this sacred corporation is the bona fide creation exalted ol' NON himself, who in being both the Supreme Creator and Supreme Regent of this whole vast Cosmos, like all regents, must possess—and value and admire—wealth and opulence and power in any and all of its many temporal manifestations.

"Of course, the fact that Vatican palace and all the corporate wealth of Constantine's Abominable Corporation—and the fact of Darth Emperor Pope playing the role of the be-robed, be-crowned and kiss-my-regal-ring, Imperial Pontifex Maximus!—doesn't exactly synchronize with the putative ideals of Sonny Boy Jesus, the putative founder of that very indubitably abominable corporation, with those putative teachings of Sonny Boy's about it being easier for camels to plod through the eyes of needles than for wealthy people to squirm through the gates of heaven, but that silly Sonny Boy putatively said all that very silly and socialistic and poverty-and-humility-embracing nonsense when he was a mere humble . . . and impoverished . . . and obviously severely misguided, earthling with no experience of possessing wealth, status, and power, and was obviously not yet the resurrected Prince-son of this Universe's Supreme Regent, ol' NON—Nasty Ol' King Nobodaddy!—and had not yet taken his rightful place on his own little cosmic throne beside the really big COSMIC THRONE of ol NON, the Supreme Cosmic Regent of this Whole Vast Cosmos!

"So I don't think any baa-bleating sheep of Constantine's Imperial and Abominable Corporation can gainsay me over the fact that that corporation putatively incorporated—under its first, putative CEO, 'Saint Peter'—by the poverty-preaching and obviously misguided-about-the-dark-foundational-realities-of-the-realpolitik-world!—Sonny Boy Jesus, is one ridiculously wealthy, planet-infecting virus of a corporation! . . . No! No! Not a mere virus, but an incurable cancer!—a SLPing/gaslighting/sin-slinging carcinoma that started its lethal growth as a small but very malicious and malignant Roman 'lump' on the Nicean 'colon' of this world in 325, and has now, after seventeen hundred untreated and unchecked years, metastasized to the point where it is terminally sickening this whole damn world with its SLPing/gaslighting/ sin-slinging malice!

"And what cancer-corporation anywhere in this world wouldn't be as wealthy and able to metastasize so efficiently—and be as consistently and maliciously powerful for so many centuries!—if it could get away without paying taxes on its . . . 'tithe-taxes,'. . . and better yet, con all its employees into working for room-and-board and a bit of spending money—and all the altar boys they can diddle!—instead of decent wages . . . and decent pensions! And what government couldn't run in the black year after year if it could con—or force!—all its employees to work their butts off, like dutiful little squirrels, for nothing but acorns! And no pensions! And of course, all the while, avoiding any socialistic work stoppages—aka, strikes!—with that very clever and conning vow of obedience!"

Then, after being most strangely silent for about ten seconds, he let out a laugh, raucous laugh as he said, "Rache, you must be half asleep in the saddle—you should have tripped me up on that last assertion!"

I had to strain my dozing mind—slowly riding a horse along that beautiful trail that gorgeous fall day while listening to John's soothing voice was about as soporific a thing I had ever done—to remember a bit of what he'd just been talking about before finally saying, "Yeah—that vow of obedience turns those 'Vader Joes' into the same, non-rebelling, baa-bleating sheep as their congregations . . . which was great for that abominable corporation of Constantine's and its precious 'bottom line!'"

And with that John angled his horse close to mine and leaning over, punched me lightly on the shoulder as he said, "Except it didn't always work, did it! . . . Martin Luther was a weary-of-the-whole-business 'Vader Joe' who decided he didn't want to continue playing the role of the dutiful corporate-man, of playing the role of the baa-bleating-shepherd for Constantine's Imperial Corporation any longer, and with his tacking of his Ninety Five Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, pretty much quit his job with Constantine's Imperial Corporation—and took half of European Christianity with him! . . . The intelligent and no-so-sheepish half!"

That really woke me up to how "asleep-in-the-saddle" I'd been. Teacher that I then was and history-minor at university that I'd been, I certainly knew the importance of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, and while I was thinking about its historical importance—and the fact that that very violent and murderous history-altering event was started by the act of a rebellious, vow-of-obedience-breaking priest, John chuckled and went on.

"What I found most interesting in my readings about Martin Luther—besides the fact that the wars of the Reformation he set in motion were eventually so bloody and violent that it proved there was absolutely no Christianity in Christianity, and very few practicing Christians in 'Christendom!'—is one of the things that really provoked his rebellion against Constantine's Imperial Corporation, was that he was a lusty ol' devil of a Darth Vader-priest who was having problems with his over-active gonads—and surely his imagination!— and his need to constantly confess his problems to a fellow, Vader Joe! And after going so apostatically—take-this-job-and-shove-it!—walkabout from that infernal, Imperial Corporation with its dehumanizing vows—again, good point you made there with that dehumanizing insight!—he married a nun who told her Mother Superior to 'take this stupid job and these stupid vows and shove them under your habit,' and in the process of catching up on all that sex each of them had obviously been missing and fantasizing about, had six children. Not bad for a ex-Vader Joe who didn't become a real father until he was over thirty five! It appears the two of them lived in a state of poverty—a natural poverty, not Corporation-enforced poverty—and though several of those six children died young, Luther later wrote that his marriage had made him extremely happy and content. "

With that all I could do was nod my head and say, "Yeah, that whole Martin Luther-Reformation thing was amazing. I mean, I know that when he tacked those 'Ninety Five' onto that Church door, he had absolutely no idea of the unintended consequences he was setting in motion. Christ!—how could he, history-altering as they were! Unintended consequences that plunged Europe into a veritable violent and bloody hell! It all just devolved into a lot of very typical and very nasty . . . power-politics!. . . . But it's interesting how few people—me included, until you apprised me of it!—know that Luther had been a Catholic priest . . . well, I knew that part . . . with serious issues about that vow of chastity—and the fact that he ended up marrying an ex-nun and was very happy raising a family. I'm not sure about his wife's take on that issue, but from the sounds of it, at least he was happy!

"All this happening because Martin Luther, a previously no-name 'Vader Joe,' gets his shorts in a knot—or whatever the hell he wore under his cassock!—over the grotesque, greed-grab of that indulgences-issue, tacks that, and a bunch of other pet-peeves, to a church door, likely expecting no more than a slap on the wrist from the bishop after he'd ripped them down and tore them up, but ends up getting—horror of horrors!—excommunicated!

"And with that simple, impulsive—or maybe inspired!—act, then quite unintentionally sets in motion the events that ripped Europe apart and set it on fire with a long series wars—one bout of them lasting thirty goddamned years!—the likes of which were not to be seen again until World War One! . . . the BASS, as you like to call it. Wow—talk about a very perverse intrusion of the law of unintended consequences into history! You'd almost think some of your . . . spirits . . . were behind it! Ha! Ha!

"But going back a bit . . . when I was growing up as a well-indoctrinated—SLP'd/gaslighted—Abominationist kid, I'd just assumed that it was totally natural for priests and nuns to take their vows of poverty, chastity and obedience! And willingly doing so because they'd actually been so blessedly singled out and chosen by God Almighty, 'Himself,' to serve—in poverty and chastity . . . and with obedience—'His' manifested-on-this-Earth, one-and-only-and-holy-Church, and that because of that, it was not only their spiritual privilege to serve 'His' Church, but their spiritual duty! . . . Never for a second did I think there might be something humanly unnatural about it—especially since being a child is all about living in a form of poverty, with obedience and chastity a given, and with adulthood being the growing out of those childish and authority-dependent states of existence. Except of course, for me, chastity was down the toilet once my father turned his lustful, 'pedophilic-eye' in my direction!

"But the way you are putting things, I'm starting to see there is a real gross level of exploitation going on there. Not just with all the work that those Darth Vader-priests are expected to do in their parishes—and in keeping their churches operating—but many priests and nuns—Vaders and Zusters—teach in schools. They work for lay-Catholic school boards that pay the lay Catholic teachers good wages but those . . . Vaders and Zusters . . . because of that vow of poverty, don't get similar wages. Which means, I would assume, that the wages they would get as lay teachers goes straight to the Church! To that greedy and already ridiculously wealthy and very abominable corporation! . . . While they get . . . for all that damn hard work—and believe me, being a teacher is no teddy bear's picnic! . . . not by a long shot!—is room-and-board . . . and cigarette and booze money! And an altar-boy or young student or two as sex toys! Shit!—that really is a real damn nasty form of exploitation!

"Those Sad Sack 'shepherds' have been conned—or deluded themselves!—into believing they are what they are because they have been singled out and chosen for their role of being the Church's serfs, by the Supreme Creator Deity of this whole Universe! . . . In effect, they have been conned into believing that they are humbly toiling away for both the 'greater glory" of that Abomination of Constantine's and for the Supreme Creator Deity who singled them out and chose them to humbly and obediently serve 'His' cosmically unique and special Church, because of their spiritually superior souls, when all they are is pathetic, Sad Sack dupes throwing away their human lives in order to slave away in service of the insatiable greed and power of that damn Church! That corporation!

"And I bet after a number of years . . . when they are getting older . . . and really sexually frustrated with that celibacy shit—and having all that confessional crap dumped into their ears . . . and psyches!—they start getting tired of all that basically unpaid . . . serf-work . . . start feeling more than a little bit used and resentful . . . like a wife that's been taken for granted too long by a self-absorbed husband!! . . You know, I'm really starting to get a sense of how abominable that whole situation is! . . . I mean, like I think you told me that Irish priest said: every 'Vader Joe' would have entered the seminary as an Ordinary Joe and while in there, having 'honey-wagons' full of the Abomination's dogshit-dogma—love that phrase!—pumped into their minds and psyches, but they were not castrated or turned into any sort of bona fide holy men, which means they would go through the years of their hard, serf-laboring, 'Vader Joe' lives experiencing the same emotions and life-demands of every other Ordinary Joe on this planet.

"Shit! I'm certain they'd fall in love a few times—and in lust a ton of times!—with some of the many women and teenage girls—or men and boys, if they were inclined that way—they'd encounter in the . . . sin-box . . . and while performing their other duties. All very powerful experiences they'd have to pretend that they, as 'God's specially chosen-and-called,' are 'spiritually above' experiencing—but would be forced, by their very humanity, to experience anyway. No differently than every other ordinary Joe—but likely more powerfully, because of their peer isolation. . . . I mean, how often do you see groups of those black-robed Vaders in a bar—or strip-club, ha, ha—having a 'boy's night out'? . . . Though I think the lust problem wouldn't be near the problem that the love one would be. I mean, like we've been talking about, masturbation would easily handle the lust, but it sure couldn't do anything about the 'falling in love' problem, would it? . . . Or for that matter, the need for companionship—different sex companionship!—that is so fundamental to a healthy human life!

"I mean, when an ordinary Joe falls in love with an ordinary Jane, he may or may not pursue her, and if he pursues her, he may or may not 'catch' her and he may or may not make love to her, and they may or may not do the natural thing of marrying and raising a family, but at least has the freedom to do all that open to him. In the case of one of those Abomination-conned Vaders, that's not on the table at all. He has to take all those very natural and inevitable human feelings of his and . . . suffer them? . . . quash them? . . . ignore them? Shit, whatever this pathetic Vader-priest does with them, it ain't goddamn natural, I can tell ya! Or doesn't seem natural so to me!

"So this very emotionally powerful and very human and very natural aspect of these Darth Vaders must be—by them, themselves!—beaten down and caged like it is some kind of rabid dog! All in the name of being 'called' and 'blessed' to serve the Supreme Creator Deity of this whole damn Universe . . . and that Supreme Creator Deity's 'blessedly created' abomination of a Church! I think it is only humanly natural that many of those . . . serf-shepherds . . . that vow-darkened Darth Vaders, would, after a number of years of that . . . crazy and unnatural shit! . . . start feeling real angry and vengeful. . . and even more than a little bit crazy! And thus start getting 'their own back' by sexually acting out!

"It would seem they start out believing they are serving the Supreme Creator Deity of this whole damn Universe who had singled them out because of their superior spirituality, that 'he' had 'called' them to obediently serve his unique-in-this-Universe Church, but after too many years of that utterly thankless and obedient service that had not only deprived them of all the naturally human . . . joys . . . and processes . . . and satisfactions . . . of a natural human life . . . like love and sex and family and sexual companionship . . . and groups of socially-equal friends to spend time with at parties and barbeques and dinner outings—you know, that Aristotelian eudaimonia you often mention!—has sucked them dry without giving them even a pat on the head, they end up as mere . . . empty . . . shells . . . of human beings . . . empty shells that can only serve . . . the Devil! . . . It's . . . it's grotesque! It's evil! . . . It's no damn wonder so many of them end up behaving like Lucas's Darth Vader! And Christ, John—I'm starting to sound like you! Pontificating on and on like that! Jeez, I don't know what got into me! What possessed me!"

That got a long, mirthful laugh out of him and a bout of clapping that brought the dog running up to his horse, as he effortlessly angled it up beside mine and patting me on the shoulder said "It's called inspiration, Rache! It's what some brain-scientists call a right-brain activity that sometimes—fortunately!—afflicts even the most compulsively left-brained of people. Like you! It's damn gratifying to hear! . . . And, yup—evil it sure is! Glad you are finally beginning to see my point of view on that issue of the evil inherent in that Imperial Roman Corporation of Constantine's! And for sure, I know and acknowledge that most Vader Joes do work damn hard running their parishes. Obviously—or they wouldn't run at all. And all those lovely churches and cathedrals would be in the state of ruin—ruins like Henry XIII made of them in England during the Reformation! Ruins that I personally think they all should be in!

"Which brings us back to that 'confessional job!' When it comes to that infernal sin-box, they are not only doing a difficult and demanding job, but an insane, and very harmful-to-their-spirit-beings job! That poor, alcoholic Irish priest really drove that home to me! I mean, in my book, Constantine's Imperial Abomination created, out of whole cloth, a vast, foul, black-and-blacker tapestry of 'sins' expressly designed to SLP/gaslight oppress, manipulate, control and collie-herd its flocks of mindless, child-credulous baa-bleating sheep by driving them into states of shame and guilt and darkness over just about everything that was human in them. And of course, the most powerfully human thing in every human being is their sexuality!

"And once that evil corporation had effectively done that, it then it gave its ordinary, Vader Joe clergy the dual job of collie-shepherding and heel-nipping that flock of mindless, baa-bleating sheep wherever the very powerful Darth Emperor Pope—and his almost-as-powerful Darth Courtier Cardinals and their episcopal underlings —deemed it financially advantageous for them to be shepherded by those 'sins.' All the while being reduced to little more than black-robed darth-sponges designed to soak up all that shame and guilt and darthness of their baa-bleating, sheep parishioners!

"Actually, you could call them sin-vultures! Eaters of the arbitrary offal of all of ol' NON's endless list of hell-damning sins! It is most appropriate that those Darth Vaders, like Darth Vader, wear black, vulture-like robes! . . . Hell, they should all be required to dye their hair and faces bright red to complete the turkey vulture effect! . . . But real vultures have digestive systems designed to cope with the rotting, maggot-swarming flesh they eat, while I am pretty damn certain that those Ordinary Joes, on being ordained and turned into Vader Joes, don't go through any magical, transformative process that gives them 'spiritual' digestive systems designed to cope with all that rotting, spiritual offal.

"And speaking of the powerful digestive systems of real vultures! Christ, I remember one morning when I was driving out to the highway and I saw something . . . moving and alive . . . on the side of the road that my brain wouldn't process into anything recognizable! I had nothing . . . even in my too-many years of living! . . . to compare it to, and I was both confused and intrigued until I drove up beside it and discovered that the utterly strange and unrecognizable shape I'd driving towards had been a turkey vulture with its head stuck deep inside the gut of a skunk and enjoying its breakfast. So deeply stuck inside that it hadn't heard my truck approaching and flown off—and didn't pull its head out when I drove past it! It was really enjoying that breakfast, I can tell you!"

"Aw, Christ, John—that gross! And disgusting!"

To that he gave a chuckle as he said, "Disgusting or not—it's life! . . . But whereas turkey vultures have been 'designed' to like, and thrive on, dead-skunk-guts, however putrefied and maggot-crawling they might be, I am a hundred percent certain that when the average Vader Joe has to play the role of being a sin-vulture, of sticking his head deep into the guts of other peoples' psyches and 'eating' the worst of what's in there, he doesn't have the 'spirituo-intestinal' defenses against the putrefaction of those 'sins' that real vultures have for the putrefied guts and flesh—and maggots!—they gorge and thrive on.

"So like vultures ingesting dead, rotting flesh and maggots, they ingest all that 'sin,' . . . all the darkest, foulest, most malicious aspects of human nature . . . aspects made infinitely more dark, foul, malicious and common by the Abomination's compulsion to label them as ol' NON-Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy—displeasing 'sins' and thus make them even more appealing to those endarkened degenerates who just love the idea of displeasing ol' NON and his zillion, thou-shalt-not rules—and believe me, I doubt any normal person . . . besides a homicide detective . . . can imagine or fathom how darkly, foully and maliciously human beings can behave!—but they can't digest and crap it out like a real vulture can, so it then it just sits inside them—like a big pile of rotting skunk-guts—bubbling and churning away and getting ever more and more putrefied, until finally they have to vomit it out through their own dark, foul and malicious actions.

"It's no bloody wonder so many Darth Vader-priests end up like . . . Darth Vaders! . . . as very evil and very predatory pedophiles . . . enveloping all the weak victims they can find in their darth malice! They've been turned into demons—into demon-vultures!—by that infernal corporation of Constantine's they are serf-serving . . . and by all that dark, foul, malicious, dead-skunk offal that their time in that infernal sin-box pumps into the gut of their spirit-being, where it bubbles and churning away like all those foul things the three Macbethean witches threw into their caldron of evil! . . . And too, it is no small wonder that their higher-ups—the Darth Bishops!—allow them to get away with it—condone it, even!—because every one of those extra-Darth Bishops and Darth Cardinals—and thus every Darth Emperor Pope!—started out their very corporate careers as young, naive, entry-level Vader Joe priests!

"And always keep in mind, no Vader Joe priest gets promoted into the officer-class, gets to become an exalted and ecclesiastically powerful Darth Bishop or Darth Cardinal because he is an extra-spiritual Vader priest, but solely because he has proven himself to be a good leader and administrator—an exemplary Darth Indoctrinator . . . a superb, Darth SLP/Gaslighter! No different, really, than it is in any army! Or Air Force or Navy! And no Darth Bishop gets promoted to being a Darth Cardinal unless he has developed, not only great administrative and leadership skills, but political ones! Spiritual skills, I am sure, are real low on the list of requirements for officer-promotion in that abominable corporation—that Army/Navy/Air Force!—if they can even make the list at all!"

"So within the 'officer-hierarchy' of Constantine's Imperial 'Army,' some . . . alas, very likely many . . . of those Darth Bishops and Darth Cardinals are themselves predatory pedophiles. And if they are not themselves pedophiles—a situation that's hard to imagine!—then they at least have spent a lot of time in that infernal sin-box listening a lot of the very foul 'confessions' of a lot of pedophile, Darth Vader-priests . . . and fellow Darth Bishops and Darth Cardinals . . . and thus, by the sheer damn commonality of the phenomena, end up knowing what all is do diabolically going on, and viewing the issue, not as a manifestation of the foulest of evils amongst the 'workforce'—the serf-force!—but just as a . . . minor problem . . . for the 'troops . . . like the way the Army during the BASS used to consider trench foot—as just another minor problem to deal with—unlike the major problem of always finding more human fodder to feed the Hun's cannons!—the inevitable side-effect of the rough conditions of prolonged, cannon-feeding, trench-warfare. . . . Or consider another prevalent but 'minor problem,' those pesky venereal diseases 'the Tommies' caught while on leave, which to the Army were really no different than the blisters the Tommies got from their ill-fitting boots on long marches!"

(To be sure, the subject of pedophile priests and their legacies of debauched and unchecked malice and the wanton destruction of innocence in the young and vulnerable, wasn't in the news back then as much as it is now—no Spotlight-movie yet shining its spotlight on at least ninety six (known about) pedophile priests preying on young and innocent victims in the Boston area in the 60s and 70s, with that vile lot racking up a victim-count of over five hundred! [That lodged complaints!] Or that very recent-in-the-news, Pennsylvania grand jury cataloguing three hundred [known about] pedophile priests and their one thousand [known about] victims—but it was in the news! And as I was much later to learn in working with John's memoirs, he, as a young altar boy had been repeatedly raped by a particularly vile and debauched—and truly Darth Vader!—priest. But back to that ride on that gloriously beautiful day.)

So, again, playing devil's advocate I could but say, "Well, I am sure not all priests are pedophiles, Uncle John! I have to believe that there are lots of good priests out there. Good priests doing good work. You know—helping people cope with their grief at the death of a loved one. . . . Working with troubled teenagers. . . . Helping poor people lots . . . especially in the developing countries . . . though even in this country. Some run soup kitchens in the bad areas of cities . . . you know, that kind of stuff. . . ."

"Oh, believe me—I totally agree with you! I've never actually met a good priest because I avoid them like they are rats carrying the bubonic plague—the worse-than-bubonic-plague of Constantine's Imperial Dogshit-Dogma! And that's certainly just a personal prejudice of mine, but I can't look upon one of those black-robed, dog-collared darth-minions of Constantine's Imperial Abomination without automatically thinking—plague-rat! Or pedophile! But like I'm saying, that's just the personal prejudice of this Joe-nobody old man living on a hobby farm in on the outskirts of Nowhere in this small, inconsequential country, so, in the grand schemes of this Universe—this planet, even—it's got the same value a single algae-fart has to the Pacific Ocean! And to be truthful, I certainly have read about the good, very 'Christian' deeds done by some of them. But still, I always consider those 'good priests' to be exceptions to the norm and always doing those good, 'Christian' works in spite of Constantine's Imperial and Abominable Corporation, and not because of it!

"Though still!—however good and 'Christian' some of those bona fide 'good priests' might be, however much their spirit-beings override their indoctrinations into the shit-pit of Constantine's Imperial Abomination's dogshit-dogma, and induce them to do some truly Christian things, those Darth Vader-priests still have to fulfill their main function as unpaid employees of that foul corporation of very aggressively SLP/gaslight-peddling the very profitable SLP/gaslight 'product' of its sin-and-damnation-dogma!

"At the foundational depths of every single Darth Vader-priest's job-description is the reality that they can never be anything more—or less!—than extorting, Mafia-thugs 'selling', for their 'Darth Godfather-Pope,'—and his organization of darth-gangsters—the 'fire-insurance' of salvation—salvation from an utterly arbitrary and whole-cloth invented damnation!—to credulous 'shopkeeper-sheep' who don't want the shop of their 'afterlife' burned down for the not buying of it!"
"Christ, every single time they baptize an innocent infant, they are very seriously saying: 'This tiny, new-born human creature was born in a terrible and evil state of 'sin' that is mightily displeasing to this Universe's Supreme Creator Deity, with this dumping of 'silly water' over its tiny head and my muttering of this silly mumbo-jumbo, I am saving it from suffering for all eternity in the fires of hell—as decreed by our Almighty and Supreme Creator Deity, ol'—Does Not Exist—NON, who much as he loves all babies, just can't let them into heaven with him when they are so foully tainted by the heinous, mortal sin of being born a human being. And especially so since they were conceived through that foul and dirty sexual act that became necessary for human beings to indulge in due to that heinous fall instigated by humanity's 'first parents,' Adam and Eve, which was initiated by that deceitful and lustful Eve, and which then necessitated that all human infants must most filthily and sinfully come into this world out of a woman's filthy, sin-inducing vagina!' I mean, Jesus!—is there anything more moronic, absurd, and downright evil!—than that diarrhea-squirt of dogshit-dogma?

"In my book—for the little that it's worth!—that is not just moronic and absurd, but absolutely insane! Insane and evil! That insane and pernicious 'Hypocrite from Hippo' should be spending eternity hung up by his anything-but-virginal-cojones for having taught the evil doctrine that innocent infants can be born as sinners who need saving with a splash of water and some arcane, hocus-pocus mumbled by a darth vader-priest representing Constantine's Imperial and Abominable Corporation! Absolutely insane and evil!

"And then those Darth Vader-priests—however good and Christian you might think that they in some ways are—go on to teach to their mindless, credulous baa-bleating flocks that from every infant's 'saving' moment of baptism—and official, SLP/gaslighting indoctrination into their very corporate and very wealthy and very powerful church—they are inevitably going to grow up and become sinners who are always inevitably going to need saving from his or her inevitable sins—and always through the monopolized aegis of Constantine's Imperial Corporation, its money-extorting sacraments, and its Darth Vader minion-priests!

"I mean, face it—even the best of those black-robed, crucifix-wielding darth-functionaries of Constantine's Imperial Corporation has, as his number one-job, the task of convincing every single member of his flock of mindless, credulous, baa-bleating sheep, that each and every one of them, through their human nature, was not only born into this world as a sin-befouled, ol' NON-displeasing infant that needed an initial, fresh-from-the-womb, 'silly-water' saving from that heinous sin of being born out of that sinning woman's womb—and worse!—through her foul and filthy and sinning vagina!

"A sin that was so heinous in the eyes of ol' NON . . . of Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy . . . that should that helpless, squalling infant die before being 'silly-watered' and thus saved—cleansed of that heinous, ol' NON-displeasing sin!—then ol' NON would instantly and righteously banish it to an eternity of righteous and deserved torment in the raging fires of hell! And if that utterly diabolical crap isn't insane enough, those black-robed, crucifix-wielding darth-functionaries of Constantine's Imperial Corporation then go on to pummel those credulous, baa-bleating sheep with the just-as-diabolical dogshit-doctrine that even after being baptized and thus cleansed and saved from their original—born-of-a-woman's-vagina sin!—every infant, if it lives long enough, will also inevitably and lifelong be a sinning adult who will constantly need re-saving from those sins that he or she is inevitably going to commit, and that unless they are saved and re-saved from those inevitable sins—through the aegis of Constantine's Imperial Corporation and its Darth Vader-priests!—ol' NON, in his maliciously judgmental wisdom, will send their eternal souls to an eternity of torment in those fires of hell!

"So however much I know there are 'good priests' out there, I still don't see them as very damn good at all, given that their number one, Darth Vader-job is to shove down the throats—and up the fundaments!—of all the baa-bleating sheep of the vast flocks of Constantine's Imperial Abomination, the dogshit-dogma of that Abomination which teaches that, in Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy's cosmic eyes, if you are born a human being, you are born a fallen creature, born a foul sinner who needs saving from your foul sins through the Darth Vader-priest officiated . . . magical rituals. . . . Powerful magic-rituals that the Abomination sells to its mindless, baa-bleating flocks under the impressive rubric of sacraments—a word which, by the way, both ironically and apropos, comes from the Latin word for military oath!—with these magic-rituals having been intentionally and cosmically created for it by ol' NON himself in all his Cosmic Greatness and Cosmic Wisdom. . . . . Christ, maybe we should be renaming ol' NON, the Cosmic Wizard . . . And not just see him as an old bearded man with eyes burning with hatred for his flawed human creations, but as a tall-hatted wizard with hate-burning eyes looming over the heaven's with a giant staff emitting all kinds of giant lightning bolts! . . . Well, that sure wouldn't work would it, because then he'd be too much like the Greeks' Zeus . . . and we'd then have to imagine him surrounded by a bevy of worshipful, naked, nymph-apprentices.

"Well, putting aside such a pathetic attempt at humor, from my point of view—again, for the algae-fart that it is worth!—even the best of the 'good priests,' because their number one job is SLP/gaslighting their baa-bleating sheep flocks into believing that they are born as foul sinners who subsequently fate-doomed to live out the rest of their lives—however short or long!—as foul sinners, are like torturers who believe they are good people doing good deeds when they offer comforting words and an occasional glass of water—and two aspirins—to their victims between torture sessions!"

I thought about what John had just so vehemently said for a little bit as the horses ambled along during that sun-lowering and rapidly chilling, but still lovely day, dismissing most of it as his usual anti-Abomination hyperbole and invective that I knew he didn't expect me to pay much attention to, before finally saying, "Do you really think that the hearing of confessions is what turns priests into pedophiles, Uncle John. That sounds a little . . . simplistic . . . to me."

That got such a loud laugh out of John that my horse gave a start and the dog came tongue-lolling running out of the bush to see what was up, as he said, "Well, obviously not! But it's part of it. . . . How big a part I don't know . . . since I've never been a priest. . . . and thus never had to hear any confessions! Never had to sit for hours in that fart-fouled old sin-box playing the role of being a sin-vulture! And I sure haven't spent enough time studying the subject to even give a proper answer to it! But common sense will tell you there's other factors involved."

For some reason I right at that moment couldn't think of any myself, so I said, "Like what?"

"Well, first of all," he very seriously said. "It starts with Constantine's Imperial and Abominable Corporation's need to have total control over its serf-priests and their serf-lives by demanding they don't marry! That they don't acquire wives who can put normal wifely and familial demands on them—especially demands for a decent bit of income to raise that family on! Can you imagine what such natural demands would do to interfere with all that very lucrative serf-service those priest-serfs provide to that vile and greedy corporation!

"In my eyes—very 'jaundiced' eyes, as you too well know!—that whole notion of celibacy has no real spiritual basis and is nothing but a real clever power-grab on the part of that Imperial Corporation—especially since Joshua/Jesus, if he existed at all, was a Jew, and Judaism at that time considered it a religious duty for all males—even rabbis!—to marry and raise a family. In fact, if I correctly remember what I read about Luther, he was a lot more taken up with reading the Bible than the Abomination wanted any of its flock—its serf-priest shepherds or it baa-bleating sheep—to spend their time doing. . . . Hell, Luther translated the whole damn thing into vernacular Hun! And in knowing that infernal Bible so well, he pressed the Abomination over the fact that Jesus was, foremost a Jew, and that at the time of his ministry, all male Jews were required to marry, a fact that made a mockery of the required—and ol' NON-sanctioned!—celibacy-vow that the 'Corporation! made such an important issue out of.

"And that fact of Jewish males being required to marry and raise a family makes a great deal of logical sense, given that any given population of Jews can only be increased through conception—Heaven forbid: through sex . . . sex between a lusting man and a maybe lusting woman!—and not by conversion and blind faith in silly stories, so the practice of celibacy would not only have been an absurd and unnatural abomination to it—but a very impractical one as well!

"But of course, the other two, very clever 'serf-vows' play into that as well. The notion that the wife of any priest would willingly go along with his vows—or herself willing take!—the vows of poverty and abject obedience to the wills and whims of the Darth Bishops of Constantine's Imperial Abomination, is a non-starter! At its foundation, every wife is the real boss of every marriage—however overt or subtle her control of it might be—and the idea that any serf-priest could serve both his wife and the huge array of often profit-enhancing demands of Constantine's Imperial and Abominable Corporation and its often ego-serving and ego-obsessed Darth Bishops, is ludicrous. He'd be like a piece of toffee that two kids are fighting over that gets stretched till it breaks!"

That image got a chuckle out me as a memory surfaced of my sister and I once fighting over a piece of red licorice, each tugging on an end until it stretched to its breaking point—and I got the bigger half! But it also brought back memories of the power-dynamics in our household, and though my father always acted like he was Lord of the Manor (especially with me!) it was my mother who dominated and controlled the household. There wasn't anything she didn't know about what was going on—and over which she had some level of control.(Which says a lot about my fucking pernicious victimization at my father's hands . . . and prick . . . and mouth, doesn't it!!!!!!!!!!!!)

"I mean," John pontificated on. "Those three 'holy vows' . . . which in essence are no more than corporate contracts! . . . are, in their essence, really dark and manipulative—and, as you wisely pointed out, humanly unnatural—contract demands, to put on any human male. . . . And though the vows of poverty and obedience are fundamentally inhuman—again, as you pointed out, poverty, obedience and chastity represent the natural condition of children! . . . Ha!—the inspiration has just come to me that Constantine's Imperial Abomination deals with its pedophile-priests like they are nothing more than misbehaving children! It's a 'Well, little-boys-will-be-little-boys, won't they?'—wink-wink, nod-nod—kinda thing!"

That got an instant response out of me, "Yeah—great insight, Uncle John! I was reading an article a while back in a psychology magazine about a phenomenon called arrested development, where some types of highly dysfunctional family situations make it impossible for the 'kids' to naturally develop into mature adults. And certainly, from a certain perspective, when a young man goes off to a really . . . strictly structured . . . education in a seminary . . . then joins the 'big dysfunctional family' of 'the Church' through the taking of those three unnatural-to-any-human-adult vows—'signs' those three corporate contracts, of poverty, chastity, and obedience, they have no choice but slip into a state of arrested development in order to cope with the unnaturalness of them.

"Because those . . . corporate contracts . . . are so fundamentally onerous and unnatural, it becomes impossible for them to mature into normal, healthy adults! I mean, the instant that they would try to mature into normal healthy adults, they'd have to see those three vows—those three ridiculous and unnatural contracts!—as serious impediments to their natural process of maturing into a natural adult. Christ!—everything about their . . . jobs . . . is so . . . absolutely . . . and insanely wrong! No wonder so many priests can behave so . . . badly . . . so predatorily malicious!—and are utterly incapable of realizing they are behaving badly! Or on realizing it, facing it. Or on realizing it, make an effort to control themselves! Like goddamn little boys behaving . . . like naughty little boys! Naughty little boys with very permissive parents!"

"Arrested development! What a perfect phrase!" said John. "And a perfect explanation for a lot of things! Thank you for it. It really sums up that situation. Perfectly! Constantine's Imperial and Abominable Corporation, in the interest of enhancing its corporate power and its corporate 'profits,' and with those three unnatural, job-defining, corporate contracts, essentially keeps all of its employees—nay, not employees, its unpaid serfs!—in a state of perpetual childhood! I mean, is not childhood, for every human being, little else but that time of their lives when he or she is totally dependent on their parents and totally subject to their authority. Poverty, obedience and chasteness are to childhood what eudemonia, autonomy and sexual activity are to adulthood.

"Nature designed children to be quite content with their childhood conditions of poverty, obedience . . . to parental authority . . . and chastity for a few short years of their lives, then it rocket-launches them through puberty and into adulthood where they are meant to feel nothing but discontent for their childish poverty, their childish need to be subjected to parental authority, and their childish need not to be sexually active. In other words, they are powerfully driven, by their hormonal and spiritual changes to shuck off that childish state of being that is so natural to being a child, and make the very dramatic transformation into adults! To transform into bona fide adults who powerfully want to flourish—to make their way in the world. . . . Who want to be autonomous—to no longer suffer under the constrictions of strict parental authority. And who want to respond to their suddenly burgeoning sexuality and become sexually active adults. To become free and autonomous and procreative members of this human race!

"But Constantine's Imperial and Abominable Corporation—because it is such an inhuman abomination!—does a flanking maneuver around its serf-functionaries' emerging adult natures by making it a condition of employment that they 'sign' the very unnatural corporate contracts of poverty, obedience and chastity. Sure, sure—they sanctify those corporate contracts by euphemistically calling them 'holy vows,' but a fart by any other name still stinks up the church just as bad, so those corporate contracts, by their very natures, put those Darth Vader-priests, those serf-functionaries in a position where they then must lifelong think and behave like children. 'The Church' then becomes, to those serf-functionaries, both their new 'familial home' and the bishops their surrogate parents, and in order to play by 'the parents' rules, they all—on 'signing' those unnatural corporate contracts—must go back to thinking and behaving like pre-pubescent children!

"They must go back to being content with being powerless, obedient and non-sexual creatures—just like all pre-pubescent children! This then creates an absurd situation where a very wealthy, powerful, and influential—and exceedingly conservative and hidebound!—global corporation that is both run and totally staffed by nothing but human males who have the limited worldviews and equally limited emotional development of pre-pubescent boys. Human males but who possess adult bodies and adult hormonal drives but who, in order to function within that corporation, must think and behave like children! And of course, like all other human adults, these human males in their required state of arrested development, are still subjected to the natural and essential spiritual injunctions for growth and change that all other human adults are subjected to—as a condition of their adulthood!

"And this doesn't just apply to the thousands of Darth Joe-priests who do all the nitty-gritty serf-work for that Imperial and Abominable Corporation, and who in so gullibly and willingly doing it, empowers that infernal corporation to make all the money and acquire all the power that it has been flaunting and catastrophically abusing for seventeen hundred years, but it applies to all its 'officer-class' as well. You can't suddenly make adult 'officers' out of a bunch of 'enlisted' serf-children! The world doesn't work that way! Promotion in any institution—corporate, religious, or military—doesn't make an adult out of a boy, it just makes a very powerful boy! A boy who is usually very emotional and willful—and very easily corrupted by that power and with no capacity to use 'adult' brakes to restrain the abuse of that power!

"So all the . . . Darth Bishops and Darther Cardinals—and even the Darthest of them all, the Super-Darth Emperor himself, infallible ol' Pontifex Maximus—are just a bunch self-important, fancy-robed and funny-hatted pre-pubescent boys possessing a hell of a lot of temporal power while playing at being the adults that they never can be! . . . And I say that because as far as I opine—and for what the hell little my opinion is worth!—just as growing from a child to a teenager, an immature adult, is the going through puberty and becoming a nascent sexual being, while growing from an immature adult to a mature one involves channeling that nascent sexuality and emerging maturity into a deep, mature personal relationship with a member of the opposite sex—and then creating and raising a family.

"At one level it is a physical and psychological—and social—process and it is a very important process in the creation of a balanced and experienced human adult—both male and female. It is also a very important spiritual process that can—though too rarely, doesn't!—create a spiritually experienced and mature adult. I mean, you don't need to be Freud or a Jung to sit down in a room with a callow teenager and an aging grandpa to see the effects of that process—and I don't just mean that one is young and full of vitality and the other is old and maybe . . . not so vital. But I think you know what I mean . . ."

He paused there as my cue to add something to the conversation and I didn't have to think very long before saying, "Yeah, you got a good point there, Uncle John. When I think back to the self-centered teen I had been . . . self-centered!—Christ, to me at that time the whole damn Universe was me! . . . and who I had to . . . grow . . . expand . . . into, to become even a not very good wife and mother. Especially a mother! Hell, it's like looking at two totally different . . . me's! . . . And I am sure that if you and I had tried having this . . . 'conversation' . . . back then, I'd have given myself a headache rolling my eyes at just about everything you've been saying. In fact, to my 'back-then ears,' you'd have been speaking . . . Swahili!"

I was looking at John as I said that and his response was deep frown and a slight jerk of his head as he said, "Yeah, this stuff we're talking about is something a person has to be ready for. . . Has to be mature enough to understand. And more importantly, to care about! But I think you are likely selling yourself short as a wife and a mother, Rache! You're doing a great job . . . given that you played into the hands of Fate by marrying a combined version of both your totally self-centered and self-serving parents. But the main thing is you are constantly struggling to not be like your mother as a mother! That's a lot more important than you realize! And it takes a level of consciousness and maturity that few parents' possess!"

Those words made me feel good, but before I could say anything else, he went on, "So if you can accept the proposition that part of being . . . of becoming . . . a truly human and mature human being—in all four categories of that essential process: the physical, the psychological, the social and the spiritual, is to go through the process. It's like the process a lump of dough has to go through to become a loaf of bread. It has to be kneaded and allowed to rise and then be punched down and allowed to rise again—and of course baked!—before you can end up with a loaf of decently edible bread. (John always made his own bread—as well as those oatmeal cookies—so he knew what he was talking about.) But Constantine's Imperial Abomination is completely staffed and run by a huge bunch of basically post-pubescent boys in a permanent state of that arrested development! . . . Well, at best, very immature adults . . . very immature adults who have gone through none of the processes that turn a . . . callow, self-obsessed teenager . . . into a mature and loving human adult.

"So we today have an historical situation that was essentially created by a very powerful and influential—and intrinsically very fascist and totalitarian!—corporation, that for its very long lifespan was—and is still run!—by a bunch of very powerful and corrupted—and very immature and very undeveloped as true human beings—teenagers . . . immature adults . . . who in having gone through puberty, possess adult hormones and adult lusts and adult ambitions and adult self-importance, but have not gone through the necessary maturing process that would normally induce them to behave like adults. Which of course, as you would put it, creates on very fucked-up corporation!

I mean, can you imagine . . . General Motors . . . or the army of a powerful nation . . . or the government of the United States . . . being totally run by a bunch of callow teenagers. (Ha! I couldn't help but shriek with banshee laughter as I typed out those words, because that is the situation this world faces today, where its most powerful nation is being "run" by Mad King Donald, who in terms of maturity, doesn't even qualify as a teenager! A temper-tantrum addicted toddler seems to be the age-level many psychologists and psychiatrists—and news pundits—are attributing to him!)

"I mean, most of those Darth Joe-priests enter the seminary as callow teens and, in order to truly be 'hired' and become true 'company men' of that invidious corporation, they must 'sign' those three corporate contracts that guarantees they will live out the whole of their 'adult' lives in the states of poverty, chastity, and obedience. . . . Well, hell—with those insane corporate contracts . . . that get passed off as sacred vows to ol' NON, those teenage lads . . . those very immature adults . . . are being forced to regress to being pre-pubescent children who must enter their new family—the Church—as impoverished, chaste, and always-obedient-to-authority children! And like children, are given a pittance of an allowance—but no decent wages!"

And here I could but interrupt his pontification with, "Christ, John—looking at things that way, it all looks downright . . . insane! . . . Or more like downright evil! I mean . . . shit—as soon as you strip all the religious . . . superstition and nonsense . . . and ol' NON . . . out of the equation, you are left with something that is really . . . sick . . . and insane! . . . Christ, I remember a close friend of mine who wanted to get married 'in the Church' and she and her fiancé had to go to 'marriage counseling' sessions with a . . . Darth Vader-priest . . . before he would agree to marry them. Fuck!—what the hell does some . . . forever teenager . . . in a state of permanent arrested development . . . who has never been married, know about marriage? He wouldn't have a fuckin' clue! Everything would have to come out of books! . . . And all of that sure explains that . . . Abomination's . . . two most absurd . . . dog-shit dogmas: no birth control and no divorce."

That got a harsh, bitter, chain-saw laugh out of John, but he said nothing, his silence encouraging me to rant on. (It wasn't until I read his memoirs that I discovered those were two very contentious issues for John—and for Catherine. Issues that very much affected—and basically destroyed!—their marriage!)

"I mean, what the fuck can a bunch of . . . forever teenagers . . . in a state of severe arrested development . . . who have never been married . . . and who have never fathered and tried to raise children . . . know about either subject! Fuck—immediately after Terry was born, I went back on the pill because I just knew that two was the kid-limit for me. And when it came time for Hubby and I to split—and divorce—it was time! Really time! I mean, if I'd been a practicing . . . Abominationist! . . . we who'd followed that infernal Abomination's dogshit-dogma about birth control, we could have had four . . . even five . . . kids before things between us got as toxic as they did and both of our lives got saved by us splitting—and divorcing. . . . I haven't remarried . . . yet . . . but at least it is on the table . . . as a possibility . . . should I ever find the courage . . . or be so foolish!

"But my point is, what the hell do a bunch of never-married Darth Vader-priests . . . and Darth Bishops and Darth Cardinals . . . and that darthest Darth of all, the Pope, in never having been married and never having had to raise a family, truly know about marriage? And the loving and raising of kids? And the fact that so often two people marry when they are so incredibly young . . . and then they change—especially once the kids start to arrive!—and things start to change in the relationship! Sometimes for the better but often for the worst! Especially if the husband is in a state of arrested development and can't accept that most of the attention he was getting from his wife is now going to the kids! And most of the sex has gone down the toilet, too! Things can get real damn toxic between them! Real damn toxic! Which is never good for either parent—or the kids. Especially the kids! They really suffer when things go to total shit between their parents! . . . And not just the fighting and shouting, but the psychic . . . vibe . . . around the place. Toxic! That's all I can say—toxic! But what could and of the Darth . . . Assholes . . . of the Abomination know about that stuff, given they have never experienced it. They'd be like doctors who take up brain surgery after reading a book about it!

"And speaking of kids! No woman knows what the hell mothering is all about until she starts . . . mothering. And same with the father and . . . fathering! You just can't know until you are in the damn situation! Like swimming—you gotta get in the water before you can learn to swim! Some mothers and fathers can handle a whole damn brood of kids, and some can barely handle one. But those Darth Vader . . . asshole-priests . . . those dog-collared idiot-savants . . . who get all their learning about the subject out of books—if they get any of the fucking stuff at all!—will tell practicing Catholic parents that regardless of how many children they can cope with—or fucking afford!—whatever number they end up with will always be 'God's will' and not their own!

"It truly is insane! Insane that those arrogant no-nothing-about-the-subject, Darth Vader-Assholes, will manifest the hubris to tell parents that they must have and raise as many children as 'God gives them!' Regardless of whether or not they can cope with—or afford them! Like those children aren't going to suffer if their parents can't cope with them. If their mother has a nervous breakdown—I sure felt like I have come close a few times, believe me!—and ends up in the psych-ward of the hospital for some pill—and shock-therapy—to help her cope. . . . And I guess we've had this conversation before, because I seem to remember you once commenting on the insanity . . . on the manifest evil . . . of the Pope, on visiting Third World countries, telling the impoverished inhabitants of it that it is a grievous sin against ol' NON if they practice the very unnatural act of birth control, but there is nothing unnatural about having ten children and having to watch six of them die because they can't be properly fed . . . or medicine afforded for them when they get sick!"

That got a long, heartfelt sigh out of John as he said, "Yeah—I'm gratified you remember me saying that. If I remember correctly, I compared it to an army using blind men as sniper instructors! It truly is insane. And evil! Very evil, dogshit dogma solely and cynically designed to 'cow' the ignorant and credulous, baa-bleating sheep into behaving like compliant baa-bleating sheep-flocks—even when it is not only patently illogical, but downright against their best interests . . . and their Aristotelian eudemonia! . . . I often get the impression you are not really paying much attention to me when I go off on my . . . pontifications . . . my rantifications . . .but then, I tend to forget just how damn smart you are and that you likely don't seem to be paying attention because you've already figured out a 100% of what I am saying after I've only said 40% of it."

Those words, of course, made me feel damn good—and were likely 60% true—but before I could think of anything to add, he spurred on his "pontification pony"—his rantification racehorse!—and said, "So here we—this whole damn cursed and pathetic world!—has a situation where it's most powerful and influential religion is not a religion at all but just a very powerful and very greedy corporation that sells landmines and grenades designed to look like breviaries and votive candles! A very powerful and greedy global corporation that is staffed and run—ruled!—by a group of forever-teenagers in a forever-state of arrested development! If that isn't about the worst situation imaginable for this world, I don't know what it is—and it sure explains a lot about the situation this world is in today, which, as I've said before, is a situation—and a world—created by its seventeen hundred years of history being dominated and directed by that abominable corporation!"

I had no choice but to ride on in silence, as I thought about what he'd said. Not much that John ever said to me in his 'pontifications'—except all that fucking inorganic being shit!—ever really affected me, but the idea that the very powerful and wealthy, Roman Catholic Church—that "venerable institution" that my baa-bleating sheep-parents truly did believe ol' NON himself had created to save us pathetic human beings from the sin-flaws he had designed into us!—could be run by a bunch of power-corrupted 'teenagers' in a permanent—and self-proud!—state of arrest development, really disturbed me.

(I'd been forced to study William Golding's disturbing, testosterone-at-its-worst book, Lord of the Flies in high school, and looking at the history of Constantine's Imperial Abomination through the lens that arrested development thesis, it was easy to see why that Imperial Abomination had for all the way-too-many-goddamned-centuries of its dark and violent—and very fascist and totalitarian!—existence, behaved with such similar and abominable, Lord of the Flies, savagery!

I mean, what were the wars of the Reformation but a continent-wide Lord of the Flies scenario! Historically speaking, it was obvious that the Abomination has never been run by psychologically and spiritually evolved, fulfilled and mature adults—as proven by the histories of more than a few utterly debauched popes who turned the Vatican into the world's biggest and richest frat/whore house!—just a long succession of crazed and power-corrupted children! Crazed and power-corrupted children who couldn't handle adult growth and change and responsibility at all, and did their best to keep things always the same and predictable—and thus something they could child-cope with through Lord of the Flies violence.

Through torture and outright murder! I mean, what was that whole murderous, Gestapo-Inquisition thing but a frantic attempt to keep things stable and the same—so those forever-children/never-adults in their state of terminal arrested development, could cope with it. And the just-as-murderous Crusades! And of course, seventeen hundred years of misogyny that culminated with those murderous "witch hunts!" In those egregious slaughters of women who putatively possessed psychic and spiritual powers that they often purportedly used to help a lot of people—particularly in their roles as mid-wives!—but, whatever the hell they were, they were very likely helping a lot of people in a hell of a lot more ways than harming them!

Those absolutely pernicious "witch hunts" are particularly interesting because they represent just how a bunch of forever-boys trying to live on an "island"—the woman-free island of their precious, totally-male "Church!"—of their own making, and as well live like frightened, women-hating little boys while inhabiting adult bodies with adult hormones coursing through them, and, quite inevitably, because of the unnaturalness of the situation, end up in a centuries-long situation where they lack all ability to understand and deal with women—and understand and deal with marriage and family situations!—and thus could but fear those women and the families they inevitably—and so naturally—want to create. And in thus misunderstanding and fearing women the way they had no choice but do, they had no problems oppressing and restricting and torturing and murdering them. As even today they have no problems restricting and oppressing us! And denying women any meaningful roles in their "all-boys-club" of their precious Church!)

We rode on in silence for a while before John finally got his "pontification pony" back in motion with, "So no 'bloody wonder' that Abomination has wreaked such monstrous havoc on this world for the seventeen hundred savage years of its pernicious, cancerous, basically puerile existence! An utterly puerile, arrested development situation that had those always frightened but very powerful . . . puer aeternus's . . . using force and violence to solve all their problems . . . to keep things always the same . . . and safe . . . and secure! The way all children need things to be in order to feel safe and secure! Starting with the outright destruction of all rival—and thus threatening—Christian sects, then onto the utter and ruthless destruction of the Pagans.

"But alas, they didn't just destroy those poor Pagans, but their very naturalist religions—and their sacred groves!—but their legacy of culture and art and very importantly, philosophy, the intentional destruction of which dropped Europe down into the deep shit-pit of a thousand years of intellectual and cultural darkness that it only crawled out of during the Renaissance with the re-discovery of all that scorned and scorched Pagan philosophy. Western Europe's re-discovery of Plato and Aristotle during the Renaissance can likely be compared with that momentous day for those living north of the Arctic Circle when the long Polar Night finally ends with the shining over the horizon of the first bright rays of the returning sun!

"Then there were the Cathar Crusades —just a brutal slaughter, really, of a small group of French Christians who were unwise enough to behave like real Christians—followed by the more famous, 'Holy Land' Crusades. And of course, the ne plus ultra of 'the Abomination's' seventeen-hundred-year Reign of Puerile Aeternus Ecclesiastical Terror, the Inquisition! Not forgetting, naturally, those infernal and gratuitously murderous 'witch hunts' . . . which of course, had a whole lot less to do with actual witches than it did with a virulent outbreak of very puerile, puer aeternus, ecclesiastical misogyny! . . . And those equally infernal and gratuitously murderous pogroms, those thousands of proto-Holocausts perpetrated by the endemically anti-Semitic 'Church' and its mindless and ravaging—and extraordinarily puerile—'Christian' mobs, against the 'Christ-murdering' Jews!

"We can't, of course, forget to mention the first of the real martial 'slaughter-fests' of history—the The Thirty Years War, so bloodily and savagely fought over issues of dogshit-dogma! And of course, political power—as if the word Christianity isn't a synonym for political power! And being in the presence of an intelligent and independent modern woman, how can I neglect to mention 'the Abominable Corporation's' seventeen-hundred-year animus towards women, which not only sanctioned, but even encouraged, incalculable amounts of oppression and marital violence towards them, while instituting the fanatical, Inquisitorial witch-hunts and witch-burnings! And of course, nothing spotlights the fundamental puerility of that deranged horde of pre-adolescent punks—as you so like to call such creatures—like their unnatural and extraordinarily unhealthy—to the point of utter lunacy!—veneration of that pre-adolescent girl, the ever-pure, Virgin Mary! Like—as you've more than once astutely pointed out—it's even possible for any 'girl' who is going through puberty to not to also go just a little bit 'boy crazy' and have her adolescent head filling up with dreams, visions and desires to rid herself of that 'purity,' that virginity, which, again as you have pointed out, no psychologically healthy girl can see as a positive virtue, but just a natural condition of her now naturally-outgrown childhood!

"And that above list of puerile atrocities of the consummately atrocious Abomination just scratches the surface of seventeen hundred years of otherwise inexplicable, gratuitous, and unrestrained violence—and outright barbaric—and systematic—savagery! It all becoming so perfectly understandable when viewed through the truth-lens of the fact that that utterly abominable corporation has been run for so world-damning long by a self-perpetrating, self-congratulating rat-pack of power-crazed males with adult bodies full of adult hormones but possessing the psyches of cowardly children living in terror, not only of the world-at-large, but of the twin specters of their denied and undeveloped adult natures and their savage and pandered-to child natures!"

And as John finished "rantifcating" on that subject, I most strangely, unexpectedly gratuitously, had appear in my tiny imagination a dramatic, over-sized vision of the perfect metaphor for that dark and violent historical disaster that the Roman Catholic Church—Constantine's Imperial Abomination!—surely has been for the last seventeen hundred years—a gang of miscreant and utterly malicious punks—yobs, as the Brits say—managing, in the middle of the night, to start up a giant bulldozer parked at a construction site, after which they gleefully and maliciously drive it through a neighboring subdivision full of sleeping people!

And so, for several minutes we rode on in silence while I thought those thoughts and John continued to muster his Swiss Guard of ideas for the next stage of his "pontifical assault," finally saying, "Like you so astutely pointed out, all three of those 'holy vows,' those three corporate contracts, are fundamentally unnatural and can but lead to that so perfectly defined state of arrested development, and the way I see it, they represent the three-blow combination of punches in a the 'Imperial Heavyweight Boxer's" arsenal, the vows of poverty and obedience being body-blows that get the young seminarian to drop his guard, with the vow of celibacy being the upper-cut that sends him senseless to the mat of the rest of his Darth Vader life!

"Let's face it, all those seminarians are ridiculously young and wet behind the ears—and hot and wet in the groin!—when they delusionally convince themselves they've been given 'the call'—by the Supreme Creator Deity of this whole damn Universe!—to served Constantine's Imperial Corporation as one of its dog-collared, Darth Vader-functionaries . . . I mean, how many septuagenarians are there applying to be priests?"

That incited John to let out a long chuckle before he went on, "Well, maybe that's not such a rhetorical . . . or dumb . . . question, in light of the lunacy of the vow of celibacy! Seventy or older is the perfect age for men to apply for that ludicrous job—but then, of course, they'd be too old and weary to do it! And too smart and world-wise to get conned into applying for it! You don't have to be a Freud or a Wilhelm Reich to know the power of the human sex drive . . . and the need for a sexual partner who is always available . . . and sometimes even willing. . . . Which of course, brings those other two crazy vows—corporate contracts!—into the picture, because puberty doesn't just open a human being up to their very powerful and life-dominating sex drive, it concomitantly—as we've talked about—opens them up to the powerful need—the drive!—to become an autonomous, free-choice-making human being! Which really—again!—drives home the fact that there is there is something fundamentally unnatural—even evil!—about that corporate contract of obedience!"

"You've got a good point there, Uncle John!" I interjected. "Christ, until puberty arrives, the hardest period of raising any child is that 'terrible two' phase when every toddler wants to express its individuality and independence! It reaches a point where it can only take so much parental control—so many parental 'NO!'s'— and then it rebels—and defiantly starts saying 'No!' to just about everything the parent tells it to do! Of course, difficult as that period is, it's a cake-walk compared with puberty and all the defiance and independence . . . and acting-out . . . and hormonal moodiness! . . . that comes with that period! Especially since they are by then way too big to make it easy for a parent to force them to do what they want! . . . Can't grab 'em by the hand and drag 'em—kicking and screaming—away from the 'candy display' of the television . . . or the refrigerator . . . or the computer game console"

"Good point! Very good point, Rache!" John said. "I'm not at all familiar with what you call the 'terrible two' phase (As you will read in his memoirs, John had only one child, little Johnny, and he wanted nothing to do with him when he was little!) but it does show that very deeply built into our human psyche is the need to be a free and independent entity. A need that again manifests itself in a real powerful way at puberty—and in a normal, healthy human being, all through the rest of their adult lives!"

And while I was thinking about all the very unnatural—and surely painful and unhealthy!—obedience that so many wives—and girls and women in general!—had to endure as daughters and wives and sisters, in all of those demonically patriarchal, mid-Eastern—and Eastern!—cultures, John went on.

"So that very obvious fact definitely throws a spotlight on the fact that Constantine's Imperial and Evil Corporation's demand of the vow of obedience from its serf-priests is vilely unnatural! . . . And as a corollary, any young man who has gone through the always-powerful-and-tumultuous, independence-establishing process of puberty, only to immediately discard it like a cigarette butt in order to take a vow of total obedience to the hierarchy of Constantine's Abominable Corporation—just to get a lifetime job that basically pays only the equivalent of a parental allowance!—has to have something very deeply and fundamentally wrong with him. Christ!—it's crazy to think that every single young man who enters a seminary had a more powerful sense of human independence when he was two than he had at eighteen!

"Just thinking about throwing away my fundamental human autonomy like that makes me feel like I have been turned into an organ-grinder's monkey who must wear a silly suit and a silly cap and dance away its life—for peanuts!—in the street to the organ-grinder's tune while holding up a tin cup to all passers-by so the organ-grinder can get rich!"

"Ha, ha!—Uncle John! Great image! Now whenever I see a priest I'll always see a pathetic, dancing monkey in a silly suit and cap with a chain going to the back of his dog-collar and connecting him to a fat, leering, golden-robed bishop while performing to his parishioners and holding up a tin cup-collection plate—and I'll not be able to help laughing my head off!"

That got a chuckle out of John as he said, "Yeah, it's a funny, cartoonish vision worth . . . a thousand words . . . and a good laugh—but it truly is a serious situation! We, as human beings, are born with natural drives that naturally develop as we go through our childhood and then are rocket-launched by puberty into adulthood. It is natural for us to want to be independent—and adult!—human beings who are making our independent way through life.

"Hell, Constantine's Imperial god-babblers are always prattling on about our human free will—which ol' NON has so lovingly given to us so we can be so profoundly free and human—even whilst they have basically sold theirs for a job working—basically for chump change—as an indentured serf for that nasty old cosmic tyrant through Constantine's Imperial Corporation. For chump change—chimp change!—and for the privilege of proxy-wielding a lot of power over pathetic and despicable flocks of baa-bleating sheep, a job that pretty much lifelong enslaves them even as it corrupts the hell out of them!

"And no less is it is natural for us, with the onset of puberty and natural adulthood, to respond to our very natural and powerful sex drive and very naturally have sex . . . and acquire a spouse. . . who will also be a very necessary helpmate and companion . . . and raise a family—a life-consuming undertaking that will require us having a decent-paying job.

"And along comes Constantine's Imperial and Abominable Corporation, first passing itself off as a religion, then playing the big con of hoodwinking all its potential 'employees' into believing that they aren't really working for 'the Corporation' at all, but for ol' NON—the Supreme Creator and Ruler of this Whole Damn Universe!—himself, and in being chosen . . . in being called! . . . by that august Cosmic 'personage,' they then must take—and live!—those three humanly unnatural vows/contracts of poverty, chastity and obedience. Hell!—I can't even imagine how they get one single sane male to apply for—and accept!—a job like that!"

And here I had to interject. "But John—you've been an . . . apostate . . . for so long that I think you've totally forgotten that when children are raised—indoctrinated!—by their Catholic parents on as much Catholic dogshit-dogma—as you so accurately call it!—as they have food, their belief in the power and holiness of that Church can be both total and very overwhelming! I mean, it is all very clever and persistent brainwashing—SLPing/gaslighting!—right from baptism—the 'silly-watering' on! Damn, but I love that phrase! And scientists have proved how powerful and effective brainwashing can be! . . . Just as psychologists are starting to understand the power of gaslighting. And sure, most intelligent and willfully independent Catholic kids don't buy into all that brainwashing/gaslighting shit for very long, but some of those kids are real weak and gullible—and maybe downright stupid . . . not school/classroom stupid, but real life stupid! . . . I guess!—and they do buy into it! Buy into the whole pernicious program!

"And they end up being the ones who actually do believe in the existence of . . . ol' NON . . . in your Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy . . . and believe in that fictional monster so totally that they can also believe 'he,' in his divine and cosmic wisdom, has personally chosen—has called!—them to serve 'him.' Though this doesn't just apply to brain-dead boys! And boy-men! There seems to be—or at one time there was!—no shortage of stupid—or just piously deranged!—girls who want to become 'brides of Christ' and spend the rest of their lives fantasizing about having celestial sex with ol' NON's 'Sonny Boy Jesus,' instead of marrying some human male asshole and at least having a bit of real sexual fun . . . for awhile at least! And in the delightfully lusty process, having some great kids, which can make it all worthwhile! And those 'dumb, pious broads' actually believe that is a great, egotistical honor to be a 'fantasy bride' of the mythical, Sonny Boy!

"And of course, a big part of all the Church's—the Abomination's!—brainwashing also revolves around the Church having convinced all its baa-bleating sheep that it is a hallowed institution that actually had been created, as you so sarcastically and accurately put it, 'by 'the Supreme Creator and Ruler of this Whole Damn Universe' ol' NON—or by his pathetic, self-sacrificing, died-for-humanity's-sins, 'son'—and that working for that institution as an unpaid serf who can't have sex . . . or any independence . . . or even a modicum of wealth . . . or even any independent thoughts of his own—is a great privilege! A cosmic privilege! So I can sure see why some . . . real Catholic losers . . . some real social fuck-ups! . . . get sucked into serving that Imperial Abomination of Constantine's the way they do! I can see why they are so willing to turn themselves in unnatural, silly-dressed monkeys lifelong dancing to a bishop's organ—no pun intended!—while holding up a tincup-collection plate and begging a lot of wealth out of the very often poor-as-church-mice . . . heh, heh . . . baa-bleating sheep-parishioners . . . sorry about making a smoothie out of those metaphors! . . . for the Church . . . for 'the Corporation,' as you like to so accurately put it!

"Though to be sure, all Darth Vader-priests can't be that stupid . . . or that fucked-up! Shit, those Darth Jesuits that you hate so much are famous for being some of the smartest people on this planet. . . . And then there are those Darth Vader Priests who go on to become Darth Bishops and Darth Cardinals—the 'officer corps' of Constantine's Imperial Army, as you've sometimes called it—so there must be something more to it than I can see."

My long and unusually thoughtful little speech must have really shocked—and thrilled—Uncle John, for it provoked him to again angle his horse towards mine, reach out and again pat me on the shoulder before pulling away and saying, "Atta girl, Rache—nice to see you doing a bit of thinking on this lovely—and according to that hawk, very important ride!—and adding something to our 'conversation.'

(John was more than a little cognizant of the fact that I didn't as naturally take to thinking all the time about just about everything the way he did—I mean, Jesus, who the hell did!—and he was also cognizant of the fact that he often used me as little more than a sounding board for all his compulsive thinking about all those things no one else wasted two seconds of their life thinking about! Especially concerning his idée fixe, the absolutely evil nature of that infernal, Imperial Abomination—Corporation!—created so long ago by that cunning, ruthless, evil and utterly Roman emperor, Constantine!)

"You make a good point of me being an apostate—a fancy word for a intelligent and free man . . . or woman!—for so long that I no longer have any real idea anymore about the powerful indoctrinations—SLPings/ gaslightings—that go on to create the precious 'faith'—the baa-bleating, sheep-stupid credulity!—of 'the Faithful,' but there's an element in there that we've already talked about and which is very important—and which likely is a powerful, appealing force for those . . . losers . . . those social fuck-ups, as you so aptly describe them—and that is power! Power and status! Personally, I don't think any intelligent Catholic can reach their late teens or early twenties without questioning—and fundamentally doubting—all the discombobulated, fairy-tale nonsense in those four gospels on which the whole of Christianity is purportedly based! . . . Keeping always in mind those cynical words of Pope Leo the tenth about the service the 'myth of Christ' had given the Abomination over the centuries . . . or all that legalistic dogshit-dogma that Constantine's Infernal Corporation passes off to its vast flocks of baa-bleating sheep as the divinely-dictated 'will-and-word' of ol'—Does Not Exist—NON!"

And here I just had to interrupt him with, "Late teens and or early twenties . . . ? Gimme a break, Uncle John! I real clearly remember thinking that those gospel . . . fairy tales . . . were utter nonsense when I was six! The whole 'baby-Jesus-born-in-a-stable-to-a-mother-who-was-a-virgin' nonsense was just that for me—nonsense! I remember looking up the word virgin in the dictionary just to find out what was so special about Mary being a virgin . . . and then, when I found out it was a woman who had never had intercourse with a man, I looked up intercourse in that dictionary, where I came across the word sex, which I then looked up in our proudly displayed set of Encyclopedia Britannica . . . that my mother had allowed my father to buy from some slick salesman because she wanted all her kids to be real smart and educated. . . and discovered it was some real yucky stuff—it even had a really yucky diagram showing what a man and a woman did together with his piddidle and her privates . . . which it called a penis and vagina respectively, two harmless enough words that sure made me wonder why my mother insisted on using her silly, piddidle and privates, instead of those proper words .I mean, like Wise Willy said, 'a rose by any other name!' So here this venerable encyclopedia was telling me that babies weren't brought into this world by storks—another favorite fable of my mother's—but through that yucky act of intercourse in which a man stuck his penis into the woman's vagina! It sure didn't then sound to me like a fun way for babies to get made, but it sure made a lot more sense than storks bringing them into this world—swinging from little white sheets hanging from their big beaks!

"But in those silly gospels, Mary didn't have to do that yucky penis-in-the-vagina intercourse stuff with her husband Joseph because the mighty Angel Gabriel looked after that baby-stuff for her. That sure sealed that deal for me that those gospels were all total nonsense—especially after reading all that yucky intercourse stuff in the encyclopedia which made me think that the Angel Gabriel must have put his penis in Mary's vagina in order to make the baby Jesus! Somehow my imagination just couldn't create an image of that happening. I mean, we'd always been taught that angels weren't physical creatures, so where would Gabriel get a physical penis to real yucky put in Mary's physical vagina in order to make the baby Jesus? And if he did happen to have a physical penis that he put into Mary, then she wouldn't have been a virgin anymore, would she? I mean, fuck!—no pun intended!—but I was totally confused! . . . Not that the damn silly story of Jesus rising alive from his tomb after being rotting-away dead for three days hadn't already done that!

"And hell, if all of that hadn't 'sealed the deal' on the utter nonsense of those gospels, it would be extra-sealed today by all that misogynistic, dogshit-dogma of the Abomination, that makes it so all Catholic girls have only three 'career choices'—become nuns and try to live their life as a proxy 'Virgin Marys'; be a 'cock sucking ho,' like Mary Magdalene; or be the proud—and exhausted—mother of a dozen good Catholic brats! Or a dozen and a fucking half like your poor mother!"

That outburst got a loud and instant laugh out of John as he said, "You sure were damn precocious as a six-year-old. No wonder you drove your baa-bleating ewe of a mother into fits of baa-bleating despair over you! We only ever had one book in our house and that was the infernal Bible, and I sure didn't know how to read two words in it. Not even the cover! Lise could read it—she was as precocious as hell . . . like you!—but I sure couldn't! And when she tried to teach me to read, none of that letter-and-word business made any sense at all! All it did was make real frustrated and real angry! I almost kicked a pig half to death getting out my frustrations after one of her reading lessons.

"So anyways, we have this situation where Constantine's Imperial Corporation consistently indoctrinates all of its baa-bleating sheep . . . and ewes—who aren't blessed with the questioning intelligence of a precocious six-year-old!—into believing all the nonsense in those gospels that no intelligent, thinking . . . precocious six-year-old!—can believe! Or, more accurately, no intelligent, thinking six-year-old can believe them to be accurate records of historical events! Sure, they can be passed off as boring fairy tales for kids! . . . Really stupid kids! . . . Or as gnostic myths for adults who understand them to be as such, and in doing that can glean the spiritual wisdom that they were inspired to carry and transmit. . . . Though I am curious about your precocious judgment of them—did you ever reveal to anyone that you thought all that stuff to be nonsense? . . . Somehow I get the feeling you were way too smart to do that!

"Yup, I sure was too smart to do that! I was as proud as Punch of that, but I was certain that if I told my mother about my 'big insight' that she'd first 'lay a whuppin' on me with a hair brush or wooden spoon, then run to the church and tell a priest and he'd come and haul me off to some Goo-lake as punishment. I was also real proud when around that same time I figured out there was no Santa Claus . . . or Tooth Fairy . . . or Easter Bunny. All those childish things seemed to 'go out the window' at once. Though I also remember being smart enough to know that it wouldn't be wise for me to mention that fact to my parents either, because I was worried they would quit giving me the stuff that went with those silly stories.

"In fact, now that I think of it, I remember one of the things that kept me from telling my mother that I thought all those gospel stories were total nonsense, was we'd been taught in school that glorious story about Saint Joan of Arc getting 'burned at the stake' because it was thought she had something to do with devils, and I figured my mother would think that those bad ideas of mine about the gospels came from devils, and that she'd tell the priest and he'd come and haul me away to 'the stake' and burn me too. Or that she'd do it herself—in our barbeque. . . . I guess I was already sensing even back then that she sure didn't like me very much!"

That got a loud guffaw out of John as he laughing said, "Yeah—I can almost see your mother feeling righteously justified in doing that—but then she would have had to bust the family budget forking out for a new barbeque! . . . And I think the neighbors might have complained about the smoke . . . and the smell! . . . So I take it you can agree with me that it's a given that no moderately intelligent and moderately educated adult—or any precocious six-year-old!—can believe those silly, discombobulated 'fairy tales' are bona fide records of historical events.

"Or accept all the unrealistically saintly dramatis personae in them as historical personages! They can only force—or delude!—themselves into pretending they believe them to be so! Their 'faith' is either all a pathetic and usually transparent sham—or pathetic, very childish, baa-bleating credulity! And they know it!

"So assuming that to be true, I think I am on solid ground saying that I doubt that any seminarian with even a modicum of intelligence has, since the Dark Ages when ignorance was . . . de rigueur!—been ordained a priest without absolutely knowing that everything he is supposed to believe about ol' NON and his willing-to-be-crucified-for-humanity's-sins, son, Jesus—and Constantine's Imperial Corporation that was supposedly created by one or the other of those Creators of the Cosmos, humanly personified concepts—is all total hokum! Is all nothing but childish, sheepish, baa-bleating credulity elevated, through delusion and wishful-thinking up to that sickening euphemism for credulity that they shout-from-the-rooftops as their precious FAITH!

"Hell, nothing is more amazing than those adult sheep who make a big, self-righteous and vociferous, baa-bleating ego-trip about their FAITH, about their total and absolute credulity concerning myths and fairy tales no intelligent child over six can take literally!

"But that infernal and abominable, Imperial Corporation has a lot of power and status that any young man wanting to become a Darth Vader serf-priest knows they can tap into—especially if they have ambitions to get promoted into that 'executive class' of that Imperial Corporation and become Darth Bishop, or Darth Cardinal—or even that loftiest of executive positions, its CEO and darthest officer of all, Darth Emperor Pope!

"So with their silly heads full of those entrancing, power-dreams, they go after that job like a starving wolf after poisoned meat! Except in this case, the 'wolf' is starving because it has something fundamentally wrong it! It can't fit into . . . can't find its proper place in the pack . . . can't be a proper wolf! . . . It's a loser-wolf! It's a fucked-up wolf, as you so accurately put it! And that is why it is starving and feels the need to go after the poisoned meat of being a Darth Vader serf-priest—all the while filled with grandiose ego-dreams of someday being an executive serf! A Darth Bishop or a Darth Cardinal ! . . . Or if they are full of enough malice to learn and practice the dark, Machiavellian arts of ruthless, self-serving, back-stabbing politics, then some blessed and fateful day they might be elected Darth Emperor Pope! I wonder how many of those wet-behind-the-ears teenage seminarians enter that seminary full of the grandiose dream of someday becoming the mighty Emperor of the whole of ol' NON's Earthly Empire, of becoming the absolute and uncontested CEO of Constantine's Imperial Corporation! It's likely why they so many of them so willingly and greedily gorge on the poisoned meat of those vows—corporate contracts!—of poverty, chastity and obedience! . . . However much they may intuitively sense—or have been told by wiser peers and adults—that it is poisoned meat. And however much those corporate contracts reduce them to a lifetime of being very . . . fuck-up . . . but powerful . . . puer aeturnuses!

"But being such hungry and desperate social. . . losers . . . such fuck-ups, as you call them . . . they don't care! Or at least, at first don't care! Until after a few years of it, they discover just how life-lethal that poison is, after which it is too late. Not only are they addicted to the power and status that goes with being a Darth Vader-priest—however serf-like the role—of that powerful and influential—and very feudal!—Imperial Corporation of Constantine's, but they are not really qualified to do anything else. I mean, unless they are qualified teachers—like many of those Jesuits—what job in the real world correlates with being a serf-priest, especially one that has been fated to spend too many years in some two-bit parish in some fifty-cent town out in the middle of Tim-buck-nowhere?

"And after a few years of living like an always-credulous, always-impoverished, always-obedient puer aeturnus in the giant 'schoolyard' of that totally mindless and autonomy-forsaken world of that Imperial Corporation, how the hell are they suddenly going to become independent adults who have to independently think and independently make choices and independently live the rest of their independent lives. They'd feel like a canary who'd spent its whole life in a tiny little cage where there'd always been lots of fresh seeds and fresh water—and protection from cats and hawks and bad weather—suddenly having to face the prospect of being released out into a forest to fend for itself. In the winter!

"Given such a choice, I think most would opt for the safety of the cage—especially since the very gumption they would need to take the plunge out the suddenly-opened door of that cage wouldn't have been part of their character structure to begin with! People get labeled . . . losers and fuck-ups. . . for a reason! Because the lack the gumption . . . the drive . . . and the wits . . . to make their way in the world! . . . Either that or they are childishly terrified of women and find refuge from their childish terror in the Boys-only club of Constantine's! Like a group of boys who build a tree-house and spend as much time painting the NO FEEMAL GERLZ ALOWD sign as they did building the structure! (The spelling on that sign is mine, LOL!)

"And on top of that, I think a lot of them would think very hubristically believe they are still ol' NON's Chosen! Still entertain that grandiose delusion that the Supreme Creator Deity of this whole damn Cosmos, truly had singled them out as 'spiritually special' and given them THE CALL—and thus they were too spiritually SUPERIOR . . . too SPECIAL . . . to live a normal, run-of-the-mill life and do a normal, run-of-the-mill job. Especially live a life and do a job where they are suddenly reduced to being Bob or Chuck or Joe and not Father Bob or Father Chuck or Father Joe! It would, in some ways, be a real nasty and humiliating come-down!"

"But John—do you really think there's enough power and status in being a Darth Vader . . . in being a fuckin' priest, to induce anyone with even a spark of normal human intelligence and a hint of normal human independence about them, to give up a natural life of being an independent human being who is allowed to indulge in the very natural act of having sex and a wife and children? And indulge in the very natural human act of questioning . . . and when necessary, resisting . . . authority? Especially when what that authority is demanding from them seems fundamentally wrong? And hell, even of indulging in the very natural, human ambition of wanting to acquire a bit of wealth . . . of a bit of that Aristotelian eudemonia you often mention. And of course, that very, very natural desire to have and raise a family?

"For some reason it doesn't seem to make any sense to me that any man would want to give up all that . . . so . . . natural . . . stuff . . . in order to take on a job where they have to officially promise their employer—basically sign contracts with it!—that they will never have sex, never demand a decent salary, and never disobey a single order given to them by their bosses—like a young child. Or at least some child who isn't two! And spend the whole rest of their lives doing every damn thing that the executives . . . the Darth Officers . . . of that Church—that corporation!—demand of them. Or going wherever they are ordered to go! . . . Like that poor Irish priest you mentioned, who got punished by 'corporate executives' who banished him from his beloved Ireland and forced to live a life in this country, which he obviously hated! . . . And sure, I get . . . kinda . . . that there's that monstrous ego-trip of being called-by-God-to-serve-him-and-his-will-shit that factors into it, but I can't see it being enough."

"That, my dear Rachel," he laughing said. "Is because—likely quite without realizing it—that you have reached a state of spiritual consciousness where you can see the futility and emptiness of most excessive temporal ambition—of chasing after that . . . after that basically wooden carrot-on-a-Pinocchio-nose-of-a-stick of excess amounts of power and status. . . . And the utterly delusional belief that on some distant day some unspecified—but exactly right and huge amount of power and status—and money—will suddenly be satisfying enough so they can quit chasing after them! Hell, there's billionaires in this world that couldn't spend the billions they have in a thousand lifetimes. yet they are still constantly striving for additional billions! It's like having a stomach that doubles in size every time you eat something! I get the sense that your level of consciousness is too high for that kind of hamster-in-a-tread-wheel . . . monomania . . . and most of the time, all you want out of life is to have a good enough job that you are satisfied with and which provides you with enough money to raise your family with a modicum of security and comfort—and buy a decent car. And maybe a small house. Am I not right?"

Well, he was mostly right about only wanting enough money and security—and a small house!—to raise my family at a moderate level of security and comfort, but what I couldn't tell him was that most of what I really wanted in life was to just spend time around him! I couldn't dare tell him that I thought of him as my Jupiter-guru and myself as his devoted Europa-disciple, because I intuitively just knew, that if I ever said that to him, he'd refuse to ever see me again! He'd tell me our relationship was fundamentally unhealthy for me and that it had to stop. And of course, as my devastating reaction to his death proved, he would have been absolutely right!

"So though most people think that the shit-flowers of power and status smell like the Queen's prize roses, they don't smell that good—and irresistible!—for you! Power and status—to change the metaphor . . . or simile . . . whatever!—are like the big, pretty, white, bell-shaped flowers of datura—of locoweed!—which cattle develop a taste for that ends up making them very sick. Those plants often even kill them if they eat enough of them. Similarly we 'human cattle' develop a taste for the flashy datura blossom, the locoweed of power and status and just cannot resist gobbling up all we can sink our teeth into—and still go looking for more when what we have already eaten too much of is poisoning the life out of us!

"History is full of that age-old story about the locoweed nature of power and status that Lord Acton summed up so powerfully with his aphorism, Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely! Look where it got Alexander! He had all of it—hell, way more of it!—than any other human being could have wanted, and he still wanted more! He conquered Greece and he conquered the whole of the vast Persian Empire—which included Egypt—and even what is today Pakistan, and he wanted to conquer the whole of India but his soldiers finally said 'Enough already!" and refused to keep fighting for him. And I am sure that had his soldiers conquered India for him, he'd have next have set his unquenchable eyes on China! And even at the pinnacle of an amount power that for most historians today is still beyond imagining, all he could do with it was feel so spiritually empty he drank himself to death. And did so by the time he was thirty two! And then there's those other driven conquerors: Hannibal . . . and Caesar . . . and Napoleon . . . and Hitler . . . and Mussolini. And even more recently, that insidious Nixon character south of the Medicine Line! Each with so much power and not a one of them ever remotely satisfied with it! And all with lives that ended badly!

"So it's no surprise that the lure of the power and status that is proxy-offered by Constantine Imperial Corporation catches a lot of 'suckers' who are only too willing to become its unpaid serfs!"

"But . . . . " I said. I still don't really see what . . . power . . . and status . . . there can be in a job that doesn't pay you! . . . That doesn't allow you any autonomy! . . . And which demands you give up sex . . . and the raising of a family! I really can't see it!."

Again he let out a loud, horse-startling laugh as he went on to say, "That, Rachel, is because it is such a nice day and you are enjoying this ride so much that you've—very rightfully!—put your usually busy, clear-thinking brain into neutral and just aren't really thinking about it! Right?"

"Yeah, probably . . . " I replied with a grin and a shrug as my face got more than a little red on his analyzing me so instantly and accurately.

"I mean face it—it's too damn nice a day . . . and this ride is to beautiful and enjoyable for all this . . . shit! . . . as you so rightfully call it! . . . that I am obsessed with rantificating about! I mean, you know . . . and don't give a rat's arse! . . . about the fact that Constantine's Imperial Corporation not only has an obscene amount of wealth, but an incredible amount of power and status. Sure, sure!—today it is not like in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, when it absolutely dominated European politics with its pretty malicious and ersatz 'spirituality,' with its dogshit-dogma paranoia, with it mad-dog viciousness, and of course, with its armies and crusaders and its beyond malicious and mad-dog vicious Gestapo-Inquisition, but it is still a very wealthy and powerful and influential institution in our western, Christian culture. And still peddling its malicious, ersatz spirituality . . . an absolutely ersatz spirituality based on having it mindless, baa-bleating maintain their faith—their childish credulity!—in ol' NON and Sonny Boy—and 'their' abominable 'Church'—or be doomed to eternal damnation and hellfire!

"I mean, look at the media coverage the election of a new Darth Emperor Pope gets! Saint Peter's Square is turned into giant sheep-pen jam-packed with baa-bleating sheep all practically—or actually!—pissing their pants while holding their collective breaths—and the whole goddamn world is doing damn near the same while watching their televisions!—waiting for those famous puffs of white smoke to come out of that special chimney atop the Sistine Chapel that announces a new Darth Emperor Pope has been elected by his Darth Cardinal-Senators.

"And just as important as that 'smoke-announcement' of a new Darth Emperor Pope having just been elected, is the ensuing verbal announcement of just who the hell the new Darth Emperor of Constantine's Imperial Abomination is—followed by his first, grand, Darth Emperor-Audience when he gets to stand in all his Darth Imperial Glory in the window of his Imperial Apartment and bless all the credulous, pissing-their-pants, baa-bleating sheep packed into the sheep-pen of St. Peter's Square.

"Not that it really matters who the hell he actually is, because any one of those ambitious old farts—those Darth Cardinals!—who is up for election is little different from the other! I'm sure Constantine's Imperial and Abominable Corporation values distinctiveness and individuality amongst it Darth Vader-priests—and Darth Bishops and Darth Cardinals—as any widget manufacturer does amongst its run of widgets coming off an assembly line. Of course, that's belaboring the obvious, isn't it—given that each Darth Vader widget-minion must wear the same black robes or suits, the same silly dog-collar, and spout The Corporation's dogshit-shit dogma with all the creativity of a dog barking at a squirrel . . . or that woodpecker we saw hammering the hell out of that pine tree.

"Each Darth Emperor Pope who gets elected by his Darth Cardinals gets to finally fulfill his first, most precious, Darth Vader, Joe Priest-dream of someday being elected Darth Emperor Pope, a dream he starts pursuing the day he ordained by absolutely knowing that his only chance of ever becoming a mighty and exalted—and ring-kissed!—Darth Emperor Pope, is by career-long being not only being a dedicated, rule-following, 'company widget,' ostensibly ever-dedicated to serving nothing but the 'company's dogshit-dogma interests' while at the same time, most subtly serving their own ego-interests—especially once they have been promoted to the 'officer class'—through a an ecclesiastical career of clever and cutthroat—Machiavellian!—political maneuvering and back-stabbing. Which means it is going to be a given that each Darth Emperor-Pope—whatever the hell his name and whatever the hell his nationality might be!—is going to be a good and predictable 'company widget' and is likewise going to be guaranteed to keep 'toeing the corporate line' that got him elevated to that position in the first place!'

"And if one of those Darth Emperor Popes does make it to the pinnacle of corporate power with a modicum of human individuality—with a modicum of his humanity—intact, for any particular one of them to actually believe they can change the dark, corporate—battleship-at-full-speed!—nature and the operational direction of that ancient and monstrous monolithic monster that Constantine's Imperial Corporation has become, is as delusional as some fool in a canoe thinking he can change the direction of an oil tanker by butting the prow of his canoe up against it and paddling his arms off!

"So if you are a dedicated, Darth Vader priest-widget, you—by proxy, of course!—partake in and identify with, all that extensive corporate power and corporate status of Constantine's Imperial Corporation, which then allows the endemically delusional aspect of your ego to induce you to believe that the extensive corporate power and corporate status of that infernal institution is also your power and your status! Like you just told me, every young Catholic is very heavily and thoroughly indoctrinated—gaslighted!—into the Abomination's dogshit-dogma, so quite naturally then, every young man who makes the choice to answer his very egotistical and equally delusional 'call from God' to go into the priesthood does so after a lifetime of witnessing the power and prestige of that Abominable Corporation, a power that all its Darth Vader priest-shepherds wield—and too damn many abuse!—over the mindless, compliant, credulous, and loudly baa-bleating sheep-flocks of their parishioners in the name of that abominable corporation.

"You've said as much yourself more than once—that they think of themselves—and are seen by their baa-bleating sheep-flocks—as the demi-gods of their parish. And many of those Darth Vader Joe-Priests, however humble their two-bit parish in some fifty-cent town out in the middle of Tim-buck-nowhere is, likely very quickly develop a gargantuanly bloated sense of self-importance that induces them to have some pretty potent and persistent daydreams about ways to wield that power for all its worth over their flock of ever-compliant, baa-bleating parishioner-sheep!

"I'm sure they have no end of daydreams in which they see themselves strutting around in their distinctive black, widget-dresses—or widget-suits, if the occasion demands it!—and wearing that distinctive, status-proclaiming dog-collar, knowing that they will get a great deal of attention, respect and deference—even from non-Catholics. I mean, I'm sure many prospective priests get pretty damn big-headed at the prospect of wearing that black widget-dress and sporting that widget dog-collar and always being addressed as Father—instead of 'Hey-you' . . . or 'Young fellow!' Or never anything as humbling or mundane as Bob . . . or Chuck . . . or Joe! Or even Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones—but always Father This and Father That!"

And here John let out a low, sardonic laugh as he sarcastically said, " I mean, its grotesquely absurd—insane as far as I am concerned!—when you've got some elderly men or elderly women—grand- and great-grandparents!—each with a lifetime of experiences and wisdom under their belt, calling some pimple-face, no-nothing-about-life, fresh-from-the-seminary, puppy-priest, Father. . . .Or at least, that's the way it was in 'my day,'—but like I've said, it's been many years since I've had to infect my reality by interacting with of one of those . . . infernal plague-rats, so I don't know if it is still that way today. . . . But, Christ—can you just imagine what that does to that puppy-priest's ego? And his arrogance! It surely must inflate his ego like a monstrous zeppelin! And make him as arrogant as . . . a Catholic priest!"

That got a loud laugh out of me, but before I could say anything, he spurred his pontification-pony and galloped on.

"And just image how over-blown that Darth Vader widget-priest gets if he's enough of a 'corporation-widget,' enough of a bureaucratic game-player and manipulator to make it his over-blown-ego's mission to climb the 'corporate-ladder!' . . . Though I guess in too many ways that abominable institution is more like the military than any civilian corporation, so I should be saying: makes it his mission to get officer-promoted to Lieutenant Bishop . . . then Captain Arch-bishop . . . and if he's a totally committed 'military,' then to Colonel Cardinal! And finally, if he's an ambitious and Machiavellian enough political and bureaucratic infighter to win all the very nasty, very political back-stabbing games that go on in any such hierarchical hell, gets himself elected Emperor Pope! . . . No differently than did many of those later 'soldier emperors' of the Roman Empire in the Third Century! . . . Though those guys would have been real men . . . have been real warriors capable of facing down an enemy and fighting him to the death . . . not sleazy, sneaky, back-stabbing bureaucrats! . . . with a heavy emphasis on the rat part of that word! . . . And with copies of The Prince hidden within the covers of their breviaries!

"Little is more interesting to read about the history of the Roman Empire than all the absolutely vicious and blood-thirsty political games that swirled around any one of its many Emperors like a toxic cloud from a burning chemical factory. Gibbon was spot-on when he wrote that history is rarely nothing more than a recording of the crimes and follies and misadventures of humankind. Christ, the creator of that Imperial and Abominable Corporation, Constantine, was as bloody a master of those pernicious games as any! That monster was even able to find some evil political advantage by poisoning his eldest son Crispus, then when the psychopathic satisfaction of that vile deed waned, had his wife, Fausta, boiled alive in her bath! After which he pretty much excised them from the historical record! A practice, by the way, that his Imperial Corporation very adeptly adopted and carried on with regards to all its cult rivals, the truly spiritual Gnostics . . . and of course, later, when it was politically expedient to do so, those 'vile Pagans' and all their 'heathen philosophy!'

"Always remember, the Dark Ages didn't 'just happen' with the fall of the Roman Empire—like a temporary power-outage around here caused by a blown-down power pole!—it was intentionally created by Constantine's Imperial Abomination in its efforts to acquire its fascist and totalitarian dominion over both the bodies and souls of every human being ill-fated enough to come under the very dark, black dome of its pernicious influence! Created by the wanton and utter suppression and destruction of all the thoughts and writings of its Pagan 'opponents' so it could drive its subject peoples down to an unimaginable level of ignorance and social decrepitude and thus establish the total, oppressive political and 'spiritual' hegemony of its fascist, dogshit-doctrine of Blind Stupid Credulous Faith At The Expense Of Intelligence and Thought!

"And I can't imagine that Vatican politics, which in essence is, and has always been, Imperial Roman politics, has changed a lot since it's those vicious and bloody days of the Roman Emperors—and the more vicious, bloodier and ignorance-worshipping days of the Dark and Middle Ages! Though I am sure that if there were any very convenient and very political assassinations performed, they were done cleverly and surreptitiously enough . . . like some are insinuating happened to one of those Darth Emperor Popes who was elected a few years back and didn't last very long . . . to mask from the world the truth of them. Especially given how hermetically sealed that Vatican is!

(John was referring to John Paul I, who was elected at the end of August of 1978 and died a month later, with all kinds of conspiracy theories swirling around that event. I suspect the truth of his sudden and unexpected death is still haunting the "hallowed halls" of the Vatican—or more likely long gone into the graves of all the Old Fart Colonel Cardinals of that day who—perhaps!—after electing him, regretted their choice—and "Et tu, Brute'd'' him! We'll never know for sure!)

"And along with that glorious, very political election—remember, as far as I am concerned, if there is any true spirituality in Constantine's Imperial Corporation, it will only be found in small quantities in a few Darth Vader Father Joes who fight hard against their Darth Vader indoctrinations at the hands of the Abomination, while, to mix the metaphor, humbly toil as hard-'serfing' Parish-Privates,—and of course, in some of the less ego-mania dominated hearts of the millions of baa-bleating sheep comprising those parishes! And very certain I am that scarce as snake slippers will be any true, Christian—meaning Gnostic!—spirituality in any member of that 'officer-class' of cutthroat-ambitious, very Roman politicos that wear all the fancy, very Roman costumes and ridiculous hats, and wield all the very Roman power that that very Roman corporation has been accruing for the last seventeen hundred years with its very cynical, very Roman political machinations.

"So there you have, in the election of a new Darth Emperor Pope, this fundamentally unspiritual and very Roman, high-level Machiavellian-politico reaching the pinnacle of the pyramid of Constantine's Imperial and Abominable Corporation, and doing so with a very political ego so bloated with self-importance it would make Jupiter look no bigger than its smallest moon, and possessed by a grand delusion bigger than that red giant in forming Orion's shoulder, Betelgeuse! A delusion so astronomically . . . pun intended! . . . grand that he actually believes he has a direct phone-line to ol' NON—the Supreme Creator Deity of this whole damn Universe!—and that when using that phone-line, he is cosmically infallible! That he himself, in being elected Darth Emperor Pope of the whole vast empire of baa-bleating Catholic sheep, has himself become a divinity who is omniscient, who can make no mistakes!

(Four or five years before that ride, John had bought himself a kick-butt telescope and, since his farm was isolated enough that the night sky was dark enough for great viewing, really "got into" that "astronomy thing"—and no small thrill it was for the kids and I—asshole hubby had no interest in partaking!—when he'd call us out on "perfect nights" to view either our moon when it was in it waxing crescent phase—I would have thought the full moon was the most exciting to view, but he said the best time was just after the first quarter, because more details could be seen—the four biggest "Galilean" moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus, or better yet, when she was in the sky during the early part of the night, those glorious rings of Saturn! And if it was a clear winter night, a brief viewing of that Betelgeuse, which he said was so big that if it was our sun, its circumference would reach out to the orbit of Jupiter. And so old it was ready to go supernova at any time. "But don't worry," he'd tell us. "That phrase 'any time' in astronomical terms could mean a hundred thousand or a million years from now! And since it is six hundred light years away, if it supernova'd right now, no one on Earth would be able to witness the event for another six hundred years."Though I don't think anything about that business excited him more setting up that telescope so we could all view the Andromeda galaxy—and inform us that not only was the Andromeda galaxy twice the size of our Milky Way galaxy, but they were speeding towards each other and were someday going to collide and merge. "But not for about four billion years—so you don't have to worry about that!" he was quick to inform the kids. The notion of Uncle John "acting like a kid" is still, for me, a patently ludicrous notion, but I can honestly say that when it came to viewing stars and planets—and Betelgeuse and the Andromeda galaxy—through that telescope, he almost "acted like a kid!")

"And once this clever old Machiavellian politico, this skillful and likely very nasty, bureaucratic infighter, has been elected to that role of Darth Emperor Divinity—and like those Roman emperors themselves, deludedly believes he actually is a divinity!—can you just imagine the most certainly deranging egomania that could but take possession of that erstwhile 'Darth Vader Joe,' who after years of hard and nasty and very-cutthroat corporate ladder-climbing and Machiavellian political maneuvering . . . and as well, no end of arse-lickings and back-stabbings and throat-cuttings, finally completes the ambition-journey from being a total nobody. Darth Vader widget-priest running a humble parish in Tim-buck-nowhere, to being elected the world famous, Divine, Darth Emperor Pope! To finally becoming the supreme and unchallengeable CEO of this planet's oldest—and very rich and powerful—corporations, Constantine's Imperial and Abominable Corporation, and in achieving that personal and lifelong goal, becoming the sole, autocratic, and utterly infallible ruler of his vast Empire of Credulous, Baa-Bleating Sheep!"

At this point I felt compelled to grab the reins of his "rantification racehorse" and yank it to a halt with, "Fuck, John—do you really believe that Vatican politics is that . . . nasty . . . that Machiavellian? Christ, what proof do you have for what you are saying? It's all so . . . extreme . . . and cynical!"

That got an instant laugh out of him as he again removed his Stetson, stuck it in front of his face, and turning to me, said, "Come on, Rache—it's me speaking . . . Mr. Nobody whose always just 'yakking through his hat!'" Then putting it back in place, went on, "I really have not seriously researched idea about how Vatican politics really works, but I have a good idea about how politics in general works—especially in very wealthy and powerful institutions created on the power-pyramid model, which, by their very nature, are dominated by the Lords of Malice! Hell, those Lords of Malice, those Celestial Fascists—as far as I can tell . . . but don't quote me on this!—create those power-pyramid institutions so they can play out their dark, always fascist, always sheep-herding agendas through them. Governments, armies, corporations . . . churches—all the same! With all those power-pyramid institutions being created and controlled—to whatever degree of power they can manifest through the flawed, corruptible characters of the human beings running those them! And since few power-pyramid institutions are as wealthy and powerful as Constantine's Abominable Corporation . . . and since it is inhabited and run by a vast cadre of . . . Darth Vader widget-priests suffering from terminal cases of arrested development and living in a very unnatural situation where normal social and family demands don't impinge upon their time, their energies, or of course, their endemic state of puer aeternus, I can but assume that they have characters that are equally puer-retarded and thus get even more caught up in nasty, Lords of Malice-dominated, power-pyramid institutional politics than the average person. . . . But again remember—that's just my own . . . my Mr. John Nobody!—opinion and it sure isn't worth quoting to any living creature any higher on the evolutionary scale than an amoeba!

"But back to what I was Mr. Nobody-blathering on about concerning the power and influence of Constantine's Abomination and this whole damn world's fascination with its Darth Emperor Pope, who gets treated like an incarnate divinity but is just a mere man—though like we've been discussing, more likely only a half-man! I mean, the world television or print media will follow his every pontification—formal or not so!—regardless that most of its viewers or readers aren't Catholics, and though what he pontificates is momentarily interesting to the whole world, those pontifications represent, to every one of his billion or so child-credulous, baa-bleating sheep, the veritable words of ol' NON himself! Which is why that billion-plus herd of mindless, baa-bleating sheep is so willing to support and empower his mighty corporation, and not only so willingly fills that very wealthy and very powerful corporation's vast coffers to over-flowing with whatever coin-of-their-realm its members can afford—and often can't!—but are always only too-willing to baa-bleating kneel . . . and bow and scrape and pleading pray before any image of their Divine and Infallible 'Papa-Pope' they can find!

"Or if they are so fatefully blessed that they get to attend one of his 'Divine Audiences,' where they have to wait for hours and almost piss their pants in the sheep-pen of St. Peter's Square in order to catch a glimpse of that divinity when he is giving them, and the rest of the baa-bleating flock of credulous sheep, one of his divine blessings!

"Or if they have won the fate-lottery and been singled out by the mysterious machinations of ol' NON 'himself'—or Sonny-Boy Jesus!—to be blessedly 'called' to obtain a personal audience with this Divine and Infallible 'Papa-Pope,' which will allow them, with their egos bloated with self-importance and their sheep-hearts filled with love and devotion and absolute abasement, baa-bleating bow and scrape before him and go into a state of supreme ecstasy when he extends his divine hand and allows them to lovingly kiss his 'Divine Ring'. . . . A ritual, by the way, which is a reenactment of that very abasing, very Roman, very serf ritual instituted by that 'Divine' Emperor, Diocletian, who in truly believing he was a god—not that any modern Pope who believes himself infallible, doesn't!—required that all serf-supplicants prostrate themselves when in his presence and belly-crawl up to his 'Divine Personage' so they could kiss the hem of his 'Divine Robe!' And with this Divine Diocletian being Constantine's immediate predecessor, there's a good chance that the grand, I-am-Emperor-so-I-am-a-god delusion might well have been contagious. So contagious it then infected Constantine who in turn infected the long line of Darth Emperor Popes . . . he started when he created his very Roman and very imperial, Imperial Abomination. And always keep in mind that the Darth Emperor Pope's exalted title of Pontifex Maximus is the title originally bequeathed to the head priest of that very pagan religion of the Romans!

"I can't even begin to imagine how grotesquely inflated and deformed and utterly Caesar-arrogant any human ego would get after it had so bare-arsed-ambitiously scrabble-climbed the long, tortuous ladder from being a hardly-humble-but-as-yet-totally-unknown, Darth Vader-Father Joe, to becoming the known-by-the-whole-damn-world, Supreme Divine Emperor-CEO/Pontifex Maximus of Constantine's Imperial and Abominable Corporation, and thus the supreme dictator of a corporate Empire with a billion-plus tithe-paying baa-bleating sheep-citizens, inestimable amounts of land, and a net worth of incalculable billions of dollars!

"Ludicrous—ludicrous and evil, for all its blatant hypocrisy!—is all I can say, especially given that these pseudo-men, those puer aeternuses—from Darth Vader-Joe Priest to the living-in-a-palace, Divine, Darth Emperor-CEO!—Pontifex Maximus!—are all supposed to be the humble, spiritual representatives of a humble and impoverished mystical teacher, who, if he was Fate-cursed to reincarnate into this world today, he would—if he studied any of the true, seventeen-hundred-year history of the absolutely abominable corporation created in his name—and ostensibly with his teachings!—and took full measure of the incredible amount of wealth and power it has acquired during those seventeen hundred years—and the destruction and oppression and torture and murder and wars it has wrought upon this world to obtain and retain that wealth and power!—he end up thinking about that powerful, corrupt and evil corporation of Constantine's in exactly the same way I think of it! Though likely considerably more harshly!

"And if he had any truly spiritual inclinations at all in his new incarnation, he would join a Zen Buddhist monastery and spend the whole of his life hiding away from this very nasty world that has, for the most part, been dominated and created by that very Lords of Malice-dominated corporation in his name! And pursuing such a reclusive, non-involved life so he'd not have to partake in this crass, violent, competitive, mechanized and materialist society that was—in its essence!—created by Constantine's Imperial and Abominable Corporation—in his name! And of course, by the Religion of Materialist Science, which created itself in direct opposition to the irrational and brutal excesses and abuses of the corrupt and greedy corporation created in his name!"

John was really spoiling that lovely day and that great ride by riling up the deep, dark, usually hidden and ignored cesspit of Church-hatred bubbling and boiling away at the core of my being, with his too-damn-accurate take on Constantine's very Roman and very Imperial Corporation-Church. (Ha! I just had a most delightful memory re-surface—after a lot years—concerning something my mother told me I did when I was somewhere between two and three years old. As once-in-a-rare-while happened—too-rare for my mother's bloated Catholic ego!—the parish priest would come over for a visit. It would seem that back in those days—or maybe they still do!—priests seemed to have had the time to do things like that! Or at least, do them for his "better"—more baa-bleating sheepish!—parishioners! Anyways, while he was drinking his coffee and eating his cookies—or maybe it was tea and scones!—and while my mother would have been lapping up his every divine word like a thirsty dog a bowl of water, I came wandering into the room holding something behind my back. According to my mother's horrified re-telling of the story, I walked up the priest and said, "Guess what I got behind my back?" And when he leaned down and said, "I have no idea! Show me, Sweetie," I showed him alright! What I had behind my back was an old brass padlock I'd found somewhere and I forthwith clocked him—pun intended!—across the jaw with it! Boy, I wish I could remember that event so I could "see" the looks of both that priest's and my mother's faces. I can only imagine! And I even more wish I'd remembered that incident when John was alive because he'd have laughed his head off at it. And made a comment along the line that my hatred for Constantine's Imperial Abomination and its Darth Vader-priests ran a lot deeper than I was normally aware. Or that maybe I was, while even so young, clairvoyant enough to know he was a pedophile and I was just giving him what I felt he deserved!)

But back to what I'd been thinking about John's relentless, beautiful-day-ruin rantification, which was the disturbingly dark implications of that relentless, bloating, and deforming process that overtakes any man's ego when he gives in to his ambition to go from being a powerless and "nobody," Darth Vader Joe Priest, and begins climbing the corporate/military "officer-ladder" up to becoming the "Divine, Darth Emperor Pope"—especially if one could see those original Darth Vader Joes Priests as the social losers and fuck-ups most of them likely were on making the absurd choice to betray their humanity, enter the seminary, and flush their human life down the toilet of their crass ambition with those three inhuman and natural adulthood-thwarting vows—corporate contracts!—of poverty, obedience and chastity!

And so I relieved the pressure of that agitation with, "Yeah—it really is absurdly ridiculous that a young man with no real life experience gets to start out his career with that damned . . . . Abomination . . . being, from the get-go, treated so reverently by a bunch of obsequious, baa-bleating sheep who are only too anxious to call him 'Father This' or 'Father That!' . . . Shit, I can still too vividly remember one of the worst things about attending Sunday mass with my parents—besides having to wanna-puke-my-guts-out witness the hypocrisy of my daughter-raping father who always played the role of the devout and pious-as-a-pope Catholic when in that church!—was how they loved to stand with some of the other baa-bleating sheep on the church steps—or in the foyer if the weather was bad—in order to shake that Darth Vader-priest's hand and obsequiously compliment him on his great sermon.

"And I remember one time when we got this new . . . Darth Vader . . . who was exactly what you described—basically a pimple-faced puppy!—and both my parents were obsequiously calling him Father . . . Father Brent, I think it was . . . and interrupting each other trying to compliment him on his great sermon—which, as I remember it, was pretty much as banal and boring as a communion wafer and delivered in a high, squeaky voice that nearly drove me out of the church because it sounded too much like fingernails scraping on a chalkboard—while he stood there, lapping up all that praise like a puppy its first dish of milk. And beaming like a toddler who has just taken his first potty-crap!

"And he was addressing them in return, as 'My Son' and 'My Daughter' and he sure gave me a nasty, you-deserve-to-be-scourged look when I was standing behind them sticking my finger down my throat and pretending to barf—and causing my brother to pantomime laughing his head off! . . . And needless to say, we were both smiling paragons of innocence by the time my parents turned around to see what their precious, newly-minted, prouder-than-Punch, Father Brent was glaring at behind them! . . . But that was years ago, and I don't know if priests still do that silly and condescending 'My Son' and 'My Daughter' shtick! . . . Nowadays, like you, I avoid them like they're . . . goddamned 'plague-rats'!"

And then I very sarcastically said, "But I could call up my mother and ask her about that if you want—and have her give you a call-back about it! She's still the same 'baa-bleating' priest-brownnoser she always was! . . . And she still thinks they 'walk on water' and that they don't do anything as crude as fart when they have intestinal gas. Oh no!—they sure don't reek up the room with nasty, foul intestinal odors like mere human beings do because those 'divine gases" escape from their hallowed bodies by osmosis . . . and billow out their cassocks with puffs of sweet smelling incense! . . . And they sure as hell don't molest innocent children!"

I'm not usually that sarcastic, and my impassioned words got a long, loud and satisfying laugh of out John—as I'd hoped they would—before he went on, "No! Definitely not! I think I'd rather get a visit from an Inquisitor carrying a load of well-cured faggots and a five-gallon container of gasoline than a call from your mother!"

And here I just had to interrupt him and say, "Believe me, Uncle John!—if there was an Inquisitor in the area intent on visiting you, my mother would be carrying that load of well-cured faggots for him—on her head! With a five-gallon container of gasoline in each of her hands!"

After a short chuckle over that bit of "old humor" on my part, he again spurred his pontification-pony into a brisk trot, "Well, back to those Darth Vader Joe Priests who, though they hate being just Darth Vader-Joes, sure love that ego-bloating Father . . . Vader! . . . part, and given how lamprey-attached that infernal institution is to its time-honored traditions and its exalted status, seminarians likely have to attend special classes where they practice calling older people 'My Son' and 'My Daughter' in the proper, patronizing tone of voice—and with straight faces!

"I mean, it's such an absurd and patronizing practice that I would think it has to be practiced! If for no other reason than so pimple-faced Vader Joes can actually say insulting crap like that with straight faces! Say it without bursting into fits of laughter! Or at least, silly, shit-eating grins! And I doubt I can stress enough just how incredibly. patronizing it is! It's like this puppy-priest, on his first day out of the seminary, gets to play the role of the medieval Lord of the Manor! Like he owns his baa-bleating parishioners! Like they are his serf-sheep—just like he is an owned serf of Constantine's Imperial Corporation! It's all patronizing, patriarchal paternalism at its worst! And I don't know how else to see it! "

John paused at that for a moment to get off is horse—both his horses! (LOL)—and for some reason look at its right front hoof, allowing me, while he got out his knife and dug something out of it, to suddenly entertain my own thoughts about one of my favorite TV comedies, M*A*S*H, with its hilarious Father Mulcahy—played by William Christopher, (who I've just Wikkied and learned died less than two years ago at 84, which means he was a lot older than he "baby-faced" looked during the run of that show!) who was always calling the surgeons and nurses "My Son" or "My Daughter" but with a twinkle in his eye, with a self-mocking grin on his face, and with a hint of irony in his voice. It was obviously Christopher's subtle, comedic efforts to make fun of the practice without offending the show's millions of baa-bleating Catholic viewers—and having some Inquisitors show up on the set with loads of well-cured faggots and a can of gasoline! I also learned he was not a Catholic, but a Methodist, so he likely truly did think that condescending "My Son/My Daughter" priest-shtick to be the pompous, patronizing bullshit it is.

John finally finished digging whatever he had to his horse's hoof, and after climbing back into his saddle, nudged it into motion, and as mine automatically followed, he also remounted pontification-pony and went on with, "Though I guess if people are going to behave like obsequious, mindless, baa-bleating sheep when around a Darth Vader-priest, they deserve to be owned—and patronized!—by him! I'll tell you, nothing drives my blood pressure into stroke range faster than thinking about that medieval, Lord-serf relationship that Constantine's Imperial and Abominable Corporation demands its 'credulous faithful' have with its almighty clergy!

"And it's not only an insane system, but I am sure that the whole corporate process inflates the egos of those Darth Vader-priests—and most especially all the rest of that infernal corporation's officer classes!—to the point where they are so deluded with self-importance, arrogance and grandiosity that they functionally are insane! . . . Insane enough to truly believe that in being the chosen by ol' NON—or Sonny Boy Jesus . . . I don't know if those idiots can tell who is doing the 'calling' when that 'celestial phone' rings!—by the Supreme Creator Deity of this Whole Damn Universe—or his equal-but-not-quite son, that they are above all merely human laws and can do with their baa-bleating parishioner-sheep—and the baa-bleating lambs of their parishioner-sheep!—exactly what they please.

"That means that if a sweet looking altar boy sets the 'divine dick' of a Darth Vader Joe Priest . . . or, to change the metaphors . . . the even 'diviner dick' if a Lieutenant Bishop Bob or Captain Cardinal Charlie, uncomfortably aflame, then it is totally within any one of their divine purviews as 'the Chosen'—the chosen agents!—of Ol' NON, the Supreme Creator Deity of this Whole Damn Universe, to forcefully shove it in that sweet boy's mouth—or up his tender ass!—in order to put that discomfort-causing flame out! Or at least until the next time he sets his lascivious eyes on that—or another!—sweet, but ill-fated young fellow and it so uncomfortably flares up again!

"So I think you should be able to easily see the seductive allure of all that power and prestige that Constantine's Imperial and Abominable Corporation—by proxy—bequeaths to its Darth Vader-clergy! In fact, I think that given how fundamentally corporate that Imperial Corporation is, its priests should not be called priests, but called Exalted Corporate Functionaries, or . . . ECFs . . . for short, and addressed, not as Father Bob or Father Bill, but a ECF Chuck or ECF Leo, and if they have been promoted to the 'officer class,' they should be titled, Exalted Corporate Officers, or, ECOs! I think when presented in that dark 'light'—heh, heh, no humor intended!—you should now have an inkling of why it was—and still is!—such an attractive career choice for so many young men. Especially young men who, as you describe them, are social 'losers' and 'fuck-ups.'"

Again, I felt the need to add something to our "conversation" and I could but interject his rantification with, "Yeah, I love that title—Exalted Corporate Functionary! ECF Bill or ECF Bob sure has a different . . . feel . . . to it than Father Bill or Father Bob, that's for sure! That Father title gives a person the impression that though they are authority figures, they are still somewhat loving and benevolent men, when obviously many of them—especially the pedophiles—are anything but! But I still don't see how all that status and that power—and all the baa-bleating sheep-obeisance that they get from their parishioners in their role as an ECF of Constantine's Imperial Corporation—creates the horrible pedophilia problem so rampant with the Catholic priesthood?

"I mean—sure, I've met my share of egomaniacal and arrogant and bullying priests who quite literally thought they were 'God's gift to their parish,' and were likely drawn to the priesthood solely because they were, in their adolescent, pre-priest lives, total losers and fuck-ups with a natural propensity for bullying created by the need to compensate for the fact they deep down knew they were losers and fuck-ups! But that pedophilia . . . It's real strange! . . . Real strange and incomprehensibly illogical! . . . I mean, to get sexually aroused by an innocent child who is giving off absolutely zero sexual signals! . . . I can't make any rational sense out of it! . . . Except to absolutely know that it is really . . . really evil . . . shit! It's beyond evil, as far as I am concerned. Preying on innocent children, for Chrissake! Raping them! Hurting them! Terrifying them! Horrifying them! Corrupting them! Damaging them for the whole rest of their lives! I can't think of anything more evil . . .except what the Nazis did in the Holocaust! So shit!—that seems . . . to me, anyway . . . to have a deeper . . . and darker . . . and more evil root!

"Though to be sure, I will say that all that grotesque and deluding, Lord-of-the-Manor, ego-bloating shit you've been talking about sure could make them truly believe that once they discovered they were so vilely bent, they possessed the right . . . the divine right! . . . to treat the 'lambs' of their baa-bleating sheep as theirs to do with as they pleased! And then of course, there is the fact that, like that Irish priest told you, they could confess—and re-confess and re-confess, ad infinitum!—their evil deeds away with impunity. . . . And I guess the fact that the Constantine's Imperial Abomination . . . due to the likely fact that half its . . . 'officer class' . . . are themselves pedophiles, has had a long legacy of tolerating pedophile priests and not making an issue of their evil—and culturally nefarious and illegal!—deeds by immediately defrocking them and turning them over to the civil police for the prosecution and punishment they deserved, because it didn't want to acknowledge—to itself or to the world—that it even had such a pernicious problem! That kind of bad publicity sure would interfere with that outfit's 'Our Holy and Blessed Church is the only True Church of God!' image!

"And shit again!—when 'civilian' pedophiles get caught, they immediately get thrown into jail, then dragged before the courts, and if convicted of molesting children and sent to a penitentiary, they have to be segregated because the other convicts will kill them because, bad as those other convicts might be as thieves and robbers and assaulters and muggers and murderers, they don't consider themselves to be nearly as evil as any of those creepy monsters who sexually prey on helpless and innocent children. And when those creep-shit pedophiles finally are released from prison, they are labeled as dangerous sex offenders who must be monitored and watched—for the rest of their sick, evil lives! I think their names are even kept in on some kind of sex-offenders list. Though they aren't treated as harshly as I figure they should be—castration, physical or chemical, at the very least!—they aren't treated the way pedophile priests are!

"Those damn really Darth Vader pedophile priests not only get to molest children—lots and lots and lots of them!—for the most part, with impunity, and when the complaints against them are too hard to ignore, their Darth Bishops—most quite likely accomplished pedophiles themselves!—don't turn them over to the police to be tried in courts of law as the absolutely heinous criminals they are, but, as I've read more than once, they slap them on the wrist with a tsk-tsk and a wink-wink and a nod-nod, then move them on to a new parish—a new, lamb-gamboling pasture—so they can have fresh supply of victims to molest and totally fuck over—and fuck up for the rest of their wretched lives!

"Or they are retired into some kind of Church limbo-land where they live out the rest of their evil days in peace and safety, masturbating to visions . . .or porno-pics! . . . of their own—and fellow pedophile priests and bishops favorite altar boys doing their 'dirty duty' for their exalted clergy! It sure ain't too damn often they end up in prisons having to get protected from fellow inmates who want to slit their sanctimonious throats for their evil deeds! Or at least castrate the evil, Darth Vader molesters with a rusty shiv!"

"You are quite right about that, Rache! And quite right to be so indignant about it. First of all, as to very evil root that drives those very sick 'men' to find sexual satisfaction in raping—defiling!—young and innocent children who are giving off no sexual signals, is just that—evil! . . . It's malicious! It's demonic! And thus it is not in any way open to rational understanding. You'd have to be a demon yourself to understand the 'rationale' behind such sick desires and actions! But of course, if you were a demon, you wouldn't be capable of caring that you were a demon . . . or even capable of understanding that you were behaving maliciously, behaving demonically! Your demonic behavior would all just be very . . . natural to you! And for us who aren't demons—or possessed by one!—we can't understand what drives demons—or the demonically possessed!—because that information can't be gleaned from demons. Such foul and malicious entities are too unconscious . . . too un-self-aware . . . too elemental . . . and too mindless . . . to think about and understand anything about life at all, let alone anything about themselves that can be scoped out and understood by even the most sensitive and insightful of psychics! And especially their demonic natures! . . . Which I guess that, in a nut-shell, kind of describes all fundamentally evil people, doesn't? (As I type out those long-ago words of John's, I can't help but think that today they sure describe Mad King Donald to a T—and I sure do wonder what he'd have to say about that utterly unconscious, un-self-aware, elemental and mindless demon now running those now more fascist than ever, Fascist States of America!)

"In fact, my intuition very powerfully tells me that both thinking and self-awareness would be as alien to them as flying to the moon on a magic carpet would be to us—they exist solely in the small, dark, foul reality of their dark and vicious lusts and desires that must always find ways to be fulfilled—at whatever cost! And with no restrictions or restraints! And when a pedophilic, Darth Vader priest—or any pedophile!—gets possessed by such a demonic entity . . . which, as far as I am concerned, is the only logical explanation for such humanly incomprehensible and predatory evil behavior—then they exist solely in the small, dark, foul, un-self conscious reality of that demon's dark and vicious lusts and desires! They, in effect, are no longer even remotely human—let alone Christian!

"Which of course drives home what I've been saying for years—Constantine's Imperial and Abominable Corporation is a fundamentally evil, demon-run organization that has been masquerading for centuries as a holy religion, and I doubt anything proves my point more succinctly than its "officer corps" going to such great lengths, not only to tolerate very Darth Vaderish, priest-pedophilia, but go to such great—and often very expensive!—lengths to hide it! And deny it when it does surface in the news! And of course, to sweep it under an ancient ecclesiastical rug—the Rug of Ecclesiastic Hypocrisy!—kept in a secret room in the Vatican for just such a purpose!

"I mean, it's obvious that regardless that abominable Corporation of Constantine's touts itself as the paragon of the Christian ethos, its vast, hierarchical cadre of Darth Vader-Officers, of Darth Vader-ecclesiastical executives are about as Christian . . . are about as full of basic, human compassion . . . as . . . great white sharks are fussy about what they eat!

"And it reaffirms another thing I've often said—that that damn black dress those Darth Vader-priests wear is indicative of the state of their souls, and that dog-collar that tops it off represents a veritable License-To-Molest, awarded to them by Constantine's Imperial Corporation on the day of their ordination!. . . . And I've often thought that given how sexually predatory priests are, it is most appropriate that their training centers are called seminaries, a word that comes from the Latin word for seed—semen. Seed of Satan, in this case, if you can believe in that pathetic old bogeyman! Though demon-seed will do just fine!

"But there is, I am sure, another major factor! I mean, there are lots of powerful institutions around that will offer such arrogant, egomaniacal, power-seeking bullies an outlet for their arrogance, their egomania, and their bullying—as well as easy and quicker access to more power than Constantine's Abomination can offers—the armies, navies and air forces of all countries, being the first one to come to mind. But any successful corporation will, fundamentally, be little different. Every corporation, every institution, is, essentially a pyramid of stratified power! So there definitely is something else to that pedophilia problem! And that something else can only be that insane celibacy requirement.

And with that he stopped talking and was silent for so long I looked over at him in alarm, at which point he said, "Being a lifelong resident of this land of forests and lakes, I presume you've done a bit of fishing?"

That question arrived from so far out in 'left field' that it got a laugh out of me, and after spending thirty seconds vainly trying to figure out how something as trivial as fishing related to the damn serious topic of rampant priest-pedophilia, I finally responded with, "Christ!—what's fishing got to do with this topic?"

And when John just chuckled and said, "Just humor me for a moment," I went on to say, "Well, I never did any as a 'girl,' but my so-called Hubby is an avid fisherman—and boat-buyer!—and for awhile when we were first married I tried to share his passion—but it wasn't something I enjoyed. Too boring, for one. And I hated putting worms on hooks! . . . And when I did catch a fish—I always threw the poor thing back after he unhooked it for me—I could only feel real bad for it! . . . I always felt it was a real . . . 'bad trip' . . . as we used to say 'in the day,' for the poor thing to chomp down on what it thinks is a tasty meal only to end up with a sharp hook in its mouth—or half-way down its throat!—then forthwith get yanked out of the water so it can't breathe, after which that nasty barbed hook is ripped out of its mouth and it is then bonked on the head—or flung back in the water!"

"Yeah, it sound like a downright brutal . . . 'sport' . . . but I don't know if fish quite feel the level of pain—and indignation!—we would if all that nasty stuff happened to us, but it's hard not to empathize with the poor creatures—if you possess the power of empathy! . . . So okay—you've surely then done enough fishing to know that using different lures tends to catch different fish."

"Yeah, Hubby is big into that lure-thing . . . He spends a goddamn fortune on the goddamn things! Almost as much as he does on beer! And he has two huge, stinky tackle boxes full of them! But I'll tell ya!—I can't understand his need for all those lures. As far as I'm concerned, it's just more of that same-old/same-old competitive male-ego thing! You know, 'my tackle box is bigger than your tackle box,' and 'my lure-collection is bigger than your lure-collection' type of competitive shit. I wanted to keep my fishing simple so all I ever used a simple hook with a worm on it—or that red-and-white one that's real popular. Don't remember the name of it though."

John laughed and said, "Ha! Most appropriate to this conversation, it is called the Daredevil! And yeah, that one is real popular. . . . Probably as good a choice as any for a casual fisherman . . . or woman! But when you get into serious fishing you cater your lure to the kind and size of fish you want to catch. And the fishing situation. You know: morning, afternoon, evening . . . bright day, cloudy day, rainy day, windy day. That kind of thing . . . that only real serious anglers care about. And for such avid anglers, obviously all things worth knowing! But only if you are real serious about your fishing. And though I've done a fair bit of fishing, I'm a bit like you—except I never found it boring and never cared if I caught a fish. I just liked being out on the water in the peace and quiet. Catching a decent sized fish was a bonus—and a tasty meal!

"But back to the reason for my sudden inspiration for this piscine diversion, which until just this instant I hadn't realized had a serious omen swimming along beside it, given that a stylized fish—called the ichthys by the Greeks—and also known as the 'Jesus fish,' was a secret symbol of the early Christian Gnostics. . . . I'm sure you're familiar with it."

I could only nod and sigh out a long despairing groan as I said, "Yuppers! Sure damn am! I'm more than a little familiar with that symbol given my father always sported a sticker on the trunk lid of his car with that symbol on it! It was his way of proudly announcing to the world that he was a devout Catholic. The fact that he loved to fuck his young daughter six-ways-to-Sunday—and most often on a Sunday—didn't seem to strike him as at all hypocritical and I often wished I could have found—or had made up!—a sticker of an outline of a Great White shark with the words, CHRISTIAN HYPOCRISY IS A REDUNDANCY printed inside it—and stuck it beside his precious fish! His damn ichthys!"

That got a short, serrated-knife laugh out of John—and a rolling red wave of rage!—as he responded with, "Yeah—the demands of being a true Christian—especially a Catholic Christian with almost all its serious sins revolving around our sexuality—are so inhumanly absurd that no human being can truly be one. . . . Though of course, those early Christian Gnostics were a lot more Buddhist—compassion-. . . and consciousness- . . .and spiritual growth-oriented—in their definition of being a Christian, so the hypocrisy problem was hardly such a big issue for them! I fact, from what I've read about what was discovered about them in those Nag Hammadi codices, sex wasn't a big issue at all.

"But back to what I originally intended to get to with this 'fishy' business that I brought up. As far as I am concerned, that celibacy requirement—that celibacy contract!—of Constantine's Imperial and Abominable Corporation is a lure designed specifically for catching those 'losers' and 'fuck-ups' as you call them . . . but which, in fishing terms, I'd call bottom feeders—big, fat, ugly, muck-lurking catfish! And not just ordinary, bottom-dwelling catfish, but sick and grotesquely deformed, bottom-dwelling catfish! Real sick ones!

"I mean, think about it! No normal, healthy, high-swimming trout of a young man is going to show the slightest interest in a career-choice—however much proxy power and prestige it offers!—that involves giving up sex. And female companionship. And marriage and family, even! And being asked to do so at that time of any young man's life when his whole consciousness is basically a steam engine with a firebox full of white-hot testosterone-coal. And with the engineer of his gonads at the throttle, and nothing along the mainline that steam engine is roaring but flag-stops for sex! (John sure didn't have to tell the erstwhile testosterone-magnet, the former "Wild Thing," that!)

"Shit!—a young man's sexuality is to his post-pubescent life like a newly bought jackknife is to a ten-year-old boy! When it's not in his hand, it's never far from his mind!"

And here he let out a loud chuckle as he said, "And the 'naughty innuendo' is intended! . . . . He goes to sleep with his sexuality on his mind—and likely in his hand!—each night, and when he wakes up each morning, he does so with an erection that's there just to remind him of it—even if he is too tired or hung-over to begin thinking about it for thirty seconds or so."

That got a laugh out of me as I thought about "Hubby" who woke up every morning with a raging hard-on that often would leaving him cursing because he usually needed to take a piss real bad, and like he too-often too-descriptively said, "Pissing with a hard-on is like running with your pants around your ankles!" (Since he was into screwing around with married women—some of them my best friends—he'd likely experienced that problem while escaping more than a few arriving-home-too-soon-from-work husbands!) And I also thought about my "Wild Thing" days and how easy it always had been for me to "troll" for—and so easily catch—always-horny boys and men of any age. All I had to do was use the lure of batting my eyebrows . . . licking my lips in a suggestive way . . . saying "Hi, Big Guy!" in a certain tone of voice . . . wiggle my bodacious booty . . . flash a bit of cleavage . . . and chomp!—they had that hook in their lower jaws—their cajones!—faster than a starving trout will leap at a mayfly! (John, of course, excepted!) Or, like the John once jokingly said, "Every young man thinks with his head—unfortunately it is usually the one on the end of his dick, not that hat-stand balanced on his shoulders!"

"So," John went on. "If you are able to accept that as a natural given, then it shouldn't be too big a leap to believe that any healthy young man—who cannot but be in the throes of a constant sexual excitement that he is constantly fantasizing about and which is either driving him to some sort of natural sexual activity, be it coition or masturbation—or wet dreams—and who is willing to give up—for the rest of his whole damn life!—partaking in very natural sexual activity . . . and the very natural enjoyment of female companionship . . . which he is already indulging in . . . and if not indulging in, then most certainly constantly yearning for and fantasizing about, then he definitely has something seriously wrong with him. Really wrong with him! He is, as that favorite saying of yours goes, 'one sick puppy.' Or in this case, one sick, future Darth Vader-puppy-priest!'

"Sure, sure, okay, okay—there's the lure of all that proxy-power attached to Constantine's very powerful corporation and the hubristic delusion that the Supreme Creator Deity of this Whole Damn Universe has cast his omniscient eye in his direction, has singled him out, and has given him 'the glorious call'—the egomaniacally sought-after Celestial Phone Call!—to become his 'humble servant'—but still, his sex-drive at that age would be dominating his life and for him to willingly want to turn away from that powerful, dominating, and fun-and-pleasure-promising drive—to outright deny and thwart it—is the act of a real 'sick puppy!'

"And so, as any avid angler knows, if you want to catch rainbow trout, you sure as hell don't use bottom-dragging catfish lures! And as far as I am concerned, that celibacy-lure is a total bottom-dragger good for catching only one kind of fish—bottom-feeding catfish! Very sick and deformed catfish!"

His fishing analogy was perfect and I could but interrupt his "piscine pontification" with, "Yeah—good analogy, Uncle John! Probably perfect! I can't imagine any normal and healthy young man wanting to be a priest. It could only be . . . unnatural! . . . My mother put a lot of pressure on my athletic hunk of a girl-magnet of an older brother, Daniel, to become her 'priest-in-the-family' . . . 'just like Uncle Matthew' and for the longest time he'd just respond to her bugging him about it, with a joking, "Come on, Ma! Me—be a priest? Ya gotta be kidding!" And once when she did her manipulative, tears-in-her-eyes, why-are-you-disappointing-your-good-Catholic-mother-like-this act, he outright told her to fuck off, stomped out of the house and didn't return for a week!

"She gave up after that. . . . My creep-shit pedophile of a father, on the other hand, wanted to be a priest—but somehow didn't make the cut! . . . So yeah, your lure analogy makes sense—my brother was a normal, hot-blooded male who took one look at that celebrity-lure and knew it for what it was—a hook from hell that sure wasn't for him! . . . While my father, sick fuck that he was, took a lunge and a chomp at that catfish lure but couldn't hold onto it. Or the line broke. . . . . More likely got cut by some Darth Vader-Bishop who saw too much darth in him even for a Darth Vader-priest! Alas—for poor little ol' me!"

"Though I think," John said as he again spurred his pontification-pony into motion. "There is also a natural independence . . . and growing up . . . issue in play with that as well—which we have already talked about. Going through puberty . . . as you have pointed out . . . is all about the natural transition—the membrane of destiny!—from being a child—a dependent, authority-kowtowing semi-individual—to being an independent, authority-defying, and totally individuated individual! In a way it looks like that 'catfish lure' has an added component to it—the provision of a perpetual authority-dependent dynamic . . . of a life-long authority-dominated, dependent-family situation.

"Actually, what we are talking about is the attraction that all corporate institutions have to certain types of authority-loving semi-individuals. I've met a lot of such . . . semi-human creatures . . . on more than a few jobs, who view the company they work for as a family, and their bosses as parents, and live with the delusion that in being part of that family they are—and always will be—paternally/maternally looked after. Truly a soap bubble of a delusion that gets very nastily pricked when the 'family' sails onto some financial shoals and 'father' or 'mother' lays them off! Or decides it prefers slave-cheap Mexican or Chinese labor and moves the whole plant to Mexico or Taiwan! Though I am quite certain that as a corporation, Constantine's Imperial and Abominable Corporation is a lot more of a hermetic 'family' than Ford or GM or the mining companies around here! . . . Which many of the 'company men' that toil for them often call 'Mother ______!" And those other corporations at least pay their employees a decent wage—or as decent a wage as the unions can wrestle from them.

"And though I've never met your brother, he sounds like he is a typical, red-blooded male who was too healthy to want to be a priest—and too independent-minded and character-strong to let your mother manipulate him into becoming one, 'for the Church!' . . . Christ, we as a 'Christian' culture sure were quick to condemn various ancient, South American cultures for their practice of child sacrifice, yet any Catholic parent who encourages a child to become a celibate priest or a nun—basically live out a non-life!—in Constantine's Imperial Abomination, is doing something very . . . evilly—similar! So tip of the hat to him for standing up to your mother! . . . I bet she's still trying to get that knot out of her knickers!"

And when I was finished laughing at that most appropriate metaphor—and the fact that when it came to her family and its members relationships to her "precious Church," her knickers were nothing but knots!—I more seriously added, "Love that . . . insight . . . of yours that any Catholic parent who encourages . . . or SLP's . . . or gaslights . . . one of their children into becoming a Darth Vader or a Darth Zuster for the Abomination, is committing a form of child-sacrifice. A form of slow-death sacrifice that lasts for decades, not minutes!"

And nodding his head to that, John went on, "Though now that we are on that ''child-sacrificing' subject, it sure makes me wonder how many reasonably normal young men end up becoming priests because of parental pressure! That 'Cult of Constantine's' is so powerful and mind-warping that there sure are a lot of very sick and hypocritical Catholic parents who pressure—sacrifice!—their sons to become priests just to make them look real good in Catholic social circles—to 'do them proud!' Or do the same to their daughters to force them to become nuns—Darth Zusters!

"And that's even sicker because it would always be the mother pressuring the daughter to become a nun—I can't even remotely imagine a father doing that!—but every mother already knows only too well the power of the female sex drive—and the equal power of the need to become an mother and raise a family. I mean, if most 'good Catholic' mothers can't face that fact, we at least can, because her sex drive—and her need to express it—is why she has a daughter to 'sacrifice' to that infernal Abomination in the first place. So I doubt there is anything more hypocritical than a Catholic mother who coerces her daughter into giving up the joys of sex and motherhood—however fleeting—in order to become a nun!"

And again, wanting to add something to our "conversation" I played devil's advocate and playfully said, "Why does that make those parents 'sick and hypocritical,' Uncle John? Wouldn't you consider it natural—and right!—for 'good Catholic parents' to want to provide a son or daughter to their 'precious Church?'. . . After all, without a few Catholic children heading into that . . . corporation . . . it would cease to exists as fast as . . . Ford . . . or GM . . . if they couldn't get anyone to work in their factories.

That got a decent chuckle of John as he took off his Stetson, and angling his horse beside mine, stuck it, open-end first, in front of my face and said, "Say that again . . . so I can hear it properly!"

And when I'd finished laughing at his "literal metaphor," he put his Stetson back on his head and said, "Yeah, but I don't think the operative word for that dark process is provide, but is more, as we've been talking about, like sacrifice—along the lines of Abraham being told by ol' NON . . . who in that absurd story was playing his Nasty Ol' Nobodaddy-role to perfection . . . to sacrifice his precious son Isaac to him—just so that sick, Cosmic Sadist could find out if he would be baa-bleatingly sheep-souled enough to do it! And again I say sacrifice because . . . again, think of it! Especially since it is as important as it is vilely absurd! Every Catholic parent was themselves once a child raised in a Catholic household and likely themselves, at some point, parentally pressured—like your brother—to become a priest or a nun—yet the only reason those parents ended up becoming parents is because, on going through puberty, their second chakras got blasted open, their groins got inflamed with liquid fire, and they liked the idea of indulging in the sex that would temporarily douse that liquid fire!

"And of course, in also having the enjoyment—and fulfillment!—of the companionship of the opposite sex. And the enjoyment and fulfillment of establishing a normal household and raising a family. Or more likely just liked, first the idea of indulging in the pleasures of sex, then having opposite-sex companionship, with the raising-the-family issue, for many, being a distant, but inevitable consideration—especially since using birth-control is considered a heinous, ol' NON-displeasing, hell-damning sin by that infernal and utterly abominable Corporation!

"So there you have these 'good Catholic parents' who years before had given-in to their very natural and very human desires and liquid-fire groin-lusts and gotten married and had sex . . . or had sex and then gotten married, as is the way of things today! . . . and started a family—with many of the men and women of today both, acquiring high paying, status- and ego-enhancing jobs and careers!—then turning around and expecting—demanding?. . . SLPing? . . . gaslighting?. . . . even outright bullying!—those children which they so naturally and sexually produced in that family, to not follow their very natural and very human example of enjoying sex and the companionship of a member of the opposite sex—and the fulfillment!—of creating and raising a family . . . and of making their successful, status- and ego-enhancing way through the world, and instead take the very unnatural—and rejected-by-them path—of becoming, not only a very unnatural celibate, denied not only sex, but the companionship and love of a member of the opposite sex, but also becoming a de facto serf of Constantine's Imperial Corporation!

"If that ain't the most pernicious form of hypocrisy in the history of this human species, then I don't know what it is. . . . Except maybe Constantine's very Abominable and very Imperial Corporation basing its very existence on the mystical revelations and teachings of the Jew, Joshua/Jesus, then turning around and for seventeen hundred dark years, being pogrom-happy and mass-murderously anti-Semitic!

"So I think if you combine the fact that Constantine's Imperial and Abominable Corporation trolls for its very Darth Vader serf-priests, not only with its human-nature-denying, pre-adolescent/authority-dependent/loser-lures of poverty and obedience, but with that utterly evil, human-nature denying, human-nature tormenting and human-nature deforming catfish lure of a lifetime of celibacy, which—whether they realize it or not—can really only appeal to severely spiritually and socially maladjusted young men with serious psychological and sexual problems.

"Or milquetoast Mama-boys who are too weak of character—and too authority-dependent/cowed!—to stand up to the you-gotta-be-the-priest-in-the-family pressures of their mothers! And I put most of the blame on mothers for this because I sure can't imagine any father demanding his son become a priest! . . . At least not in this day and age! In the very feudal, Dark and Middle Ages when primogenitor ruled and positions of power outside the estate had to be found for lesser sons, it would have been common, though in those days, Darth Vader-priests . . . and subsequent real, Darth Vader-Bishops, Darth Vader-Cardinals and Darth Emperor-Popes—like that infamous paragon of corruption and debauchery, Pope John the Twelfth!—who came from the gentry and on taking those vows—making those corporate-contracts!—didn't take any of them even remotely seriously! They were like speed-limit signs to millionaires driving their Jaguars and Ferraris and Maseratis on a freeway in the 'Big Shitty!'

"But today, in our average, democratic cultures, most men—even baa-bleating Catholic ones—know the power and value of being a 'real man' and they sure would not want to deprive a son—or at least a son they had some affection and respect for—of that privilege! So I tend to go with good, crazed-on-religiosity, Catholic mothers being the prime 'priest-recruiters' for Constantine's Imperial Corporate-Army, though I suspect their son-sacrificing motivation is a 60/40 split between providing that vile 'army' with 'cannon fodder-priests' and their own, obsessive desires to protect their precious sons from committing all the sexual 'sins' that they are certain their male sexuality will drive them to commit—not realizing they are coercing them into a very inhuman situation that over time, will drive—compel!—them to become demonic predators who can but very 'sinfully' express their thwarted and deformed sexuality through the evils of pedophilia!"

"Yeah, I think you've got some good points there, Uncle John," I said, with a bit of interest. "My mother always doted on my brother Daniel and he lapped it up when he was little, but as he approached puberty, he chaffed under that too-close attention, and once through puberty, he outright rebelled against it! He and my mother had some real battle royales over her compulsive interference in his life. Especially if he found out she'd gone into his room and had been rooting around for his precious stash of 'skin mags!' Hell, I think my mother would have reacted with more equanimity to a huge rat scurrying across the dinner table than the sight of a Playboy under Daniel's mattress! He didn't like those 'apron strings' and cut them off as fast as that 'tearful' manipulative, interfering, privacy-invading bitch of a mother of ours could re-attach them."

'Yup! Sounds like your mother, alright!" said John. "Again, kudos to your brother for standing up for his inchoate manhood and cutting those apron strings. All normal, healthy young men will feel the over-powering need do that! They have to do that! In tribal cultures, boys on the cusp of puberty are yanked away from their mothers by the men of the tribe—father, uncles, older brothers—and put through some pretty arduous ordeals specifically designed to cut those apron string and allow those boys to transition through puberty and into manhood! There was no room in those living-on-the-edge-of-survival tribal cultures for over-grown mama's boys! The men were the brave and intrepid hunters and warriors, and the tribe's survival depended on them performing those difficult manly duties!"

With that I felt a rare flare of inspiration light up my brain, and I could but say, "You know John, if most priests end up becoming priests because they are . . . half-men . . . are basically over grown 'mama's boys' who can't stand up to their mothers over their demands that they become priests, then that would explain part of priest-pedophilia problem. Especially since all pedophiles are predators who prey on unsexualized children . . . on those who are vulnerable and weaker than them. No male who is still a little boy . . . in this case a little boy attached to the 'apron strings' of his beloved, Mother Church . . . is going to feel comfortable initiating a sexual relationship with an adult woman . . . or adult man. . . . Though of course, I'm over-generalizing there, because I've heard more than a few stories of Darth Vaders being involved in long-term affairs with married women. . . . And seducing—or raping!—teenage girls!

"But for many of them . . . in being over-grown and authority-dependent forever-children . . or that fancy Latin term you used . . . but really just Peter Pans!—Peter Pans with big, hard, raging piddidles!—they can only feel comfortable preying on other children. Adults would be way too intimidating! It would be interesting for some academic head-shrinker to undertake a scientific study of pedophile priests to catalogue their reasons for becoming a priest, and most importantly, their relationships with their mothers!"

"Good point, Rache!" John answered with a note of bitterness in his voice. "That Latin term, by the way, is puer aeternus . . . not that it matters beyond the fact that it is a fancy way of describing a 'man' suffering from what some head-shrinker would call 'the Peter Pan-syndrome! And those academic head-shrinkers should also find out to about those Darth Vaders' non-relationships with their fathers! . . . Kind of like the non-relationship that whiny kid in those Star Wars movies didn't have with his real, Darth Vader father. Little boys only become 'mamma's boys' when the father is not in the picture, because every little boy, if the father is there for him, will always and naturally want to be around—and be just like!—his father!

(As The Fire will show, John was speaking from self-recriminating experience, because when his son Johnny was a young child, John, severely damaged as he was at that time by his abusive childhood—at the violent hands of his father and the prick of a pedophile priest!—and then his PTSD from the BASS, wanted nothing to do with the poor little guy. He thought of him as nothing more than a bloody nuisance who belonged in his mother's care. And even though the little fellow worshipped the very ground 'Big Daddy John' walked on, he ended up becoming a 'mama's boy,' not only because his mother was the only one who would pay attention to him, but because Catherine herself was in a very damaged and vulnerable state after the death of her infant, Emma—and her unnatural isolation on that ranch!—and used little Johnny to replace the emotional support she wasn't getting from John, who at that time, had a saddle-horn for a heart and was obsessed with the success of his ranch. And his own psychological and spiritual problems. It's a dark and ugly—and too fucking human!—story, believe me!)"

"So it looks like it's wise to say there's a lot of factors going into the fact of so many of Constantine's Imperial Corporation's priests becoming predatory pedophiles, the absolutely main one would be that celibacy requirement which becomes the bottom-feeding catfish-lure that can only appeal to young men—mamma's boys or not!—who are socially and sexually dysfunctional. Sexually normal young men—even authority-dependent boy-men!—are just naturally attracted to the trout, bass or walleye lures of sex, family and Aristotle's eudaimonia—the good, natural/normal life, and wouldn't even be swimming close enough to the bottom to notice a catfish lure!

"So, from this point of view, it looks like Constantine's Imperial and Abominable Corporation is fishing—and pretty much always has been!—for its future Darth Vader serf-priests with catfish-lures, thus only catching and reeling in bottom-feeding, social losers and fuck-ups—as you call them!—who have serious problems with their natural adult-autonomy and with naturally expressing their sexuality. And obviously also having other psychological and spiritual problems! And then you combine that with them being authority-dependent boy-men who, in playing out their role of being Darth Vader serf-priests, not only experience the constant state of sexual frustration endemic to trying to be celibate, but the accompanying states of unnatural loneliness and unnatural isolation that 'goes with the territory'—as you like to say!—of not having female companionship, of not having a wife and a family. A wife and family to come home to after a long day's work—especially after a day of work spent in that pernicious sin-box . . . that spiritual Porta-Potty! . . . getting 'honey-wagon'-loads of psychic shit and piss dumped into their ears and psyche!—then it is small wonder that infernal and abominable corporation of Constantine's has turned itself into a Dante's hell with all nine circles full of demonic hordes of very evil and very predatory pedophile-priests!" (For those of you who have lifelong lived in urban areas with central, communal sewage systems, the term "honey-wagon" might not be familiar, but in rural areas like this, where just about everyone has a septic tank, the "honey wagon" was the tanker truck into which the anything-but-sweet-as-honey contents of those tanks were regularly pumped.)

"Yeah, good points! Especially about it being the mothers who are most responsible for driving their sons to become priests. I don't remember my father even once suggesting that to Daniel. In fact, I remember once when my mother ruined a good, very rare, steak-meal by bringing the subject up at the dinner table—hoping, I am sure, to bully my usually religion-compliant father to support her on the issue—but my father surprised me . . . and certainly my mother!—by rolling his eyes, shaking his head, then going back to sawing off another piece of steak, jamming it in his mouth and silently staring at his plate as he chewed the hell out of it.

"My brother, meanwhile, flung his knife and fork down on his plate of half-eaten food, pushed his chair back so hard it tipped over, then charged out of the dining room while screaming at my mother that she was a 'crazy, meddling cunt!' I don't think my mother had ever heard anyone call her that word in her whole life and she burst into tears as she screamed at my father to get up and discipline my brother. He just kept looking down at his plate while he sawed off another piece of steak like nothing had happened. My sister, meanwhile, was balling her eyes out—she was real sensitive and always cried during family fights!—while I had to fight the fight of my life to keep from letting out a loud laugh while raising my fist and cheering my bother on! And you could take full measure of my brother's rage, not only because he called my mother a cunt, but because he didn't finish eating his steak. We rarely had steak and he so did love steak! . . . No less than did my father, who after finishing his piece, reached across the table, speared Dan's piece with his fork, and after saying, 'Waste not, want not!' ate it as meticulously as he'd eaten his own. . . . Which really pissed me off because I'd had my eye on it and had hesitated just a fraction of a second too long."

That got a chuckle of John, but he said nothing as I went on, "But do you think there is any solution to that pedophile-priest problem, Uncle John? . . . I mean, do you think that infernal . . . Abomination . . . will ever solve it? Do you think it will ever start fishing for priests with healthier lures? Paying them a decent salary? Allowing them to marry? Have families? . . . And most important—allow women to be priests? . . . That would be a damn good thing, as far as I'm concerned!"

That got one of the most cynical, saw-edged laughs out of John that I have ever heard him let loose, as he harshly said, "Never! Not in a million millennia! I don't think that infernal and abominable corporation of Constantine's will ever even acknowledge it has a pedophilia problem, so it will never do anything about that!. . . . Unless it gets so bad that it starts getting covered in the news too much—despite its bests efforts to prevent that happening. . . . And even then, I'm sure that wouldn't make a damn bit of difference!

(Well, it certainly has done that since he died! And it is turning out to be a bigger—a totally global problem—than he likely ever thought it was! . . . Or maybe not, given that he was intelligent enough to know that with Constantine's Imperial and Abominable Corporation being what it so powerfully is in just about every country around the world, and human nature being so profoundly and typically human no matter what country you are talking about, the priest-pedophilia problem could only be everywhere! Like cancer and heart disease and tooth decay . . . and political corruption!)

"As for the idea of paying its priests a decent salary for all the work they do . . . I think you will see that outfit recruiting, training, and ordaining chimpanzees and orangutans as priests before it would ever do that! The Abomination's bottom-line is too important to it! After all those centuries of amassing great wealth and power by getting free, basically slave labor out of its Darth Vader-priests, it's sure not going to mess with a good thing like that! Or at least, not as long their catfish lures are catching the required number of suckers! Pun intended! And not as long as their sucker-serf priests don't form a union and go on strike—which is about as likely to happen as the Pope moving out of his Vatican Palace and into a humble hut somewhere in the Italian countryside.

"And with regards to allowing priests to marry—never! Not in ten million millennia! That institution is too old, too hide-bound, too self-satisfied, too self-important, too self-righteous, too arrogant . . . in effect, too Roman! . . . to ever make that kind of dramatic change—especially since in allowing priests to marry, it would first have to start paying them a decent salary so they could support their families! Then it would have to start sharing that almost total power it has over its Darth Vader serf-priests with women! . . . And as you know, that Imperial and very Abominable Corporation had only two uses for women—as breeding ewes of more baa-bleating Catholic sheep, and as nuns!

"And as to women priests . . . which I believe would be great idea! That wouldn't happen in a million aeons! I mean, that institution is as fundamentally patriarchal as it is abominable, and it after all, is still essentially Constantine's! As far as I am concerned—again, for as little as my John Nobody-opinion is worth!—Constantine's very corrupt and murderous and very Roman spirit still infuses that abominable corporation! And as the history books show—honest history books, not the Abomination's propaganda-books—he was a very corrupt and murderous and very Roman Emperor whose attitudes towards women can be encapsulated in the fact that he cast aside his first wife to further his political ambitions in order to marry Fausta, whom he eventually murdered by having her boiled alive when it suited his political needs!

"So I doubt few cultures were as endemically and passionately patriarchal and misogynistic as that Roman one he epitomized! In fact, I suspect a lot of aristocratic Roman men had more respect for their slaves than they did for their wives and daughters!—and I am sure current historians would have a better chance of discovering that women served as officers in Constantine's legions than future historians have of seeing—in even the most distant future!—a female priest in his Imperial and Misogynistic Corporate Army!

"No, I think the only thing that will end that pedophilia-priest problem will be the absolute end of Constantine's Imperial Corporation! And given how wealthy and powerful—and interwoven and entrenched!—that corporate institution is in our world culture—and how many 'losers' and 'fuck-ups' there are who are ever-willing to chomp down on its cat-fish lures promising power and prestige in place of sex, money and autonomy . . . and all the flocks of really stupid, child-credulous, baa-bleating human sheep there are available to continue willingly accepting its manipulative, sheep-shearing, sin-and-damnation nonsense and keep it in wealth and power!—it will be with us until the end of the world as we know it.

"Until the comet or asteroid arrives to put us out of our lunacy and misery! That infernal corporation of Constantine's will continue to dominate and control its ever-expanding flocks of mindless, baa-bleating sheep—and keep electing world-famous Darth Emperor Popes!—until that comet or asteroid—or a nuclear holocaust!—exterminates the exponentially multiplying vermin that we are demonstrating ourselves to be, from this planet!

"Western Europe, during the decline of the Roman Empire—and on into the resultant Dark and Middle Ages!—was, on a spiritual level, a lot like a severely over-grazed ranch where the natural 'spiritual grasses' could no longer grow in abundance, which allowed some real noxious plants—locoweed!—to gain a foothold and then dominate and drive out what remained of the good, natural grazing grasses. Constantine's Imperial Corporation, on a spiritual level, is nothing more than a whole lot of very aggressive and poisonous locoweed that took over and dominated the 'over-grazed and degraded spiritual fields' of Roman Europe! And it is a known fact that once a piece of land is so severely overgrazed that the natural grasses are driven out, allowing noxious invasive species to take over, the damage can never be reversed. In fact, what usually happens is that naturally lush grazing land ends up becoming a hard-packed desert where only very tough and very noxious plants can thrive. When a stupid and greedy rancher destroys his grazing lands by over-populating it with cattle that inevitably over-graze it, the only solution is to abandon that land, and I suspect that this good Earth right now is, spiritually, like and over-grazed field on its way to desertification, a desertification conducive only to the growth of the noxious locoweed of Constantine's Imperial Abomination and its poisonous-to-our-spiritual growth, dogma, which means that its not

Bam! Bam! Bam! . . . Bam!

CHRISTALLGODDAMNFUCKINGMIGHTY! What the fuck is going on??????? How did I get in this fucking room? . . . And where the fuck did John . . . and our horses go????????? HOLY CHRISTALLFUCKINGGODAMNEDMIGHTY!—I was so fucking into writing about that ride it was like I was living it. Like John and his dog and those horses were still alive and we'd actually been out riding on that lovely fall day! Wow, man—what a fucking trip! But who the fuck could be way out here knocking on my fucking door—so loud like that!—at this time of a foggy morning? And I know it can't be Jonathan, because he has a key and would just unlock the door and walk right in. Fuck-a-banging-fist!—I'm going to have to ignore it because I just have a little bit more to write about that ride, and then I'll be finished with it

Bam! Bam! Bam! . . . Bam!

FUCKINGGODDAMNHELL! They're real persistent ASSHOLES! It must be a couple of those brain-dead Jehovah Witness assholes trying to peddled all their end-of-the-fucking-world-because-everyone-is-a-sinner, Nasty Ol' Jehovah-Nobodaddy shit. . . . OR JUST AS FUCKING GODDAMN BAD!—a pair of those even more obnoxious, clean-cut, suit-wearing Mormon MORONS peddling their moronic, ANGEL-MORONI-VISITS-MISTER SMITH-SHIT!

FIST-FUCK-ALL-IDIOT-PEDDLERS-OF-BRAIN-DEAD RELIGIONS!—if I had the energy I'd tromp down the stairs, go to the door, fling it open and moon those religiots with my big fat ass! And hopefully have a big, loud reeking fart ready to blast at them when I do!

Bam! Bam! Bam! . . . Bam!

Fuck those assholes really are FUCKING PERSISTENT!—AND THEY REALLY ARE PISSING ME OFF!—and they just don't want to disappoint their NASTY OL' JEHOVAH-NOBODADDY . . . or MISTER SMITH'S MORONIC MORONI!—by leaving my door without shoving some of their Watchtower gibberish-garbage in my hand . . . or standing there in their slick, pressed-perfect suits and fucking Brylcreemed hair, telling me that according to the Great Cosmic Law Firm of Smith, Young & Moroni, I am a born-sinner and it would be wise of me save my sinning soul from an eternity locked up in Lucifer's HELLFIRE PENITENTIARY by joining their moronic MORONI-CULT and finding God and Christ and Jesus and Mr. Smith and Brigham Young and GOD-ONLY-FUCKING-KNOWS-WHO-THE-FUCK-ELSE

Bam! Bam! Bam! . . . Bam!

FUCKING HELL!—but they are REALLY pissing me the fuck OFF! Especially this early in the FUCKING MORNING! And don't they FUCKING KNOW that I spent the first part of my pathetic, TOTALLY FUCKED UP LIFE trapped in a way BIGGER and MORE POWERFUL and LIFE-FUCKING CULT than that pissant, sin-slinging outfit of Smith, Young & Moroni out there in the Utah desert, which all its Mormonic members deludedly believe—same as all fucking Catholic morons deludedly believe—to be the one-est, the only-est and the true-est religion created on this almost-FUBAR planet by Nasty Ol' Jehovah-Nobodaddy

Bam! Bam! Bam! . . . Bam!

WHATTHEFUCK!—I can now hear those ASSHOLES shouting something at me! That's real FUCKING STRANGE because usually if you ignore those religiots, they slink away like stray dogs you refuse to feed

Bam! Bam! Bam! . . . Bam!

FUCKINGGODDAMNHELL! I guess I better go see what they want

FUCK THE FICKLE FINGER OF FATE! I'm back for my last minutes at this keyboard—and this FUBAR "Preface," because after fucking near falling down the stairs and then waddling to the door to fling it open so I could yell at those RELIGION PEDDLING ASSHOLES to "FUCK OFF!", I discovered it wasn't any peddlers of any religion at all—but a real worried looking Jonathan with a couple of real serious looking paramedics standing right behind him And the reason he wasn't letting himself—or them!—in with the key, was because the door was nailed shut with a bunch of boards and big nails half-driven into the frame! And on seeing me, Jonathan shouted at me to pry the boards off the door or he was going to smash the window and come in that way!

Just the sight of those two big, scowling paramedics standing on my stoop behind Jonathan was enough to cause me to piss myself. I mean, really PISS myself! It GUSHED out of me like I was a fucking COW, for fuck's sake! What a fucking MESS! My legs are DRIPPING and my nightgown is SOAKED—and now it's cold and clammy and so fucking UNCOMFORTABLE sitting here at this computer like that, but I have no time to change!

And while was so embarrassingly PISSING MYSELF, my PARANOIA-SCORPION instantly grew from the moderate sized scorpion it HAD BEEN when I woke up just a little while ago, and instantly turned into a RAGING MONSTER SCORPION that just as instantly filled me with such a RED-BLACK RAGE that I just KNEW that if I didn't get out of that kitchen I was going to STING those ASSHOLES—Jonathan excepted!—to death!

But first I roared at Jonathan, "WHY'D YOU BRING THOSE ASSHOLES, JONATHAN—YOU KNOW HOW I HATE THEM! . . . THEY'RE NASTY BASTARDS!"

"Mom!" he calmly and only as loudly as he had to, said through the closed, barred door. "It's because when I was here by myself earlier, and I knocked and knocked, you wouldn't answer the door. and I saw those boards, so I knew you were in a read bad way so I called for an ambulance. . . . if you are okay, why didn't you answer the door?"

And I stood staring at him like a crazed doofus when he asked that because I had no memory of hearing him knocking on the door. Though I did remembering hearing what I thought was one of those Pileated Woodpeckers hammering various trees along our ride and I had been wondering why John hadn't commented on it. Wow, I can't believe how into that ride I was. I wasn't just remembering and writing it, I was living it!

And as I was waddle-climbing as fast as could back up here in my wet feet and piss-sopping—and real clammy!—nightgown, I was wondering where the thick fog had gone that had been there less than an hour before. Then I looked at the clock on the wall and realized I'd been totally engrossed in writing about that ride with John for FOUR FUCKING HOURS!

HOW COULD THAT BE? It seemed like less than an hour! And FUCK!—I can't even remember most of what I wrote now! Mostly stuff John and I talked about, I guess . . . Though even as I was thinking about that, my memory of everything about that ride seemed to slip away from me. Not just what we were talking about, but the ride itself. It's totally gone from my mind now. Like a dream when you wake up. Fuck—was that ride an hallucination and not a memory of a real ride at all? Fuck—I guess I have no way now of ever knowing! But fuck—I hope it was important enough to be worth all this fuckin' trouble! But no fucking wonder I had to piss so bad I pissed myself—with a fucking BIBLICAL FLOOD, for fuck's sake! Drowning all those ants crawling around on my filthy kitchen floor!

And now that I look around at this garbage dump of a desk, I can see that while doing that writing I ate all that left-over pizza and drank the three Cokes. FUCK!—NO WONDER I pissed myself! But FOUR FUCKING HOURS!—where the FUCKING HELL did those hours GO? It seemed like I just sat down to start writing all that stuff I now can't remember, and then minutes later I was hearing those asshole paramedics hammering the shit out of that boarded up door! It can't have been FOUR FUCKING HOURS and I can't have written THAT MUCH! . . . HOLY FUCK! I've just looked at the word-count for this poor, FUBAR "Preface" and its jumped from 325,000 words to over 435, 000!

THAT'S where those FOUR FUCKING HOURS went! I HAD NO FUCKING IDEA! . . . I guess I was really enjoying that writing-ride! That what must have been an hallucina-ride! An absolutely amazing, finger-flying hallucina-ride in a really super-charged Cor-azy-vette! Just like I sure as fuck know I enjoyed all of the many real rides John and I—and the horses and the dog!—enjoyed all those too many fucking goddamn years ago! Except I get the feeling the ride I just wrote about NEVER FUCKING HAPPENED! Not in real life, anyway! And no FUCKING WONDER I can't remember what I wrote—all those fucking words must have GUSHED out of my fucking head like all that piss just did out of my poor, strained-to-the-limit bladder! I can't believe I've still got fingers left on my fat hands. They shoulda fuckin' burned off!

And now that I am here writing again—fuck, my fat, usually stiff slow fingers seem to be still, Cor-azy-vette burnin' rubber on this keyboard like they belong to some geek-kid and sure not fat old me!—I am thinking that when I first saw Jonathan and those para-ASSHOLES at my boarded up door, I wanted to stay there just fucking DARING them to break my window so the MONSTER SCORPION I was becoming could give them what they fucking DESERVED, but while I was standing there, stomping my bare fucking feet in that big warm puddle of ant-drowning PISS that had just GEYSERED out of me, I could suddenly hallucina-feel the PRESENCES of both John and Catherine REAL FUCKING CLOSE to me—and hallucina-smell both Old Spice and fresh lilacs real, REAL FUCKING STRONG! And I could HEAR John speaking REAL calm and REAL slow in my head, saying, "C a l m d o w n, R a c h e!" And when I did force myself to calm down a bit, he went on, "Now go back to your my computer, close the file, put it on its memory-stick, hide the stick, then let Jonathan and the paramedics in—because they are only there to help you and not harm you. . . . And remember, I enjoyed that ride with you . . . that you very brilliantly just finished writing into existence . . . as you did. So did the dog and the horses! And those two glorious hawks! And that big old Pileated Woodpecker! William Blake would be proud of your imaginative powers during that ride!"

GODDAMN! I had no idea what the fuck he was talking about—what fuckin' hawks? . . .and fuckin' woodpecker?—but I sure did not want John to quit talking! What an entrancing and blissful hallucination!—I could spend all of eternity listening to him talk and I would be sure I'd gone straight to heaven! And DAMN IT ALL TO HELL, but his stopping talking has made me start crying and I am having a hard time seeing what I am supposed to be doing right now! NO! NOT LETTING THOSE ASSHOLE PARAMEDICS WITH THEIR MIKE TYSON-KETAMINE PUNCHES INTO MY HOUSE SO THEY CAN KNOCK ME INTO NEXT FUCKIN' YEAR! But to listen to what John said, and close and save this FUBAR "Preface"—except I can't seem to STOP WRITING this stupid, unnecessary shit about what is going on. CAN'T FUCKING STOP! . . . It's like my fingers have minds of their FUCKING own and they've gone completely manic and are totally out of fucking control! It's that fucking goddamn COKE—that's what it fucking IS!

### Bam! Bam! Bam!—Bam!

Fuck-a-framing-hammer!—but I have no memory of nailing boards over that door! And in the few seconds I spent looking around at the INCREDIBLY FILTHY KITCHEN—it looked like someone had dumped a FULL FUCKING GARBAGE TRUCK in it!—that I FINALLY REALIZED!—AT THAT FUCKING INSTANT!—how SO INCREDIBLY FILTHY it had BECOME! And I also noticed that someone—me, obviously!—had used my two kitchen chairs as sawhorses to saw those boards. There was sawdust on the floor—on and around the empty, ant-crawling pizza boxes and empty Coke cans—and more fuckin' booze bottles than I even want to think about! And in the middle of a WHOLE DAMN LOT of filthy, ant-swarming and fly-buzzing dishes and moldy, ant-swarming and fly-buzzing pizza crusts, was an old handsaw and hammer. And I guess I'd slammed that hammer down real hard without looking, because the filthy, crust-littered plate underneath it was shattered into about a HUNDRED FUCKING PIECES! And to think I'd woken up this morning thinking all that cutting and pounding shit had been just a dream

### Bam! Bam! Bam!—Bam!

OH FUCK! I can hear Jonathan shouting "MOM—PLEASE OPEN THIS DOOR! PLEASE!"

FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!—I was hoping I was going to be able to keep myself under control so Jonathan could have an easy time taking me to the Shrink-Klink but that sure ain't gonna happen now. FOR-FUCKING-SURE-IT-FUCKING-AIN'T!!!!!!!

And I'm getting real tired of this cold, piss-wet nightgown so I'm taking it off!

Ahhhhhhhh, that feels better. And FUCKING HELL!—but I can't believe how filthy and stinky that old rag of a thing is. YUK!

And I can again smell Old Spice REAL STRONG and hear John's R E A L C A L M voice telling me to REAL QUICK close this file, store it on its memory stick, and hide it. But my MONSTER SCORPION just KNOWS those paramedics are going to REAL SOON come crashing through my kitchen window and are going to come stomping up those stairs and are REAL FUCKING QUICK going to give me a REAL NASTY MIKE TYSON-KETAMINE PUNCH, so I have to do SOMETHING!

THERE—I'VE FUCKING DONE IT! I've closed the door to this room and dragged the spare bed and the dresser in front of it, but my PARANOIA SCORPION feels like it is in TOTAL CONTROL and is filling me with such a FUCKING RAGE that my hands are shaking so bad I can barely hit the right keys to type these last words. Good fucking thing for good ol' Auto-Correct! And my PARANOIA SCORPION grows even HUGER and ANGRIER when I hear one of those paramedic shout, "BREAK THE WINDOW! That mean and angry shout was followed by a loud CRASH of breaking glass, and then some loud pounding and the sound of boards falling on the floor, and one of them—in the kitchen!—shouting "WHERE IS SHE?"

My reaction to that was to scream, "GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE AND LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE! I HAVEN'T DONE ANYTHING WRONG!"

And I can hear Jonathon in the kitchen shouting, "HOLD ON FELLOWS!—LET ME TRY TO TALK HER DOWN!"

Then I heard him softer saying, "She's real scared and paranoid right now and when she's like that she's stronger than bull. Two bulls! Let me try and talk her down a bit—so somebody doesn't get hurt. Particularly her! She's not a young woman, you know! Christ—she'd pushing seventy and is way over-weight and I'm terrified this is going to cause her to die of a heart attack!"

I then hear a soft knocking on that blocked-up door and Jonathan real nice saying, "Come on, Mom—it's me! Jonathan. Calm down and let me in. I've got to get you to the hospital and back on your meds—you know you are out of control. You can't go on like this—the longer you are off your meds the worse it always gets! And this house has turned into . . . into such a . . . dump . . . such a health hazard, I feel like we should all be wearing HAZMAT suits! What have you been doing to let yourself—and this house!—get in such a state? I've never seen things get this bad before!"

As he is saying that, I can hallucina-feel John and Catherine's presences grow really strong and this room suddenly reeks with Old Spice and lilacs. OH WOW!—WHAT A RUSH! I can feel both of them—both of their spirits . . . if I could only believe in spirits!—"move into" me, causing me to suddenly feel real calm and peaceful. And GOOD! And now that I have calmed down and am feeling so good, I hear Catherine's sweet, soft wind-chime voice fill my head with a soothing, cooling breeze as she says, "It's over, Dear Rachel. You've done more than enough work on the preface to our memories. Please stop now."

And when she stopped speaking, I not only felt real calm and peaceful—and good—but I am feeling a deep, calm urge to tell Jonathan that I will be opening the door in a few seconds. And now, as I my mind fills up with a profound wonder over what an hallucination can do, my being, my psyche seems to fill even more with a strange feeling of calmness—and rightness!—as I am about to close, store, and hide this poor, FUBAR "Preface"—and doing it with my fingers crossed—well, figuratively, obviously!—that the enough of me survives those waiting bouts of head-lighting to remember where I put it. And then publish it just as it has been written!

Wish me luck, Dear Patient Readers, for this Cor-azy-vette ride is finally over and this is all that this "Crazy Rachel" is ever going to write

