The Succinct Story of My Broken Toes

This little piggie went to market, this little piggie stayed home because it fell down the stairs and snapped its little-piggie spine right in half, this little liggie had roast beef, this little piggie had none, and this little piggie cried wee wee wee all the way home because it was on the run from the Luxembourg mafia but they caught him anyway and taught him a lesson about what happens when a little piggie turns into a dirty rat.

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4:27 A.M.

So the light dawned. So the day began. It did not promise a soul a single inch of painless passage.

I just took it. I crossed the dawn's tide-drawn line. And now here, opposite there, I find everything to be just as wonderful in its own splendid way.

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3:33 A.M.

What I think is fog is filth on the windows and obscurity is just months of my lazy. It's then, then, that I realize I've always been the same:

Why's the sugar left out for the ants?

Why's the coffee left to grow green?

Why's the ashtraty left to vesuvius over its brims?

Why's the letter I meant to write never made it from head to pen?

Why is it I am learning to care less? Is this a bad lesson I teach myself with every good lesson I am afraid to accept then reinterpret?

Ah, hell, I don't know. Why am I awake at night, every night, when the moon itself isn't watching what you do?

I don't know.

I just know that, with a cigarette lit, I am always a puff closer to something I understand -- the eruption of a volcano -- than at most other times during my daily breath.

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Journal entry, August 13, 2002 4:44 P.M.:

Lyrics from "Muddy River" by Laurie Anderson.

Rain keeps pouring down
Houses are cracking. People drown.
Cars are rusting here. A church floats by
Washed in the blood of the lamb...

Blackness here. Sitting at my silent computer. The office has died; no modern office can be considered alive in a blackout. Computers are out, phones are out, lights are out. The only sounds I hear are murmurs from the other people in this locked room and an alarm that has begun clamoring in the lobby. Now, though, I hear new noises: the alarm is the elevator alarm. People are trapped aboard.

And all the superhighways have disappeared
One by one. And all the towns and cities and signs
Are underwater now. They're gone...

I leave work after security guards free us from the sealed electric doors. It is 102 outside, and the temperature inside was rising quickly, the temperature inside our locked room. (Sitting in the dark feeling like a fire is building just over your shoulder is disconcerting.)

On the sidewalk, beneath the molten orange sun, horns are blaring on the other side of heat vapors so thick that gazing at traffic feels like I am looking at the cars, trucks, and buses through an old nickelodeon. A woman in a grey sedan is crying as she screams into a cell phone. Ahead, the rush-hour thick intersection has no operating street lights. Madness is rising.

Mud is everywhere.
Fish are swimming in the fields.
Everybody's running around, they're yelling
Is this the end of the known world?

I cross the intersection where two men are being carried on stretchers into ambulances. Apparently, no working traffic lights means GO to everyone. The mangled husks and strewn parts of their SUVs litter the intersection like war.

Men and women in their boats
Try to save what they've lost.
They're yelling, "It's all gone now.
We're never gonna find it again."

Another ambulance sits in Harvard Square where an older woman is being electrocuted by an EMT. The paddles appear to be doing no good at re-starting her heart. From only two feet away, I can see sweat from the brow of one EMT drip into her slack, open mouth. A moment later she revives, screaming. I enter the station.

But when the muddy river starts to rise
It covers us all. And when I look into your eyes
Two tiny clocks two crystal balls
We begin again. We try.
We begin again. Down by
the muddy river.

On the platform, which is bathed in the sickly yellow of emergency lighting, hundreds of people mill about in a frantic cacophony. A megaphoned announcement by an MBTA representative whose white shirt has been rendered translucent by his sweat lets the waiting passengers know that two trains have blown fuses and are disabled on the tracks. It will be some time before anything moves again.

It will be some time before anything moves again.

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It Could Be Radiohead, It Could Be Sunshine

Amazing. It just ocurred to me why a staple question that I'd heard countless times as a youngster does not get asked of me anymore: "What's your favorite band?"

Obviously as the people I spend most of my time around and I get older, we ask it less because it applies less: as the years go on and our tastes become more diverse, we listen to more and more music, from the past (such a huge catalog of gems, ripe for the spelunking!), the present (like digging a silver dollar from a large sack of otter shit it often seems, but hey, them silver dollars are shiny!), and with an ear open for the future.

I can remember 1979 or so, when my favorite band was AC/DC. Shortly thereafter, it became Prince. In the meantime, I began a love affair with the Pixies, Tones on Tail, Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream, and the Police. During this time I would always have said that Prince was by far my favorite. Little did I know that years later Brian Eno would be as influential and important to me as Prince was in my youth, and, startlingly, Eno became more relevant in my life, something I never could have forseen (I have drifted off to sleep with Eno's 1/1 playing on well over 1000 nights since 1993).

Th question is still valid; it just needs to be updated: "Who is your favorite band right now?" Even that can be tricky...I can think of three answers before glancing at my Walkman. I have figured out the answer, though -- say, do you know this little number?

"Hummm.....hum hum hummmum, hum muuuh hu hu mumhuuh kaka muhmmm...."

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Inexplicable note found in an old notebook's margin, 8/11/02:

To know the clam,
Is to be the clam;

But to love the clam!--
Is to eat
The clam.

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Texticity

1. A quickly-jotted mental process transcribed by anyone able to comprehend and utilize an alphabet.

2. A seemingly random, yet captivating idea.

3. An unreleased 17-minute long epic by the Buzzcocks recorded in the freeform, languid, dark-and-moody style of late-era Doors with Pete Shelley revealing his innermost, most collapsing sensititvities. Still unreleased.

4. a) A race of single colors; b) a single color of all races; c) a flu that makes you smarter; d) a contagious elephant.

5. A pamphlet of eternal palimpsests handed out by a disheveled Believer in a Boston train station, despite the ambient temperature of 122 degrees.

6. An enticing, exhiliarating, life-changing kiss on the lips by a stranger.

7. Four large male emus that each weigh exactly 21 stone going "berzerker" in the downtown of a predominantly Protestant community.

8. Every letter of every alphabet lined up by height and crossing a stormy river like ducklings in a row.

9. A stream-of-consciousness thought propulsed by its own energy (sometimes like a river in a late-winter heat wave, sometimes like a case of empty Coors cans over Niagra Falls, sometimes like a Bösendorfer piano down the rear blood-stained staircase of a cheap two-floor motel in Cincinnati, and sometimes like a silicate tear leaked from the eye of your One True Love when they leave you, forever).

10. Whatever you think you see.

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The Eleven Day Tale: The Final Day

The Eleventh Epiphany: Habitation of the Mansion

I may have fallen asleep. Or I may have died, for just a little while. I was in the arms of angels at certain points; and I was also ignited by light in flame. I had one hundred dreams. I may have been drugged; or I may have died, for just a little while.

The Eleventh Epiphany is never less than Ace High.

Upon waking, I found myself in the denoument of a milky dream, a great white fog lifting. Beneath my feet grew an endless and lush plain, each blade of grass soft as a pillow. I walked, and climbed a hill that was in front of me. Atop this hill, after a picnic of peanut butter and tequila, I stripped myself bare and found a Thor-sized axe in my hand.

The Eleventh Epiphany wants to know: Are you a page in this great epic, or a bookmark?

Atop this hill, as the fog became a high ceiling of bright, opulent cloud, I tore myself down. It was exhausting work. I napped. When I awoke, there rose a spiral staircase from the rubble. It latticed upward perhaps one hundred feet before disappearing into the clouds.

The Eleventh Epiphany wants you to practice whistling one perfect note.

I decided to climb the ladder (of course...who would feel they had a choice!). I placed my left foot to the bottom step and the sun broke through the clouds with a sudden and brilliant clamor of light. A shadow rose from behind me. When I turned, I set my eyes on the mansion, my mansion, that I had built where the rubble of my old apartment had stood for years, decaying.

The Eleventh Epiphany, in the Basic computer language, could read this way: 110 GOTO 10

I strode to the great, dark doors. Mahogany, I thought. Beautiful. I noticed that my mansion had many large and wide windows. Inside, where it was well-lit by the sunshine, I could not see ceilings. My mansion, I had built it with plenty of floors, but nothing to interfere from above.

The Eleventh Epiphany is an empty book, with infinite pages, and your name scribed in gold on the cover. The Eleventh Epiphany hands you God's favorite pen and whispers, 'Create.'

I entered. The smell inside was the spice of cinnamon and nutmeg, coriander and clove, the sweetness of orange blossom and rose. There was also a smell of me, my own musk, as if it had been rubbed like oil into the wood. There was also a smell of electricity.

The Eleventh Epiphany is the repeat/random button on your CD player.

With one great leap I soared to the third floor. I knew I could fly. I knew that now I could fly. After all, that was why I had built this home. From the third floor I could step outside onto a half-moon balcony from any of countless rooms. I parted the great glass doors and stepped into sunshine. Now I could see all of the endless plush green valley. And scattered out across this warm land, dotting hills and horizons, were countless other mansions. Your mansions.

The Eleventh Epiphany contains multitudes.

With a smile I leapt from the balcony. With a laugh I flew out over the valley.

The Eleventh Epiphany contains the all-of-Yous.

This is the Eleventh Epiphany: I am still soaring. I may have fallen asleep. Or I may have died, for just a little while. I may be awake, or I may be dreaming. But the descriptive state of my consciousness no longer matters.

I am still soaring.

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The Eleven Day Tale: Day 10

The Tenth Epiphany: Pink Freud

In 1979, Pink Floyd brought the psychological concept of ‘The Wall’ to mass consumption in an easily understood, easily assimilated form (rock music and cartoons – a foolproof plan for dogma delivery in the Western World). The album and movie The Wall is an allegory for a set of Freudian psychological ‘defense mechanisms’ that we design individually and put in place in order to protect ourselves from that which we fear or consider potentially harmful.

The beats and messages of 'Another Brick in the Wall' and 'Comfortably Numb' entered the collective human psyche, and Floyd and Freud both got a big ‘Hell, yes, I hear that!.’ from the captivated audience. The truth is, using that allegory, not a one of us can claim not to have a bit of mortar and brick littering our mental landscapes. The reason is, though most of us don’t build the Wall quite so high and thick as the character Pink did in the story, we all nevertheless have a foundation laid long before we are aware of its existence -- our parents, families, and surroundings, from the moment we begin to reason out the implications of survival and self-preservation, begin building the foundation of our inhibitions and fears. Before we’re done sucking our thumbs most of us have stamped-out boundaries in place; when we are subsequently thrust into society (typically via schooling) and we learn, sometimes brutally, that conflicts are going to leave us battered and reeling, we begin building fences. Fences lead to walls.

[An aside: In his book Outside the Dog Museum, Jonathan Carroll introduces us to a curious, clever man by the name of Morton Palm who illustrates through his philosophy and experience the daily-life and grander-scheme necessities of two simple human inventions, the door, and the ladder. This is to be kept in mind.]

[An aside: Zen thought states, ‘A good door needs no lock.’ This, too, should be kept in mind.]

Pink lost sight of the top of his Wall; he let it get high to heaven, and it became all he knew, his funneled field of vision, his world view: what went on outside the wall could only ever be damaging. This is the ultimate loss of perspective; this is why so many people - so many of us - are closing themselves off as they get older.

This myopia starts the moment you begin to mortar your fence in fear; and it is exacerbated with every brick laid to your wall that falls above your eyes (whether old eyes or tenth-epiphany new-fangled eyes does not matter, blindness is blindness).

Once you lose perspective on the outside world – once all you can see and therefore live by becomes managed by your fears and bigotries, your misunderstandings, agonies, and staid, uncompromising misconceptions – your ability to live (in the esoteric form of the verb, meaning to enjoy, revel in, and worship life) begins to atrophy.

This degeneration can takes years to destroy your life-force, the all-of-you. (Though, sometimes, it can take the length of a single movie.) But know that it will murder you, it will kill you right in your beating heart, it will devour you, it will hunt you down and slaughter you where you lay huddled inside your wall.

*

This thing, this life-force, collective and individual, certainly takes a beating, doesn’t it? Life is, after all, a zero-sum game. Always has been. Today, there is a common ideal, nearly archetypical in scope, of the masses being likened to cattle, sheep (“lambs to the slaughter”), TV-lobotomized, unoriginal, and capitulated. As a race we are all being withered by this cancer, this torpor of the soul, this dolorous dwindling away. We are suffering from a simple problem with an obvious solution: Our collective life-force (and our individual ones as a result) is being extinguished because we are too afraid to tap those vital energies that lie outside our walls. So many of us fail each day to recuperate our spent energies and restore our desires to create, to seek, to discover. We are prisoners of fear, prisoners of ourselves, terminal.

It is much harder to tear down a wall-to-heaven from the inside than to hop over a fence that stands but heart-high. This is what we must do: before we begin building these enclosing walls to heaven [An aside: if the top (light, freedom, vision, perspective) is then way up there, doesn’t that place us in hell, sealed in down at the bottom? This, of course, is to be kept in mind.], we must jump the fence, escape the cell we are spinning for ourselves, and, full of terror and anxiety – but boldly! – land our feet on the other side. Stand high.

Leave the cell behind. Leap into someone else’s perspectives. Wear their tinted glasses for a time. Take their useless advice, their odd ideas, their offensive lifestyle, and drape it upon yourself like a ceremonial headdress – do this as a ritual: Become Other. Become that which you do not comprehend. Become that which you fear. Become that which you loathe. Be not just in their shoes, but in their skin.

Look at yourself in the mirror, adorned this way. You may smile…and find yourself changing your mind about what it was you feared (a brick falls, explodes into quiet dust). You may shake your head, perhaps unsure why someone would wear such a thing, but at least knowing why you would not; or maybe you will understand completely why it is right for them and wrong for you (a latch appears amidst the once unbroken chain-links).

The Tenth Epiphany tries to tie all of this paragraph madness, this chain-linked disparity together. Here, then, in the twist to this plot, is the Tenth Epiphany: The enlightenment you need, the channel of energy, of life-force, does not come from the understanding of the ‘headdresses’ one way or the other; it comes from the strength you build from trying them on. You must keep trying! You must stay curious! This is how you began life: precocious, ignorant, hungry to know know know, and energetic! The pains of acquiring knowledge are growing pains. We never have to stop growing – and yes, this means we must choose to always, inevitably, be in pain. This is LIFE! This is LIFE!

Mind free, open energy. You, now, you become a dynamo. Walls torn down, fences only high enough to keep out the worst floods and vermin (sometimes those dual tides can rise high; and sharks patrol those waters). A baseball bat by your side for power. A glimmer in your eye; you are a black-sand diamond.

One last thing: A dictionary is your bible. Its Old Testament is what you were. Its New Testament is what you are becoming. In between lies every poem, every tome, every epic, every wish, every word – oh, and it so happens that there are an infinite number of blank pages under the entry for “Why.” But of course you have learned that already.

See the back, the last page of the book? There is the hint about this, you, and everything you can see with your eyes: there is no

"The End."

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The Eleven Day Tale: Day 9

The Ninth Epiphany: A Parable of Home (as Told by the Ace in the Hole)

I am the Ace of Spades. Do you know where I feel at home? Everywhere. I am at home when I am one of a powerful Four-of-a-Kind. I’m at home when I’ve got the other twelve members of my suit stacked around me. I’m at home shuffled anywhere within my deck, as, together, we comprise something absolute. And I am also at home when I am all alone; I never have a confidence issue when I know I am so rakishly, cockily Ace High.

But I am also at home outside of my deck, that which many may consider my true home, my natural home, or even my only home, this last being the most narrow and ill-informed of the three misconceptions. For, you see, I am also at home with my brethren symbols of sharply delivered death, the sword, the dagger, the lightning bolt. I am at home amongst horse head and shiny copper penny, harbingers of confict to come and vendettas to be settled.

I am also at home laced between radiating spokes of a bike wheel; then, I also am at home as part of the tapestry of neighborhood sound as we go riding by.

Of course, I am always at home up a magician's sleeve, or down his shirt, or in the secret compartment in his top hat, or -- don't blink! -- in the hallucinatory space behind your left ear.

Everyone has someplace they call home; I, on the other hand, call everyplace home, from the slim cardboard box from whence I was first slipt into a pair of dexterous hands to the bottom of a garbageman's heel as he tromps through the sticky and obscene of the local dump.

You see, "Home" is not just place for me; home, to me, is as much when as it is where. If I'd slipt from that cozy box where I'd been sealed for so long with my birth-deck straight into sticky position on the bottom of the garbageman's boot, well, I would be a differently-thinking Ace. However, I have always tried to make the best of my Home, both its where and its when, and as the years have gone on I have grown to realize something: Home's 'Where' is your have; Home's 'When' is your want.

Everyone knows the phrase "in the right place at the right time." We could call this "in the right where at the right when." Everyone is also familiar with how it feels to not be there, then. This happens to some of us a few times a day. It is common, it is frustrating, in can be devastating. But it is an accepted part of life, like angry bees and house fires.

People who have wanderlust are beacons, giant, horny fireflies of When, on the hunt for Where. They are ready for anything -- they just need to figure out where it is 'Is' is; i.e., where they need to be for the 'anything' for which they are ready to happen. They are conduits of When, ready for Where.

However, it is the other side of this silver dollar that causes the chaos that is rife in so many of our lives, the swells of heartache that heel us over like dingys on hundred-foot seas; you know this sensation -- unrequited emotion that manifests in the feeling of piano strings snapping in your wrists. We find a spot to hunker down somewhere on our big ol' blue-green rock, we set up house, clean the guestroom, set up shop and put faith on sale, and throw all we have into the arrival of our vital When. The problem is, very, very seldom does 'When' equal 'Now.'

Some of us, those with much patience, orchestrate their own Whens. These are people who know where to set their body in space and how to set the space in their minds. These people are confident, intelligent, open to knowledge, mutable in their opinions and ideals, and often they happen to be damned happy with who they are. For them, When comes when they want it to.

Most people, though, do not possess such Ace-of-Spade-like qualities (well-rounded and robust here and here, sharp there, solid, sturdy, elegant). People want their When, and they want it now. They do not consider that they might be too staid, too myopic, too intolerant, too frightened, too callow, too stupid, or just too undeserving of the When they feel is obligated to them. (Remember: no one deserves anything for notihng.)

I have learned -- sometimes via my patience and sometimes via drug-thru-the-mud capitulation -- that you can only get your When by preparing for it, by seeking the insight that will enable you to be positioned in the "right place at the right time" when your When arrives. Of course, there is a Catch-22 to all this: You MUST prepare, or it will never arrive; your When and the desire for it are symbiotic.

So many people cut corners, engage in denial and self-deception, the telling of lies and the dissemination of misconceptions -- their own and those that are spawned by others' -- that it is no surprise when their When arrives it is nothing like what they anticipated, i.e., felt they deserved. It is a let down, a bummer, a cheap, knock-off, deriviative When that delivers nothing. In other words, it is, indeed, exactly what they earned.

Only you can teach yourself this lesson: everything you are and can be resides in your control. If there is somewhere you know you need to be -- somewhere and somewhen that comprise your ultimate Home -- then it is your power to get there; to go Home.

Anyone can love being a single card in a deck, or a single page in a bible, or a single grain of silicate on a black-sand beach. But wouldn't you rather be a tiny diamond in all that dark, glittering by the sea? Then get to the sea...and glitter! Wouldn't you like to be a Revelation more than an Index? Then seek, learn, know, and reveal! And of course, wouldn't you like to be the Ace of Spades, brother to power, sister of Swords, eternal good luck, the way out, the rapier Ace in the Hole--!...

...instead of yet another Joker?

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The Eleven Day Tale: Day 8

The Eighth Epiphany: Be Loved

I am discovering that as the ongoing revelation of these Epiphanies winds toward its conclusion, they interlace more and more. As I translate them from electricity in grey matter to electricity in digital ether, I find their individuality becoming as challenging to discern as raindrops on a tin roof; eleven drops, all falling together, apart. These epiphanies are revealing themselves as contradictory veils: enfolding you in dazzling silk, to protect and enlighten and entertain, even as they fall away. Perhaps Salomé had eleven veils…?

‘Appreciating the pieces’ leads to a widening of the abilities of the heart and mind to exercise the liberating abandon of emotional response (spontaneous and premeditated) alongside the grounding nature of the twin necessities of curiosity-inspired scrutiny and dispassionate observation; the ‘Appreciation’ enables not only a strong and maintainable balance between feeling and logic, but the ability to utilize this balance, this strength. Or, in fewer words, you have x-ray vision and you can read people’s minds. More or less.

By now, with the previous seven doors epiphanied ajar, you feel a glorious wonder at being able to discern the latent beauty that exists in almost everyone (even deep down inside many rat bastards who do not deserve to possess beauty, though it is often not by their choice that they contain it). The key, however, is that this exercise in perspective is not for the sake of those who are ugly of soul: it is not for the absentee parent or the lecherous boss, nor is it for the violent neighbor or the very, very bad driver backing up on the highway; it is not for the thief, the burglar, the liar, or the coward; it is not for the bigot, the racist, or the sexist; it is not for the rapist or the murderer (two whose trace of beauty may simply not exist); it is not for the zealously religious who are convinced of your doom, it is not for the uncompromisingly political who carve up your country and your body with equal relish, it is not for the unabashedly greedy; and it is not for the sake of the most undeserving of all, the ignorant (and their cur brethren, the stubborn, stupid, and unwilling to learn). This ability to distill beauty from the most obscuring vulgarity is for you. It is tapable, unutilized power. It is pages for your library. It is clever, sharper knowledge, that you can employ in your own expanding, exciting existence.

This ability to penetrate the darkness in others and discover their rare, divine facets is a transformative power, for it gives their beauty – that is often neglected, or, sadly, unknown to themselves – to you. You search for it there, deep in their core, you find it, you seize it, you rescue it, you store it, you hone it, and you increase your own beauty through the challenge of surviving the darkness in all others.

You possess this capacity already (we all do this, daily, this tapping of each other, if unconsciously and on a much smaller scale). So why do you not use it consciously, consistently, and boldly? What holds you back?

You are hiding from you. You are afraid of yourself.

You must eschew your concept of self-esteem. Self-esteem has become a tool of society, media, politics and corporate shark-marketing. Your height, your weight, your age, your accent, your complexion, your hair color, your nationality, your education level, your career desire, your athleticism, your tastes in music, in art, in books, movies, and cuisine, your choice of toothpaste and deodorant and the color and bulk of your car (bigger is better – just ask a tumor), your religious beliefs, your political leanings, and the frequency with which you use the word ‘fuck’ have all become playing pieces in society’s favorite game, JUDGEMENT. In the game of Judgement, the goal is to find flaws in others that can be easily exploited while concurrently masking your own flaws from society and from yourself. Anyone can play – the game is open to all ages, there is no limit to the number of players, and the timer is the length of your life. Of course, we’re all playing right now – and not paying attention to the killer punchline, the obvious plot twist, the big HaHa: no one wins. No one wins.

You must re-imagine everything you think you know about your self-worth. Step out of your mental apartment, now; I have something to show you from the hill on this endlessly plush lawn. Step toward me, where I stand in the light. Step toward my embrace. The eighth epiphany throws my arms around you, and with my lips it kisses your wet cheek: Be Loved. Be Loved By You.

In a song called “We Got Married,” Paul McCartney sings the lines, “It’s not just a loving machine/It doesn’t work out if you don’t work at it.” This is in reference to marriage, but perpetually for the 13-odd years since I first heard the song I have had it rattling around in my brain-pan, wanting to mean more. Now I know that it does: It refers to self-love as well as any other, perhaps in advance of any other. You can not decide you’re ‘an okay person’ and leave the idea there to desiccate. You have to re-evaluate yourself with everything and everyone you encounter. You must keep the experience of being inside your own skin, firing off the mini-lightning bolts in your own grey matter, exciting, enlightening, and, hopefully, enjoyable. Take a daily gander at that randy old anima coursing around in your wetware, spunking like a kitten after a Gypsy moth through your bloodstream and tissues, and make sure it’s not chasing it’s own tail; or worse, hiding from mirrors.

The fears arise now. What will I see? What if I hate myself? What if I am just fundamentally loathsome?? Acknowledgment of one’s flaws and inconsistencies is not about instigating shame, placing blame, or forcing change. It is about understanding yourself and appreciating the shimmery glimmers of your many imperfect gems alongside your most refined jewels. It is about taking pride in all of your sparkle! Ah, yes – it is about sparkle, not shine. It is not about being a symphony – it is about being one well-whistled note.

Train your love to be mightier than your fear, hatred, loathing, anger, and despair. People make the mistake of interpreting this lesson as meaning that you should replace those energies with love, to which I say, “Damn, what?? Hells, no!” I will never love that rat bastard who is driving 54 MPH in the fast lane and clogging all of the highway with his senior citizen swerving – but I will love myself a bit more if I scream at him only within my car, then smile and wave bright-eyed as I pass him going 80. I let him feel, somehow, a bit more loved (by alleviating his fear that for about 13 minutes I was projecting into his mind the lurid phantasmagoria of his narrowly-escaped roadside slaughter).

Be loved. By you first; then worry about the rest. So many people end up alienated and/or alone because they can’t imagine reciprocal love. It boils down to this: companionship takes just as much exercise as the effort that must be put into maintaining the body – you have to constantly work at it (see Paul McCartney, above), more and moreso as you get older, and you and those around you change, age, and slowly but surely run out of time to be together. Your life remaining is growing shorter – and you must decide how – and on whom – you will spend your minutes. Don’t waste another moment on misgivings about your own beauty.

Go grab your anima. Stroke it’s fur, pick it up, and carry it, like a baby, to the mirror. Take a good long look at the two of you. Rub its belly, make it laugh. It loves you.

Now purse your lips and blow.

Become one well-whistled note.

Boy, are you easy to love.

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The Eleven Day Tale: Day 7

The Seventh Epiphany: “...a Library in Purgatory.”

You are walking on a shore every day. No matter if you are coastal or landlocked, your geographic location has nothing to do with this place. Yes, do imagine this strand of beach. It is the length of your life, stretching South to North, birth to "end" (Death; transition; I know not. Yet.). This strand, it has tides on both sides. To your left the breakers bubble and foam, and to your right also, they do the same. This strand is yours and yours alone -- this is your thinking space.

The seventh epiphany is one of common sense, but, as with many common sense characteristics, it is neglected by all too many all too often: inhabit and utilize your thinking space.

As the roil of the surf crashes to your left and right and you place your perpetual steps along the sand toward the next moment of your life, the rhythm of the tides dictates a rhythm of life, and how it will challenge you. Sometimes -- at double low tide -- there is plenty of room for experimentation and error; you have enough lateral room to cartwheel and dance, spin, twirl, and cavort, drawing names and images, spells and recipes in the sand. But then, sometimes, the tides do rise high, and they rise together, and you must fight drowning even at the most centered point of your strand. Sometimes these life tides – seemingly random, always faultless, and very deadly – can appear to be conspiring to drag you into the riptide, where you can be lost in the chains of undertow. This is not so -- the chaos of life bring as much purposefulness to bear on you as you do on it; it just weighs more. Lots more.

The strand, that is your thinking space – and you must protect it from these tides. How? The history and magic of moon worship and true-blue ‘lunacy’ now come to call, as you enact Step One of Part One of the Seventh Epiphany: Create a moon, your own moon, in the sky, your own sky, immense and immeasurable above your strand. Make your moon powerful and great, make it able to stand the seas straight up on their ends. You must make a moon that can shift the weight of the world.

Step Two is, of course: Control Your Moon. This is your space, your strand that you are protecting. And this is your moon. You decide its rhythm, and you hold the tides at bay. Then your thinking space is free from these tides of life that so often threaten to scour it away.

So. Why must such steps be taken?

Everything that happens to us gets catalogued in our minds as falling somewhere between a Heaven and a Hell that are created by us, uniquely, to suit each our own individual paradigm: Sleepless last night – insomnia, or no worries about waking up? That thousand dollar check – did you deposit or withdraw? It is 60 degrees outside – is it July or January? This morning, did you get a blown tire, or a blow job? Everything that happens tips the needle on our meters and decides the next moment of our day; and though most things might seem bad (blown tire) or a boon (depositing a thousand dollar check), the context and severity of course come down to our observation, interpretation, and reaction to the 'pieces' that surround the circumstance.

Our thinking space is our purgatory – it is our common ground, where we can center ourselves while the foaming tides batter away. Here, in our thinking space, is where we must build a library with the power of nothing more than our own mental muscle. (This is a facet of every Epiphany: Never underestimate the strength of your own mind.)

This creation is our key to homeostasis. It is where we can catalog all that occurs, all that we know, all that we wonder, and all knowledge that is vital for our survival, sanity, and joy. It is the house of our fantasy worlds, and the haven of our waking life.

This is the lesson of access. This is where you must utilize all that you know – and, especially, understand what you do not. As the life tides roil around you, this is where you will retreat, to your strand, your Thinking Space, your Purgatory Library, with your moon full and high by your own design, holding all that batters you at bay. It is here that you can then check the Encyclopedia of Common Sense, or the Dictionary of What Should I Do Now, or the most important volume, your own, self-scribed Catalog of Experiences (hopefully thick and richly detailed!), and judge what it is you are encountering, crack the secret to its effect on you and its power over you (note: nothing effects us without having power over us), and then square your shoulders and Deal With It.

This place, this Thinking Space, this is your limbo. You can decide if it is nothing more than a palimpsest of grey on grey on endless shades of grey, or if it is rich with the spectrum of who you are, were, and will be.

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The Eleven Day Tale: Day 6

[NOTE: It is 3:03 A.M. I have had insomnia since these began coming to me. I wonder if Moses napped as he climbed the mountain.

Them: “How dare you compare yourself to Moses!”

Me: “How dare you assume I might not be greater.”]

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The Sixth Epiphany: Appreciate the Pieces

Look back through your new eyes. See all you have known in countless new ways. Look forward, through your new eyes. See all that will come, in countless new ways. From this perspective, the exhilaration of knowing that “nothing is true; everything is real” stops your breath with a gasp of awe and ecstasy.

Everyone I have ever known has shared a common fantasy: to be able to go back in time, to their past, and re-live grand moments, trials, and fondest memories with the knowledge and experience they have gained since those events occurred. That dream now comes true – from this moment, you can re-live everything; you can experience every future and past you ever may have had.

And you can also live endlessly forward! You no longer have one future. Use your endless knowledge (remember, you contain ten times what you think you know (E. 4)), and this wealth rises with every breath you take. Look ahead – imagine everything, everywhere, everywhen you could be, you want to be – you WILL be. You will never travel blindly again (unless, of course, you choose to enjoy that excitement, the whimsy of the unknown, the skip of the Fool over the cliff with ignorance and knowledge the peanut butter and jelly on his brain's greybread).

The sixth epiphany offers us a coffee break before it arrives. It packs us a picnic lunch (peanut butter and jelly anyone?), to be eaten in the lush green atop the only hill on an infinite plain. It mixes us a margarita at 2:12 P.M. If epiphanies contained naps, this one would give us a full-bellied siesta before dropping its veil. Number six, three times over…perhaps the Devil has just been trying to tell us to relax...?

The sixth epiphany whispers with subtlety between tequila sips and sandwich bites: appreciate the pieces.

‘Knowledge is strength’ is a fine platitude; the capabilities to make fire with sticks or place an important overseas phone call or navigate the bus system in a foreign country are all wonderful and important. But your mind also fires up with the knowledge of the color and texture of a crust of white bread; memories real and imagined occur with the scent of a flower that you can name. The appreciation of the pieces of things – the color of the crust of bread; the species of the flower; the muscle tone of a stranger’s thigh – is the key to the root of all you know. The sixth epiphany: appreciate the pieces – it is this that must be applied to all you know, all you will know: from the knowledge of what fascinates the mind grows the curiosity to learn all.

Pieces, of course, can be immense; this is not about digesting things in their minutest possible bites. Pieces of society can range from the curve of that stranger’s thigh to the words being spoken by a man waving a gun. The height of a skyscraper in a hurricane is a big piece of something isn’t it? Especially if you’re on the 42nd floor. When a life is fractured by rape, a thousand new pieces are created in that life’s puzzle. The same with a murder, or any death – the removal of a person from your life creates endless new pieces to fit into your frame. This is the secret of the sixth epiphany; by appreciating the pieces, we can indeed see all of our futures; we can cope with the unknown, the improbable, the seemingly impossible and the unforseen. We are the puzzle, everything else is pieces – and regardless of their size, their gravity, or their weight, they must go where our hands place them within the frame. We are the creators.

Halfway through these epiphanies, we find a composite understanding: Never ask the question “Why?” “Why?” never answers what you want to know unless you do not want to know enough. Should you ever desire to ask that question again, here is your answer: “Because there is so much more you can not wait to learn.” You are the pieces, you are the puzzle, you are the hands, you are the eyes, wide and afire.

Gestalt theory states that the whole is equal to more than the sum of its parts. Welcome to You: Water + Chemicals + What You Know = You And Then Some. This formula is accidental, a quirk of chaos. It is unable to be duplicated, by animal, man, or God. Smile in the morning, as you watch the Earth’s 1.825 trillionth sunrise watercolor your horizon, knowing that even God could not create another You. (God is crafty; not only does God not try, but God lauds chaos, aberration, mutation, and individuality.)

Wake up. Sunrise 1,825,000,001 awaits you. Take a coffee break. Enjoy a picnic. Spill bright plastic colors to the checkered tablecloth that sits upon the plush grass, and play. Put together the infinite puzzles of yourself. Try different combinations, different mixtures of You. Play with Your possible pasts, Your next few moments, Your infinite futures. Create a new You with every combination, and wear Your favorites like holiday clothing. Go wild! Get creative! Appreciate Your pieces above all, and enjoy costuming the countless Yous.

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The Eleven Day Tale: Day 5

The Fifth Epiphany: We Are Family.

Hello, my family. My genetic family. My universal family. It has come to my attention that I am writing all of this for you.

I came from a family. It fell far outside the textbook, but it was a family nonetheless, with a mother, siblings, and the occasional father, or none, or two. It was amorphous, erratic, and unstructured, but it was a family. And it was this root -- alongside the fifth epiphany -- that made me realize that my family has always been more than my blood and my name.

I met my best friend in 1984. We will be celebrating his tenth wedding anniversary in two months. I have never met my father; or, more precisely, my father has never met me. I can tell you the eye color of my best friend's father, because I have seen them up close in fury, and I have seen them even close in an embrace, the day of his wife's, my best friend's mother's, funeral. I do not know if I share eye color with my father.

I have understood the fifth epiphany perhaps longer than the rest, which is why it has taken me so long to write it -- the others were serendipitous; this is an attempt to realize my oldest mature knowledge into words.

I began building my family when I was a pre-teen. I knew the need for such a collection of people in my life: people who could comprehend and accept the peculiar and unique person who I am. Strangely early on, I realized that the people called my 'family' were not the ones who would satisfy my need for a family. Hey, they were/are fine folks -- but they were thrown in with me as was I with them.

Too often I meet people who are in the process of agony due to the situations they are in with their family, the group of people into which they were born as a mandatory member. I know someone who is often in tears. I know someone who is often on drugs. I know someone who will need to talk about their upbringing for the rest of their lives.

I got to realize early on what is important about family: we must create our own. We must move beyond being the child of our parents, the sibling of our siblings. We must realize for ourselves -- and for the education of our children -- that this mandatory society is just a nest, and not the entire tree. We must teach our children early on to build their families.

There is no such thing as an only child. There is no such thing as an orphan. Adoption is a process, not a characteristic. Parents with a single child must teach that child that he or she has a family awaiting, a grand family of like minds and emotions. A child without parents also has a family ready to be built, a family of that child's own creation. Another child is only adopted during the passing of the papers; after that, the term is obsolete, and the child should be taught this -- as should the parents, and the siblings.

Those not born of your blood still share the same chromosomes, the same genetic material, the same atoms and elements, electricity and water. When it comes down to the skin on in, we are all twins.

I remember the eighties, and the republicans spewing on and on about "family values." This epiphany -- we are all family -- has shown me that, frankly, they had no idea what they were talking about. Whose family and which values did they mean? How specific were these platitudes? Charles Manson -- he had a family. So did David Koresh. Those men had strong, proud family values. People still take this tack today as our ever-sensitive, political correctness cataracts our society more and more. People continue to espouse this paranoid, existential insulation the republicans brought to us decades ago, closing society down until one day we will be nothing more than fractious bands of inbred hoodlums -- yes, just like the dark ages. Preach family values -- your family's values to your family. Keep everyone on different pages, so we can never finish the book.

Okay, the root idea of family values is fine -- be nice. But frankly, sometimes the people at home simply don't deserve your kindness; and many families have those who will take advantage of it, especially if they are the characters who taught you not to question them in the first place (forced incest, child rape, abuse, molestation...these are all family values).

I have build a family of brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers and even a cousin or two, and we are all united right at the genes, just like we are with the people who first gave us blood. The difference is, this family is mine. None of us are adopted, or an only child, or a half-anything. We are all family.

The idea of a constructed family deserving precedence over a 'natural' family often meets with scorn, especially by parents who have children solely to bring meaning to their own perceived-as-meaningless lives, an all too common occurrence that ranks up there with 'ignorant unsafe sex' for the two main reasons the populating is growing. People like their insulation. People like a static, easy to perceive society in which they do not have to worry about right and wrong, judgment, or penalty. We can not have that outside the front door, so we create it inside the home -- to mirror the safety we feel inside ourselves when we hide, when we run, when we close down.

This insulation -- this inability to leave the mandatory family, create the real family one needs, and teach ourselves and others to seek who and what we need -- is a manifestation of the fear of derision, ridicule, judgment, violence. This insulation is our lack of self-esteem.

Simple acceptance is too homogenous, too easy, and most importantly it is too easily faked and exploited by many of the pedestrian wolves that make up society, those out there hungry to feed on the trusting, the naive, the kind. Those vampires -- all of whom were taught some form of family values -- have left many of us unable to believe that we can seek and find those who praise us and praise us honestly, whole-heartedly and without malice or duplicity.

You can become surrounded by such wonderful people. Be brave, be smart, be strong. These people are your family, and they are out there, with birthday cards and questions about you. They could be right in your own home; but know that some of them are not. These people are the treasures of the world, waiting to be discovered. Somewhere deep, in their DNA, they carry your name, engraved in gold.

Find them.

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The Eleven Day Tale: Day 4

The Fourth Epiphany: Always As Other

The phrase “forget what you know” is often heard when the subject is re-education, reconstruction, or enlightenment. This is a stupid, stupid phrase.

What we all know is not only what we have actively learned since our conception, but also what we have absorbed – everything that enters our senses lodges in our grey matter, somewhere. We know an exponential amount more than we ever utilize, and it is in this, the fourth phase of reconstruction, that the key becomes recall and remembrance, of everything ever known.

With my mind opening not only to so much that is new (as with my Endless Depth I now sense layers upon layers more than I ever did before) but also to so much that was always here, stored away, I have enhanced my mutability – and thus arrives the fourth epiphany.

I am countless; as Walt Whitman said, “I contain multitudes.” There are thousands of me; and with this realization, I now know how to enter life, live life, encounter life, and enjoy life.

Family members and friends die. Orgasms sometimes rock me close to a stopped heart. Bills raise my blood pressure. Police lights cause me to worry, even if they are speeding by while I reside quietly indoors. Epiphanies shake me right down to my foundations. The fourth epiphany: you must let things that happen to you – the thousands of things that happen to you in any passing moment – happen to the member of You, the facet of you, that can handle them.

This could be simply put as ‘multiple personality development.’ I contain a cool head that can brush my teeth and send me to sleep the night I learn of my grandmother’s death. I possess a mind that can clime my spine alongside the serpent Kundalini and enjoy the lights of heaven upon orgasmic release. I have the mind and muscle to make money to cover perpetually arriving debts. I have a wink and smile and composure for police lights, whether outside or right behind me. I am a writer, and a reader, of epiphanies, a teacher and a student of enlightenment.

This ability must be developed, as with catching a ball, or chewing, or successfully navigating a bus route, or maintaining the positions of T’ai Chi. As children, we are not taught the extent of this ability; ‘teen angst’ is the manifestation of a young personality with few developed facets; a person who does not yet have the skill to face each increase in stress with the side of themselves that can navigate the treachery. Teenagers battle their frustration at being unable to deal with an increasingly intense world. As teens become adults, more skills – more facets – develop, but anger in adults, too, is common; this battery of oneself is caused by a lack of the knowledge of how to turn the diamond of one’s personality to the correct facet that can deal with the pressure.

In Astrology, one of the oldest of personality maps, we are not simply our sign; we are defined by the placement of dozens of aspects of the self on a chart that usually looks like a wheel with twelve sides (a shape, it should be noted, that appears as a cross-sectioned gem when viewed two-dimensionally). More recently, widely accepted schools of psychology developed by Sigmund Freud and then Carl Jung were based on a multi-faceted personality: Freud’s standard trinity of the subconscious is well known – the Id, Ego, and Superego. Jung, building off of Freud’s idea for his Personal Subconscious, took the idea of personality facets further, developing the theory of the Collective Unconscious, which contains a more extensive list of five vital archetypes (The Persona, The Anima, The Animus, The Shadow, The Self) that form a foundation for countless others (The Trickster, The Hero, The Wise Old Man, etc.).

These are two quick examples of the fourth epiphany, that we must be able to access our multiple personalities at will, and that we must be aware we are doing it. This is self-honesty, and it is a challenge. Schizophrenia, ADD, OCD, Manic Depression, MPD (Multiple Personality Disorder), and most sociopathic behaviors are examples of the gravity of the fourth epiphany; each is an illustration of a personality type that can not come to terms with either 1) the extensive reality of how many ‘Me’s’ there are bumbling about in one’s noggin; or, 2) if the person does understand that they are not a simple, single-minded entity, they understandably, and often with frustration at their ignorance, display an inability to focus the right facet in the right place at the right time.

We hear things a lot. Like “you have to love yourself before you can love others.” And “you have to be honest with yourself first before you can enjoy trust.” Unlike, ‘forget all you know,’ these are deadly true. As I come to terms with the population that lives up in this bowl of brain-pan soup I use to check on the condition of the sun and the moon and the stars and the Earth each day, I grasp the jarring fact of what this realization entails – I must also deal with the scores of inhabitants of each and every other one of the people I meet, know, see, and encounter.

This realization, and acceptance, has dissolved so much of the stress I once felt (up until just a few days ago). The Me who got livid with a woman on the train for having too large a baby carriage in the aisle now instantly gives up the reins to the Me who is curious about the substance of the carriage’s tires, or the Me who is concerned about the look on the young mother’s bruised face, or the Me who is simply too occupied with the novel We are reading to worry about something so mundane. I am building an army of me (tip of hat to Bjork), ready to deal with anything that occurs, quickly, intelligently, with curiosity, wonder, humor, and always more interest in burgeoning questions than often unsatisfying answers. I am not alone.

You are not alone.

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