THE MISADVENTURES OF AN ESOTERIC INVESTIGATOR

I got unstuck from space-time, but only in a sensory sort of way. Not really unstuck physically. Because I can't even imagine what that would be like. I've done it metaphysically, spiritually, and psychologically and a few other allys I might mention.

First, as I left work, staring across the street to the Marriott, the light drizzle dabbling at being rain, blackening the pavement, suddenly transported me to the lot of a Denny's restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I've never been to Florida, but who am I to argue with what my senses tell me?

That's a rhetorical question. That means you don't really have to answer it. But you can if you want to. This IS a free country, after all.

Ah, the sky. Yes, so after leaving Denny's in Florida, I entered my car and drove, and I became unstuck again. This time, I was traveling along an expressway with the purple sky over Tokyo. Everything was bathed in pinks and violets, deep and thick, substantial. Philip K. Dick said God delivered messages to him in a pink laser beam of phosphene. Now imagine most of the sky is filled with it. And it's tangible. Reach out and cut me a slice of neon cotton candy.

Then the sun burst across the horizon like a brimstone demon clawing its way out of hell, and I found myself on Venus at sunrise; the sun too big and too bright, burning away the toxins and impurities of the atmosphere. The sun continued upon its trajectory, the demon eradicating the Venusian meteorological effluence, leaving me with an ordinary Earthling-blue sky.

And I had this thought, how Earth is right in the middle between Mars and Venus, the mythological Man and Woman, the sun and the moon, the yin and the yang, and how everything on Earth, even languages can be broken down to masculine and feminine, binary code, zeros and ones, alpha and omega, cat and dog, Hodge and Podge, Starsky and Hutch. (Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, stuck in the middle with you?)

On a more mundane note, I finished reading The Half-Blood Prince for a second time, and it's still good. I have a metaphorical shit-ton of theories about what’s going on and what’s going to happen. Only two more years to the exciting conclusion. Egads, what will I do?

I've read a few more Terry Pratchett novels. Has he written a book where Vetinari, the Patrician, is the main character? I love how his books overlap and center on different characters, and Vetinari is one of my enigmatic favorites.

I'm now reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. It's a murder mystery where the dead one is the neighbor’s dog and the detective is a fifteen year-old autistic boy. It is amazing and I've only read thirty-eight pages.

This is more than long enough. Oops.

I’d rather be working for a paycheck,
Than waiting to win the lottery.

That's a quote from a Bright Eyes song. And this morning while driving home, I thought of it in terms of a love metaphor. Would I rather be working on a steady relationship than waiting to win the lottery, a.k.a. strike it rich in True Love?

Every indication tells me that the idea of perfect love, of soul mates, of impossible, mythic love is an immature idea, obsessed upon by the young and abandoned in the face of reality. Even Spiderman says you have to give up your dreams in order to do the right thing. But do you have to? Is that really the only choice, the natural course of the heart?

I don't know and I'm feeling too melancholic, too bittersweet to think about it. Part of me says to give it up and the other part says to hold on. How to do both, I cannot fathom at this present moment. So I leave it alone and step away.

*Step*

I'd better take two just to be safe. *Step*

That leaves me plenty of room to tell you that the entire sky this morning was a dirty, matted blanket of unrefined cotton and the sun was the bright cherry of a celestial cigarette which had fallen into the rough bedding, threatening to burn the whole place down. One can only hope.

Last night, on the drive to work, the following poem appeared in my head, fully formed and I present it here for your edification:

Lachrymose eyes lacquered,
Oceans to eyelashes cling,
Brine encrusted sandman's dreams-
A macrobiotic diet of tears,
I kiss away the streams.

Don't mistake this seeming poetic brooding for sadness or unhappiness. I revel in the interplay between the light and the dark and love is the seed which births them both.

I love dichotomous weather. When I left work this morning, half the sky was Arizona turquoise and clear and the other half was Zeta Reticulan grey and bulging with angry buckets of rain. I drove in the direction of the rain. Now the sun and the clear sky are playing catch-up. I hope to beat them to the punch line, a.k.a. I love to fall asleep when it's grey and raining.

I recently had a dichotomy in my own personality thrown into the light and I'm not happy about it because unlike most contradictions and paradoxes of my self, which I find very easy to express, I find no way for these two to mutually coexist without making me and possibly others miserable. Perhaps time will allow perspective by which I can find a transcendental route for this paradox. I can only hope. How long can I waste energy fighting myself? That's a rhetorical question.

First thing in the morning as I leave work, I am immediately struck by the ball of poo the celestial dung beetle of Egyptian lore is pushing above the horizon, and every morning I must think of new ways to describe this clockwork miracle. I sit in my car, cruising at a lovely 70-something miles per hour and think, "How will I describe yet another sunrise to my dear readers in a way that I haven't before so they don't suffer from rigor mortis at yet another dawn brought on by this ball of clay spinning around?" It is a challenge you know.

Today, the Easter-egg sky of dry, chalky pastels reminded me of the Middle East in a way that only someone who has never been to the Middle East can be reminded. The morning fog rose across the city of Madison in waves of willowy, wafting Santa Clause chimney-puffs of silky smoke. The sun, a flashlight in the eyes of tripping drunk burns through the haze and I see old video of the sunrise after Baghdad was bombed back in 1991 superimposed on the scene. The smoky tendrils of fog like smoke rising from smoldering buildings and charred neighbors, satellite dishes on rooftops like CNN and Al-Jazeera fighting to broadcast the aftermath of this Middle Eastern Dresden. The Lord God the Sun looks down with his Sandman-encrusted morning eye and fumes at mess we've made of his wife, our Goddess Mother. And a moment longer, the image fades and it's just another sunrise, another clockwork miracle.

While driving to work yesterday in the midst of thunderstorms and tornado warnings, I looked up to the dark blue-grey wall of storm clouds and saw an eye-shaped fissure in the cloud cover. Moreover, the sun was perfectly situated as the iris and pupil of this eye-shaped hole in the clouds. Thus, my first thought is, oh my, the giant glowing eye of God is in the sky! Just then, a massive bolt of lightning arced horizontally from the Eye across the sky. For that moment, it was like Yahweh, Thor, Zeus or any other all-powerful storm deity had come down from their heavenly heights. At the other end of that lightning bolt, was there some poor shlub who just said, "If I'm lying, may God strike me down where I stand!"?