Yellow Light Means Prepare to Stop

The grouping of sounds . . . said something comforting to Inman about the rule of creation. What the music said was that there is a right way for things to be ordered so that life might not always be just a tangle and drift but have a shape, an aim. It was a powerful argument against the notion that things just happen.
                                                                                 -- Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

Hello, hello, baby -- You called? I can't hear a thing. I have got no service in the club, you see see. What, what did you say? Oh, you're breaking up on me! Sorry, I cannot hear you, 'cuz I'm kinda busy. Kinda busy. Kinda busy. Sorry, I cannot hear you, 'cuz I'm kinda busy.

                                                                                  -- Lady Gaga, "Telephone"

Because I try to maintain a sensible equilibrium during difficult times, I have been re-reading Charles Frazier's book called Cold Mountain. It's about the chaos of battle, panic and loss, perseverance, and ultimately the hope for redemption in the old South during those bleak, defeating days after the Confederacy fell to the Union. Inman is the protagonist of the book. Yes, that's right, Inman.

Climbing back up the slopes of Cold Mountain seemed the right thing to do since lately I have experienced (in my troubled mind), unwillingly and incessantly, patterns of four -- thoughts, phantoms, memories, fears, questions, or some combination thereof -- that collide and become jumbled up in that hidden but conscious part of myself that I call Me. Each package of four always I experience as a mysterious and discordant nexus. I know what I imagine is not real. But yesterday I believe I saw four jagged and stony pieces of meteorites, aimed at me like brutal, fleeing convicts scarily blowing in from the four corners of our minimum security galaxy, borne on perpendicular shafts of gray interstellar winds. Like the raw ingredients of an unholy zia, the four racing rocks seemed to have emanated from a secretive otherworldly desert. As yesterday gave way to nightfall, my thoughts became fixed on a collection of daring, logo-covered stock cars -- each was coming relentlessly toward me from north, south, east, west -- grill toward grill, bright and flashy headlights merging into a blazing white and blinding spotlight, as if a chicken at the crossroads battle had been green-flagged by an unseen and evil-minded mastermind. Goofy. Troubling. Unstoppable. As each of these episodes recedes in my imagination, with the postmodern and symbolic ambiguity of a David Lynch movie, I hear this song, Into the Great Wide Open, as unseen credits roll,

     They moved into a place they both could afford,
     He found a night club he could work at the door,
     She had a guitar and she taught him some chords,
     The sky was the limit -- Into the great wide open,
     Under them skies of blue. Out in the great wide open.
     Rebels without a clue.

So what will this day bring? I have a premonition that it might be my last. But that's probably just my paranoia at work. Why do I say so? Because here in the darkness before dawn . .  .

I am staring transfixed, sensing a hotness in me, at a strangely alluring piece of photo-art. It is a stylish picture made with a classy Nikon camera on a sizzling desert day near the Four Corners of the Southwest. It decorates the front panel of a CD jewel-case by a local rock 'n roll band. The group is called Dark-Eyed Juncos -- desert-dusty, sharp billed, and relentless scavenger birds of prey. They (the musicians) remind me of hardened, blue collar power trios like Cream, Rush, the James Gang, and other music legends.

This stylish picture's hues are primarily black, white, gray, and a color that makes me whisper (to myself) fuchsia, a lush pinkish hue. It depicts my friend -- and current stylist at a place called Dream in Color -- named June (who plays a dedicated-to-rock bass guitar for the Juncos in local clubs) and her two middle-aged male bandmates. She is perched in the middle. These men have crept close to her and appear to be whispering secrets into her left ear and the right. ('Here we go again. I feel the chemicals kickin' in. It's getting heavy and I wanna run. I wanna run and hide. -- So, what are you waitin' for? Take a bite of my heart tonight!) One man is dressed in a spotless and glimmering white linen suit, topped by a tilted white fedora. The other is clothed in a diabolical black frock coat, with a pirate-style do-rag (all black with white diamonds) tied over his skull and an equally black gentleman's stylish top hat over it all. 

June wears a stylish, but reasonably modest, gray dress, an enveloping shawl with long strands of fringe, and high cut gray-leather boots sharply decorated by straps and buckles. She sits outdoors whimsically (reminiscent of the mythical Alice, in a granny rocker, anxiously making her way back from Wonderland) on a fiery hot, improbably overstuffed easy chair of fuchsia out in the  burning Mesa Arts Center park. June has a 'curious girl' -- or is it perplexed and frustrated? -- maybe surprised but heart-aching -- expression on her face. Her finely etched eyebrows are arched high. For the moment, she seems pinned tight to her perch, like an avian corpse stuck on the board of a science experiment. The entire photo backdrop is a mysterious blend of pink and gray, like an airborne cloud tinted by a flaring sunset. In the middle, at the top of the photo, is a prominent number 928 (which seems harmless enough) on a plain black panel. Ambiguity and ambivalence drip like liquid drugs from this CD cover. What secretive temptations, what salacious thoughts, which indecent proposals, what hurtful assertions are being whispered into June's ears? What does she hear? (Does she hear anything?) Will that linen white or distrusting black one turn her head? I begin to imagine that June is, what now?, what?, shaking, rattling like an angry desert snake's tail, now coming apart while lurching back and forth hard -- a desert bird, a junco, ensnared, pinned, pulled, then ripped by the wings while anxiously attempting to take flight. -- I blink and everything goes white. In my thoughts, I fear that I have gotten lost somehow, not knowing where, on a vast and sunny expanse of Death Valley desert . .

But somehow and for some clouded reason I suddenly stand erect and gaze blankly, feeling alone -- there is no searing heat, no numbing cold, no physical sensations at all -- outside the glass door of the cramped little hair salon of Cheri Casio (a stylist of mine from another lifetime -- but not that long ago . . . ), which I visited almost monthly for twenty years. I am looking through the wide pane of glass that holds the swinging door-frame and spreads out to effectively form most of Cheryl's storefront wall. It is a sultry and cloudy afternoon during the month of June. It is the year 2006. Forgettable days. Summer in the South is really coming on. A sense of irony wells up in me. The building that holds Cheri's cramped quarters is growing steadily warmer because the Louisiana humidity (a phenomenon constant and oppressive in the old South during deep Summer months) is beginning to build up like a radioactive cloud. Many of the little hair and fingernail shops surrounding Cheri's are dark and abandoned, haunted by the irrevocable loss of their lease-holders who fled the tornadic violence of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, then the horrific flooding aftermaths those troublemaking ladies brought to town.

I notice that my in-glass reflection looks forlorn, I am shaggy and unkempt, dark half-moon circles of depression underline my eyes, my shirt is wrinkled. I read the name of Cheri's business painted in green and gold just above eye-level -- A Cutting Remark -- on the illuminated pane. I hesitate. I can't bring myself to push inside just like old times. I am leaving. Soon. It's going to come too soon! Is this the last time? "Probably," I whisper wistfully, to myself and gaze down. No one overhears.

Cheri has been a kind and loyal (but lonely and husband-hungry) friend, over month after month, over year after year (for almost 20 years, over 200 trips in, I told you). -- She's a Catholic girl raised on a Mississippi riverbank across from New Orleans. She exhibits great pride, precision and perfectionism in her work. Once a thriving business, she has now lost much of her clientele to the powerful storms that have come and gone. Cheri would invariably ask for my Dear Abby opinions, as we waited for her hair-dyes to seep into my roots and before she would go swinging her scissors around my head, about her recurring troubles with men both single and married.

That forlorn aspect I see in my reflection is beginning to feel like an anvil of guilt pulling down on my neck. Okay, I will not tell her that this is the last time before I leave. No farewell. No 'thanks a lot,' my dear. I have decided. Sorrow will rule the day. (Sadly I know this is the wrong thing to do.) I hold a tattered, paperback copy of the novel Cold Mountain, which I thought I was going to re-read as we waited in uncomfortable chairs for the hair color to take effect. -- Why? . . . Seven long months have passed in this damaged and reeling area, as it struggles back toward wholeness from being hurled into a barely civilized, medieval state by ferocious winds and deluges, still reeking with the acrid and messy smells of hurricane floods rising up from the bayou turfs. Each stressful day (all through 2006) devolved slowly into a long wake in an unsanitary civic funeral parlor, yes, a wake that refused to end at sunset, like a nightmare and unfunny parody the film Groundhog Day.  I tell  myself:  Not one more painful utterance of  'So-long, pal. Thank you and goodbye. You've been great.' No more daylong wakes. Not one more clingy handshake. No more awkward hugs and teary endings. So I turn my back wordlessly, regretfully, to A Cutting Remark. I feel sad beyond words. Walking toward my car, head down, like a preoccupied pall-bearer carrying a corpse toward a gaping hole that's already been dug. I know this is wrong, an immoral choice, a sorry turn of the screw. Perspiration drops trace from my neck down my guilty spine. I wonder if Cheri will forgive me for my disappearing act. I will try whisper an emotional 'I'm sorry,' ever the con at work, into her ear someday.

Stop thinking this, I command. Then my imagination heats up, working hard, and I let slip to the ground the worn paperback of Cold Mountain -- as if I am stroke victim gone horrifically numb on the left side -- but I am not standing in the raggedy parking lot anymore. No, I standing upright again in a place far (perhaps very far?) away, inexplicably, that I have never encountered before . . .

but . . . a strong feeling of disbelief overwhelms me. I feel dizzy and claustrophobic. I have been been lurking motionless -- on a hard, gray industrial carpet -- in the dim and poorly finished-basement hallway of an indistinct office building. The walls need to be washed, having turned iron-gray mixed with urine yellow, an unattractive and cloudy tableau. I sense anger and disbelief. This basement smells like an ancient library. Well, in fact, it is an old library I notice. A high-tech office telephone with a complicated panel of buttons and lights sits archly on a thin white shelf by my side, a waist-high protrusion on the bottom half of an old dutch door. The message-waiting light on the phone flashes red brightly. -- On (red). Off. On (red). Off. On (red). Flash. Flash. Red. Flash. Off. Red (on) . . . Persistent. Unflagging. You've got mail are the disembodied words that echo through the hallway. Tirelessly the blinking continues. Eight voice messages have been captured in the terminus. Eight lights a flashin' . . . Seven calls a waitin' . . . Six words unheeded, I hum spontaneously, stupidly, to myself. The phone flashing red, off, red, off, red, off has been ignored for six months, perhaps more. This I somehow know. I judge it to be an evil sign.

Anger swells anew in my heart. This phone extension apparently belongs to any staff member. A catchy song -- Hello, hello baby. You called? I can't hear a thing! -- about telephoning pops into my head. Then, a nameless, faceless aged co-worker stands with me, seemingly oblivious to the fact that this situation is all wrong. Callous inattention and disrespect are words that preoccupy me.

I ask her, why did these calls come in? What did the callers want? Does anyone care?

In a hushed tone, the old woman worker tells me, ' . . . Well, you see, sir, the secret password was not retained. No one has it. Can't do anything about it. Not now.' 

Then, she shrugs. I feel like bursting because I am so mad. Liquid and toxic disdain floods my body and soul.

And who's gonna fix this? Who's gonna this mess clean up?, I demand to know, like a charging bull in small pen. Get I.T. pronto. No excuses. Fix it. -- Who's in charge here?

I look to myself like the hollow shell of a court-martialed officer, clothed disgracefully in a tattered uniform, a failed leader with no conscripts, bereft of his battalion of Misfit Toys, sent back to an empty barrack. Big winds issue from empty caves, I remember, as an old saying goes.

The bland co-worker replies like a dispassionate junior officer, 'Why, you are, sir. You're in charge."

I blanch, my hands fly up, and I lean back quickly as if shocked by an electrical current. Here it comes again. I sense a tingle in my neck, then  rush of vertigo and quickly I am feel turned upside down,

Then rapidly, incongruously, I go slip-sliding down a steep metal chute straight into the driver's seat of my frigid car, hitting hard on my butt but seated upright, at the chute's bottom. I hear a bone-crunching sound. My tailbone area crackles in pain. After a single nervous breath, immersed in the green glow of my illuminated dashboard, a strange fantasy swirls to life --

I am driving my car to the New Orleans airport, block by block in the famed Garden District. It is a wickedly frigid and incredibly dark winter morning of 2006. The neighborhood is enveloped by a deep and pure blackness. Silence reigns. Houses are dark inside and out. Many are abandoned, boarded up, water-scarred; some are tagged with painted-on graffiti, courtesy of post-Katrina search and rescue squads. Many tags are shaped like a cross (with a variety cryptic symbols around it -- these denote clues like 'empty house' or 'abandoned animal on these grounds)' There are still bodies of people and animals lying, decomposing, in some of these places. But search teams have gone home and must be sleeping now in warm encampments of their own. A great many street signs are utterly useless. They lay face down, their poles flat on the easements by the sidewalks or wedged in messy gutters, toppled by the ravaging winds and floods those big, hurricane girls brought by.

My headlights shine like the eyes of a wild beast in this deep, unnatural darkness. On the deadly day of August 29, 2005, thousands of streetlights all over the city of New Orleans malfunctioned catastrophically. Their cycle of lights -- red-green-yellow-red -- disappeared. Traffic lights began to blink  either yellow or red incessantly as the Hurricane Katrina headwinds at last relented. The maddening and incessant flashing for months upon months, most of the lights in the Garden District were yellow, lacked clarity and finality, hurled caution into the wind. It symbolized a taunting message from the inscrutable gods: 'Heads-up, trouble abounds. There be no safe passage during this life.' The taunting, like trash talk on the basketball court, went on month after month unremitting throughout the city streets. 'Fragile is life, vulnerable is humanity, we hold your fate in our hands, so vulnerable are you! At times the taunt went: 'Make your own rules. No more black and white, no more red and green. Nothing clear. Or make a break for it. Dare you, loser.'

At a very slow speed under the morning darkness, worried about who or what might be approaching, I roll the car carefully to the storied intersection of Broadway and Freret, near historic but hurricane-ravaged Tulane University. On Broadway I am heading toward the airport. A shiny dark red Suburban emerges oversized,  from darkness, to my right. It comes toward Broadway on Freret Street. It is on a right angle to me. Its brakes whine as it halts for the yellow light. I look over. The whole scene goes bright yellow, then dark, then . . . on each of the four street corners sheets of cold mists -- like an amber cloud of airborne illness -- settle down and seem to spread like paint over all.
I think I see Cheri sitting the Suburan's driver-seat, a thick black coat with a high collar is pulled up around her neck and dark hair. Her stare is red-eyed, menacing, ungodly. I am very alarmed. The woman looks right toward me and through me. Her lips are closed tight but I hear her angry sentiment "Get away!"  She shakes her head back and forth, violently, to emphasize her bitter indictment. I spy an animal in there with her. Dark-tempered, black, and furry -- a big dog?, a gorilla?, a black wolf?, a different kind of predator from an untamed wilderness? The beast stalks around the interior of her SUV with menace, its full furry tail swishing madly. Momentarily I think of piney, Tennessee forests swaying in stiff winds in the story of Cold Mountain. A horrific sense of resignation wells up in me. I sigh -- but the whiny sound of my cold breath redounds to me, from the green glow dashboard, doleful and stale. The cold pinpricks my face like a spray of ice pellets. Heartbreak takes me. I feel lost. Alone in the dark. Freezing and lost.

A song springs up on my car radio -- "Animal"

(Admittedly, I fall into a confused state. In reality, this cannot be! The properties of time, sound, and place are bending right before me. This record will not be heard by anyone anywhere on any radio until early 2010. -- Yet, here it plays on this winter morning, an up-tempo departure anthem, way too uptempo for this deep, misty cold, and soulful pre-dawn --

     Here we go again, I feel the chemicals kickin' in
     It's getting heavy, And I wanna run
     And hide -- I wanna run and hide,
     I do it every time, You're killin' me now
     And I won't be denied by you
     The animal inside of you. Oh oh,
     I want some more. Oh oh
     What are you waiting for? 
     Say goodbye to my heart tonight.

I grunt, Ugh. --I whisper lyrics I have just heard: 'Hush, hush. It's us that's made this mess. What are we gonna do?')

The unbidden song ends with an eerie fade, not a cold and definitive endstop. No music follows. Radio static buzzes around my ears as if the station has suddenly signed off the air. I reach for the FM buttons. Oh right, I remind myself, the radio in my vehicle no longer works.

The scratch of static dies away. Silence prevails. The illuminating yellow lights keep blinking. Momentarily, (like a fool) I worry needlessly that a runaway Amtrak train, it's exhausted conductor catnapping at the controls, might come crashing through this scene to mash me senseless, just as Cheri's fiery Suburban runs into me. A four-corner, four-direction disaster is what I imagine, I gasp and look away. I wish it would . . . Nope . . . I don't, I don't, I won't. Moments of inaction slip by. No other cars or trucks come by. Silence reigns. This stupid shit is just never going to end, I shrug. Dejection. S.S.D.D., I tell myself -- same stuff, different day. 

(Time brings about a difference .Months later, after my mind has cleared somewhat, I wake in a crowded lecture hall and see an authoritative and reliable professor standing behind a podium. I sit on the left hand margin of a hushed audience. She begins in a measured way to pose intellectual insights and deep questions to ponder about post-traumatic stress disorder, as if it were a clinical disease. With her smooth and trained voice, she posits a thesis. PTSD is a condition wherein someone victimized by a real life experience, which often proves lastingly painful and horrific, is burdened, perhaps in an unalterable manner, by . . . Huh? What? My mind must be wandering through the jargon . . . .

But wait. Wait. -- I wonder if I have indeed heard the expert at the podium correctly. What was that that she just said? The professor skims hastily over her text toward a poignant conclusion. She seems to be suddenly short on time. But I am still back on her previous point. In my limited brain matter I piece together an image of a Netflix movie that unreels time after time deep in someone's unlucky cortex, an emotional tsunami masquerading as a technicolor, Dolby surround sound show either On-Demand or Pay-Per-View lasered into a fated person's head. It is typically triggered by the pulse of a hidden command button.

The lecturer says for them all to listen up, this is her last key point..

She reads through half moon eyeglasses with shiny black rims, a very academic look. She holds note pages steadily. 'Often an innocuous moment of sensation can be the tripwire, that hidden command, that reignites the painful experience one has had. Post-traumatic and disordered I have posited about what one has suffered. It could come from the smoky odor from a house fire that's turned a family's life into cinders and fear, or a seemingly innocent pinewood smell or a piece of clothing with moth balls on a hanger that waits like a lingering marauder deep in a backroom closet. Or, as you all have no doubt heard, for many survivors of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in this region, it could be the hurricane-soaked reek -- just a whiff or two of this most putrid smell -- in a flooded home or a lowly Toyota's previously flooded trunk now cluttered with salvaged junk from the storm. Finally, perhaps it could come from the head-turning odor, or the sorry sight, that rises from sidewalk piles of tragically ruined and discarded personal items: personal photos, kids' toys, broken knick knacks, decimated X-Box an PC units, musical collections and stained  castoff clothing, all on a torn up easement in front of an abandoned dwelling during the heat of a day,' the professor contends.

The professor closes her notebook. She looks pale, grim, fretful. She stares at the floor of the lecture hall briefly. Silently she tucks the notebook under an arm and strides out of the room with looking back. I notice one phrase -- author unknown -- scrawled onto the a erase board. It reads: 'Let us learn from The Great Deluge.We've come too far to turn back now.'

I sit, in a dead-stop, at the nexus of Freret and Broadway, a crossroads, a zia some would contend. It seems like time to fly. Gotta go, bro, I tell myself. Delta is ready when you are! 'We love to fly, and it shows!' Elvis must leave the building -- The amber street lights caution against rash action; they flash without sentiment: Go. Don't! Go. Don't! Go? Don't! . . . . Sick stuff. Survival. Just doing their job. It's all too confusing. Prepare to stop, or prepare to fly?

Like in a poorly plotted horror movie, the false image of Cheri with the red eyes fades into the deep black mist. On all 4 streets, the nexus, the absurd yellow blinking will go on for months more. Can't anybody or even a computer in this effing town repair anything? Can't anybody tell me clearly what I should do? 'How many more repeats . . . .?'

Suddenly, I flinch. My muted cellphone vibrates somewhere deep inside an interior pocket in my hefty overcoat. A phone call? A text message?

      Hello, hello, baby. You called? I can't hear a thing.
     What, what did you say? Oh no, you're breaking up on me,
     So sorry I cannot hear you, I'm kinda busy . . . --

A message at 4 in the morning? No. Impossible. It can't be . . . My heart thuds. My stomach rolls. I get that dizzying feel of vertigo again. I am spooked because I sense who's trying to reach me. In fact, I'm sure of it. Here in the everlasting dark with my Sprint phone at my service, this cannot end well.

Towerless and powerless, like it is after a hurricane's stiff winds have blown through the scene, I can't linger anymore. In my mind I hear the nervous trill of the future song again:

     Here it comes again
     I feel the chemicals kicking in
     and I wanna run and hide
     I wanna run and hide:
     say goodbye to my heart to-night 

And without warning, once more I find that I have been placed transfixed, a hotness rising like a cloud in me, at a strangely-alluring piece of photo-art on a CD cover. The number 829 looms at the top of a black-slate panel, as do the ominous words A Dreamer's Remarks. I recall that this scene at one time seemed harmless enough. But now, with its few alterations, it may foretell a cruel coincidence. Is this a secret code?, I ponder. Is this supposed to be funny, some kind of joke? I feel anger and resentment. But I smile in resignation because reality can be stone cold, and unforgiving. In my mind I hear the tinny echo of a Tom Petty tune about the great wide open spark to life, in a cavernous room, perhaps far far away.

 

In the entrancing photo (the one which I am studying), there is an oddly appealing scene of three people, obviously a trio of rock 'n roll band mates. One man is in spotless linen white, with a spotless white fedora; one man is cloaked in a black frock coat with a black do-rag (covered with white diamonds) tied over the top of his head, and the last figure, a pretty female, dead-centered in the picture, a Summer girl it seems, wears big silver hoops for earrings and stylish gray clothing and boots. She appears to be tight-lipped, perhaps curious, perhaps alarmed, perhaps grateful as she heeds the words of one of the male musicians being whispered in an ear. I gather that she is piecing together a deep, dark secret that has not yet been disclosed . . . .
 

*****

Soundtrack.  Click here to listen to:

"Animal," by Neon

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Houdini in the Audience

This is my favorite story of 2010. It was told to me, by a stranger -- with a gift for gab -- as we sat in easy chairs at a Starbucks not long ago. I just happened to ask him about what he was reading. The book had the words 'Desert Disappearance' in the title. Then he said what he had on his mind, particularly an interesting vignette about his admiration for Harry Houdini's well-conceived magic tricks.

http://newdaydiarist.wordpress.com/2011/01/07/houdini-in-the-audience/

Lander's Outlook

Miracles are retellings in small letters of life  stories

 which seem too large for us to grasp.  --  C.S. Lewis 

Lander's Restless Outlook

       This will be the day unholy. He knows that this must be. --------  The young man's name is Juan Jose da Brava Lander. He stands seventy-two stories up from the earth behind a spotless and impossibly large pane of thick glass -- it substitutes for one complete wall in his father's spacious executive office -- and it protects him from a vast toxic bubble of noxious and grimy ozone that settled down long ago like a smothering pillow over everyone and everything in the capitol. Lander is very close to the window, his outstretched fingers record oily prints on the translucent surface as he tilts forward and his warm breath leaves an irregular gray dot that will soon fade from sight. Up here he is high above the predator birds that slice through the polluted air, above the sharp pinnacles of dozens of tall commercial buildings and modern hotels, and above steaming streets crammed with scurrying people and eroding ancient cobblestone alleyways that crisscross the jittery hive that is Mexico City.

       Lander's friends back home in the States, far removed from his father's birthplace and culture, call him Johnny. He allows himself a thrilling rush of fear, an uncontrolled and sickening dizzy senssation, as he peers all the way down to the Calle Real where it bisects the the granite surface of the Calle Gran Via. How long would it take, one thousand-one, one thousand-two, one thousand-three . . . to plunge through the grime thickened air, like a wingless eagle, unable to alter now chosen fate, and discover the secrets of rock bottom, he wonders. How would the impact feel?

        Lander leans back and stands up straight. His body posture has been deteriorating, he fears, he looks down a lot at the ground before him, since recurring boundless and bottomless waves of depression have afflicted his mind, his heart, his outlook on existence. He looks out toward the far away northern perimeter of the rampant, multicultural ciudad, past the legendary central plaza called the Zocalo with its mysterious eight pathways shaped like a North Star -- the energetic locus of the great city, a practical gathering place since the days of the ancient Aztecan society, and in the direction of the legendary Tepeyac Hill, and on toward a horizon where wiggling solar heat waves rise up across the vista like fiery, waist-high fence posts and where the crispy crust of Mexican earth, once known as New Spain, curves down and away gravitationally to disappear from sight.

        Once he had settled on the plan that would take him into the darkness of forever, Johnny felt a stirring inside. He wished to see his father one last time, so perhaps that inexplicable inner sensation was a longing for reconciliation between them or perhaps it was just a longing, on Johnny's part, for an apology from his parent. The great chasm between father and son had troubled Lander greatly as he exited his adolescent years and moved into early adulthood. So, since money was never a concern, Lander had flown back to Mexico City -- to say goodbye one way or the other. It upset him that DaBrava-Lander was nowhere to be found. It was the nature of his cloaked and serious business, these prolonged and unexplained absences, the boy had been told on many occasions. Lander settled in at the big house that his father owned, when necessary made a few purchases on several familiar teeming and tawdry streets in the shadows of the old city, waited for his father's return sometimes at the office instead of the DaBrava's palatial hacienda, and surrendered once again to the prickly temptations of Patron tequila shots, regretfulness, and an angry sense that lander could not shake that nothing made sense at all. After some days of isolation, moving from one station to the next completely on his own, coming and going at will from the house to the office to the streets, not caring at all what time or what day it was, Lander's still young brain had been baked again -- it had happened before -- into a lifeless adobe brick. His eyes burned like red coals and felt seared into their sockets. His lips were cracked and stinging. The tender membranes in his nose and upper throat were scalded. For the plentiful peyote from the streets -- for the mescal boosts and the array of other drugs that he craved -- he was once again handing over to his demons a painfully high price.

        Lander glanced at his glittering, ridiculously expensive wristwatch, an 'I feel guilty again'  gift that had been delivered by UPS Overnight from his father, purchased no doubt by some DaBrava Enterprises underling with funds drawn from one of the Senor's many illegal and wildly profitable escapades. Date and time, the young man noted, were December 9th and 2:00 PM -- a warm and humid, late-year moment even for Mexico City. Lander planned to take a speedy express elevator straight down to the airy and expansive third floor mezzanine in a matter of minutes. The elevator was slim and tight -- there was just enough room for 2 or 3 normal adult bodies to be crammed in uncomfortably -- and it was slickly disguised, hidden in case of emergencies, as an ornate closet door adjacent to this father's private washroom.

Looking left, Lander smiled wanly at Marcolino, a powerfully muscled and loyal body man in a sleek sharkskin black suit, starched white shirt and darkly rich red tie, perched noiselessly on a straight-backed wicker side chair. Marcolino's ominous presence, gun at the ready, always close on orders from the big boss, Miguel DaBrava, was meant to be reassuring to the young man. Lander was glad he was guarding the office door and the massive bullitt-proof pane of glass that enwrapped the large office suite. Then the gang boss felt a pang of sadness, as a heartlander and dark philosopher, for so, so many millions of little mestizos, and cowering natives, and unwanted children, dusty earth bugs crawling through life's passageways without compasses, navigating about weather-worn city grids, sneaking into the ancient alleyways for commercial goods to steal, fending off desperate denizens lurking in shadows ready to pounce, just to have something to accomplish, seeking some secret to it all, some secret, so piercing that when understood all things will forever change.

       Early on in the rough trade, once they had all reached the interior of the Mexican states, his superiors and compadres gave Lander a nickname, Juanito. His real first and last name were never spoken again. He rubbed his eyes. During the dark night before, he had again seen in a dreamscape the innocent face a young Nahautl girl, a native of this region.  A soft, wavewring glow emanated from around her head. He was certain that she was trying to say something, an important message, to him but her lips could not part. Over this Lander felt despair and a lagging sense of power. He felt that his time in this world, particles of sand slipping down through a smoky hourglass, was slipping away. Not only had he ruined thousands of other lives with the fruits of the agave, the liquid torment of mescal, now he was in turn ruining himself. Perhaps she was laboring to tell him so.

Lander's drug-fueled visions of the senorita had led him to curate a parallel personal habit both arcane and superstitious. He began to repeat it compulsively, like an addict will.

Aztec Calendar

When he was haughty, young, and a zealous daredevil, in no manner needful of religious piety nor the hidden patron, El Senor en el cielo, whence time passing and calendars were of no concern,


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because he fretted incessantly (as Mexican clocks ticked and tocked without mercy, as he kept glancing at all hours of the daylight while in his work suite, through that impossibly sturdy and bulletproof pane of tempered glass toward the towering timepiece on the government highrise out to his left, to the point of taking mild (so his circumspect physician had said) sedatives by day and through the black unknowns of his often lonely nights at his glorious hacienda, the finest that drug monies can build and buy, on the edge of Mexico City, a guilty response ridden with fears that usually led to spurting bloodlines in Lander's never restful and easy imagination, that involved the Virgin of Guadalupe. This why Lander's confused and guilt-wracked face had likewise turned so many times during times recent toward the fabled Tepeyac Hill on the northern rim of the bustling but twisted metroplex and why he, in the deep-dish privacy of his enviable decorated office, when he was secure in his belief that no one ever would enter, that he ran his right palm as delicately as he could imagine over the perfectionistically painted little statue of La Virgen with her linen, creamy veil in place over her expressionless visage -- with her symbolic black belt and slight baby-bump so obvious -- the long-standing  redolent, rosy cheeked queen of the Indian natives, the treasured little work of Mexican art and plaster and paint that was planted in the grasp of his lined, slightly trembling left hand.  Lander knew that he was going to die soon. With all his riches gleaned from his hard fought scramble up and through the honeycomb of the drug trade and the ruthless cartel, for all the worldly powers that he had taken for himself and his gangster compatriots as the unrelenting boss, who all sadly but certainly were now mostly extinct, moldering, and buried without ritual or ceremonies in plots unknown, and that he had murdered innocent and guilty others for, Lander remained confused because his rich but bloody means and ends seemed so irrevocably tied, almost but not quite yet dead to earthly life, to this religious image of an existence eternal, the hidden truths if any of the Tepeyac Hill long, long before the city became the sprawling, enormous, grinding and bussing Mexican metropolis, and the Virgin's little secret that, in time and church matters, became so luxuriantly (but perhaps bogusly) cleverly symbolized by wintry December roses, of all things unlikely and most unnatural.

        His stalkers, shapeshifting night crawlers as Lander saw them vividly in dreams, cannibals actually in Aztecan mythological tales, were coming for him and he would probably die hideously, shot dead, cut up, and eaten lustily by these dark night-dancers, if he did not flee with hasty dispatch, Lander worried. In his mind's eye, he was a resourceful compadre, good fellow, once an immortal youthful man who sprung from the impervious and conquering States, and a storied villain in modern legends told throughout Mexico's barrios. Many locals, Lander among them, feared that the benighted shapeshifting soldiers who came from the dark place were ruled by the hideous Aztec god of the underworld and keeper of the dead, Mictlantecuhtli -- or Mictlanti -- and from his mythic burgeoning, pierced heart and unflagging spirit they would slither into your private quarters unfettered, into your restless, sweaty hours and dreams in the dark, and even into your bed clothes. The few victims who had seen the Aztecan shapeshifters and yet survived swore that at the moment they struck with vengeance they seemed like agile snakes who had been sent from crusted, blood-soaked sands now cupped under the dried bed of Lake Texcoco on which Tenochtitlan, island home first to Nahuatl tribes who emigrated from Atlan (the rumored cradle of human community on earth) and later the stout, wide-spreading precursor to the contemporary   ciudad muy grande, positioned in the rich Valley of central Mexico. Perhaps this virgin girl would help him in his corrupt anxiety escape this ugly fate after all and the ruthless blood oath that his enemies, organized and unstoppably brutal and rapacious, had sworn against him, Lander thought ruefully.

Mictlantecuhtli, God of Death

Once again, with a softness and delicacy, he stroked the statue from top to bottom. He glanced toward the gold vase of fresh and fragrant red roses that he had had delivered daily to the hand-crafted wood desk in his polished office suite, during early morning hours, just after dawn, before his secretive arrival in the basement garage via his black and impossibly shiny Rolls Royce limousine, windows tinted as black as his unforgiving night-times at his cloaked but gorgeous hacienda. The only ones he lived under the hacienda roof with were the limited coterie of reverent and quiet little, superstitious housekeeper peasants, even today so much like the legendary servant of God, Juan Diego, said to descend from a local and spiritualistic Nahuatl tribe, illiterate and tongueless, thus unable to speak to anyone mythic or real (by his cruel fiat), and also fully locked-and-loaded and fatalistic bodyguards constantly on the watch -- with ready semi-automatic weapons and stacks of lethal ammo, at all entrances and exits so that no one could pass through, not even the ghostly and snake-like shapeshifters sent by Mictlanti, the skeletal god dispatching from the dried lake bed, to get at Lander. These vigilant and loyal hombres prepared ceaselessly to spirit The Boss quickly away, like a fleeing and desperately frightened little mob of native peoples fleeing an eclipse of the sun, within the armored limo, and the armored quintet of steely Hummers, and onto the mythical, disappearing dirt trails that forged their way into Mexican hillside hazes.

        It was a painful and difficult life that he had chosen, Lander thought, so help me, God. At that thought he smiled, his heart cranked up with a hard jolt of cynicism. Maria, la madre de Dios, la virgen de las Americanos, was symbolically within Lander's grasp, right in his right hand, but he in his guilt and cognizant of his most ruthless history, could not yet grasp the secret, the key to a meaningful and happy existence, that this oddly demure, native girl and yet striking Mother Earth goddess had wished to impart, in a cold whisper, to the lonely man who knelt cowering before her, her breath lightly fogging the chilly pane of reality and fantasy that kept these two entities from touching and which seemed to extend up and into eternity. One of the two would have appeared, there at the foot of Tepeyac Hill, under a thick canopy of gray clouds, to casual passersby to be a humble, brown-skinned little Nahuatl descendant, a pietistic believer bowed and wrapped in his warm serape, down on his skinned knees, who went on from that strange encounter in December 1531 straight to becoming a changed and committed servant of God, who submerged his real name, his native identity -- his most precious possession, all this in the name of the Savior of the world, and who was christened Juan Diego. The other would have been seen as a gentle peasant girl yet somehow so lofty, shining, and present -- like the long-reverenced female deity Tlalcihuatl, goddess of the earth, flowing daughter of the most high god of will, Huitzilopochtli. It would have been a tableau colorful and worthy of El Greco and other refined Spanish artists. But that legendary pair of bodies in that storied encounter, on the north rim of the ancient island community of Tenochtitlan, in fact were never really there at all, nor was the lady's frosty breath, nor Juan Diego's protestations of faith, not any more than fresh roses or a tacky paint palette and brush would have been. 

. . . While stroking the statue of La Virgen, Lander looked through the gleaming bright window to the north -- what if I had never been here at all as well? Where does someone depraved and lost like me turn, corrupt in my heart and essence, at such moments, he thought, feeling ready to lay down and decompose, his tarnished mind goading him about ghostly and lethal shapreshifting stalkers as if it were full of sharp and curling waves crashing along unknown shores, overflowing its natural boundaries, an unrecognizable and turbulent sea, or jammed to its bursting points with pointy nails and harsh irony.



The Aztec Calendar

Tepeyac Hill


Zocalo central, main plaza in Mexico City (Templo Mayor, 1521)

Hernan Cortez 1521

Palpably haughty with a hint of angst

If I were a psychologist, or at least a smarter man, I would love to write (in a psychologically-sophisticated manner) about what really happened, if anything at all, on Tepeyac Hill, which is to be found on the near-north edge of today's Mexico City, on the rumoured winter-chilly sunrise of December 9, 1531.

It's a fascinating, legend-worthy piece -- a movie-thriller in its origins -- the story about the mysterious Tepeyac occurrence, which stars a dark and whispering virgin, plus a humble lonely (and recently widowed) little man. It might even be classified a medieval, mythological morality play, by some who hear it. To a semi-knowledgeable, coffee-table psychologist like myself, the religiously-pregnant symbolism and the sharply-drawn shadow images, in a purely Jungian sense, within this questionable Mexican myth-telling of the highly unlikely, make me eager to know more. If only at least one of us -- you or me -- could fly timelessly back to 'the rest of the story,' now, that would be a miracle (that is, you see, if anything happened at all on that hillside in late 1531 . . .) because the whole unlikely plot has been mired in sticky pools of religious doubt, by many among the world's spiritual intelligencia, for centuries. Yes, literally, centuries.

Headline: John Paul II Makes 'Juan Diego' a Catholic Saint in 2002

Some of the wise ones among us earth-bound folks claim that miracles happen inevitably to those who believe in them.

And, so, ancient Mayan and Christian-Mexican legends have it that a dark-skinned female apparition -- a suddently-there vision of a teenaged young lady (obviously a Native American and Mexican-bred), say about 14 or 15 years old, seemingly an Indian local's imaginative take on the famous Mary of Nazareth, La Virgen, began calling out -- in a dark and whispery voice -- from a rolling, pastoral hillside, early on a painfully-cold December morning, the 9th,  in 1531. The little lady endeavored to get the attention of a preoccupied, simple, illiterate -- but deeply bereaved and religious -- widower, born and raised as Talking Eagle (real name: Cuauhtlatoatzin -- later called Juan Diego after his Christian baptism by some Franciscan monks from Spain) as he made his way to church. She said she had an urgent message for the world, utilizing a kind but mysterious demeanor (or so it says in the books about her), just like she usually has whenever she has broken briefly back -- at other locales, in other eras -- into the unfolding history of the human drama. To date, there remain many who seriously question if ever there was a lonely widower named Talking Eagle, or a Juan Diego, or a dark and kind-hearted female vision in a blue serape, who is now known as La Virgen de Guadalupe, but at least we can acknowledge that there is a real Tepeyac Hill sitting out there in the Mexico City 'burbs of today, but the hillside frankly is not telling us what really took place, if anything happened at all.

Looking at the reputed big picture of events, centuries later, the young lady's clear message ('build a religious shrine here on Tepeyac and convince the homeboy Catholic bishop, and all of your peeps, that I am real') does not seem so hill-shaking, faith-enhancing, telegram-urgent, or church-rattling. It's kinda pedestrian 'been there done that' apparition fare, if you ask me. No 'you ain't seen nothing yet!' No big pop; no blinding flash. Apparently, it (the divine revelation that the humble La Virgen Pequena spoke to a stunned and shaky Talking Eagle, causing him to jump out of his rough-hewn sandals) simmers down to an age-old storybook lesson (one that's been told many many times over, starting with the Book of Genesis), one that is absolutely cherished by much of the human race; and it appears to be this: an unchanging Creator loves his simple little creatures, which would be us homies, yes, us human beings, and that said Creator continues to reach out to us, affectionately, in all of our free-will folly and stupidity and stumbling with a heartfelt divine longing. This is so He can gently nudge us back on the murky path when we idiotically (repetitiously) cause things to go spinning wildly in really bad directions. Only, you see, there was a fun, divinely-playful, all 16th Century twist to the oft-repeated divine lesson that was delivered from the Heavenly (perhaps) on December 9, 1531, in barely tamed old Mexico. On that fateful sunrise, or so the legend says, God happened to dispatch his Mom (Mary of Nazareth -- yes, actually a poor Jewish girl -- looking like a brown-skinned, hardly regal, common indigenous peasant), instead of His larger-than-life male Godself, to caution God's stumbling creatures, 'cuz perhaps He was occupied with big trouble elsewhere with other earthlings @ the time, or perhaps He was ironically enjoying an early yuletide break, or because He figured sagely that 'if these boneheads won't listen to Jesus, or the Dad well, then maybe they'll take a clue from his Mom.' In this take on the J.D. narrative, very much like the timeless Nazareth manger story, the Godly proves to be upsetting to legions of rich and famous, and powerful, because it looks like a commoner, sounds just like a commoner, dresses like a commoner, and worse, to cultured but misguided Christians, like a dark-skinned Mexican -- like a power-Mestizo portrait of the Heroine of the kiddies' classic Runaway Bunny.

So, the unplanned reports of all this these mysterious goings-on between Talking Eagle and The Lady, and his disbelieving Franciscan bishop, must have come as quite a shock to the systems of the pure-blood, pure-bred Spaniards who were (a) over-powering the post-Colombian landscape, and (b) others who were passing their time back in Europe --like, say, the narrow-minded racial and social bigots running Arizona today -- since (as far as they, the Europeans, fallaciously believed) God the Almighty, the Creator of all, was firmly on their side of the equation, not those humble little folks, 'natives' that had been found running around that (possibly) gold-bearing answer to all of humankind's desires -- the rumoured El Dorado.

[For a minute or so, take time to consider the context of the early 1530s in old Mexico, birthplace of Talking Eagle and his extended Mayan neighborhood. It had been slammed by a vicious, resident-slaying occupation army belonging to the Spanish conqueror Cortes and his King; it tingled with the sultry temptations of wealth and power and European values, a whole new set of concepts for the indigenous -- Dios mio, look at those glitterly gold swords and breastplates and knives!; and it was made toxic via a bushel-basket full of unsavory white-person values (plus communicable diseases, of course) that had been slammed down into the verdant and innocent, and agrarian, culture of Native Americans by the Spaniard Christians. Sadly, it is taught that the wife of Talking Eagle (she was baptized with the name Maria Lucia) eventually lost her life thanks to one one of those ship-born, deadly viruses. So, as Mark Twain was to claim sardonically, some centuries later, about the French adventurer Cavalier de LaSalle's claiming of primitive Louisiana at the foot of the Mississippi -- 'The whole territory thereabouts was claimed by the bold explorer, who came from lusty Europe, at the bidding of his powerful King and homeland; then the Church-worthy chaplain/monk who was also on the unsavory journey celebrated the bald-faced and abominable robbery with a hymn and a Mass.']

An Unsolved Mystery (Mexico City Edition)

Nobody in Europe, or elsewhere that we can tell, wrote officially, or even creatively, about Juan Diego y La Virgen until about 1650. Thus, before our mass communication era, during this 120 actual years or so (1531-1650), roughly, an eon went on by -- during which mythologists, Mexican storytellers, Mayan lovers, and Christian believers, and all manner of other storytellers could go to work, elaborate, make stuff up, manufacture evidence, and cook up clever and catchy 'did you know's' about a lonely, childless, grieving peasant-widower who was, unexpectedly, called to by a comely and young (perhaps pregnant) native girl, covered by a blue serape, from up on a beautiful Mexican hillside one chilly December morning.

Admittedly though, whatever went on there, if anything at all, it makes for a compelling psycho-thriller and a very classy plot, the stuff movies are made of, if you just fill in some details in between the paper-thin script lines. Did you happen to know, for example, that while the Catholic Spaniards were scooping up big gobs of those golden, delicious New World treasures, there in the mid-1500s, back in the oh-so civilized world of Iberia and other European turfs, just about everyone was freaking out, yes, going totally psych-out haywire, over the heretic Luther's bold assertions and the flashmobs of the Reformation that were rocking the casbah? Can't you wonder in faith, or at least simple amazement, how a timely miracle in the New World -- which clearly proved that grand heretical miscues were taking place in Germany and elsewhere -- came rolling like thunder out of the untamed West, like an unsolve-able mystery, at such a critical juncture of Western Christian history?  (Here's another metaphor for you to contemplate about those times: cue the actor Robert Stack; he is wearing a Mexican trench coat and a jaunty gentleman's sombrero; he walks out of the cacti and shadows on a darkling slope of Tepeyac Hill; she strides upright into a well-lighted patch of ground; Stack stares earnestly into his camera shot, then intones in a breathless voice, 'It's one of the great unsolved religious cases of all times, set in ancient Mexico -- an unsolved mystery of the 16th Century. And it contains, for some, a timeless spiritual message . . . . like no other!!' The TV picture blends slowly to a stark black-and-white screen, as a lonely little man -- apparently a Mexican native -- in a rather-nice tan serape and sandals, makes his way down a rough and rocky path. Winds blow. Morning snowflakes fly. Suddently he hears a voice shouting . . .

Now, This Is as Far as We Go

If I could, I would now have you access an audio-file brimming with the smooth voice of Mr. Paul Harvey, the radio legend. He would read, on that file, "Well now, we've all heard the religious story about a simple, grieving, and lonely Mexican peasant who, one unseasonable and chilly December morning somewhere near to today's Mexico City, on his way to an uncommon Saturday church service, met an attractive young senorita in blue who called to him, gently, kindly, but quite assertively, from a pretty rolling hillside. Then, because this faithful peasant could not in his right mind believe her fantastic message, she somehow perfectly imprinted her colorful portrait on his strangely, way-too-expensive cloak, and also (to prove her point) stuffed it full of a big bunch bee-yoo-tee-full . . .  red. . . . roses! Yes, That man, Talking Eagle, by name, was perplexed because she had claimed . . .  When he was done (after being interrupted once for a cheerful Cream of Wheat or Denture-Paste commercial), Harvey would sum the questionable Juan Diego y La Virgen script for all it was worth -- dramatic pauses admirable -- capping with iconic, upbeat capper: "Annnndddd now! You know. . . . Good. Day!"

Only, to be truthful, we do not know it -- that is, the rest of the story. More details would simply be fiction; in fact, that's what some people will say I have added above. So only the Lord God knows what really happened on that December day. If anything. And unlike his Mom, in December 1531, God is not talking about it.

Since I'm not a psychoanalyst, nor even a decent coffee-table shrink, I have to grab at flashing-light unsolved mysteries as best I can. Were I to be challenged to pen a contemporary script of the new Juan Diego and the Dark Lady dvd -- I'd probably wind up casting Johnny Depp as Talking Eagle and Ellen Page (who played the cheeky, pregnant Juno) as the Apparition. Page one of the script would begin:

"December 9, 1531 -- it is a glistening and coldly dewy morning in the primitive Mexican 'burbs as warmly-cloaked, fully-armed Spanish soldiers and shivering, poor local peasants begin to stir. Pale yellow sunrays peak over the hilltops. Then . . . . "

As wise men and women assert, miracles occur to those who believe in them. Now, go, you write the story. At least think about this medieval tale as if Stephen King or Dean Koontz had penned it not so long ago. That's right, imagine. Now you've got it rolling. --

(Post-Script: It's unthinkable almost, but Talking Eagle, a.k.a. Cuauhtlatoatzin  -- is improbably pictured above this actual blogpost. He has somehow misplaced his peasant and Mexican-Mayan looks, in the mists of time, so that he could forever resemble a mannerly, European gentry born in a province of Spain. Unthinkable. Unlikely. But, as the writers of history and fiction often point out, the victors collect the mythologies. Those who win the wars and conquer foreign peoples write the history books and paint the official portraits. And, in the end, a key lesson here is that power and money conquer most things, and those who possess them get to tell their version of the tale that captures the imagination.)

 

Before She Speaks Up, Let Me Tell You About My Mistress

In hotels, sometimes, at night, I get down and look under the bed. There's always nothing there. But I was afraid there could have been monsters. --  A Friend

“All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow with the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.”  -- Thomas Wolfe


This ain't gonna be easy, I fear. And not particularly pretty. I have decided to return to my mistress, a tarnished feminine jewel of the South. No need to whisper anything to Lynn. She already knows the whole story and the truth -- and she glances at me ruefully whenever it, this mystery date of mine, comes into her thoughts.

My long-left mistress is ill-tempered, sullen (especially on some of those breathlessly humid, rainy days), mysterious, a storm-magnet, a scene of majors disasters, addictive. People often love her at first sight; consort with her with relish and abandon; breathe in her noxious-smelling and river-tainted air; enjoy what she conjures up; swear they'll never ever want to leave. But, soon enough, after a strenuous (and likely an alcohol and cuisine-driven) approach-avoidance holiday, mostly, they (people) usually depart reluctantly -- with a curious spasm of longing to get back one day to my mistress on the Mississippi.

But, you must understand one thing. These people are the outsiders, las turistas. Northerners and Westerners and Eastern folk and Yankees, and what not, who have never labored to endure life in and with this culturally-confusing Southern belle-who-would-be-a-lady, to consort with her really, intimately, languishing and struggling and fussing (all at once) in her engaging lap. This female, that has been frequently labeled the face and place That Care Forgot, has just about vanquished me on a regretful series of memorable occasions.Yes, almost smashed, sliced, diced, smothered, killed, murdered, and buried me -- Rasputin-style -- time after time. Yet in many ways, too, like a rising sun, Care Forgot has often offered me life renewal, professional and personal, and has kept my aging head miraculously above water, while some around me painfully paddled, then dipped down wordlessly, silently, under the water line, breathed their last, and drowned. I guess I matured, as much as I ever will, in her house. Many of the drinkers and eaters and smokers and inhalers, and others, with whom I had opportunities to carouse, as day to day became year to year, on many a sultry humid Louisiana evening, have passed on and passed away and have fallen into darkness. Never to return. Never to be heard again. And -- for some reason -- I yet endure, as Faulkner would say. Abide. Perhaps prevail. (I sense a rippling case of stomach-cramps and ulcer pains coming on.) I don't want to go back now. The probability of this large step-to -- an encounter with the unknown; the "strangeness of destiny," as Thomas Wolfe put it -- scares me left and right.

It was, in the end, a difficult parting. We actually never said 'Well, that's it,' or goodbye, or 'Siempre manana,' or anything of the kind. I just got up one day from my bed. Because I was done. It was hurtful to see Care Forgot losing her flesh, and color, and muscle tone, like somebody's tormented remains lying near a morgue about to expire -- or like a stunned victim lying face up, but not seeing a thing, in an intensive care bed. How classic it now seems -- the ever-repeating tale of the tragedy of the deep South land. I got dressed. I put my bags into a vehicle. Took some deep breaths. Viewed my last of the floodlines on homes, plus the rows and rows of hurricane scattered neighborhoods one last time. And then I drove out, focused, to the New Orleans airport. Minutes later, we were thrusting wheels up into a partly cloudy haze (with no kisses goodbye, alas) -- and the sight of the southern star of mystery, a Mistress and Beguiler to countless fools for centuries, just languished there below that spreading grayness --all damaged and swamp-beaten and unvirtuous and sinking slowly and inexorably into the dark and swampy mire of the Gulf -- which was exactly, in truth, how she had first appeared when I first had flown down into her bosom, three jam-packed decades before.

At random, I wonder sometimes what Vietnam War veterans see and feel when they travel back. To the cities, like Saigon and Hanoi, and the Asian small towns and villages. To the jungles where Charley hid and scrambled in black pajamas in subterranean tunnels. To the watery rice fields. Where they (the war-weary fighters) worried about everyone) -- about who was friend and who was foe. To the Mekong Delta. To the marketplaces teeming with Vietnamese and Cambodian sellers, and pungent cooking foods, and buyers of silk and straw goods, and others. Surely, war-savvy and scarred Nam vets see other things hidden in between these emprical lines, images of post-traumatic stresses dancing in their craniums. Do they not find themselves re-living, unwillingly, certain terrors, sad thoughts about comrades once bleeding, maimed and dying, amidst a horribly hot and rainy nightmare of a place that was war-wracked and whipped to the ground by human folly?

Well, I am going back to my former mistress for a couple of days, much like a veteran warrior returning to the theater of a lingering and hurtful clash. She was lying flat, bedraggled and blasted, still much Katrina-torn, when I left. Now? I think I will notice first, without prompting, her great hidden misfortunes suffered over many decades, but particularly in 2005, which have been dealt out so harshly by human fallibilities and follies, political corruption, and nature's blind fury. Perhaps I will see in her several emerging age-lines and skin tarnishes -- and the lethargic spirit of life that still pumps away inside, though faintly-- and all will appear more meaningful than ever before.

Again, there's need to whisper about any of these matters to Lynn. She knows in her heart. She's been briefed. Lynn will likely smile ruefully if you do tell her. PTSD memories are a kick in the head; surely they are near impossible to shake off. What will the aftermath and 'life goes on' look like to me, in the heat of Care Forgot's lap today, so up close and personal? My innner discipline says take it easy, look things over with care, take one step cautiously, then another, and goodness, boy, . . . breathe deeply . . . try to center.

So, we've been apart -- this complex mistress and me  -- for a long, long line of days. <<  Sigh. >> I wonder what she will say, if anything, as I approach her? (Ooh, there go those stomach cramps and stings of ulcerations again.) For my part of this inevitable return, in a worried manner, I'm gonna be straining to hold my tongue until the Lady Southern speaks first. And I imagine, if she says anything at all, she will open up to me and finally exclaim . . .

Postscript about the strangeness of destiny:

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

                                                                                                          -- Cormac McCarthy

The Moltman Memorial Home for the Incurably Dead

"So, then, people a thousand years from now -- this is the way we were . . . This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying."
                                                                                        -- Thornton Wilder, Our Town

Molt (verb) -- to shed skin, or feathers, or the like, that will be replaced by new growth.

The moment has just about arrived. Soon I will be travelling back. Not that I have ever much wanted to. But I took on this furtive assignment to return (as a fundraising volunteer) with nearly no enthusiasm, in other words just to try to aid others in a modest way, while thousands of would be conference-goers have eagerly queued up, smiling with anticipation, looking to let the good times roll.

But -- not me. New Orleans was my home for almost 30 years. Then terrible things happened (as people always said they would, like the Big One that many prognosticators claim will someday strafe California's coast and make it sink and disappear). The hot summer ocean tides first in the Bahamas, then over to the Gulf of Mexico, blew up cyclonically in August of  2005-- and all those bad omens and things, that everybody had digested warnings about, came to pass; terrible things (as I said), that all began with the letter K, and then later the letter R. Hurricanes, on Summer break, girls gone wild.

Something undeniable, inexplicable, impossibly morose, flickered inside of my head and heart one day in early 2006 -- soon after I had begrudgingly returned, virtually homeless and heartsick and alone, to a nicknamed, tear-stained, hurricane-reeking City That Care Forgot. The flicker? It was this. I unsmilingly acknowledged the truth that Thomas Wolfe was right, even without taking anti-depressants, mind you, that one cannot fully (ever) return home again. Not really. Not after a horrifying, death-dealing molting season. Especially if your home has been mortally wounded. When a tornado has so ripped and rocked your once-cozy neighborhood that the well-known landscape now looks like a pod of power-mad, mythical nature gods have had a little 'boys will be boys' entertainment at your expense with an olympian-sized eggbeater. Especially if the overall situation, the city itself and its people, now clearly seem akin to a doomed bunch of Neros fiddling away as all in all inexorably sinks into a great roiling gulf, never to be seen or heard from or loved again

In these, my post-trauma thoughts, that little (dimly-lit) flicker started a short and sad little recording in my head -- and it came to me over and over. It echoed like the measured, heavy, squealing, grinding-rolldown of a massive garage door, aiming to settle into its cement groove, at ground zero. Down all the way to the damp, gray, hardshell floor. A cold, clunking, ending reality. A bump in the night! Then, an unseen latch would slam steely (hard) into its slot.

So, I was, and I am, gone, and I don't want to (and I won't) go back. Which gives me some pause. Because it reminds me of the old cautionary line, 'If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.'

The place where we held the wakes for my dead mother and father, 3 short years apart, during the late '80s, was the Moltman Memorial Funeral Parlor. Parlor. What a ghastly concept. What an anguishing set of experiences. I remember staring, as much as I could, at the Moltman walls. They were painted an odd color -- which resembled summery peach in muted, death-respectful lighting. I would just stare; though surrounded by people, I wordlessly would hope the moment would just end. Now and then, a demure or quizzical stranger, or a little-known family member, or someone else, would amble up to inquire if I was the son; say that my parents were good people; and then solemnly add that, yes, it's a sad, sad thing when someone however old passes over to the Great Unknown. There's a thought out of Wisdom Central.

When I try to picture what it will be like to work, for a good cause, for a few days in a house of death, the New Orleans Convention Center, I keep recalling those times at the peachy-clean Moltman Parlor for the Incurably Dead and my parents in their ornate caskets and the emotionally-wrenching stories that I was privileged to hear (post-K), from Convention Center survivors about the injured, the lost, the incurably dead. I think I will attempt to just stare at the wide-reaching peach colored walls -- and be kind and receptive and polite, as if I were in a hushed "at a wake" frame of mind. And maybe I'll only speak when spoken too. See, I have resented deeply that the Superdome in New Orleans, and the Convention Center, are 'back to work, in business as usual' -- seemingly without a thought or care for those who suffered and died in each. About the thousands of folks who continue to suffer traumatically and will never get over it, because their city drowned or the home and livlihoods got washed away. Peach colored walls, purple carpets, the graffitti on the convention-room walls -- tagged in spray paint thier by desperate people feeling hopeless and abandoned, in some cases dying -- covered over, the sound of business being done, laughs being had, drinks being toasted, and money being made. Yes, it's the American way. Molting is a powerful process. In nature, it portends good, and growth, and renewed life. In the hands of human beings, molting, as a metaphor, often tells a very different story, mired deep between the obvious lines.

So, the moment has just about arrived. As I've told you, I am almost back. My bag tags will once again read MSY. Will anyone notice or care. Will I find a way to make it work? Sure. But it's gonna be weird. I suppose I will stare a lot as the days and the people in convention central wander by -- staring straight at any peach walls that I can find. I hope there is good cable and wireless service in my hotel room. But even with such diversions, I am afraid that I'll wind up counting down the hours, as if they will never end, until my homebound plane, with a sense of relief and a mighty thrust of man-made power, wings away from ground, all wheels up and shining in the December sun.

Before I close, though, stick with me for one more plea. Please remember in thought and prayers the thousands of people who died (and others who unfortunately suffer much, to this day, throughout the Gulf region) in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Some 'girls gone wild' make quite a pair and cause more mischief than others.


'Dad, I'm not kidding. I'm pretty sure there's some mind of monster under my bed.' 
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Early December and the Melancholy Maalox Mashup

CAUTION: To all A Big MonstEr Blog users. This post will be different from my usual overwrought contributions. I am a writer, you know. When the inevitable request comes in, now and then and again, for a piece with a religious or spiritual theme, that will pay actual U.S. $$$, well . . . a blog-driven hack like me has to eat. Tru dat? And so it goes. If I had really cut loose with my real Adventageous sentiments below -- which my editor would have slapped back @ me for a rewrite faster than you could say "Keep Christ in Christmas" -- then I would have written about depth human emotions, such as the fallible Israelites' long, vexing journey thru a never-ending darkness, fear, ambiguity, and longing. And how the biblical Israelites function as symbols of our wayward, wandering, permissive culture. But for most mainstream-religion readers such topics are kinda heavy. And scary. To say the least. And a bit too real. So, I would say most just don't want to go there. And, frankly, I want the $$$. So, here goes . . .

Advent: It's Not Just for Shopaholics Anymore

Recently, a person in the RCIA, at a local Christian church, wondered where the season of Advent came from. I smiled. Easy. Got it, I thought to myself. ‘It’s about a long but hopeful wait among God’s people for their Messiah, their Savior. It’s also about the coming of the Word of God into the human community.’

Some group conversation ensued. Then, I spoke up. “I think Advent’s about wrapping our arms around values that aren’t so popular in American culture anymore. Like, patience. Dealing with uncertainty. Self-denial, prayer . . . It’s not just for shopaholics anymore. Several group members laughed a little. Surprised, I thought, ‘Now where did that come from?’

It’s a Long Story, But a Good One

Advent is a special season of the Church Year, the one that comes right before Christmas. The Latin term adventus means “coming.” It begins on the Sunday closest to November 30, the feast of Saint Andrew. It lasts until December 24.  In any given calendar year, the Advent period will last from 21 to 28 days.

 An advent season was celebrated, by some Christians in Europe, as far back as the year 500. It soon became common, in the Church, make special preparations for the “birthday” of Jesus of Nazareth. This was an echo of the many centuries of waiting and hoping 'in darkness,' by the People of Israel, for the One who’d lead them to hope and liberation.

By the 900s, many Christians had begun to celebrate the first Sunday of Advent as the beginning of the Church’s liturgical year. Later, Gregory VII (1073-1085) taught that the Advent season, throughout the entire Church, was to extend over four Sundays—and he selected certain Bible passages and composed lyrical prayers, many still used today, to help Christians get ready for the sacred feast of Christmas.

Certain spiritual practices cropped up here and there. The Advent wreath, a significant ‘evergreen’ symbol of life with four candles, became popular during the Middle Ages in Europe, then North America. For centuries, families made creative “countdown to Christmas” calendars during December. A serious emphasis on prayer, fasting, and self-denial (central to Advent traditions from the start) remained part of daily Catholic life.

Some of you who read this will recall what this kind of Advent was like. For younger readers, know that the period was a big deal – about hope, and self-control, and watching for something big. Yes, something almost unimaginable – the Word of God becoming part of humanity!

Light a Candle, Say a Prayer

I briefly thought about titling this section “Can You Wait for Jesus at the Mall?’ Instead, let’s go with an ancient Christian saying: ‘Light a candle, say a prayer.’

Every year, as I grow older, Advent and Christmas seem to mean something different. Less about getting the goods. Fewer packed-full parking lot spats. Avoidance of shop-till-you-drop marathons. More about time with family and other relationships -- and a focus on all of our rich, life-giving (often simple) gifts from God.

The key, I suppose, is to discover, yearly, a way – individually or as a household – to make the season of Advent meaningful, so a true celebration of the Nativity can be realized in our corner of the earth.

Of course, one can ‘wait’ for, and ‘watch’ for, Jesus at the local shopping mall. Malls today function like the town and village squares of ages gone by – central points at which common folk would gather, socialize, care for each other, share faith.This Advent, if you watch closely, you will see waves of shoppers in our contemporary‘village squares’ who are harried, who seem to need something – a brief, friendly smile, a helping hand, a simpler and less materialistic lifestyle (but also one of those scarce spaces in over-crowded parkng lots of course). 

Today’s holiday rush often turns ‘the Christmas spirit’ into a mash-up of Maalox moments and empty encounters. So, this is a particularly right time for us to light a candle, symbolically, and say a prayer for everyone involved, in hope that the pre-Christmas hubbub will lead, in the end, to the Right Person and the Right Place.

Advent: When It’s Come and Gone

When December 25 arrives, then the 26th, what will you recall about Advent 2010? By Christmas dawn, for century after century, Church members had practiced the value of patience and prayerfulness.  They had accepted uncertainty – while trying daily to do God’s will. They had made self-sacrifice a December habit to create a bigger open space for the Nativity in their hearts.

When Advent has come and gone this year, what will your story be?

Is Sisyphus Happy Now?

It's been a while. So, I am back. I guess that near-miss with the little red truck rocked my world a little more than I thought. And it hasn't helped much either that my sullen little Muse has been lurking, wordlessly, in a far corner. They make a quite a pair of aces over there, Dark-Side Butch and the Sullen Muse.

-- (Geez, I think I just came up unintentionally with a name for the next Smashing Pumpkins cd.)

I found myself posting on Facebook briefly yesterday about Sisyphus again. I keep going back to him these days. Likely, that Facebook chirp happened because I was listening once more to the totally sick but sweet Pink Floyd song "Hey You" -- while mired in another epic traffic-jam on the west-side of Hooterville midday, I would add. The song had grabbed me, as usual, by the throat and by the soul, and simply would not let go.

"Hey You?" A sisyphean meditation, if ever one existed, in pop culture. The life sentence 2 which the promising but sin-streaked and mythical royal, named Sisyphus, was condemned is and was, of course, massively absurd. Leave it to a master philosopher like Albert Camus -- in writing compellingly about S's dilemma about a century ago-- to throw new light and new heat on a dark and stormy human situation. Life is like a no-parole sentence. Hard time on a hard rock. Word. Sink or swim, chief. Hold up. Endure. There's a truckload or more of serious nonsense -- the inexplicable, the meaningless, the mystery -- coming your way. He (Camus) then  claimed stuffily but brilliantly (I suppose with a tiny absurdist smile creasing his weathered, European face) that we must accept -- in the end -- that the human struggle itself to endure, literally the myth of Sisyphus, must be enough to fill any person's soul. Now, the trick: believe that poor Sisyphus, though held tight in absurdity's grasp (for eternity), must be nevertheless be happy.

There is nothng more one can say, or hope in.

I then made an quick note, on Facebook, to no one in particular: Don't forget to chuckle over that magical Frenchman's insight.

So, why must we imagine, believe, that Sisyphus, the original Rock Star, must be happy? Well, if he cannot be so, then we will never taste happpiness either. There is nothing more. That says it all. It's a big leaky boat that we're all in, and the seas are foaming with waves. Hold on. Smile when you can. Grab a piece of the rock, as some insurance commercials say.

HEY YOU  -- by Roger Waters

Hey you, out there in the cold
Getting lonely, getting old
Can you feel me?
Hey you, standing in the aisles
With itchy feet and fading smiles
Can you feel me?
Hey you, dont help them to bury the light
Don't give in without a fight.

Hey you, out there on your own
Sitting naked by the phone
Would you touch me?
Hey you, with your ear against the wall
Waiting for someone to call out
Would you touch me?
Hey you, would you help me to carry the stone?
Open your heart, I'm coming home.

But it was only fantasy.
The wall was too high,
As you can see.
No matter how he tried,
He could not break free.
And the worms ate into his brain.

Hey you, out there on the road
always doing what you're told,
Can you help me?
Hey you, out there beyond the wall,
Breaking bottles in the hall,
Can you help me?
Hey you, don't tell me there's no hope at all
Together we stand, divided we fall.