va te faire foutre Robert Anton Wilson

I was pouring over books that claimed to hold secrets. Later, these secrets would lose their lustre. Sarah's brother David watched me trying to perform the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram by candlelight with a butterknife on a night where the moon loomed heavily in the sky through the window. I could feel the electric in the ether. It was like static insanity. He looked at me, smiled, and said, "Be careful. Some people make the mistake of trying to make too many things fit together." I didn't understand, so I asked him, "What do you mean?" He said, "Not everything goes together. If you try to make sense of it all you'll be wasting your time at best and you may lose your mind at worst." Fuck him, I thought. I could make sense of it.

The Order of the Golden Dawn wasn't for me. That much I knew. Still, there was something strange. Even in the Christian orders my mother had brought me through they were chanting in strange tongues and casting demons. I don't mean they were speaking Latin, I mean they were going full-on glossolalia as men and women. They were having visions and they had gifts of the spirit. The Golden Dawn was just a book by Israel Regardie with different stuff in it than the book the Fellowship slung which was variations of canons, Maccabees and Enoch. In fact, the Sons of the Priests of the Christian Fellowship later initiated an Enoch Collective for harps, psalteries, and cymbals.

The Occult. Hidden knowledge was purportedly embedded in architecture, paintings, books, cards, tea leaves, and sins of divinare. There was a store that sold quartz crystals in the University town of Newark to the mystically inclined. Mario advised me that they may be doing something but it wasn't worth paying for. I didn't have any money. Still, you didn't need money for visions and derivations. Nor did you for divinations, but that I was told was wrong. If we could, as men, see what was hidden from us we were looking where we shouldn't. It was a fool's errand to consult an oracle, or to divine through mancy, and an offense to god.

Why then, did these things exist in broad daylight? I had read that women had been murdered because of Ergot on the rye and seen the Wizard of Oz. It was obvious that witchery was wrong. When we drove past a very lushly gardened house with iron gates wound with ivy, the Fellowship's Saul told me that a coven lived there and owned that house. How he knew this I do not know, but he did and let me in on the secret. "Why don't the police do anything then!?" I panicked? "Because witchcraft isn't illegal, the police don't care." I was thoroughly confused.

The world was on end, at it's end, and ending any day now. Like waiting for a bus or a train, I could not predict when, but it was going to come. No one would know when, they told me, because god would not say, but there would come a day that the world would end. "Probably in your lifetime," they told me.

When the worlds of genesis and youth became corrupt with vice and venom I left my small family for the world. The first place I went to was the Preacher's Son. Joshua scratched his head and listened to me tell my young story. Ang, his roommate, told me, "You are good. You will be fine." It was a strange sort of love she sent me and felt like a blessing. Joshua nursed his beer and mumbled about a guitar. He did do me right though, with all of his resources. So then I went feral. I was a young 14 and trying to find my role in the world.

They let me live with them, the college. I became a child of the University. I lived in girls' dorms, guy's drunken flop houses; I lived in houses on sofas as the houses changed tenants, like I was some feature of the edifice. Along the way I met a lot of young people with a lot of ideas. A girl named Sarah was very nice to me and I found myself flattered by affection. I lived with her in a room for a year. Someone compared me to Mowgli from Kipling's Jungle Book. I liked that.

I stole Marny's ritalin and gave myself a good dose of post traumatic stress disorder. Ending up in the University library I began behaving like a criminal trying to steal information. From shelfrow to shelfrow I slipped, searching for that answer that I would pilfer. What the hell was WRONG with me?!? It was in here somewhere, and by god I would find it. The Christians who told me that divination was a sin also claimed my grandmother. She would tell other Christians about how wonderful it was when she just opened the bible and the page fell to something for her especially. That, I felt, was bibliomancy! Well, then, call me a Bibliotecamancer and let me know.

I was totally fucked in the head. I sat there by candle trying to resonate Raphael, Gabriel, Michael, and Auriel. I didn't have a steel dagger. I had a butterknife. The butterknife became my go-to phurba. After a sojourn to Louisiana buoyed by the Fellowship and one sister of which who had the most lovely eyes and was so beautiful, an Armenian girl, I made an attempt to negotiate a return to domestic living with my mother and sister. I was promptly deceived and placed in a psych ward for youths. On my first visit to the cafeteria I slid a butterknife up my sleeve and then stowed it in my room.

Being so young to have life be so full of amazement with everything and to believe in magical things as I did I was a basketcase for real. For reasons of proper plot coursing, I told the kid in the next room over I would like to borrow his watch so that I could time the 15 min observation period checks from the nurses and techs. He did, but made me promise I would give it back. In fact, I left it on his windowsill on my way out.

Once the door opened and closed I thought I had 15 minutes. In reality, that was a presumption based on the notion that psych ward protocol would be followed precisely. Surely it wasn't. I listened to my roommate's breathing and he snored away on his psych meds. I slid the butterknife under the lock and popped the window open.

To this day I believe that god made that window lock for me. I can't describe it easily in words, but it was basically like they used metal screws and plates to bolt against the lever which would open it and lock that lever down. Even when the window did open when I broke the weak cast alloy plates to free the window, it only opened like 8 inches at max. There was a second catch for the window so that if it weren't locked it would only serve as a vent, not a port.

The nickname I adopted was "Itsy." Many people liked to make fun of it, and several very stupid and uninformed people asked if it were an allusion to my penis size. They thought that shit was clever. I was just small. I didn't want to be big, I didn't want to be seen. I wanted to be infinitesimal. My prayers were that god take back this whole world, that god would please just undo it. Infinitesimal indeed. "Infi" didn't have the same catch though. I slid through the slim opening and was outside in the cold.

It was frozen, the ground and there was old snow and ice. The air was crisp though, and I felt that electricity, the ether was charged. I placed my neighbor's watch on the outside of his windowsill, figuring that he could either ask one of the staff to retrieve it for him or not, but his puzzle wasn't my problem. I figured out how to get out, he could figure out how to get his watch back inside. The sky was cloudy and there was a purple amber light reflected in the low drawn clouds. HAHAA! I can win. Do not trick me. My mother and her lover had betrayed me and I was no longer her child, nor anyone else. If I could not trust her words then whose words then could I trust? I was a man of my own, father and all, and by no means fit for it.

That night I raced across their hospital grounds and across the street. I ran with such freedom and such natural levity, like a wild animal straight into the woods, knowing only that my instincts would guide me. I bounced over thickets and through thorns, but my freedom made me drunk from any fear or pain. As fast as a deer I flew through the woods until *splash* I was waist high in icy cold water. This was not a good sign, and I had become very sensitive, constantly seeking the omens, growing into my visions, becoming a seer, a ראה. Now I was a very wet young man on a night where ice didn't melt. It was clearly a profound trial.

I found train tracks and the moon lit them blue for me. They would lead north and south. There were people I knew to the south, in Newark that would help me to get dry and sleep in my victory over the tyranny of lies. I suppose I had a 50/50 chance of choosing the right direction, and no landmarks along a strip of rail through the woods. Still, having seen the sun in the psych hospital rise and set once calibrated me and I felt like I knew which way to go so I pressed on. The faster I moved the warmer I was. This was rhythmic and meditative and I sang songs in my head for divinity good and great.

When I encountered the road I was unsure. The brownies -- the county police -- or the bluey staties would surely take interest in such a small man walking down highways in the middle of the night. That would not do. I resolved to walk casually, subduing any fear and repelling the attention of those who would cage me. It was a ritual in its own right. Hitchhiking would attract no more or less attention, though I would be careful not to indicate with my thumb that I was adrift on the seas of suburban roadways until I knew that the headlights and car shape were not similar to patrol cars.

For as long as I can remember, I've hated police. They took away my dad, they came and lied to and were lied to by my grandmother, and my parents used them as armies against each other in some bizarre war that was their own type of love. I still hate police even though I have witnessed them do me a good turn or two, if you consider deciding not to further fuck with someone than you already have a good turn. That they enforce laws which may or may not be Right in the eyes and scales of mens hearts and Divine Omniscience, that they enforce laws which they may not believe are Right leaves me to conclude that they have betrayed their own sense of humility and love, that they have become tyrants faute de mieux. What's worse, they can choose as fallible men to enforce or ignore laws as they see fit. Either way, they're betraying something. Without them, though, I would have different contentions with someone else as an oppressor, and I am no more than them so I hate them with love and tolerance.

Late in the night, a woman pulled over. She was young to be a mother, but she spoke to me maternally. That night she drove me the remainder of the 14 miles between Meadowwood Hospital and Newark. I didn't tell her more than I needed to and she was either tender enough or tired enough not to probe. Maybe she didn't care. She dropped me off in Newark and I had arrived at my friends' friends house. Marco looked at me through confused and grumpy eyes, ready to close the door in my face but I pleaded and he pointed at the sofa. I went to sleep the victor. When I woke up, I had nothing but myself and was unwelcome at their apartment.

As time went by, I made my way and got by with a little help from a lot of friends. As mentioned, I stole Marny's ritalin --which was a horrible thing to do-- and became horribly tortured after I ingested it. I couldn't sleep and my mind raced and raved lunacy. So I stalked my quarry of information, my philosopher's stone deep in the University library. What -was- wrong with me? I could not account for my actions or antics. My thievery and lies were stalking me as I sought their own master, the origin of their motives. I was losing my innocence and was not letting it go without a fight.

I read about the Adamites, or the Brethren of the Free Spirits. Hieronymous Bosch, a mysterious man with many names in many places was charged with being a member, a ritualist as an Adamite. His paintings were geometrically profound, I could see through diagrams in books of his paintings what he was saying, the painted images and symbols or at least some of them. The thing is that the Adamites were trying to achieve lost innocence, a prelapsarian state through natural nudity and feral fucking. Unfortunately, though it is one of the better ideas for redemption that I've come across, I don't think it works that way.

After paranoia runs its course, the sufferer either encounters the threat or doesn't and in the process of fighting or fleeing it engages in some criminal or socially perverse antics that may make sense to the sufferer in defense of the Invisible Bureau of Investigation or whomever threatens him or doesn't and finds himself uncomfortable and sad, humiliated, and --quite literally-- emotionally gutted. So I found myself in the medical periodical section hiding from noone and searching for what was wrong with me. Flipping through some journal of Psychiatry inconspicuously I arrived at some article about sociopathy. The word sociopath scared me. I looked it with the nearest Psych reference I could find and read the most horrible things I could think to say about a person. It was all about me! Later I would be told that I am just self-centered and narcissistic, but in that library and on that day my soul was shattering. I was a MONSTER!

I had an answer what was wrong with me but I didn't feel any better. The ritalin hadn't worn off. Lost in a labyrinth of self, like discovering that I bleed if wounded, that I defecate if I eat, that my teeth are dirty dirty dirty and my tongue speaks nothing but hate and I, myself, my whole being, my soul is ugly and filthy and dirty. Do I kill it? I can't, can I? Sitting on the old stone wall of the post office, and staring down at the pavement I have never felt so dead.

Sid slid by and mocked me thoroughly. So quickly and so defensively I mentioned god, and he asked me questions like where did god come from. I spent time seeking the answer in my head. He laughed heartily at my confusion, my pain. Where did space come from? What was space in? The fallen human condition that Bill sprake, my stepfather, about which had roared laughing at me rang again and woke me from the comfort and trust of youth. This time it was in my own heart and there was no escape and no mother to protect me. Sid's perfect smile was joyously unrestrained, and he prodded further.

What is that forbidden knowledge, that light that some "serpent" gave through woman? Even today as a man past thirty I swat away creeping notions that Mephisto himself did visit me that day in young Sid. He taunted me in ways I can not imitate nor describe the smooth and almost gentle evil and brutality with which he did do. In the end, I was only completely certain that I was a monster and doubted that I could be saved from life itself, the great looming Heavens and Hells their own enormous problems on top of it all!

There were unforgivable sins, and perhaps in my flippant antics I had made an errant but blasphemous transgression and was no longer in the auspice of g-d. I was properly and thoroughly fucked.

He left me there and I began in my broken posture to become a stone chimera on the wall surrounding the United States Post Office Newark Delaware 19711-7307.

Mario stopped as he was passing me and I saw his shoes slowly turn to me. I followed them up his body to his head. He looked down at me with his own pout, like he and Sid had been in collaboration to break and mend me, and he was coming along to play "Good Cop". In reality this was all theatrics of my own twisted and drug addled psyche, drawing on the experience and pattern I have felt and seen. Mario was a clinical psychologist and on that day he was a good Samaritan. He asked me if I was OK.

"I'm a monster. I'm a sociopath and I don't deserve to live. I was in the library and..." Mario cut me off from my rant. He asked, "When was the last time you slept?" I had to think about it to answer him. "A couple of days maybe?" He told me in a very weary voice that I was not a monster, sociopath, and unfit to live and that the mere fact that I was so concerned about it eliminated me from that sort of unclinical categoric bullshit. "Get some sleep. I'm serious. Get up from that wall and go get some sleep." I knew a lot. This much I was sure. Sleep would not cure this malady. This was life. For every time you fell asleep you awoke to more of it, more of life, yourself, and your mind. I did find a quiet place on International's White Clay Creek Indian Reserve and I fell asleep. When I woke up I felt better and Mario made a little more sense. I wanted to exact revenge on Sid.

Later Mario took me to a meeting. It was in the Unitarian church. The meeting was for UFOlogists and those concerned with local extraterrestrial affairs. Reynold's had a wrap, a summary of the local sightings and events of interest. Later there was a speaker who did have, he claimed in front of a room of dozens of people, first hand experience with an alien. This man was Riley Martin. The alien he knew and even *represented* was named Tan. He was telling us about the Mothership that would come and collect a set of persons from Earth before the Earth fell apart somehow, and only those who had a "ticket" sort of paper would be collected. These tickets were on 8.5x11 paper, which is convenient for filing in the same cabinet as other papers.

One woman asked, "I have 11 cats. I don't want to go anywhere without my cats. Can I bring my cats?" Another explained, "I don't like being all cooped up. I need to walk around, stretch my legs and breathe fresh air. Is the mothership big enough to walk around on?" Riley satisfied their concerns and allayed their fears. Immediate family would be counted in the number and all would be well. Mario looked at me and said, "Any time you feel like you're crazy, like there is something wrong with you, remember this." I love Mario Pazzaglini for being that good to another soul, to my soul. Tickets were twenty dollars and could be purchased in the back of the room after the session.

As Mario and I approached the ticket table, Riley informed us that our tickets would be twenty dollars each. I just looked at Mario and said, "I don't have any money." I didn't. I never did. I don't now. Riley Martin looked at me with an intensity. He said, "You have a MAGNIFICENT spirit! MAGNIFICENT!" Mario concurred. I walked out with a ticket to the mothership on the house. I have since lost that ticket and will have to be content to be a really MAGNIFICENT spirit without any guarantee to be aboard that great vessel of salvation, the Mothership.

Sitting there with a butterknife and a candle, surrounded by lithe and perfect girls and acting like I do, they regarded me as insane I suppose. Only David reconciled my behavior with his older authority against their already fickle social calls. I really was trying to perform the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. It was the beginning of the book. At least I could sort of understand this one. The visions they had in that Fellowship sometimes devolved into casting judgement cloaked in prophecy on other souls and became a comedy to me. I spoke in tongues because surely -I- had the Gift of the Spirit and not just the one, either. Visions, apparitions, smoke and mirrors. I had them all.

One day in the hot hot summer of I don't know when, Yaysung's cousin brought me along to work a day for pay. I was to be a carnie in Penn's Grove, NJ. He told me that Bruce Willis might even show up. It sounded good, especially if I were to be paid. When we got to the lot and set up from our truck, Yaysung's cousin and his own friend gave me the short end of the stick. I had to lie to every paying customer. It felt so fucking bizarre, the whole thing. The idea was a baseball pitch radar. The problem was that I wanted the kids to feel super so I lied too big. The first little kid and his dad came up and paid. I pointed the Radar Gun that was completely not a Radar Gun but a stupid piece of plastic across the trajectory of the pitch.

"The Radar Gun gave the kid 37mph. Not bad for a first pitch!", I barked. I was a natural. I started commenting real loud like it was a baseball game and the television is turned up so loud that your deaf-ass great grandfather can hear it in case he can't see it. "The kid's setting up... He's got his signal...Looks like a fastball!!! WOW!!! THE RADAR GUN CLOCKED THE KID AT 88MPH! HE'S A KILLER!" You see, I thought I was being conservative since the Rocket Roger Clemens back when he came up with the BoSox was cracking 100. The problem was that the father knew I was full of shit and the Radar Gun wasn't plugged into anything.

He demanded to see the result. Suddenly the gun "went dark". It does happen sometimes, you know. "Give me back my money." he was fucking serious. The father started looking around for an authority greater than myself to settle this with. There were two local cops leaning on their patrol car just twenty yards off. My boss, the kooky cunt that he was, raced the father to the police and explained, "The Radar Gun must have gone on the fritz. Do you think we can use your radar officer?" The police consulted each other and then gave us a negative. My job was over after my first client as a carnie. They paid me ten bucks for the day. I was pissed.

My mother looked down at me and god knows what she thought of my ululations and palatial clicks. I was all about beat boxing the Wholy Spirit. It was a parade of greatness every Sunday. When it got quiet and the lights were turned off the prophecies came out. I was never allowed to give mine. I did dig though, deep in my psyche and heart for the truth for all of us. It just wasn't there I suppose. I was, after all, a rather nihilistic youth in some ways but I still saw god presiding over all the nothingness. If they would have let me, I'd have given them the ripdown on the mic when it was praise and glossolalia. God would have really liked that.

I'm sitting at a table with a projection of cardinal posse of archangels around me and teenage girls confounded and an older brother who somehow understands my intent and wants to help me. At least I stole the copy of Regardie's Golden Dawn, and the literary goliath that is Border's Books caught the cost. David was telling me something important when he said that you can't make everything fit together. I don't think his statement as I represent it is true, but what he was telling me was not to go insane. I didn't listen. East is the direction of the dawn, indeed. Later I just learned to throw salt at the corners, and yes I am insane.

Poor Little Prince

I Nearly Died on Kellett Road

When the light went off, so did the heat. The cold was an oppressive one, sneaking through the scant walls and the window, under the doors like some black spirit of death. I had given up trying to pay for it and just picked the lock for the little cash box that collected the 50p coins I never had. I just took the coin and kept putting it through the slot. That death would have to come back later or take it up in collections.

Morrissey felt so much more real than I wanted him to. Now he made the only light amusement I could find in my current scenario. Somehow, though, I had an amazing girl who wanted to fight through it with me. The cold wouldn't kill me for now, and even though I had negligible money and tobacco I felt like I needed to get out and try to make my stake in London, and for that matter the world. The empty conversations I had with people in shops and cafes beat me down. The calculus was that I didn't have a social security number I could use.

Life had grinded me down aready and I wasn't 25. Of course, I had some irreverence for the fears that people who cared enough to tell me I should have, but that only went so far. I can't claim that I had much in the way of strength or virtue, but Georgia was a soul of force to be reckoned with. Soon enough I got myself into HMP Brixton on Jebb Ave. You can see the building I lived in if you watch some old Clash videos of "Guns of Brixton". That didn't matter to Georgia. The landlord accosted her about my electric thievery. I mean, we were cold and poor, and the box was unlocked and there was no point in trying to argue anything other than being cold and poor. Georgia also had to deal with the ugly fact that I was in HMP Brixton for an undetermined length of time, with the great likelihood that I would be deported afterwards.

Before I ended up on Jebb Ave., and after I, without anything like a good reason, effectively gave up trying to find a way to work and earn a living, with my unemployment due to expire any day, I spent too much time with the Portuguese, English, and other international tramps & junkies at the Brixton tube station. Around Electric Avenue the purveyors of small packages wrapped in plastic wrap set up shop. Sometimes they were Jamaican but always they were unfriendly and wary. They spat the little pellets out and insisted that you put the pellets in your mouth. I always viewed this as optional as I turned around and walked away.

Georgia spent her time and effort searching down a job. She did find one, though from what I recall it would have been enough only if I had a job that paid as well. I didn't have much that was redeeming. I hated a lot. I hated the world and I hated those who fit well into it. Georgia was amazing, and she amazed me, but I was both too broken to overcome the challenges of getting work without a visa and too loathesome to go out and carry on the effort. Georgia deserves much more. When I was in the police station she found me by trial and error, since I hadn't phoned her because I am exactly what she calls me, and came to see me and leave me a note that read, "TWAT" in very angrily scratched letters.

So I was. When I tried to kill my time one day in a way that would make me feel good, if guilty, I came close to killing myself instead of a day's time. I had something like twenty pounds, which should have been spent on food, electric for heat, something to let Georgia know that she meant something to me and this world, or anything other than what I did spend it on. That's my way though, fuck myself but fuck everyone else at the same time so there's no sympathy to be fucking endured. I present that as if I planned it. Truthfully I can barely plan the opening of a pack of gum. I just am an asshole and I fuck myself and probably you in the process as well.

After I returned home I unwrapped my purchase and prepared to ingest it. I rolled a cigarette with golden Virginia tobacco and it tasted that much more savory with the worldly relief to come just presently. In NYC I would have loved a coffee, but this was not NYC. As I felt the morphine ride through my veins I realized that this dose was stronger than it should be. I fell to my knees. I tried fighting it, I gave all of my dissolving resolve and all to remain standing, but once you're on your way out, it's not easy to bring your self back in.

When you're unconscious, you don't have much of an idea of time. As you come to, you may notice that the light of day has changed if you've been gone a while., the television may be airing a different show than what you were watching. I never look at my watch so much for such an event, but I did know that I could expect Georgia back at a certain time and would like to have the small bedsit cleaned up and myself not a mumbling mess when she returned from the work she had. Still, I don't know how long it had been, but I came to on my knees. My body was in order, nothing was asleep, and no physical injuries presented themselves to me.

I had a fear though. My heart pounded. How many times would it have to happen before I realized that I would die that way if I kept it up? The peace I once knew, the relief it once gave me was gone. My horrible life was no better for it, and I had 20 pounds less. I had lost plenty already, and still I was going at it. Something was wrong with me. Georgia had her problems, but I told her that my only wish was to show her that life was beautiful, that it had its trials and terrors, but along with them it had flips and tremendously perfect twists. I was failing at this.

I collected myself from the floor, cleaned the table off and threw away any and all reminders of the horror that I had just ritually perpetrated. In many ways, it would have been a relief if my soul had left me on Kellett Rd. In no way could I let Georgia find me dead though. That poor girl had seen enough. I didn't die, and though the sickness carried on for several years, and Georgia and others suffered enormously for it, innocently in most ways, along with myself, I kept on; I've suffered pain that made death a better option than living. By the time Georgia got home I believe I had pulled myself together physically but could not function but for to love and be lonely. I loved Georgia and I was lonely.

Peripeteia for the Peripatetic

The vomit never came out, but made itself a concern. Paul couldn't contend with much, he was dripping with sweat and breathing through his nose like some bastard might tell you when everything is going to hell as if it matters how you breathe. He had chosen everything he was wearing from the dryer. Already it felt old and filmy. His imagination tortured him with images of a beach and breeze, sun and sea. White cotton clouds and blue painted doors reminded him of better days, days he lived which seemed like a dream at present.

This was the price. If only it could be exacted at once. No, it would be a couple of weeks of this, then he would wake up one morning and the panic would be gone, like an unwanted guest. He got up from the sofa flinging his hands free of themselves and then realized he had taken 3 showers in the past 24 hours and he was building a tolerance to them. They weren't helping. He laid back down. Paul looked at the stereo and realized he would never be OK with anything he put on. The window showed it was a quarter to four. The night had her twists and burdens, but somehow it was less brutal than the day.

His hair felt like it was falling out. A sure sign of mortality, he invited it.

It Really Doesn't Hurt that Bad

God, I Know I'm bad,

but People are So

Uptight.

They all have At Least

One reason Why they

are Right.

I try to Practice

Being Wrong daily;

you Might.

Those wiser Than me

Let me know I'm not

So bright.

Breaking

His friend dropped John off after a calm and mature party. Then he decided that he would need a little something for breakfast since he was starting work the following day. It would be amazing, he had come through and applied at three restaurants and received three job offers. He was getting good hands. Coffee and milk would be necessary. He needed something to ease the pain and weakness of the morning. There was a large water jug in the closet full of change that he saw. He grabbed some and headed out the door. The bus was late and it was past midnight. Already he was realizing that he wouldn't be able to do this well. The better idea would be to turn around and head home, wake up and live the next day the way that his ancestors did: cold and hard. It wouldn't be that bad though.

No, John kept on at his mission. When he arrived at the stop where he could catch the next bus towards a place that would sell anything at that hour he saw that across the street the bus was waiting. He headed across the street. Halfway across he realized that a car was going to hit him. Everything was happening very quickly, and all he really saw was headlights getting closer very quickly. He jumped, trying to clear the car. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to and his head smashed the windshield as he rolled over the car and landed on the ground behind it. He could feel the consciousness slipping away from him, like he was sinking under water. He held his arm up in the air trying to fight through it. He lost.

When he woke up he had no idea where he was. Quickly enough, he realized that he was in a hospital. He felt like he had been hit in the head by a car. His voice worked, though the pain seared when he used it and opening his eyes bruised his brain. "Help!" he shouted. He repeated his plea a few seconds later. The man in the bed next to him got the nurses' attention. The nurse asked him the questions like, "What day of the week is it? Who is president? What's your name?" and so on. He asked for morphine.

Yaysung reminded him later when he'd recovered his faculties more that he could be dead, could be paralyzed, could be much worse off. Yaysung was always wise in ways. He was very much right about this. When they were younger they had experiences that tried both of their constitutions. On one occasion, a sheet of LSD was around. A kid named Bob had it. His parents were old and as their son he always seemed sort of geriatrically quiet. A playboy magazine was sitting in his little room. There were school books, a desk, a computer, and a bed. Two lawn chairs served as furniture.

Bob went off the deep end somehow. He took as much as Yaysung and John, but something different happened. He reverted to a very primitive state, like a monkey. To him in his state, it was ok to fiendishly masturbate there in the room pleading, "GOD please give me a woman!" I totally understand the boy's plight. I can't deny him that. In fact, I don't even judge him. When you lose your mind, you lose your mind. Just pray it finds its way home.

Bob declared that he was going to die. He knew suddenly that he was dying. "I'm dying, and I'm on acid, and my mother doesn't know!" he was having an emergency. I replied, calmly and with a small stifled laugh, "You're not going to die. Well, we're all going to die, but not right now. I mean to say you're not dying. My mother doesn't know I'm on acid either and I'm not going to tell her. She doesn't want to know." Bob kept trying for the phone. I ended up ripping the phone out of the wall so that it couldn't be used any more.

Yaysung was losing patience with him. He was flicking a knife open and had a pretty frightening look in his eye. I asked him for the knife, which I confiscated, and I demanded to know where the acid was from Bob so that I could confiscate that. With telephone, knife, and acid all secured away, we could hopefully find something better than the emergent panic that had so far been the trip. Musically, we would not meet. Yaysung had the best taste and appreciation for music of the three of us, but Bob's collection and taste would bring me to suicidal / homicidal states.

Somehow the time went by. I tried to keep my mind for the sake of us all, and Yaysung held fast as well. In fact, if it weren't for him I would have conceded my own sanity and I can't imagine where that would have led. As the sun came up, Yaysung communicated to me that we should leave Rob to himself and go somewhere more comfortable and quiet. The escape was not easy, because Rob sensed we were abandoning him and jumped into the back of a pickup truck with broken glass in the bed. It was ugly. The neighbors were getting ready to go to work and the world was waking up. The last we saw of Bob was him running off towards the sunrise across an icy baseball field.

Then Yaysung and I went out to a quiet street we knew and stood in the woods for a few minutes. The woods felt safer. I think I knew then that I could trust Yaysung with anything. I saw his character and knew he was a good man. Even as a young man, and making his mistakes, he was always generous and kind to me. He's the best example of a friend I've ever known. And after I was knocked out by a car he was again good to me. It pissed me off, that what he said was right, but it was true. Life isn't fair. That's a lesson that I never learned to like. Yaysung, though, showed me again to look at the positive.

When John walked into the apartment he was living in, he nearly broke down in tears. His vision was bad but he could still see the flecks of dirt and everything all over. The windowsill was never painted. There were the papers all over the floor. There were the bags of letters and documents for his sister. There was the laundry, the remnants of a wardrobe, once kept organized and ironed, all helter skelter. His lover had her possessions mixed in and at once the whole scene leapt up and stole his breath away. He flailed his arms about, and tried to calm himself. How do people -live-?

He mocked everything and everything mocked him. The only noble thing that he thought he could do was to take Andre the french bulldog out to go to the bathroom. Andre was love. Sure he could be obstinate and he pained his mother with his persistent infections and his allergies to everything, his neurotic paw chewing and general human condition. Still, he loved you and you could see in his eyes an innocence that whoever fluffed fluffed and that was that.

John was down on himself. He felt bad for the driver, who never set out to hit him that night. He felt anger at being judged unfairly, and he felt embarrassed when judged fairly. A young Russian med student asked if John did, "think you are a bad person?" "I don't know about bad people," he answered. It felt like some sort of play, will all the vivacity of Waiting for Godot. When he turned 30, his friends asked him what he had learned. It took him a while and finally all he could say is, "I don't know." That was maybe one of the hardest things he'd had to learn.

Yaysung was a good man. John just fell short. Life had shown John though that it's full of twists and flips, irony and comedy along with all the void and pain. You get up and you keep trying. That's all John could do. He did believe that all things worked together for good for him, and there was a reason why. Where he went wrong wasn't so important as where he needed to go. His favorite answer when unsure of what he should do with himself was, "the next right thing" as Joe once told him.

He could die a sad death having missed a beautiful life or he could take what he had and get on with it. Words are that much. Telephone calls seem to be the hardest thing. Yet, once they are made the wheels turn and progress is sometimes made. John was like a child. He was like a big, hairy, uncute, smelly, asshole of a child. Still he was a child of god and like the ugliest creature in the sea, or the most loathsome form of insect he had his part to play. Instead of crying when he walked in and being in the apartment set off a blast of anxiety, he sat down and made the phone calls he had to make.

Three times he called the same institution and trying two different numbers he was left on hold for as long as half an hour. It was sad. How do people live? How should a man live? Soldiers are men made to kill. How do those veterans return home and live among fellows at ease? John did pray for them. Murderers are killers facing death. John did pray for them too. Life makes more life and men are the rememberers, the animals that keep themselves. John's mother told him when he was young that there were much worse places to be born in. Boxer John had a great saying, "You get the same thing everyone gets; a life to live." The telephone. John was not in love with the modern world.

The phony antics, the antics that were genuine, golden, and unscripted all confused and mâchéd into some file on some docket is the sum of a man's name. John Crevecoeur was a tally of transgressions and philanthropisms. What is seen and known is not the man, but a small window dusty and imperfect that he is judged through. If man is animal then these judgements make sense. If man can reason that reparation can be negotiated and made then justice is served when a trespass is made. If a good deed, a charity is made and there is no mark made of it, then it counts as beautiful and true. They are not weighed in the courts of men.

In times of heartache he remembered that the experience was a magic itself, that there were a universe and that this universe was in something, that there was space for space and this helped frame the pain. Mostly when he tried to talk to people about it they told him to shut up and that it wasn't important. What was important was the money he owed them, the lies he was caught in, and that which he wronged. Surely so. When John was in a jail cell for a crime he did commit, though his intent was not criminal and the circumstance so desperate and insane that he couldn't even explain it to himself, he tried to find himself in the papers. Men find religion in prison.

John was free. Sure he had obligations and they got vagrancy laws too, you know. He was free.

Bob claimed to hate Henry James

"It's a game, life." Andrew didn't like this. He sort of snapped a question, "What do you mean that life is a game?" Bob just mumbled a partial list, "Rules, objectives, strategy, opposition, resources... but I'm not playing well. I'm not being very strategic." Head doctors and their crews ask some absurd questions. "Are you hallucinating? Are you hearing voices? Do you think you are a bad person?" He just wanted some freaking medicine, Bob. He didn't want to answer questions.

The internal dialogue sang and shouted, a pychotheatre on a stage with ideas and ceptions, victories, defeats and compromises all dancing it out. Andrea once suggested that quieting the "internal dialogue" was a good thing for feeling better, being alive and all that. So have others. Still, the board of directors met in his head every day. There were decisions to be made. Some of them could be important.

As if this weren't enough to contend with, Bob dragged his young corpse through the underworlds of medicine and the cultures of resentment, judgement, fear and sickness. He was a tourist, and Hades could not conscript him, but he felt like he was waiting in Casablanca. Truly he was waiting for a piece of paper to take to a chemist and to get a prescription for a drug that was meant mostly to prevent seizures. The whole pursuit of the piece of paper consumed at least two hours, conservatively.

A young student doctor asked him questions from a form. Even though the questions were not her own and he was feeling very sciencious about answering them, the only thing that interested him during this whittling away of his life and time was hunting down her ethnicity through her married name and muted accent. When he found it, he made some cordiality with her as a patient. She then let him phrase short answers for her paper of questions.

The doctor was less jovial than other times, but Bob still felt a gratitude that she addressed him with some familiar respect. Saving words put him at ease. Iterations and reiterations of the obvious were torturous. His hands were sweating and he felt a techtonic tide of anxiety and frustration welling up. When he had the paper and a sample of yet another drug, he made his way to the door, and with his hand on the doorknob the Doctor stopped him, "Hey, hold on I want to make you another appointment." So she did.

On his way home he was enjoying the company of the Committee in his psyche. It was calm and well paced, rhythmic and more at ease than usual. He decided that he wasn't really that smart after all. The day before he had been arguing with some anonymous coward on the Board about how one could be phenomenally smart and at the same time an impossible fool. Wisdom and intelligence are separate qualities. He was defending himself; who knows why? As he made it through the streets, he adjusted himself to fit into not being that smart at all.

A woman walked across the street in front of his car. An old man hobbled on his cane over 5 lanes of traffic with green lights. We all stopped and he just kept smiling and pecking away at the steps. Jaywalking as a hobby. While Bob waited, he remembered being younger than 7 and telling his father that he wanted to be a jaywalker. His dad did not like the idea. Bob couldn't remember the actual response, but came up with an appropriate one. That was one of the hard things about his memory. He didn't trust it.

Two years before, he was running across 5 lanes of traffic with a green light to catch a bus at a stop before it left. He then woke up in the hospital. His head hurt more than anything he could remember, and maybe he could remember less with the head injury. Jaywalking is a dangerous practice. Some lessons are learned the hard way. "Bought lessons," Jeff had told him when steeping in a regret one day. As he sat in a quiet apartment on Tuesday when he wished he were at work he thought about how much tea he drank when he lived in England.

He thought a lot. All those questions that crop up, or drop themselves like dirty boots onto one's psyche he hoped would be answered in an afterlife. Bob didn't want streets paved with gold, 42 virgins, perfect teeth or any of that. He wanted to know god's thoughts. That's all. He lived, and so did the other Jaywalkers. Philosophically, he could give himself to the uncertainty and bareness of proof of much and embrace sciencia as much it gave the opportunity to speak logical truths. You can imagine how tiresome that can become as well, and how little other people like it.

As he opened his door, he remembered a doctor he used to work for. They worked on systems for patient records. The notion that patients should be processed like data and the processing and data should be governed by standards and rules, that the laboriousness of a rigorous bureaucracy had its own beauty. The discipline there would give the patient at least a continuous thread to follow and road to forge. Determinations could be made, respected, drawn upon, and data would have their own specie.

It just doesn't work that way. By the time he was upstairs in the apartment, he considered the words he had used to describe a painting he had done. "Space Angel" was the phrase he had used. A smile crept on to his face as he thought about the aliens whom undoubtedly introduced the catalyst and blossom of the reflective consciousness and the very human protolanguages smashed with the tower of Babylon. True space angels, he decided, were those very aliens who maybe did it. These revelations were more fun than the doctors. "It's better to go a little bit crazy than a lot crazy," Mario reassured him through a golden capped grin and ancient eyes.

The back of his T-shirt that he wore to the doctor said, "Yes, I am a Rocket Scientist." He got it at White Sands Missile Range the year before. It was a good shirt and idea that others would challenge. Fuck them, really. This was the beautiful thing to be learned from the company of complete bastards: What other people think about you doesn't usually matter to you. The doctor student was Russian. He wasn't really a rocket scientist. His greatest achievements included the usage of an illy brand espresso can as a directional 802.11 radio antenna shield. It sounds impressive, but it's more putting a square peg into a square slot than anything.

So he wasn't so smart. At least he got laid. What did he have to do more than the ethically right thing? In the simplest living that was all he had to know. Since he wasn't that smart, he was given, consciously given to the simplest living. The getting laid part was more than enough trouble than he needed. He was better at throwing rocks at the sky than studying rockets, but he wasn't all that good at throwing rocks. Beautifully, he realized that throwing rocks at the sky was also dangerous. They might come back down, and if one wasn't careful it would be possible to get hit in the head.

So he had been hit in the head by a car while he was jaywalking. The doctors had looked at images where Bob's brain had gone dark. No dye, no blood, no oxygen, no life, no soul. It was just the rocks in Bob's head. He loved the pictures of it, though, and he hadn't used up all his brain, at least. There was some still in there, still ticking. The Board were still meeting and he was still looking at the dark spot. He would rather still be using it, but that happens if it does. Even if he tried the hardest he could to think with that part, think using that part, or use that area of the brain however it was used to the best of his ability, then he would have no guarantee for anything other than driving himself a bit more mad than he set out as.

When the doctor asked what the neurologist said, Bob rambled about a few things. Eventually, the doctor sort of waited and Bob resolved, "...I mean, who wouldn't want pictures of their brain?" The doctor was not amused. She gave a strong flat eye. Then she said, "They teach us in med school that if we learn that there is something different... then what?" Bob cut her off, "I know, I know." Bob probably didn't, but that's what he said. It ended the dialogue.

Yes, life is a game. It is lived, or played, as it is dealt. As a statement or perspective it seems childish, maybe, but it felt true. Why Andrew didn't like it was not Bob's problem. Bob had his own problems. To be judged as a patient was not worth the paper. He didn't like the medicians any more. They seemed really uptight as a whole. He was very prone to bouts of uptightness, and he was concerned about contagion. If he looked at what he had found and learned along the way, he would certainly see that it was less and less beneficial.

There was the game of resource to be played, and he would because otherwise he would regret not playing. Importantly though, he knew that he was playing not for himself but to solve riddles of guilt. He was just a dumb kid. How could they have a problem with it?