Tumbleweed

On a visit to my hometown, I perched myself in a Tim Horton's seat as I watched for people I might know. My hometown was, with an emphasis on 'was', filled to the brim with characters.

A few remained.

High priests of voodoo economics had rendered the town redundant. Like so many gutted towns, many had left. The town's character had changed. The old piss and vinegar spirit had been replaced with mind deadening opiates and tranquilizers. Those that stayed behind retreated into a haze of drugs, fat, sugar, and television.

As I sat, pretending to read and half pretending to drink coffee, a loud energetic bustle of strangers laughed their way through the entrance. They stood out, garish-like; like politicians. I recognized one of them from the news. It was Preston Manning, leader of the fledgling Reform Party. They were campaigning and drumming up support for their new brand of 'conservatism'.

A silhouette grabbed my attention and dragged it out of the coffee shop. It moved briskly with singular intent. It moved like a rooster along the side of the building as a group of chattering young women made way. The figure was wearing a long trench-coat and a wide brimmed hat. In no time it made its way to the bright entrance. I couldn't believe my eyes. It was the Gypsy.

The Gypsy; still alive and in full living colour, his Gallic face weathered and alive. I hadn't seen him in well over a decade.
The politicians caught my attention when they came in but the Gypsy brought me into a heightened state of awareness.

"Sam", he said as he entered. He walked straight to me. Without even sitting down or asking about my life or where I was living, he recruited me to a chore that would place me squarely between a rock and a hard place.

He was working on a project.

He wrote his phone number on a scrap of paper, place it in my hand and said, "call me tomorrow". Then he said, "I'm going to weed the garden". He turned abruptly, walked over to the now seated political party, and reached into his pocket. The politician smiled and put his hand out to shake the Gypsy's hand. The Gypsy pulled out a bullet, placed in the politicians hand and said "think about it".

He was gone back into the night as quickly as he came in.
The impact of what had just occurred hit me. The Spirit ambushed the abstract, flesh ambushed plastic, and the Gypsy ambushed the Reform Party.

The Gypsy was a nocturnal creature. For him, the divide between night people and day people was vast and any notion of bridging it was not only unfathomable, it wasn't desirable. He paid lip service to them but only in daylight. On his turf they played by his rules. They were clearly on the Gypsy's turf.

It wasn't the presentation of the bullet that saw them on the next flight. There was something in the eyes of the Gypsy that suggested they were in alien and unforgiving territory and that they were not welcome.

As they silently got up, put on their coats and left, I wondered why they thought they could plant southern seeds in a northern climate.

Not Enough Salt

"This sauce is fantastic", Harry said.

We continued to eat in silence and again he mentioned the sauce. "You need to give me the recipe".

"You'll need to contact the company", I said and got up, opened the garbage lid and pulled out the bottle the sauce came in. "President's Choice", I read.

"You got this from a jar?"

"I did".

Harry then explained to me that he started to perfect his spaghetti sauce many years ago; 'twenty' he guessed. He said that at first he would only buy a jar from the store and add a few spices that he liked. He then graduated to buying canned tomato sauce and various ingredients he would get from reading various recipes. Eventually, he started to buy tomatoes, specially ground meat, fresh vegetables, and the spices he would need to perfect it. He said that he used maybe a dozen different spices and herbs. Some would be more or less prominent depending on the company he was serving. He would eliminate some and add others. Eventually, the original spices were lost in favour of new ones. Meat and vegetable ingredients went through enormous transformations.

"This is my sole source of snobbery", he explained and said that this was his pride. This was the thing in life he aimed to perfect. This was his art. He talked about it frequently and served his dish replete with home baked garlic bread, fine wine, candle light, and home-made pasta. He said the process had taken years of experimenting and reading and all along, it was evolving to something better than it was before.

Harry stopped talking and appeared to be reflective as I continued to eat. Harold wasn't eating. He got up and retrieved the empty jar and scanned the fine print showing the ingredients. He sat down and spoke about the impact of what he was in the process of realizing. "Forget the embarrassment", he said. "That's the least of it. I have spent all these years perfecting the sauce and I got so caught up in it, I completely lost my way".

"I had no idea spaghetti sauce meant so much to you".

"This isn't about the sauce", he said. "It's about my own delusion". Harry seemed a bit perplexed. I wasn't getting the significant of what he was telling me. "This is about my own delusion", he repeated.

He then started to re-frame his fable. He said that what he started out with was probably better than store bought spaghetti sauce. He said he spent years perfecting it, getting various spice combinations 'just right' in combination with different kinds of meat and vegetables. He said that it is just now that he understands that he went into a world of his own. He said that he now needs to recollect the hints and advise that have been granted over the years about the sauce. He said "the only one that was honest was Fritz". He told a story where Fritz made a visit several years ago and said, "This tastes like shit" and refused to eat any more. He laughed and said that Fritz was a "bit of a screwball" and didn't take him seriously.

Harry then said that this is a revelation more important than his sauce. "Can't you see I was rendered totally ignorant by my own ego. I couldn't accept any other recipes. I couldn't be told or advised. Suggestions were made early on but people stopped saying anything. My identification with the sauce boxed me into a world of my own. By the time I was done it wasn't even spaghetti sauce. I was putting things in that sauce I now understand should not have gone in. Compared to my own, this President's Choice sauce seems a work of culinary art".

After a moment's silence he said, "this is way beyond the sauce. This is the most important revelation I've ever had. I was caught inside a drama I created all by myself. Noone else cared and that confused me. Now I know they shouldn't have cared; they couldn't have. It was just sauce."

"You're making a fool of yourself", I said. "Just stay quiet."

"What?"

"Your fable is your new spaghetti sauce."

Angel of the Morning

An angel appeared out of the blue. It manifested from the shapes and sounds of my daily life. When it's eyes shined time would tremble. They were magic and their moisture drew me inside. I felt drawn to join its ethreal groundlessness.

Was it a dream; a hallucination?

I dreamed I would be real. I dreamed I would be born into form. Where did this arise from I wondered? I couldn't look away from the spirit born in the morning mist. It was drawing me out of death and into life. It's colours magnetized. It's song pacified. It's form enriched.

Somebody spoke and it was destroyed.

Awake, I noticed there was nothing to grasp.

The dream left me empty and I realized the angel was real.

It showed me the rich mixture and flow of sadness, love, death, and birth. The dream - or better still, the angel, reminded me that emptiness and form are seamless.

It was a bodhisattva out of the blue.

The Mad Dog and The Englishwoman

I watched my neighbour with some interest. I noticed her life; something about her suggested she may be a few degrees away from ordinary. Her name was Valerie.

Married she was with a small child, and the bulge beneath her breasts held another. From time to time she'd have a minute to speak to me over the picket fence that marked the edge of her family's private world. She'd tell me the details of her confusing and hectic existence. While holding a part time job she attended part time college. She cared for her child with the rest of her time - and then there was Sally.

Sally was an utterly insane and fucked up mutt that she took in as a stray. It's straydom may have caused the madness or maybe the madness caused the straydom. In any case, mad she was; mad as a hatter. On top of this, the dog managed to get fertilized in solidarity with her assumed commander and was beginning to show.

I'd watch as Sally would roll around in the front yard after shitting on the grass. She'd roll around in her own shit smearing it through the grass and her own fur. Valerie would arrive home, put on tea, tend to her daughter, wrap up a zillion minor chores, and then deal with Sally. And in dealing with Sally, she would wrap her up in towels in an effort to avoid contamination and then carry her up the stairs to the bathtub. To make matters worse, the dog dispised water. Each time the affair was marked with sudden spats of resistance and multiple lunges for freedom and she would manage to escape and hide under a car, a step, or anything at all. Valerie would never give up and each time, she managed to defeat the defiant and angry mutant till all the shit was cleaned away.

One day she told me that Sally had been vomiting and loved rolling around in that as well. The dog had become sick and required medication that Valerie could not be close to. It could affect her own pregnancy. The weight of the dilemma was obvious in her eyes and speech. The medicine rarely stayed down before Sally would retch it up and playfully roll around in the spew that would come up with it.

On top of it all, those closest to her never stopped complaining about Sally; about the smell, the danger, or some new offence to the world of sane humans. She was unpredictable and as a result, struck fear into many passers-by and visitors.

I would catch Valerie, from time to time, alone with Sally; softly rubbing the dog's neck and back; softly telling the oblivious mutt about her day; her trials and tribulations. In some way, Valerie loved that dog as she could love no human. The dog was hopeless and in the most desperate and precarious state a being could be in. And it was mad; a complete and total outcast. She was completely dependent on Valerie. Who else would tolerate the daily rolling through shit and now, the even more odious addition of vomit in the mix? Every time Valerie arrived home, she would be greeted by the ever loving Sally, jumping up on Val with her coat awash in a stew from the depths of hell.

I watched one damp evening as an animal control van pulled up in the ally behind Valerie's back fence. Valerie carried her innocent pet to the fence and passed it over to the waiting arms of the animal control officer. Sally licked Val's face, completely unaware what's behind the salty taste.

From my perch, I could feel the edge of Valerie's unfathomable pain as she wept on her way back to the house. She turned around to see Sal one last time. The man had already put the dog in the back, and she stood on her grass and cried in the pouring rain. She had to sacrifice her child to save another. Valerie understood all the reasons for doing what she had to do. But for Valerie, a profound betrayal echoed against every corner of the universe. It stood outside the fine lines of reason. And she stood there with it, in the rain, in her back yard - alone.

And that was the reality of Valerie's life as I watched from the sidelines. Nobody could understand her pain because Sally was, after all, a dog.

Nobody cold see her extraordinary heart as it melted in the rain and aloneless, in the sadness and love. She turned and went back into her ordinary house and into her ordinary life.

Sleeping with Fritz

From time to time my friend Fritz would show up and demand that we go to sleep together. Being the completely dispassionate and sexless human being I knew him to be, I had no discomfort in obliging him.

One night I caught what he was up to. I caught him talking, whispering to me as I began to drift into sleep. He instructed me to focus on the bright spots that seemed to reside under my eye-lids. He said, "focus on the spot; stay with it, stay with it". As I lost my attention he would seem to know and say "go back to the spot and concentrate as if your life depends on it". As I did he would ask me about what I was seeing and then told me to use it as an enterance. To my surprise I found myself in a dream. I was drifting over small trees and he would urge me to bring myself down to the ground. As I did I would find that once I hit the ground I'd float again and begin my drift over the trees.

Fritz spent many nights teaching me to stay on the ground.

He was intent on teaching me about dreaming. He explained to me that dreaming is one of the most important things that I have at my disposal. He said that I should take the practice seriously. He said that I would have to use all my energy to maintain my lucidity. Fritz explained that most of the content; pretty much all of it, is "complete and utter horseshit". What is not horseshit, he explained, is the fact that I am dreaming and this context itself is the gateway to the discovery of other dream items that existed outside the realm of complete and utter horseshit.

Fritz trained me, over time, to find and seek out elements of the dream that had a grounding in reality. He said that these items are not items at all but energetic components of the dream. Like the awareness of dreaming, they are firmly grounded in Reality and not conceptual residue emanating from the greater reality of Reality itself.

"You are a lazy fuck", he said at one point as I was enjoying a dream. "You get caught up in your stupid fucking imagings of self importance and lose your focus on what I'm telling you to do".

The strange part was that at that point I realized that Fritz sounded exactly as he did in waking life; a sour and merciless prick. It occured to me that all the other times when he was instructing me in dreaming, he was a different person. He was patient and pleasant. He even showed a sense of humour at times. But not this time. "Never mind thinking about me you moron", he shouted. Stay with the chair, referring to an item in my dream that stood out on it's own. "Keep shifting your attention around the dream field to stabalize your mind", he demanded. My energy seemed to be waning. "Stay with me", he demanded. I focused on the various aspects of the dream and skirted to the chair every now and then. Then other aspects of the dream took on the same quality as the chair. The more nonsensical elements of the dream began to fade or rather, transmuted by themselves. They shifted from precarious obects to apparently real objects. Then they merged into each other in a brilliant field of confluence. Fritz disappeared and I was on my own now. An overwheming terror enveloped me and I was there alone; no Fritz, no me, and eventually, nothing, not even aloneness or even fear.

My recollection of anything after that point is not available, yet, I know, I experienced something inconceivable.

I slept for 12 hours and when I woke up I was felt sick and disoriented. I remained in in my flat for five days before I got back to anything close to a normal state of mind.

I felt angry and disillusioned. Fritz had led me to somewhere I should not have gone. I felt like he was a monster.

But then I knew, for better or worse, I would never be the same again. Whatever happened was irreversable. Fritz had managed to bring on something that I could never erase. But then I realized that it wasn't Fritz at all that did it, and neither was it me.

I was dreaming again.

Lucid Dreaming

I was washing my dish having eaten some beans.

My friend Fritz walked in. He asked me what I was doing. I said, "I'm practicing lucid dreaming".

Fritz turned around and walked out without saying another word.

Be My Guest

"They think I'm insane", she said to me out of the blue.

She was a teenager, one of them teenagers that chew gum with an attitude. She sat in front of me in a crowded cafe. I said nothing in return. She continued as if I were interested.

"They put me on this fucking medicine and I'm not fucking taking it".

I felt like asking her to take it but I said nothing. She looked directly at me and her nose flared as she continued.

"I know Becky's gone and nobody knows it. But I know it and her replecement knows it. We dropped acid and she got lost."

"Did anyone call the police", I asked with the most rational voice on I could muster.

"I saw it happen", she said. "I almost went too".

She explained that there are multitudes of parellal universes right in front of our noses and we are not aware of them. She said that sometimes we pass into one and when we do we steal the energy of the host, including all its memories. When that happens we can't remember where we came from and we are convinced we are the person whose memories we inherit. The host either flees to god knows where or its absorbed into the life and being of the alien. The alien itself thinks it is the host. The whole thing is almost seamless. Except a few things happen. You change abruptly in your personality and mannarisms. Everyone notices except yourself. They want to give you medication. You have a vague memory of nother world but you can't get to it. It is more of feeling of nostalgia for something that has been disconnected but you don't know what.

"How do you know you got away. You might be the alien now", I offered.

"You know, this isn't a coindidence", she snapped.

"It is a grand coincidence", I said. "Make yourself at home".

The teenager smirked a smirk and left some change on the table and walked out.

Harry's Demons

"Hi Harry", I said as Harry Williams walked by. I was sitting on my front step doing nothing.

I noticed Harry's pace slow as he rubbed his chin and he turned around. I knew he'd come and talk to me. Harry was around the neighbourhood but I didn't really know him. He was rumoured to have an awful problem with cocaine.

"Sam, You gotta minute?"

"What's up Harry?"

He explained that he had tried for years to rid himself of various addictions and other problems. He said that he had an instinct that I could tell him something that might give him a little extra energy in this battle. He presented a dream of a future Harry that was clean and lived a good life with routine and a healthy diet - and no drugs or prostitutes.

"You're fighting demons", I said.

"No kidding", Harry responded with a sardonic grin and tone.

"Kill the demons", I said.

"What are they", Harry asked.

The image you have that is a clean and sober nice guy that only fucks for love, these are the demons. The man standing in front of me is a holy man".

"Hah", Harry said. "And I thought I was fucked up".

Harry laughed as he turned his back to me and walked toward the gate. As he slowly closed it he was back to where he had been, deep in thought. He looked up at me with a large grin. He slowly closed the gate and I could hear the latch click as Harry held it for a second, waved and resumed his journey.