45s on 33 – #61: “On The Floor”

After the demise of Chubb Rock and disappearance of the James River elves, my desire to conquer the space-time conundrum I’d found myself immersed in somewhat accidentally kicked into overdrive. So I called Rey-Rey.

“Man, where you been? I’m 69 steps ahead of you.” Rey-Rey told me to meet him at a mutually known spot in the tunnels. He had apparently rented a trailer in the early 1980s (“can’t beat the price!”) outside one of the exits within walking distance through the woods. We went there – a vintage wonderland scenario with a couple dozen junk cars in the woods behind the trailer, which sat by itself at the end of a long rutted driveway, like a pre-fabricated institutional mint blue abrasion against the otherwise entirely natural scene. The footpath from time tunnels to trailer front door was about half a mile through the woods, so Rey-Rey kept the gate at bottom chained shut. The official lord of this land was absentee, reachable only by phone, so they never questioned why Rey-Rey came and went without ever unchaining the gate at the end of the raggedy rugged driveway in much need of fresh ton of gravel.

Rey-Rey didn’t have a key, but he kept a butter knife under a cinderblock by the steps (also cinderblocks) which he used to jiggle the lock free. Inside the trailer was zero furniture, excepting a couple car bench seats which looked like Rey-Rey probably got them from the junk cars in the woods. All these notecards had been laid out and tacked to the floor.

“These are all the exits I’ve mapped out, what I know about them, what we’ve seen. I’ve talked to Railroad Time about a few things but he don’t seem to like too many questions and shit.” Each card had scribbled notes in obsessive Sharpie squiggles, urgent yet self-medicated looking, kind of like how east coast graffiti starts to look once you get below the Mason-Dixon line. There were hundreds and hundreds of index cards scattered across the stained sandpaper carpet, indexing the time tunnels multiple worlds as best as a single man’s experience and weed-hazed memories could lay out. It was also – bizarrely – a living testament to the obsessive behavior I was capable of. Rey-Rey was, after all, a version of me, one without a wife and kids, unchecked by responsibility to anyone but himself. It disturbed me a little, probably because it forced me to imagine my life without my family’s anchoring influence. A dilapidated trailer rusting back into the earth beside a forgotten auto junkyard certainly seemed kitschy and appealing in notion, but to see it in reality, with obsessive compulsive scattering of notecards tacked into manufactured floor with semi-permanent hopes – it made me thankful I was not this version of me.

The realities of multiple versions of yourself is kinda fucked up actually, and Rey-Rey was explaining the basic layout of what he’d laid out, but I was lost in the existential crisis of hating a version of myself that wasn’t really me. Rey-Rey was excited to have his life, and to have this early ‘80s escape from that life as well, and he smelled like dirtweed, and his hair was greasy about three days beyond having needed a shower. It honestly fucking disgusted me. Why was I here? Why was he here? Why were we together, when we were the same fucking person, branched off in different realities? And god, he was so fucking annoying, with his stoner laugh.

“So over here, this is where that future dude lives who is trying to control all our shit. But I been watching him, and he’s also got spots at these other two exits he stays at.”

I zoned back into Rey-Rey’s actual words, the results of persistent reconnaissance. Rey-Rey sucked, but he was the only other me I had as an ally against that worst of all versions of me that caused this whole convoluted mess. I think.

45s on 33 – #62: “Back To The Island”

I decided to go back to the Seven Islands of the elven peoples, hiding in plain sight along the James River in my home state of Virginia, but it was strangely quiet when I got there, and inflatable boat floated across. They keep it nomadic enough, to hide their existence from humanoids when necessary for peaceable survival, but I knew that, and they knew me. Generally, you’d run into one of their sentries at the edges before getting far onto the island, but not this time. There was no sign of them, not even up in the trees which you could usually still see elven trinkets made of driftwood if you knew what you were looking for. Nothing.

I poked around all the islands looking for them. It should be noted to you the reader that when I say “island” these are tiny places. You can cover the entirety of all Seven Islands in an hour. We’re not talking huge Pacific rim volcanic archipelagos or anything. It’s just land that chopped and screwed itself into the middle of the river instead of on either bank. But on the fifth island, one of the smaller ones, I found somebody finally – Chubb Rock (one of the main sentries… I’ve mentioned him before earlier in this thing). Chubb Rock’s beard was fucked up though, his beard heavily soaked in elven blood, and he was mumbling. I leaned down, talking to him, tried to lift him up like dramatic movie scene, but he just moaned in horrible pain an ungodly elven moan of impending death, so I didn’t try. In the attempt though, I could see the throat camouflaged by beard had been slit, not cleanly but in a rough and rusty serrated fashion, which is probably why he was not already dead, as the blood was a slow leak, not gusher.

“You are here finally. They left me for you to find.” His voice was gargled and meek, lacking all the jovial nature Chubb usually possessed. “I am supposed to tell you… nothing.”

“What? Who left you? You’re supposed to tell me nothing? That doesn’t even make sense.”

“Yeah. Nothing. These worlds don’t always make sense, do they?” And his eyes had a flicker of laughter to them before the moaning took back over, before a chuckle could make his voicebox.

“Who’s they? Where did everybody else go?”

“Nothing. I am telling you nothing. That is my dying duty.” He coughed up thick chunks of partially coagulated blood. “That is what you know. But it is suspected you think you know more than nothing. You don’t. So I am to tell you nothing, so that you can know nothing.”

The elven people loved riddles, especially with humans, because we think of ourselves as so logical and efficient, in a way that goes beyond actual nature of all things. I can’t say if the elven tribe was more in-tune with nature or not, but they certainly lived without forcing a dominion on all the surrounding real world. So having an elf riddle me some nonsense gibberish was not surprising in itself. But for Chubb Rock to be dying, beside me, no sign of any other of the elves, that was weird. It was all very confusing for the logic – albeit an alternative and non-traditional logic – that ruled my thinking somewhat oppressively.

“What the fuck do you mean, Chubb Rock!” I yelled dramatically, as if in a theatrical facsimile. But there was no answer other than finally a little bit of laugh coming out with the clotted chunks of bloody mucus from Chubb Rock’s mouth. He gave a little elven laugh, and then that fucker was dead. And I have no idea why.

45s on 33 – #63: “Linda Mujer”

It was always fun gawking at gone people on these Greyhound bus rides through the 1970s. One time passing through Lynchburg though, it got familiar in multiple directions. It must’ve been school shopping time back then or something, because I caught a glimpse of what I’m pretty sure was my mom and me in this shitty old brown Honda Civic hatchback we had back in the day. It certainly looked like a little blonde ass kid like me sitting there, and my mom’s face focused forward at the stoplight. She looked stressed but not mad, and I was looking out the window, passenger side, just like the other more current me (well, not current in that scene I guess) was on the bus passing the dirt brown Civic. It seemed like it could’ve been us, but I wasn’t entirely sure, because I don’t remember going to Lynchburg to go school shopping specifically that time. I know we did sometimes, trips to the nearest city (not even a city by most city folks standards) where they had a giant mall – an hour from my actual home, but hopefully cheaper clothes by having so many clothes option packed tightly together in a thicker concrete cluster of American civilization.

As a kid, school shopping was like a fake Christmas, because you’d hope you’d get all these wonderful things, but mostly what you got was practical shit. Once I got old enough to have peers and pressure, brand consciousness became a thing, which in a poor rural school was less complicated because there were no higher class systems involved (all those kids went to the private school in our area) but kids were jocking Nikes once they became prominent. All I ever wore was bobos though, the cheaper more generic department store knock-offs of the famous shit. No “My Adidas” for me, instead “My Kangaroos”, with fat laces that didn’t even color coordinate completely because fat lace selection was thin. But whatever, I was clothed, without holes, and knew to change into young dirtgod play clothes right after getting home from school, to maintain the integrity of my good shit.

My mom got pregnant with me at 16, and married to my dad – also 16 – before I was born. In the wedding picture, she is visibly ripe with me growing inside her belly. Both turned 17 before I was born, and my dad didn’t really get too much further than 17 in terms of maturing, but my mom held it together. She did well enough that I did well enough – here I am now, a grown ass man with my own kids, college degree (first in my family), with kids expected to go to college. (Not that I associate college with progress, but it allows access to shit my line didn’t have access to in that 1970s real world. So even if my kids fuck up, they have a wider range of opportunity to achieve or fuck up. I guess that feels important – to not limit your offspring.)

A lot of shit was missing from childhood that you’d want in an ideal world (which mostly doesn’t exist), namely emotional stability. Young parents do young things, and party was a well-used verb in the biosphere I was cultured from. But somehow, I got to where I am. Knowing all the various possibilities that exist, not only in terms of my one narrowly defined real world existence, as well as all the infinite chances of multiverse chaos, I realize how blessed I am. It wasn’t perfect, but it could’ve been a lot worse. It still isn’t perfect, but it still could be a lot worse. And as that shitty old dirtgod brown Honda Civic hatchback turned right at the light and I caught a quick glimpse of the blonde face looking out the passenger side window (definitely me), it struck me (now me, the one who went back to ride the old bus) how that’s what’s important, how that’s the bettering of the world I do. I don’t make the whole universe better necessarily, at least not in any discernible way, but in that little one drop of universal essence that this real life is, I make that one drop more pure, more clear, less toxic. That’s all I can fucking do. It’s not easy (never is), but I fucking do it, and I can be okay with that. You’d hope everybody would do that, each variation of each one of us, but that’s the work that needs to be done, to let existence continue. I can’t take pride in it, because it’s work that needs to be done, but I’ve got to feel pretty damn okay that at least I’m doing it, no matter how hard.

45s on 33 – #64: “Sugar On Sunday”

After Chief Blackberry Blossoms walking lesson, I kinda disappeared for a minute. (Minute is slang for period, because actually I was gone a few weeks, decades even when factoring in what I was doing.) I wouldn’t say I was depressed necessarily, but the realities of my real world (the one I know) as well as the whole universe (all real worlds combined) left me feeling heavily introspective, lost in thought deep inside the rib cage, far removed from the brain. At one point during Rey-Rey and me exploring the time tunnels, we found an exit that was in the late ‘70s, so I took during this period to weekend round trip bus rides through the 1970s rural south. At first this was mostly contained to Virginia – back and forth to Roanoke or Richmond or Norfolk, but it expanded to all the other cities I remember from Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling as a kid: Greensboro, Asheville, Charleston West Virginia, Charleston South Carolina, and then went beyond that down to Atlanta, Birmingham, Biloxi, New Orleans. I didn’t do shit but ride the bus and talk to people. A lot of the areas were mostly shutdown on Sundays, so it was slow, and stops would be next to closed stores, but you could see all the people coming and going from church – black folks and white folks, and the deeper the South the brighter the church clothes it seemed.

It got complicated getting old money to use to buy bus tickets, but older stores were far less secure than ones nowadays, so I cashed out a few grocery store registers from time to time, just enough to have plenty of old money to not raise eyebrows by buying 1970s bus tickets entirely in quarters. (Old change is far easier to come by than old dollar bills. Dollar bills cycle out of existence pretty fast it seems, once you become attuned to noticing the date on them.) But I kept it handled.

What was far less easy to handle was my place in my own real world. Having access to this multiverse escapism made it too convenient to self-medicate in a way off into another world not my own, not attached to my realities and responsibilities and hard ugly truths. Real worlds are all about ugly truths – you do not ever stereotypically hear of the extremely wealthy having real talk Come To Prophet moments about “the real world”, unless they are attempting to scare an offspring into more corrected behavior.

I don’t have it bad as a human – I am entirely unfulfilled by my work for pay, but the pay is enough to keep my family fed and two-thirds of our bills paid before final notice. We are able to juggle credit and hustling to cover the rest. But after the Chief Blackberry Blossoms lesson, when I realize I am metaphorically treading water in literally toxic water, how am I making the world or collective of worlds known as the universe a better place? Ultimately, how am I improving the health of the whole? Or am I just slowing down my own individual part in the metastasis of humane death, in a way to pretend I’m not part of the problem because I’m not as glaringly wretched as other more obvious examples?

That’s what I was thinking on looking out the passenger side window of Greyhounds, about halfway back on the bus (the far back of the long trip bus has always been a hellish sketchy place at times, thus not good for introspection, as you may be thrown into someone else’s fire), staring at past towns passing by, sipping on throwback Pepsis, which weren’t throwback but mainstream then.

45s on 33 – #66: “Take Me”

On the back part of our half-feral pasture, near where I used to raise pigs, blackberry vines spread to an immensity of pokey fruit yin-yang. (I consider good solid wild blackberry vines to be nature’s razor wire, and have done plenty of self-scientific studies on how much blackberry thorn poison can be tolerated by person who is normally highly resistant to bee and poison ivy poisons. Blackberry thorns give off an entirely different type of sting, almost vibratory and painful in a way similar to high-pitched noises, but for your skin not your ears.) They are ripe about now, so I’ve been spending time each day just picking, with last year’s popcorn bucket from the movie theater looped through my belt, pick and drop into bucket, pick and drop into bucket. You learn (at least when your brain is efficiency driven) how to hold with one hand the vine by fat part and pick off handful of berries, two at a time, with second hand, thump them into bucket, and move to another part. Blackberries grown in such large clusters vary their ripening stages too, so you have all these green and just barely red ones sitting there still, waiting to soak up more sun, and be ready next week.

The blackberry cluster we have is crazy large though, and if you’re picking each day, you’ll “cherry-pick” the easy ones on the outer loop, just like the deer and maybe even stray bears do, but you’ll also see these fat clusters of nice thick dark black berries not yet marked by insect effects just teasing you from further in the vine clusters, saying “take me, take me!” I am not one to ignore the near-sexual pleadings of ripe fruiting plants, so I tend to go in further.

Inside the blackberry clusters, you’ll find open spots to stand without having thorns rip at your flesh (I never pick fruit with a shirt on, ever; trust me, the trees appreciate this, regardless of your sex; they want you to be more naked, and perhaps this was the source of the Adam and Eve and accursed apple myth), and you’ll pick away, filling your plastic bucket higher and higher, but then you have to get back out. Except there are no more blackberries on the way out, and there are plenty more further in. This leads you (if you are like me) deeper into the viney chaos with plenty thorns to poke you into thinking you should’ve thought better (like “maybe I should’ve worn a shirt” but then you know that’s bullshit thinking from your brain, not your heart).

Eventually though, you gotta stop. You’re never gonna pick all those berries, ever. And if your feral berry clusterfuck has gotten as big as the one on our pasture overlooking the rock altar and field jukebox nestled underneath the red maple tree, you’re unlikely to work your way all the way through to the other side. You won’t reach the end of it – berries or clusterfuck of thorns, so you have to work your way back out.

I was in there yesterday picking berries meditatively, and I wondered if maybe the time tunnels underneath Buckingham might not be similar to that, especially factoring in the huge variable of timelessness’s fourth dimension to the grid of it all. Maybe this was an existential crisis within the larger existential crisis of there being a multiverse level of Raven Macks scattered outside the exits of those tunnels, where I’m not sure (meaning this Raven Mack, the dirtgod one, 1000 Feathers, me writing this – I think) it’s wise to keep pushing further into all those tunnels, into all that mess. Maybe I should recognize when I’ve gotten enough of a taste and just pull back out.

Not sure though, but all these blackberries of course reminded me of the wizened old leader of the elven people who lived on the Seven Islands scattered in the middle of the James River – Chief Blackberry Blossoms. I hadn’t thought of him originally until I questioned whether I should continue these time tunnel explorations with Rey-Rey and Railroad Time and all, but like a flash, in the middle of a bunch of blackberry fruit born from blossoms, I was like, “Oh yeah, Chief Blackberry Blossoms,” and figured I should pay my man a visit on the morrow.

45s on 33 – #67: “Nobody’s Fault But Mine”

Got lost for a little while, nobody’s fault but my own. Sometimes all the daily battles become overwhelming, but you walk through the woods while it’s raining and notice the ghost pipe congresses blossoming, and you realize all those daily battles out there navigating the immense gridlock, both infrastructural as well as psychic, just isn’t all that important. Even the Other Realm gridlock of time tunnels and future versions of me trying to enslave all other versions of me seemed trifling and unnecessary. I can’t control it all, can’t even control tiny portions of it, and in fact try to remain grounded in the fact that it’s all energies and chemistries and the most I can hope for is to be at peace with all this shit, just tune my energies to flow smoothly with all else.

The complication becomes the infrastructure that civilization has put in place, meaning the physical gridlock. We, as humans, don’t really respect the larger biosphere’s equality too well, and still have a pretty strong sense of god-ordained or even god-like dominion over all else. As I was on the forest floor, contemplating the ghost pipe, this was really driven home to me.

Ghost pipe looks fungus like but is in actuality a chlorophyll-free plant, which grows in long straight stalk, white as white, with single flower on top that shows signs of pink. They grow in clusters – and I always think of them as little beacon congresses of hope. They are scientifically considered parasitic, because they feed off the mycorrhizal woodland sub-strata, and they’ve never been grown in captivity because there’s too complicated a relationship between trees and fungus and sun to replicate them.

Are they real though? Of course they are, even if they look ghostly and a strong example of Other Realm-looking shit in our real life. But scientific thinking suggests that real can be replicated in the lab, that those conditions can be recreated by man. Ghost pipe can’t be grown in cultivation though, never has and likely never will. Thus, according to scientific egotism, it doesn’t truly exist.

It seems to me easy to extend this to much of the other Other Realm things that have happened to me, that though science can’t explain the shit through re-creation, it doesn’t necessarily mean it doesn’t exist. But mankind, when armed with militant mind, regardless of the hollow point philosophy behind that militancy, is so quick to judge and demean and demoralize. It leaves me feeling drained, and not really wanting to fuck with it, not caring about Heart Stars or making words have rhythm or finding images that capture magic or bother with any fucking art at all. It makes me disappear into the woods, sheltered from judgmentalities and the gridlock.

Of course, even in the woods we’ve built our footpaths, and we have our maps from previous travelers and the gridlock still sneaks its nefarious little philosophical tentacles into our actions. But yesterday I was walking along through the woods, hit a crossroads of two planned paths, and a turtle was there, in a direction I wouldn’t have gone. So I figured he was pointing me that way, so I went, and then that path ended, and I should’ve kept going, into the wilderness, but I was afraid to leave the gridlock completely, wasn’t ready for that just yet, might not ever be, because heart can’t completely commandeer this spaceship body from monkey-minded egotism, so I went back. It hadn’t been but ten minutes tops, but the turtle was gone, nowhere to be found in any direction.

I walked the path back out the woods and went home, eventually, but sat at the ghost pipe for a long time. I didn’t write shit, and tried to think as little as possible, at least with my brain. I breathed in all the world’s suffering and exhaled relief. It helped, but as soon as I hit the asphalt with truck tires, the judgment started beaming in from a myriad of manufactured sources again. It felt like a losing battle when I thought about it too much.

45s on 33 – #68: “Puerto de Amor”

I was back at the picnic table when I heard the Space Espanol, so I figured I’d drive to the time tunnels for the fuck of it, by myself. Rey-Rey has such a better sense of direction in that expansive void, I wanted to do a little in real life recon mental mapping on my own. But as I walked through the yard, my youngest boogie chillen was playing by the calf-hutch she’s turned into some sort of self-universe. She was sing-songing some relevant but strange words, too:

“Watch out railroad time, don’t miss the right switch/or find yourself yourself, yourself caught in a glitch.”

“What are you singing?” I asked her.

“Oh, if you hear me talking, it’s just part of my game.” She always said this as she babbled unexplainable prophecies from the oracle of child’s play. “By the way, Ellabell was in the field. She asked where you were?”

“Wait, what? Is that part of your game?” Even my real world tends to be confusing.

“No, of course not. Ellabell really is in the field. I’m not lying.” She never stopped whatever it was she was playing, and shifted right back into sing-songing, “Watch out railroad time, don’t miss the left switch/or find yourself yourself, yourself stuck in a ditch.”

I walked down into the field where my rock altar was, and the magic broken jukebox was plugged into the red maple dirt foundation, and sure enough the lime green orbs were floating like dollar store bubbles. I sat by the rock altar, made sure the orgone generator’s wiry tip was still pointed in the best possible direction, and waited to see if Ellabell was actually there. Quick enough, a bigger, bolder, brighter lime green aura bubble of Other Realmsy realness manifested and enveloped my sensory perceptions. And of course, there was Ellabell. But she looked worried, not chill at all.

“Don’t be distracted by trying to explain all the unexplainable things you are finding out about the larger universe,” she said. “You have a destiny, even within the confusion of destinies that is this larger truth you’ve been exposed to. You’ve been shown all this for the purposes of your destiny. Do not get caught up in sidetracks involving emotion attached to this one realm you call reality.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I don’t mean anything. My words are clear. It is only your filtering of them into understanding that needs clarifying.”

And then the bubble burst. But the Space Espanol was still playing, very low, background noise level, so I jumped in my 4-cylinder 1993 Toyota pick-up inherited indirectly from my grandfather, and pointed that raggedy machine towards Buckingham, specifically Dillwyn, more specifically the playground behind the elementary school, to see if there was access to the time tunnels there, being that’s where Railroad Time had brought us out when he changed into a wolf.

Sadly, this is an uneventful chapter to this ongoing saga, as I stopped off at Ali’s country store on the ride to Dillwyn, wondered if Rey-Rey might show up there by chance, but he didn’t, so I got a styrofoam cup of country store coffee and headed on further south. By the time I got to Dillwyn though, the Space Espanol was gone completely. I poked around at the playground for a few minutes, as there was nobody else there, but honestly the external sense of awareness that I looked weird as fuck, a 43-year-old man staring up a sliding board tunnel at a small town playground, all by myself, that was a little too weird. So I went home. But I stopped at the dollar store that ends up being a grocery store in the future, and bought a bunch of scotch tape for making zines, transparent not invisible, because it is clearer and makes strange diffusions of photocopier light sometimes. Also I got thousands of index cards, because one can never have too many index cards in a reality like mine.

45s on 33 – #69: “Get Back Baby”

A main issue with In Real Life is its refusal to acknowledge Other Realm impact on daily existence. Every baby is born not necessarily the complete clean slate we assume with scientifically-validated mind. It’s easy for you, the reader of this, to comprehend the time tunnels of this recollection of events as futuristic Other Realms, and you likely assume this is from an imagination of reality that I – in this physical existence – own somehow. But past Other Realms weight fairly heavily, on me, on all of us. Perhaps some have had relatively smooth Other Realm tunnels from their past burrow into their present – I cannot make that assumption, but I know plenty of people trying not to be broken by these unexplainable Other Realms, not possessed in any “I created this” way whatsoever.

This goes back to self-medication again. Folks like this (like me) self-medicate to become functional In Real Life (as in “functional alcoholic”). Often times the medication we choose though might get too strong as we attempt to be functional in Other Realms existence that we lose functionality In Real Life. Then we are judged as negative participants In Real Life, generally jailed, at the very least prohibited. Even in the realm of therapeutic care, this ends up crossing over into official-medicated (not by self). This does nothing to address the Other Realm realities, and only works to make us functional In Real Life.

I am struck by the somewhat opposing forces of being functional versus actually healing. Is the goal to be functional, or heal? And if it’s only to function, what are we functioning for? When the Heart Stars start floating around me, when I am home at the Bird Tribe Sanctuary compound, indulging in Other Realms exploration, it seems observationally to be as close to healing from Other Realms from the past as I get. But these are only my observations. The problem becomes a conflict of time, in that a majority of my daily allotment of actual existence if dedicated to being functional, not healing. Thus healing is squeezed in around the edges of function. If too much trauma affects an individual, they then become “dysfunctional”, or unable to function. They are, in that moment, worthless to the functioning system. And it seems the goal is to get them functioning first, without healing a secondary objective.

This seems completely fucked up to me. I am sitting at the far back picnic table in my yard, contemplating the time tunnels, contemplating what Heart Stars of inspiration mean to me, what they mean to Rey-Rey, and wondering how this all relates to the future version of both of us that is somehow fucking that up. Rey-Rey and me are healing in our different ways, recovering from the same shared time tunnels of the past, in our fragmented tendrils of the multiverse. That’s not functional to any future financial benefit – it’s just growth, no different than a vine growing up a wall or tree aging some fresh roots off-shooting from the thick ones already holding dirt tight.

When I saw that future me, writing in what appeared to be a successful manner, that definition of success was financial. He was a functional writer, existing as that entity. But very little economically-rewarded writing is done for healing purposes, because there’s no coin in healing. There is coin, however, in perpetually functioning, always working, buying, consuming, exchanging abstractions of wealth. Most of the writing that succeeds in accumulating these abstractions of wealth is a momentary escape from function’s mundane existence, a complete and total distraction. Rarely does it address any healing, on individual or massive scale.

I don’t know, this chapter ain’t really got nothing happening, other than me sitting at the picnic table contemplating the purpose of all this. Rey-Rey and me are gonna have to go back in the time tunnels, and address whatever the fuck it was Ellabell was talking about with regards to the future version of us fucking up the main Heart Star transmission, dissipating those moments of creativity into darkness. I guess I’m feeling existential as fuck today though, and meditating on the differences between functioning and healing, and wondering if it’s enough to just function. I mean, is that lowering the goal? Is that accepting a lesser reward to benefit somebody other than yourself? I don’t know. But I hope the fucking Space Espanol comes out the jukebox, because I could use a new adventure to distract me from functioning far too far into my head, when I’d rather be burrowing into my heart, trying to better connect past Other Realms with the present and those future ones, let that shit heal together a little (or a lot).

45s on 33 – #70: “Too High”

Got a couple dudes I play dominos with on Friday evenings, and I’ve found it becomes difficult to talk about these recent endeavors with them. Before I can even get to the realities of time tunnels and shape shifting, even something as simple in the beginning of this story as music coming out of an old weather-beaten jukebox in the field gets them tripping, being like, “Damn, you must’ve got too high!” or looking at me side-eyed with the judgmental gaze of devil scientific knowledge born deep in the infertile fissures of mind. So I’ve learned to keep it to myself.

This creates a new dilemma in that In Real Life friends start to suffer, those relationship are not nurtured, because they negatively judge and are generally dismissive of these Other Realm friends and realities, seeing them as not real. The conflict between In Real Life and Other Realm gets too much, because honestly I am far more comfortable in the Other Realms. In Real Life is mundane and repetitive and many days, for ten hours of it, I feel like one of those genetically engineered white chickens stuffed into the cages on the tractor and trailers rolling west on I-64 to the slaughterhouses. I’m just riding along, stuffed into my little work pen, administratively tasking after the tasks that are most pressing, pushing the others aside, not invested emotionally at all – in fact deeply detached from feeling anything because to let feeling in would be painful.

There was already enough pain embedded in my existence already, perhaps from born DNA clusters, perhaps environmental, likely a combo deal of both (with a free super-size by society), and I come from clans who are adept at self-medication. This I understand all too well – the desire to numb the pain, to let the dark unexplainable hurt be swallowed by opioid or alcoholic fog. The sharp edges of suffering are not gone, but you don’t see them so clearly, and don’t feel them nearly as much. Thankfully, I recognized that as a cycle going nowhere, and stepped off it, not without a lot of struggle, which continues to this day.

In Real Life seems to be getting more pokey, sharper, shivs and shanks and broken glass from all directions, and yet the civilized fog seems to be pumping harder, probably to dull our sightline on all those painful realities which should be obvious. And when I look around at others In Real Life, it seems to be working. They don’t seem to be freaking out, many of them are shinefaced and successful, able to buy things. Often I am not able to buy simple things like more groceries, so comprehending how to get the complex things like houses built in the past twenty years or vehicles less than nine years old is almost like reading Urdu, in that it certainly looks great but I got no idea what the fuck.

Thus, as I am forced by circumstance to navigate In Real Life more and more, it becomes more painful, and I want to disappear into the Other Realms. But In Real Life won’t let me. In Real Life has timely demands that require timely response and expect timely reactions. Flux time Other Realm nonsense only gets in the way of In Real Life demands. So I am forced to ignore the Other Realms, and take care of business, so to speak. Take care of business. Taking care, of “business”.

That shit is painful, a clenched fist of a heart painful that sometimes becomes unbearable, and you want to actually go ahead and get too high. But you know you shouldn’t, because that repeats failures you saw as a kid, as an adult, through both sides of the family tree. So you suffer it, and try to keep going, without giving up and laying down on the train tracks and hoping to sleep forever, no more In Real Life to fucking judge you.

Thus, I am thankful for the Other Realms. Without them, all I’d have is In Real Life.

45s on 33 – #71: “Fireflies”

After we got back, Rey-Rey and me went home, meaning our realm homes. After stopping off at the store for butter and milk and bread and contact lens solution, I got to the house. It’d only been about two hours since I left, though it felt like I’d been gone for weeks. Time is fucked up enough when it’s normal, but this off-the-grid fluctuating fourth dimension shit was going to be hard to configure to keep a personal schedule.

We had fried rice and chicken and tofu (separate skillets) cooked in tamari for dinner, and then I went out to the main looping path meandering through the woods behind our cultivated Bird Tribe property. Once you circle halfway around the main loop, there’s a secondary loop I built following animal paths that cuts back near a debris pile from decades ago. I’ve got various rock altars and hidden Buddha figurines all around back there, so I like to walk those non-circular circles to scope out the always-changing advanced mushroom technologies, and try to get my mind to settle.

On that secondary loop, right at the beginning, in fall and winter it is brown and angular, and the winter freeze squeezes up a fresh batch of trash quartz for harvesting in the spring. Whenever I pick up a quartz rock, I gently touch and tug at first, to feel whether it’s ready to come with or not. It’ll usually tell you. But in summer, once everything’s gotten bright green, by that debris pile on an angle it looks luscious with the sun filtering down into the ground-level green, giving everything a lime aura. Crows are usually back there in the distance, over at the wizard-looking neighbor’s land, dropping crow freestyles into the sky. It’s often times my favorite place on earth that I’ve found thus far. (This earth, meaning my specific earth – not all earths.)

As I was out there, summertime was official because the fireflies and lightning bugs were flickering up out of the green undergrowth as twilight started to get lit. Fireflies and lightning bugs are almost exactly the same, excepting fireflies possess a slightly higher upward mobility. So I sat there by one of my Buddha stumps (one in which the Buddha had long since left… I think sometimes maybe they come alive, or perhaps the crows took him, because I used to leave them peanuts at this same stump altar) and contemplated the fireflies and time and all this that had been going on.

A good exercise against the anxiousness is deep breathing, and I’d had a lot to be anxious about in my normal existence before all this other realm foolishness injected itself into complexifying being. I closed my eyes and took deep breaths, at first concentrating on the breathing but then unconcentrating on it. The best way to think of it is that old Taoist mantra often seen in kung fu flicks about how you have to first know something, and then secondarily not know it, meaning it goes from conscious to unconscious. Once I get my deep breaths washing through my rib cage, I try to detach from thinking about it, or anything, always with my eyes closed to decrease the sensory distractions which always threaten to lead us astray. It’s fun to do this for a while and then open your eyes and see the world with supernatural crispness.

As I kept breathing, I imagined the fireflies floating up, and started to feel like I was floating up physically, just a touch. I’d like to think I’d be more lightning bug than firefly, but the floating sensation started to cease as I thought like that, so I went back to just breathing. Just breathing. Just. Breathing.

It felt as if I was floating for a good while before I finally opened my eyes, and there I was at tree levels, higher than human feet could know, and luckily my brain didn’t become startled and look back at my body like had happened when I was a teenager. I felt higher than a firefly so kept floating forward through the trees, towards the crow calls in the distance.

One translucent black grimy crow was nearby, who I didn’t see until he squawked at me, “Who the fuck are you?” He spoke crow, but I heard him say that specifically.

“Raven,” I answered.

“You’re not no fucking raven!” he squawked back, then flew off, zipping in the direction of the symphony of other crows further off. I thought about being Raven, and saw my body sitting by the debris pile back in the woods, and felt the umbilical cord of consciousness pull me back into that body.

I opened my eyes – my Raven the human dude eyes – and got really excited. I think I had actually turned into a crow. I know for sure I did, but still, I wasn’t quite confident in my thinking so.

45s on 33 – #72: “El Contrabando del Paso”

The Space Espanol kicked off again, reverberating through the tunnels, but also my skull (tunnels as bass, my head as tweeter). Rey-Rey and me must’ve had the same thought, because he struck first with, “Yo, Time, why don’t you take us on a run while the music’s playing? We don’t have to get nothing, just show us what it’s like.”

Railroad Time hollered out again, “You sure we don’t need nothing, Woodie? Seems weird the Space Espanol keeps playin’.” Woodie yelled back that they were still good, no worries for another month at least.

“Maybe the music keeps playing because you’re supposed to take us,” suggested Rey-Rey.

Railroad Time laughed his old man of middle-aged years laugh. “Alright, we can run out. Ain’t takin’ nothing though, just going for looks.”

The three of us got up and Railroad Time led the way with his red-green gaze to the appropriate tunnel exit for entering Dillwyn where he and the runaways normally stole supplies. The Space Espanol got louder on the high end as we got closer, meaning the cavernous bass remained at the same level but inside my head, the notes were more piercing, in an almost slightly unpleasant way, yet still entirely bearable. The actual exit was just a half-dollar sized point of light, pelvis height, but having gone in and out various tunnels, I knew most of them were just circular openings like wombs of various dilation, but with immense elasticity.

We were about to go through when I grabbed Railroad Time’s work thick arm. “Will you be a wolf? Show us how you wolf it up.”

“What for? We ain’t stealin’ nothing.”

“So I can see, so I can try to figure out if I got bird in me or not.”

“How’m I gonna tell y’all what to do then?”

“Well, if we’re not stealing anything, Rey-Rey and me can just promise to follow you the whole time. It’s not like we want to get lost in another realm.”

Railroad Time said, “Fuck it.” I expected him to spasm and have some horror movie special effect-style metamorphosis, but all he did was sit down and close his eyes, and start deep focused breaths. After a six-pack or so, he asked, “Can y’all stand behind me? I can feel y’all lookin’ too hard.” So Rey-Rey and I moved behind him. I could still tell his breathing was very deep, very intent, and there wasn’t any real visual metamorphosis, just all of a sudden I realized he was a wolf. I think Rey-Rey might’ve realized this a step ahead of me, because he went, “Wow” again right before I was conscious what was just a man was now a wolf.

Railroad Time in wolf form jumped through the light hole, and Rey-Rey and me followed. It looked just like the Dillwyn I mostly knew, us coming out near the playground back behind the elementary school. The convenience store I knew from my time had a different name, but the McDonalds was still there, just older and grubbier looking. What was a Family Dollar in my realm was now a grocery store, looked to be operated as a small food outlet branch of a larger store from my time, who I won’t mention by corporate name because I’m not sure of this, but it had the same blue stylings and smiley face dropping prices bullshit.

Route 15 there is fairly busy, and traffic appeared normal, so I was a little hesitant about crossing so easily. But the Space Espanol was still playing in my head, just soft and soothing, like elevator music almost. I hadn’t noticed the piercing effect going down and the bass disappearing consciously until we got to the road and the sounds of the cars took over my attention. The reason for this was it was not constant, nor was their movement. There were glitches, where the sound and visual appearance of the vehicles would bounce back twenty feet. It seemed to happen with a regularity, but it was disturbing to me and Rey-Rey nonetheless, because we were used to time being smooth, even in the tunnels. But Railroad Time in wolf form led us across the street to the grocery store outlet, and he walked to the front door entrance, looked back at us – his gaze still red and green, oddly exactly like his human peer, down to the eyeball – and led us through, where we stood a couple feet inside.

The same physical glitch kept happening, and the cashier closest to us turned upon seeing us, glitched back, turned to see us again, and this kept on. He said, “What’re…” then glitched, “What’re you do…” and so on until after about five minutes, he had asked us “What’re you doing?” and others turned to look, and eventually one lady screamed. In real time, all of that would’ve taken about five seconds, but with the glitches it dragged out dramatically. I can see why it would be easy to grab and go with whatever one needed in that distorted confusion.

Suddenly the Space Espanol bass kicked back in. Immediately, Railroad Time turned back out the exit door, Rey-Rey and me following. He was a decent gait, not speeding but no leisurely, and we crossed back through traffic back towards the playground we’d come through the portal at. The piercing nature of the high end of the Space Espanol gradually got more pronounced. At the bottom end of the tunnel of the playground slide, there was a dark hole floating, half-dollar size.

Railroad Time was a man again, without me noticing when, or how, and he said, “So that’s what it’s like when we go. When the music gets louder, it’s winding down, which means real time is winding back up, so it’s best to get the fuck on out. It’s still got twenty minutes of wind-up probably, but the longer you wait, the louder it gets, which can give you a headache. And we ain’t actually takin’ nothing, so I figured we oughta just get back.” And he turned and climbed up the sliding board back into the time tunnels beneath Buckingham County. Rey-Rey followed him, and I looked around for a quick second at this world I completely recognized but was also not my own at all, and then climbed up too.

45s on 33 – #73: “Heaven or Hell”

Railroad Time explained shapeshifting into a wolf like so: “First time I done it was like meditation. I was trapped in some blackberry bushes along an L&N line, hiding from sheriffs after that one sheriff done shot himself and they pinned it on me. My heart was beating like bongos and I was worried the sheriffs was gonna hear it, so I tried to calm myself down. Just focused on my breathing slow and deep, thought about how all the shit going on right then was just the moment but in the big picture of all this shit, I was connected to it all more than I was just to that one spot.”

“That’s kind of like meditation, Railroad Time.” I’d not called him by his name before. He laughed.

“You can just call me ‘Time’. That’s what most folks does. But yeah, I don’t know a whole lot ‘bout no meditations, but if that’s what it is then that’s what I was doing. But it started to feel like I was floated out my body, like I won’t connected to this body no more.”

I thought of my own time where I had that out-of-body experience after sleep deprivation and meditation behind my mom’s house when I was a teenager. “Were you still connected to your body at all?”

“Well, I knew I had a body but I ain’t think about it. I just felt like running. And I won’t afraid of them sheriffs. So I popped out the brush and took off running. Some of them sheriffs shined their lights at me, and they said, ‘Wolf!’ and pulled they guns but none of ‘em shot. And I seent where my body would’ve been back there, and they was gonna look there, but I want to go back and see if I was still there. So I ran like a motherfucker, ain’t stop runnin’ ‘til I was halfway to Georgia.”

“So look, Time, I had a thing one time where I felt like I was out of my body like that, but I was floating up above myself, and when I saw my body down there, it freaked me out and got sucked back down into my body.”

“You was probably almost there, I don’t know. I done had it happened where I be thinkin’ too hard about it all, and I’ll be a wolf but still thinkin’ ‘bout being a man, and it’s like a rope pulls me back into being a man. That was in the beginning though. I got it down now. If I wanna be a wolf, I can be a wolf, no man thoughts in the way.”

“So it might’ve been the same thing?” I asked, as if he would know. He didn’t even know what I experienced.

He laughed again. “Yeah, could’ve been. You named fuckin’ Raven, maybe you a bird or some shit. Where you get that name anyways?”

“From my folks.”

I thought about Railroad Time’s shape shifting abilities, and what he said about how it worked, how that felt familiar to the one time I had. But how do you just make yourself do something like that?

“The thing is, when I say I can be a wolf,” Railroad Time said, as if reading my mind, “I ain’t make myself do it. Kinda hard to explain but I have to unmake myself do it. As a man, all we do is make things do shit, force this into that. That ain’t how wolf does, or bird, or anything else in nature for the most part. Most things just is, without forcing anything. They just is. So you can’t make yourself. All that making forces all the broken shit, all the blacks and whites and heavens and hells and norths and souths, and ain’t no wolf or bird or nothing thinkin’ about all that shit. They ain’t even thinkin’ like we think. But they ain’t thinkin’ in a lesser way. Plenty times I feel like they might be thinkin’ smarter the whole time, like they think with their heart instead of their goddamned head.”

“Our goddamned heads,” I thought, ironically enough in my head. I tried to think it with my heart, just that three-word phrase. “Head” translated easy enough, and I could get “our” to make sense to my heart, but “goddamn” I just couldn’t squeeze into heart thinking.

“When we get out of here, I’m gonna go back to my mom’s house and try that shit again,” I made my head promise to my heart.

45s on 33 – #74: “En Una Cajita de Oro”

I guess up to this point, I had assumed hearing the music from the jukebox in my field was a localized incident, specific to me having placed an old likely enchanted jukebox and poking the cord into some red maple base dirt. Thus, I also assumed what got called Space Espanol was also localized in the same ways. As me and Rey-Rey and Railroad Time and the runaways were chilling in the tunnel though, suddenly the echoed screwed sounds of fresh Space Espanol started to fill the upper areas of dark caverns like a giant speaker cabinet. And it grew louder, but not overbearing, a consuming sound which somehow didn’t steal your ear focus, like sunspots or solar flares for your hearing.

Before Rey-Rey or I could really mention it, as it took us by surprise, we not being acclimated to daily life inside the time tunnels, Railroad Time hollered, “Hey Woodie, how we doin’ on stores? We lookin’ good?”

Woodie yelled from the inkiness, “Yeah, we prolly good for ‘nother month. We don’t need to make no run right now.”

“Good,” Railroad Time yelled back through the cough syrupped sounds. Then at normal voice level so that only Rey-Rey and me and a couple of closest (physically speaking, not emotionally) runaways could hear, “I ain’t feel like goin’ out right now, anyways.”

I had wondered about how they survived in the tunnels all this time (albeit technically not “time” in the way we know time, but they still had to eat and shit, right?), so I asked, “Where do y’all get food?”

Railroad Time monologued, “From town outside one of the tunnels, in Dillwyn from some point, probably ahead of your time from the looks of you. That’s why I had asked Woodie, because we go when the Space Espanol plays.”

“Wait, you call it Space Espanol? You know about that?”

“Well yeah. That’s when we can go outside the tunnels without hassle because time is recalibrating itself. Everything’s movin’ kinda sideways, so the people in the town don’t got time to really figure out what we’re up to or who we are because time’s skippin’ in that moment anyways.”

I was confused as fuck, by lots of what had been going on yes, but also by multiple points of that last statement by Railroad Time. “’Time is recalibrating’? What does that mean?”

“Well, you know all these tunnels goes out to different places in time? All the shit people do out there in those times gotta connect to all the other times sometimes, or else you get too many glitches in all the different times. That’s when all the shit that don’t match up across times matches itself back up, recalibrates, fixes as much broken shit as it needs to to keep running along.”

“Doesn’t it break things too? I mean all those exits are tied to set times?”

“Well yeah, some shit gets broke, but some shit gonna get broke either way. Shit breaks. Don’t matter which time you go out into, some shit gonna break. That’s life.”

I still didn’t understand why they went out during these moments. “Why does it recalibrating matter for you going out? And what does the Space Espanol playing have to do with it?”

“We learned way back,” (note that he didn’t say ‘a long time ago’ – I found that intriguing), “that when the Space Espanol rocked, that’s when time outside the tunnels was fixin’ itself. Then we learned that was the best time to go get all the things we needed, usually just Woodie, a couple extra hands from his crew, and I’d wolf it up to put the fear in all them people outside.”

“’Wolf it up’?” Rey-Rey asked. (Finally, fucking Rey-Rey asked a question. He’s always just sitting around zoning out. I have to admit, even in other realms where space-time continuum is unfamiliar to me, stoners sometimes suck.)

“Yeah man, I’d wolf it up, meaning I’d shift into wolf form. I thought I told y’all I could do that? We go out into town, it being a future town of some kind, with three or four old scary ass looking runaways slaves and a motherfuckin’ wolf, all while time is skippin’ a beat sideways? Them folks ain’t got a chance to even think about stoppin’ us before we done loaded up a wagon full of goods. It’s like a gold box outside the tunnels when the Space Espanol plays… just turn into a wolf real quick-like, hit out real quick-like, and by the time the music done stopped, we already back in the tunnels, sittin’ fed and proper for the next couple months.”

I waited, hoping Rey-Rey would ask another question, because I really wanted to know more about Railroad Time shape-shifting into a wolf, but all that came out of the darkness from Rey-Rey’s side was his stoner voice going, “Wow. That’s fuckin crazy, man.”

45s on 33 – #75: “Ha Ha (Laughing Song)”

[The following is Railroad Time’s accounting of how he came to be in these time tunnels of central Virginia. It should be noted that the entire time he relayed these details, he laughed heartily throughout – a literally “heartily” where the laughter was without thought and deep and real. There was a rhythm to his speech that I doubt my recounting here – again, I’m no journalist – will properly reflect, like the clacks of a train running alongside a skinny thick river rustling through rural country. And though Willie Strunk, Jr. may disapprove, for sake of sanctity, I’m gonna abandon quotation marks for his account.]

I won’t no slave by law, ‘cause it was after that time, but ain’t nobody ever thought slaves was right, in a real sense. Devil men find a way to make it happen though, make different laws that take the wrong and launder it through their laws until it can seem like it’s right. That was me, ‘cause I was in jail. But then they let me loose to slice sap out the pines for the turpentine people. And if they gonna tell you, you can stay in jail or you can be free, you gonna be free, always. Ain’t no sensible man alive, or dead, who gonna choose to stay in jail, unless he done been made a slave all the way down to his heart and don’t know how to think right no more.

So I was cutting them pines and pulling the turpentine, and ain’t never been a single man with as much energy as me, so I was rolling through them pines. That’s when they started calling me Railroad Time at first. I got more sap for them turpentine people than anybody. But at the same time, I know right and wrong and that ain’t always the same as allowed and against the law. So I had to move, and I guess that name Railroad Time stuck to me, even though to me I was just ol’ Mo, country boy from ‘bama, natural born bama. So I moved with the tracks, mostly where I was ‘cause I could. But then a sheriff came one time, trying to force the law on me, wrong as ever, and that man was a fool, done went and shot hisself while trying to get at me. You know the law ain’t gonna admit the law was wrong though, so the papers was saying I killed that sheriff. So I had to move a little wider a circle than before, stayed to the tracks though. Took what I need if I needed it, and shared what I had if somebody else needed it too. If it got too cold, I went south; too warm, went north. If it got too crowded, I went west; and if I got to feeling too alone, went east. Just went as things told me too. Along the way I learned how to be a wolf if I needed to be, couldn’t do it for too long, but I could wolf myself away for a day or two if I needed to really get away from some devil ass people.

Anyways, I ain’t one for maps and knowing about this state or that state, but I seen the desert, and I seen cities full of buildings that touched the clouds, and I been places where ain’t nobody speak my language, a couple times been like that. But I was just riding, and the train was by a river and I thought I seen some little men, like little dudes out on an island. The train stopped a couple miles down, so I jumped off to go back and see what them little dudes was all about, because like I said, I been all over the place, and I ain’t seen nothing like that before.

I ain’t find them little people, though heard tell of them plenty of times. I ended up living out in some tunnels for a while, just to be safe and still for a little while, and I ran into these runaway people Woodie was with. Been wandering these tunnels ever since. I loved the trains, following them tracks all over the place. These tunnels like that too though, they go all over the place but different places. Not just like north, south, east, west though but like that got multiplied by math ain’t nobody ever showed me how to do. But I think I got it figured out a little bit by now.

[Railroad Time laughed at that. By my own calculations, I’m guessing he maybe saw the elven people at Seven Islands, and jumped off the train either at Shores or Bremo Bluff, which is directly across the river from where the slate quarries still exist. Railroad Time made me feel practical safe. Knowing things is helpful in attempting to feel safe, in calculating your observable world for solutions. But some folks – Railroad Time type folks – know in a different, deeper, non-brain way, which gives you a deep sense of safety that cognizant knowing just never really fully accomplishes.]