SONG OF THE DAY: Somebody's Gone

Brother Theotis Taylor is a nonagenarian (dude in his 90s) down in south Georgia, who apparently for decades has had a piano and an old reel-to-reel tape recorder set up, so that when the mood struck him, he’d record some sounds. He toured as a gospel singers, even played the Apollo, and with Sam Cooke for a while. But mostly he’s just been living his life down in Georgia, feeling the creative spirit as it hit him, and making his art as a conduit from wherever it comes from for whoever might hear it. Even if they don’t hear it, it’s more about a relationship with creation than an end result of consumption. People lose sight of that too often. I lose sight of that too often. (My kids are always like, “why are you saying ‘people’ when you mean us?”) Creation existed long before consumption did, and will continue to exist long after this system of mass consumption – which has poisoned every possible creative outlet you could think of – is dead and gone. Anyways, this song is pretty fuckin’ great.

ancestral energies charge

bloodstream with unseen traumas;

strive to revitalize self

strip mine personal brand build

until there's nothing left of

what was you, just this bullshit

one time scribbled "language" on

magic field jukebox looking

glass; Seger started playing

sign my name with mountain M

and often exclamations

of blown out geo-metrics

the fool attaching his "I"s

to words images odds ends

which channel outward through him

Heart Stars of inspiration

emitted wheresoever

mytho-logicals allow

scribble heart thoughts across all

available surfaces,

literally anything

45s on 33 – #81: “Rapture”

Suffered another of those umbilical cord-like raptures back to known physical realm, sucked like flying rainbow vortex out of Buckingham time tunnels, away from Railroad Time’s green-red gaze and Rey-Rey next to me, and like that was in my own yard again, near the jukebox – that raggedy broken jukebox which had started this all by emitting those strange sounds and then those orbs. And the inspiration was strong – Heart Stars of inspired creation were floating out all over, like dollar store bubbles, each one holding poem or tangent or photographic image or sacred scribble or stack of metal or on and on and on…

I have never understood when people who classify themselves as creative complain about inspiration, or having ideas. I have always been overwhelmed by them. Each day is navigation of expectation of real (and uncaring) world while all these Heart Stars of inspiration appear, my day a clouded daze of colorful ideas, most of which I’ll never get to indulge or explore, but not for lack of trying. I squeeze the indulgences into every crack I can, and attempt to work over as many more as I can each evening. I have found myself more tired, more dull-brained in the evenings, perhaps suffering the ill consequences of decades of sleep deprivation, or maybe the manufactured fog has gotten too thick to fight through, fighting against the unseen wireless riptide at all times fatiguing my spirit to where I can’t get by on my at-one-time-normal four or five hours of sleep a night.

The Heart Stars overfill my hopes, but they remain there, and will pop due to neglect – more burst creative bubbles. There are more ideas or more visualizations of how to beautify my dilapidated world than I could ever actually do. But I’ve never had a problem with them coming to me. I’ll never understand those who complain about such a thing.

But as I found myself standing there in the field, having been raptured home, more beautiful ideas pouring out of less-than-beautiful environs, something I’d never seen before started happening. The Heart Star orbs were still coming from the broken jukebox, from the red maple, from the white trash quartz rock altar, but some of them started to dissipate quickly, before they even got to me. What were in those ideas? Why were they disappearing? This had never happened, and a panic that my virile creationism was being challenged swept over me, heart turned into clenched fist of fear and mind overrun with the failure demons immediately, like a thousand metaphysical black vultures descended upon my insides all at once. Is this what those people talked about? Couldn’t be, because they were always casual about it, like “I have writer’s block” or “I don’t know what to do next”. For me, this was apocalypse level anxiety – THE INSPIRATION WAS GONE BEFORE IT EVER EVEN GOT TO ME!

I guess on technical level if inspiration never reaches you physically, you never had it. So it’s not like I was suffering a loss of creativity so much as I wasn’t creative. But I could see them over there, floating before they fizzled into nothing. This wasn’t like what Ellabell explained about neglected Heart Stars congealing into loss of them existing.

Or was it? Had I left too many ideas, too many worlds from inside my head (or more likely heart) to wither on the vine?

Look, I have tried to be very upfront about how I attempt to be logical and use fairly solid critical thinking skills, even in the midst of all the nonsense mythology going on around me. But in that moment of panic I did what can best be called “pray”. I kneeled in the field that legal documents recognize as mine, leaned my forehead down to the dirt, and prayed to everything – whatever gods may or may not exist, whatever sciences may or may not be true, to the elven elders I’ve held court with on the James River, to all universal magnetics which may or may not be actually charged, called on it all to please come help answer my anxiety, because honestly, I was freaking the fuck out.

I looked up, and the unpolished amethyst on the rock altar started to glow. I hoped this meant Ellabell would appear again. Critically thinking, that’s what it glowing would mean, but fuck man, nothing’s been logical about this whole deal. I’m starting to think I might be a little off, and if I am a little off, AND I start losing my creative inspiration, that’s gonna be a horrible combo to stomach. I had always looked forward to being just crazy enough to be left alone by this bullshit material world to be allowed to fully indulge in my creative nonsense. If I was gonna now be crazy but not have creative impulses? Fuck… I don’t even want to contemplate that living hell.

45s on 33 – #84: “Excusa”

Buckingham County, Southside Virginia, United States of America, Earth, is the county over from where I live now, and was the county over from where I grew up, but those two counties (where I live, and where I grew up) are opposite side counties, so I consider Buckingham the connector between the two longest habitation phases of my life. Buckingham is a county where slavery was practiced, and though it is not still slavery, the psychic recovery has not been as good as in other places. There is epic high unemployment rates among able-bodied, prime working aged men, and I use the term “unemployment” in the realistic way that makes sense, even though many of those not working are not counted because they have been not working for so long it no longer makes bureaucratic sense for some reason to continue including them in the count. I guess it’s a paperwork thing, or fabrication of numbers, or I don’t know. But the real world reality is that there’s a lot of people with not a lot of economic wealth, and they have piecemealed together existences for generations, and though many of these people have a helpful, good-natured, smiley, laid back “Simple Man” vibe to themselves, this is no excuse for the conditions they continue to live in.

I personally theorize there are geologic ties to this continued suffering, which may sound odd (as if anything in this entire Space Espanol talking jukebox in the field strung together tale didn’t feel illogical) as there are a couple of notable geologic scars to Buckingham. The most obvious is the kyanite mine all these tunnels me and Rey-Rey are inside of, because you can see that. But another one is the slate mines of the southern end along the James River, where at first Welsh immigrant (indentured) labor was used, and then slave labor, to pull slate from the earth. This is the same slate that was used for most original U.S. government buildings, in D.C., Philadelphia, so on, none of which are really considered “slave states” at this point in our fuzzy history, but those buildings seen as the good side were originally slated up with nice roofing rock pulled by slaves, in all likelihood. Those quarries still exist, and still offer that traditional quality “Buckingham Slate” at a premium price, more expensive because cheap labor is not as cheap as slave labor, though honestly if you look at the living conditions of your average manual laborer in Buckingham County (considered middle class, because of all the non-working), it’s not the good life we’d expect if we were looking at America: The Brochure.

A son of these slate quarry slaves was a dude named Carter G. Woodson, who went on to bigger and better places of renown, and Woodson was the singular man full court-pressing society for a Black History Week, which later grew into a Black History Month, which still exists. Buckingham just built a large new institutional-looking elementary school, and it was named after Carter Woodson. A majority of the kids who go to that school are hungry, and poor, and qualify for reduced or free lunches. When I say “majority”, I do not mean like 55% - we are talking nine out of ten kids. So as we make our modern progress, there is no excuse for people to continue to subsist in substandard psychic spaces, still being strip mined of all valuable resources, without sharing that wealth with surrounding community.

All this comes to mind, because as Rey-Rey and I hollered through the darkness at the person or people yelling about “railroad time!” at us in those underground tunnels, I – being a total nerd about reading local histories – realized that likely, though illogically, the people or person on the other side of the darkness may have been descended from runaway slaves from Arvonia, where the slate quarries were and still are, where Carter G. Woodson came from. As Rey-Rey did the talking with them (he was the talker, I was the thinker), I started to wonder even if perhaps these weren’t actual runaway slaves. If these tunnels connected to different realms and different times within those realms, it is conceivable a tunnel could connect to slave era slate quarries. And if those runaways had hid out in the tunnels this whole time, how did “real” time apply to them? Maybe they hadn’t aged. And what the fuck was “railroad time” about?

Lots of questions, not many answers. Welcome to my world (all of them).

45s on 33 – #85: “La Capsula”

Fast forward a few hours, which is an ironic term to use because where we ended up is in pit of solitary mountain where apparently concepts of time have gotten blurred, or connect as universal infrastructure I’m too simple of an organic creature to comprehend. We always quantify our lives in time, celebrating the annual marking of our birth, even though calendars remain arbitrary to a large extent. We recognize our limited time existing, and lament wasted years as we grow older and slower and achier and less likely to be full of fool blood ready to stab the earth with virility.

But Rey-Rey and me was in the middle of these tunnels. “This is where I came from,” Rey-Rey said, pointing down one tunnel which he claimed led back to his real world. “But up this one that’s over here down this tunnel about fifty yards or so, to the right is the tunnel that goes to my future me which actually is your future you too. So if we got the same future us, we must be the same, kind of.”

I don’t know, I’m far too proud of my individuality, as any righteous capitalized American should be, to easily accept that some other dude, albeit a pretty chill guy like Rey-Rey, is equal to me, not just like in equality scale but literally we’re equal, the same shit, just splintered off somehow in some space-time bullshit I don’t understand. I wasn’t high like Rey-Rey, so I was on that scientific tip, being belligerent and wanting some logical explanation for all this.

“I don’t know, Raven. We can’t explain everything in this world, ya know? I mean, I kind of freaked out too at first, but you know how when we was kids they did those time capsule things to bury and somebody else digs out in twenty years?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, maybe all that time just gets mixed together and that was like ants carrying sugar into a hole.” Rey-Rey, when he was really high, like he was, didn’t make the best sense, but in sunlight (or orb light) I could at least gauge his facial expressions to see what he was trying to say as he said it. He also could use my own facial reactions to reel himself back towards shared reality and not get too over-indulged in individual realities. But we were in a dark tunnel only lit close to our bodies by the dollar store glow sticks we used as light torches. Rey-Rey glowed a dull bright green in the tunnels while I was lit by purple (because purple forever).

“What the fuck does a time capsule got to do with these tunnels?” I stammered at Rey-Rey, louder than we’d been up to this point. A loud rustling happened up ahead down the tunnel in the direction of the future us turn Rey-Rey was taking us. Not really a dangerous rustle but a mass of movement, and we heard some hushed talking, deep voices but trying to be quiet.

Rey-Rey, high as fuck but clutch, took the lead. “Who’s up there?” he yelled. No answer but some shuffling. The sounds didn’t get closer though, so we stood our ground. “Who’s there, damn it?” Rey-Rey again asked.

“Railroad time? That you, railroad time?” a thick country voice hollered. Me and Rey-Rey looked at each other, no clue what that meant.

“Who are you?” Rey-Rey shouted down the dark sideways hole into parts unknown, realms unbelieved by me to exist yet, but there we were, at the door of some shit.

“Where’s railroad time?” the voice hollered. “You ain’t railroad time. Where he at?”

I looked at Rey-Rey’s face glowing green in the dark. There was no way to stifle our glow sticks unless we tossed them away, which neither of us seemed to eager to jump into doing, so we just stood there looking at each stupidly in shared green and purple chemical luminescence.

45s on 33 – #86: “Mi Ultima Parranda”

Rey-Rey was at the house when I got back, for real, not floating orb hallucination Rey-Rey. He was sitting at the close picnic table in the back yard, the one in the front of the yard, not the one way back by the woods. (One can never have too many scattered picnic tables in their life.) I was surprised to see him, not just in what seemed to be real human physical form in a way even my neighbors would see, but also why was he here?

He walked over as I parked my truck, and before I could say things, was like “I know, ‘What am I doing here?’ Maybe even ‘how?’ But I figured out how to get here. More importantly, I figured out where he is – the he I seen as old me and you seen as old you. I know where he is.”

I asked where. “Not far. But we ain’t ready for this, at least I’m not ready for this. I need to get high.”

Rey-Rey as potentially hallucinatory vision of parallel universe me who remained true to teenage hesher roots was one thing, kind of easy to accept, but actual existing parallel me Rey-Rey, shaggy haired and ready to smoke a bowl in my back yard, was different. I’d been sober many years, and even though nobody was home, the ol’ lady and kids might come home any moment. The ol’ lady would shrug it off, another that’s so Raven moment, but I’d worked hard to minimize the inherited effects of self-medication on my children, in the hopes their psychic health is not as clogged up by crazies as mine is. So I hedged.

“Bro,” Rey-Rey said, “I appreciate your situation, trust me, I really do. But we about to embark on epic journey of unexplainable level, also with mysterious consequences. That future me and future you is one and the same. And I had a sort of vision about a place I used to go, underneath Willis Mountain in Buckingham, so I checked my vision out in my real life, and the tunnel was there, and it connected to everything else, and I came out the tunnel to here. Straight here. This is your real life, not mine, but it seems to be built the same, and it’s kinda fucking me up to think about. So I’m gonna get high. I’m gonna get really fucking high.”

Willis Mountain is a single mountain in Buckingham County, Southside Virginia, which has the largest proven reserve of kyanite on earth. New age people consider it precious, and industry uses it to coat spark plugs or counter tops – all kinds of weird industrious shit that us human monkeys dream up for a profit. Over the decades the mountain has slowly been blasted and scraped away, and there are no other mountains around it to hide this fact. It’s just a giant brown earth scar staring at you as you drive past on U.S. 15 between Dillwyn and Farmville. Every time I drive back to my mom’s house where I grew up, I pass it, and it makes me sad. But I hadn’t ever gone underneath it. We did some off-roading up there as tripping (literally) teenagers, but no secret world cave explorations. So I imagined my sadness must’ve been how Rey-Rey felt, except he’d been in the guts of the mountain.

Thus, I ended up relenting, and Rey-Rey had a last carouse of marijuana intoxication as he explained the tunnels underneath Willis Mountain, sitting down in the field by my rock altar (like always), and though I didn’t smoke any, it felt like I got high too, just absorbing all his energy.

The ol’ lady and kids got home, and I introduced Rey-Rey as a dude I knew from high school (which was sort of true), and said I had to go somewhere for a little while, I’d be back later. My wife followed me out for more details, not nagging, just on a needs-to-know basis as is common in any mutually respectful relationship. “I’m going into some mountain caves that apparently lead to astral planes that connect various realms.”

“How long you gonna be gone?” she asked.

“I don’t know, seems like the space-time continuum’s unpredictable. Maybe like an hour? Or forever?”

She laughed at the forever part and asked that I get some butter and chocolate chips on the way home, the good kind of chocolate chips, 72% cacao.

45s on 33 – #87: “Fortunate Son”

Chief Blackberry Blossoms the ceremonial leader of the elven peoples of the Seven Islands, local to me, clarified his knowledge of Ellabell, the orb spirit mentioned previously throughout this thing. I guess I’ll paraphrase and just type it out instead of use quotes, because I didn’t record it, and I’m not a journalist or anything. But basically he told me that he had an older brother called Floodhead, who had a different name at birth which nobody remembers, but as a toddler there was a big flood in the James River. Whenever this would happen, the elven people would climb the trees in case their islands got flooded, which was preferable to crossing over to where the human people lived. Floodhead got bit by an enchanted dragonfly, which are shaped like normal dragonflies but glow bright green like the lightning bug. This made Floodhead enchanted. He was 47 full moons older than Blackberry Blossoms (the elven tribe keeps calendars by the moon, like all sane peoples on this earth) but Blackberry Blossoms said Floodhead was really different, tapped into an awareness uncommon, even amongst mythical creature cultures on mostly unknown islands.

Thus Floodhead was recruited to work in the in-between realms, known to you and me as the aether. Those realms are where all the various shit that various organisms consider their reality connect together. But Chief Blackberry Blossoms said that once you joined the aether, you never came back – it was a lifetime commitment. I figured it was like classified military work for us (you are human people like me, I assume). In fact, I asked Blackberry Blossoms, “You mean like an intelligence officer?” He looked at me like I was a fool and said, “No, not intelligence. The exact opposite – intuition. Intelligence is what you are taught; intuition is what you already know.”

The elven clan got word back on Floodhead every now and then, through the dragonflies (not all of which are enchanted, but enchanted dragonflies and regular ones live together and share lines of communication). Floodhead did good work and had found love and apparently had had three children, all daughters, triplets in fact, with some sort of indigenous South American fairy female. The triplets were named Chillabell, Hollabell, and Ellabell. And being they were all three born in the aether to parents working those in-between realms, all three were automatically recruited to work there as well. You’re not exactly allowed to leave, at least not here. You have to be relocated a couple universes away, which often takes the entire lifespan of a creature to even get there, which ultimately means if you are born there and don’t pan out as a second generation aether worker, you are shot into space. Kind of felt to me like the “travel to a neighboring universe” part might’ve just been added on to make family members feel okay that their kids got shot off into space until death.

Hollabell was loud and abrasive, far too rough spirited for the in-between realms, so she was shot off pretty early on. Chillabell was quiet and tended towards pleasantness, but Chief Blackberry Blossoms wasn’t really sure whether she was still there or shot into space. But Ellabell had taken to the work marvelously. He said, “My older brother Floodhead was always considered the most fortunate son of our people for generations. He was destined to be an elder from birth, even before he became known as Floodhead the one with ultra-awareness. The dragonflies said that Ellabell was as fortunate and aware as Floodhead, but times three. She is said to be one of the greatest elven people of recent times, even if she is only half-elf. I do not know what her maternal fairy people were like, but I imagine that influence has helped make her even more of what Floodhead was, multiplied.”

“So she’s cool? I can trust her?” I asked the chief elf. Again, he looked at me as if I was foolish, but then it was as if he remembered, “Oh yeah, this motherfucker is only human.”

He smiled at me a deep old dude friendship for naïve youngster smile and said, “My friend, I would do anything she asked of me. I trust you are doing your own self a favor by doing the same.” So then I went home, but not before rolling dice with Chubb Rock on my way out. (I lost seven whole chunks of white quartz to Chubb Rock. I suspect he might’ve been cheating.)

45s on 33 – #89: “Frankenstein”

Ellabell, the metaphysical fairy spirit, explained to me and my hesher friend Rey-Rey, about a future version of us who was apparently now a malevolent force working against us in space-time continuum sort of suicidal struggle:

“One of the futures of you born from same baseship somehow slipped into figuring out a backdoor to time travel. Most creatures such as yourselves are limited to your present time, which is fine and not a limitation at all. Too many creatures in the universe traveling fourth dimension scale would create clusters and chaos on many astral planes, so it is for the best and nothing anyone should feel lesser about. Just as some things are limited to two dimensions, which you consider flat, some things are limited to three dimensions, which also is seen as flat.

“Thus you can see the dilemma in a third dimension creature traveling through time – their knowledge of what they are traveling is flat, literally limited by their own reality so that they don’t understand the full implications of what they do. A particular future you who we don’t know specifically which you it is yet, has pieced together things beyond his intelligence. When I say ‘we’, I mean the protectors of inspiration, which we do in order to sustain creation. Without creation, there is no color, no suns, no constellations of collaboration, no rainbows of what might be, and darkness swallows up all of it. Nothing can survive darkness, ultimately.

“This particular future you, we give him no name so as to not allow more power than he deserves to be present in him, he cobbled together from different versions of future you different qualities seen as successful. These successes were not in terms of quality of life, or in terms of feeling the joy of creation, but more attached to the financial fruits of those labors. We are certain this perversion of spirit came from the demons and their vile suggestions, but generally that only takes hold to an individual you in existence. We’ve never seen this flourish across multiple versions, and threaten an actual baseship.

“When I say this future you has pieced these things together, he has only done it to himself, by traveling to these other versions born from the same baseship, and frankensteined the little portions he’s observed into his own ways. He is the Frankenstein monster but also the creator of the monster, which goes against the universally known fable, I know.

“But now that he knows he can travel, he hopes to get to the original source baseship, and apply his dark learnings to those original membranes, so that the Heart Stars of inspiration which are produced are fogged out with his perversions of goal. This is dangerous. Generally speaking, throughout the universe, the dark delusions can congeal an individual heart, which is conduit of the source baseship, so that the individual heart no longer receives inspiration, and spirit shrivels up and dies. But never before have we seen an actual baseship go dark and potentially begin producing dark Heart Stars pre-lost to demon desires. We’re not even sure what would happen if this began to be. The fact creatures such as yourselves shriveled up spiritually when the darkness overwhelmed was certainly sad, but it was also a self-defense mechanism for the larger universe, in that you did not create further demon desires. Thus creation has always meant life, and color, and the universe’s quintessence is associated with that. But if this Frankenstein of a man can accomplish his wretched goals, he will maximize the abstract wealth of future versions of him, but we don’t know for certain how it’s going to change the basic nature of the universe.

“You two are two of the only three of you who have actually been to your source baseship. We, the protectors of inspiration, ask that you contemplate its connection to you, and what you might be able to do to protect it, and thus yourself, as well as each other.”

Me and Rey-Rey looked at each other, both flummoxed by how complicated this shit was, both of us kind of simple dudes anyways, and then Ellabell was gone and Rey-Rey was gone and I was in my field, like everything was normal, no Frankensteins, it wasn’t even close to Halloween.

45s on 33 – #90: “Sin Sangre En Las Venas”

Me and Rey-Rey was sitting there by the creek bottom, comparing our own mental notes about that futuristic me which we assumed might be futuristic us since we’d connected on the level that we were very similar in many unexplained ways, and also connected to that vivicolor tunnel that shot us to Rey-Rey’s baseship for birthing his creative arts (mostly epic space raps) and that seemed might be source of mine as well, though the direct connection had not been made. Rey-Rey had seen a dark fog vision one time with a similar future dude, not an office with giant writing computer but instead a music studio with ancient growth hardwood everything and foam soundproof padding made from the slave cotton dabbed with the tears of innocent children so that future Rey-Rey could have the utmost perfection to his hollow sound’s reverberations when recording. Apparently future Rey-Rey did no actual writing of music and had an minor army of ghost writers – literal ghosts resurrected through dark metasciences – who composed the melodies and music and then future Rey-Rey stamped the output with his name as executive creative controller, and by law this made it his. (The law is fucked up, and protects those who have access to how the law reads, not those who are forced to read by the law’s words.)

“He had dead eyes is how I saw him,” said Rey-Rey about his encounter, “Which I’d seen in me when I felt dying, but never all the way dead like that. It was fucked up to see, because I don’t want to be dead in the eyes like that.”

I understood all too well, as when I’d seen those type eyes in the morning mirror, and thought about how I used to twinkle with hazel blue-green hope in photographs from my youth, it concerned me. What was different? Could I get that glow back?

But all our commiserating must have triggered warnings to the aether, because our conversation was quickly swallowed up by brilliant lime green shade, and here came Ellabell bouncing into our collective consciousness, perhaps there perhaps not because logically I’m not even sure it makes sense Rey-Rey was there, or any of this. (I just can’t think about logic, or at least not psycho-logic of earth, and keep it to astro-logic of unexplainable realms, or else I’ll consider myself lost to the craze.)

Ellabell assured, without explanation, “What you saw, both of you, is in fact future versions of you both. And these versions of you both are versions from the same base, which you’ve begun to deduce. But those future versions were clogged by the dark clouds, and their heart stopped functioning to where it allowed Heart Stars to exist. They still believed they were using Heart Stars, but their actual blood stopped flowing behind the metastasized congeal of stifling blackness. Their veins no longer pump blood, and instead subsisted off the flow of abstract numbers, sharp-edged and immoral little shrapnels of ones and twos and fours and nines and zeros poking through their physical form, not dead in physical sense but no longer alive.”

Me and Rey-Rey both was like “what the fuck”. Ellabell continued, “You have both had these visions, and been brought together not by chance but by purpose. Those future you’s are planning great internal attack, through time, on your shared baseship. It threatens all color to your lives, and could plunge all you know to be real into endless mundane hopeless grey – an eternal dreariness to existence. You will have to fight this future, but unfortunately from the space of the present, to which you are attached, which is not a bad thing necessarily, but does leave you susceptible to the dangers of the future.”

Me and Rey-Rey again, we was like “what the fuck” and stared with hype and fire of infinite activated caveman molecules, full of fool adrenaline.

45s on 33 – #91: “Tragico Destino”

A powerful dark cloud emitted, swallowed my consciousness whole, to where all lifely colors were momentarily lost, but then within the darkness I was able to focus (whatever part of “I” was experiencing sensory perceptions, which is probably questionable at this point), and there was an older form of Raven Mack, in what looked to be an office space, not a speck of dirtgod to be seen though, which unsettled current me trapped in prison of present moment. This was a form of me? Some of the same shit that bedazzles my present haphazard life was cleansed, framed, polished, and displayed in this office territory very foreign to current camper cave oracle studio mentality (where I create my Heart Stars).

Futuristic Raven Mack stared at monstrous chrome silver computer contraption, finger pecking language. I thunk, “Well good, I am writing in the future,” but I micro-scoped in and it as missive demands to others to write words to finish his (mine) projects. I read over his (mine) shoulder as he angrily chastised  perceived lesser-thans, who it seemed were in a manufactured creative labor to him (me). His tone was foreign and off-putting to present me, and yet he still signed off with “peace, Raven Mack” (as if that atoned for his demeaning behavior with actual words in the message).

I scanned the grey scaled room for signs of color, but there was none – just sterilized greys and pasteurized off-whites and unconscious-realized blacks, meaning the darkness seemed to have swallowed me. Obviously this was disconcerting.

Such unsettled blasts of two-and-two togethering a seemingly potential future did not prepare me for when future Raven Mack turned around in his rather nice ergonomic office chair. He did not see me, as I guess I wasn’t present there (which makes logical sense as I am present in my own time) but as he turned he looked in my vague direction. His eyes were stunningly devoid of any soul, blanked out though still obviously functional. This blasted me with deep molecular fears, as some mornings I’ve seen vague hints of that same look, when the fog has thickened and is taking a toll on me, “up and atom” in the morning but not feeling motivated to be living the life I follow, and looking in the mirror to blank eyes, no longer alive but only going through the motions. It always struck me as too similar to chicken eyes, not just the ones from my back yard flock but when you pass those big rigs on the interstate with one white body stuffed into each metallic cubicle cage, and they just flop there in transit to their own slaughterhouse demise, resigned to their tragic destiny without even questioning it, not even realizing it, just fucking stock fodder for other creatures further up the pyramid to live off of.

But this future me had not fogged out eyes but those eyes of the believer – one who has accepted the tenets of some false philosophy and has the grey-glazed eyeballs of scientific delusion. I’ve always considered myself a somewhat woke motherfucker, so to see this future me as textbook antithesis to my own notions of who I am (presently), it shook me, I cannot lie. It shook me hard enough that the dark cloud vision started to choke me, like water into the lungs but a spiritual lung not physical.

Pale orange life preserver appeared in far left periphery of my choking vision, and got brighter until it took over, and there was Rey-Rey again. His face was concerned, and then the red maple from my field fleshed out around him in the background.

“What the fuck happened? Why you on the ground in psychic seizure mode?” Rey-Rey asked. I couldn’t put words together (probably for the best) nor could I even think them together correctly, so Rey-Rey’s ability to penetrate my thoughts with comprehension was no good. An unthinking brain cannot be read.

45s on 33 – #92: “Sombras”

As I chilled inside the vast and vivid membranes, Rey-Rey continued to explain, “This is where we counter the darkness, where we fight off those manufactured shadows meant to swallow up all this, and people like this.” Sitting in the midst of this vibrant lava lamp baseship structure, I couldn’t really fathom the power of the darkness in the moment. I mean, I knew that shit existed – it swallows me up regularly, the shadowed depression of comparison, of desire, but right now with Rey-Rey in his baseship, it made no relevant sense.

Rey-Rey still reading my mind though was like, “It might not seem real in this reality, but this reality don’t penetrate the whole universes. I mean, it did, that’s what universes get born from, but it ain’t like that no more. Go back, and you’ll see.”

Many years ago, as a teen, after a period of sleep deprivation, I was deep breath meditating in the backyard behind my mom’s house (which was then mine too) right where we ended up building a Unabomber shack, and I had what I would consider an out-of-body experience. I was floating up in the air over myself, watching myself sit there on the ground, good twenty feet above. But then my conscious mind registered, “Oh shit, you’re floating above yourself looking down!” and immediately, as if connected by unseen umbilical cord, my seeing self was sucked back down into my physical self. I’ve never been able to recreate that moment either.

Until now, because as soon as Rey-Rey said, “Go back, and you’ll see,” the psychic umbilical cord activated itself again, and I shot through the technicolor tunnel for ten seconds or so, and found myself right back in the field, near the broken ass jukebox, sitting on my favorite orange milk crate. No colored orbs were pumping out the jukebox now, but I could hear the gears jiggling and something manifesting. With a cough and sputter, a coal dust grey cloud of sound bleched out the jukebox.

It was warbling some horrible unscrewed and unchopped sounds I couldn’t make it, but it float at me, and I heard horrible demon voices singing of desire and want and lust and greed and all that nasty shit that pretty much every mythological spirituality since the dawn of monkeys thinking of themselves as better than monkeys has spake about. The jukebox kept spitting out the dark grey demon bursts, but then – finally – a little colored cloudburst sang out in contrast. It almost ran to my head (or me to it), and it sang in slow syrup Space Espanol, “Easy to get lost in shadows, but the demons lurk behind; beware of getting lost in shadows, to where demons control your mind.”

The grey was everywhere though, and a few of those clouds fogged over the little colored cloudburst. I heard the demon shrieks of “great American novel” and “genius grant” and oh god the wretched ear worm of “M.F.A. master of fine arts, creativity mined from well-trained minds, never hearts”. I tried to hear the Space Espanol shadow chant again, but it was being drowned out by the others, and I wanted to get up – I was in my own fucking field again, wasn’t I? – but I couldn’t. The shadows were literally weighing me down. I recognized this as what science calls clinical depression, what I call not being right, or being lost in the fog. The fog is shadows and the shadows are made by demons and it gets thick to where, even though it’s not necessarily a scientifically validated physical thing, it weighs you down, and you can’t even get out of bed in the late morning without exerting a day’s worth of effort. It sucks the life right out of you, just to be alive.

45s on 33 – #93: “Ain’t Nothing You Can Do”

Ain’t nothing I could do – Rey-Rey had snatched me up in his colored fog and we floated off together through blitzkrieg of visuals which was like those roller coaster-like intros to Imax movies where they show you all the awesome epileptic shit they could do before slowing back down to the feature. But we didn’t slow down. It felt like a thousand hours of travel through color tunnels which twisted and turned like tree roots tendrilling down through the dirt, except we were shooting through I don’t know what. I didn’t really have time to think on it, as it all was happening faster than my cognizant ability to process. Rey-Rey floated right beside me, his shaggy cactus jack hair flapping behind him, and it felt like he was holding my hand, firm but not tight, like a stereotypical business handshake greeting, but his hands were visible, held out in front of him, mime-like.

Finally his voice hollered through the rumble of travel we were having, “WE’RE ALMOST THERE!” His head never turned nor did his mouth move, but the sound had the effect of somebody yelling at you through tropical depression winds. Our physical movement stopped, along with color blurs along periphery, with cacophonous vacuum shutting off sound, and without plop, we stopped and were standing in some sort of science fictional contraption, but instead of sharp electronic gadgetry, everything pulsed like muscle tissue, even though it had lots of weird brightly colored nodes all over, which seemed like electronic devices but part of a living thing. Again, it had the feel of that dream state where one thing is like another thing you recognize, but not that thing at all, except underneath, built from foundation your consciousness recognizes, but in unconscious ways.

I was about to ask the obvious “Where are we?” when Rey-Rey laughed and pre-emptively answered, “We on my base-ship. This is for me what you have with them raggedy ass campers in the field. One and the same, just different planes… astral planes not aero planes.”

I realized this motherfucker had telepathy on me. Rey-Rey laughed again. “Yes. But we’re the same. Infinite strings twisting around to form the same mosaic set of electrical impulses that we both call ‘me’.”

Looking around at all the throbbing membranes in brilliant vivid colors sidetracked me from my scientific indignation this shaggy-haired Rey-Rey dude was shooting conversation straight talking with my internal brain. That area has normally always been monologue territory. But even having that notion of reality hijacked got lost to all the dazzling pulses of what looked to be organic actual life matter, but in sci-fi spaceship basic structure. But he had called it a “base-ship”…

“Yeah, we call them base-ships, but that’s where motherfuckers like us, well like me because that’s both of us, build our Heart Stars to manifest decoration to fresh universes. Gotta bedazzle all these universes, ya know?”

I didn’t like him calling us all part of his “me”, because that felt subservient on my part. But I thought that in my brain, so Rey-Rey caught it, and corresponded with, “No tops or bottoms to our ‘me’, man. All them different strings twist around together, equally, building the strength of the whole. Ain’t nothing you can do, ain’t nothing I can do either to take ownership of ‘me’. Don’t no known body own who we are. No unknown body either, as a matter of natural scientific universal fact.”

Rey-Rey smiled. His shaggy hair was long but not long enough to have that evened out look of long-hair masculine, but with the shaggy bangs eyeballs could hide behind and peek through like curtains of growing irresponsibility. He had that old school stoner metalhead look, like my own 9th grade yearbook photo.

45s on 33 – #94: “Buscarte Para Que”

The camera I have was in my hands as I walked down into the field the first time I remember hearing the Space Espanol. It was twilight, which is a great time for the camera I have because I put it on baby mode (no flash) and it still sucks up strange rays of between day and night, giving everything a foggy glow, just like my eyeballs see a lot of times. The rock altar was there, and I have a few tiny unpolished pieces of amethyst scattered in it, including one at the top pedestal next to the homemade orgone coil of lounge generation. That piece of amethyst was glowing bright lavender in the twilit sky. And the Space Espanol was playing. I’m still not clear if the Space Espanol had started and drew me down to the field where the rock altar and broken jukebox were, or if it started as I got closer, or what – the specificity of memory is sometimes blurred in important moments like that. But by the time my memory catches up to what happened, I know for sure I was there, with the camera I have, and the amethyst was glowing bright, and the Space Espanol music was playing. I tried snapping some pictures of the amethyst but it kept fogging out, camera unable to catch it right, like a sky or full moon.

As I said in the beginning, “Space Espanol” seems like a stupid term for what was making sounds but it’s appropriate. It didn’t sound like Spanish I knew from jobsites, but was similar, perhaps based on the same basic structures. But it felt non-earthly, which again, none of this makes logical sense. I really struggle with that, because the demons inside start piping up with their voices, “You are stupid, these things aren’t real, what the fuck is wrong with you?” And I start to want to distance myself from believing what I know I’m experiencing.

After wasting about 69 blurry pictures on my SD card, I stopped trying to take pictures of the glowing amethyst, and walked over to the jukebox. It was on F8, and every time I’d gone to it, I’d bumped it up one, so I put it to F9. Now understand my broken jukebox sits underneath a red maple and the power cord for it is plugged into the dirt near the red maple’s base. I could feel a burst at the base underneath, in the ground, and light purple glow, similar to the unpolished amethyst, traveled up the cord, disappeared into the jukebox machine, where I could hear some gears springing and pings ponging and old machinery undoing itself, and then with a visual boom (but little additional sound) a watermelon-sized purple orb came out the front speaker cabinet of the ragged jukebox. This was full of natural seeds, full-sized watermelon, not tiny seedless transmogrification sized. The orb was similar to the Heart Star I had previously seen, which Ellabell had been inside of, but this one was darker. It floated around, solar flare like, where I couldn’t focus on it but it was definitely there, then just like the Heart Star, it surrounded my head.

Look, despite all this babble, I am a logical person, with fairly decent critical thinking skills, so I knew the previous time this happened the glowing orb was full of bouncing happy girls, I expected the same. And there were small people-ish shapes in there, somersaulting and back flipping and running hoo-hahaing in excited spirals, but they had dark shaggy hair, the color of ancient sand, and appeared to be boys, not girls. One floated right to the front of the images I thought I was seeing (but am not sure, obviously) and though his mouth never moved, it certainly felt like he said, “What up? I'm Rey-Rey.”

45s on 33 – #95: “Bad Bad Leroy Brown”

Nice cars (like long Cadillac) or nice clothes (like silk draws) or fine women (or whatever sexual desire you make a trophy into objectified status)… these are the suggestions of the demons who tell you of desire. This is how the moments of inspiration that add up to years of effort get hijacked into red. You think of others who use what appears to be their inspiration and spin that into gold, spin it into all the material desires those little demons perched on your shoulder suggest you should have to. These desires are always black – the opposite of the Heart Stars – but leave you in a red state of anguish and frustration. Even when the visions floating in the black desires are grasped, they never move from black, because there are more already crowding those to the side. There’s always one more thing to be had, one more thing to be “needed”, one more thing that will finally make you feel whole (you think) – at least you tell yourself.

We get told to define our successes in these dark desires’ terms, in the black demon suggestions we are able to accumulate. We view others as lesser when they don’t accumulate as much, when they have less. It’s their own fault – not the demons, not the devils behind the demons, no… it’s purely their own fault.

And then there are the devils who have vast collections of these desires, born with it in their devil genetic lines, so even if they realize how wrong it is and shun it as much as possible, the darkness remains a burden on their existence, though none of us acknowledge this. We pretend those dark clouds are what make us great, make us successful.

Those demons are bad. I take pictures every day, pictures of my little world and little worlds within that world that I create (not produce), and the camera I use is the one I have. I have had other cameras but they haven’t felt the same, and sometimes the price has been more, on purpose, because the demons tell me, “You are great. What if you had a great camera too? What if you had a nice camera, like those other people?” But any time I’ve had a different camera, it has not worked like the camera I have. So when the camera I have breaks (which it has), I get another camera just like the camera I have, usually for dirt cheap, because it is old and obsolete and nobody has demons on their shoulder telling them to get a camera like the one I create with.

The demons tell you that you are never good enough. But the fucked up thing about the demons is they get inside of you. Somehow they gain access, not sure how (though I suspect the brain) but they crawl down into your guts and wrap their little demon tendrils all around your intestines and up through your stomach and try to clutch at your heart. They can never get in there, so when The Inspiration comes, it is still pure heart thought, but they get right there so they can grab at it with the demon suggestions as soon as The Inspiration radiates from your heart outward.

Most of our best creations as upright monkey people suggest that these demons get their comeuppance, that these demons eventually meet their match in someone who is just a little more powered by what is right and what is heart than the demon. I’m not sure how that happens when those demons get inside of you, and start to working at The Inspirations as they are born, and the frustrated inspirations from before have started to congeal, and the emissions from heart become smaller and the demons are right there to grab at what can still get through, waiting to pounce on it and pepper spray it with all the psychic blackness.