excess

i could do with a bit more excess. from now on i'm going to be immoderate--and volatile--i shall enjoy loud music and lurid poetry. i shall be rampant.

joanne harris

primitive darkness

one day, they'll find a way to record dreams and put them up on grainy projectors in auditoriums. my dreams would be in hi-def-technicolor-buena-vista-warner-brothers-restored-to-original-glory. if i watched my own, would i dream them again? would there be sequels, twists in the plot, re-runs? would people like the stories that come from the border between headland and heartland, soulville and spirit city? would it influence our own mental thrift shops -- elements, people, and illogical sequences like estate sale lamps, shrunken sweaters that belonged to someone else? spectacular light shows of flora and fauna, thoughts like burrs clinging to subconscious wool, later spun into elaborate tales. nonsense is practical, reason is upturned, fears take supernatural form.

dream material seeps into waking life. it shows up in poetic moments, coincidence, archangels and bona fide villains. characters cross over from the mind's directorial debut. they make demands. they obscure road signs. they leave trail markers. they fight imagined evil -- tigers morph into humans, the humans hang signs around the dreamer's neck marked "primitive darkness".

paranoid schizophrenia -- a tidy seam, a red licorice split down the middle of what is real and what is imagined. and what is distilled from the imaginarium of the unhinged? black crystal bubbles that shatter prettily against the sunny bricks of sanity. back away slowly, hands up, weapons dropped, escape is hard-won from a black hole. extraction -- carry anything that will fetch a price, ignite sleeping dragons, aggravate the ether tigers. waves, olas olas olas, to wash away the path of tip toes fleeing in the night.

why should light retreat from the dark? dark calls light dark. dark consumes snuffed out light. fading light is more wholly devoured by so-called primitive darkness. retreat invites attack, attack yields exhaustion. mao said: when the enemy retreats, we pursue. sun tzu said: do not pursue an enemy who simulates flight. a simple event becomes an insidious network of trench warfare. extraction rattled the chains of zealotry.

beauty is demonized. budding branches, frost-defying blooms, vernal magic -- the number two -- all targets of a bitter patrol. mother nature is now a saint stripped of title, a ribboned harlot, a devious queen, a scheming temptress. locks turn. the scent of loss meets the eye of memory. sterile isolation breeds scorn as furious as the passion it despises. blanks filled with damning ink, blood dripping on the page in razored streaks. resentment: the kind that comes from a heart-shaped box heavy with the entrails of the innocent.

neighbors living side by side. truth chocked up to false beads strung meticulously on an abacus of obsession -- this date, this time, this injury. normal constructs of law, morality, good conduct -- all incinerated in the fires of synthetic brimstone: jesus freaks on crusade.

match up: religious zealotry in the ring versus moral turpitude in the opposite corner. both fighting blindly. both under the banner of murky prerogatives. fear fighting itself. truth defending freedom. a clash of raw struggle for dominance. good versus evil, tiger versus dreamer.

bridges

We build bridges
Don’t we
Sometimes need a hand

Despite our best laid plans
Don’t we
Sometimes miss what we had

And we struggle
Don’t we
Sometimes lose the reasons

But in the peaceful morning
We can clearly see
Where we’ve been

Oh, and the tide pulls us out, alright
Oh, and the tide pulls us out, alright
Oh, when the tide brings us back
How sweet it is

crocodile

last night i dreamt that i was the proud owner of a bar in louisiana. the bar had flooded and after years of trying to drain it, i just let it be a swim-up swamp bar. the water was murky, the lights were browning out in raw bulbs, and my clientele sat on stools that were one foot under water. algae and bog slime floated on the surface of the water, which was an army green with specks of silt in the sunlight. i perched on a stool, and pondered new methods for draining the bar. people gave me advice -- drain it, don't drain it. then, one day, an old man came in and swam up to where i sat, puzzling at my muck-filled establishment. he said, the only way this swamp will ever drain is if you find the crocodile that lives here. it was supposedly the largest crocodile anyone in this undisclosed backwoods town had ever seen.

how can i find it and get rid of it? i asked him.

you can't, he said, it has to eat every person in the bar. then it will leave and the swamp water will drain.

i only had about four clients, plus a bar tender. i wondered if i was included in that "every"...

just then, a younger man came up to me and told me he could kill the crocodile and no one would get hurt. i told the old man to clear the bar.

he asked if i had a gun, i told him i did -- in the cash register. the old man made everyone leave and sat with me on the bar, convinced this younger man could do nothing to stop the crocodile from having its way.

the younger guy opened the cash register and pulled out my dripping gun.

it won't shoot, he said.

he found a large pepper grinder and decided that would be his weapon of choice. the old man and i were doubtful, but willing to let him try. just then, i saw the crocodile sleeping under the water between the window and the register -- bubbles zigzagging up from its nostrils. it was a caricature of the ferocious beast evoked by saturday cartoons, a captain hook nightmare with a mouth large enough to swallow a man whole.

i pointed to the crocodile and the young man plunged the pepper grinder into the water in a lame attempt to knock the crocodile out. the crocodile was not amused. slowly, it rose to the top of the water and scooped the man into his jaws--pepper grinder in hand--like a pelican. with one closed-lip smile, the crocodile crushed the man like a mouthful of pretzels -- his bones snapping audibly. the crocodile stared at me, then sank back into the water. the old man disappeared. i thought, he was right, and as soon as he eats me the bar will finally be saved. and now, i was left to face this thing alone, but i had no desire to escape.

the crocodile rose out of the water with blood-stained teeth, inches from my face.

i'm not going to eat you, he said. i just needed to eat one last man, and then i could be free again.

then, the crocodile turned into a man, and the bar slowly drained and morphed into a cocktail parlor in the lobby of a hotel -- red carpet, wine glasses suspended in uniform perfection, employees polishing the bar and patrons sipping gin in booths under hanging tiffany lamps.

he walked me through the bar and told me tales of being stuck as a crocodile for years, with a voracious quota set by whomever had issued his reptilian curse.

it's been so hard, he said. eating all of these people for so many years, but i'm finally free.

[fade to black]

salve

From Eckhart Tolle:

Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it can never leave you. It is not dependent on some other body, some external form. In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is Love.

goldilocks

goldilocks broke into a cottage belonging to three bears. she ate their food, sat in their chairs, rifled through their unmentionables and slept in their beds. why couldn't she just get a nice job in town serving porridge to the townfolk, eek out a few dimes and sit in her own chair? sleep in her own bed?

maybe she was curious. maybe she wanted to know what a house of bears looked like, what they ate, how they slept. she was a picky breaker and enterer too -- she didn't accept anything that wasn't 'just right'.

first, she samples the bears' porridge -- gratuitously left on the table. she dips a finger in the first bowl. too hot. she scoots to the next bowl -- slightly smaller than the first -- and dips the same finger for a taste of mama bear's porridge. TOO cold. it's the little mickey mouse plastic bowl of porridge that finally lights her fire...just right. why stop at illegal entry when there's food to be stolen from a baby? conscience and guilt are distant spectres in her story -- the only thing that matters is her mission to find "just right".

instead of guessing that baby bear's meager possessions are typically 'just right' based on the porridge, she insists on trying each item from the top down. papa bear's chair is too wide, too hard, too tall -- smells like whiskey. mama bear's is too soft, too narrow, too short -- beset with knitting needles. baby bear's is -- surprise -- just right.

is it curiosity that compels her to try the "toos" each time rather than recognizing a simple pattern? does she fret, at all, that while she's trying on papa bear's smoking jacket and donning mama bear's shower cap, that they'll come home and think she's just right for dessert?

she doesn't. not until they do show up and she books it -- having already discovered how she likes her porridge, her reading chair, and her sleeping arrangements.

in choosing what is 'just right' i work in extremes. if i were goldilocks, i would try papa's first, then baby's, then i'd assume mama's was just right. i'd assume that whatever sat in the middle would be the average of papa's concrete bed and baby's satin crib. one extreme is usually a catalyst for the other, the impulse flipper, the frictionless pivot. i'd assume that if papa's is too hot, baby's must be too cold...but not so. goldilocks is methodical, consistent, and puts her theory to the test to discover her 'just right'.

goldilocks isn't concerned with finding what's 'right', sort-of-ok, or good enough. she is undeterred by the possibility of jail time, or the threat of a grisly death via pissed off bears. she is so hell-bent on finding 'just right' that she breaks into a house of bears and loiters there long enough to find out.

for when she was good she was very, very good. but when she was bad, she was perfectly horrid.

living room

complete with inadvertent grounding, nike mud skiing, and sledless luging down a spring rivulet.