Second Paragraph, First Sentence

The woman who caught his attention walks on.  In three years, she filled this part almost to capacity.

He noticed a crack in the concrete encasement which contained the catalyst.  Once it began to leak, he feared repercussions.  For his mind contained many working parts.   None by itself was intelligent.   Combined together; you have something that can almost think.   Even ooze is capable of basic arithmetic. 

Abruptly, she soars into light rain, and we tilt and turn.

The walking wounded have to take care of themselves.  Anna has given her weapon back to Katniss.   The games continue.   She now is in medical mode, doing a sort of instant triage on the man with the leaking brain. 

Meantime figures are gathering just inside the doors and arrows begin to flicker and ping. 

His days passed in a dream, as if time itself flowed differently for him now.

She gave him wine that smelled and tasted of baby fat:  "Dude, you seriously need to focus."

I can't, I told her.   I no longer have the equipment.   Take a closer look.

A white stump of bone stuck out of a bloody mass of flesh.  The hand that had been drinking the baby fat wine was severed at the wrist.   And two tiny fingers had been almost stripped of flesh, ligament and muscle.

My wrist, I yelled.   It has been bitten through---by teeth!

She left him and went out on the porch, shading her eyes from the hot morning sun.  According to the usual theory, the ground under our grove of trees here is stable.  Yes, the roots have pushed through in certain areas, but you will find temporary solace here. 

So he found a valley high in the mountains, away from all the trails with a hard to find entrance.   There I built a hut and established a garden.   The first year was difficult.   So was the second.   But I persisted.   Ninety eight percent of life is just showing up, I kept telling myself.   At times I was lonely, but not often.   In the third year, I built a cabin and started entertaining visitors.  The cycle continued.  

Happy Memorial Day:-).....

Desiccated

Its impossible to go back to your past.  All you have are snippets, images, flashes, phrases.   You cannot go back to full sentences, let alone paragraphs.  The context and emotional content is missing.

Going back to your past in dreams comes closest.  Dreams are always different than the past reenacted, but sometimes the emotional context can be approximated.  Indeed, the memory of an emotion experienced in a dream is something  more profound than the memory of the mere event.

In my case, it was the emotional intensity of dreaming being back at the campus at Notre Dame seen through the eyes of a freshman.  The immensity of it.  Of course the feeling is shrunk now even in a dream.   Desiccated.  The dream of my past emotion at Notre Dame was the sensation that the other students had so many more answers.  Whether I was in the dining hall, in the small parties in rooms that were permitted by the rigid alcohol policy, or in the back of cars,  I was a spectator in awe of all the conversations around me.  As if I were living on a planet where everyone was privy to a secret agreement that I was not part of and could not participate in. 

I don't feel that way anymore.   And probably haven't felt that way in years.   Now I live on the same planet as everyone else.   And the only secret agreements are those that are kept secret from everyone.  There are no more mysteries--at least not with people.   I'm more of less just like everyone else. Yawn.

Back at Notre Dame, I heard about the story associated with the dude whom the residence hall I stayed in at Notre Dame was named after  ("Howard Hall").   Howard was his last name, I don't remember his first name.  He lived in the 19th Century I think.  The story went that Mr. Howard was socially awkward and into poetry.  One day a woman shook him out of his revere.   As if he were living in an isolated upstairs bedroom and the chick was down in the front yard throwing rocks up to disturb him.  After she did that, he evidently took to her and they married and lived together happily ever after.   I'm sure there was more to the story.   Likely, she was just coming off a bad relationship and he was a nice safe guy.   Or his family had a lot of money.  (Clue--a residence hall at Notre Dame was named after him).  Still the story resonated with me at the time--as if I were waiting for a headstrong girl to overcome my shyness and show an interest in me.   Unless I misremember, no one ever did.  At least not at that time.  I was still living on another planet.   A planet that lacked artificial raspberry flavoring made from desiccated beaver anal glands.

And indeed, maybe it was the lack of beavers during my formative years that caused me to be so alienated. Just when I thought that I was biting into that piece of raspberry flavored dark chocolate, it turned out that was I was really biting into was beaver anus, or specifically, raspberry flavor extracted from the gland next to a beavers anus. For now I know that beavers mark their territory by secreting pungent scents from their behinds. But unlike Fido's odors, the fragrance of beavers has been prized by perfumers for centuries. Extracts of its secretions are thought to have put the punch in many famous eaux de toilette, from Chanel to Shalimar.   And, as the urban legend goes, are used to mimic the flavors of raspberries and other fruit berries in candies and chocolates.   I think this explains much of my salad days with raspberry vinaigrette dressing.     

 Mr. Beaver drinks too much wine a the rotary party, the hot bag of what?, and the new berlin winery which is becoming increasingly accessible by bike

An aid to fix the memory in my head

Stories are important.   In the end, they are all that is left.   All the present moments leave us.  Stories endure:

"For old time sake, darling won't you break this heart of mine.
Make no mistake, we could never fake a love so fine."

So the Ronin hits what he perceives is a new low.  And indeed it is very low under the ocean.   A real low for Low Ronin.    For it has been recounted that: 

The Low Ronin drives a little slower.  The Low Ronin is a real goer.
Low Ronin is the one to meet yeah!
Low Ronin don't use no gas now
Low  Ronin don't drive to fast
Take a little trip
Take a little trip
Take a little trip and see.

Just when all hope seemed lost, the Ronin washes ashore into the da da dum.. the Blood Orange Lagoon.  Now our story starts to become extremely citrusy.  For who would have thought that in the next hour, our whole existence would be turned upside down by that most malevolent of all citrus fruits, the "Blood orange."  The blood orange is the only thing worse than having a brother in law who suddenly comes out of the closet and starts dating the most flamboyant queen in the small town that your favorite sister resides in.  Take that back. The blood orange is the only thing worse than having a brother in law who suddenly comes out of the closet and then marries the most flamboyant queen in the small town that your favorite sister resides in.  Take that back.  The blood orange is the only thing worse than having a brother in law who suddenly comes out of the closet and then marries the most flamboyant queen in the small town that your favorite sister resides in and then puts the wedding details in the small town newspaper.   Back that take:  closet, orange, queen, town, put, reside, in, buoyant sister wants to move out of the town but her two kids are still in high school and don't want to leave.

I could have sworn that I had never been to the blood orange lagoon before.   But this is a much different story.  As soon as I washed ashore, I could tell that I was drawing attention from something.    Attention of the worst kind.   Attention that cannot help but result in catastrophe.   Yes, I'm speaking about that kind of attention than can only be resident in one place.  And no, I'm not talking about the attention you get in a small town when your husband suddenly comes out of the closet and starts dating the most flamboyant queen in town, etc. etc. etc.  

So I decide to call it a night at the local inn on the cove within walking distance of said lagoon.  I saunter up the to the bar.   "Yo innkeep, how about a room and a shot of Don Julio Anejo."

"I'm so sorry senor, but we don't want no trouble here."

"What are you talking about? And why are you speaking Spanish?  I thought we were in the South Pacific?"

"Did I say trouble"?  "I'm sorry, I meant to say that we don't want to no treble here.  Bass only, and I don't like your octave." 

Well La Di Fucking Da...I retorted.

Keeping it all together

The mind is a terrible thing to waste.

So it must be kept in check.   The cerebral spinal fluid is a subtle stasis field for just that purpose.

That's what my friend Dave K. thought.   But he was late for my little get together.   He thought he would drop in unexpectedly.   But for some reason his chute didn't open.  There he was, dead, sprawled out on the side walk.   The parachute was still strapped on his back, unopened.  His body twisted in all sorts of contortions when it hit the ground. 

I wondered what must have been going though his mind as he was frantically pulling on the ripcord trying to get the damn thing open. Then again--maybe he died peacefully, resigned to his fate, breathing deeply:  in and out, every three to five seconds in a cycle of inhalations and exhalations. Maybe he was totally relaxed and his Heart Rate Variability didn't deviate from 100 until the unfortunate impact with terra firma.

If Dave K did it, I can't think of one valid reason why we all can't slow down this entire burlesque show called life into breath by breath increments.  Every step we take every move we make one breath at a time.  It would take a ton of discipline, but a little discipline never hurt anyone.   Wouldn't it be great if we could live with that much intentionality?

But who am I crapping?  I wolf down food with scarcely a second thought.  Two gulps and the glass of wine is gone.   I look up from work and half the day is almost gone.  I only approach the one breath at a time method when the shit is totally hitting the fan.   When its late at night and my mind is racing and I'm doing all I can to put the stasis field around it. 

My mendicant is sitting cross legged on the rickety wooden steps leading down to the silly silly river.  An old man sitting straight backed.  He seems to be staring at the evening sunlight's fading reflection into the stream.  Tears brim in his wide eyes and pulse down his leathery cheeks.  A small mosquito has settled into the corner of his left eye to have a drink.   I put a few coins in his tin cup just so he can keep it all together. 

 

You Sorta Missed It

September 12, 1994.  

I'm in Goa, India on the Beach.  Next to the Beach is St. Anthony's restaurant.  St. Anthony's then, like now, was nothing special.  Just a small thatched hut on the beach with a few chairs and tropical drinks.   And fish curry.

Later on that night, I hear music coming from the hut next door.  Lots of music.  And there were Germans in the hut.   Lots of Germans.  I knew they were Germans because other than myself, the only other Caucasians in Goa at the time that I remembered were Germans.

The music coming from the hut was peculiar type of music.  To my unsophisticated ears, it sounded like techno--whatever that would have meant to me at the time.  But a less rigid techno.   I knew Kraftwerk for instance.  But this was much more upbeat.  Like Kraftwerk on acid.   And the Germans were dancing to it like animated freewheeling yet still unavoidably rigid hippie robots.  It was a site to see.

I had no idea at the time, but I was witnessing the birth of Goa Trance, which later developed into the nomenclature of psychedelic trance or psytrance, which splintered into numerous subgenres by the early 2000s.  These included progressive psychedelic, darkpsy (dark psychedelic trance), full-on, psybreaks  and suomisaudundi (Finnish trance), psychedelic ambient ("psybient" dub), and psychfibbonacci (Lithuanian trance) and a fusional aesthetic referred to as "ethnodelic", all the signs sounds and scenes of a diverse culture, albeit psycultural movement.

And Goa Trance was the wellspring of this musical movement, and its role as "marginal" cultural central was unmistakable.  And I was there.   I was witnessing the birth of something new, something powerful.  And what did I do?

I walked out of the hut.  I was so unbelievably lame at the time.  I had a visceral fear of entering bars, nightclubs, or basically anyplace by myself.  So I missed it.   Crap-a-deum.   Who knows what would have happened had I overcome my fears and joined the hippie robots? 

P.S.   I hear that St. Anthony's is now a karaoke bar:-(