Where Are The Great Sages

I wish I could make like Houdini and perform a great escape from here to anywhere else...slip out of the ropes and handcuffs to freedom and dead on Halloween...a great escape to someplace good, just any place to get away from the way...when you’re way way down and owe three months rent, where are the sages?...when your girl that you figured you had something going with drops you for some Johnny Come-Lately, where are the sages?...when you are down to your last dollar and all prospects look dim, where are the sages to slip you twenty?...most likely the modern day wannabe sages are tucked away somewhere in a fancy looking temple, wearing thier precious robes, meditating quietly after a nice dinner of warm bread and hot soup—legs folded, eyes closed, hands in the official position to reach enlightenment—totally stiff as a statue seeking nirvana—the clock tic-tocking the only noise in the room with plush red carpet with the smell of incense wafting through the air...the purveyors, soothsayers, and bricklayers of the zen way, and the moans and groans of the old bones of the handful of people in the hall...the dead ones meanwhile are locked away in a dusty book in some library and are off the grid...no wonder they’re all so goddamn peaceful, they don’t have to try to get by from day to day in the real world; the struggle, the drama, the circle of life that grinds you down, down to the ground and pounds on you and beats you into submission...the recipe for life is a massive amount of problems sprinkled liberally...sometimes it’s easier to self-medicate with vodka or whiskey...we communicate with the liquor spirits and listen to the hypnotic pulsating samba music and fade into the darkness of the nothingness of another night...sitting in a dive in the dark recesses of our favorite lounge long after happy hour and as we sink into unhappiness...conversation has ceased with the local neighborhood stranger--it’s never the local neighborhood sage…they’re like cops, they’re never around when you need one...hell, they’ve got it worse than you do...so for now, we stare at the floor in a stupor or hold the bar up with our elbow...well ok, we’ll have one more drink and call it a night, maybe...we think about what might have been if only or dream about what might be if only--we only had a chance...but maybe when that chance called, our phone was out of order...contentment is the desperate fugitive that eludes capture and lures us into the dark alleys and bars...uh oh, it’s closing time but you’re not ready to go home just yet...you’ve been hanging around with with your best friend Jack all night and aren’t ready to part...why does this place have to close so early, you think to yourself...then you answer yourself that it really isn’t that early now--in fact, it’s so late it’s getting early...so the stragglers like you head out, grim-faced with their heads down and their hands in their pockets...they wobble into their cars and you wobble down the sidewalk...you are so lucky--you have a place a couple of blocks away that you can use that unsteady zigzag walk to get to...it’s a dump but the way you feel now, you can’t wait to get there.

Looking Behind The Curtain of Nostalgia

He walked in the room of good times which seemed a lot smaller than it used to be and which was just off the true and peeked a look behind the glittery warm curtain of nostalgia and didn’t like what his eyes eyed...saw and heard echoes of rust in full reverb, serious deterioration with massive feedback, and a muddled mix of totally serious dilapidation— and then it dawned on him in that landfill of a mind that maybe things in the bygone days weren't all rainbows high in the sky illuminated by Sweet Mary Sunshine and jazz band concerts and red and blue balloons all jacked up on atomic number 2 and rising fast on the charts...up up and away —nostalgia is a pretty blanket that feels warm but is nothing more than something to be thrown over the hole in the sofa or the messy bed that you made for yourself but that isn’t made because the wind cuts through it and into you like sword of the mighty samurai..there were a lot of sub-freezing wind chills in your face kick in the pants down on all fours beat you into submission days but with the passage of time most of those—they fade into nothingness; ink on the sales store receipt left through the seasons on the garage floor with the dirt and the sawdust and the cigarette butts...or become grotesque twisted winces that can’t be expunged from the record...rose colored-glasses wearing soggy brained remembrances of fond memories with a silly smile that happened but never really happened except in the workspace of the mind—a cluttered work area with copious junk, projects never finished and a purple workbench decorated with oil stains...an out of touch with reality mind that created it with crayons and scissors and glue--real cut and paste with the wrong, uneven or the less desirable laying on the floor waiting to be swept up by a broom of forgetfulness...like mounds of ribbons of film snipped dead now to an epic of meager proportions that had long stopped playing at The Paramount Theatre downtown which was on the street called vacant lot avenue where the broken glass on the road shone and stared you in the eyes and challenged you to a knock down drag out fight...burned out lights and the broken marquee and a large crack in one of the front doors--maybe it was a crack into the celluloid world where all try to escape to at one time or another...and now it’s all nothing more than rubble from trouble...the reality was a technicolor picture of weeds, broken windows, walls of dreams that had bowed in and long since buckled into some form unrecognizable...and then there were those opportunities that were lost that somehow fell out of the pocket of his best hoodie and wound up blowing in the wind and wadded up like last week’s grocery list and eventually incinerated...and frustration found when it kicked in the front door and woke you from a sound sleep to answer questions and you groped to find equilibrium from your stupor and they have ways of making you talk...living in the past is often preferred to living in the present by those with unremarkable lives.

Cubicle

In my experience, there’s several types of people who inhabit work cubicles...I myself wouldn’t be caught dead in one and then remind me of mausoleum crypts, but I’ve been in and out of office buildings enough to scope the layout and get a read on the different types of employees you find...you got the worker who takes to heart that they spend half of their waking hours there and should make their cubicle feel like home...they have pictures of their spouse, their ever so beautiful children in cute little frames, their pets, photos of every living relative, and so on...small plants and other decorations...so much peripheral stuff on their desk, they practically don’t have room for what their actually supposed to be doing...it’s clutter city...if they ever get fired, they’ll have to get a U-Haul to take all that garbage home once the company throws it in a corner of the human resources department in a few nice boxes (how generous of them),...then you have the worker who has papers all over their desk, and every inch of anywhere else is taken up with sticky notes...can’t find a square inch of empty space on their desk or surrounding area...they often get complimented by clueless management on how busy they must be and how much work they must be doing...most of the time, these kind don’t know up from down and if their desk is a mess, you can imagine what a dump they must live in...the truth is that they don’t get much done, but they sure create the impression that they do, and it’s all about perception isn’t it?...if their phone rings, it’s five minutes to find it...there’s another kind that posts motivational sayings all over, or puts pictures of expensive sports cars by their computer to urge them on...is that for themselves or if they just think they are impressing management with that charade...of course, they have no chance of ever getting such a car at that kind of job which pays weekly...very weakly...and motivational sayings aren’t worth the junk their written on, but they sure do look impressive to the bosses...it’s a sure sign of a motivated employee!...yeah, sure...their motivated all right...motivated to find a better job before long and leave this loser of a job behind...then there’s the type that keep a nice organized desk...these are the kind of workers who usually do the most, but management figures they must not be doing nothing since their desk is so tidy...they don’t go around beating their chest about what they’ve done...they do their work quietly and efficiently...they usually get passed over when it comes time for promotions...they never win the employee of the month award...they’re overlooked by the big boss types...another kind of employee in that circus is the kind that I would be...the one that brings absolutely nothing in from home...they know their position is always tenuous and that the first time management figures they can get by without them to save money, they’ll be shown the door...they know that it’s easy come, easy go...they work from day to day like the hired gun they are...when their employer decides they don’t need the hired guns anymore, then the gun wanders onto the next town...they use a paper cup to drink out of, not even wanting to bring their own mug to work...if they get let go, they can just walk out and be save the embarrassment of having to get a box to take their crap out.

All American White Men Are Evil

I’m always amused when I hear some fool say on television, “We are seeing history”, or muse about some event as history being made...no kidding idiot, anything that happens becomes history or historic...there’s nothing significant or groundbreaking about that...what is different is that some history is more noteworthy and likely to be remembered than other kinds...in our own lives, we have certain things that stand out from the past...for some reason unclear undefined or understandable, there are those things that have a seemingly permanent place in that little corner of the mind that the great architect designed to hold such things...some are trivial, silly things to others, but they are historic to us...and some things remain remembered for no reason whatsoever and we need a delete file button to press to erase them from our hard drive and free up space so that we can remember stuff that we really want to remember... another thing about history is it isn’t always the truth despite what the ‘authorities’ want you to believe...for thousands of years, history has been embellished, whitewashed, or twisted into some kind of lie...go through any older history book and you will find things that are not quite the truth...lies, exaggerations, half-truths...they’re all there--whatever it takes to present their ‘version of the truth’...like when one side writes things about a war—the winners always write the ‘definitive’ version of what actually happened even though it may not have actually happened that way--and it’s accepted as fact by most people...these days, a new version of history is being written about old history and many people want to rewrite history to paint a more favorable portrait of things or to push a social agenda...something like how physically challenged eskimos actually played a huge part in the winning of World War I...you know something to push the desired agenda and place in history...and certain people want to try and minimize the evil white man’s role in anything good...all American white men are evil right?..we all are the white devil--I mean if you watched that dreck of a movie ‘Wonder Woman’, you would certainly think so...an American Indian fighting wearing native dress because the WHITE MAN stole his land, another guy complaining the WHITE MAN wouldn’t let him be an actor...true, some did but why pound it over somebody else’s head?...am I supposed to feel guilty?...well, the brainwashing is working on some but not me...I don’t go to that many movies, but I’ve noticed a new trend in films...whereas the black guy was always the first to die, now the theme is that the white man is evil or stupid and gets his comeuppance like in the movie ‘The Meg’ for example...this usually involving being killed...if a white guy isn’t evil, you can bet he usually has an Australian accent or something or is kinda dopey acting...another example was that cinematic classic ‘Unstoppable’ and no I don’t know who was in it...it had a not too bright white guy being schooled by an older black guy with a Hispanic woman who if I remember correctly was some kind of railyard boss...and sure enough there was an older white guy who played the corporate bad guy...what a surprise...--but about all white men being evil...uh, noooo...some are evil of course but they can’t all be painted with the same broad brush any more than you can ‘paint’ any other group...you just can’t believe ‘history’ anymore though and the way the world is going, I’m not sure you can believe anything anymore, words pictures ‘facts’...it’s like a ride at Disney World...everything seems to be fake now no matter how much they try to make it look real.

Pastor Holy Joe

Hey leader of the frock that was a rock, a role model all could aspire to, outstanding member of the community,  mr. family man with the devoted wife and two and a half kids...pastor role model, he spoke in tongues or so they say and he spoke a lot of dung when I heard him and he said the Easter Bunny was evil and blamed electric for the ills of this sinful world in one of his fire and brimstone sermons that went on and on and on and on for an eternity burning in hell...not only was the devil in the details according to him, but the devil was everywhere...behind every building, tree, under every rock, inside every red blooded human...the bewildered and the naive good-hearted believed and couldn’t do enough for him and his little church The Holy Name of the Beloved Dollar or whatever it was called, located inside a double wide just off a dirt road between two cypress trees covered in moss that hangs down low and that probably wish they’d been left the hell alone...plush red pews that radiated religion and purity the good news of the book—twisted and mangled into whatever shape benefitted his viewpoint but of course he wasn’t the first or the last....the ubiquitous Sunday school with the Stepford wives and their plastic smiles and vacant eyes that saw nothing...he was quick to point out faults of others—the real and the imagined but slow to recognize his own shortcomings...imagine that...anyone that doubted him was seen by him as someone who had strayed from the flock and needed a good shearing to get back in line...lightning and thunder, thunder and lightning from the pulpit and plenty of come to god moments...all day Sunday the service would go with the occasional dinner afterwards consisting of cheap corn dogs, potato chips, and buckets of sweet tea to wash down the food and all the bullshit they were fed...he was a human 8-ball that had all the answers even when he wasn’t asked the questions and was about as accurate, but of course he would resent being compared to something he would surely consider “the devil’s work”...this guy used to do a radio show on some local Hispanic station and gave advice and pretended to be a ‘life coach’...well, one day I drove by and saw a for sale sign in front of the building and figured he must have gotten someplace bigger, but NOOOOOOOO!...the neighbor who used to go there said he ran off to New York or New Jersey with a young girlfriend he was keeping on the sly that old sly dog, that hypocrite...quite a shock to his wife, his kids, and the congregation after he ran off with the young assistant who worked with him at the church and always had on the tight skirts and blouses...rumor has it that some of the collection plate money might have been used to ‘take care’ of the mistress in question...i’m sure the congregation and the elders brought over some comfort food for the good wife and the kids afterwards...and then found a new leader that they could believe in...meanwhile pastor holy joe absconded with a good chunk of the church money and last I heard they were still looking for mr. holy joe and his christian values and his hot girlfriend...no surprise to me there...nor am I surprised when other churches wind up in the news when accusations and a whole kind of sensation revelation are made against the ‘youth pastor’ who turns out to be a child molestor and once again the people at the church are ‘shocked’...they can’t believe that could happen...and gee, he always loved to work with kids...i wonder why???

Drift Away

Imagine having this kind of experience when you’re totally not expecting it...your laying on the couch or the bed, chilling, relaxing on the sofa vista, laying back in your recliner, sitting in the loveseat without the love of your life or whatever...you’re looking at nothing in particular because it’s your place and there isn’t anything in particular worth looking at is there?...then without any kind of surgeon general’s warning or civil defense announcement or air raid like sirens going off nor effort on your part...gradually the lights in the room blur and seem to start moving...no, what?...they are moving...or at least seem to be...maybe some extra lights appear too…soft pastelly colors of green and purple maybe, or maybe soft white lights that help set the mood...slowly, slowly...you start to feel as though you are floating weightlessly…free and easy peasy...then it seems like you are drifting, just drifting away somewhere in space...maybe into a secret stratosphere?...who knows?...all this without the help of a bottle of Wild Irish Rose or some pricey vodka that doesn’t taste any different from the low end kind that you have to get on your knees and reach to the back of the bottom shelf of your favorite purveyor of spirits store to get...this is pure natural participation in another world type of reality and being...it isn’t anything conjured up or manufactured in any way--anyway this feeling is one where you’re just drifting along in peace and floating on a sea or cloud of ataraxia...floating  floating floating—pleasant all the same...the longer you drift and lift...sometimes it feels like you’re drifting through space, brushing by the moon, touching the stars and the constellations, taking a bite out of the Milky Way with its chocolate caramel nougat...and maybe, maybe you are even drifting through time even...minutes and years and millenniums dissolve...time is no longer real and you’re going into a different kind of dimension...a third, fourth, or even fifth?...maybe while all this is going on, you start to look inwards and begin to ponder...ponder the wonder of it all maybe--ponder the ponderable...your mind is just an open field and the gate to the corral is wide open and you are ready to run like a wild horse…there’s just a feeling of calmness about the whole thing...no fear at all, no anxiety, no nerves...just pure tranquility...all your problems have slipped away...and then…...everything slowly comes back into focus...this feeling of ecstasy has ceased and once again you sense yourself laying on the couch and the lights come back into a state of fixed reality and you’ve got what is known among the jargon of doctorates and titans of the psychological industry as a ‘warm and fuzzy’ feeling inside of you...soon, real life experiences intercede...you don’t know what happened, but you’re glad it did and hope it happens again soon...this type of experience happens to everyday people...Joe Sixpacks and Oliver O. Officetypes...you don’t need to be of the paranormal leaning persuasion to encounter such a phenomenon...it happens to some people and never to some...some people scoff, brush off, dismiss, reject, ridicule and scorn ideas of this type of thing occurring, but what do they know for no one has an understanding of these profound experiences...they haven’t had the pleasure of it all...pleasure and magical experiences tend to avoid these carcasses of negativity...they probably don’t believe in rainbow colored unicorns either...who wouldn’t want a feeling of joy and peace?

Georgia Rain

Nice night in The Palmetto State a.k.a. northern South Carolina, a state where I’ve met the friendliest people...my car broke down the next day and I got towed to an auto repair shop in Spartanburg...they were closing and couldn’t fix my car that day...it’d have to wait until tomorrow—what a drag...I was telling the counterman guy my woes and sorwoes and he offered to take me to a hotel down the street...not too far but far enough that I couldn’t walk or drag an old brown luggage that I borrowed from a friend and was starting to look like it was on its last legs...or wheels as it was I guess...it really needed a wheelchair...and I had my dog with me too...so the guy drove me there and told me he’d call me the next day when the car was fixed and would come pick me up...and he did!...his name was Francisco and he was a really good guy and one of the nicest people I ever met and went way beyond what he had to do...I sure as hell wouldn’t have given some stranger a ride in my car to a hotel, but then that’s me and my sorry-ass misanthropic attitude...I told him that if he was ever in Florida, look me up and I’d show him around...broken down between exits—trees and grass, grass and trees…now here I am again on the road again and driving through Georgia and it’s starting to rain...no, not rain, pour...like somebody’s got a big plastic bucket and they’re holding it over you and just dumping the water...a downright downpour and my wipers are in a manic frenzy trying to keep up with the down...Valdosta, Tifton, and Cordele...I’ve been through Georgia many times and it don’t matter what town I’m in, it’s raining...well they got some mighty fine fried chicken and apple pie ala mode at the Ramada Inn or at least used to years ago...it was a real nice restaurant complete with southern charm and a charming waitress with a sweet southern accent out of the movies and I half expected a gentleman of the south to come out and dine with me…you know a gentleman of leisure...one of those guys who is of independent means and doesn’t need to work...a man who is free from the duties and responsibilities of everyday life...elegant, cultured, and most assuredly rich, he’d be wearing a seersucker suit and a big old plantation hat and probably smoking a big old cigar...the kind of guy who orders scotch and then regales his evening’s company with stories, a raconteur of renown...it’s pouring when I stop to get something to eat...when I’m inside the rain lightens up and I’m thinking that maybe it’s clearing up and it does until I get back in the car and hit the road...the drops get bigger and the radio gets softer and the wipers start going crazy again...still raining...Macon, Forsythe, Mc Donough...it don’t matter what town because the rain gods have got it in for me...finally a stop for the night and in my hotel room I hear a long train whistle over the sound of my creaky air conditioner that I got on full blast to drown out all the other sounds...the train is somewhere out there in the night or maybe it’s just a ghost...I don’t actually hear the train going by, but I hear the whistle a few more times and then like an old soldier, it just fades away...then I hear the sound of rain again on the roof...I know how somebody got the idea for the song ‘Rainy Night In Georgia’--great song--I finally crash because I gotta get an early start in the morning...the alarm goes off and I wake up with the air conditioner still bumping and grinding and the omnipresent rain...I get my stuff and run out to the car...there’s no let up...outskirts of Atlanta and it’s still raining like a 19th century French King and there ain’t nothing I can do about it because I’m just a pauper...and it’s crazy because this always seems to happen whenever I got to drive through Georgia to get to Florida or to get to Chicago or to get to wherever I got to get to...why you always rain on me Georgia?...you got something against me?

Gone Tropical

Slip chuck bang bang buck boom boom hang, oh it’s always so bad to be hung up this way...hang down your head and cry in your glass of umbrellas from the outside of the deep misty mountain windows where you can peer through the looking glass and through the steam into the smoking hot lua pele and watch the goddess of fire herself do her volcano hula dance—no not hula, the hip shaking earth quaking soul breaking all mesmerizing windmill dance with her arms and legs of molten flame coming at you...or just content yourself with gazing at the old dark wooden bridges covered with lei’s and spanning the soft murmuring waters of the Kon-Tiki River that starts on some mountain and flows to some ocean through some jungle and splashes underneath and on and on it goes and goes behind the abandoned sugar mills that the last sugar ship bade farewell to some time ago and sailed on...now it just produces ghosts...the easy slide guitar music Santo and Johnny-like and the pork and the poi on the carnival plates shimmering like the finest mined diamonds on Diamond Head swishing forth and back and side to side among the catamarans that the handsome dark skinned men captain...palettes of fruit in pure color...the winds of the trade blow low through the fronds and over that of the blondes golden hair matted down with ocean and sand and suntan lotion and little pieces of crushed shell...I lay not lei in the cool damp with a faux migraine tapping me alongside the head and with the sun roasting me like a macadamia...I don’t wanna move for the next fifty years at least...my very spiritual herbal essence has been completely discombobulated from the ocean motion of east west north and south all banging together at once—head spinning and wanting to bury myself like a little crab into the darkness of the subterranean beach...alternately I lay still like conch shell—take me home dark haired and tan attractive 40-something beauty on your return first class flight and put me under your bed at home for luck- I promise to lay quiet on your plush blue carpet in the shadow of the dust ruffle and sound like the ocean when you pick me up...breeze of the tropical late afternoon blows drops off and I drop off sleepy time where I hear the occasional remembrance of ebb and flow until I wake up and take some time to regain my longitudinal bearings in accordance with Greenwich England and clear my head and find some ice drowning in a glass of dark liquor—Banzai time—and the water crashes with the rabies dog foams and the bronze and the beautiful head out to make love to the tall and dark and dangerous strangers coming in to wet kiss the shore in warm embrace and softly touching hands as it departs in sweet sorrow...ride that curl you shocking blue bikini clad girl as it sets her mind and soul free in a world wide ecstasy of sound, motion and oneness with the beautiful universe baby...surfing the chaises myself to wipe the grains of pain and sand from my eyes—I run a personal ad; potential second degree burn victim seeks long term commitment into the late night hours with beautiful chaise lounge who likes shady spot under cabana or even better, a beachside bar with long cool drinks and small bites of white flesh...from a large hollowed out coconut full of rum and fruity delights.

Exotic Kyoto

Somewhere in the swollen downtown region of exotic Kyoto it doesn’t matter where—I’m just sayin’—a fallen man tries to drown his sorrows in a bottle of sake--not being aware that sorrows are good at swimming and do not drown...the neon light flashes through the window and into his brain...I know from experience...they might disappear under the tides for a bit, but they soon resurface...there’s never a riptide to pull them under and drown those bastards and make them disappear forever...they’re always wearing bright orange life preservers...the man who gets to the airport two to three hours early and then boards a plane to Paris to get away from his troubles finds his troubles there to greet him...sitting in one of those nice comfy fancy red leather-like chairs they got at Charles de Gaulle airport or maybe he tries to trick them and goes to Orly airport instead...waiting for him...they’re standing there holding a sign with his name on it like the hired drivers do...as he deplanes...those troubles follow us around like a shadow wearing a trenchcoat on a sunny day, they turn up like a bad penny; always there when it is least convenient, if there ever is a time for problems to be convenient...there’s gotta be a way...so off we go to Japan to join millions of our closest friends, all of us full of aspirations and dreams or something--high ideas and sure to succeed...now it is a couple of years later, and we are running a sparsely visited, dirty, cheap noodle shop which is located right across from the motorcycle repair shop...you know the one...barely able to keep our head above water, and living in a crumbling paper walled apartment where the cold comes right through and grabs you by the decaying bones and where the klank klank klank klank noise, the rhythmic pounding from the neighboring factories and the ring-a-ding-ding sounds emanating from the pachinko parlors prevent anything resembling a good night’s sleep...but our pork cutlets are good...sorta good...even the bugs got more class and know better than to be caught dead in there...or alive...drinking away our nights trying to forget our days...drinking away the days to forget the nights...what happened?...why did we fail?...it isn’t what we signed up for...we were so sure of ourselves...now we wanna go AWOL...if it makes you feel any better, maybe we didn’t fail, we are just fulfilling our destiny according to the stars...yeah, that’s it...you gotta blame something right?...even though we can make our own choices, we are still at the mercy of fate...kind of a dichotomy, don’t you think?...we got the di part down...we can’t be what we aren’t nor what we weren’t meant to be...so what’s to do?...I walk the streets rueing my fate with a few yen in my pocket and staring at signs that I don’t understand...thank god for the Coca-Cola and Sony ones...then I look forward to a good bottle or two of sake from the industrial size bottle...the first glass is the appetizer...the second glass is the main course, and the third one is the dessert...from then on, it’s binge ‘eating’...the problems and worries stop elbowing me in the ribs for the time...I sit back on the barstool and hum old college fight songs to myself...I just want to be dead to the world...in the morning, our problems are back in town and knocking on the front door..nothing’s changed...shampoo, rinse, repeat.

Lost City of Tanis

Tanis is a city that can be found among the shifting sands of that north-eastern Nile Delta of Egypt...beginning in the 19th century, it’s been the site of many archaeological digs, some authorized, many not...it was in the year of 1866, Karl Richard Lepsius discovered there what is called the Decree of Canopus which is an inscription that is closely related to the famous Rosetta Stone...thee Rosetta Stone...it was written in Egyptian...the discovery of this was a major player in being able to decipher hieroglyphics…a written language never looked so beautiful and mysterious...those markings found on walls and on sarcophaguses and tombs...a lot of people seem to speak to me in hieroglyphics and I don’t know what they’re saying...anyway, once they learned to read the hieroglyphics, things began to come together and much was learned...Lepsius was a pioneering Egyptologist, you know like you and I—that is one who is an expert in the study of ancient Egyptian history, its language, customs, religion, architecture, art and they are also sometimes well versed in the ways of the Egyptian occult...such as curses...he was hailed as a noted linguist and recognized as a pioneer of modern archaeology...it is said by some in the know that the treasures found in the "lost city" of Tanis rival those of King Tut's...in Tanis, ruins of many temples can be found...in fact it contains the burial places of three pharaohs who ruled during the 21st and 22nd dynasties...these tombs somehow survived the plundering ways of tomb robbers throughout the plethora of passings of suns and moons...they were found with everything in tact in 1939 and 1940...inside was a large amount of gold, jewelry, and other precious stones...stones that were buried with the pharaohs to keep them company on their way to the next world where they might be needed—since they were still there, I guess they weren’t needed...there were coffins fashioned out of silver, bracelets, necklaces, amulets and pendants...they even included the funerary masks of these three kings...but they weren’t the three kings of orient...you might think, “Hmm, I’ve heard the name Tanis before but I can’t remember where…” let’s go back to the film ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, which was released in 1981...in the movie, it was said that Tanis was the final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant, (not true) which had been hidden in a secret chamber called the Well of Souls...Dr. Jones says that the city of Tanis was buried in a huge sand storm until the mid-1930’s and was just recently discovered by a German field expedition working outside of Cairo...this is most interesting and helpful to the plot, but wrong, wrong, wrong...just the imagination of a hungry screenwriter somewhere who probably figured nobody knew or cared about  the history of Tanis anyway...even in recent times, finds continue...in 2009, the Egyptian Culture Ministry reported that archaeologists had discovered the site of a sacred lake in a temple to the goddess Mut at an archaeological site in ancient Tanis...in 2011, analysis of high-resolution satellite imagery found many mud-brick walls, streets, and large residences...a French archeological team confirmed mud-brick structures approximately 30 cm below the surface...however, a claim that the technology showed 17 pyramids was denounced as being "completely wrong" by the Minister of State for Antiquities at the time and with that title, how could you not believe that guy?

Going Above and Beyond

Intense dream sequences that some people experience while sleeping...the word for it is transliminality but that sounds so antiseptic...the word suggests "going beyond the threshold"...but what does going beyond the threshold even mean?...what it means is when someone who has a hypersensitivity to a type of psychological material that originates in the deep and dark unconscious where angels fear to tread and the waters are murky and deep and it is rash to fish and sometimes unwelcoming...some place that no one can actually place as it’s not on any GPS device... nor can everyone can access it...it may be a treacherous mountain pass that’s been blocked by massive amounts of snow caused by an avalanche—real or imagined… it could be on the other side of a gorge where a bridge has been washed out and away by torrential rains that leaves a gargantuan gaping gap and a deadly thousand foot fall into a chasm below, or maybe it’s a door in a half-lit peeling paint of a shadowy room that no one wants to open for fear of what may be behind it—beyond lies the threshold that is to be crossed...this person is prone to having intense types of dreams...everyone has dreams when their asleep, but many of these are really intense heart pounding horror...it can be the sound of possible footsteps in the hall creaking—when you KNOW you’re the only one home...the apparent sound of breaking glass in a downstairs window...the breaths of a stranger just outside your open window at three a.m. frightening...not just your standard “I’m running away from a monster” stuff that seven year olds have and wake you up in the middle of the night for...hmmm, could that be though the sowing of some kind of seeds of transliminality in the young mind however???...we all have monsters we want to run from at one time or another...although associated with dreaming, a person could be affected with transliminality in an external environment as well when wide awake...who hasn’t seen menacing shadows--mysterious faces in a crowd, a feeling of dread and impending doom...high degrees of this have been shown to be associated with people who have an increased tendency toward experiencing and touching the world of the mystical, those who have greater amounts of creativity like artists and writers, and those who have a greater belief in the paranormal…maybe they are the ones who have the supreme crystal visions and whose feelings are in tune with a world far removed from the norm...so that is to say, someone who is open minded to these types of things...some of these dreams can truly be horrifying and so ‘real’...a dream that can make you scream...some ‘experts’ even suggest that this transliminality could be a link to psychoticism, especially in the case of subjects who experience these types of conditions when they aren’t dreaming...yes, sometimes perhaps but sometimes life itself can make you seemingly psychotic with all its twisting and bending and unwelcome kaleidoscopes that turn in your mind and thought processes inside out, upside down, and your brain is on a spin cycle...and sometimes the person isn’t psychotic but just absolutely aware of certain esoteric experiences the ‘experts’ can’t even guess at...cryptic and baffling moments in time that defy explanation by any sense of the real and the only answers may be found in the abstract and the mystical...not all transliminal dreams are nightmares, but many are...just like life is one long nightmare for some.

From Here To Tokyo

It’s early in the morning here in the garden of eden and the white crescent moon fades away into the purple sky and the sun takes its place in the orange and yellow and blue sky and it peeks over the horizon and over the top of the housetops and mountaintops...I’m sitting on my garage sale tatami and looking out the dirty window dry spotted with raindrops at the makeshift zen garden that I made with stones and rocks from the beach, the Smoky Mountains, the back yard and a thousand places unknown to me...what I need in life is a minimalist painting for a mind--simple simple simplicity--no complications frustrations abstractions refractions—just a minimalist painting in an all too busy world of surrealistic zigzags with ten faces and a hundred eyes staring at me, but of course it’s not real because a zen garden doesn’t know anything about real life and I don’t either...it exists in a little dark corner of the world that tries to hide and just wants to be left Greta Garbo alone wearing a big hat and hiding her face...like some monks who wear holy robes and well worn sandals and who hide themselves away in a monastery for years and when they come out back into the real deal world, all the purity of the mind gets washed off with a fire hose and replaced by grime and perspiration from the world they’ve been avoiding—the real existence...sometimes though I fool my little fragile mind that can bust into little teeny tiny fragments of glass at any time--kind of an instantaneous combustion--into thinking that I can see a great deal...far beyond the garden and all the gardens of the world and all of the rocks, the twisted branches, sentry trees, and endless sky...oh yes, I have touched the realization of pure consciousness and nirvana, I am one with all and all is one with me...the birds--a choir in the trees, the early morning dew on the Sap Green grass reflecting an artist’s palette of Vermillion Reds--Prussian blues and Van Dyke browns...there are days when I see fire and I see rain, the sun rays slipping through the slender slats of the blinds on to the wooden floor and they shine peace right in front of me and I glow inside while they’re tiptoeing on little cat paws from one side of the room to the other...the candle burns and does the dance of the seven veils with no prior choreography rehearsal and the shadows are making Franz Kline lookalikes on the wall...smoke coming from the incense curling up like a poor dog seeking warmth on a chilly morning...twisting around and round and round, merry go round without a sound and floating in the air not touching the ground—a work of a great magician levitating above—just drifting...sweet fragrance...patchouli or cinnamon or cannabis...I think that I might just be finding enlightenment...I sometimes think I can see everything crystal clear from here to Tokyo and the bullet trains and noodle shops and the ten million people walking down the sidewalks...a crystal vision...but who am I kidding?...then life walks through the front door and doesn’t wipe its feet on the mat--unannounced and unwelcome, it intervenes to spoil everything and remind me that I see nothing...damned life...I’m reminded there ain’t no magic, no spells no potions that can keep everything in the distance out of sight, out of mind...the only thing that can do that is death.