What I Told The Doctor

I told the doctor I don’t want

Just a little Nazi torture

I want all of it. 

The needles

The electricity

The drugs

I want Demerol and she can stand on my nuts

In Stelletos until I believe that I’m a six year old girl. 

She can do the whole Nazi dominatrix bit, if she’s into it. 

I told her I want all the Uncle Sam propaganda. 

I want the whole strawberry cake and all that red, white, and blue frosting. 

The entire Canadian Parliament can stand up and applaud me 

as I plow the Nazi propaganda cake stuffing handfuls in my mouth 

and wash it down with pasteurized milk having none of the health benefits of raw milk. 

And I want lots of rat poison Vitamin D added to my milk and to be reminded 

about how good milk is for me when I watch TV and that I can drink a lot of it. 

And when I watch the real world on TV

I want the acting to be first class. 

I want the actors to be better than 

Trey Goudy and Lindsay Graham. 

I don’t want to watch fuckers like Pierre Kory. What a terrible actor. 

I thought the actor’s guild was supposed to police itself for quality. 

Where did Thomas Crooks come from? 

Cut the ugly out of the actors guild or I might stop watching.  

(Some people will never stop watching the show said Charlie Sheen). 

Then the automated voice on the answering service asked me if 

I wanted to try recording my message again and reminded me 

to schedule my ritual sodomy exam and to wear my brown shirt. 

 Pythagorean Dream

This is a dream from my college days. In the dream, I’m taking a test in a large open testing area with many kids sitting at individual desks. Everyone had a blank piece of white paper and a pencil. A tester at the podium asked the one question on the test: “Imagine you are visited by an alien species with whom you cannot communicate in written or spoken language. What would you do to communicate with them? All you’ve got is paper and pencil and an hour. Go.”

For a long time, I sat in stunned dejection wondering how to respond. I finally decided to draw a right triangle and label the three corners A, B, and C. Then I wrote the equation: A squared plus B squared equals C squared. My idea was to demonstrate to this supposed advanced race that I also understood some principles of mathematics and to open communication with them on that basis. If they understood that the corners were labeled with the first three letters of our alphabet, they perhaps could understand how our alphabet works and we could develop a kind of substitution code, which would lead to the beginning of written communication. 

I didn’t know whether my answer was correct or useful. The person behind the podium asked us to bring our papers forward one at a time. She looked at each paper and then told the test takers which way to walk down the hallway, and which door would admit them. When I got to the podium she looked at the paper and told me to go down the hall and enter the second door on my left. When I got to the heavy wooden door I knocked. A slot opened up and the doorman asked me: “Who is the greatest philosopher of all time.” I said Pythagoras, not because I believed it but because of my response on the test. The door creaked open and I stepped inside. The doorway led to a short tunnel that opened into a large brightly lit theatre. It was filled with men mostly. Young and old. All of them were carousing and telling loud stories and laughing uproariously. I walked toward the stage and ended up in the beer line. There was a keg going. I got my cup full of beer and started looking around. Faces I’d seen before popped out to me. “Hey, fellow from school whose name escapes me. Hey, I’m glad you made it. Have a beer.” It seemed I knew many of the faces in that theatre. We were all so happy to have made it. We congratulated each other and toasted to our health. 

After an hour or so of this, I started to wonder why we were in the theatre. Was there to be a show? There wasn’t one. And every single person in that room started to wonder what the hell was going on. The beer continued to flow and each new person who came through the tunnel was welcomed with a shout. “Hey! Another Pythagorean! All right!” The dream continued after this fashion for a long time. Eventually, I became dissatisfied with this. And I realized that I had answered the question incorrectly. As I woke up, my mind told me the correct answer: to draw a picture, of course. It had nothing to do with mathematics at all. If you have no language to work with, you draw a picture. Duh!

The Absurd Ass Bird

 

The most ass bird thing one could observe  Is the fluttering of the absurd ass bird  Pecking around a single word The word should be interred for token Slur from this word inferred Savagely rough-aged and ill spoken He circled as if one wing was broken He scraped his beak across the curb  Throwing sparks he squared at sharps  Jumped upon and posted jargon Wingbeat talon eyeball saltpeter Screeching while dancing on a parking meter  He looked me straight in the eye. Crooked and cocked his beady head.  Absurdly said he the word he said Ach! It’s from the German.

The Two Faces of Priestcraft

The Two Faces of Priestcraft are religion and atheism. Religion (which is false) leads to atheism (which is also false). A person involved in religion eventually becomes tired and disappointed with it because he invested in superstition. When he sees that the results of his adherence to religious ritual are nil and void, he adopts atheism. Both faces of priestcraft are designed to create an ambivalent state where the victim sees his life as pointless and he becomes ethically malleable. In this state, it doesn’t matter to the victim if he does good or evil. The victim becomes a useful agent for the devil. Because of his ambivalence toward evil, he becomes the pawn of Satan. After a religious person commits evil acts (for the greater glory of God), the priests are quick to offer their false forgiveness. The priests set up religion and atheism as a false dichotomy…two sides of the same coin. They pretend there is no other option and that the only choice is between religious ritual superstition and total unbelief (atheism). What they don’t want you to discover is ethical goodness. They don’t want you to know that you can choose ethical goodness, because in a state where you are choosing ethical goodness, Satan has no power over you. You become useless to Satan and his earthly kingdom. You become useless to his religion and his system of usury and slavery. 

I have stated that a religious person is on his way to becoming an atheist, but this is not the only direction that a religious person can take. If he fights hard against atheism and holds to his false religious belief, then he can achieve a feeling of personal holiness. Sometimes this feeling can last throughout the victim’s lifetime. This feeling of personal holiness becomes a sort of limbo (hell), where the person is unable to take part in acts of ethical goodness or evil. He is taken out of the game. He believes that his restraint is goodness. He is in the hell of self-righteousness and who can tell if he will ever awake? “In Hell all is self-righteousness,” said William Blake. 

Priestcraft

 The evil that dominates our world is priestcraft. The priests {Jesuit, Militant} run every corporate state and all the intelligence services. There are more than five eyes. They use the analogy of the checkerboard. The white squares are the churches, the schools, the orphanages. The black squares are what the devil really does with all God's money. The poisoning. The superimposition of religious ritual and superstition to replace ethical goodness. The explosions. You have no idea how deep this is. The bible itself is counterfeit, although God works good out of the evil works of Satan and writing the bible has now backfired on Satan finally. Jesus didn't live in Jerusalem. They want you to think all civilization comes from Europe via Rome and Babylon, but actually, ethical goodness came from Ancient Briton, and we are all living under the Roman Deception. The priests want you to think there is no alternative to their system of usury and slavery. They want you to think evil is native to the human heart. They want you to think that's just the way the world is. Every single catholic priest is a Satanic witch (why would they let people who weren't like them in their club?). The movie Elizabeth is the story of how the Vatican took over the crown of England with its Satanic cult. They own and create all celebrity. Hollywood. The popular music industry. They want you to accept what they produce as real art. They want you to accept McDonald's as real food. They want you to accept TV journalism as real news. It's all fake. All constructed to control you and to poison your mind and body. John of Patmos foresaw the Catholic Church and called it the Whore of Babylon for a reason. It offers a replacement for real ethical Christianity in the same way that a whore offers a replacement for real conjugal love. They want you to not be able to tell the difference. Finally, the Priests want you to accept their authority over you. That is priestcraft: the process of convincing humanity that they are in authority over us. (That is where their infiltration of science comes into it. Read Consilience by that Satanic pawn Edward O. Wilson 1998. Steven Hawking died in 1990 and they used his dead corpse to trumpet their Evolutionism and Atheism because they don't want humans to know that we are created for the one true God. They founded the Smithsonian to destroy evidence of ancient humans and giants that would complicate their narrative. The Osiris Club of London has for over 150 years done exactly the opposite of what it supposedly was founded to do--preserve the history of Ancient Briton--they want to destroy and obscure the history of ancient Briton--that is why when St. Patrick got to Ireland in the fifth century, the first thing he did was collect and burn all the ancient books in Ogum--the written language of ancient Briton. That is also why in 1280 the Vatican paid King Edward 1 to kill all the Bards of Wales--Welsh being the original ancient British Language and the Bards being the last vestige of that ancient cultural practice. That is also why, in 1765, when McPherson produced his ancient British epic poem: Ossian, that every Satanic pawn from Benji Franklin to Voltaire shouted it down as a fraud though it was genuine).

3 Rejected Poems

           The Sperm Whale

There is something to being on the surface of it

Lashing about in the sun and waves

Forever buoyed like a porpoise among forests of kelp.

The student of history is like a biologist

Aboard an underwater craft.

The incandescent truth pulls him through the darkness.

Many dolphins have orange dots on their foreheads

But their flippers cannot reach up and remove them.

I am a sperm whale and I rarely visit the surface

Forever compelled to dive further down

Into the dark cold recesses of the past

For in the depths of the past

The stars which are below

Shine again in another light.

         The Green Sea Turtle 

A Green Sea Turtle in conversation with 

Several yellow-fin Tuna fish

They take the words like food out of his beak

Their flippant words a feeding frenzy

He wonders openly at their appalling rapidity

"Don’t buzz my tower with your words,

You tuna fish," says the Green Sea Turtle 

A corral pool where the water gently swirls

His silent flippers churning disturb the surface of the water

And in his solitude, he experiences a gentle slowing of the tempo

A cannabinoid clarinet cadenza 

A mental ritardando approaching the place 

Where time cannot pass.

    The Flounder

At base, the flounder knows that he is delicious

That’s why he must hide on the bottom

Flicking sand and small stones to cover himself

He looks out with both eyes on the world

Inaction is the price of anonymity 

The virtue of the flounder’s inaction

Is Taoism in practice

He is very wise not to display his desirable flesh

To hungry prowlers

To other fish what the flounder does looks like failure

But if the flounder didn't flounder he couldn't live.

Prophecy No. 1

History only exists in individual minds. There is a need for stewardship of the public domain. There is a need to preserve the works of history, but for them to be truly preserved, they have to be read. They can’t exist only in closed books in libraries, in books that no one reads. There will be an improved society where the lives we lead will be ordered very differently than in today's society. Instead of going to college and then directly into the professions, we all will be working-class until our kids are raised. Only after our own kids graduate from high school can we enter the professions. If a person desires to enter a profession, his training will begin at age 36 or 37 and by age forty he or she will be a professional.

Not all professions exist in the future. All exploitative professions no longer exist. They implode. Their evil unsustainable. Their appetites unnatural. The banks implode and the stock market implodes. The insurance industry and investments fall like dominoes. Doctors, Lawyers, Judges, and Priests find a lack of incentives in the marketplace. Those who practice wise-craft basically serve the social function that the African witchdoctor fills in his society. The practitioners of wise-craft,—the witches— will no longer exist. But there is a need for the stewardship of the public domain. It takes individual minds to sustain history. We need people who will dedicate themselves to the stewardship of history, even the history of science before science was politicized toward human exploitation. The history of literature in a thousand languages. The history of art and music. A culinary history.

The most basic thing that is occult in our society is the understanding of the medical uses of herbs. By teaching this, we can let our children out from under the thumb of the medical industry. The medical industry is destroying itself, along with all exploitative practices. Science and medicine have become monstrous scams that are unsustainable. Industrial farming in the United States will collapse and the people who survive will adopt Mexican food practices. Only by keeping people ignorant are they able to exploit us. Doctors are thirsty and exploitative. Many of them borrowed a quarter of a million dollars to enter their marketplace. The bank owns them.  They are the automatons of evil. They don’t have choices. They already made their choice—they chose to enslave themselves to the banks and to the ethic of human exploitation that dominates our world. There is no freedom in money ethics. Either your behavior optimizes your finances or it doesn’t. If it does then you are a perfect Philistine.

A society of educated and ethical people is not exploitable by professionals and their professionalism.  The witches that rule us must depress our mentality to protect their marketplace. What would lawyers do in a society free from personal disputes? The reward for living a Christian life is that the practitioner of Christianity gets to live a Christian life. Once the good news is completely disseminated, we will also get to live in a Christian society (whereas we now live in a Philistine society). This society is the kingdom of God that Jesus taught us about. And we can read from the good parts of the bible, where Jesus teaches us what the kingdom of God is going to be like. The lawyer and the doctor both find little to do in a healthy society in which we all value each other. The judge will find himself adjudicating in an empty court. His druidical robes will no longer strike fear into the hearts of the accused. The crack of his gavel will be as silent as if it were pounded in an empty forest. When the ethical system of Christianity is fully disseminated the new age will begin.

The problem is that many of us have been duped into thinking that Christianity is a religion. It wasn’t supposed to be one. Christianity is a system of ethics that tells us to serve the needs of other humans. To forgive them, as Jesus forgave us. Christianity is a system of ethics that antagonizes Philistinism, which is the ethic of human exploitation that currently dominates our society. 

Priestcraft is and has always been witchcraft. It is an exploitative act of intentional deception to practice Priestcraft. The spell of religion is truly how the witch Circe turns all men into swine. Christianity is not a personal holiness quest the way these priests make it seem. Holiness becomes a status game in any church. For a thousand years we’ve had this problem of holiness and social status. If you appear to be more holy than other people that is status. And so, it’s natural for those people in elevated positions to act “holier than thou.” It’s in the way they speak and in the way they walk. In all their mannerisms. And which of us would not fall into this mode of superiority if we were giving the smallest amount of status? Are we not like kindergartners who wish that it was us that was given the privilege of erasing the chalkboard or assisting the teacher in handing out crayons? But all this is not Christianity. It is religion. Once a person falls into this pretense of holiness the only cure is to slap the log out of his eye and to see if he turns the other cheek. Christianity will always frustrate notions of personal status. The only status in a Christian society is the giving of gifts.

If a priest can make you ashamed of your natural self or your bodily functions, then he can own you. If he can make you fear what happens to you after you die, he can control you. Priestcraft cultivates mental weakness in the church members by playing on the superstition of the believers and encouraging it. Yes, demanding it.  Reject the priests and their stupid mumbo-jumbo! Wake up from your religion! You are no longer swine. Recognize the pearls that you’ve been trampling. The spell of the witch is broken. Hallelujah!

Wolfbane: Chapter 2

        “If you don’t want to see or hear evil, you’d better keep your eyes closed tightly and your fingers in your ears. The truth is that the Satanic Church has grown too large to be concealed. The witches are too thirsty for the blood of our children. Even with the whole abortion industry producing adrenochrome and the entire child protection network providing orphans for Satanic sacrifices, they cannot quench their evil thirst.  Even with the importation of children purchased from the third world, there is not enough nutrition to sustain them. Those of us with our blinders firmly in place will not be able to deny much longer. Are they witches or are they vampires? It matters not what appellation, what parallels to popular culture are most correct. The blood machine is the bank machine. The Swissy flagged Red Cross drains us of our blood and cash.”
    “God Damnit, Wolfbane!” I said. “Why are you so poetic? Can we not enjoy our Christmas dinner without this talk? I don’t see you for fifteen months and we fall into this dramatic mode in the first ten minutes? It took me all day to prepare this fucking figgy pudding.”
    “Fuck your figgy pudding!” Wolfbane roared with laughter. “Although we could use a dram of your botanical spirits, as an aperitif, of course.” A great suggestion! “A little gin never hurt anybody. Tell me again your recipe?”
    “Wormwood and Fennel. Then Eucalyptus and Elderberry. One pot.” I said removing the stopper from the bottle and lowering my nose. My senses heightened by the effervescent aroma of Eucalyptus.”
    “A hint of lavender, as well,” he said. “Delicious.”
    “Pointless to keep a secret from you, sir,” I said. I poured the spirit into two chilled snifters and added a little soda.  A whole meadow of fragrance in one breath.
    Wolfbane tapped his cane on the floor as he gathered his thoughts. “It’s wonderful how our senses respond to a new ingredient that we had been without. Like the truth that is forbidden; once tasted it will never be forgotten. And also how one can become desensitized to the bullshit stinking under our very noses! Little by little, we’ve gotten used to the taste.” Wolfbane never jabbed unless he followed with a straight right. “We’ve spoken many times about the CIA infiltration of the press and the total collapse of the free press in 2008. Newspapers went under in their dozens after the emergence of online media. It’s funny how easily we forget.”
    “Yes, I also remember the housing bubble of 2007 and how the banks wiped out American homeowners in their millions and then hung For Sale signs on the houses. This caused a large recession that affected business, and the most affected business was the American newspaper business. The free press was wiped out by the same bankster bubble that ruined the housing market. And by 2012, what remained of the popular American press was propped up by Federal Bank entities disseminating pure corporate propaganda.”
    “Mind control!” cried Wolfbane. “Witchcraft! Like religion itself, poisoning the mind against the real ethical Christianity that we’ve inherited. When did Christians forget that usury is a sin against mankind and a tool of Satan, who is the slaver of mankind? Who are these fucking priests who replace Christian ethics with doddering religious superstition? Their priestcraft reduces us to bowing our heads and mumbling their Satanic words. Remember this my friend, the Pope is not the Vicar of Christ on Earth and Satan is not God.”
    “I’ll drink to that,” I said. “And communion is not a religious ritual involving the Babylonian cannibalism of the Christ. Communion is when Christians get together and enjoy the freedom, the love, and the blessing of being together. The cup of Christ is not filled with blood, but with wine.”
    “Ye Gads! You’re a fucking heretic,” said Wolfbane.
    With that Wolfbane reached into his jacket pocket and produced two pairs of white cloth gloves. “Put them on,” he instructed. Next, he reached down into his leather briefcase and pulled a gift-wrapped package from it. “Here’s your gift, but you can’t keep it. I borrowed it from the library.” I hesitated. “Well, go ahead, open it,” he said.
    “I know it’s a book,” I said ripping away the wrapping paper.
    “Tell me what you see,” said Wolfbane
    “I see a very old book. A full vellum binding over boards with clasps. The boards are beveled and the covers blind-tooled.  Gold tooling on the spine with handsewn end bands and the edges are sprinkled; all typical of 17th-century bindings. What library did you get this from?” I asked incredulously, already fearing the worst.
    “Why, the Newberry,” replied Wolfbane wryly.
    “Wolfbane, you’re a madman!” I yelled. “The Newberry Library has no circulating items for checkout.”
    “I didn’t say I checked it out, I said I borrowed it!” He bellowed. “I have certain privileges among librarians. Special access, you might call it. Now open it.”
    I opened the book to the title page. It read Demonology by His Majesty King James 1 of England. “Antique laid paper printed with Gothic script. Every page of this massive volume is worth more than $20,000 in the collectors market,” I said, my hands shaking.
    “That’s why it’s so hard to keep old books together. They are worth much more ripped apart page by page,” he replied.
    “What do you want me to do with it?” I asked.
    “Read it carefully. Then take it back to the library. Got to a kiosk, order some materials, then leave it with the materials. You’ll be the first one to have read it in fifty years.”
    “And if I’m caught?” I asked coldly.
    “There is as little chance of that as of you ripping out pages of this book for your own profit,” said Wolfbane.

Wolfbane

    When I was an undergrad, Twenty-five and more years ago, I met a man of a singular character, who I now call Wolfbane. A professor of English at a small college in a quiet mid-western town, I assumed he was at least seventy years old when I first met him, but to a twenty-year-old, everyone looks more advanced than they perhaps are. He had a shock of white hair that once must have been red. He was the opposite of good looking, but he had a very strong bearing and was remarkably healthy. In fact, his appearance changed not at all from the time I met him until late last year, the last time I ever saw him.
    What his initial interest was in me I can not say. I was his student. He had many who were more serious and more talented than myself.  I think now, that we shared a love of poetry into which most people cannot enter. Even those bright competitive students, my classmates, many of whom have today published their own works, did not apparently receive the joy of poetry in the way that he and I did. In previous centuries, people used to entertain each other with poetry. Poems are not read, they are sung. Many are the times that Wolfbane would beg me to sing from my own poems.  We were to spend many hours reciting verse and singing our favorite poems aloud to each other.  We had much in common. I would sing Poe and Coleridge. He would sing Milton and Blake. We smoked tobacco and cannabis. And sometimes Opium. We would drink port and whiskey.
    It is my particular talent to eat and drink without ceasing. And apparently the last faculty to be encumbered by drink in myself, is the verbal faculty. Even when I am beyond the place of standing or walking, I can still be found jabbering away quite coherently or even brilliantly. Like Socrates himself, I become more wise as I continue to imbibe. Wolfbane too had a moist soul like mine. Although there was never any indication of overindulgence or sloppiness in him. We simply drank and smoked and read poems, or sought other amusements. Always simply for our enjoyment. Our eternal games of poker, chess, and billiards filled those years. I never ceased to be astounded at Wolfbane’s endurance and his zest for competition. When drink gave way to hunger we would eat a huge repast in the wee hours of the morning. And this gave us burst to continue our entertainments until the crack of dawn.  Several times I was late and unprepared for his nine-thirty class. He was never late and he never gave the slightest indication that the previous evening and morning had all been spent in smoke and sport. Perhaps after that morning class he would take a brief respite, but then he was back in the afternoon class on Milton which he taught with fire and zeal.
    One of my great memories of him is when he told me, upon my graduation, that I needn’t become a scholar. I hadn’t the scholarly gifts of patience and discipline. Truly, I felt such relief at that moment. I embraced him. He was the only one who understood me. That was the most freedom I have ever felt. For what I feared most of all was a life of skullduggery or drudgery. The life of a bean counter and the life of a person who reads student writing is to me the same dull round.
    As fate would have it, I came to know him even better after graduation. I lived in Chicago for a few years as a young adult, and he often had business there, at the University of Chicago.  It was at this time that I first noticed his walking with a cane. Not that he depended upon it. It was like jewelry to him. A birch cane stained black, with a silver tip and a carved silver head in the shape of a wolf. He claimed it once was a Hollywood movie prop. It was as much a club as a cane and its heavy silver handle could deal a severe or deadly blow. He showed me once how pulling away the bottom of the cane would reveal a gruesome silver blade some ten inches long, and by tilting the handle on it’s hinge he could expose an old fashioned pistol with a single silver ball.
    This was also when Wolfbane began to expose to me certain Baroque prejudices. Certain attitudes which I thought had gone extinct centuries ago. He was right to keep his true feelings hidden while I was a student, but now that we were both adults living in the real world, he did not hide from me a darker side to his personality. His acrid judgments and incisive tongue were shocking to me. It may also be true that he was actually a heretic. He had an antinomian bent and professed his anticlerical sympathies. He was like an Englishman transported from the seventeenth century.  A ranter. A dissenter and protestor against all orthodoxy. He spoke of the 17th century as if he had been there himself, and he referred to all of his contemporaries in academics as babies or illiterates.
    “Philistines!”  He would shout in reference to the clergy. “A poor show of Christianity indeed,” was his usual retort after sitting through a mandatory mass. “Look at all these illiterates,” he would say in reference to the churchgoers. “They have not read even their Hawthorne.” I knew well enough what he meant by that. He was referencing Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown, where the same priests and ministers who run the Christian church on Sunday can be found of a Saturday engaged in their actual black religion. Of course, atheism has perhaps crept into the church in the last century, but surely priests are not engaged in witchcraft at this late date. Nevertheless, this lunatic idea was the central theme to his speech.
    “How do you know,” he said to me during one visit, “That every single priest is not a Satanic witch who has sworn fealty to Satan? How do you know every single one of them has not bled drops of blood for Satan or not committed atrocities with children?” This was the general train of his thoughts. I would try to temper his fury by injecting some reason in the conversation: “We live in a Philistine society,” I would say. “People do things for social position, personal status, or just money motivation. Ninety-nine percent of people in America are Philistines. It’s not religion, it’s just the way we are.”
    “You don’t understand what a Philistine is,” he replied. “At the ancient city of Ekron, 6000 years ago, Philistines began worshiping Baal-Zeebub, Son of Dagon. The most bloodthirsty of all gods, Baal-Zeebub taught his priests to extract blood from the adrenal gland of their humans victims at the base of the skull, and to embibe.” I could tell he was getting worked up now: “You haven’t read the works of King James I of England! If you had, you would know what Mystery Babylon is. You would understand why King James called the Catholic Church the Whore of Babylon and why every single Catholic priest is a fucking whore! How long will you go on in your stupid indolence! You fucking cow!”
    I am a person who is habitually slow to anger. I am accustomed to taking flack. It is my personal gift to be able to breath such things away. To clear the air leaving room for reason.  In this case, I told my friend he was showing signs of stress and I encouraged him to take a minute to calm himself. I went to my closet and fetched a bottle of good Mexican brandy. Good for anyone’s constitution. I grabbed two glasses and placed a single cube of ice in each and then I poured a liberal drink for myself, and one for Wolfbane.  When I handed him the glass he looked me straight in the eye and said, “The Power and the Glory.”  “The Power and the Glory,” I repeated, and we both drank.
    “And you don’t understand what religion is either,” he started in again. “Religion is all the little things we do without thinking. The unquestioned allegiance. The pop-corn prayer. The mindless ritual observed in thoughtless obedience. The superstitious fetishism of Rosary beads. The sick belief in the purity of the Bible and the respectability of money.”

The Horror of Romance

The American Horror Genre comes directly from English Romanticism (lie #1). There is always an ethical barb to a horror story. Often, horror stories depict what happens when we have distorted ethics that cause degeneration over time. The impact of such distortions are very creepy in Lovecraft when worlds under the ground are opened up, and we can see the centuries of decrepitation and the weird outcome of generations of moral and ethical decay.

Horror is in essence philosophical. Horror creeps up from the cracks in the rationalists' ethical thinking. Rationalism becomes the apologetics of human exploitation and money motivation.  The apologetics of usury. The smutty table conversation of a blighted English aristocrat with his mildewed lady--rotten people that they were. Devotion to the wrong ethic can cause grotesque distortions in a single lifetime. Extrapolate these distortions across several generations and the outcome can be monstrous. The musty inbreeding of monied interests. The weird appetites of the habitual and professional exploiters of the people. The stale cadaver of John Stuart Mill breaking free from its grave and limping perpetually from library to library over the earth.

    The Horror genre sailed like Dracula across the Atlantic transplanting it’s dank soil to a burgeoning American audience (lie #2). Edgar Allen Poe was a big fan of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and they had similar habits concerning opium use. It was common then to smoke opium on one’s tobacco. I imagine the reading experience of those days as by firelight through a blue haze of opium and tobacco smoke.  The smoldering of herbs and the power of the snuff has never been equaled to what it was in London’s late 18th century. The Apothecary’s entire cabinet was open to the paying public. Tinctures of cannabis were common. Laudanum was a popular and heavily addictive tincture of opium and Absinthe was already adding a trippy edge to the first psychedelic generation. The late 18th century was a time of tremendous experimentalism.  A fascination with spontaneous combustion and hypnotism were in vogue. The infusion of Jewish and Indian ideas into the cultural milieux made for a stew richer and older with vampires and witches.  Weird deities in Tantric sex positions. Entities older than the English language itself and older even than our ugly Roman letters.

    What are the works of English Romanticism that form the root of the horror genre? Henri Fuseli’s Nightmare. Fuseli was pal and partner of William Blake, the most violent and horrific of all Romantic poets.  Readers should research what Blake meant by what he called the Vintage of the Nations: The Goddess Enitharmon gulping down her cup of ambrosia. Pure adrenalized human blood. All of humanity pressed like grapes for our juice at the pleasure of the Gods.

Grotesque

Grotesque is a man who embraces one overarching truth and makes it his guide stone. He becomes distorted in holding onto his truth. When it passes below the horizon his truth will be upside-down and so will he be. So will he be.

Note: This is my meditation after reading Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg Ohio, which I thought was interesting enough to reread after twenty years. The idea of the Grotesque as a person who is distorted ethically, or is perhaps demented, is missing psychic components, has mental mal-nutrition, are at once pathetic and creepy. It smacked me as reminiscent of Balzac's Comedy Humane; and certainly, that seems to be where the genesis of the Grotesque lies--in the French tradition.

Then it also struck me that the timing of Anderson's American work somewhat coincides to the modern period in Russia, where Anton Chekhov was producing works of short fiction that are similar in structure and content. Of course, there is an affinity in Russian culture for the French.  Russian was once a vulgar language in St. Petersburg, where French was spoken in the court, the church, and the university as well as in polite society.  This is often depicted in classical Russian literature (Tolstoy). So, I think that the impact of Balzac's short fiction can still be felt generations after he had completed his work, in two divergent literary traditions.

Or perhaps they are a single tradition: international modern lit.--which I think would be an interesting course. Does Balzak give us a prequel into modern lit? Yes.

"Immediately the Lark mounted with a loud trill from Felphams Vale" -- W. Blake

http://ramhornd.blogspot.com/2018/06/harvest-vintage.html

The Jade Teddybear

The jade industry is a crying shame.
Mining huge slabs of British Columbian Jade
Loading it onto ships and sending it to China
Where communist slaves mill small teddybears
From the billion-year-old adamantine pillars.
The teddybears, which cost 35$ are then sold over eBay
To Philistine slaves in America for Valentine's day.

He will present this to her in lieu of a real gift
And she will be well pleased because she would rather
Have the money after he croaks anyway
Which could be any day now.
Leaving nothing but a rich beautiful fifty-year-old widow.
And she will be his gift to society at large
The outcome of his seventy hour work weeks
The sum of his ethical stupidity and spiritual inadequacy.

The saddest part is that the jade is lost to the future. Perhaps in millions of years, the Earth will turn again, and again there will be giant slabs of jade in what used to be British Columbia.

Philistines cannot have good art because they can’t tell the difference. A Philistine cannot value art differently than its monetizable value. This is the outcome of a society comprised of the ethical slaves of Philistinism: The supplier must do unethical things to meet the unethical demands of the consumer. There is a clockwork. A fatality. An if/then logic to the Satanic service of our appetites. The jade teddybear is a symbol of bourgeoise frugality and stupidity. Its a symbol of bad taste. There are millions of them—all alike. Each milled from the same lifeless stone.

Wolves at the Door

I built my cabin from logs of new spruce. At the foot of 

the mountain and the edge of the wood.  Not too far 

from a gurgling brook. I can look at it shine in the light of 

the moon.  Perched on top of the richest land I can find. 

The year is eighteen and thirty-nine. 

I came from Ohio across three states, but here in

Missouri my soul snagged its thread. It’s the Adirondike 

mountains I can’t get across. The summer gets hot but 

the winter comes quick. Build a strong warm cabin 

before the snow comes thick. 

It was the last of October when I first heard her voice. 

Like the peal of a trumpet from the top of the hill. 

I heard his reply from miles away and it gave my spine a 

chill. The she-wolf came down to give me a call.  About 

my cabin she paced round and round.

I stood in my cabin with my musket in hand and heard 

her footfalls on the ground outside. I could hear her 

snarl. I could hear her breath, but else I could not 

perceive.  “Wolf,” I said, “I’ve got no hospitality for you. 

I’ll give you nothing but a ball of my lead.”

Cause there were wolves. Wolves at the door. 

Wolves. Wolves at the door. 

Well I stuck my musket through the slot and I shot blind. 

Through the whole valley was heard the report. But when 

it echoed back her voice came through.  “In a fortnight’s 

time I’ll win you true. In these hills with me you’ll run and 

remember this place no more.”

Cause there were wolves. Wolves at the door. 

Wolves. Wolves at the door. 

Those days they came and weeks they went, and God 

can tell how they were spent.  In trepidation and in infirm 

mind the days grew short and cold.  On the fourteenth 

night the sun went down and a carpet of snow lay 

packed on the ground. 

And there were wolves. Wolves at the door. 

Wolves. Wolves at the door.

The moon was high when she led them down. I could 

see it shining in her eyes. At her full stride she came 

down the slope. She lead a pack of twenty. They made a 

circle around my cabin and they came a-caroling. A choir 

in full regalia.

And there were wolves. Wolves at the door. 

Wolves. Wolves at the door. 

They sang me a song and they sang it well. To hear them 

howl it thrilled my soul and to see their jaws a snappin’.  I 

lost my mind in fear and awe. Some fur cropped out all 

over my arms and when I reached behind, the tail I found 

was my own and I was astounded.

And there were wolves. Wolves at the door. 

Wolves. Wolves at the door.

And when their song had come to an end it raised 

the hair on the back of my neck and my skin began to crawl. 

The she-wolf said, “Boy, did you rightly doubt me? We 

came here to make you our own and we’re not going to 

leave without thee.”

And there were wolves. Wolves at the door. 

Wolves. Wolves at the door. 

There comes a time when each must say good-bye to 

his domestic comforts. The soul must run across those 

mountains under the light of the moon. It must raise its 

voice like never before and quit its habitation. I can never 

forget that She-wolf or the night she freed me. 

And there were wolves. Wolves at the door. 

Wolves. Wolves at the door. 

The Ugly Alphabet

Where can my eyeballs go to hide from these letters
This Satanic alphabet imposing its own structure
These figures aren’t lovely
My mind is troubled in the attempt
To bend them to an erotic purpose.

Unlike their facile Hebrew counterparts
That Swedenborg once found to be impenetrable
Only pulled their skirts up an inch
And still he was driven mad by their beauty
They left him raving naked through the town at midnight..

Aphorisms Vol. 1

Too much wisdom and not enough wit.
Much too Frank and not enough Gaul.

The problem with reading books
Written by people who thought they were smart
Is that you might become one of them.

If you’re not a book reader or music listener
Then you don’t understand what it means
To store up treasures in eternity.

Ridicule her who hates mathematics,
Embrace her who hates science.

The concept of wasting time is only relevant
To those trying to achieve something.

When the devil wrote the bible
He caused his own revival
And now he is cursed to forever attend church.

The poet sings but the prophet cries.
The poet sings but the prophet cries.
The poet sings but the prophet cries.

Prayer:
If I am to meet a Jew, let him be a pious Jew.
And if I am to meet a Muslim, let him be an impious Muslim.

Evil is an upside-down pyramid scheme and Satan is at the bottom of it.

Let him with the ethics of a reptile become one.

Satanic Ethics Vol. 2: Witches, Werewolves, and Vampires

Christianity is not mysterious to me. Nor is it mysterious to the people who have read John Toland’s book “Christianity Not Mysterious,” published in 1702. I wonder how many of us there are. The once crowded hall of book readers has emptied out somewhat lately, and I wonder truly how many of us could access the work if we even cared to. When I call people illiterate, and I often do, that is what I mean: They lack the capacity to read books. I believe there are many people who have read the KJB cover to cover twice and still are not capable of understanding the book in its cultural and historical context. These illiterates should perhaps have the bible taken away from them, as well as all the other books they can’t or won’t read. These people might wound themselves by reading the bible. They are like children playing with their father’s tools.  (For example, an illiterate bible reader may believe that the point of Christianity is to perpetuate the lifestyle and ethics of the ancient Hebrews to all times and places when exactly the opposite is true.)
Christianity is not primarily supernatural, and the ethics of Christianity are not otherworldly but are of great practical use. Christianity is a system of ethics which opposes the Satanic ethics of the world at large. The practitioner of Christian ethics works to make himself unexploitable by the practitioner of Satanic ethics (also called Philistine ethics).  By using the example and the teachings in word and deed of Jesus Christ, we Christians can resist the efforts of the Satanist to abuse us, to enslave us, and to devalue our humanity.
The twin ethics of Puritanism and Philistinism are the tools of the Satanic practitioner. He uses these tools to become the usurer, the slaver, and the accuser of humanity (Satan is the accuser of this world, but Jesus Christ is the advocate of humanity before the judgment throne of God). The practitioner of Satanic ethics at base despises humanity.  Satanic ritual witchcraft is the primary method that the Satanist uses to perfect his Satanic ethic. A Satan worshiper worships himself in an effort to elevate himself above humanity. It is the challenge of the Christian to value humanity even at its most debased and perverse. 

WITCHES:
Our English word witchcraft, in essence, means ‘wise power.’ It is not generally evil for people to develop and use their wise powers, nor is it unchristian to do so. Witchcraft is far older than either Christianity or Satanism. Throughout the centuries, many witches all over the globe have used their wise powers to heal and perform mental and spiritual therapy.  All Doctors, lawyers, judges, and priests have as their progenitor the African Witch Doctor. All the ecclesiastical trees waving their heavy arms in the sky come directly from the simple relationship between the witch and the people. There has always been and will always be a demand for this wise power among the uninitiated oceans of humanity.  However, a witch, who is a person who has developed these wise powers, can turn against humanity and become Satanic. A Satanic witch exploits humanity instead of serving humanity. There are also many who are born into Satanic witchcraft, and who inherit the tradition of Satanism along with their wise powers. I believe the tradition of Satanic witchcraft among the Jews goes back to their time of slavery in Egypt. Of course, there are accounts of witches and magicians among both Egyptian and Hebrew sources. Most Jews worship God. Some Jews are Satanists and are living servants of the Satanic ethic of human exploitation.  This Philistine exploitation of humanity is as prevalent today among the professional classes as it ever was in the past. Many of today's doctors, lawyers, judges, and priests are invested in the evil exploitation of humanity.

WEREWOLVES:
Practitioners of wise-craft have their own ethics and there are two rules which are the traditional means to tell if a witch has become Satanic. A practitioner is forbidden from A) enriching himself unnecessarily and B) extending his life unnaturally. When a witch does these two forbidden things (they go hand in hand), he is said to become a werewolf. An aware wolf is a person who takes advantage of asleep sheep.  You don’t want to be an asleep sheep. You might get taken advantage of by an aware wolf. This parlance goes back at least 500 years and perhaps much farther.  Does this type of werewolf have anything to do with the lycanthropy we are familiar with in popular culture? There are sources both Christian and classical as well as recent eye-witness accounts that claim the existence of dog-headed men. St. Christopher himself was supposed to have been a man with a dog’s head.  I’m not sure this is relatable to the witchy werewolves I’m describing here.
I don’t know very much about Werewolves, but I believe there is a conscious effort to produce a popular culture that would ridicule notions of their existence. Werewolves are real. There are people invested in pulling the wool over the eyes of the sheep.

VAMPIRES:
A vampire is a person who drinks human blood to extend his life unnaturally.  Vampirism is currently fashionable among the wealthy elites of many nations, and there is current private medical research into the health benefits and increased longevity attributed to the drinking of human blood. When a practitioner has become opaque to the divine vision of a natural life and death, he may decide to drink human blood. By doing so, he steals the vitality of another human for his own use.  The act of drinking human blood is Satanic ritual witchcraft and those uninitiated who indulge in the practice unwittingly become Satanic witches. The most famous vampire in history is Countess Elizabeth Báthory, who drank and bathed in the blood of an estimated 500 peasant girls before her bad habits could be curtailed.  She murdered them to benefit her own health and beauty. She was one who purified her Satanic ethic through the means of Satanic ritual witchcraft.

This Dojo Does Not Exist

Arguing is a funny game. The winner gets nothing, the loser can improve his ideas if he will. As the combatants face each other, each adopts the posture that most fits his style. The first man swings the finely honed sword of Romantic Idealism and the second blocks with the jaded shield of Enlightenment Rationalism.  And then the rationalist slips a touch by mentioning Descartes. Now he’s left himself open to a counter discussion of Bishop Berkeley, and if he doesn’t know his Baxter he may not be able to keep his balance.  In truth, the rationalist was hoping for an early knockout and now may be fighting out of his depth. His legs are jelly. Does he have reserve forces to call upon? He distracts his opponent by spinning to Spinoza.  Then he lands his own combination of Bacon and Locke to his opponent's midsection.
To his credit, the idealist is still standing as the bell rings. He has felt his opponents best punches, but how should he respond? Should he take up his traditional Platonic posture, knowing full well the position is drawn, or dare he advance his center to Blake and Coleridge, perhaps tempting his opponent to fight on unfamiliar ground? Getting one’s opponent out of his prepared books is a great strategy.
In truth, there are no judges. Each of the fighters is keeping score for himself.  This Dojo does not exist, but here is the centerpiece of their argument: The Rationalist knows that knowledge is acquisitive and that the knowledge of one generation is built upon the knowledge of the previous generations. Therefore, the best ideas are the newest ones. Only the current philosopher could have the perspective that he enjoys. Modernity was not possible for the philosophers of the past, and that is why the ideas of the past do not fully suit the present.
On the other hand, the idealist knows that all ideas are eternal, and to him, it seems that the progress of the generations, in which the rationalist is so secure, is actually generational decay. The wisdom of each successive generation only gets farther from its original source. Knowledge is not acquisitive, and wisdom is instantaneous in the mind of the wise. In the moment of wisdom, the wise person is taking part in ancient knowledge.  He is interacting with eternity. He is timeless.
Both of these historical conceptions are lies. History is not a line, but a circle. Revolution doesn’t mean something new is about to happen, it means something old is coming back around again. Its incumbent upon the combatants to choose a point of origin somewhere on the circle which would otherwise be arbitrary. Each must frame his narrative from his selected point of origin, and it is the true challenge of the philosopher to make his story make sense to himself—to tell himself a story he can believe. A philosopher never quite believes the story he is telling himself.

Two Mice Fell Into A Pail Of Cream

              The two mice took advantage of the garage door being left open. They both scampered under as the door was shutting. Later, as they were trying to open a box of instant mash potatoes in the overhead cupboard, they would be thrown headlong into a waiting bucket of fresh cream.  It was then, in that situation of imminent mortality, that the true difference in their characters was revealed.  

The first mouse, having examined at length the ethics and philosophy of the ancient Taoists and being accustomed primarily to a contemplative and literary mode, quickly mastered himself. After a brief struggle and a couple of spasms, he was able to peacefully drown.  Next, he was deposited onto a leaf where he grew for ten days, hatching out then as a remarkable caterpillar he munched his way through the lazy summertime.  Finally, as autumn fell, he built a cocoon and in the spring he broke free from it.  He had transformed himself into a monarch butterfly and he took place in the ecstasy that only monarch butterflies know as they fly thousands of miles across mountain ranges and over inland seas. 

            The second mouse did not benefit from the rich inner life that had so tremendously helped the first mouse. He had no education and knew no ethic other than the struggle to survive. When he fell into the bucket of cream he panicked. There is no other way to say it. He had no mentality in that situation, but his instinct took over and he began to kick and struggle with his paws and through the process of struggling to keep his nose above the surface of the frothy cream, he…as we all well know…churned the cream into butter and was thereby able to climb out of the bucket. 

           There the second mouse found himself. He was covered all over with butter on the kitchen floor of a strange house wondering what he should do next. That’s when the second mouse first noticed the cat.  Now, a cat has no ethics that he is aware of--he is not a mouse-a-tarian--he is no respecter of mice. And, he is much larger than a mouse and faster and has better agility. Also, he has claws and teeth. 

           The second mouse certainly was a mouse of ill fortune. Perhaps if he would have had the slightest bit of Greek education, he would have known that in climbing out of the bucket, he had defied the fate that the Gods had proportioned for him. It is an act of hubris to take one’s fate into his own hands. This hubris, this insolence of not dying, is what it is about mice that cats most despise and punish. Next, the cat batted the mouse around and tossed the mouse up into the air. He came down with a fat plop on the ground. Then the cat put his paw heavily on the mouse’s back and squeezed the air out of him until he lost consciousness.  A minute later the mouse regained consciousness coughing and sputtering only to find himself back in front of the cat, who was enjoying himself tremendously.  The cat then repeated this process one hundred times and each time it seemed funnier to him than the last, until, after the one hundred and first time, which was not quite as funny, the cat decided to let the mouse try to run away. When the mouse tried to drag itself to safety the cat let him go a few feet and then he stuck one claw through the end of the mouse’s tail and drug him back into the middle of the floor.  

          “Why are you doing this to me,” said the mouse.  

          “My People,” purred the cat, “Love me and are dedicated to my every comfort.  They feed me twice a day with a treat in between, and to tell the truth, I am not much hungry for a mouse at this time.  In fact, I find you quite disgusting and repulsive.  You, Mr. mouse, provide the only entertainment in what is otherwise a sanitary and boring existence. Why do you think I caused the garage door to remain open by flicking my tail underneath it? Not that I want company so much as I desire a plaything.  Besides, look at me. Look how much smarter, faster, more beautiful, and more desirable I am than you are.  You are a flea-bitten dirty infestation, and I, sir, am an adored long-haired cat of high breading. Therefore, I have the privilege of treating you and your kind in any way that I desire, according to my whim.”

          As the cat was involved in this discourse a woman entered through the front door. She walked into the kitchen and discovered the ruined pail of creamy butter. She saw the cat brutalizing the exhausted and bloodied mouse. She cursed her stupid husband who had left a bucket of cream to spoil on the kitchen floor. She screamed. The cat jumped. The woman grabbed a sticky mouse trap from the cupboard and as the mouse was trying to drag itself to safety, she stuck the trap on the mouse’s back and threw it in the waste basket. Then she fished the drowned mouse out of the pail with a spatula and threw him into the waste basket as well. Next, she took the trash out to the curb with the second mouse still barely living inside of it.  

           At this point, the second mouse understood the futility of his struggle. He was stuck fast to the trap from his tail to his head. His forelegs splayed out. A plastic milk jug ring pressed irritatingly into his scalp. He oozed blood from several wounds. To make matters worse he was forced to gaze into the beatific face of the departed first mouse, who had benefited so tremendously from his classical education and extra-biblical literacy. The departed first mouse’s face beamed with buttery joy. 

         As fate would have it, the garbage bag was black and this was a hot day. In the heat of the afternoon sun, the temperature of the garbage bag increased and the odors congealed. Those vapors, which would have been poisonous to us, were to the mouse both salutary and medicinal. It was as though he had sucked vinegar from a sponge. He started to trip like he was on acid. He opened his third eye and he felt his soul expand as one will in his dire extremity.  He came to understand that pain is the ultimate psychedelic. And as he was in this state of rapturous resignation, he didn’t notice the sun going down and the trash panda that roamed the neighborhood at that hour.  The trash panda could smell the buttery carcass of the first mouse. He chattered happily to himself as as he knocked over the trash can. He used his little hands to rip open the black plastic trash bag. He quickly discovered the buttery and delicious carcass of the first mouse and popped him into his mouth. The trash panda was truly thankful to receive the body of first mouse. He said a brief prayer of thanksgiving to the god of trash pandas. 

           Just then a raven noticed the second mouse stuck fast to the trap. He said, “Caw,” to the trash panda which startled him into a quick retreat. Then he began to poke and rip at the second mouse, but he couldn’t remove him from the sticky trap. Next, the raven began to pluck and pull at the guts of the second mouse. And soon the mouses guts were all strewn about while the raven plucked out his bloody organs. 

          “Am I to be disemboweled endlessly after the fashion of some perpetual Promethean punishment?” asked the mouse.

         Quoth the raven, “Nevermore!”

My Soul Goes to Vegas

       When I close my eyes and my head hits the pillow, my soul travels out of my body drifting up into the salty sea air above my house in Vallejo, CA.  My soul then drifts south following highway 29. My soul arrives at the Oakland airport and quickly boards a flight to Vegas. Once in flight, my soul escapes the fuselage and drifts along in the wake of the plane. It looks down over the snowcapped Sierras that glisten in the light of the full moon. The plane descends into McCarran airport but my soul continues breezing above the strip toward downtown Las Vegas, Nevada. My thirsty soul wishes it could get two ice cold Budweisers for five bucks in front of the Bellagio but it doesn’t want to land on the strip. It would take forever to get a cab. 

My soul spends a lot of time walking around the Charleston arts district. It sees many homeless people and a lot of people who aren’t fairing well, despite the US government and it’s constitution. It sees drunks begging for change and getting it. It sees one black kid walking around with a roll of foil, a lighter, and the shaft of a pen. My soul can’t tell if he’s trying to sell foillies or if he’s openly freebasing cocaine on the street. My soul thinks this neighborhood is getting a little rough but continues its journey to the Golden Nugget Casino and Hotel. Once inside my soul can finally be at rest. Still thirsty for beer, it feels for its wallet but the wallet is not there.  

          Then my soul remembers what happened last night at the sports book. When all the free throws bounced the wrong way and the cynical Satanic basketball referees took control and enforced Satan’s wishes upon the outcomes of the college basketball games. Nothing left but a pocket full of drink tokens. My soul goes up to the bar next to the poker room and offers two tokens for a cold draft of Modelo and my soul is finally able to quench it’s parched and dusty throat with the golden libation. My soul reflects that the trip appears to have been a success. Beer in hand, my soul joins the carousel of souls meandering about the casino. It goes to the sports book and looks at the overnight board. My soul intently gazes at this board for a long time, but none of the numbers calls out to my soul.

Finally, my soul heads back around to the poker room where our Tulpa has been grinding perpetually for days on end. He is still up and he gives my soul two black chips. Yes!  What would we do without our Tulpa grinding away at poker? Eighty-four hours ago he started playing with three hundred dollars and now he has a couple of grand in chips and who knows how many hundreds are tucked underneath his stack. 

           You’ve got to love the poker action at the Golden Nugget.  

          “It’s like no place else.” says our Tulpa. He only takes a break on Saturday afternoon because that’s when the Veterans of Foreign Wars guys play. My soul does not want our Tulpa to get cut apart by these gentlemen who are aged beyond the care of money and whose only delight is in crushing the unsuspecting tourist who happens upon the table.  

           My soul goes to the cage and cashes in the two black chips. My soul remembers to go back and tip the bartender 2 bucks.  That’s when my soul begins to feel itself fade. It needs to go to the buffet so that it can transubstantiate some food matter into the stuff of spirit. As it rides the escalator up to the buffet my soul reflects that even when it is down at the casino, it is always up at the buffet.  After a substantial meal including real soul food, my soul pours its beer into a plastic cup and walks out onto Fremont St.  

           My soul goes out to many people that it sees out on Fremont St. and touches them. It goes between them and through them. My soul goes out to body performers and homeless people. Veterans. Tourists holding hands just trying to figure out what this place is about. The mentally deranged. The hopelessly drunk.  People holding signs that say: Fuck You! 

And that’s when I feel my soul start to expand. When it gets like this, there is little that can be done to remedy the situation. My soul gets larger and larger.  Its heels lift off the ground and it drifts upward toward the awning that covers the street.  And still, it expands and opens rising above the whole city until its face is superimposed over the whole scene and it sees the morning sunlight on the mountains to the east.