What a beautiful dream. Somehow I had come across these two relics. The main one was some sort of solid gold sculture about the size of a fist. The other was larger and was some sort of totem. It was more like a wooden carving that stood about as high as my waist, was gilded with some translucent, multicolored coating, and appeared very, very old. My feeling during the dream was that I had somehow found these objects and they were legitimately mine to do with as I chose.

I approached this old woman in a big mansion to see if she would be interested in buying them. Her family, composed of her children, mostly daughters, pretended she could not afford them even for a few thousand dollars. But the old woman knew what the pieces meant, and to her family's surprise, was not concerned at all about the money. We both knew she was wealthy beyond their knowledge.

Somehow the scene shifted to include other people. Perhaps she had called them to her house to consult with them about the authenticity of the relics. Three people appeared. They walked in side by side. The two people on the outside of this row of people walked almost mechanically like robots. They had a golden glow about them and perhaps were not people at all. I now get the impression that they were the original owners of the objects, and wanted them back.

The middle man of that group seemed to want to argue the position that I had stolen the objects and bring the price down from the terms the old woman and I had discussed earlier. I was unmoved by their shenanigans and was prepared to leave with the objects, although I didn't know who I could approach to offer them up again. Apparently they realized I was going to walk and upped the ante to the hundreds of thousands of dollars. I still wasn't satisfied and indicated such.

Then an older man appeared to the left of me wearing a business suit, rotund and bald-headed, he entered the fray by saying, "I will make you a one-time offer of three million." I turned to him and said, "You want both of them?" He said "Yes." I asked him, "Will you make the arrangements for me to have an account at the (Swiss) bank?" He said "Yes."

The three people turned and walked back the way they had come, still glowing and shining, and with great ceremony.

The entire dream took place in a goldenish atmosphere that pervaded everything, and I felt wonderful throughout the entire scenario. I was aware that I was dreaming during the entire affair, and don't think I ever wanted to change anything about it. It was too powerful and I continuously marveled at the wonder of it just as it opened itself to me.

I waved goodbye to that good woman and went on down to the river. My first sight of it impressed me with the strength of it's current. It had been raining upstream when I got there, and it wasn't as clear as what the woman had led me to expect. Still, compared to the water of other rivers it was pretty clear. It had cut it's way through the limestone hills, and the shoal I found myself on was not all that common for the shoreline on the other side of the river. The steep hills around it was covered with forests, and kept the river bound within a more narow stream than the rivers in the flatlands I had come from. It appeared as if the Ozarks pushed the water into a narrow stream in such a way that the water seemed to covort and play with itself as it rushed through the hills.

I had been on the road for several days by the time I got to the river and hadn't had a bath for a while. Since there was no other people around I decided to get naked and wash out my clothes in the river water. Even if it wasn't as clear and clean as it usually was, my clothes would certainly smell better after I rinsed three days of perspiration out. I anchored my clothes with the river stones that permeated the bottom of the river and waded out to about waist deep to clean myself.

The whole river bottom was composed of smooth stones. It was difficult to walk because the stones were large enough that they didn't give at all when I stepped on them. The only sand about was there on the shoal itself. In the river the current was too fast for sand to accumulate. When I got far enough out in the water that I could sit down and wet myself all over I stopped walking, it was too rough on my feet.

The water was cool, but it was mid-summer so it wasn't too cold. On the other hand I was quite hot, and my dip in the river, except for the way the rocks hurt my feet, was very refreshing. I tried swimming a little bit, but found myself carried by the current for about a hundred feet downstream very fast. This meant that I had to walk back upstream on the rocks, and the idea of swimming faded fast. Eventually, I worked my way back over to the shoal so I could walk on the sand. I left my clothes to be washed by the current, and went for a little walk to familiarize myself with the area.

There was quite a few places where people had camped on the shoal. It was easy to see where they had built campfires. There was a lot of driftwood around to use for a fire. I decided to camp on the shoal that first night myself. I was worried about the woman coming back, so I picked a spot well away from the road that led down to the river. I figured she might not look too hard for me if she did come back.

The shoal itself was about two hundred yards long, and seemed responsible for the road that led to it. Other than that shoal the hills rose quickly on both sides of the river. There were a few slues in the shoal so that to traverse it required moving about quite often. The campfire sites seemed to show that the locals who came there had their own favorite spots. There were a lot of boulders exposed by the run of the river along the shore, and I had a little fun jumping from one to the other.

Before I checked out the eastern end of the shoal I took my clothes out of the water and hung them on some bushes to dry. Then I worked my way downstream to the other end of the shoal to see what I could see. I was very impressed by the nature of this place. The flatlands where I came from only had an occasional fist-sized stones that had washed down from the piedmont, and here I was surrounded by rocks of every size. The trees on both banks hung out over the river and in some places it looked like the river was going through a tunnel. I felt very priviledged to be alone here.

It was getting late in the day when I realized I needed to return to the other end of the shoal where my stuff was. I needed to get my clothes and then get some firewood together to make my fire while I could still see my way around. I didn't want to be moving around in the dark because of the possibility of running into snakes. I waited to look for the firewood a little longer than I should have, but there was so much of it that it wasn't really a problem.

I didn't really need a fire to cook with. All the food I had was canned meat and the crackers that I had bought earlier. I just wanted a fire to sit and look at. I didn't have a sleeping bag with me, and that was very inconvenient. Especially when the mosquitoes came out and started biting me. The fire I built seemed to keep them off the front of me, but they attacked my back with enthusiasm. By the time I decided to lay down in the sand and try to get some sleep I was covered with mosquito bites everywhere my skin was exposed. The mosquito repellant I had brought with me didn't seem to help much. By the time their feeding frenzy slowed down I was miserable with the itching.

Sleep did not come easy. After all, I was alone in the middle of the Ozarks and I wasn't familiar with the kind of animals that hung out there, especially of the human kind. The mosquitos bites had changed to more pain than simple itching, so I lay there a long time before I fell asleep.

I woke up early. The mosquitos were back. I could see that they were going to make my life miserable. I hadn't planned on them when I sat at home and planned this great adventure, but they were nothing in comparison of what I would experience later on that day.

Just after sunrise I had visitors. A couple of young men came to the shoal to do some fishing. We saw each other and waved. They seemed friendly enough, but it appeared obvious that they were there to fish, and after our brief greeting they went about their business with a great seriousness, occasionally yelling at each other when they caught a fish. About an hour later a family with three young children also came to the river, and when another family showed up I figured it was time for me to start moving down the riverside to look for a cave.

When I got to the end of the shoal, the road along the shore, that was only useful to 4-wheeled vehicles, ran out. That was when I discovered that moving along the edge of the river was going to be much more of a challenge than I had previously reckoned. The river cut straight through the low mountains of the Ozarks, but they were still mountains, and the steepness of the hills running up from the river valley was very sharp. There was somewhat of a trail for a little ways, but that soon ran out because of the steep incline of the hills. Down toward the river itself there was a lot of underbrush that was hard to get through, and there were a lot of briars that were very frustrating to try to maneuver my way through.

I looked uphill to see if it was any better up there. The trees were larger, and it appeared to be less underbrush, but the hillside seemed straight up and it was hard work to keep my footing. There were a lot of loose rocks that caused me to slip and slide. One time I fell about twenty feet before I could save myself from falling head over heel by hanging on to some low limbs. My day pack was kinda heavy, and was not helping me keep my balance. I started sweating profusely as the heat of the day arose, and all the physical work I was exerting just to make slow progress, made it all the more excruciating. I really wanted to turn around and get the hell out of there, but for some reason I keep fighting my way through the woods. By this time I had just about forgotten about finding a cave at all. I was more worried about surviving than finding a cave.

After innumerable times of stopping to rest and forcing myself to get up and get moving I finally got to a inlet where a small stream joined the river. The stream itself was fairly small, but the valley it had cut through the hills was quite wide. It was a spectacularly beautiful place.

I sat down to rest, collect my thoughts, and figure out what I was going to do next. As I had clumsily tramped my way through the thick woods along the river I had heard people on their rented boats moving down the river. Oh, how I wished I was on those boats with them. They were having a wonderful time, while I felt like I was struggling for my life. There at the open area of the stream entrance I begin to actually see them floating along the swift current of the river laughing and having a great time. I didn't want them to see me, so I sat on a big boulder that was hidden by some bushes.

After a while I decided to go swimming again because I was soaked with sweat from all the effort needed to make my way through the woods. I rinsed my clothes out again, and found a spot where the water of the river and the water of the stream met that allowed me to relax without getting taken downstream by the river. A couple of canoes passed. They saw I was naked, but they laughed and waved at me as they continued on their way.

After I had refreshed myself for a while and recollected my mind, I decided to explore the valley created by the stream. This place was like a dream to me. The water of the stream ran down one side of this cut through the hills, and it was sandy on the leeside of the stream and made walking pretty easy. As I approached the first bend in the stream I heard the motor of a car coming toward me in the distance, and so I hid myself behind some bushes to see what was going on. I knew that it meant that there was a road nearby and I was tickled by that prospect, but I didn't know what kind of people might be coming around the bend.

From behind the bushes I saw a 4-wheeled vehicle come into view. They passed about fifty feet from me, and I got the impression that it was two guys out on a drinking toot, and I was glad that I had hidden myself. They drove down to the river, got out of the truck, and it looked like they were going to hang around for a while. I decided to climb up the hill behind me and look around for a cave while I waited them out.

There was a small spring that seeped water down the hillside, and it had cleared a little open space that I followed up the hill. The climb was very steep, but the water ran over some large boulders that made my climb easier. As I got higher up on the hill and sat down to rest for a while, the view down into the little valley with the stream seemed even more beautiful. I sat there for a long time just looking it over. Again, I forgot about looking for a cave. Climbing in these hills was no walk in the park.

My serenic repast was broken when I heard the truck crank up, and then I watched it as it rounded the bend and I couldn't see or hear it anymore. Then, I made my way down the hill again, filled my water bottle from the spring, and started working my way over to the road the truck had taken. I had decided to get the hell out of here. This was no place for me.

There was a road. One may have needed a 4-wheeled vehicle to go all the way to the river, but once the road moved into the hills it was a decent path to walk. It was all uphill for a long way.

The interesting thing about this walk was coming upon several abandoned homesteads. It was easy to figure that when the government bought the land along the river to make a national park out of it, that the people who had lived there had to move out. One of the homesteads had a stone house that was still intact. It was very small and consisted basically of one room with a fireplace, and from the debris scattered around I could see that the stone room had other wooden rooms attached to it. The fire place looked like it had been used for cooking. Of course, there was no electrical lines or evidence that there had been running water. It looked like a family had lived there. I got the idea that the stone walls of the place was put up by one man, and that accounted for the smallness of it. It probably took a pretty good while for one man to put it together. The fireplace itself had probably taken a couple of months for one man to find the rocks and bring them together in one place, much less to actually erect it piece by piece. The sight of it filled me with admiration for whoever had made this happen.

I had looked at an Arkansa map I had picked up at the state border when I came into Arkansa, and from what I could make out and figure from where the woman had taken me and the way I had walked along the river, it couldn't be more than ten miles to the little town the woman had turned off at. The more I walked, the more I figured I had figured wrong. I hiked for about three hours at a good pace, and I hadn't even gotten to the top of the mountain yet.

When I did get to what looked like the top, the road got a little better, and I saw a cottage that looked like a summer cabin, and electric lines strung out along the road. Then I came to a house that was obviously occupied. I didn't walk up to the house straightaway, but called out to the house to see if anybody answered. After a couple of minutes a middle-aged man walked barefooted and rumpled looking out to the road to talk with me. He seemed a little leery to see me standing there, but he was obliging when I told him how I got there and asked him how I could get back to town. He told me and I asked him if I could fill my water jar, and he pointed to a faucet, and walked back into the house.

He told me to continue along this road until I crossed a railroad track, and then turn left, and eventually this would lead me to the small town. I was very encouraged to have some idea about how I was going to resolve my situation. I had a full jug of water, and I set off at a good pace down the graded road. I didn't expect it to take very long for me to get back to civilization, and besides I was now walking downhill.

That didn't last long. Soon I was going uphill again, and there were no more houses for a long way. Finally I came to a well-kept house with gravel in the driveway and lots of flowerbeds and shrubbery. I kept on going by the house, but down the road I stopped to rest a bit. As I sat there I heard a vehicle approaching from the same direction I had come from. Soon a pickup truck appeared with three men in the front. I waved as they passed by, and for some reason didn't feel at all strange when all three of them gawked at me as they drove past. The truck continued for a while, then turned around and came past me again with the guys staring at me again. Then when they got to the graveled driveway they turned around and came back, and this time they stopped.

The driver was a big man with a red, florid face. The other two guys were skinny looking with dark eyes and dark hair and never spoke a mumbling word. The driver asked me where I was going. I got up and walked over to the truck to talk with them. I wanted a little better look. I was a little nervous because I seemed to know there could be trouble if I didn't mind myself.

I told the man who was driving my little story of getting lost and was trying to work my way back to town. He stared at me for a moment, and told me he was going to town, did I want a ride. I was so tired I didn't really give a damn about their intentions any more, and told him I would appreciate a ride. The driver told the guy on the passenger's side to "Git out, and git in the back, and let this gentleman ride in the front, I wanna talk to him."

Without the slightest hesitation, the guy got out and scrambled his way into the back of the pickup, I got in, and away we went down the road, hopefully toward town.

Turned out the driver was a preacher of the most fundamental kind, and the two guys with him were members of his church. From the way he had been obeyed by the guy in the back of the truck I sensed that they would do anything he told them, and that if he told them to knock me in the head, they would do so with no less hesitation, so I tried to present myself with as much politeness as possible.

It turned out that the little town was about ten more miles down the road. The only reason the preacher had picked me up was to save me for Jesus. We came to the railroad, he did turn left, and when the edge of the little town became apparent I was very relieved. The preacher let me out at the laundermat I had asked him about, and I expressed my gratitude and went inside and washed my clothes. By the time I finished washing and drying my clothes and sponge washing my body in the bathroom of the laundermat and making myself presentable, I had made up my mind that I would wait for a better time and circumstance to find myself a cave to meditate in. Arkansa and the Ozark mountains had whipped my ass.

I have experimented a bit with sensory deprivation. I built my own float tank and used it for about two years. What i really wanted to experience was to spend some time in a cave. Finding a cave to use to experience nature's own sensory deprivation chamber has not proved to be an easy thing for me. I haven't found it easy to find a cave to sit in. I haven't experienced it yet.

I began to research about how to find a cave on the internet. There isn't much information there that would do me much good. I did read about the conditions that allow caves to happen, and found out that certain areas of the country have more caves than others. Kentucky has a lot of caves such as are in the Mammoth Cave area, but I've had some bad experiments in Kentucky, so I didn't want to go there, My next best choice appeared to be in Missouri and Arkansa. Well, I'm a wanted man in Missouri for driving with an expired license a few years ago, so I decided to hitch-hike out to Arkansa to see if I could find a cave there that would suit my purposes.

I didn't know exactly where I should go in Arkansa to find a cave for meditating in, just the general area where they should show up, and so when I made my plans to go there I found that I could travel I-40 to Little Rock and turn right, and the area between Little Rock and on into Missouri should serve my purposes.

I decided to use my day pack to make the trip. It isn't a very large bag, but I didn't figure I would need a lot of stuff to sit in a cave. The problem with my day pack is that it doesn't facilitate carrying a sleeping bag. It's too small to put a sleeping bag inside it, and doesn't have the tie-downs to attach a sleeping bag to the outside, so I went without one. This proved to be a mistake as I got out on the road.

I caught a ride with my brother over to Fayetteville where he works to start out on my trip. By going that way I figured there would be at least some local traffic, and it would take me through some old hills that used to be mountains called the Uwharries. These old hills aren't what they used to be hundreds of millions of years ago, but they are interesting to me because of the stuff that hasn't rotted away yet. I have found some perfectly white granite rocks that have flecks of gold in them in those hills, and thought I might find some other interesting things like those rocks as I passed through there. The flat swampy coastal plains where I grew up don't have many rocks, and so I have a natural interest in them. I knew I wasn't going to pick up any rocks and haul them around in my backpack on my way to Arkansa, but I might find an interesting location I could return to later in my car.

As it turned out I didn't have much of a chance to look around in the Uwharries, the rides I got didn't allow it. I got stuck in this small town where there was not much traffic, and spent most of the first day standing by the road. When I did get a ride it was with a young man who had just gotten off work and was going to Winston Salem. I remember this guy mostly because of the truck he was driving. The thing about the truck that was so memorable was that it didn't have any brakes, and when he came to a place where he was required to stop, he would have to down-shift as fast as he could and pump frantically on the brake pedal. It was a little scary because we were in the edge of the Uwharries and there were some pretty good hills in that area where having good brakes is a good thing.

This young man had a story he liked to tell. He was an acoholic and had just got out of clinic where he dried out, and this job he was working putting up sheetrock was real important to him. He had to drive fifty miles one way every day to get to the job, but he had messed up so many jobs because of his drinking that he said he was lucky to have it.

He had a hobby he liked to talk about. He was a woodcarver, and his favorite thing to carve was wooden indians like the ones that used to be in cigar stores. He told me that he carved some really nice ones, and there was a tourist trap called JR's we were going to stop at just so he could show me the ones they had on display there. The cigar store indians at JR's were vastly inferior to his, of course, and the thing that made him mad was that JR's didn't seem at all interested in having better quality carvings in their place.

We did stop at JR's so he could show me their wooden indians, and finally we got to Winston Salem without having a wreck because of the bad brakes on his truck. He put me out at an intersection of I-40, and I was glad to be there in one piece. Driving through the side streets of Winston Salem in an old truck with no brakes was quite an adventure. When I asked him why we were taking the side streets he told me he didn't have a driver's license.

The intersection of I-40 he put me out at didn't appear to be a very good place to catch a ride, but I got lucky. Within fifteen minutes I got a ride with a young man going to Memphis, Tennessee. Memphis was a good five hundred miles away, and he was driving a fairly new car with air-conditioning, so I was fairly pleased he had stopped to pick me up.

The driver had a fairly interesting story. Presently, he was a good Christian and had a good job in the computer industry, but during his college days he had been a speed freak and a drunk. He told me that Christ had saved him from a horrible life. He was a fairly bright person and had figured out how to make his own methamphetamine, so he had gotten in deep trouble with his self because of the constant availability of his drug of choice. I pretended to be interested in how Christ has saved him from his own weakness, but I was more interested in how he made his own crank. Surprisingly, he seemed very interested in telling me. So, for the next ten hours or so he explained to me exactly how easy it is to make it happen. I guess I should have written it down, because I have forgotten everything he told me except that it somehow involved ether, which he said was easily available over the counter in spray cans sold for starter fluid. Somehow I think I deliberately forgot what he told me about how to make my own crank because I figured I'd get into the same trouble of using it just like he did.

He let me out east of Memphis in a suburb called Germantown. Germantown is about ten miles outside of Memphis. The intersection he let me out at was a terrible place to catch a ride, but I had been sitting so long that after about an hour I decided to walk to Memphis just to get some exercise.

A woman at a nearby convenience store told me that there were sidewalks all the way to Memphis. What she didn't tell me was that I had to walk through the roughest part of Memphis to get to the Mississipi River. The roughest part of Memphis is pretty rough indeed. Lots of drunks and crackheads. Probably a good thing I didn't know. I believe I was there on a Sunday. There wasn't much going on in Memphis. I did find myself walking past the Sun Studio where Elvis recorded his first records. I knew that because there were signs all over the place saying as much. It's located in a rundown section of town fairly close to the Salvation Army store.

I finally worked my way back over to I-40 in downtown Memphis where there wasn't much room for cars to stop if they were interested in giving me a ride. I squashed the fleeting fancy of walking across the Mississipi River Bridge. Eventually I did get a ride, and in a few hours I had reached Little Rock, Arkansa. I had to go about ten miles west of Little Rock to get to the road leading north through the Ozarks. I had passed through this area several times in the past, and was surprised at how it had developed since my last memory of it. There had been a lot of road-building going on and it seemed a little unusual to see how many new industrial parks there were around. I finally caught a ride out to where the road I was looking for was, and soon found that the new look of Little Rock quickly faded away as soon as I got a few miles down that road. I soon remembered why the Ozarks are referred to as Dogpatch.

I got a ride with this guy who was going to do some work on his summer cabin. He was a retired military guy. He certainly didn't look like most retired military guys I've run across. He started telling me horror stories of how "outsiders" can run into real problems up in the Ozarks. I had heard them before. He stopped at a feedstore to pick up some fertilizer he planned to use up at his cabin. My suspicions of this guy developed a little when one of the employees at that store expressed surprise that I would be hanging around with this guy. The impression I got from his comment was this guy I was riding with was one of those people who preyed on "outsiders", so when he offered me a job helping him work on his cabin I decided it was not a good thing for me to do. He turned off the main road to go back into the hills where his cabin was, and seemed real disappointed that I refused to go with him.

The place he turned off at was sparsely populated, and I had to walk a while before I got to a country store that was about five miles down the road. There wasn't much traffic on the road, and what there was didn't even slow down in curiosity. I began to feel a little nervous about where I was. There was no good place to hide in case I ran into trouble, and I felt trouble brewing.

The country store was used mostly as a gas station from what I saw. It seemed to be the only one around for the local people. It had a hokey touristy look about it. As though the owners were attempting to pull in some of the people going to the National Park further down the road. Inside there was not much stuff that went beyond milk and bread for the locals, and snacks such as tourists might be interested in. The prices were very high. I was getting into the area where I might find a cave, so I bought some cans of tuna and a box of crackers so I would have something to eat if I found one. The people who worked there were not too friendly, but they weren't openly hostile either.

I stayed near that store for four or five hours. It was a hard place to catch ride. Traffic was not only slow, but it was going the speed limit right pass me without any need to slow down, and there wasn't much of a shoulder on the road for them to pull over if they did. I figured my best hope was to catch one of the people who stopped at the store. And eventually, that's exactly what happened. A thickset woman in her late thirties pulled out of the store's gas pumps. She went past me at first, and then stopped and backed up to get me.


It always surprises me when women pick me up when I'm hitch-hiking. It just doesn't happen very often. As we drove down the road this woman explained to me that the only reason she had stopped was that she was originally from California, and she knew none of the locals would give me a ride. She planned to drop me off in the next little town where I would have a better chance of getting a ride because the traffic had to slow down to go through the little town.

She liked to talk. She was going home from work, and said she had to stop by the dairy where her husband worked to talk with him for a little bit, and because he would be pissed off at her for picking up a hitch-hiker, that she was going to let me off beside the road while she drove in to talk with him. She would pick me up again on her way out. The buildings of the dairy were just visible from the road, so when she stopped to let me out she told me she would be back in about twenty minutes, but if I got a ride to go ahead and take it. We both knew I wasn't going to get a ride.

She was good for her word. When she came back she stopped and picked me up again. She told me that she had ended up in Arkansa because back in the Hippie days she and her second husband were looking for some cheap land to buy where they could "return to nature". The land in the Ozarks was very inexpensive compared to California. She told me that she was now disenchanted and was trying to sell her land. She didn't really like the cliques of the locals, and they didn't particular like her and her "hippie ways". I didn't know what to talk to her about, so I asked her what astrology sign was and about her children. She had five children, three of them had already left to go out on their own. She intended to divorce her husband. She told me she was an unhappy Aries.

I told her why I was in the Ozarks, that I was looking for a cave to meditate in. She assured me that I was in the right area, there were a lot of caves around, but that when I looked for them I would have to be careful of the marijuana farmers who were constantly on guard against people looking to steal their crop and some of them booby-trapped their pot fields to discourage people from stealing their pot. She told me my best chance was to look on the National Park land that stretched out along the river. She said the Park was a big tourist attraction because the water in the river accumulated from all the limestone springs that fed it, and that the water was clean and pure enough to drink because it had been filtered through the limestone. The tourists would rent boats that would take them down the river to see the land along the river.

As a matter of fact, she said, her house was very near the river, and that she would take me down to the river before she went home if I wanted her to. I agreed that being off the main road portion of the river might work out good for me, and agreed to go where she was going to take me because it was isolated, and if I found a cave, I didn't want anyone to see me going into it.

She turned down this street in the little town that eventually turned into a dirt road, and the further we went down that dirt road the rougher it got. We came to a fork in road, and she told me she lived down the road that split off, but that she would take me down the side road because it led to the river spot she had told me about. This road was hardly a road at all, but more of a one-lane path through the woods. By the time we got near the river I had figured out her real reason for taking me down to the river was to have sex with me.

I wasn't very comfortable with this idea. I don't like the idea of messing around with married women for one thing. And the next thing was that I didn't feel any excitement with this woman. Over the years I have found out through experience that the old saying about a woman scorned is pretty much the truth, so I was in a quandry about how I was going to deal with this.

If I had been a young man and still in my prime, and could have gotten aroused by just about any woman, this wouldn't have been a problem, but I was sixty years old and had lost a lot of interest in sexual activities, and it would have to have been an woman that really interested me to get it up to get started. I felt totally dispassionate around this woman. She had told me she was an Aries, and I knew she would not only be available, but would initiate whatever needed to be done to make what she wanted to happen. So, I knew I would have to refuse her advances rather than just leave it alone and feign ignorance.

Sure enough, when we got down toward the river far enough and she couldn't risk taking her car any further because the dirt on the road was getting mucky, she stopped, got out of the car and made her play. She did it by pretending to pick something up and letting her skirt ride up her considerable butt. She was not an unattractive woman, and the way she did things could be fairly alluring at an earlier time in my life. What I did was pretend not to notice and walked toward the river which was just around a bend in the road. She called out to me to stop, but I kept going toward the river. She yelled out to me that she had to go, but that she might come back before dark. I told her that would be okay, but I kept moving. I never saw her again.

The dream was about merchant marine ships. The problem was that the cargo that was on a slower ship needed to be transferred to a faster ship somewhere in what seemed like the South Pacific, and the interaction of characters had to do with the competitive nature of the crews on the two ships. The Captain and the mate of the faster ship had flown to an earlier port than the slower ship so that they could discuss the transfer of the cargo and arrange the logistics of the coming transfer before they got to the port where the faster ship waited.

A couple of incidents seemed so strange that they should have made me realize I was dreaming. The first one involved the speed of the slower ship. The "slower" ship got up to speeds of 60 miles an hour. To my knowledge only nuclear-powered ships could go that fast at all, much less a small cargo ship. The actual cargo was never discussed. But, there was an conversational exchange between the mates of the two ships as they approached the port of exchange that indicated the priviledges of the faster ship. The faster ship got the choice of all the top-rated movies for later viewing at sea even before the slower ship arrived in this port, and the mate of the slower ship was miffed at this priviledge.

The first incident happened at the earlier port where the captain and mate of the faster ship boarded the slower ship. The captain of the faster ship got aboard the launch of the slower ship okay, as his rank would be priviledged, but the mate "didn't quite make it" as the slower ship pulled out of the port. The mate jumped in the water to try to catch the launch boat, and when it looked like he was too slow, he literally started running on top of the water to catch it, and it was only the efforts of the one of the crew members of the launch who got down on the guard rails of the launch to catch his hand as he raced across the water that he was able to board the launch.

The speeds attained on the slower ship may have only seemed rather remarkable to me as the dreamer. In my own experience on destroyer-class vessels where trial speed runs between Oahu and Midway Islands only got up to 36 knots with the whole ship trembling like it would vibrate apart if we went any faster, so the speeds attained in the dream seemed incredible to me, even though more modern vessels especially built for speed might go faster. Maybe I saw the ports as being of the South Pacific because of these former speed tests.

The ships only stopped at these two ports to pick up the captain and mate and to make the exchange. They were not military oriented ports. There were neon lights shining across the water at the ports but we never went ashore. The slower ship got painted with phospherated stripes at the first port to help it be recognized at the port of exchange to speed up the logistics of tranferring the cargo. This would not ordinarily happen so the paint stripes should have appeared as unusual too.

As the dreamer I saw the ship leaving port and was aboard it too to hear the conversations. It was as though I was not perceived as being present to hear the conversations, but was there as a witness nevertheless. I seemed to be invisible. it seemed like I was in an out-of-body state and not a participant.

I have been present on what has seemed like space ships in other dreams, so maybe being on water-bourne ships would not have seemed all that unusual to me. The uniforms were of a nautical fashion, but too casual to have been military ships. The water was beautiful. It had that greenish tint that deep water always seems to have, and it was almost translucent.

In my experiences with certain research chemicals I have seen the characters on some of the space vehicles as various creatures that wouldn't ordinarily have the forms they did and also possess that level of intelligence. In ordinary dreams without special inducements I would have changed the various creatures into having more ordinary features like humans. To see them in the chemically-induced visions as large insects that commanded space ships was almost too spectacular to believe, and so this difference makes me think I automagically changed them into something more familiar in regular dreaming. Maybe even to the point of changing the scenario from space ships into nautical ships.

Sometime I get the impression that anthropologists "create" our former incarnations into "ape-men" with primitive features such as they show in scientific magazines with the same facility. The intellectual abilities are of the same order, but it's the experience in giving order to the elements involved in prehistoric times that is primitive. The actual intellectual primus is already in place and has been from the beginning and survives death.

Writing about dreams is so digital. I don't remember dreams sequentially, although they do seem to occur in linear order. It's just that my memory of them is so nebulous that it takes remembering one part of the dream before I remember other parts of it. Probably the most intriguing incident of this last dream was the mate trying so hard to catch the launch and not be left behind, so that he would have had to catch an airplane and be left out of the logistics meetings, inspired such fervor that he literally swam so fast that he was able to attain enough speed to emerge from, and run across the top of the water, was intrinsically fascinating and helped me to remember other parts of the dream.

I suspect that if I had waited an hour to write the dream down the memory of it would have faded altogether. The incidents that allow the digital-like recall seem to exist as the real trick to remembering any of it.

When I begin to write about those unbelieveable incidents is the key to the whole recall process. I suspect the fantastic nature of what is considered unbelievable is specific to the dreamer's beta state experience though. I have a couple of friends who teach chemistry who would have probably seen unbelievable molecular structures instead of nautical ports like I did, because that's their ordinary beta state activity, and they would have written about what seemed fantastic to them just as I write about what seemed fantastic to me. However, I think all of us would have been pretty impressed by a guy running across the top of the water. LOL

Maybe this equating what one experiences in ordinary beta state life in dreaming is the real secret to lucid dreaming. To recognize one is dreaming in real time, some specific incident in the dream has to appear unusual to the dreamer. And what appears as unusual to a person who makes a living as a lawyer, and what appears unusual to a person who makes a living as a chemist would seem completely different. What would appear fantastic and unbelievable to both a lawyer and a chemist might pass right by a dreamer who makes their living as an assembly line worker at the local Ford plant, who was dreaming about court systems and chemical labs.

There are other states we all seem to participate in besides the ordinary day-by-day "wakening" beta state and the alpha-theta dream state. The delta state is an example. The delta state happens at the very bottom of the dream cycle and doesn't seem to associate with the beta state in which we normally make a living. It may associate somewhat to a mixture of all the various states we encounter, and the average person might not make that connection in the delta state in such a way that some part of what happens in the delta state seems unusual enough that we realize we're dreaming, and be able to take control of dreaming in the delta state.

Maybe this is what happens with experienced meditators through their long experience in attaining the various states and recognizing the different associations possible in each state or combinations of states. Their familiarity with what might seem unusual in one state or the other allows them to realize what can be brought to lucidity, and thus control.

There is a voice I hear sometime just before I wake up or just before I go to sleep. If I hear it as I fall asleep I find it almost impossible to go to sleep, and if I hear it in the morning I can't go back to sleep. It doesn't happen often.

The last thing I heard was that I would die unexpectedly. That death would catch me off-guard. It was a pretty simple statement. And not anything more than that. It did not tell me how soon I would die unexpectedly, just that I would, so it could be anytime.

I came close to dying a couple of years ago. I was eating with my mother and niece in a restaurant and some sausage I was trying to swallow went down the wrong pipe and suddenly I couldn't breathe. I was totally unprepared for this. Nobody had the slightest idea what was wrong, only that I was acting funny. I was very calm about it at first.I tried to cough the sausage out, but that didn't work. Then, when I realized I was going to be able to get enough air in my lung to blow the sausage chunk out of my wind pipe I stood up and continued to try to get air in my lungs. Nothing I did was getting me air. Finally, a young man a couple of booths away approached me and asked me what was wrong. I could no more speak than I could breathe, but I used my arms and hands to indicate the Hiemlic manuever, he realized the meaning of my gestures, and got behind me and forced the sausage out. It took a few minutes to get to breathing correctly again. I sat back down realizing that I had come very close to death. Maybe, if I had passed out from a lack of oxygen and fell to the floor the sausage might have come out on it's own and I wouldn't have died, but from the reaction of the people around me I don't think so.

This event made me realize the fragility of life and how I am always just moments away from being a dead man. Something like this will probably kill me, I just don't know when, and somehow I don't really care. Better this than to lay suffering for months and perhaps even years withering away from some disease that slowly takes my life.

Perhaps a car accident will cause my death or somehow I will get caught up in some violent incident in which I get killed by gun fire. Maybe I'll drown during some unpredictable way. The way I imagine it, I'll be living my regular life one moment, and the next moment I will be struggling to live without even realizing that this is my final moments in this body.

Why would death be any different for me. I have lived in a very reckless manner much of my life. I have taken chances with my life on a fairly regular basis when I was younger. I have even went through the motions of taking my own life a couple of times and that obviously didn't work.

Probably the one time I thought death was certain was the time I jumped of the mountain in Yosemite National Park. I was in a situation where I thought death was inevitable, and so I acted in a way that at least indicated some choice on my part.

The one thing that worries me somewhat about dying unexpectedly is that I may not realize that I'm dead. When I do die, I want to realize that I am dead and move on with the choices available when death takes my body away from me.

My out-of-body experiences have convinced me that there is life after death. One experience when I was out on the road hitch-hiking was particularly convincing. I got put out at the intersection of two Interstates somewhere down south of here early in the morning hours about three o'clock, traffic was fast and there was very little of it at that time of day, there was no sign of any houses or stores around this intersection for me to disturb anyone by my singing, so I danced around and sang at the top of my lungs as a diversion from the extreme fatigue I was experiencing from being out on the road so long. Suddenly I found myself high in the air above my body and looking down at this fool singing and dancing in the middle of nowhere. My only thought was, "What has become of me." In that moment I realized I was not that fool down there singing and dancing, but rather, the "me" that was up in the air looking down at that fool.

This is what I think will happen when I die, unexpectedly or not. If at the time of my death I am attached to my body and don't realize that it is dead, I will hang around it trying to bring it back to life, maybe forever.

I don't know and probably can't know if there are choices about what to do next upon the event of the death of my body. I have read stuff that indicates that there will be choices, but if the spirit that is really me is unable to accept the death of the body and hangs around futily trying to get back in my body and reanimate it I may miss any choices that may exist at that time. The Tibetan Book of the Dead paints a scenario of this order that kind of makes sense to me.

But, without a living body, which I have always returned to when I lost my sensory contact with the world, it is hard to understand what really happens at the moment of death or what happens after that. When I have lost contact with the physical world previously, like when I have been in the hospital and lost that conscious contact through anesthesia, I don't remember anything. When I lost consciousness from eating trumpet flowers down in Key West, I don't remember anything after I passed out. When I smoked the Diviner's Sage and fell into a stupor however, I was consciously aware, but I was totally disassociated from any awareness of who or where I was, and that's how I think it will be when I die.

I had read everything I could to prepare me for smoking the Diviner's Sage. I spend a couple of days reading other people's accounts of what happened when they did it. Nothing I read prepared me for what happened though.

I had a sitter for this occasion. I had read that having a sitter was a good idea because some of the reports I'd read warned that people do strange things after they inhale the smoke, along with the warning that how a person reacts can be unpredictable. The ritual requires that one attempt to get as much of the smoke into their lungs before the ingredients of the sage takes over and does what it does. The biggest problem is that some people jump up and run and can hurt themselves by doing that. I was going to smoke the sage upstairs in my bedroom, and I wanted someone to be there to stop me from running and breaking my neck trying to get downstairs. Later, when I was sitting for a friend of mine while he smoked the sage, he did jump up and run, and it happened so fast I couldn't stop him. He did not get hurt.

I used a combination of some regular sage leaves in the bottom of the pipe, and packed some concentrated sage that was five times stronger on top of it. I wanted to have the full experience on my first effort, and I thought using the concentrated stuff would optimize those chances.

I was also warned to inhale the smoke while I was sitting down so that I would not fall and hurt myself when I took the smoke into my lungs. So, I sat down on the edge of my bed so that if I fell backward I would fall on the softness of my mattress. This turned out to be a good decision. I lit the pipe and took as much of the smoke into my lungs as was possible and held it down for as long as I could. My sitter was helping me light the pipe, and was urging me to hold it in as long as I could. When I couldn't hold the smoke any longer I blew it out, and immediately took another lungfull from the pipe. I held that as long as I could and took another.

Before I finished that toke I felt the effects of the sage. I experienced a bunch of colors with my eyes closed, and those colors had a shape that became my entire sensory awareness. The shape was like a the Nautilus seashell. Event the colors I saw conformed to and was arranged like the little growth ridges in the shell. It was out in front of me at first as though I was seeing a circle of light on a flat plane in front of me, and then that circle swooped over me similar to flipping a hoola hoop over my head. It became the only thing I was aware of. As the flat circle of pontilistic colors enveloped me into itself I heard a circus-like voice shouting, "Here we go!", and as it swooped over me and enveloped me I fell back on the bed. That was the last thing I was aware of as a human being.

At that point I was inside of the shell-like environment with the colors existing as my only awareness. I had no concept of being a human being. I had no idea that I had a body or lived on the earth. I had no memory of anything and just was. I was totally detached from anything that reminded me of my former self. I was just there. I lay there struggling for orientation. I didn't know where I was or who I was. There was nothing to attach this awareness to. There was just the colors. I somehow found myself searching for the origin of that voice I heard as the smoke overtook me. I had no concept of time in the least, just that I didn't know what was going on. I felt helpless. After existing in this formless, timeless place for what seemed like an eternity I became aware of some entity and I reached out to it. I realized that I was trying to get a grip on something... anything! I realized I was communicating to this entity, but I didn't know what I was saying or what it was saying back to me. I was lost in the immediacy of the moment, and could not store information about what was going on. It was going on, but I could not reflect on what was going on to make sense of it.

The first awareness I had of being a human and where I was happened when I asked the entity, "Have you got me?" It was at this moment that my sitter, thinking that I was talking to him, answered me by saying, "I am here."

When I heard my sitter's voice I began to orient myself to the situation I was in. I lay there for a few minutes realizing that what I had experienced had happened because I had inhaled the smoke of the Diviner's Sage into my body, and that I was alive and had a body, and that I was laying on my own bed in my bedroom. I wasn't dead.

This is what I think will happen when death comes. Total disorientation and helplessness. The brain will not function at all and no memories of what has happened when alive will be available to latch on to. There will be consciousness, but nothing to attach that awareness to. The memory of the sensory world will be gone and that conscious awareness will be alone with itself. Only the Other can help that conscious to orient itself to the situation it's in. If there be such. Only if there be such. I do not gnow.

Other than my reading about Semiotics lately, I have been stymied in my creative efforts recently by my decision to go on a diet and lose some of my rather immense girth. The diet I am following, more or less, is a low-carb diet basically along the lines of the Atkins diet. I have been avoiding sugar, rice, potatoes, and breads for about a month now. I didn't weigh before I started this regimen and I haven't weighed since I started the diet, but it has had a strong effect on me. I seem subject to grumpiness and a bit of depression during this time, and my enthusiasm for writing about my life has literally gone down the drain.

I suspect my physical life depends on the habitual use of sugar in one form or the other, and that what I am experiencing has to do with the withdrawal sympthoms of this addiction. While these withdrawal sympthoms evidence themselves more in my physical body, my mental life seems to have an equal toll taken upon it in the form of the depression I have been experiencing.

Depression is an old, old story with me. It doesn't sneak up on me as it did when I was a kid. I'm familiar with the signs of it to such a degree that I'm aware of the smallest parts of it as they appear. Depression is something I have a habit with. There was a lot of it going on in my early life during the time of my teen years and expecially during my twenties. I ended up committing myself to the state hospital when I was in my late twenties.

Prior to the time I committed myself to the state hospital I spent a considerable amount of time going to see psychologists and psychiatrists to attempt to understand why I felt so depressed. I think most of them tried to help me in the best way they could, but this is a very difficult area to deal with, because they are humans themselves. At one time I thought I wanted to enter this field as a professional, but in the years since I realize there is not much they can do without endangering themselves simply by their association with their patients.

I didn't follow through with my interest in becoming a psychologist. When I started taking courses in that subject I found it to be the most boring subject I encountered. My impression is that the people who do go into this field do so to help themselves. Instead I decided to study acting.

Formal education has not worked with me. I think I know why, but I can't say I'm certain about it. I think it has to do with my determination not to let myself be gulled the way I was when I was a young prepubescent kid. I believed everything anybody wanted me to.

In the times of past
when I was a boy
I listened to every word,
and the meaning of my prayers
was to wash away
the guilt and fear
of doing wrong.
I wasn't strong,
but I'd sing a song.

Just to settle down
I bought a wife
with the pictures
that she saw
of her mother's smiling eyes.
She did not understand
that I was a man
just for loving,
and Lord, I can't smile.

Then, my chances come
for me to run
from all the golden rules.
To be the biggest damn fool!
To buy my way into the dreams
to make things fit
into my schemes,
and Lord, how I screamed.

I could sing a song
about pretty girls,
and all the friends I know,
but the song I sing,
with a distance ring,
is about a man
without a plan
to own the future,
or kill the past.

fmp '69

Even as a kid I seemed prone to conversion, brainwashing, and the sympthoms of metanoia. One of the first times that I remember clearly was in a church by a preacher named Reverend Cox. I was nine years old. It shocked my parents to see my small body walking up to the pulpit to accept Jesus Christ as my savior. They didn't think I understood the implications of such a decision. They were right, of course, I didn't understand the implications, but I was in the full throes of conversion, and I wouldn't have it any other way. They had no choice but to go along with me on this. It was probably a mistake on their part to leave me alone with this guy for his "instruction", but doing the Christian thing in a small town in the Bible Belt was expected, and they probably had a difficult time finding arguments to restrain my enthusiasm. The next event of conversion happened when I was thirteen, and it given the direction of deciding I'd had enough of Christianity.

My decision not to take Psychology as my major in college probably had a lot to do with my susceptability to conversion. Somehow I realized that to get into the field I had to undergo a type of conversion to allow it to happen, and I had enough of that. In fact, I think that's why formal education did not take with me. Any and all of it requires such a conversion. My studies in dramatics seem to lead me much more effectively toward my unseen goal, that of learning to induce conversion myself.

I may have posted this entry previously, but I'm too lazy to look it up. I have spent some time editing it to make it more understandable to myself, and hopefully for any perspective reader. This is one of the more difficult concepts I play around with to put in words.

The persona is that which in reality one is not,
but which oneself as well as others think one is.
~ Carl Jung

It interests me a lot to read that Carl Jung came to the same conclusion that I have. Or rather, that we both came to the same conclusion some others may have also arrived at independently. The relevance of Jung's statement is something that needs to be understood before any real progress can be made in trancending the conceptual world we created for the survival of our identities as individual people.

This is not to say that I have gotten beyond it, but that I sense that I do understand the meaning associated with Jung's quote now. I have only arrived at that meaning recently.

This all started when I returned from an involuntary out of body experience that happened to me many years ago. Later, when I realized that I was back in my body again, I found myself saying one sentence over and over again. This sentence was the anchor that allowed me to remember I had the out of body experience. The sentence I repeated so repetitiously was, "Everything is nothing but the idea that it is something, and it could be anything at all."

It took a while before I understood what that statement implied, and even longer before I knew what it meant to me in regard to my own world view. Eventually, after repeating this sentence redundantly for a long time, I realized it meant that I was perceiving the sensory world I experienced daily in a conceptual sense, and my concepts and ideas of the sensory world was not the real material world at all.

After reading and studying Joseph Campbell's book, The Hero of a Thousand Faces, and began to understand his description of what he called "The Hero's Journey", I began to associate this sentence I brought back with me from the out of body experience, and this association led me to begin to understand the psychological concept of projection. The notion that we only see ourselves in other people. As I began to understand this better I could see examples of it's truth for me in my own relationship with the sensory perceived world and the possibility of it happening in other people's relationships with the hallucinations of projection too.

When I first began to get it, my nature of being led me to think of ways I could use this concept to get what I wanted from others. I soon realized that what people said about me or any other thing was a projection of what they thought about themselves, and possibly all of us betrayed our innermost secrets about who we think we are with every description we made of the other.

I soon found out that this betrayal of self is very difficult to remain consciously aware of in the moment of betrayal. I thought at first that by acquiring a critical database about how others thought about themselves, I could use that information to manipulate them for my own ends. The second thing I thought of was that the same method was possible for them to use... for better or worse... against me. After that, I didn't seem to have the time to mentally maintain a list of ideated personal attributes on anyone but myself.

Recently, in the past month, I read a book written by a Jungian analyst that, according to Jung's psychology, all of our projected personal attributes and careactoristics dwell in our psyches unconsciously, and this same unconscious material we project on others, is the very materials we desperately need to become conscious of in our own person.

This entire process of my understanding projection had a little twist in it, and it was this skewered twist that changed my entire gestalt. It took a while for me to realize that our own attributes and careactoristics we project on others is not necessarily the way we think we really are.

The judgements resulting from what we perceive in others is what we almost certainly visit upon ourselves. The qualities and characteristics we deem them to have, relates to the same opinion we have of ourselves. What we observe them doing and saying could be true about us too, but if, and only if, they did what they do for our reasons rather than their own reasons. Paradoxically, other people don't seem to do and say what they do and say for our reasons. Nor do we do and say what we do and say for their reasons.

This train of thought is how I arrived at the same conclusion as the Jung quote above. We seem to think that everyone else, at some level, are basically the same as ourselves, that all of us do and say what we do and say for our own reasons. That's true in an ordinary sense, but that is not how we are the same in my opinion. We are the same because each of us projects our opinion of ourselves upon the other, and we are not who we think we are.

We only hallucinate that we are our own individual person, and that we own or possess our identity as individuals. We are not those projections we place on others anymore than others are the projection of ourself we attempt to make them into. We create this conceptual illusion for the artificial purpose of reason, and then pretend that reason rules the sensory world. It does not. Something beyond reason and beyond our conceptual contructs prevails in spite of the games we play with ourselves and others.

I had an experience once at a party where there was a mixed gender crowd of about twenty people. I left my body during a very curious personal moment, not intending to go OOB, but when I looked over to the sofa and saw my body sitting there I kinda figured it out. ;-)

I found myself near two young college girls who were sitting on the floor in the middle of the living room of this house down by the Tar River. They were having a conversation about something that had happened during one of their classes. I started talking to one of the girls, and she responded to me without stopping her
conversation to the other girl. At this point she seemed to be talking to both of us at the same time. Her personality continued it's conversation with the other girl, and another aspect of herself simultaneously talked to me. At the same time I was talking to her, my body over on the sofa was having an animated conversation with an old friend of mine, while I was talking to the girl while out of body.

This incident got me to thinking that my personality can operate quite well without awareness of my anima, while my anima is aware of itself and the personality simultaneously.

Since that particular incident I have realized I am not aware of my anima most of the time, and I only assume that it is always out and about doing as it pleases, and communicating with other entities, some with bodies and others not, without the awareness of my personality.

This seems similar to entering the dream world and believing myself to participate in that dream world without awareness that at the same time I'm laying in my bed sleeping. Sometime, however, I am aware that I'm laying in my bed sleeping and also aware that I'm participating in my dream world at the same time.

It seems possible to have some sort of control with this. I don't seem to have it. I feel lucky if I am aware of both povs happening simultaneously and when it does happen it happens randomly and serendipitiously. I suspect having control is a matter of intent.

Maybe the control of intent is the secret the Sayings teaches. I'm halfway guessing here, but I seem sure intent comes from my anima, and I also suspect that my personality foolishly thinks it controls intent simply because it does seem to exert control over my identity or who I "think" I am.

There is a deep yearning to resolve this issue and this yearning is represented poignantly by Rodney King who said, "Why can't we all just get along." LOL

The conflict between my anima and my personality over identity and intent postures itself as the true mystery of life... for me. My personality wants to control intent and my anima wants to be recognized as my true identity.

I figure this dichotomy represents the father/son deal in the Gospel of Thomas, and is also addressed in the sayings about rendering and blasphemy.

I have had a drinking problem for most of my adult life. This drinking that I've done seemed to have a purpose, and it is connected with my relation with females. It was only recently that I became consciously aware of it's definitive connection with females during my last relationship with a woman a coupla years ago. I think it became conscious to me because previous to meeting this woman over the internet and deciding to move to her place to live I had reduced the variety of my drinking to red wine.

Previous to this I drank anything and everything as it become available at various events. I knew I didn't like beer the first time I drank it. A half can of beer made me sick and I puked for hours until I got the dry heaves. But, since most of the guys in the Navy drank beer and it was considered a manly thing to do, I eventually got used to the taste of beer.

I learned to drink hard liquor in the Navy. I had to try it all to satisfy myself that I was sophisticated about these things. Mostly I drank mixed drinks that were sweet and easy to get down. My first favorite mixed drink was sloe gin and coke. Incredibly sweet drink that tastes a little like my favorite soda pop. By the time I realized I had too much, I already had enough booze in my body to be over the top and quite ready to betray my natural reserve and make a complete fool of myself.

Between not liking the taste of beer and the devastating effects of drinking hard liquor I decided to buy nothing for myself but red wine, usually a very hearty burgundy. Burgundy is sort of so so with me. Usually the first coupla sips of it don't taste too good. It is certainly not sweet enough that I gulp it down like soda pop, and after the first glass it gets to taste a little better. When I'm by myself, which is most of the time now, I seldom drink more than three small glasses and most of the time I don't finish the second one.

I live like a miser and have for most of my adult life. I have issues with money, and if I have enough to live a little extravagantly it usually leads to pain and suffering that doesn't seem to come around when I remain poor. Presently, I live off a small Social Security check that is barely enough for me to pay only for the most essential domestic conveniences. I buy a gallon of wine every coupla of weeks that costs around ten dollars, and normally drink two glasses of wine per day, unless I have visitors, and then I may drink more for the sake of sociabilities sake. I don't have many visitors.

My point is that when I'm alone I don't drink very much. It's when I get involved with other people that the drinking becomes a problem. People usually seem attracted to the person I represent when I spend most of my time alone, and expect me to stay that person because that's what they were attracted to about me in the beginning.

I said that I became consciously aware of this during my last affair, and that's true. That's not to say that I have been unconscious of the fact that most of my relationships break up as the result of drinking. It would be hard not to notice that over the years even for me.

This woman began writing to me off-list while we were both subscribed to an e-mail discussion group. She admired the way I wrote and we started a personal relationship through e-mail. She was interesting to me also. Eventually she declared love for me sight unseen, and since I also felt like I was getting involved, I decided to drive up north to where she lived to get a good look at her. She was/is beautiful. I knew from the getgo that she was too young for me, she is sixteen years younger, but she insisted that didn't make any difference to her because she found it so difficult to find a man who fit her notion of what real intelligence amounts to. Besides, we both have had strong spiritual experiences that seemed to make us birds-of-a-feather.

I think I stayed with her at her place for about a week and come home. Our e-mail relationship continued with more intimacy and feelings, and so eventually we decided to try to live together. I would leave my home and move to her small studio apartment with her two cats.

We had other things in common besides the aforementioned spiritual and intellectual experiences. We both had been married twice, and had lived very active sexual lives of some dubious social worth. Drinking, drugs, and carousing had been a big part of our pasts. We were fairly open with each other about how we had lived, and also about how this seemed to be connected with the influence of other people.

So when I bought the first gallon of wine we both enjoyed it, got a little too inebriated at times, but since we were happy and in love, it just seemed more like a celebration than a going back to our old ways. That came into play when I bought an ounce of pot to carry up there, and we started smoking from time to time. This did seem to come to the fore more as an open issue because she was a college professor, and her reputation was very important to her. She really loves her job. She seems to enjoy being around young people. She has no children of her own and appears to enjoy mothering them.

Then, little things that hadn't seem to have been a big deal at first became more important. She had these two cats she had saved from certain death. She did not allow them out of the apartment for any reason. It was a very small two room apartment with a small bath, and the cats became an issue. I don't dislike cats, especially if they belong to someone else, but I didn't like having to live with them inside the house. At night they got naturally rambunctious, and chased each other all over the apartment including the bed we slept in. One night one of the cats pounced on me with all claws extended and woke me up wondering, "What tha' hell?", and when I threw it up against the wall for it's troubles, our troubles began. She told me I was a cruel, heartless person who had no respect for helpless animals. I told her she was even more heartless for locking them up in her apartment and never letting them act like cats.

I began to realize her intent was to treat me just like she did the cats. I was to fulfill a role she needed played out in her life, and that I would not be allowed to go outside the cage she built for me to act like a normal human. Her extreme jealousy became more and more apparent, and soon enough, openly so. Eventually, she told me directly that she was a control freak, and that it was her way or the highway. I left most of my stuff that I had carried up there to live with her and took the highway.

As I mourned lost love during the aftermath of this failed relationship, and looked back on other failed relationships, it was then I began to see the relationship between them all. The drinking seemed to be based in my childhood.

I didn't know my mother had been married twice when I was a kid, and that my oldest sister was only my half-sister. I found that out in a hayfield while working with my father. My father made the mistake of treating me like his confidant. When we were out working the farm together he liked to tell me about his adventures experienced when he was young. I guess he thought he was giving me advice about the mistakes of young blood. On this particular day, when I was about 15 years old, he was telling me of all the women he had been with before he met my mother. When he told me about this one woman he should have married instead of my mother, and how sorry he had not married her instead of my mother, I became angry, and told him I didn't want to hear all this stuff, that he was talking bad about my mother and I didn't want to hear it.

The work we were doing was pretty tough on both of us. He was raking up and pitching hay into a high-railed trailer, and I was in the trailer stomping it down to pack it tighter, so we could get as much hay in each load as possible. Hay is gathered on the hottest rain-free days of summer, and we were both dripping with sweat.

Suddenly, we were not having a picayune conversation about the lusty adventures of his youth anymore. When I yelled at him to stop saying bad things about my mother he got mad. His face turned red, and he started screaming about how little I understood about my mother and waving the pitchfork at me. That's when he told me about her first marriage. I was totally stunned. I couldn't believe him. I wouldn't believe him. Like most young boys I thought my mother was good and pure as the rain that fell from the sky no matter how mean she could be sometime.

I stood in the trailer holding on the the side rails and just stared at him as he raged about how my mother had gotten pregnant by a drunk, and then tricked him into marrying her so she could get away from the shame of it. Nothing that had happened in my young life wounded me so deeply. I jumped out of the trailer and ran for the woods to deal with this devastating news. He screamed at me to come back and get in the trailer because we hadn't finished the work. To this day I don't think he realized how strongly this hurt me. His pain has inured him to how it might affect others.

I don't remember exactly when I came home again. It was dark. I had cried myself into a great tiredness, and there was no where else to go. While I would out in the woods, I vowed to go find the drunk who had abandoned my mother and kill him. Within a couple of weeks I ran away from home to my grandparent's home in Mississippi to execute this plan.

I couldn't kill him. I got lucky and found him. It wasn't hard. He was the boy next door, and just happened to be visiting his parents while I was there. When I realized who he was and saw what was standing in front of me, a dried-up nothing of a man, I understood why he had left, and forgave him. This skinny little man was no match for my mother, and my father wasn't either. That's when I began to wonder if my father wasn't telling me the truth. They were both victims.

This thing makes me wonder is how much this affected my ideas toward women. Here were these two men who both married my mother. One drank to get away from her harridan ways, and one who stayed and suffered. I seem to get attracted to the suffering a hard woman can put on a man, and the ecstasy of escaping it once I get caught up in their grasp.

My friend Billy came over a coupla days ago. He was distraught. He had an envelope in his hand, and as he came in the door he looked down at the envelope, looked up at me, and said, "Damn people, I think I'm gone kill myself." and laughed.

He had gone to an auctioneering school and then failed the licensing text.

Two minutes later he was hypnotized, and walking around A National Park on the top of Lookout Mountain and looking down on the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee in a state of awe.

After he had refreshed himself there in that place and relaxed a little, I aked him to return to the examination room where he took the licensing test. He told me that he was okay with the way the test was going until he came to the fill-in-the-blank portion of the test, and he froze. Even though he knew the answers, he could not write the words down on the paper. I asked him to fully describe how he felt at the moment he realized he would fail the test because his fingers were paralysed.

He told me he felt totally helplessness. Defeat,shame, humiliation, and anxiety seemed to flood his emotions in that moment, and he felt a disgusting emptiness in the pit of our stomach.

I asked Billy to hold that moment in time, and to search back through his life for other times he had felt this feeling before the test. His eyes became active behind the closed lids and I knew he was seeing multiple events as he contemplated his life.

I asked him to find the first incident this feeling of helplessness happened in his life. He sat silently for a while, and then he said he could not tell me about the first time it happened because it had happened for as long as he could remember.

I asked him to go deeper into state and relax even more, and then to look again for the beginning of this feeling of dread, but to start out at 6 years old and search even more deeply. I told him that he would begin to search more deeply when I counted aloud from three back to one, and then clapped my hands. I repeated this to him several times, and then told him that each time I counted down from three to one and clapped my hands, he would continue his search for the original event he had felt helpless like this, but to search in the next younger year.

I counted down and clapped my hands and told him to look for the first time he felt that way when he was six years old. He just shook his head as he looked at all the times this feeling had wounded him when he was six years old. Billy had a very sad, tormented look on his face during this time. Sitting across the old tool chest I use for a coffee table, I could only feel what he was experiencing. I asked him if the same feeling happened earlier than six years old. He nodded his head.

For brevity, I'll just say that we regressed him back until the birth moment and the feeling still came around.

Since we had already approached his moment of birth, I figured he might want to experience what he might be aware of previous to his entry into the world as Billy. I asked him if he wanted to go back through the birth experience to before he was born. He straighted his shoulders and made his back a little stiffer, and sat erect on the front edge of the sofa. I've known Billy for 15-20 years, and I recognized this posture from a long time back. Billy comes from a Native American heritage, and this erect way of composing himself is his warrior pose.

I had him go through his entire body looking for pockets of tension or nervousness while I counted backward from one hundred, and that as I counted each number he would be able to let go of being Billy for a while. As I counted down on each of his exhales I saw him relaxing and letting go. When I had counted down to one I asked him if he was ready. With his lips in a straight line his eyes smiled out that he was. Immediately, I counted down from three to one, and then clapped my hands as loud as I could to startle him into jumping the broom.

Previous to my loud clapping his face was a composition in nobility and strength. A moment later his jaw dropped, his shoulders sagged, and there was a look of confusion I'd never seen before. I asked him who he was. He didn't know. I asked him if the feeling was still there. He said "Yes.". Even before he was born? "Yes."

I asked him to tell me what he could about the feeling that was part of him even before he was born. He said something was coming for him. He couldn't see what it was, but he knew it was so powerful that he could not put up a fight. He said that if it found him it would have total dominance over him and that there was nothing he could do about it. He said he would be totally at it's mercy and that all he could do was beg for his life. I asked him repeatedly what it was that was after him, and he could not tell me. All he understood was that he sensed that it was after him, and there was nothing he could do but try to escape, and that even to try to escape was impossible for long.

I asked him if that's why he decided to get a body and be a human. He said becoming human was just another place to hide, but not for long, that eventually it would get him. I asked him what would happen if his hiding place was found out. He said it was waiting, that eventually it would get him. I asked him what would happen then. His answer was that he would have to go back. I asked him where he would have to go back to. He wouldn't tell me. Whatever it was he was frightened more than his courage could help him with.

I took Billy back through the birth process as slowly as I could. He didn't say much. I didn't ask much. I told him to remember what happened, and set up a post hypnotice signal so we could get back to it, and eventually I brought him back to sitting on my sofa.

Funny thing, he had forgotten all about failing the auctioneering test. It must not have been all that important.

My childhood nemesis, my older sister Billie, has often attempted to control my memory of certain childhood memories. When the family would get together and look at photographs, we would argue about what was going on when the photograph was taken. Usually, I didn't have any idea what was going on at that one moment all those years ago, but my sister takes the position that she was two and a quarter years older than me, and was more aware of what was going on. Then she clams up.

Since I don't have any real memory of such photographic events except for her dumb assessment. It's all based on some stupid snapshot from a bad camera and even worse film. It's just sickening to think I could have a little girl's memory of my childhood simply because she could beat me up if I didn't agree with her. But, she was even more underhanded when it came to blackmail.

Billie was a tattletale. A little power game she was good at. Inevitably, she would come to me first and tell me that she was going to tell our parents I had done something against the rules. I would call her a liar and that her shirt tail was on fire, and the screaming began. Then, she would stop yelling, draw herself up into her most self-righteous nine year old stance, and tell me that if I didn't pay her something to shut her up, she would tell on me, and not only that, but that she was obligated by family duty to expose me for the sinner I was.

Then, with a haughty practiced twirl, she would spin round on her heels, and head for the house yelling, "Momma" like the witch she only pretended to be. Mostly, I would find myself following her and yelling, "You better not tell! You better not tell!" Fat chance. Billie was a tattletale.

Usually, by the time she found out what I'd done, my parents already knew about whatever it was she was manipulating me about, and it didn't make any difference what transpired between Billie and I. Our family was a very closed loop system, being strangers with no kin about, and the outcome of my innocent mischievousness was painful and certain. Spare the rod, spoil the child.

Billie taught me the nursery rhyme about what little girls are made of, you gnow, sugar and spice and all that jazz. Billie liked the part about what little boys are made of, and when she got to that scene she would scrunch up like the Wicked Witch from the fairy tale about Hans and Gretel, and her eyes would be sizing me up for the oven while she screeched that part out as if it were truly painful.

Billie was fairly believable. You should hear her ghost stories.

"Sweet Mother of God! Run for your life!"

**************

A friend wrote to tell me he felt holes in my last entry about the trumpet. He didn't get a sense of closure because I didn't tell what my parent's response to my terrible anger at my father's present of a cornet instead of the silver trumpet. I realized I was closing the story fast, because I wrote it late at night and run outta steam. I just wanted to end it and go to bed.

I don't seem all that sure what my parent's attitude was about breaking a child's spirit. Maybe that attitude seemed similar to that of the prevailing community standards of that time, and yet they raised me and my brothers and sisters away from the place they themselves were raised, and the two societies were much different in set and setting. I think it made a difference they had both been to college (my father had already graduated by this time), and they were of an experimentive temperament as young couples sometime are. My father beat me, quite badly at times, especially if he was under a lot of pressure, but the beatings he administered were not as a stranger.

His beating seemed sometime like a ritual that included an unseenfamily group I did not know because we had moved around so much. My father would compare a beating he gave me with one he had recieved as a kid for doing exactly the same stunt he beat me for. He would compare a time he beat me with beatings his older brother and male cousins got for doing something he said I did. And we both deserved it.


Candidly, I don't know if I was ever convinced that what I was supposed to have done wrong was really all that bad, but that I was getting beaten for was because of family tradition. Blood is thicker than water. To become a member of my family seemed to require beatings of a certain kind for a very specific reason. My natal family might suggest I fell out of the highchair when I was a baby as an explanation of my uncouth ways, but I don't think they would ever deny that I earned my stripes as a family member.

Of course I got beaten for throwing a tantrum. It was standard fare. As usual, everything was calmly discussed before hand. I knew exactly why they thought I needed punishment. It made no difference if I plead innocence. The metaphor of how it was going to hurt them more than it hurt me got spoken like a a prayer for my wicked, lost soul, and the games began.

Some people finalize a deal with laughter, others with some unholy waking of the dead ancestors with ritual screaming and despair. I was punished severely, and heard the lecture about how much sacrifice the family was making to give me what I preyed for. I was bruskly informed that I was going to take that cornet to band practice, and I was going to learn to play it whether I liked it or not, because the family's honor was at stake. Why on earth should the generosity of my father be slandered by my childish selfishness? I would do right or suffer the consequences.

I did a little of both. My parents and I both seemed to somehow negotiate a deal over time about it. Later, all of us seemed more repentant about our anger than what the horn represented at the time. The last time I saw the cornet, my oldest daughter kept it as an icon representing her absent father. She says she feels my pain through it. She wants me to feel her pain too. Maybe I do. She says I cheated her out of family tradition by staying away from her. I hope so. Some pain is not all in your head.

We came to Clinton just after I turned twelve years old. I was truly awed by living in a town more than twice the size of the last town we had lived in. The last town we lived in was twice the size of the village I lived in previously. Clinton already had kid's little leagues in baseball and basketball, and I had never played much of either before we arrived here.A lotta bonding, both seen and unseen, had already taken place with many of the native kids. As a result I was one of those kids who was the last one chosen for the first coupla years after we moved here. I was a tough kid, but I was small and skinny. I had a big head and a small body.

The best thing that happened to make me feel pretty good about being in Clinton was finding myself intrigued by Sidney Carter's silver trumpet. Sidney was a kind of quiet, shy person. He was the grandson of the man who owned the house my family rented. He lived with his grandfather in the big house up the lane.

The house was a one-story house. It had a modular look to it as if it had grown from a fairly small cabin. It was told
that ol' man Carter built it himself, and had added more rooms to it as his fortune developed. It looked like one of the last additions to his house he made was a front porch. It had banisters around it. They were painted white and consisted of a rounded top rail, a rectangular bottom rail about six inches off the floor of the porch, and turned wood spokes spaced about four inches apart like the pickets of a fence.

But, for me it was hallowed ground. I would go visit Sidney at that house and the first thing I would do would be to ask him to show me his trumpet. He was proud to do it at first. He would bring that trumpet, case and all, out to that porch as though it was the holy grail on a velvet cushion, lay it down with great, exaggerated tenderness, and then open the case up. The suspension and awe I felt as it came into sight was one of the most beautiful sights I had ever seen. It was for sure the most precise machine I had ever seen, and it was shiny!

It was a marvel just laying there in the soft, royal blue, deep pile lining. Slowly, with proper reverence to the Gods of Music, he would uncradle it with his hands and hold it up to the sunlight, and it bedazzled me. My jaw would drop open when it sparkled in the light like some precious jewel. Then, he would play and shatter my illusions like so much fluff. I didn't want to hear him play that trumpet. I wanted to hold it it my own hands. I yearned for it with the deep prepubesent yearning of a twelve year old boy to hold that thing in my hands and just turn it over and over until I had memorized every detain to my heart's content. I abided with his torturous attempts to play just for the chance I could talk him into letting me hold it. There was some horrible angst overcoming me, because Sidney recognized how mightily I wanted to hold the trumpet, and began to tease me unmercifully, but he wasn't a mean person, Sidney wasn't, and we both knew the time would come.

When he did let me hold the trumpet I felt stupid. I had only seen pictures. I had never seen the real thing itself, and I felt belittled by it's very structure. It astounded me that somebody had taken the time to figure out how to make it. It made me wonder what I would have to know to create a trumpet. I couldn't even imagine making the shape of it in model clay. Much less figure out what had to happen when a human blew into the mouth piece to make those sounds come out so acutely on the right pitch. Something woke up in me that day out on the porch of the big house when I finally got to hold the trumpet in my pitifully small hands.

I wanted my own trumpet. Then, as now, I have no shame. Whatever it takes. For some reason it seems a little unpleasant to remember what I had to do to get that trumpet. I'm sure my mother had a lot to do with it. Earlier, she had me taking piano lessons hoping to lead me into a more cultured perspective. They didn't take. It wasn't my idea of something to do. But, the trumpet was my heart's desire.

One day I came in from playing just after my father had gotten home. He called me over with the rest of the family. Immediately I saw a strange box. My father was in a good mood. That was a good sign. When he felt relaxed and playful he was a lot of fun. He didn't get that way often because of his work. Today, however, he was in good form. His antics always made me smile, but today I wanted to know what was in that box. He saw me looking at it. He knew how powerful my curiosity can appear when I am totally dumbstruck. I knew what was in that box by the way he teased me. I knew it was my turn in the barrel.

He stretched the suspense out pretty good, but not enough to hurt me, and then handed me the box and sat waiting.

I didn't know what to do. If it was what I thought it was, then it didn't appear to be a long enough box to fit a silver trumpet in. Carefully I pried the flaps off the box and opened it up. The first thing I saw was the crowsack colored side of the case. I got it all the way out of the box and saw that it had mahogony brown leather reinforcing all around the edges of the case. The stitched leather handle had shiny brass rings on each end of it that attached to brass templates on the case itself.

Something was wrong. Hurriedly, I unsnapped the shiny latches and opened up the case, and there it was. It was not a trumpet, and it was not silver. It looked like a trumpet, in a rather squatty way, and it was not slim and slick, but bulky and utilitarian. It was a cornet. A lousy CORNET!

My response was not discreet nor diplomatically conceived. I screamed. I raged. I tried to throw it in the fireplace. My whole family dived for the cornet to save it from my wrath. They knew me well. I ran outside. I never went back to Sidney's house to see the trumpet again. I hated him and his damned trumpet.

I was a spiteful child, and I became a spiteful man. Wrestling that demon rage seemed to have become my life's work.

This rage, as such, seems neutral and unconcerned with the ethics of it's demands. Just that it moves the mountain. When it appears it comes like a thief in the night and overtakes me by surprise. It both protects me and wounds me like a double-edged sword that it mimicks. It took a long time to see it as cyclic, that it came in waves of passion that pulsed at the periphery of whatever understanding of things I might have in a particular moment. Always beyond the this and that of my day-by-day sniveling, I could not conjure it for my own use. Rather, it used me.

In this particular case the outcome of that particular rage did not fare me well. It was not a hard thing to do. I just refused to learn to read sheet music. I found that if I could learn the scales and practice them by rote, that I could play anything I wanted. I could stand next to somebody who could read the notes, and after I'd heard it once I could play it by memory. The band leader figured out my ploy, and in a big humiliating scene in front of the whole band, he told me to play a new piece of music to see what the trumpet part would sound like. Naturally, I was shocked and became a muttering fool. But, Ed Taylor was not through with his humiliation. It would last for three more years.

First, he made me switch instruments and play the French horn. He got the same results. Then he made me play a baritone and soon gave up on that. At the beginning of my 11th year of high school, he switched me to playing the tuba, and that was that. I could figure out what the bass line would be by memory, and as long as I played in key, it didn't really matter what I played, cause I got pretty good at improvising.

Mister Taylor was a stern disiplinarian. A taskmaster of unyielding morals. My very presence seemed painful to him. Occasionally, I would look up to see him grimacing at me as if in the throes of deep agony. He simply outlasted me. He was determined that I would learn to read musical notation. In my senior year he told me that I was going to be one of the soloists in the yearly Band Day Concert, and the musical piece was called Tubby the Tuba. I was required to learn to play that song by note or I would be the laughing stock of the whole school.

After consulting with my father, his fellow teacher, and telling him the plan to call my bluff, My father agreed to let Mr. Taylor keep me after school for two hours every day but Friday for private tutoring, with the tutor being himself.

I don't recall exactly how they blackmailed me into it, but by the date of the concert arrived, I was almost convinced myself that I could performed the piece just like it was written. They had patiently watched me made a joke out of playing music long enough or me to owe my father and Mr. Taylor a sincere effort to do right. The concert went over big, and my big solo got me three standing ovations.

I was hooked, but as it turned out, it was the roar of the crowd that really excited me. I really enjoyed getting people revved up enough they can't stop clapping was the biggest thrill of all. I just didn't know it yet.