If this was a real story...

If this was a real story, I would have an enemy. A relentless oppressor who tries to pin me down to one version of Blue Skunk, one version of Blue Skunk's Dream Shack. A fanatic who rants in the distance, "Stay in your world, you! You!" Sometimes I hear him, very faintly.

I open my eyes. The spaces between the worlds are punctuated by deep canyons filled to the brim with bones. Skulls, bits of toes and fingers, row upon row of rib cages, each imprisoning some lost part of me. You would not think that one person shed so many parts of him and still be here, but that how it is. I died more than a thousand deaths, but most people can see only one of them.

I close my eyes. I feel the gnarled bark of a tree that is more ancient than most countries. It towers to the heavens, perhaps because the gods loved its presence. "May I climb you?" I ask. "I allow only birds," the tree replied. I reached into my soul until I found a room filled with feathery down and wings. This would have to do. "Fine," I whispered to the tree. "Then I would have to come to you as a bird."

I open my eyes. I am at the morning of the World, the beach where all the debris of all old places washes away. I realize that most people fear this place. They fear the wet fingers of the ocean, riffling through their yesterdays until they have none left, but I came here with nothing except these eyes that behold the glittering freshness of new waves.

I close my eyes... To continue, click here

An Ancient Cave

The Gnostics believe that the world was created not by God but by the Devil. They could have a point. The way I see it, God is that divine moment of now. The devil is everything else. Memories, opinions, analysis, plans and hopes - everything that seeks to descend upon that one sacred moment you hold in your consciousness, in order to shred it to pieces. It is eternally trying to break and enter, to snatch bits of now in order to replace it with little parasites called 'then' or 'soon' or 'one day'. It wants to halt the river, to obstruct it, to sully it with yesterday's dirty laundry, which by all accounts, should not exist anymore and tomorrow's storms, which might never strike. The devil's world is all things that do not belong to now.

I open my eyes. I am sitting in a stone seat in an ancient cave. The air is cool and filled with primordial music. A voice says, "Look around you. Right now, you are in a place so high above your enemies and adversaries, that it will take them many, many lifetimes to even reach you. The only way to continue any kind of struggle with them, would be to go back down to their level. Do you really want to do that?"

I close my eyes. I am listening to the lies told about me by an old lover. The words with which she is trying to bind me, tighter and tighter into her world. But it is her words that cut the canyon forming between my reality and hers. Deeper and deeper, the divide between what she says and what I remember.

I open my eyes. What I see is butterflies, but in reality, they are some of the people I've known in my life. There is the sweet funky butterfly that fluttered backwards. The butterfly that thought itself so hungry it sucked the color right out of every flower it landed on. The butterfly that starved to death because it failed to tell the difference between plastic flowers and real ones. The butterfly that was afraid to commit to any kind of landing. The butterfly that got stuck in the nectar. And then there was the butterfly who landed on my eye - like it wanted to be close to me, but did not want me to see it. That was the last one and that was the one that stuck in my mind.

I close my eyes... To continue, click here

How the angel crossed the road...

I'm on a pedestrian bridge high above the freeway. Just ahead of me, there's a bird, pecking at something in the tarmac. I said, "Hey bird, you lazy. You're supposed to fly over the freeway, not walk over it." He stopped pecking and replied, "Hey angel, where have you lost your wings?"

I open my eyes. I am walking through a graveyard. There are rows and rows of tombstones and they all have the same name on them - my own. The dates are different. The styles are different. I listen to my breathing. I touch my face. My heartbeat continues. But the physical sensations seem surreal. They spread out and trip my mind. The more I try to convince myself that I am alive, the more it feels like I'm really something else.

I close my eyes. No one must know I am here. For some time now, Reenie has been hiding me from a world that believes I'm dead. Somewhere along the way, she transcended to a higher aspect of her self - Storywoman. I tell her story and she tells mine. So who writes the story? And who becomes it? My problems are like those of someone has forgotten what he is? And yet, it is not that I have amnesia. Someone with amnesia remembers nothing. My problem is more complicated, as I remember several versions of the past that has brought me here. They could all be true. They could all be false. In one, I meet Reenie/Storywoman in a Kurdish coffee shop with tribal musical instruments and tapestries on the walls. I follow her home. In another, I close my eyes in a hospital emergency room and wake up behind Reenie's eyes. I experience flashbacks of her life. She is surprised to find those memories back. Reenie and I are the pill dissolved into water. Difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends. There is a Reenie who stumbles across my obituary and recognizes me, although we never met. She calls me to her and I take the greatest leap of faith. There is a world where I am alive, in my own body, writing this, furtively, fearing discovery....

I open my eyes. Storywoman and I are having a tea party with the Sane Hatter. There's a funny story about how we met him, but I haven't remembered it yet. We started a game of draughts. The game pieces are cookies. If you win an opponents game piece, you get to eat it. Loser goes hungry. Those are the rules.

I close my eyes.... To continue, click here

A box filled with fake

Imagine you are in a room with a hundred million light bulbs and about as many switches. You need something to illuminate the darkness, but all of them at once will blind you or drive you crazy. So, you better start making choices, boy.

I open my eyes. I have a box of masks. Some of them are happy. Some are sad. Some are gaudy flights of fantasy. Others are so realistically crafted that they are indistinguishable from real persons. Speaking of which, I once read somewhere that the work "person" is derived from "persona", which was originally synonymous with "fake identity". So what I have, is a box filled with fake. It's not the first time I'm using it. I've played this game many many times. Don a mask and say outrageous things. I've fooled good friends and family that way. I'm about to do it all over again. This time, I choose to wear a woman's face. It is a good fit. For the time being, I will call her "Storywoman". I sit in her chair, wearing her body. And I begin to write.

I close my eyes. I'm eleven. It's summer vacation. There's three of us at the old Manson Lodge. We take turns to haul ourselves upwards to peak through a cracked dusty window. Hartley sees a dead body or a dummy or something lying across the floor. Its head was hacked off and lies to one side. He only tells this later. Cadigan sees nothing but an empty room. There's a crack in the fireplace. Some papers scattered to one side. But no body. It is my turn and my burden to decide who was right. But it's a little more complicated than that. I see a young woman sitting in a rocking chair. She is writing in a thick journal book. She looks up and seems to draw me into the room, into the book with her. I let go and drop to the ground. I have no answers for Hartley or Cadigan. The only ones I found were for myself.

I open my eyes. Someone is nudging me. It turns out to be a forty-five year old woman. She asks, "Can I have your autograph please?" "I'm practically a nobody," I said. "You're Johnny Moonlight," she helped me out. "I have all your records. I'm your biggest fan." I feel pretty sure that I'm not Johnny Moonlight, but for some really odd reason, at that moment, I know how to do Johnny Moonlight's autograph. So I take the pen and trust the right hand to know what the memory knows not. When she is gone, I go over my face with my fingers. I feel the rubbery fake of a mask. Johnny Moonlight's mask. But I still don't understand how I was able to sign his name.

I close my eyes...

The Frozen Now

For as long as I keep my eyes closed, there is a sky above me. High shifting, feathery clouds. Beautiful blue.

When I open my eyes, the world around tells me that I will never see such a sky again. Light sears my consciousness. There is a smell of disinfectant and piss that won't go away. Someone is always weeping somewhere. Someone is always crying somewhere else. Curses buzz through the atmosphere like blue bottle flies scenting blood and rot. There is no time. I am locked into the frozen now of a death row prison cell.

I close my eyes. High school detention. I am drawing a space ship with my blue ballpoint pen, adding stars and angels and jellyfish. I dunno why, but I have this idea that space is full of massive translucent jellyfish. Everyone laughs when I try to tell them about it. I don't want anyone else to see the artwork, but I can't stop adding lines and curves to it. I have to stop, though, when Mr Humphrey sits down hard on my desk, blocking access to the book. I can smell old sweat in his jacket, and onion on his breath. He'd been drinking too. He leans very close to my face and says in a harsh whisper that is in some ways louder than shouting, "he told me to tell you this.... There is no such thing as time. You know where it comes from? The Illuminati ... invented it." He pauses, belching into my face. I think this is a memory from the past, because I'm sure I remember Mr Humphreys getting taken away after some mad fit in his classrooms. But, he continues, "They made the days like a long row of prison cells to incarcerate your souls!" He is shouting now. "And you do nothing! NOTHING!"

I open my eyes. I am in the dog house. Quite literally. Rain is pouring down. I am locked out, tied up with rope that smells of sea salt and about to puke my guts out. Beneath me, lies the still warm body of an old friend. He is dead. Inside the house, his dog Susan is keening. I feel sorry for the dog. There is no one to feed her now. The dead friend leaves me numb. He's a good 40 pounds heavier than me. I shouldn't have had it in me to kill him, but desperation is not a demon to be trifled. He found this out the hard way.

I close my eyes... To continue, click here