Dizzy Spell

I woke up dizzy from a dream about flying. For two hours, things spun around and I felt sick, like throwing up and pressure on the chest. I walked slowly to the cafe, but was unable to drink the coffee. I went home and lay down for almost three hours, until the phone rang. The body sure does strange things sometimes to the mind.

There were problems, understandably, to understand, easily ironed out during conversation, or resolved during a friendly promenade with talkative talkers. First, unhook personality. Restrain reason from rushing in and grabbing inspiration by the throat. Reason will thankfully prevent psychotic breakdown, or aggressive ignorance and self-destructive passion. A good old system of checks and balances, I went down the street to read signs and to admire decorative lettering.

In order to be checked out, the street walk had to happen down past the string of grocery stores, restaurants, bakeries, religious supplies, hardware, music and whatever else one might find during such a walk. Leave the smell of melted candles and burned out matches. Follow your feet as they pound the pavement in order to get somewhere and achieve something.

Lohbado's Third Eye

Opening of the third eye, to see what was there all along, removal of the veil, crumpling of the tissue, crack in the veneer Lohbado caught a glimpse where he'd gone wrong, but felt powerless to do anything about it. He didn't know what to do, so he went to the cafe.

In the cafe, he witnessed the drama of laughter, a little competition between two women to see who could laugh the loudest. It began as a young woman in a red dress and Bambi voice tilted her head back and howled a forceful, harsh, declarative laugh. A woman at the next table responded with a hearty, teary-eyed laugh from the belly. The Bambi woman topped the teary-eyed laugh with operatic syllables, ha, ha, ha! Not to be outdone, the other woman raised her head and hollered a mezzo-soprano, trilling, window-shaking laugh.

Each laughing woman sat at a table with a quiet puppy man, smiling and a little overwhelmed from the harsh trumpeting laughter. I could not control myself any longer. I threw out a sizzling ham, eggs and bacon, uproarious laugh, aah, ha, ha, ha, ha! Slap happy laughter, spanking glee put me in the competition. I swilled the rest of my coffee and tried to read messages in the grinds at the bottom, as a garbage truck drove past the terrace and left a cloud of morning perfume, like the smell of the body after it rises from the bed to seek its first cup of coffee.

Chapter Z from Lohbado's Eternal Sneeze

The idea is to slow down, take a thread and follow it to the end before branching out in new directions. Unfortunately, Lohbado doesn't work that way. He's an explosion of scenarios, sneezing all over the place, starting half way through the book and working diagonally back to the beginning, for example, just as Little Jack Horner stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plumb, sort of like in the above photo, (another picture from a sequence in progress entitled Lohbado's Dance of Death), Dreaming Man, like any true dreamer, using Finnegans Wake as a template, Lohbado attempts to tell his story, entitled, The Experiment of My Life.

By the way, here's a nursery rhyme I wrote years ago: Little Tommy Tucket/ Barfed in a Bucket/ He wiped his nose between his toes/ And then he said, aw fuck it.

I apologize if sometimes the ranting gets a little obnoxious or insulting, like in the last post. I did that post after a few ounces of whiskey helped me get the glow on and ended up insulting myself. I'm a lover of humanity, a follower of the Secret Jesus, believer in a hard day's work, or a good honest effort, I love to touch and be touched, to sneeze and be sneezed, to listen carefully until sound fractures the wave-scape and to watch carefully as the surface of reality fragments into billions of tiny colored dots.

There's a lot to do. I better save the rest for tomorrow or another day and get busy on sweeping out the heart-temple for the upcoming Balshazar's Feast. But first I'll see if Nebuchadnezzar stopped walking on all fours. He had some funny dreams. Good old Daniel tried to help, but Nebby's arrogance prevented him from listening. He was too wrapped up in himself.

Regarding the plum in the above picture: Granny took a semi-liquified plumb, forgotten for six weeks in the back of the fridge, and pressed it through the flimsy screen door, where flies got in through little tears in the mesh and made deep purple-red ego-puree. Eat it from a bowl, or spread on a slice of human flesh, the flesh of a man who never got over the loss of mother's apron strings and melon breasts, a man who never recovered from the bad breath of his father who shouted commands too early in the morning.

The Days Before Intestines

In order to create the world, God first had to deal with Oogah, who preferred floating in liquids to standing on solids. He didn't feel creation of a solar system and a planet earth would be a good idea. Humans would be sure to mess things up. Oogah predicted ecological disaster, climate change and wars within wars. These were the days before intestines, when chaos rumbled in God's belly like half digested material mixed with microbes, working its way downwards in a cold, squeezing, oozing motion.

The sixth awakening of Oogah happened when dirt got in his third eye and someone called him stupid. The dirt of policies, and standardization, the wriggling of parasites working for the giant make-work bureaucracy, The Department of Regulation, it was all part of the zeitgeist, like number nine, in the Beatles revolution. A slow tossing and turning resulted in Oogah getting out of bed forty years later.

The creation had already happened. He noticed people stealing and lying. In some places, alcoholic psychosis, the triggering of aggression centers of the brain, many took it literally and acted out, with devastating consequences. Aggression is like a fart. There's an art of farting in public, so as not to make people run away; otherwise you're likely to end up feeling even more alone and alienated than before.

Oogah had a glass of Scotch and bitters to unlock sections of sky between skeleton key branches of trees infected by acid rain and various diseases. Revolution is a joke. "Blah, blah, blah; open up your hand---SMACK!"-- goes the angry mama across the street after a boy hurts a girl. Don't mock her righteousness. She's the backbone of a rotten society. Beware of her curse. Society can't be avoided, unless you're tough enough to be able to endure extreme solitude and loneliness.

This late afternoon glass of whiskey to gladden the heart of rootless, unemployed nomads watching responsible citizens go by like the scenery outside the window of a bar car on the train, drink magic orange elixir when down-struck by dehydration and intestinal virus. Behold, the voice of God, an eye in the middle of a blazing white triangle in a blinding cumulus brain-shaped cloud. This is the comic book riddle version of the universe, serious and mean like flip-flop sandals on the gorgeous feet of a young blond who has no respect for men because her mother was a psycho, alcoholic earning a hundred grand a year, while her father floated away as a deadbeat, welfare bum with a drinking problem. Or you could be serious about the materialistic dream. Get a job. Marry, husband and wife work hard as a team, send kids to daycare in order to buy a house to keep up with the neighbors and feel self-respect before descent into hatred, marriage crisis and perhaps divorce. Divorce could be quite likely after the kids are old enough to explain the situation to therapists, after the kids grow up to be spoiled, pampered, high-salaried bums feeling on top of the world because they landed in a smooth sell-your-soul situation, which could be rationalized later, because we're all in the same boat.

An Honest Effort

Zombie shuffle to the cafe, a woman crossed my path and inspired me with her zest for life. It almost made me feel human. I stumbled off on a dreaming tangent into the cafe, ordered the forbidden fruit, went astray, got lost in the woods, sat by a lake in front of my grandmother's house in the bush, white pine, silver birch, maple. The beauty of the forest inspired me to spread a sheet of paper on some exposed granite and to make a picture, or to record words from grandmother's dream.

She said: be proud of what you are. Appearance doesn't matter. You don't have to be sexy or suave. There's a tradition of tall thin men who seek places of quiet solitude in order to contemplate existence. There's a place for people who lounge through life, who appear to do nothing, but introspection.

Don't feel bad about not having a regular job. There aren't enough jobs for everyone. I had a job, but somebody with more qualifications wanted it and felt no hesitation about taking my job. I made an honest effort to be part of the system, but was expelled from the hive, an alien bee, fly away, no connection to anywhere, no place to call home, always a visitor, space alien, immigrant, eternal exile. It's not a problem. One is never completely alone. Kindred spirits find each other. There are a lot of people in a similar situation, flying Dutchmen and women, fellow travelers down the side roads of life.

In the morning, I felt groggy, sheepish, low self-esteem, but then saw somebody and realized everything is fine. There's a lot to explore.

Loss of Time

Staggering backwards and forwards in memory, going way back, retracing steps, the final landing after a bout of chaos, waking up alone, but connected to other people, the challenge is to stay within the picture until the candle goes out.

I had a good session on the computer, digital painting. When the eyes started burning, I stepped into the back yard for a moment, cup of coffee, wind blowing the foliage into soothing sound, dark shadows from thick tree trunks and branches, bright light filtering in to lure Dante into Inferno or John into the past, jolting the needle of reality out of the groove, the reality I'm supposed to pretend is real, in order to avoid being disqualified. I'm in a good situation. I don't want to blow it, time to make pictures and gaze at the sky through the breaks in the trees.

Why the zombie-like staggering man in the picture? I make the picture and ask questions later. I remember visiting the grandparents in Parry Sound, Ontario. They lived in a big brick house on Gibson Street. The grandparents were larger than life.

One day, a drunken man staggered into the cozy little world, as we sat in the car, saying goodbye to the grandparents. The drunken man leaned on the car, gave us a funny smirk, said a few maudlin words about how it's nice to see a family together, after all the damage he and his drinking did to his own family and then he straightened up as my father backed the car out of the driveway. That man was like a dent, a slight tear in the tissue of coziness that existed in the golden world of childhood, where everything seemed to be fine, until that drunken man leaned on the car. I never forgot him. Even at the age of six years old, I felt his sorrow. He was like a doorway into the shadow world, the world where things didn't go so smoothly, where embarrasing and unpleasant details stick out like sore thumbs. Don't go there. It's a slippery slope. Things only get worse. Do you really want to know what lies outside your golden-pink bubble? Let's not think about how death will happen and pleasant situations come to an end. Let's pretend it's a fairy tale world of happy endings, where nobody gets hurt and everybody eats cake.

Digest and Be Digested

Maybe some of the pictures were a little morbid, deadbeat, whatever. There's more to the story. The pictures are part of the sickness. The next phase is taking medicine and dissolving the sickness, or emerging from dark clouds of affliction. This is the true meaning of resurrection. Rise, candles in the bathtub, (more about that in future posts) and then zombies appeared in the hot light.

Ultimately, the medicine is to keep making pictures and texts and to find out what they want. The pictures and texts are like demons, asking to be noticed. They won't go away until I pay attention. Maybe it's not possible to understand the images. The situation digests itself; a sequence of images fade and then others appear, light and dark.

A doorway opened, a tear in the membrane, the wall melted into soft tissue. A procession of zombies attempted to rise from the bed, to overcome the pull of inertia, sluggishness, exhaustion, thantos, disintegration, or spontaneous self-digestion. Imagine a body capable of consuming and digesting itself from the inside out.

The body undergoes a kind of digestion, in the belly of the environment. The body loses moisture, (I'm studying moisturology), gets stooped, shrivels into old age, dries out, life evaporating, body decomposes, crumbles to dust or burns in the fire. My body is half-digested, the smooth youthful skin rough and dry, wrinkles, growths, discoloration, moles, melanomas, red patches, varicose veins pop out like worms, as if some invisible force squeezes and wrings the body, a kind of churning, pulsating process that turns a youthful body into something worn, ravaged, used and abused. Muscles go to flab. Gravity yanks at the eyes. They sink and droop deeper into the sockets.

Ravage of time and the toll of slavery to a job digest the body. First a child is born. The baby swells to adult size. Young adult body bloats and puffs into middle-age body. When it feels as though the body can't expand anymore, the shrivilege and shrinkage of old age, sickness and death happens. The digested body becomes a corpse.