I am a dead man walking—er, actually I am currently sitting and sipping a highly honey-sweetened cup of Wyoming-roasted coffee with cream on the back patio of a coffee house in downtown Laramie. The pale-brown liquid within my cup has grown quite cold over several hours sitting and exposed to the elements of a high-country afternoon, though ice has yet to form around the rim. I sometimes gaze into the swirls of milk fat floating on the surface and the patterns of variously mixed solutions of bean juice and water and honey and half-and-half to scry with what shapes might emerge to tell of things present, past or possible.
I don’t mean that someone has me as their mark, necessarily, or that I am keeping a wide-eye open for fear of potential assassins, necessarily. My point with these words is in fact rather more stark. What I actually mean by this opening statement, these first words in print after flyleaf and front matter, is that I have already been murdered, and perhaps on as many as five occasions. The most poignant and certain instance of experiencing my own homicide occurred one ordinary summer’s day at dusk in Golden Gate Park, when two bullets were rather randomly and I dare say undeservedly introduced to the inside of my skull after an otherwise pleasant and uneventful day on Hippie Hill.
In addition to such homicidal intrigues, I have encountered sasquatch, a skinwalker, apparent holes in space-time, and a shape-shifter who did her turn whilst astride my lap. In pursuit of romance and the hidden secrets to life and history, guided by instinct, intuition, chance, and sometimes helpful deities, I have been granted many such glimpses behind the veils of normalcy—at moments to my delight, and at others to my terror.
At a certain point in life I decided I had a desire to unabashedly seek the truths that seemed unavailable in academia or conventional religion, and to discover what hidden magic and beauty and adventure this world really has to offer. I concluded at some moment of disillusionment or discontent that merely reading books of fiction or supposed scriptures to find inspiration and truth, else vicariously viewing others’ explorations and adventures on TV or on the big screen proved insufficient means to satisfy my yearnings to experience or to satiate a want to know, and thus I decided that I had a need to endeavor the quest, and by the most quixotic and heroic means I might have need that I might find what abides behind life’s curtains.
And so I began to live as a wandering renunciate before I truly knew what this meant or might imply, hitchhiking and train-hopping and back-country rambling on a simple and more or less innocent search for answers and quest for love both transcendent and terrestrial. Thus began the ride of my life. Visions and experiences that answered to my curiosity and were revealed to my searchings surpassed extraordinary, and indeed met with the sublime, and even Divine.
I have been tailed by a tornado in the badlands that bore the certain imprint of God made manifest, and have pursued an apparent apparition or Avatar of the Goddess across the breadth of the continent. I have crossed the threshold between life and death more than once, though still I breath, drink, eat, piss, shit, think, and even occasionally fuck, and thus by all appearance and common indicators I am quite alive. In the most recent third of thirty-six or so years lived I have experienced things most would assume the stuff of fairy tales or fantasy, mythology or merely a wild imagination.
Yet here I sit, just where I sat some twelve years ago, and with little if anything overt to show for my years of questing, labors of love, challenges to the system and changes to myself. I now have a PC upon which I type these words, whereas then I had a Mac. This evening I pen (er, type) my early memoirs, whereas then it was my Master’s thesis I labored to complete. Little else overt has changed, save that I am now long since estranged from then-wife and son, church and institution, I have lived over a dozen years more, and these days don a beret and wool overcoat instead of a thin cotton trench coat and ski cap. Three fat dreadlocks also now dangle amidst the otherwise unknotted past-shoulder-length hairs on the back of my head.
The sun is setting behind the Snowy Range Mountains, and the oft-ferocious high plains wind is only a gentle breeze this evening. I’m watching this rather dull spectacle (compared to the best or even average of Laramie sunsets) from the back patio at Coal Creek Coffee Company’s downtown coffeehouse and roastery. A freight train is roaring past beneath the steel footbridge that spans the railroad tracks which reside between my vantage and the sunset. This bridge links the downtown to the Near West Side, and purportedly is or at least was longest of its kind in the country. Random pedestrians in wool coats and down parkas pass by both near my seat and strolling over the human viaduct in the background, faces only glimpsed between snuggly wrapped scarves and hats pulled low, and fewer I know now than I knew in days past in this small city on the high plains.
Said painted black steel and concrete span, occasional trains rumbling beneath, the derelict smokestack tower that stands ten stories tall behind, and people passing by in warm winter gear provide an excellent foil for the now dark gray clouds and fading light and subdued colors of this evening’s sunset show—or would it be the other way around? Regardless, it seems to me at this moment, this picture painted in words might offer a poignant backdrop for you to bear in mind as you read on, dear reader, providing a scene that appropriately sets the tone for the tales to come in this text.
Before the beginnings of my wild and weird cross-country adventures, before I tried to make a break from the system’s sometimes subtle and subliminal hold, I would often sit at this very table laboriously researching and writing my Master’s thesis, “Non-Essentially Occidental: Heteroglossia in the European Discourses on Islam.” Back then I still held on to some semblance of the assumption that there was a comfortable place for me within “polite society” and inside the bounds of the popular consensual reality of Anytown, USA, and its various venerated institutions.
Never quite finished this thesis, and thus abandoned hopes of becoming a certified PhD professor-type. Instead I decided to seek the truths of self and other (and “Self” and “Other”) outside of familiar text and tradition and institution, to take to the open road to search for evidences of heteroglossia (many tongues) telling different versions than the officially-sanctioned and academy-approved, and to find a more personally valid and abiding title or state of being than “Doctor” or “Professor.”
In this loosed condition, wonderful and weird magic and mystery unfolded before my sight and other senses. Wisdoms both beautiful and terrible were bestowed as the wide world opened doors to mysteries archaic as well as immediate, from revelations regarding obscured secrets of ancient myths and migrations of ancient Gods and their peoples to the manifestation of divine plays presented first-hand in my own life-lived. Such accounts are the substance of this bound book, dear reader, presented for your entertainment, and perhaps for the enrichment of your own life-lived in this everyday world, where truth proves more than meets a mere two eyes . . .
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Introduction
There exists within the minds of many in the modern world a rather compromising division between what has been officially deemed rational truth, i.e., that which has been “scientifically proven” of the natural world, taxonomized and isolated in a laboratory setting under artificially controlled circumstances, and that which has been deemed “superstition,” or at best “supernatural” or “spiritual.” This dichotomy, emblematic of relatively recent ways of knowing in the philosophies of Europe and America, has created a stark separation between, say, religion and politics (though perhaps not so complete in practice as in theory), between physical sciences and the social sciences and humanities, and especially between practical living and mysticism. This is surely a symptom of the broader and indeed rampant compartmentalization of life in this modern (or postmodern/post-postmodern?) age, where once was arguably a more holistic way of being.
A farmer or blacksmith or scholar or merchant of times past did not divorce occupation from home, and finding some semblance of satisfaction in life did not assume an escape from the office or other place of employment. Similarly, religious or ritual practice did not take place solely on Sunday (or whatever given day, per whatever religion), but was in fact integrated into the everyday. Myth and the mundane, science and the spiritual, magic and material reality were similarly inseparable facets of life, the rhythms and rhyme of the day and night yet succinctly attuned to the natural world.
Though one can argue that there are benefits to current modes of dividing the day or week, or even to current conventions of separating ways of knowing, certain disparities and psychological conflicts unquestionably arise from these arrangements. Indeed, I might go so far as to argue that a selective blindness has o’ertaken the masses, something not unlike a tunnel vision that prevents most from seeing much of the beauty and wonder of life, an institutionalized myopia that shrouds a natural, magical, divine and eternal aesthetic that underlies and pervades all that is.
It was with something like a half-baked awareness of these notions that I set out to discover secrets hidden by the official institutions and popular paradigms, to reach for truth and beauty and divine love, to endeavor to discover a more complete aesthetic, and to seek to find myself—or better phrased from the perspective I now maintain, to find Self. Atman, brahman, the true and good Divine Self seeded within each and every and all as well as Universally present and pervasive, most succinctly and distinctly (in my humble but fairly well-informed opinion) expressed in said Sanskrit words. “God1” already present, rather than requiring an invitation and a bath. With some subtle awareness of this existence of something better and more valid, I wandered away from convention and conformity, parting with programmed presumptions and the purported truths presented me during years of education and social and religious training, and hit the open road.
What I discovered upon opening myself to the freedom of wandering the highways and wild places and sacred spaces of this land, by loosing my mind from the fetters of so called “common sense,” and upon learning to see with more than two eyes blew away the paradigms of church and university training and shattered the shallow assumptions and officially sanctioned presumptions generally made of experiential reality. On these journeys and intermittent sojourns I encountered shape-shifters and sasquatch, faeries and freakish, anomalous, serendipitous and synchronistic incidents that far surpassed expectations of what I’d imagined I’d discover upon disembarking from the programmed path and setting aside unnecessary societal expectations. The following short story accounts are a few of the more salient and readily recountable happenings from my journeys through time and space and mind.
To tell the truth of what’s to come in these forthcoming pages, these tales told in print are intertwined in time such that a clear chronology is not necessarily to be read in the progression from each account writ to the next. Some events are visited more than once within separately titled tales, to some extent tying these only somewhat temporally arranged narratives together in the midst of potentially confusing webs of causation and sequence. In other words, though each chapter does build upon or is built upon the others to some degree or other, this temporal progression is not without loops and reveries—indeed, as life experiences in a general sense are not necessarily granted meaning by strictly linear arrangements of memory, time and travel. Hopefully, then, the repetitions of certain accounts will serve to clarify or elucidate preceding or succeeding events which might otherwise have only minimal sequential grounding in the text, rather than proving redundant.
These things said, each chapter might nonetheless be read either as a separate and self-contained and fully satisfying story, as well as indeed part of an interwoven narrative which spans the expanse of the text, from page one to the end. The reader is therefore free to peruse any given chapter without feeling as if she or he has missed some vital element of a particular passage’s emplotment in pages skipped or in one story passed over to favor another, else she or he might choose to endeavor a more traditional linear reading. I might also note that these accounts were not necessarily penned in the sequence in which they appear in the text, and thus the tone, style and content included in each differ according to the inspiration, mood and memories that came to mind as I separately typed each tale.
The stories herein writ are mostly telling of time spent to some degree or other in-transit, of wanderings across the North American continent with in mind to discover evidences of magic and beauty and mystical truth still surviving somewhere underneath a sheen of American Dreamish normalcy. And as is the nature of a transit state—time and space being relative and so forth and certain bends and distortions, if not outright instances of “time-travel” as potentials whilst in such a state (again, by the principles of relativity and so forth)—a traveler in transit might not only find quite altered the linear appearance of an ordinary time line, but might even find the certainty of spatial continuity in question, if he or she looks closely enough to denote discrepancies. Home found at the end of a journey may indeed not be the same place left behind, once one has traveled afar. Or to offer another illustrative metaphor for the sort of time-space displacement possible to a truly open traveler, imagine jetlag-squared or cubed or times a thousand.
And these tales, though truly true-life accounts, are also journeys of and in Mind. Visions manifest from dream or imaginings directly onto the screen of “reality,” déjà vu, and extrasensory awakenings were indeed as much a part of the trip of these travels recorded as were simple reckonings of point “a” to “b” and “what happened” in-between. Indeed, whatever interconnectedness or “synchronicity” of time and space exists or what road magic is manifest to the wonderment of a traveler is conceived and wrought in and through Mind, thought, imagination and intentioned “manifestation,” and not merely via “rational” or “common sense” modes of causation. Thus, when you are told of unusual experiences or anomalies you encounter, “Oh, it’s all just in your mind,” you might justifiably and aptly reply, “Perhaps, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”
To travel any distance in time through space conveys a very different consciousness than is active in a more routine state of life, especially when wandering to places unknown, as one peripatetically preoccupied is freed from psychological and psychic ties to everyday habitual practices, and his or her mind naturally opens to experiences and possibilities not normally granted attention in the midst of life lived nine-to-five. The traveler notices things otherwise overlooked—the shape of a cloud hanging over an unknown mountain peak, the scents traveling on the air at a market, the shapes of faces or a sparkle in the eyes of a stranger. A willing traveler is tuned-in to encounter alterity, difference, the possibility of novelty, and despite the seeming contradiction is also opened to an heretofore unknown unity with others and experiential reality. Travel thins the veils, and reveals the unity as well as relativity of time, space, mind and life-lived.
I will apologize in advance for a lack of engaging dialogues, with quote-bound conversations only sparsely interspersed within long stretches of narrative. I have done so to avoid potential misquotes, to prevent even the least misrepresentation, and to forgo inaccurate improvisation due to a lack of concise memories of specific exchanges. I fully intend to relate these events with as much verity and precision as I might, and thus must admit I have left out many interesting conversations for lack of perfect or even paraphrased accuracy. I shall surely include more dialogue when or if I try my hand at writing and publishing works of fiction.
As I recognize that much of the content of these accounts will be hard to swallow, and even more difficult to digest, I have gone to great lengths to be certain to avoid any distortion of events and to refrain from even slight embellishment. Indeed, everything I have written is accurate according to my perceptions and recollections and in many cases with other reliable witnesses present, though given the fantastic nature of much of what I have to tell I shall not hold it against the reader who questions what I represent in these accounts, and in fact would hope for a thoughtful and indeed critical response.
Simultaneously, however, I would hope these narratives (which, again, I stand by as true) will cause you, dear reader, to question the constructions of reality by which you have been trained to formulate your own perceptions of experience, and to open your eyes and other senses to the beauty and magic that exists only a short distance from the everyday consensual reality you’ve been so subtly (and sometimes surreptitiously) conditioned to believe.
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