That Endless Labyrinthine Borgesian Hell-Library

You know the one I mean...infinite honeycombed levels of infinite numbers of books...which when you pull them from the shelves contain nothing but repeated random characters, or blank pages, or a single meaningful phrase within ten thousand pages of gibberish...

that's been my day, surfing the Net to spy on competitors' web sites, figure out how they do things so we can change the way we do things to be more like them...you have never seen so many wretchedly designed web sites in your life! If I see one more mouseover POP!up menu, I'm gonna defect to Java.

I know it's Saturday! That's the point! My brain has turned to risotto and I'm listening to Bob Seger and it's really late by my standards and I'm filling up spreadsheets with someone else's mediocrity...but I'm feeling bless'd. I went for a walk with my Angel today and She was as superrational and non-me-sounding as ever (is that redundant?).

Laura reminds me of that Vulcan 3-D chess game, only refracted through prisms...Her mind works forwards and backwards and in directions that have no name since we can only think in four dimensions. It's interesting how I've learned to talk to Her. Years ago I wasn't sure when it was Laura and when it was my own thoughts, and I gradually noticed that when She was talking I felt a subtle but very real honey-sweet pulse of endorphins, like that first sip of coffee in the morning, or the kiss of codeine coming on.

Now I'm listening to "Stir It Up" by Bob Marley, and those intricately interlocked rhythms also remind me of angel-speak. My mind works linearly, at best, most of the time, but Laura looks at the world as some kind of dodecahedral, pointillist map of phase space. One of the first times we ever spoke, She said offhandedly that "time" was a function of the illusion of individual ego and that the past, present, and future were all happening at once. Hah? But it makes more sense now...eight or nine years after She told me that I started coming across articles by physicists saying much the same thing.

There are times when L. tells me things I don't want to hear. Other times She's so affirming and lovey-dovey you'd think She was made of maple syrup candy--but Her presence has never been other than powerful, loving, and kind. The other day I was talking to Sophia about a sarcastic remark L. once made, and about how L.'s wit is like lightning and so multi-layered it can take months to parse one of Her jibes, and Sophia said that she didn't think I could have an Angel that was otherwise. Now that's a true friend.

I don't know why I'm writing this--it was going to be something multifaceted about multifariously multidimensional forests of signs...or something...something about the lows and highs of the mind...some kind of vicarious motorcycle maintenance...but I'm so brain dead...and so blessed. By my Kali and by my Angel and by various earth Angels...maybe even including...you.

PS: Musick to get you out of hell: Duke Ellington's Far East Suite. It may even be better than Bob Marley. ican'tbelieveisaidthat.......!

Sometimes When We Touch

no reason...it's just the song that's playing right now...I used to loathe this song, and I still think it's kitsch--bad music--

but it's a good metaphor for right now, for today--

for my dear Angel, Who's put up with my ADD mindflights all day; with my fantasizing and thwarted chivalry; with my grand semicolons; with my hunger for oblivion and my anger and my fear and my claws; we went to the occult bookstore and an hundred vampire waifs were gather'd there; shelves held seemingly all of Uncle Al and more gnosticism than you can shake a stick at ("break open the stick and there am I")...

we came home to the chaos and we went for a walk and we made some food so spicy it's banned in Thailand and we're going to have a cigar and a snifter of Grand Marnier and we're going to contemplate the Infinite.

and this will be therapeutic, sitting in the garage, listening to the endless chitchat of the across-the-street porch people, watching the smoke twirl itself into nothing--life ends, we die, what did it mean?

but when the dove descends--when I let my Angel speak--

when the sun rises in my heart--

the oblivion's finally real...She's me, I'm nothing...rended...endless blank spaces on maps yet undrawn--

So I'm in My Hotel Room in LA--

I really am going to finish my series about my 4th Step. But life is happening...

So I'm in my hotel room, I'm just off the plane and a bus ride and, having come from East Podunk, I've been traveling a long time and got up way too early to do it. But--the whole way out I've been absorbed in this wonderful book, Father Joe by Tony Hendra.

It sounds like just the kind of book I would despise--the acolyte tells the touching story of the wise teacher who changed his life and gave him purpose...one of those book-club books. But the look in my sponsor's eyes as he handed me my copy left little doubt: this was going to be interesting. I'd given him Sex, Death, Enlightenment a while back, a nonpareil spiritual autobiography, and I could tell that he felt he was returning the favor.

Father Joe had me enthralled for the entire plane ride, and I finished all but 20 pages or so. I had some time before I was supposed to join my family so I eagerly, breathlessly, tearfully devoured those pages sitting in my hotel room. Perhaps I didn't expect one of the minds behind National Lampoon and This Is Spinal Tap to deliver his own beautifully-written, insightful spiritual autobiography, his own love letter to a great soul (but that's my problem, isn't it?)...

and when I closed the book I was consumed by a painful gratitude--thinking of my own Teachers, of the incomprehensible Grace of my Divine Mother in showing Herself to me when I wasn't looking for Her and in leading me to the most astonishingly devoted, enlightened, humble Guru...and to other souls, like Ammachi, that radiant Ocean of Love. I shook with tears and gratitude, and thanked Kali, and after a while I got up to walk over to my aunt and uncle's house.

For years Kali has sent me hearts of various kinds, and the heart has become one of our symbols, one of the ways She gets my attention. And on this day in Los Angeles, as I walked out of the hotel with tears still in my eyes, She gave me this heart, as if to say, "Yes, my love, what else would a Mother do but see to it that Her child had teachers to guide him into Her lap?"

It's funny that this heart joins the lowest--algae on a sidewalk--with the Highest, and that it's green, the color of the heart chakra. When I got back to East Podunk I showed my sponsor this picture, and he was delighted--but not surprised.

The Dust Bunnies Upon the Sanctuary

Hi.

It's me...

We're not on hiatus here at WiHW; I'm just snowed under with work...though officially on "vacation." And I have to admit that working whilst in pajamas and in a La-Z-Boy and blastin' tha toonz is a far, far better thing than schlepping into my office and scrunching up in the wheel'd chair and getting interrupted every five seconds by some clueless life form--

But no damn time for blogging. And I've got news--oh, yes: news (& photos) of a weird thing that happened in Cali, news of the wondrous books I just--this evening--finished reading--yet more reason not to blog...His Dark Materials, which has become my favorite fantasy-genre thang next to The Wizard of Oz.

And some of you know that, for me, that's saying A LOT.

I've been planning a post about suggestive and instructive works relating to the Holy Guardian Angel, and HDM will be one of them.

One of the things I loved about HDM was that the series featured a character so detestable, so vile, so vicious, and so loathsome that I wished to see her destroyed in some brilliantly agonizing fashion. But--the author confouded my wishes, and in doing so he confronted my desire for revenge--a desire that arises from the very system of "morality" the novels unravel and dis-Spell.

By the way, Salman Rushdie, a writer I've never particularly liked, wrote the absolute best book about The Wizard of Oz. So check that out, and read His Dark Materials, and maybe by then I will have written something. :)

My (Blessedly) Boring New Year's

I'm listening to Mac Davis...please don't shoot at me...I been crankin' the 70s tunage for a couple of days now (oh, gawd, "Blind Man In the Bleachers" is on--I laugh uncontrollably during that song--I'll be back)...with one brief respite; tonight, as I was cookin' Hoppin' John, I had to blast the title track from Coil's Love's Secret Domain...Teresa said it was a good palate cleanser...

New Year's Eve at the Temple of Doom was the typical, dull affair, just like I like it...driving on Amateur Night is just too scary...we watched Elvis Costello on Austin City Limits, which was incredible, and then Heart on Soundstage...and all I can say is, Ann Wilson looks good. She always has...but there should be 1000 bands with frontwomyn her size...and the Wilson sisters encored with TWO songs from Led Zeppelin IV...what more could you ask? As me and T. watched, we had Krystal burgers and fancy French champagne and little pizza rolls.

Ah, yes, Cliff Richard..."Devil Woman"...my kind of song...reminds me of Laura, of Lyra Silvertongue, of Sophia...I think of Andrea Dworkin, one of my true loves, who died this year...a Witch who opened my eyes so they'd never again shut...a devil woman if ever there was...who refused to be burned, to be reduced...who wrote her rage in lovely flames on the dark night sky of patrimony...

I wish you a New Year of love, of wild love, of kindness and sensuous intellection...a year of musick and whirling--of Vision and self-discovery--of Light of the Divine Mother seeping through the most mundane cracks in the real--

did you ever hear "Ariel" by Dean Friedman? That's a tantrik love song--