It was autumn and I was supposed to walk to the theatre to watch the film. I set out through a set of doors and there were fewer people around than in the daytime. Up about twenty stairs I walked, and then across a road. On the other side of the road there were large trees and old buildings. After about ten more minutes of walking I got to the building where they were showing the film. It was called The Bicycle Thief. I sat and watched.

 It was an extraordinary film.

 Sadness.

 A precursor to a further if only more sophisticated alienation that would sow itself.

There was a mistake in the film though, and perhaps it was intentionally made. The story is about a man that needs his bicycle for work, but his bicycle gets stolen. He spends the film in a series of misadventures while looking for his bicycle. The film culminates in a larger misadventure that speaks to the desperation that sits waiting to be sprouted in perhaps any individual. The willful mistake, if it could be called that, was that he never asked his obviously more well-off acquaintance to loan him some money for a bike. This friend had a truck, friends or workers to help him, and time, which is said to be a commodity. Maybe in the stressful situation the main character did not think of it. Perhaps the main character was too proud. Maybe some of both.

The bike is gone.

The world is without color.

Such simple bleak things. We can' get around them. We can't get around them. We can't get around them. No we can't get around these. Not this time. Not really ever. Not ever. Not ever. Not ever. We can't get around them.

I got up and it must have been about eleven or eleven-thirty. It was windy outside, but the lights on the path were kind in the darkness, witnessing the death of parts of me, the crumbling off of selves with nothing to take their place. I walked the way back where I came from.

There is no way back.

What’s more, you left for the journey even before you thought you did.

Outer darkness is a lark compared to what the other, the inner, contains.

There were other lights too, along the way, though they were far beyond trees, and seemed dimmed, unjustified somehow, and even otherworldly. At that time, there was a sign along the way, of a large construction company or something of the sort. It was a white sign with blue lettering. It said ELLIS DON. I walked a bit further, to the street. When there was a gap in the traffic I walked across. Steady traffic, even at that time.

William Carlos Williams was wrong.

What so much depends on is the automobile.

So much so, that this is like air. Not considered.

Back though the doors. She was waiting. We went for a walk. She was good that way. Always good for a walk. Now, walking the other way, towards other bits of moon, other streetlamps, there were terrors on the inside, racing terrors that never seemed to have a birth or a death. I told her about them and she listened well.

Wisdom beyond years.

Her own brand of suffering.

Leaves good colors rustling round sturdy streets.

But sturdy is something we don’t really have. Not really.

 When we got back, we were still wide-awake. So we got in a car and drove somewhere for coffee. That’s what people do. And besides, it was a beautiful city, even and especially at night.

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It was hundreds of streets in new urban sprawl. I was visiting T and having arrived on Friday afternoon, we were outside waiting for his friends to pick us up. Soon they pulled up and we got in. “Let’s go,” said T, and then the car went.

The driver had short dark hair, and the passenger had longish blonde hair. The driver exuded some smarts in his conversation but every time the passenger spoke it became more apparent that he was not bright. He was nice enough though. “I brought a scale this time,” said blonde, “so I get the amount I am paying for.”

For some reason we went to blonde’s house. They took a piece of foil from a cigarette package, poked holes in it with a pin, and placed it atop the opening of an empty Coke can. Then they broke a cigarette and sprinkled the tobacco on top of that, lit it, and when the small flame went out, inhaled the smoke.

Nighttime. We had gone to a girl’s house before arriving at some large party. T in a flash opened a jar that was on a counter top and stole a twenty-dollar bill.  When the girl came down she noticed. T said he didn’t take it. Then T’s girlfriend arrived. She was curious looking to me. She looked like she could be a lesbian. She showed up with a beautiful black girl named Tracey.

The party. There must have been one hundred people around. People were talking about T’s initiation into a gang, an initiation that would involve him getting beaten up. T had been avoiding the initiation. I was talking the whole time with Tracey. She was kind, interested and interesting.

Cops. There are police entering the basement. Everyone is running everywhere. After most people scatter from the basement there seem to be about two hundred people on the streets and everyone is walking in the same direction. I approach Tracey a certain way and she says, “Not yet,” and takes a piece of chewing gum out of her mouth.

Coffee shop. T is making fun of someone because they were in jail. I don’t understand this because the person he is making fun of, though a friend, is about six foot five inches tall and looks like he could have killed T if he wanted to. He laughs with T. T says, “Oops, I dropped a quarter, I am going to bent over to pick it up. I better watch out.” Tracey is nice. Calm.

T’s basement. The night is over. He is watching Colors. He has rented it for my benefit. Apparently he has watched Colors over fifty times. I had seen it the once like most other people I knew. The basement is well furnished. T’s father is a successful architect. T has done well in school, and knows about “Drawing,” as he calls it, and I suppose it just means how to draw basic architecture designs properly, in some kind of industry standard. It was apparent that being a bono fide gang member was something else he was working on at the time. Sort of like having a double major at university.

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Arriving in a small motel in the middle of nowhere, I sat on a bench to the side of the front of the check-in counter. The man taking the money and information was dressed in a plaid shirt and had greasy gray hair. The pen he used seemed a thousand years old though it was only a Bic or something akin to one.

In the room later on our Italian leader ate from and shared a few big loaves of bread. He was sixty-years old and looked about forty. Soon I heard the walls starting to shake from the other side and he and his friend started laughing. I didn’t know what the noise was from the walls and I didn’t know why they were having such a laugh. “Those people,” the Italians said, motioning to the door, still chomping on their bread, now having an even hardier belly laugh, “the two that were at the front…”

I realized they meant a man and a woman that I had forgotten about that were checking in at about the same time.

The next day included plenty of walking through forests so deep, and with no trails, that I do not know how they knew where they were going. The leading Italian would stop sometimes and I would ask someone what he is doing. “He is collecting mushrooms. A special type of mushrooms for cooking.”

Hours more of walking. The forest was full of light that got filtered down from a generous sun. Millions of shapes it made as it hit the ground after striking old oaks, different species of evergreens, and strange large shrubs. It was good to be away from a world of television sets and cars.

Shots rang up ahead.

The Italian had shot a Quail. It turned out that this would happen four more times. Eventually we arrived at a road and followed the road. The Italian was in a good mood.

Talkative.

He said, “ When you go with a woman, that is the best. But don’t wear any clothes at all. The man, the woman, they get all naked. Then, under the covers. Beautiful. This is the best thing. Great thing this. Make sure she is completely naked though. That way it is the best.”

It was good to be along the road. Long dirt road, with no end in sight. Lonely telephone poles stood guard along the forest lines. Everything was or seemed light brown, the dirt road, and the trees, our dusty clothing. The descending sky though, was there, pure, washing over us and our walk and our talk.

Mushrooms.

Quail.

Laughter.

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It was the beginning of a cold winter and we were sitting eating Whoppers. He had long hair and always needed to shave. People came in and went out the doors and cars and trucks rolled past on the roads. There were no trees there, and I don’t remember ever seeing a bird or even a stray cat. It was like the world was teetering towards its ending because it was getting to be middle dusk and also because everyone and everything seemed so closed off from everything else.

What made it worse was that if I had mentioned anything about it to him he’d not have understood. I asked him about his work and he said, “ Nobody thought I’d stay cause nobody could do that fuckin’ job more than a couple months nobody did before dangerous too that’s where I lost this part of my finger see but I don’t fuckin’ care the fuck with it cause I been there three years now and nobody thought nobody would do that.” I thought it was a charming exchange of words and admired the depth of not only his ideas but also the language that he used to convey them.

We worked on our second Whoppers. His teeth were yellow and black. We talked about a few things and there was something in the paper in front of both of us about break and entries in the area or B and E’s as they were called in the trade. We got to talking about that. He offered that that was a part of his past and that,” We only broke into garages and sheds anyway. No fuckin’ houses. That’s stupid. You don’t break into another guy’s house. We used to steel tools and some larger equipment, but some of us got caught. It didn’t work out. Its cold breaking into that shit in the fuckin’ cold too you know. Fuck that. I work inside now. I’m not going out in the middle of the night in the fuckin’ cold to do that any fuckin’ more.”

Soon it was time to leave, and he went one way on a bus as I doubled back through the plaza parking lot to an exit that led quite neatly to a residential street that met up with the residential street I was living on. It was dark soon after I arrived, and I thought of how lonely the parks and plazas were. Outside, in the sky, the snows began to arrive. It would create a sheet of white over the paint factory, the dingy two-story plaza, the old houses sadder then they knew they were, and the sheds, sheds that were safe now, because my friend had found new career avenues.add text, images, video, widgets, etc...

I was being driven in a car, and it was somewhere nestled in the early 1980’s. The car was maroon, a large sedan type of model, with plush seats and spacious windows. The car was headed north, and there was a countdown on the radio that weekend of the best thousand or so songs of all time. I could hear the music gently behind me from the speakers. This coupled with the engine, the darkness outside, and the overall autumn night made for a wide allowance of consciousness to permeate everything.

There were many songs that played, but one was by a Canadian group called Triumph. I cannot remember the name of the song, but I could feel the singer’s voice as if it came from deep in what some might call the heart chakra, one of several spinning energy vortexes in esoteric thought said to spin throughout the body. Since I had now entered a sort of timelessness, I felt endowed with otherworldly wisdom, that was at once wisdom but no wisdom at all,- not the way any western world thought would think of it, save perhaps some mystery schools or some native traditions.

Onwards the car went, and deeper and deeper the song went. It didn’t seem to end. I now felt as if I was in everything at once, from the vast good and crisp darkness outside, to the interior of the car, to something below, above, in, and beyond all of those that is un-namable. Someone opened the window a bit to let the air flow in, and the feeling of exultation only widened and deepened and expanded.

Still the car went and went. I felt as though I was bursting. I felt, though connected to the heart of the world (not an actual heart but the heart as metaphor for the world’s true self), also a stranger in the world, and not only a stranger, but a stranger from a far, far away place. I felt privileged to have ended up in that time and that place, though I had absolutely no evidence or even recollection of any other time or place save for the immediate facts of my life up until then such as biographical facts.

Yet all these experiences were not only vivid, they were what I was then, in the traveling car, with the outside and inside night, the autumn trees hiding this time no secrets. The feeling of extraordinary light folding in on itself within me thousands of times, light and light and light, popping, bubbling, sparkling. add text, images, video, widgets, etc...

    Walking along the retreat pathways with the groups of people Jacob began to feel uneasy. It was cold autumn and in a parallel life, a life that should have been felt and lived, things would have been all right, even enjoyable, because of the fall hues, the relative carefree hours ahead, and the company of the other people. Instead this something amiss would continue to grow.

    Jacob didn’t know what was the matter. He started to feel as if there was a lump in his throat and his back ached also.

THUMP *  THUMP *  THUMP*   went his heart.

    He knew in a sense, a large sense, that nothing was wrong on the outside. He knew enough to know that. He never passed out during such episodes, which he thought was a remarkable achievement. He put his hands, the palms of his hands, on his jeans, and pressed inwards, pressed against the denim in hopes of grounding himself. He began to feel a buzz in his ears and things worsened.

Things usually always worsened.

    There was a pond, and a places to sit, but he couldn’t sit, and though the pond was supposed to be a good thing, it began to look only like a dirty thing, and nature took on the feeling of being quietly dirty, unwelcoming, and then all of the trees, all of the sky, and most of the ground acquired this look. His mouth, he noticed, was very dry.

Dry. Dry. Dry. And no water.

    None of this was the bad thing and Jacob knew it well. What was bad was that he refused to excuse himself, to go rest in a bed, to find some water, to do anything that would help this curse-like set of things that were happening. He clutched quietly at his guts, where a formidable tension began to grow into an awesome terror.

Unfair. Unfair. Unfair. All without due cause. Unless the universe respected him so much that part of it was fearful of him and trying to veritably do him in. No, it couldn’t be that, but he didn’t know for sure.

Sharp pains inside his head, like needles. No air.

He couldn’t breathe.

The pain went all the way down his neck.

 His heart began to hurt, like it was being stabbed from the inside out. Still he stood, just breathing through his nostrils a bit.

Then, somehow, it passed as much as it could though he felt crumby and deteriorated. He laughed just a bit, as he always did. This laughter was his quiet rebellion. Sometimes it wasn’t a laugh, but just a smile. It was an acceptance and a distancing technique at once, from an existence that was often grueling and lamentable. add text, images, video, widgets, etc...

    The growing sun came over the hills and shone upon the fields. The rows of houses that were nestled at the bottom began to wake up. It was harvest time, and the families would all be working the fields for the next few weeks. This morning was an October morning in 1922, the women began to cook food and brew coffee. Outside a man in overalls threw the contents of a metal container towards some livestock, then he adjusted his hat, turned around, and went back into a the door of a barn.

    By seven o’clock the land was completely lighted. The men had eaten their breakfast, and were harvesting the fields. It was such a large harvest that some of the women would come out soon and help. There had been talk by one of the elders about a cold storm coming, and the men of the community listened, preparing for this the best they could, but in the end the harvesting was dependant such greater, outside forces.

    At about eleven o’clock a woman came outside to talk to a group of the men. A man not working with that group became concerned because he noticed that she was waving her arms in exaggerated motions. What’s more, she didn’t have the basket in her hands that she would normally have had at that time. The basket, though a small gesture, was looked forward to at that time. It contained various fruit and vegetables, and pieces of bread also. It was just the right thing to eat a couple hours before they stopped for lunch.

    Now the woman was pointing to the sky back over the house, and as the man looked there was no immediate need to move or talk to anyone, for he knew there was a problem. The entire sky in that direction had become black, and clouds were moving towards the fields at an alarming rate. Dust and dirt was beginning to rise in the air, and within seconds it felt colder. The clouds, rains, thunder, lightning, and winds began to assault the fields as the morning had turned upside down in an instant.

    For three days and three nights it continually rained. Tornados touched down, lightening scorched the earth numerous times, and then flooding saturated the fields, the residences and the barns. The season’s crops were lost, the coming year’s livelihood was lost, and the cheer and light heartedness of the folks that lived from the land became absent. When winter came it was more menacing than other winters, and it was all the families could do to survive.

 The following spring saw the sun coaxing up greenery out of the earth.

 The families gathered their strength and continued.

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The steps were dark where Jacob carried the buckets of gravel. To the one side, beyond the fence, was an old stairway and raccoons lived under there. Once, decades ago, that stairway used to be new, but now it was lonely and if any place could be haunted, surely it would be that place, with the strange creaking, oddly humid night winds, and overgrown trees. The raccoons didn’t show themselves though.

Bump, bump, now went the trolley, as Jacob had decided to use the pushcart instead of just his hands.

He had laid a flashlight on the ground to light the first part of the way, and the second part was alighted by a motion detector. The railway ties were old, eaten away by army ants. Jacob quickly surveyed the skies for any strange lights hoping to see a falling star, a meteorite, or even a UFO of some sort.

Only overcast skies. Bump, bump, went the wheels. Bump, bump.

There were only five large pails, but it was taking a long time. He wanted to make sure the pails didn’t spill, because then he’d have to clean that up.

Bump bump. So far so good.

Jacob thought the night had become beautiful in its own right. He had been reluctant to begin transferring the materials, but the lights had broken through the fright and wall of the night. They made wonderfully dreadful shadows on the walls, on the old grape trellises, on bits of metal, parts of siding, and other places.

Bump. The wheels were full of air. It was a high quality pushcart, and this was making a difference.

Sometimes, sometimes things worked, and that this was the case was a wonder in itself.

Bump.

He poured out all the contents of the buckets into the makeshift retaining wall, and then used a small tool to level it all out. At another wall another motion light turned on. Where was the humid air coming from? Jacob thought he sensed some birds fly past overhead but couldn’t tell for sure.

Yes, they were there. Night birds.

The look of the passageway back up to the top of where the entranceway seemed like something from an old world movie. Jacob remembered when it was first built, many years before. Someone had looked at it from the angle Jacob was looking now and said, “ You half-expect a short little Chinese man to pop out from there with a smoke and say, ‘Got a light?’” This was an interesting memory, because now a populace that was mostly Chinese inhabited that neighborhood.

Jacob thought there was something blessed about the night and the idea of recollecting and remembering. He piled the buckets inside of one another and put them on the cart, then headed up the good, old, long, disheveled, railway tie framed, dimly lit stairway. He thought of the band Heart, and old wandering dogs, dogs that could wander days and sometimes weeks before returning home. He thought of people he knew long since grown up and beyond what they were then. He also thought about far off places and how if you knew how to remember them, with a little help sometimes, they didn’t have to be that far off, or could at least be revisited in the mind and at special times, in the heart also.

He thought of the night birds.

Bump. Bump.

Bump. Bump.

Bump

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She was a funny sleeper, and would often wake up exclaiming something or another. It was the middle of winter and the lights from the streets shone into the room. Even in the middle of the city, by the busiest road, one of the busiest in the world in fact, the black squirrels found their way around, onto the steps, onto the sills briefly and lightly. Their footprints were signs that everyone, with a little hustle, could make it through the winter. One thing that was scarce though, at that low temperature and strange hour, were people.

    “ I dreamed of people chasing me,” she said, “ All of these people, men and women,” and it lasted for hours. They had knives, they were killers, and one bald man even had an axe. He said to a woman, ‘We have to get her. We have to get her for sure,’ and they chased me through alleyways. I lost them in a tunnel, but they were on the other side. Finally, in an abandoned building, I slammed a door on the bald man’s fingers, and there was blood, which was when he got angrier, and the woman came up to me and tried to throw me off a set of stairs. It was terrible. Then all the people were back, and I was swimming, swimming in a lake, trying to get away from them, under the cold water. I was holding my breath, hiding, and I could see them on the top, on the land, looking, waiting, because I couldn’t hold my breath for ever.”

    “So what happened? Did they get you?”

    “ I don’t know. I don’t know what happened after that. More chasing I think. I think I fought them off. I always fight them off in the end.”

She was in the kitchen, and retrieved one of a hundred packets of juice from a large box and began to make the juice in a plastic jug. She was like that, always buying things in bulk, always drinking the same things over and over again for a year or two, until some other novel idea caught her attention. It was peculiar, because as he stood there and watched her mixing the juice, it occurred to him that she often dreamed the same things the same way she ate and drank the same things. She’d been having the nightmares of people chasing her for years.

 Outside, the snow fell and got carried around by the wind. The ploughs could be heard in the distance, and there was something reassuring and poetic about ploughs in a city in the early morning winter hours that had to do with things running on schedule in the world yet being far away from you and your own freedom that was mixed up in waking and sleeping dreams plus the reality that, say, the plough drivers out there shared also. The black squirrels were always on the move, and when they were still for a period, they also seemed somehow on the move. Like mind. Like time. Like emitted light. Like a large plow with a powerful engine in neutral, idling. Like the fearful and chaotic dreams of a still and sleeping woman with dependable habits.add text, images, video, widgets, etc...

It was the type of statue that was embedded or connected to the structures of houses or castles of old. You’d see them in movies mostly, and they looked out at you with terrible expressions, or at best were grim and depressive looking. Jacob had read or heard somewhere that those statues were actually meant to scare off evil spirits from entering, and when he thought of it that way, it began to make more sense.

Churches.

That was where else. Jacob could have sworn that it was churches, old churches that those goblin-devil things were on. Whatever the case was, Jacob Ellis was in the dark, wandering quietly the labyrinths of his mind, when he had a vision, and the vision was of one of the statues. It was a small, and it was a dog. He sensed right away that it was a true vision because attached was a meaning and he received the meaning clearly.

Meanings.

The dog represented the daemon that had something to do with the Greek language and also something to do with an essential part of oneself. Jacob knew that the vision of the dog was his own inner daemon, and at the same time an outside, sort of path into the world daemon, and that he should at this moment follow this daemon without hesitation. He conjured the dog statue again in his mind. It was surrounded by darkness and it was at a high altitude.

Darkness and height.

That was the message though, that the daemon was there, waiting to be used, waiting all along, only it was difficult to locate because of the dark and the its height. But there were two more parts that Jacob intuited. Part one was that though the dog seemed ugly, frightening, and small, it was actually the path towards beauty, (true beauty with depth), security, and grandness, when followed. The other part had to do with the dark. There were two types of dark as far as Jacob was concerned, and it was important that this dog, representative of the daemon, was seen in the second type of darkness.

Dogs of dark. Dogs of hope.

The first type of darkness represented ignorance and worse, non-good things of a thousand kinds. The second type of darkness represented the rich and textural beauty of night, such as a night ocean, or a peaceful cricket sounding summer night by a country house, or a spring night when one can feel life blossoming from within and from without.

Discernment concerning continuance on the path.

The final matter of business regarding the vision was that Jacob had to have the wherewithal to understand that the dog statue high up on the front wall of the night structure was not seen during what would normally be called a beautiful night. It was an arid night. Nothing greatly redeeming about it. But. This was part of the message also. Enter where it seems difficult. Enter there. The seemingly or conceptually mundane night can be transformed into a night of knowledge, beauty, or something else not known yet but beneficial and attainable.

It had been interesting that the daemon had shown itself in what could be considered as something that could look or seem almost like a demon, in this case a brass or wrought iron dog affixed to a high wall of some building, seen at night, and created, made, quite intentionally, to look ugly, provide a function, and in this case, not be easily discerned visually or thematically.

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    The water was cold water and a piece of lemon was cut and put into it. The day was a cold day and the hearts of the people of the world felt like cold pieces of lemon put into the world. The streets stretched around the world, and cars and trucks traveled around the world.

 The world.

    There were sweaters in the world to keep warm with, but the sweaters sometimes didn’t keep one warm from cold hearts. Lemon and cold hearts and one thousand buildings with ten thousand people.

The people.

    There were dictionaries of words. There were books that told of ancient things. What were really needed though, were not words of tales of ancient things, but something else altogether.

Something else.

    People were perhaps searching for the something else. How blessed they were once they found it, once they got into its sphere of influence for it sustained them and they sustained it. Maybe whatever it was made the water, lemons, streets, cars, buildings, words, ancient tales, and so on, not so bad, and, even conversely, to be pretty well.

Yes.

    Yes, there was a mystery there, and it was the mystery of happiness, which was in the end no mystery at all. You had to just try happiness, like you tried other things, and maybe somehow it would catch, or you would catch, like a tree catches, like a civilization catches, like the water catches the lemon and the lemon floats.

Floating.

    You had to float, and if you didn’t try at all, or tried too hard, it wouldn’t work. That was the artful part, if something could ever be called art.add text, images, video, widgets, etc...

Traveling by car on northern highways Jacob felt that the other cars always went far too fast in those parts. He had known it before, and forgotten since then how aggressive the drivers were on those stretches of highways. He could only surmise that they knew something he didn’t know, such as that the police simply didn’t enforce the law in those parts. It was a rugged area, where the hills began to rise up higher and were inclusive of rocks, where it were as if the beginnings of the Canadian Shield that that they talked about in long ago geography classes were showing itself.

Zoom.

Everything zoomed. The trucks the vans the cars. Even people carrying trailers seemed to zoom. He had to speed just to stay in some sort of semblance with the flow of the traffic. The speed limit was one hundred kilometers per hour, and eighty in other parts. He was now doing one-ten and one-fifteen as everyone zipped past him. It dawned on him that the world was its own organism, and would be more than willing to cast off parts of itself so long as the entire machinery kept going. The traffic and its speed became a symbol of this. It would continue, it would continue in the face of absolutely any philosophy, political creed, or argument to the contrary.

Reverberations.

The atmosphere, by the air and wind and hills and earth, absorbed its reverberations as it had been for decades. Jacob looked for music on the radio dial. There were commercials. There were modern pop songs that reeked of pretense and a simply and accepted poor quality. The sky was gray, somehow menacing in its indifference. If Jacob could only understand the pace of the world. Someone had to be right, and someone wrong. He was a minority on one.

Music.

Finally, as if veritable manna from heaven, he heard a sound on the dial. It was a native Indian man chanting a beautiful chant, and though Jacob could not understand what it meant, he felt its rhythms, and these rhythms had a slower, more guttural cadence, that seemed to come from within, form the inside of a hill, from the inside of a stream, from the inside of something good and honest and natural. There was a drumming, and the drumming was slow but sure, constant and confident, resonant or evocative of a larger cycle of time, what some called Indian time.

Good.

It was better now. Jacob felt eased somewhat. The song ended. He had only caught the last part of it. But the idea that such things existed was hope enough. He had to bank on that. He had to bank on a way back to some sort of connectedness with such a thing as the earth. Soon the day was ending, and the driving felt even worse, because in those parts there was not much electric light to show the way. The way. The way was frenzied. What frenzied foment of mind and engine had been brought by people to an earth, an earth that was otherwise good and well in its own sounds, in its own ancient rhythms, in its own way and ways.

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    Far in the dream Jacob had become tired. He had been traveling for a long time, in a car it seemed, and his journey’s had been interesting but a bit troublesome. He couldn’t remember what those journeys were exactly, but at least he had arrived at a place where he could park his car for a while. It looked like a small section within a small town, down and to the side of the town.

Somewhat to the side of.

It was definitely daytime. And it was overcast. Severely overcast. He didn’t notice this consciously at first, because he was looking at a man against a wall smoking a cigarette. It was only later on, and perhaps completely afterwards that he had realized it was almost like evening time so dark it was though it was again, day.

To the side and overcast.

The man smoking the cigarette was gone when Jacob looked up from parking the car. It seemed as if he had vanished in an instant, as if by magic or the way something would happen in a science fiction novel or film. Pooof! And he was no longer there. Only there was no actual moment when he vanished because he had merely walked off when Jacob wasn’t looking.

Sides of, overcast, walking off.

Out from his car he didn’t know what to hope for. Some brief respite from his travels, and a smoke. That would be the thing more than anything. To sit outside somewhere and have a cigarette in peace. There was a corridor between the buildings that led somewhere. He walked along by the slightly dirtied white stucco walls.

He walked along.

Then before him opened up a marvelous scene. He could hardly believe it. There was a mountain-scape beyond (though it was not as visible as it could be due to overcast skies), and a huge, potent, fiercely alive river flowing right not forty feet away. Rushing it was, beautifully tumultuous, as the rocks and riverbed underneath were uneven thus forcing the water to crash upwards into the air. And fast. It was flowing fast, because of its usual force coupled with some kind of thaw in the mountains. Jacob knew this instinctively.

Uneven and flowing.

He walked up to his left a slight little bit. It was actually up and then down about ten feet to the left, beside some large rocks that were there. He knew only that next he was smoking, and had been in a sort of conversation with a woman, and that she was having a cigarette also. He felt like the volume had gone off and couldn’t exactly understand what she was saying. Then it would click on. He thought that she was a nice person, s good and even kindred sort of soul. He knew he was in a strange place, but didn’t realize it was a dream.

Dream places that know you.

Next he found himself saying, “What was your name?” and he was surprised that he asked, because he felt that she had already told it to him. In real life if he had forgotten it he would have faked it usually, or found another way around to find out her name if need be. Rarely would he ask, as this marked a sort of confession, and though the honesty about it usually brought instant forgiveness, it was a question he avoided asking more than once if he could.

“My name is Li, and I already told you my name…”

“Oh yes. Li. I somehow forgot for a second,” and he felt that he would have to acknowledge at some point to himself or others just how bad he had become with names. He didn’t know how this had happened. And this Li, this Li was someone he found interesting, though he had no idea what they had talked about. A kindred soul. Yet he had forgotten her name in an instant.

Kindred spirits and some forgetfulness.

Soon it felt like it was time to leave that place. That is when Jacob noticed that there were other people, small groups of two or three, and sometimes perhaps individuals, sitting on other, similar rocks, talking and probably enjoying the river, this strange tumultuous river that came from the mountains down to the dream town on this overcast day.

Strange tumultuous rivers.

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The airport was actually open aired and built of pastel stucco walls painted an indeterminate color. The hue was soft. As the passengers walked through to the luggage pickup, the group shared a happy feeling. Smelling the humid night, some individuals felt they could acquire the scent of clouds and the twinkling lights both. The electric light was beautiful also, casting light shadows on benches, on floors, on shoes. The great flow of people that walked through there had not created a difficult aura or energy, as is often the case of high traffic places. Maybe it was that the people were happy. Maybe the sea air from beyond and the palm leaves worked constantly to bless the area, doubling as unknown spirit guides hiding in plain sight.

Spirit guides are well.

Outside the luggage handler ran a con. There was a group of over ten people and he told them that he had to affix an extra luggage carrier at the back of the shuttle bus that took everyone to various hotels. He attached it. He asked for more money, and when he received an extra tip, he asked for yet more. While riding along one of the passengers looked out the window at back and saw that there was no extra luggage carrier. The luggage man had gone to the trouble of putting it on, loading it up, showing it off, asking for extra money, asking for more extra money on top of that. Then he would unload it when the passengers were on the shuttle, and put the luggage where it fit well all along, which was under the bus in the carrying compartment with the rest of the luggage.

Everyone has some luggage.

They dropped off the ten or so people at the incorrect hotel. It was too ritzy there anyhow, with ceilings that never ended, and people with too much money. The people with too much money were odd, but odd in a way that was sought after. When the mistake was clarified the group was happy, because their destination was just next-door. The lobby was open aired and the place was wonderful. The infinite cosmos as non-ceiling was better than the gaudy overdone diamond-minded ceiling of the first place.

The sky is the limit.

At this new place there was a woman that sold photos of tourists. Everyone in that part of the world accepted American dollars, but there was a different currency and when anyone used it, the photograph woman short-changed them. When it was pointed out, she corrected it, still short changing the buyer, constantly giving herself tips. It seemed that though in paradise, people that didn’t mind hustling a bit ran paradise, and what’s more, held the travelers in a sort of continual contempt. This was obvious from a hundred small

clues.

Maybe there are thousands of clues about thousands of things. Yes of course.

Soon some of the group walked along a pathway that connected all of the hotels. One every few miles. In the days there were stray dogs, and a market at the end with high prices. There was a tall ship or the skeleton of one, and people called it a pirate ship. The sand was clean, the undertow was strong and dangerous, trying always to bring whoever and whatever it could out and down into the sea. This was the undertow’s racket and it was done often, just like the luggage handler’s and the photograph woman’s was. The moon, the planets, the clouds and the rest had their own rackets too, but that was another thing altogether.

Another thing. About good rackets.

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There goes the world, and down a street at the end there are balloons and a fair in front of the lake or the ocean or just any landmass of water. The setting sun glimmers and I know you know how that happens, where there is pavement and the streetlights don’t yet glow but they are friendly nevertheless. We need the right song at the right place, and far off down the ways miles from Humboldt there is a great gust of wind and then another and another. Cool and wet in the afternoon old boards lonely and still standing, grasses bent over, blow wind blow, blow wind blow. There goes the world, and I think of the beginnings of middles of mountains and summits, butterflies in the night, jars of jelly and above all else frogs and frogs and frogs jumping lightly to and fro. Yup, the winds. Yep, the sands. Yup, old dirt and shingle. The greatest and realest beloved though, is the rain, the rain that brings the ennui with it, the rain that is the same always and everywhere that way, the rain so indifferent that it becomes personal. Rain you rain, rain, where the soft world recedes and the difficult arise, but there is no need for a woman there, no need for line about a spectre gal from the carnival making her way home. No, better only with the crashing swirling sifting, succulent rains. Better only where the fast weeping skies and cool angry ether waters the clapboard and it gets so beautifully bad that even the rain frogs worry sometimes.

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Dancing particles of sin, and the motives of hatred and pervasive greed, while cushions of silk bounce off light. Telephones and candies or green trees and one thousand Popsicle dandies. The world aglow. The rains washed the houses and streets away. It washed lookers and hookers and lock washers and drill bits or all of the mountains and pins and dreams of souls. Falling. Falling. Cream colored girls, and skateboard stickers where lions roam, where the transgressions grow large, where nicotine stains and pennies wait. Some Floridian girls by the five and dime singing songs adorned of t-shirts and cool hoop earrings, eating chocolate bars in the sacred night, unknowingly ushering some type of dreadful entropy. A rainbow watches, a clean blonde woman opens something with an electric can opener, a dog is born, and the grocery stores die. Cotton sweaters and swaying flowers, rivers of fresh water and distinct psalms of wisdom.

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The dental hygienists were the worst by far. They were a strange group of women, and they shuttered w/ oohs and ahhs at patients’ mouths, declaring all manner of problem. These gals were portents of doom. They didn’t understand that people out in the real world drank coffee sometimes, or didn’t floss their teeth three times a day. Another group were teachers that treated the adult world like children. This group could not switch modes, and one wondered about them and their perpetual corrective view. There were others, the pharmacists and doctors, the do-gooders and green people, the police, the parking enforcement, and the bi-law makers and enforcers. The world was full of narrowness dying happily and busily.

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There were ten mountains. Below them were other mountains but only smaller. Below them were summits. In the skies were flocks of birds, so distant and silent, the way stars are silent, the way the sun is silent, the way the moon goes w/out words or fuss. The sun was hiding behind the mountains and going down and down. The clouds looked stationary but moved and moved, the way a watch hand moves on its own time, the way water boils on its own time. In the foreground there was a cabin house, and just beyond it a stream. The area saw storms, days, nights, dusks, winters, springs, summers, autumns. It housed devas, people, animals, and was painted by many landscape painters. add text, images, video, widgets, etc...

The moon watched over both the town and the forest. The town was quiet. Once and a while some night animal ran past, back into the forest from where it had ventured out from. The humid summer breeze came and kissed the trees and windows. Soon, in the quietest part of the night, a pitter-patter could be heard as the rain began to fall. The night rain came steadily and calmly for the next hours. The moon continued to watch the quiet town and forest.add text, images, video, widgets, etc...

It was bitter cold, and the days had become unfocused and dismayed. The thought that there was much more winter to endure was stifling. Jacob had been awoken from a nap to go to the grocery store and pharmacy for his wife. He crossed the parking lot in his vehicle and then made a wide turn into the bank drive-through. Right there was where it all began, and for no real discernable reason. Or perhaps. Perhaps for more reasons than one could ever hope to properly surmise.

Jacob noticed that a middle to older aged Indian man had opened his van door. If Jacob had felt like tuning into his super-perceptive self (of which he didn’t consciously because he was too tired), he would have noticed that the man had none of the nervousness or frustration, even in the slightest of body language symbols and signs, that a regular driver would if they had misjudged the distance from the automatic keyboard, or had a defunct window. No, this man was calm. He was retrieving bags. Three large bags. One was blue, one was forest green, and one was gray or grayish. He took his time, and put the bags into the side of his van like groceries.

Thoughts raced through Jacob’s mind though he appeared calm, even dazed. The man must be of been sub-contracted by the bank. The man must have also been doing this a long time, because he had become lazy and confident, not even once glancing around. Even seasoned Brinks drivers and their assistants glanced around. Jacob pulled up and did his own withdrawal. He couldn’t help but eyeball the van though. He was already thinking about what it would be like to follow the van, to hold up the unsubstantial looking Indian man, and make away with the money. One time, and never again. Then he caught himself and admonished himself for even entertaining such a crazy thought. Then something else happened. The man was out of the van again, across the way, not ten cars away in fact, and entering another bank. Out he came with bags. Smart sturdy bags, bags banks used, industrial strength bags, for important things. Something clicked.

It was windy, night had descended now. Jacob could make out the Indian man’s van two cars ahead of him. He had been following it for twenty minutes. It pulled onto a side-road and Jacob knew this was the time to act. He came up and bumped the van. The van stopped after pulling to the soft shoulder. Jacob hopped out and ran up to the window. The Indian man opened the door to get out of his car. Jacob moved aside and let him walk to the back of the van. Then Jacob grabbed the man at the shoulders pulling him backwards over an outstretched leg, in effect tripping him and landing him on the ground where he wanted him. He held him there and turned him quickly face down. “I have a gun. I am going to take all the bags from your car and put them in my vehicle and drive away. If you get up or look up before I am gone I am going to stop what I am doing and shoot you dead. Do you understand?” The Indian man nodded.

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In the rural night whiles light plays upon the trees and a thousand specters roam. The great and Godly earth will prevail, the prevailing earth of love and light, soft laughter in the afternoon creative ebb and flow of soul. In the rural night the radio men bring hope and articulate ideas about the dawn and the light ones, the cycles of time, and a thousand other inroads and good even ways. Long live the radio men, and they will live long. God give us a chance. Give us a chance to dance in our own special way you meant, in grace and lightness and light. Long live the radio men even and always where there is pain and worry they remind of the assuaged soul and centeredness. Long live the radio men.

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 He had a big black dog and a big blue truck. He wasn’t like the others and I didn’t know why he had shown up, but you take them as they come. I asked him once, a few months later, what he did for a living, and his response was, “A little bit of this and a little bit of that,” and I left it at that because one wasn’t supposed to ask for more. I showed him around and explained some things to him. He liked everything and had cash. He pulled out hundreds, fifties, and one of the largest stacks of twenty-dollar bills (three inches thick) I had ever seen. He had the pure vision of the world, purer than the others, the mystical set. He spoke in engines, bulk purchases, and money, not really “A little bit of this and a little bit of that,” at all.

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