top of page
Mystical Tarot Realms
Click on page 67 above or hover your cursor above BLOG to go to other pages.
Pestles on a Pounding Stone
hmans
00:00 / 05:54
APT. 24
You are informed that you cannot leave Apartment 24 due to some great danger to your health. Unfortunately, you lose your job and quickly run out of money to buy food and pay rent and so many other bills. The government sends you a check, which you use to pay rent for one month and utilities and a little food, but the danger lingers on and on. As you hang out in your apartment, you discover that three people in your country own as much wealth as half of the population, and these oligarchs are able to find every loophole imaginable to avoid paying taxes. They control the politicians through campaign contributions. Over half of the government's discretionary spending funds the war machine, not on preparing for health emergencies. Since you no longer have a job, you don't have any health insurance, and you would go bankrupt if you went to the hospital. For your job, you spent years going to college--which has nearly bankrupted you. In Apartment 24, every night as you are falling asleep you dream that a huge monster is sucking the life out of you.
​
​
​
(You realize that you are still on the right path because in the corner of the room you find an old box containing Chapter Five of Alternate Reality Apartments....)
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
Pounding Stone in the Inundation Zone of Millerton Lake
​
​
​
​
ALTERNATE REALITY APARTMENTS: CHAPTER FIVE
SOCIOPATHY
​
My son-in-law John and I stayed at a cheap hotel in San Francisco after my daughter experienced a stroke due to an AVM, or arteriovenous malformation. She was in the neurological intensive care unit (NICU) of a San Francisco hospital for a long time. At one point, John and I strolled down a crowded street in downtown San Francisco looking for a restaurant, and an exotic street person rushed up to John and gave him a great big bear hug, then addressed John by his nickname and blurted out, "It's okay! It's all love!" John anxiously pushed the man away, yelling, "You don't know me!" The man then skipped away as if he were the happiest human being on earth. John confirmed that the man could not have possibly known him or his nickname.
My daughter was at death's door seemingly every minute of every day that she remained in the NICU, and by that point, she had nearly died numerous times from causes related to the stroke.
To this day, I remain dumbfounded by the way the man had comforted John. We had both lived in Fresno, CA, for most of our lives, and we had never walked down that street in San Francisco before. At first I thought the man was a lunatic, but as far as I know no rational explanation exists for how the man knew John's unusual nickname or how he knew that John needed to hear that message.
Fortunately, after many months, my daughter made a miraculous recovery. Strangely, even though I have witnessed evidence of the genocide of Native Americans all over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and I know that humanity could vanish from the earth due to climate disruption or nuclear annihilation or both--even though I am keenly aware that a different John--last name "Blackmore"--has tried to murder me more that once, the exotic street person's inexplicable message still resonates with me.
Before my daughter experienced her stroke, Blackmore had attempted to murder me a second time. My wife and daughter were again away on a trip, but this time I slept in my wife's bedroom. That night I pushed a heavy chest against the door that accesses the patio and piled other heavy items, such as the TV, on top of the chest. I locked the hall door, and positioned empty beer bottles on the floor. Blackmore would not be able to enter without making a great deal of noise.
His strategy the second time, in fact, was to make as much noise as possible to spur me out into the hallway. He entered the house a different way the second time, through the back door into the laundry room, and from there he tiptoed through the kitchen and dining room, then loudly pulled open the door between the dining room and the hall. Within a matter of seconds, he loudly pulled open the guest-room door and the door to my daughter's bedroom. Then, I assume, he stood, gun drawn, waiting for me to appear. Strangely, I knew the exact moment he realized that I was in my wife's bedroom. An emotional current of homicidal rage, mingled with confusion and disappointment, flowed through the bedroom door.
I waited to see what his next move was going to be since he had lost the element of surprise. He didn't make another sound. He did not come around the outside of the house to my wife's bedroom patio door. At some point he simply slipped out. Despite my efforts to be prepared, I had forgotten to charge the phone. The phone's battery was dead before he entered the house. Once again I had no proof.
The stakes had risen. At first he was determined to commit cold-blooded, premeditated murder while I slept. Blackmore, of course, would never attempt such a crime when my wife and daughter were home, but the second attempt revealed that he was now willing to resort to physical confrontation to achieve his ends, and the chance that others might learn of his maliciousness was no longer stopping him.
Blackmore also probably had some reason to believe that I might suspect him. He no doubt went over every detail of his first attempt and at some point realized that I might have been sleeping in my daughter's bedroom.
I pretended to be oblivious to his nefarious intentions while at the same time striving to understand the mind of a sociopathic cold-blooded killer.
He is one of the most methodical and ruthless killers, the kind who waits for years to let his plan unfold and lies in wait for his victim. He is willing to defer gratification to establish the most ideal conditions so that no one will ever suspect him.
His first attempt to murder me in my sleep was partly stealth, partly the act of a predator who has weighed all the risks before attacking, and partly cowardice. The second noisy attempt revealed a hint of desperation, a willingness to risk confrontation while maintaining a distinct advantage. He is of course aware that I dislike the thought of owning weapons of any kind.
At some point he committed himself irrevocably to deception and murder. He must have realized that he might need to play a part for years while attempting to create greater intimacy with my wife, all the while never disclosing his real intentions. He dedicated himself to a total compartmentalization of feelings to accomplish his ends. He had to always, always present the kindest, most thoughtful side of himself even as in secret he was becoming more and more engrossed in carrying out his homicidal plan.
I am no psychologist, but I believe I understand a sort of primal motivation. As someone who is well aware that nature is red in tooth and claw, Blackmore no doubt prides himself on being stealthier and more ferocious than his prey, and I mean prey, plural, because I believe that I'm not the only one he has targeted.
He owns seven rental houses, but one of them is full of his junk and several others are in disrepair. He is a hoarder, his own house a disaster-area overflowing with newspaper and Styrofoam and cans and bottles and numerous odds and ends that he has collected over the years. He no doubt in his own mind has a clear system of organization, but an insistence on this system long ago resulted in an odious, unrelenting disorder. A great deal of junk ends up in his unrented houses as well, and I'm betting that bodies can also be found on some of those properties. You do not have to be a genius to figure out that his houses reflect a chaotic inner state. In various attempts to assert control he no doubt has murdered other people along the way.
I must confess that at first I only tolerated him because he kept helping my wife and family, and unfortunately, since I have a chronic illness and occasionally have trouble making enough money, I easily became duped by his phony generosity, especially since I considered him a comrade in our fight to protect the environment.
Signs of his deviousness should have alerted me. Blackmore is married--yet my wife became the object of his devotion. He apparently has acted the perfect gentleman around my wife, in all but two instances. He once commented about how my wife's blouse revealed too much cleavage, a comment that my wife vehemently objected to. He also asked my wife to act as a surrogate mother for him since he and his own wife have remained childless. He proposed using a turkey baster to make my wife pregnant. My wife and I of course found the suggestion completely absurd.
In retrospect, I should have decked him and demanded that he never show his face around the house again. But Blackmore had at other times seemed so rational and had done so many things for us--for my wife, in other words--over the years, and he had also accomplished so many positive things for the community through his activism that I felt sorry for him. His "turkey-baster" proposal remained an embarrassment for him that no doubt became a trigger for his homicidal rage. He did not like to feel embarrassed around a man he considered inferior. Embarrassment no doubt also made him feel inadequate and no longer in control.
The first time Blackmore tried to murder me, one of the most chilling sounds was a sigh: He sighed immediately after he cocked the gun and stepped into the guest room, just before he discovered I wasn't there. The sigh revealed excitement, satisfaction, relief, as if a pressure valve had opened for a moment: the almost sexual excitement of total domination, the ego satisfaction of proven superiority, the relief of finally realizing his homicidal plan.
I have searched the mountains for Native American village sites for almost twenty years, but I never contemplated the motivation for genocide before Blackmore attempted to murder me. From what I've experienced, I now believe that the motivation for the systematic extermination of an entire race is similar to the motivation of a sociopath who kills individuals in a calculated, methodical manner.
Several weeks after Blackmore's first attempt, I explored the bottom of a reservoir at the confluence of a river and a creek. Cockle burrs blanketed the otherwise denuded slopes. A faint dirt road snaked through a Native American village site, close to pounding stones, between the dark skeletons of oaks and sycamores, all of which had remained under water for over sixty years. Blackmore and I at different times had fought the cultural and environmental devastation caused by dams, yet that had not created any real comradeship. Instead he viewed me as a threatening rival, similar to the way the early settlers of European descent must have viewed the Native Americans.
The early white settlers must have felt afraid of their unknown surroundings and of the Native Americans who were far more knowledgeable about the environment. A sense of vulnerability must have at times overwhelmed those early settlers. Unfortunately for the Native Americans, the settlers had better weapons and enough fear to fuel their undeclared war day after day, year after year, until they finally cleared the region of the Native American presence.
Unlike other species, which use violence as a means of survival, killing in self defense or when hungry, humans often exhibit a twisted type of maliciousness, providing an array of meanings to justify violence, usually for emotional, social, religious, economic or political reasons, a self-justifying behavior which is almost as common for social groups, political institutions, and religious organizations as it is for individuals. The overwhelming fear of being out of control sometimes leads to a vicious cycle; in recent times, for instance, governments have stock-piled weapons of mass destruction that can destroy the planet many times over. The more destructive the technology, the greater the fear--and the more terrifying the weapons become.
Serial killers are often physically, emotionally, or sexually abused as children and grow vengeful against a particular group, such as African-Americans, Native Americans, women, gays, or Hispanics, and they often target members of a group indiscriminately. Individual sociopaths and sociopathic groups tend to target others who are different, blaming them for causing negative feelings or circumstances. Some sociopaths have a predisposition for calculated, "instrumental" violence as a means to an end, which they direct at an individual with characteristics that trigger feelings of inadequacy or fear.
One of the most common causes of hoarding is obsessive-compulsive personality disorder--and sufferers of the disorder exhibit traits such as trouble finishing projects, difficulty throwing things away, exaggerated conscientiousness, and perfectionism. They constantly experience the sense of being out of control, so they hoard to address every potential material need.
Blackmore is articulate, intelligent, and interesting. The sociopath often has an abundance of charm and wit and may also appear friendly and considerate, attributes that are superficial. These personal qualities blind people to a personal agenda stemming from a profound feeling of inadequacy.
My wife once told me that Blackmore had been deeply scarred by a cruel father and had remained powerless to protect a vulnerable mother--so it was logical for him to feel a subconscious desire to harm men and protect women. Blackmore's cruel father left him feeling vulnerable: He could neither protect his mother nor himself. He must have often felt inadequate in the eyes of his mother. A man who triggered that feeling of inadequacy could easily become the target of a hidden, homicidal rage.
At one point Blackmore might have experienced the excitement of an assault where he was completely in control, an experience that propelled him over the edge to commit an act that would give him the ultimate sense of control: murder. The sociopath understands a crime's seriousness but nevertheless experiences such a rush that he risks the consequences. Every time he gets away with murder, he continues to develop more confidence, which motivates him to continue to seek the same excitement and sense of control.
As an activist, Blackmore has often undermined men who have gotten in his way, but he has earned the trust of my wife through seemingly limitless generosity. His unflagging kindness could not make my wife feel romantic love for him, however, which only made him resent me even more. Whenever we had problems with the car or around the house, my wife called Blackmore, and he would come running, but she never offered to pay him back--in any way. This no doubt satisfied his subconscious need to be the hero for the female and to make the male look small--without of course ever openly expressing his disdain for me.
Over the years, he developed a persona that makes him appear to be the most rational of human beings--as a way to hide the fear and chaos in his soul, for he has proven to be one of the most calculating and treacherous and deceitful of men.
At one point, my wife and I experienced a rough patch and separated for several months. Blackmore must have considered my absence his chance to fill the void in my wife's heart, but being married himself, he had to be extremely careful about his next moves, and because he is so calculating and methodical, he took too long. My sudden return must have unbalanced him, triggering old feelings of inadequacy. At that point, no doubt, I became his most hated enemy.
The spiritual path is not for wimps. On one hand, you see the best in people. You know the magnificence, abundance, brilliance and harmony of the human spirit because you have experienced it in yourself and others. And you know that everything is profoundly and inextricably connected. On the other hand, you know the fear, guilt, shame, or sense of inadequacy that can make a person or group try to harm you or others. Because of your sympathy and understanding, you have absolutely no desire to harm another person. Because of your heightened sensitivity, you know when someone is harboring the kind of hatred for you that is motivating him or her to find every means imaginable to harm you. Because of our fear and our deadly technology, as a race we are ninety seconds from midnight. Even so, as a spiritual person, you can do little but establish and maintain harmony in your own sphere of influence--unless you are working with Archangels and Angels and the Most High.
Truly a force to reckon with on the mental level, Blackmore attacks every problem, from fixing a toilet to influencing the political system, in a methodical manner. When it comes to matters of the heart, Blackmore has used the same strategy, calculating every move. Consequently it had taken him years to set up the circumstances that would lead to the perfect murder, using a business method perfected by Howard Hughes--first treating his adversary like a friend to gain trust and then mercilessly destroying him. I'm guessing that at least five years have passed since Blackmore first began developing his plan, and in the process, his heart has continued to grow blacker and blacker. By focusing on committing the perfect murder, he continues to channel pure evil into his heart and mind, transforming himself into a deceitful, heartless killer, not a lover. Even if he succeeds in getting rid of me and winning my wife's affections, the wheel has been spinning in the direction of evil for years; it would, at this point, be impossible to make the wheel suddenly stop and spin the other way. Blackmore has destroyed his own ability to love. He has undermined himself, which is, of course, not much of a consolation.
​
​
​
​​
All poems, stories, essays, illustrations, and music Copyright © 2024 by Jim Robbins.
Mangled Bridge
beat19
00:00 / 04:24
APT. 25
In Apartment 25, people around you don't believe anything about your life. They don't believe that you have a chronic illness caused by gluten; they think you're faking it. They don't believe that you have had COVID eight times. They don't believe that at one point someone was trying to murder you. They don't believe or don't care that you have discovered memorials of genocide all over the Sierra Nevada Mountains: abandoned Native American village sites. They don't believe that you have healed yourself of serious illnesses with your own mind through meditation and spiritual rituals. They certainly don't believe that you regularly invoke Archangels and Angels or that for a period of time you were relentlessly assaulted by demonic forces. They don't believe that during your daily ritual you feel a profound sense of eternity that makes your personality vanish, which also causes all of your regrets and all of your negativity to vanish. In Apartment 25, you might as well be invisible.
​
​
​
(You realize that you are still on the right path because in the corner of the front room you find an old box containing Chapter Six of Alternate Reality Apartments....)
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
Tiger Lilies in High Meadow (before the Creek Fire)
​
​
​
​
ALTERNATE REALITY APARTMENTS:
CHAPTER SIX
​
Rain out of nowhere suddenly smacked the windshield. I switched from low beams to brights, and the drops seemed to shoot out from an invisible shower nozzle floating about five feet above my improperly angled left headlight. No matter how fast I sped down the rural highway--sixty, seventy, eighty--the nozzle seemed to remain suspended in front of my car. All the while I could also see myriad drops exploding on the asphalt, the black orchards sliding into shadows of vineyards or voids of pastureland.
Suddenly I glimpsed in the headlights a massive bullfrog, like a malformed infant, crawling across the wet pavement, its right foreleg stretching out to drag the rest of its bulky form directly into the path of my car. I swerved a little to the right; I will never know whether or not my car crushed it, whether or not other tires would soon be squishing it into a ratty, quickly graying mush.
Able, within limits, to choose the quality of each moment, you might decide in complete innocence to cross a road and suddenly become reduced to a bloody mush on the asphalt. I shuddered a little but refused to imagine my own body mangled in the black rain because I have come to believe that thought-forms infused with emotion sometimes manifest. Instead I imagined the ritual that I would perform when I got home. I usually work with the great Archangels Raphael, Michael, Gabriel, and Auriel in a ritual known as the "Supreme Invoking Ritual of the Pentagram." With the Archangels, I would heal and cleanse myself and my spiritual friends and sometimes even my enemies. Recently, after I had felt completely healed and cleansed, I began to realize that I was also healing and cleansing the collective consciousness of humanity. With each of the four great Archangels, I would find myself being crucified and then dropping into the fires beneath the earth's surface, where I, along with a great deal of dark energy, would burn up completely, transformed into brilliant white light. At one point, this just began happening during the ritual even though I had never before considered myself a devout Christian. With each Archangel, I feel a profound sense of eternity, and my personality disappears along with all the negativity in my aura.
As I drove, I envisioned The Magician, the Tarot card representing the path on the Tree of Life between Kether, the Crown of Creation, and Understanding, the Emanation of the celestial Mother, the root of form. I pictured the Magician in a robe holding up a wand with her right hand, her left hand pointing to the ground as she stands behind a table upon which rests a sword, a wand, a cup, and a pentacle, symbols of the astrological triplicities and their ruling planets associated with the four Elements of the Wise: Air, Fire, Water, and Earth respectively. The Magician invokes the cosmic energies for the highest possible good, and above her head floats a gray infinity symbol, or lemniscate, symbol of the knowledge of the infinitude within, a symbol that I, in the first of many synchronicities, had envisioned during meditation two days before I purchased a pack of Tarot cards. The Hebrew letter Beth, the first letter of the Bible (but the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet), is associated with the card. The Romans personified the subtle forces of the Egyptian God Thoth as the God Mercury, "Thoth, the heart of Ra, the Logos who speaks the Word that manifests the meaning within the underlying patterns of existence," I thought--as I swerved a little to avoid crushing another frog. I planned to place that card on the altar tonight.
Rays of water seemed to keep shooting out from the invisible shower nozzle above my car, and as I swerved again to avoid smashing another lump on the road, I realized that just as the hearts of a great many people do not resonate with the beauty of nature, or with the ideals of truth and justice or with music or poetry or paintings, their hearts would probably not resonate with the concept of the higher self. In fact, I would be even more separated from the herd because of my desire to live in the higher self and even more vulnerable because of the ferocity of the group mind, which has the uncanny ability to identify and vilify anyone who is different, like the aliens in the Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
A jackrabbit suddenly shot in front of my car. I heard a sharp crack followed quickly by a loud thud in the undercarriage. I winced, remembering when my wife and daughter had left me alone for a weekend. I remembered hearing, late at night, a thud somewhere in the house. Soon after, I heard what sounded like someone cocking of a gun in front of my small room where my wife had banished me due to my snoring. A few minutes later I heard a window being unlocked in another room.
I shuddered as I gazed at the rays of water; if it hadn't been for my intuition that something bad was about to happen that night, I wouldn't have slept in a different room, and my wife would have found me the next day, a lifeless, bloody lump on the couch.
Suddenly I felt the car wobble a little. "Please, God, not now in this rain," I thought, as I pulled over next to an orchard. I flicked the hood of my jacket over my head, grabbed a flashlight from the trunk, and inspected the tire. The head of a nail glinted in a vulnerable slit between the treads. Slow leak. At that instant, a white Ford pickup truck flew by, splashing water from a large puddle all the way over the roof of my car and onto my face and jacket.
John Blackmore owned a white Ford pickup truck. Every man with any money in the San Joaquin Valley owned a white Ford pickup truck. The truck in the distance appeared to be turning around; I thought I glimpsed the headlights far off sliding over trees and then slowly growing larger on the wet pavement. Blackmore no doubt had brought his gun. Blackmore had planned to kill me and bury me deep in one of these orchards--and nobody would ever know. In a panic, I clicked off my flashlight and hustled over to the first row of trees, hiding behind a thin trunk. Sure enough, the white Ford pickup swung around and parked behind my car.
A man with a large flashlight, about Blackmore's height--it was hard to tell due to the hood of the raincoat--bent over to inspect the tire. Then the man stood up and gazed down the road. Soon the shadow turned the flashlight on the orchard, and I dropped down to the roots of the almond tree. The hooded man got back in his truck and drove off slowly down the road. Shaking slightly, I swore bitterly under my breath as I watched the red tail lights growing smaller. But then the truck, far off in the distance, turned around again.
Only three people would have done that: my wife, a landowner searching for trespassers, or John Blackmore. My wife had no reason to suspect that I was having car problems, and a landowner would be crazy to search for trespassers on such a dreary night, unless of course he was maniacally protecting his private property rights. The man got out of the pickup and began walking directly over to the orchard without a light to guide him. I panicked again, but I knew that if I ran, I would probably make too much noise, so I tiptoed three rows deeper into the orchard before the shadow reached the trees. Suddenly light flowed slowly over the trunks, casting eerie shadows, and I slumped down as close to the roots as possible. The shadow carrying the flashlight suddenly paused and waited.
A veteran trespasser, I knew that I would have to remain completely still until the man became distracted or wandered away; remaining calm, I decided that I would then move as quietly away from my adversary as possible. Then I would sit quietly like the Buddha under the Bodhi Tree. I could not escape in my car, obviously, due to the flat tire, but I might circle around and try to see the license plate number of the pickup, to prove once and for all to my wife that Blackmore was a homicidal maniac who would stick a nail in one of my tires and then follow me to work on a wet, dreary night. I decided instead to disappear farther into the orchard and wait until the truck took off.
I leaned against the tree. "Can we really neutralize the worst memories of our lives?" I wondered out loud. Suddenly I remembered a moment which had occurred over twenty years before. I, my girlfriend Karen, and my eight year old son were all standing in the badly lit kitchen of our apartment. Karen, who for five years had never tried to get along with my son, out of nowhere called my son a "bastard and a mother f--ker." She had attacked me before in front of the boy, often without what I would consider any provocation, but she had never before, to my knowledge, verbally assaulted my son in such a vicious manner. Karen would sometimes harangue me for hours, becoming more and more furious as I tried to smooth things over or end the argument by going into another room; she would follow me wherever I went, still screaming. I remembered that moment in the kitchen clearly because it became clear then that I was living with a sociopath, and it was the beginning of the end of my relationship with her: she had carefully enunciated the hurtful words, then stepped back, patiently waiting with a smirk on her face, as if she had just dropped a grenade between me and my son. Suddenly I stood up and my hand shot out, slapping her across the cheek. I couldn't think of any other way to keep her from abusing my son. Furious, I then stomped into the bedroom, shoved open her closet door, grabbed as much of her clothing as I could and ran to the door, throwing the clothes in a heap on the front steps. I never saw her again.
I realized then that Blackmore might have heard me splashing through the orchard and might still be waiting for me, so I decided not to try to find my way back for a while. I realized also that, to master myself spiritually, I would need to keep a clear mind even in my worst moments, to control myself even if my lover was trying to poke my eye out with a red-hot wire or my "friend" was trying to blow my head off.
Before my spiritual awakening, I had been an atheist. I had started meditating, and during meditation and ritual I had sometimes touched the hem of eternity, envisioning archetypes and invoking subtle intelligences that transcend human consciousness. Those great intelligences remain ineffable to humanity due to the limited brain capacity of the our species. Oddly, however, their presence can be felt if one exalts consciousness, and for some reason, the Archangels and Gods elevate the human soul--as if the evolution of humanity was for some reason significant to them. Their energy exalted me and made me stronger emotionally and mentally than I ever before imagined possible.
I tried to clear everything from my mind, and, failing that, I imagined my painting of Thoth on my altar at home. In my painting, the figure of Thoth stands against a yellow background and contains flashing colors--in other words, complementary colors of purple and yellow that vibrate if one stares at them long enough, the intense colors helping the mind tune to a higher vibration, so that the worshipper could more easily tune to the higher energies of the spiritual plane. I tried to hold the image in my mind, but instead, I continued to remember the argument that had occurred decades before.
As the rain dropped from the branches like tiny liquid fruit in the darkness, I cringed again. How? Why did sociopaths keep finding me? Did I attract them? Are they unavoidable because of the way we are socially conditioned? Did dark forces target the people around me to stimulate their sociopathic tendencies? Maybe the dark forces were trying to destroy me through other people--since they couldn't harm me. When Karen left the apartment, I had been so angry that I couldn't think of a thing to say as she left. I didn't even ask where she was going. Karen was gone three days before she phoned me to let me know that she was staying at a battered women's shelter. She also mentioned that she felt foolish when she saw the other women at the shelter, most of whom, unlike her, had been brutally beaten. I reminded that I had slapped her only once to keep her from abusing my son and that another man probably would have killed her or kicked the crap out of her. Then I told her not to come back ever again.
"Empty your mind," I thought as I sat under the tree as the rain continued to fall. In an attempt to completely rid myself of negativity, I purified myself emotionally and mentally and spiritually, forgiving everyone who has ever harmed me. I have not seen or talked to Karen in over two decades but I forgave her again anyway.
Old wounds were still opening, though, and I suddenly knew why. Karen had damaged me and my son psychologically, so when I graduated from college, I became an environmental activist instead of going into a doctoral program, and I encountered John Blackmore at numerous political meetings. Suddenly I shivered. I was getting soaked as big drops plopped from the branches onto my jacket and pants. When I closed my eyes, I imagined how Blackmore--if he finally completed his heinous plan of committing the perfect murder--might a few months later blithely ask my wife out on a date.
I suddenly envisioned Blackmore's heart center enveloped in blackness from which the snarling heads of wolves protruded. Blackmore was clever enough to hide his homicidal tendencies, but those wolves in his black heart kept anyone from getting close to him. At some point in his life, Blackmore had chosen to channel dark, negative energy, and in my psychic vision that dark energy appeared as snarling beasts out for blood.
Then, in my imagination, I released all of my negativity into the fires below the earth's surface, where it burned up completely. The soul, or higher self, can transmute negativity into brilliant light and harmony. The higher self does not care about social status or money or what kind of job you have or even if you get harmed in some way by following its dictates. The higher self insists that you manifest the highest spiritual ideals, such as truth and love and justice--and I felt sure then that life would be intolerable without a belief in something higher.
The rain and wind were dying down. I closed my eyes again and tried to imagine the ritual that I had planned earlier. Suddenly, however, I could only imagine Osiris. In my imagination, I sent out golden energy from my heart to the hieroglyphic symbol of the Eye of Horus, which at home was positioned in front of my painting of Osiris on the altar. Suddenly, in my mind's eye, the symbol was no longer in black ink on paper but was the purest gold. I imagined then that the golden energy from my aura was infusing Osiris until his form glowed. I felt the energy flow back into my heart and the intense circuit of energy actually brought tears to my eyes. "Osiris, slain and risen, perfected by suffering--through Thee and the Most High, I am resurrected," I whispered, imagining torn pieces of my soul put back together again. Then, at the moment of my recovered wholeness, I envisioned a spiritual sun at my crown. Whoever was trying to obliterate me now was so far away now, in some other part of the valley or the galaxy, and nothing could harm my essence.
Suddenly I heard coyotes howling in the distance. I opened my eyes. I could see the trees more clearly now. Perhaps the moon had broken through the clouds. I slowly stood up, groaning, and tip-toed down a row of trees, careful to avoid startling any wild animals. After what seemed like an hour, to my great relief, I found my car parked in the distance, and I trotted through the mud, howling, in my mind, for joy.
I quickly changed the tire and brushed my hands off as I stood up with a groan. A smudge of gold glinted just above distant mountain peaks as one far-off light on the road suddenly split into two, both lights slowly growing larger.
​
​
​
​
All poems, stories, essays, illustrations, and music Copyright © 2024 by Jim Robbins.
Graffitied Pounding Stone
bigsol
00:00 / 04:22
APT. 26
In Apartment 26, you experience a feeling of vulnerability. You have a highly contagious skin infection, a relentless case of scabies--in other words, tiny spiders crawling around in your skin. You contract COVID every time a new variant surfaces, and sometimes, thanks to COVID, you experience heavy brain fog and terrible bouts of insomnia. Inflation and higher interest rates are pounding everyone. You are an empath, which is mainly a curse nowadays because of all the trauma, abuse, betrayal, upheaval, abandonment, poverty and loss that people are suffering. You feel the dark energies of genocide and ecocide both in the valley and the nearby mountains, and you have an overwhelming feeling that you must do something to end the brutality and exploitation and destruction that threatens the existence of the planet and all of humanity. You have to continually release dark energies from your aura into the fires below the earth's surface to cleanse yourself since you are taking on the negativity of the collective consciousness of humanity: every day in your imagination during your ritual you are totally vulnerable--you are crucified, and, nailed to your cross, you fall into the fires below the earth's surface, and your personality vanishes, along with all the layers of black negativity, but when cleansed you feel the unity underlying all consciousness and know the holiness of all energy and the divinity within each person.
​
​
​
(You realize that you are still on the right path because in a closet you find a box containing Chapter Seven of Alternate Reality Apartments.)
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
Fivespot ​
​
​
​
​
​
ALTERNATE REALITY APARTMENTS:
CHAPTER SEVEN
​​
​
I returned to Sycamore Creek to see if I could experience any more memories of a past life. After I parked the car on the edge of the road, I scrambled down the slope through Chinese purple houses and Ithuriel's spears and baby blue eyes and fiddleneck, the unseasonably warm temperatures stimulating a few of the late spring flowers to bloom with the early spring flowers. As I stood enveloped by the breath of the plants and trees, I felt revived, the sun heating my skin even as the breeze chilled me. I had spent most of the past three weeks house bound, so the contrast felt almost shocking. As I paused to catch my breath, I sensed the life-force flowing into my aura until it penetrated my core. Everything was energy: the plants, the trees, the clouds, the purling air. Every part of me was pure energy: body, emotions, intellect, and spirit. In my third eye, each invisible form of energy in my mind seemed to have a position in space, as if my feelings and thoughts were things made of some subtle substance. At the same time, I sensed that if those vibrations suddenly dissolved, I would experience my essence in some dimension beyond space and time.
A dream that I had just before I woke up suddenly made sense. The dream, which resembled the many symbolic visions I have had associated with the Tree of Life, contained three pure white flowers resembling lilies, against a pure black background. Every part of these flowers was white, even the stamen and the stems, and the petals formed a perfect circle at the apex of each flower. They seemed, as I stood on the slope feeling the life-force penetrating my essence, to represent the three supernal centers of my core, a unified triad containing the primal polarities. The supernal Emanations of the Tree of Life exist beyond manifestation, on the other side of what the Qabalists call the Abyss. The flowers were white to suggest the unity of the primary colors and the underlying unity of all consciousness as well as the purity of remaining untouched by the influences of the manifested cosmos.
I, of course, have been preoccupied by thoughts of death due to Blackmore’s attempts to murder me. My subconscious mind was revealing a symbol of my essence beyond death. Did this symbol mean that everything besides my essence would at some point fall away into pure blackness? Was the transient material universe, like my body, at some point also headed for the Abyss, leaving only the supernal essence of the Universal Consciousness? If so, did that mean that everything I was experiencing in this place and time, including the flowers and trees and memories of a past life, would slip into oblivion, leaving only the supernal essence? Or is the material universe the Abyss itself? On the Tree of Life, black is the color symbolically associated with the physical universe.
As I pondered these strange questions, I realized that I had become hyper-sensitive to the life-force, not just due to being housebound for weeks, but also because of a long process of mental and spiritual self-purification. In Western societies, the idea of a “life-force" remains in limbo even though every culture I know has developed some concept of it. My experience therefore remains in the realm of fiction as well--even though the life-force is tangible to me. I can feel it flowing into the deepest part of every living thing. "Western science cannot even explain how or why consciousness exists, but here we are," I thought as I followed an ancient path down to the creek and found the ancient Native American village site again.
At that point for a moment I wondered whether I was a Jewish or a Christian mystic--or if it even mattered. When I was an atheist both Judaism and Christianity had sometimes repulsed me, but I decided that now after my mystical experiences, I was actually both since Christianity had grown out of Judaism. Recently during my rituals I was focusing mainly on purification, and I recognized four main types of negativity that needed cleansing: personal negativity, of which there is at least half a ton in just about every person alive these days; the negativity of the soul-group, family and friends and ancestors; the negativity of the culture and society in general; and the negativity of the collective consciousness of humanity, and these types of negativity tend to overlap. Based on personal experience, I know that when you are in the process of mental purification and you reach stage four, the purification of the collective consciousness of humanity, you can become seriously ill and lose everything like Job and then get crucified like Jesus on the emotional, mental, and spiritual levels, and of course you feel vulnerable--oh, so vulnerable. In the process, you develop empathy for all of humanity, for whom you take on, not "sin," but the negativity of the collective consciousness, and then you transmute the negativity into harmony. This, I now believe, is something that many people-- some of whom we now call "saints"--must have done in the past. Nowadays, though, there is so much negative energy because over seven billion people exist on this earth, many of whom are so damaged that their hearts would keep turning in the direction of evil even after being purified by a saint.
As I lounged on a pounding stone, I heard something crashing through the brush in the distance. When I turned, I glimpsed someone pushing through the branches of a fallen tree, the shoulder strap of his rifle caught on a twig. Since I was near the unfenced and therefore ambiguous border between public and private land, and he had a rifle, I dropped immediately to the ground. No predator in the wild terrifies me more than a human being with a weapon, so I peered at him through a crack in the stone. He was far enough away that I could not make out his features. I could see that he wore a stocking cap and long-sleeved shirt, both black, which seemed strange in the warm weather. Most hunters would be wearing some type of camouflage.
"Blackmore!" I thought to myself. As he approached, I scrambled down a steep slope and crouched behind a buckeye tree whose roots were breaking a rock in two. Suddenly I remembered the map of my current location that I had drawn and pinned to the frig, against my better judgment. After I had left on my excursion, Blackmore could have visited my wife and noticed the map. He wouldn’t be able to resist hunting me down. After examining the map, he no doubt had made some excuses to my wife, jumped into his white truck, and drove out to Sycamore Creek to find me. It wasn’t like him to make noise, but everyone in the woods sooner or later ends up struggling through the brush.
Hunting is normally a social enterprise with two or more people involved. In fact, I have rarely encountered a hunter alone in the wilderness, nor have I encountered any hunters dressed in black. Blackmore wears a black t-shirt and black blue jeans all the time. As I hid in the tree roots, I began to wonder if I was just being paranoid. Could I be experiencing some form of PTSD due to Blackmore’s previous attempts on my life?
In the most tranquil of places, I have found pounding stones. Near the creek, miner's graves covered with stones and deserted Native American village sites reveal that some tragic drama once occurred there--a tragedy that just might be about to replay itself, I thought, as if places steeped in violence continue to attract it.
I wasn’t even sure Blackmore was the hunter. Why was I afraid? Was the survival instinct kicking in? When I have met people in the wild, I’ve always instinctively distrusted them, as though for them and me it is understood that the rules of civilization no longer apply. Then, I thought, there is always also the general fear that weapons of mass destruction might wipe out the planet at any moment, a collective fear that we project onto other peoples and nations. Had I lived in denial of the horrors of the modern world so long that I was instinctively personifying my subconscious fear, personal and collective, in the form of one person, John Blackmore, the way someone might personify his repressed fear in the form of a monster or a demon our another nation?
I didn’t plan to hang around long enough to find out. I watched the hunter in black hurry down an ancient path toward the creek, so I headed in the other direction. Despite my fear, I still felt the tranquility of the life-force in the sycamores and oaks and buckeyes and manzanitas next to the gurgling stream. Even though I always feel at peace in the wild, I am also always alert, feeling a slight tension in the back of my mind, because I know that any second I might encounter a snake or a mountain lion or a bear--and end up slipping into blackness.
Again, I found myself near the confluence of Sycamore Creek and Dry Creek, where before I had experienced an inexplicable rage. That day I had felt like I had stepped into a current of cold air floating by the creek that contained an intense emotion.
I was not experiencing the cold current of energy again, but I suddenly experienced impressions of the past as though the very air were charged with information. I don't know how else to explain it, and I of course have no way of proving what I suddenly knew. In my mind’s eye, I envisioned a meeting place on the ridge above me. With rocks that formed a natural semi-circle where people could sit, the meeting place had often instilled fear in the tribe members because terrible judgments were sometimes made there, often at night when the fire gave an unearthly glow to the faces of the elders.
After climbing the slope on the other side of the creek, I found the stone semicircle and experienced another impression: The tribe was discussing some woman, judging her, deciding what to do with her. Suddenly shifting consciousness, I became part of the scene, and I gathered that her young husband had been killed by white settlers as he was attempting to steal horses from a farm that had once been part of the tribe's hunting grounds, and she had not been able to overcome her grief, avoiding or becoming angry at the other members of the tribe who tried to help her. She refused to believe that her husband was gone forever. She was slowly starving, weeping if she ate anything, and wandering off into the woods for days by herself, which was terribly risky because of predators. It was problematic for the tribe to keep sending men out to look for her.
She refused to speak when the elders talked to her. She just stood with her head down, tears welling in her eyes. They talked to her sympathetically, and in the end decided that she should be taken to the clan nearby so that she could recover in different surroundings, away from her husband's grave where she had spent so many hours, completely inconsolable. Relatives in that clan would take care of her as long as she didn't run away. If she disappeared again, they would have to let her go.
As if time could be fast-forwarded, I could see that she followed her brothers down the trail toward the valley to a large village at the base of a hill, next to a stream. Her brothers left her with two kindly old people who made her feel at home. At first she worked away from the tribe at a pounding stone with one mortar on a ridge overlooking the village. Soon, however, she started grinding acorns with the other women.
As though I was recalling a dream, I saw on the screen of my mind how she got up early to get water from the creek one morning and noticed white militia men crawling up the ridge. Her screams awakened the village just before white men began firing their guns into the huts. A few members of the tribe were able to arm themselves and attack from hiding places in outcroppings of rock on the hillside. She ran toward the battle and grabbed the rifle of a fallen white man, and she shot a white man in the face before she was hit with a rifle butt and lost consciousness.
Suddenly I couldn’t see any more; all impressions of the past vanished. The strange vision had left me only with more questions, but I knew this vision revealed what had happened in the time before the vision I had originally experienced, as if for some reason I was experiencing these visions in a nonlinear fashion.
I suddenly felt uncomfortable. I had not heard the hunter dressed in black firing his weapon in the distance, or had I? What if he had returned to the road and was waiting near my car to ambush me? I instantly regretted not rushing immediately back to my car and heading home the moment I had first sighted the hunter dressed in black. I decided to take a less-traveled path and soon found myself surrounded by poison oak. Taking a detour, I came upon a rivulet cutting a small ravine in the slope and followed a faint path that led to a waterfall, the small, dark pond below it surrounded by flowers. I paused, unable to move, as though I had stumbled upon a tiny Eden. Suddenly I no longer cared about the hunter in black. He could lie in wait by my car all day if he wanted to. I remembered an old saying: When trapped on a cliffside with a mountain lion above and a bear below, reach for the blackberry that hangs in the brambles. I decided to hang out by the waterfall for the rest of the day, pondering my essence, my visions, the flowers, the dark waters.
​
​
​
​
All poems, stories, essays, illustrations, and music Copyright © 2024 by Jim Robbins.
​
Ihuriel's Spears in Poison Oak
celeb
00:00 / 03:56
APT. 27
In Apartment 27, anyone who steps through the door turns into a monster. Some look like insects, some appear reptilian, but some look more like animals. One was ant-like, with very sharp pincers; one resembled a snake with extremely long fangs; one had turned into a ferocious cat-like creature. One looked like an arachnid, a cross between a spider and a scorpion. The scariest are those who seem demonic. Sometimes, a person who passes through the door of Apartment 27 doesn't immediately turn into a monster, but the moment eventually comes when they turn, and then, usually, all hell breaks loose. After awhile, you decide not to let people into the apartment anymore. "But what kind of monster am I?" you wonder out loud as you lock the door--at some point, somebody had removed all reflective surfaces.
​
​
​​
(You realize you must still be on the right path because in the kitchen you find a box with Chapter Eight of Alternate Reality Apartments.)
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
Newt on a Pounding Stone
​
​
​
​
ALTERNATE REALITY APARTMENTS: CHAPTER EIGHT
BUGS
​
The coffee maker began sucking, groaning, and growling, strangely resembling both a huge salivating insect and an angry crowd far off in the distance.
"Oh, crap," I moaned, "I should have put on the water first." The water for the oatmeal would have boiled by the time I had finished making the coffee if I had followed the right sequence.
Late again. As I was dumping the second cup of water into the pot for oatmeal, I remembered vowing the night before to be attentive at work. "Strive to make eye contact and actually listen and respond thoughtfully," I had admonished myself.
Stomping toward the shower after waiting for the water to boil, I heaved a sigh--not because I wasn't feeling well-adjusted but because I didn't feel awake.
"You jerk," I hissed as I adjusted the hot and cold water faucets, launching again into the litany of self-deprecation which flowed out time and again when I was having a bad allergic reaction to gluten. This was the classic stage three reaction: the onset of depression (which included a lot of self-deprecation). Fortunately, all I needed to do was adjust my eating habits, alternating my foods more, and I might be emotionally placid in a day or two, if I were lucky. Of course, if I didn't take those measures, I would be mumbling on some street corner in no time. I sighed again, realizing I was one of the lucky ones who could identify the allergies, but I laughed at myself for wanting to overcome alienation in the workplace.
As the shower drops pelted me, I thought to myself, "Everyone else flies along steadily with a little turbulence now and then. But you have to go suddenly into a tailspin, spiraling downward, always when you least expect it. So far, you've been able to pull yourself out of it--but every time, you believe the tailspin won't happen again. You should never, ever make that mistake again!"
I hid my symptoms from everyone at work and at home as much as possible. When I was a child, even my mother suspected I was faking it. The illness was undeniable when, as a child, I doubled over and groaned and sobbed for hours due to an allergic reaction to eggs. Physical symptoms carried no stigma. However, depression was a psychological problem, not obviously connected to anything in the environment: in other words, I should be able to overcome any negative feelings through sheer effort of will.
Suggesting that gluten and chemicals in foods can cause debilitating depression made people uncomfortable even though nobody questioned the detrimental psychological effects of drugs and alcohol. By revealing the effect that basic foods had on me, it appeared to most people that I was also questioning authority, questioning the capitalist system and America's blessed way of life, questioning a government that had conducted a de-facto experiment on the populace by allowing copious amounts of gluten and chemicals in food as well as toxins in the air and water--for a century or more. If my illness were real, major changes would have to be made, changes beyond the ability of average citizens to make--unless we banded together and organized an effective movement. For the most part, I realized I was usually considered either a liar, a madman, or a revolutionary, or a mixture of all three. Those who actually believed me, even if only a little, treated me like a personal and political oddity, something between a communist and a leper, so I usually kept my illness to myself.
I toweled myself off and suddenly found it difficult to get dressed. "Just another bad reaction, old man," I told myself. "You'll be okay in a bit. Just hang on." I slowly put on my clothes, feeling suddenly exhausted, shaking a little. Then I downed my coffee and dashed out the door.
John Blackmore had pretended to understand, only because John at first wanted to appear to be my friend so that he could stealthily destroy me later on, without causing any suspicion.
I barely made it to the office on time. I worked as a part-time, contracted employee, a "quality control consultant" for a video distributing company, which meant that I sat in a cubicle all day and tested a program being developed for a new computerized cash register, which, besides handling transactions, also kept track of the inventory--and remembered your childhood. I would go through the motions of conducting every transaction possible, in every imaginable order, writing down each new path I had taken, finding "bugs" just about everywhere in the new system. When the programmers fixed one bug, two more would often surface. I could tell that everyone in programming and management was getting super angry at me even though I only documented the bugs.
Around 9:00 AM, while the radio was playing "Don't Forget Your Second Wind," a real bug, like none I had ever seen before, crawled out of my computer. At first, I thought the insect was lovely, but on closer inspection realized that it was kind of odd--a pale yellow bug with a faint stained-glass-window design on its body, and with long, stick legs and a thin abdomen. I had read about synchronicities where external reality suddenly mingled with a person's internal state, as though both were actually part of one reality, so I pondered the bug carefully. It sat on my keyboard, fearless, in no hurry, completely at home, while I inspected it. I finally realized that I shouldn't waste any more time, so I brushed it onto the floor with a piece of paper. Twenty minutes later, realizing that it might have been shipped inside the computer case from another country, I searched for the bug and couldn't find it. I wondered if it had crawled back into my computer, but I couldn't find a hole large enough for the bug to crawl into--or out of, for that matter.
I decided to search for it on the way to the bathroom. As I ambled along, I gazed at the floor of the hallway and in all of the cubicles I passed, without success. The bug might be on the wall or the ceiling, so I paused and looked all around. Still no luck. As I proceeded to the restroom, I recalled another bizarre experience with bugs that occurred many years before, not long after my father died. I was on a camping trip with my brother and mother, and we were all eating cold cereal for breakfast. I cruelly complained to my mother that she didn't seem to care very much that Dad had died. My mother cringed and groaned, staring down at her cereal bowl. Innumerable bugs were squirming in her cereal.
"How could they all end up in your bowl?" I demanded, spooning through my own cereal and then searching through the rest of the cereal in the box carefully without finding any other bugs. "You put them there yourself," I sneered, then stormed away into the woods.
"Could that have been some kind of synchronicity?" I wondered as I was peeing into the urinal.
I recalled a dream that had occurred soon after my father had died. In the dream, I was fixing lunch while watching television, and bugs started crawling out of my sandwich. Soon I noticed that bugs were crawling out of the TV, so many of them that I couldn't find a place to stand that was free of bugs.
I shook my head and admonished myself, "You need to get back to work!"
When I returned to my cubicle, I discovered Brian, the head programmer, standing by my desk. "Oh, there you are," he said. "I've been looking for you. Let me guess, the program still isn't bug free?" "That was a lucky guess," I joked.
Brian smiled and looked down. "I'm afraid we have some bad news. We are running out of the money that we had budgeted for quality control. I'm afraid we can't keep you any longer than the end of this week."
I grimaced, "What if the program is still full of bugs?"
"We're going to have the programmers do some quality control and pray that the program works well enough after we release it in the field. We can't afford to do anything else, at this point. You've been doing great work, but we need to move this out of production. I'm sorry, but we had to make a real-world business decision here."
"That's understandable," I replied, partly relieved that my work was over.
"Thanks for understanding," Brian said sympathetically. "Just try to document as much as possible before the end of this week. Thanks."
"Sure, no problem," I replied as Brian was leaving. After Brian was gone, I muttered under my breath, "This is the worst possible f-ing timing!" Then I quietly hissed, "Nobody here gives a crap about anything but money!"
Just then the head of production walked by with "a Suit," examining the recently installed cubicles. The Suit boasted, "You can see that the cubicles are effectively eliminating waste conversation." The head of production smiled and nodded, unaware that the programmers had obsessively consulted with each other about their work before the cubicles were installed.
"You better watch what comes out of your mouth," I thought to myself. "You still have two more days to go."
Then my phone rang. "Who the hell could that be?" I wondered. "Nobody ever calls me." I imagined an insect at the other end of the line holding up a telephone.
"Hello," my ex-wife mumbled. "Can you talk?"
"Oh, hi," I responded. "Yeah, but why are you calling here?"
"They found Russell's body," she groaned. "From what I hear, he surfaced with roses tangled in his hair."
"Oh, my god, I'm so sorry," I murmured.
"I just thought I'd let you know."
"Thanks," I replied and hung up the phone. I assumed that my ex-wife had been having an affair with Russell, which served me right, since I was also having an affair. We had agreed to have an open relationship, which had led to her staying out all hours after her shift at the IRS. My ex-wife, though, had insisted that she and Russell were only friends--Yeah, right!
Suddenly I saw the bug crawling up the wall. I felt the urge to squash it, but I was too appalled to move. The last time I had heard from my ex-wife, she had informed me that Russell had drowned. Russell and his brother had gone out drinking in a boat on Millerton Lake at night with a friend. The brothers had gotten into a fist fight on the boat, and, according to the friend, Russell's brother had fallen overboard and Russell had dived in after him. Their friend had waited a long time in the boat, but the two never surfaced. They dredged the lake but found nothing. A memorial service on the lake was performed where the two had disappeared. Russell's ex-wife had thrown roses into the water at the service.
"Explain that," I demanded of the bug, which was just underneath the clock on the wall of my cubicle. I had the uneasy feeling that the bug was going to crawl inside the clock. I cringed, believing for a moment that John Blackmore had planted a venomous, exotic bug in my cubicle. But my current wife was only interested in Blackmore as a friend, someone who would come running when she needed help. Eventually it became obvious to me that Blackmore was channeling a homicidal rage, the most negative energy in the universe--and he was directing it at me.
Something even stranger: my wife and I had eaten dinner with Russell's widow and her new boyfriend the previous Saturday night and had watched a video afterwards. My wife was working as a waitress with Russell's widow, and they had become fast friends. Fresno was not a small town anymore. The odds were overwhelmingly against such a chance occurrence. I had seen Russell only once as he was driving away in a pickup at sunrise. "How could Russell have come to figure so prominently in my life?" I wondered. After dinner, we had watched the Star Trek movie where the alien, some superhuman Latin lover type, slid a bug that looked like a tiny crab into Chekhov's ear. Chekhov had writhed and screamed in agony. I grimaced and turned away.
Back in my cubicle, I took my eyes off the computer screen. I no longer felt motivated. The bug had vanished again. I suddenly wondered again if the bug was poisonous and stifled the urge to dash out of the cubicle.
"This is just crap!" I hissed. I couldn't keep a job. It seemed like I couldn't maintain a relationship for any significant length of time. The whole world was being poisoned by mindless videos full of hatred and violence, which people would soon be able to rent at their corner mini-mart, thanks to me and my coworkers. The world was being polluted in in all sorts of ways by huge corporations. At that very moment, as I was staring at the computer screen, the government was making and stockpiling chemical and biological and nuclear weapons that were unimaginably destructive and poisonous to the world. I took a bite of a candy bar and unexpectedly gagged.
On my way to the restroom again, I cringed when I saw a programmer, an attractive woman, chatting with another programmer in the hallway. She didn't notice me at all. As I passed, she wiped a strand of hair from her mouth, and for a moment it appeared to me that a bug had just scurried out of her mouth and down her neck--and I had to stifle a groan.
I returned to my cubicle and rebooted the computer. I felt a tickling sensation on the back of my hand but did not look down and did not move my hand away from the keyboard. Instead, with my right hand, I picked up the soda can and took a sip, placing the can down next to the computer--in direct violation of the rules regarding food in the work place. Instead of swallowing the soda immediately, I swished it around in my mouth, feeling the tingle of carbonation on my gums, holding the soda in my cheeks a moment before fluttering my tongue to rinse my palate. Then I took another bite of the candy bar, which I suddenly realized contained a few ingredients that I was allergic to.
I felt the tickling sensation again on my hand--this time, realizing with great certainty that sensations, even very small ones, don't occur for no reason. Imagining an ant maneuvering between the hair follicles on the back of my hand, I shook my hand violently and returned it to the keyboard without looking down. The motion, though merely a reflex, distracted me for a second, just long enough for my eyes to wander to a painting above my desk. The painting was extremely bright, with a large, intensely orange oval floating just above the center of the canvas. The colors appeared to explode around an orange balloon, as if it were a source of life. At first the painting appeared to contain depth, as though it were an expressionistic landscape, but after a few moments of scrutiny I realized that, in fact, nothing was delineated enough for the painting to be considered figurative. The orange oval, though evoking the sun and its symbolism as the source of life, was really only bright orange paint on canvas. It just was, or is, I thought, like a flower. Again I shook my hand, envisioning the hand of Buddha lifting up the lotus flower in his most profound, wordless sermon.
On the computer screen, a man and woman coupled doggy style, the woman with a pained expression on her face, and I felt a slight, involuntary arousal, as though a slug were slowly stirring awake. The figures for a moment seemed almost alien--a coupling of inscrutable protoplasm. Just as I lifted the soda can again, imagining that I was lifting a flower, I felt a stabbing pain in my left hand. "A bug bite of some kind?" was all I could think. I shook my hand again as I became dizzy and my vision blurred.
​
​
​
​
All poems, stories, essays, illustrations, and music Copyright © 2024 by Jim Robbins.
bottom of page