Neighbors

Neighbors
The unattended broom propped against the porch in the alley, delivering the question of "Who is cleaning up this world?" Your Fearing of the worst is bringing about a great dreamy paradise and you reflect the image running in the street shouting at double rainbows and halo moons.

What better reason to take a walk? See the tall skinny neighbor who travels in long skinny strides, with his destination of nowhere, nowhere, nowhere! He’s got a halo on his skull and its receding outward, consuming his fuzz, gobbling him up in the spread.

And then there is tall skinny (All these skinny shells!) MISS PARALLEL with her Orthopedic Clogs and Fencing Uniform, knocking at insane hours, announcing her queen complex while trying to burn the whole building down.

And how about those countless visions of being mugged at knife point? The transcending images of a man coming full speed at you on a bicycle, full speed, on a bumpy brick alley way road. Worry, worry, worry and ask "Should I turn around and check if he will intentionally run me over? Steal my wallet?"

So one stops carrying a wallet or anything resembling such things in his pockets except for a unsheathed pocket knife, blade against the thigh, dicing the lining of the inner cotton sleeves, hand always on the handle, ready to slice. Are these just countless walks of wandering thoughts? Whose idea was it to drop the hurt and hurting off in this beautiful city?

So in the city one can struggle and come up with thoughts of devotion and worship. The Trees told me this would happen. A Mountain protected me from Evil. All while fighting that feeling of home not yet being there, not quite right. Something is unsettled. Something just isn’t right.

So the bike goes down the stairs and heads through the intersections, comes to a stop at a bench with a view of the boat channels and fancy yachts. I don't want to be disturbed in this moment yet the phone is beeping an awful mess. I’m sitting on the edge of the shore, glad to find that the sea never forgets me. I breathe in rhythm with its rise and fall. In all my busy ignorance, it still rocks about wet and whispering. I forget the sea then finally get around to visiting it, and now suddenly I am ignoring all these "BEEPS" and all these cries for help. Clouds swollen like her navel was, I CANT MAKE IT RAIN, I can’t be all eyes all the time unless the harbor is vacant, ready for a question.

Yet, eventually these small troubles will seem like cat hair caught in the wind when thought of next to the event of a large army pairing up with a bottled water corporation with a plan to BOTTLE UP an entire river. That river being the only thing that buys a small town some time before the men in boots come and slaughters them all. That river grows shallower in inches with each day that passes, with each consumer that quenches a thirst. It won’t be long till the men come on marching through the mud with reflections of fleeing children in their killing eyes. So I leave that thought, enter another, while pedaling out from the boat channel, back into the city, passing the wealthy blocks with ease, taking the sidewalks in the section 8's.

A drizzle falls and now I'm damp, somewhere else in thought. A conversation takes place between two ladies sitting in lawn chairs. This was the tale I stumbled into, mid way through its happening, the tale of Miss Translucent.

"That was my husband, that man over there, hanging upside down from that tree. About five years ago he took a vow of silence. He thought his own perception of life was dangerous if copied by someone who did not fully understand his process, so he stopped speaking, so as not to ruin anyone's life. This was also to protect anyone in case his thoughts on life were wrong. He wanted to protect others from a possible chaos. In other words, he saw himself walking towards priesthood. He was viewed by some as a priest. He didn’t like this. He was never pious towards anything. So the "PRIEST" just shut his mouth. Look at him dangling from that tree though! At least he still smiles at me, from a distance."

So out from that vision I came. Now I was sitting amongst an audience of questions. And all that could be heard was magnetic poems from the fridge.

Belly throbs a stiff Universe,
Breathe Rhythm magic!
All could drink peace voice and heal the wounds of yesterday.
Celebrate the Present!
Cloud days,
You bring out our windows.
As old wet hands wake the oceans, I think, perhaps time is a thing, Always.

CLAP....CLAP...CLAP...

Man,
See into your child cup!
Brother, ask how one makes good Coffee!
Explore stars as a web to this vast rot we bellow in!

CLAP...CLAP...

We said it was about robbing words...

CLAP...


And somehow, in between it all, at some point between the squeaking of my bikes brakes and the inch of dust that collected around its tires through the winter, my hands became a tool for another creatures thoughts, someone I never met. The pen would touch the page with no intentions aside from the action of the ball point actually hitting the surface of the paper. Nothing else would be intended yet these faint images would arrive through a scratching heat of magazine pages. Dented transfers of glossy ink would sink onto it all. Hard outlines would appear layered over faint whispers of things that, I myself, Could barely make out.

Take for example The First Hand Driven Image. This was a drawing of a Rhino, stuck in the heavens, with its ankles dipping into a rainbow and plump clouds rolling into its spine. Beneath the Rhino sat a lush mountain landscape and valley, all of it presenting shadows from a very large Half Moon or Sun, dangling above their peeks. And on both sides of the Crescent Blade were two small ghostly children, reaching to grab something invisible...Possibly a toy.

Then there was The Second Hand Driven Image which was actually consisting of two separate pages, but they all seemed related. The faint outline of a Lotus Flower sat over the top of an even fainter picture of giant boats with cannons, blasting lead balls into one another, some with sails aflame. I scribbled "Dead Blue Jay on the Sidewalk..." above it. That drawing drifted onto another page with an image that can only be understood as patches of scribble with the text "...Decomposing Blue Jay on the Sidewalk...”

Now how about The Third Hand Driven Image which also consisted of two pages drifting into one another. Now there was an introduction of some new methods. Torn Sections of page, as if they were picked scabs, Hard ink lines as well as some bleeding through of past ink from other pages and finally, very bright colors. One single white cloud, very chiseled and sharp, sits closely to five trees of winter vacant of leaves, very cold looking. Spanning from left to right, covering four of the five trees is a tube, with a flag pole on its end and a feather at half mast. In the tube is an extended pointer finger, pointing out into the tunnel its hovering in, directing the viewer’s attention towards hundreds of very systematically drawn interweaving cube’s. The entire tube is held upright by the leg of what appears to be an insect. And, just like two young children in The First Hand Driven Image, There are two delicate ink imprints, barely visible. They are lightly stamped outlines of a Native American on horseback. One is on the left corner of the page and one is on the right corner.

To make things even harder to digest, the image that rest below this page, (on the opposing page), has now introduced color and a THIRD mirror image of the Indian. The outline is subdued by a hard crayon wax sea of Yellow and Orange with a quote coming from the Indians mouth that says

"Plutocracy is a Government by the wealthy, Says I, The Ghostly Indian."

And finally The Fourth Hand Driven Image ends the climax of it all. It’s a bit of a letdown, not appearing to be related to the other images. If it is related it is only by the "system" and/or "method"... if you can call it either. I’m surely not aware of any method during the time period of its occurrence. It’s just happened to me. It was a weird happening.

The image consists of two pages, like the others. One thing that is clear in this final image is that it shows (with much more clarity than the others) that one page of the image tends be like the light and color of a projector and the other page tends to be the wall that the image lands and culminates upon, showing all the patterns and actions. One page is the "bones". The other is the "Flesh". Can you see the Neighbors beside each other, living differently according to perception?

In this image, on the first page, there is a very light pink, blue and gray square with some hard ink outlines in between the corners. On its inside, as if fenced in, is a field of raising and falling bumps, like hills, culminating inside its withered outline. It’s barely visible and aids in little to any understanding without the neighboring image on the page beside it.

On the opposite page a faint, cartoon like imprint of a man who appears to be in a Tibetan Robe, holds up his hands in a graceful gesture. Another scab in the page appears right next to his faint face and this scab too is brought out to the forefront with hard shading on its edges, an outline of what was once a slight tear on the epidermis of the page. Above the man are a group of very thick hard lines streaking downward as if they were concentrated beams of light. And in the top right corner, bending into to the path of light, against its flow, is a crooked, twisting outline of a Tulip, also hard lined and more visible than the Tibetan man beneath it all.

I struggled with all of these peculiar images and as left unsettled by them. An easy excuse for them could be the traditional blaming of the subconscious and I didn't want to just write it of so easily. I was completely shaken up by these mysterious events! All of them took place throughout the span of a confusing year. Perhaps what could be found in it all was this other itch behind my mind regarding Parallels? When reflecting on it some more, I can think back on a time when I felt the word Surrounding sounded like Sorrow Ding. It was before things got really cold in that season. I had a sudden urge to start a community baseball team that only played on Sundays. I wanted to turn a room in my wife and I's house into a Radio Room. I was interested in furthering my investigation into all those shaded thoughts. I remember planning to clean out the room and start the project and talk with some friends about buying some bats and gloves and balls. I know I had developed a curiosity towards CB Radios as well. The problem to these wonderings was that they were all being birthed from panic, still feeling unsettled about those strange drawings that day in and day out, continued happening to me. I fell asleep during writing down the benefits of a radio room and was awoken to strange floating images of public school lunch sandwiches wrapped in duct tape for all the unseen lucid hungry students.

WHAT WAS GOING ON?

I feared, as I told my companion, that something was getting ready to crumble down onto itself. Everything was coming to some kind of catastrophic shatter! It had too! Things were too intense and vivid for them not to be. I dug deeper into that notion of Parallels and Neighbors.

I had a thought of Equality.

"A circle is equal to parallel lines because any point on a circle is on the same path just as two consistent lines, laid next to one another, with no start and no end, infinite, have no point greater than the other, which defines to me the meaning of the symbol for equal." =


Perhaps that was the meaning of the Third Hand Driven Image in which the pointer finger caught inside the tube is pointing at all those interweaving squares. But did that equality suggest that those lines could overlap? That would suggest that equality was a farce, a hidden agenda and that really, all things, layer in a messy clutter of one!
All of a sudden I wanted to research the Origin of the EQUAL SYMBOL. But I didn't. Feeling that my thought was correct and that this all pointed (in my strange inner investigation) to a notion that all things are parallel to one another. I would be lying if I were to lie and say that my conclusion was not lazy and arrived at through shear mental exhaustion.

As Though sounded better than As If and I still have no clue why.

In the days following all these strange thoughts, vision, drawings etc, I found myself writing this thought down at 11:35 PM:

Who was it, be it a separate individual or my own self that stole that feeling of real good and its true existence? Who robbed me of that token wisdom?

It was becoming clear. My body, in times of what can be perceived as dramatic change, (during major elections, major moves, major catastrophes and major grooves made in the path I think I am walking on) becomes heightened towards everything, as if it’s fleshly goal were to further obscure everything, make it harder to find what’s really going on, so that when I do...I can really latch on to the outcome, become more involved in the present moment and allow it take me for a ride without questioning it. Now that it was coming to the front of it all, I knew how to handle the heavy flow of strangeness coming at me like a charging bull.

I blew the dust off my bike and went for a ride. I coasted down the road and saw in the distance the tall skinny neighbor walking across an intersection, aimlessly, swerving throughout his strides, unsure whether to go left or right. I ignored him and pedaled past him, deciding that I should pick up a six pack of beer. I picked out something that comes in a can, paid with cash and left. I felt better after realizing I had ignored the skinny neighbor and had not questioned what his strangeness was all about, and, in realizing that small defeat of my ego, I rode back home with the beer pulling against my handle bars, ready to relax.

Two blocks from home I realized I had made plans with someone for that afternoon. I hurried back, parked the bike, downed a can of beer and sat outside waiting for him to pick me up. We had arrangements to go take a bee keeping class. I had been told my contribution to this event could be a box full of matches that would later be used to make the most wonderful pine needle smoke, so calming and heavy with sweetness. I sat with the box of strike anywhere matches at my side, waiting for my friend to arrive in his silver pick up truck. I drew bees on the faces of the honey comb pavers with the chard ends of matchsticks I had been burning during the wait. He picked me up thirty minutes late which resulted in the stone beneath my feet becoming covered in the outlines of ashy bees, hardly enough of them to produce any honey for my hungry heart, even if that honey were to be invisible.

One thing that did occur to me, as we drove off to that class was this...
I felt that while sitting there waiting, in a trance, burning one match after another, feeling the tickling heat gradually crawl down towards my finger tips, embracing the fact that of nothing being as important as doing something as meaningless as drawing those bees and burning the match sticks to produce the ash to do so, that there was peace in that slight "Inactivity".

Later on, as the bike once again leaned against its kickstand and went on collecting dust, my wife and I planned a move geared towards something simpler. Some friends of ours provided us with a kind invite into their home which we now have moved into. It is a small urbanized farm that they started and maintained well and now we all take part in caring for it as a group. We view it as a cooperative aimed at self sustainability and the achievement of our real goals towards a greater happiness.

In accepting their invite, we left our neighbors and the city along with the romantic notion of things becoming or living as what they most definitely are not. They are close neighbors and we are theirs. All things that were shaken up and sprinkled about my lawn of overgrown and uncut thoughts had settled into a trimmed pile that I can only now write about.

The mysterious became no more than this:

Ah hah! I’ve found you again! I’ve missed you my little squiggle! I saw you in the freedom of my dog. I saw you in the habits I called bad ones, when the only bad habit, how I lost you in the first place, was in trying to stiffly organize your wildness. Now I see you. I met you briefly again while putting away some soup. Stay with me bending and twisting and never allow me to try straightening you out. If it happens again, please, leave me for my own forgotten good!