Kinks in the Chain

A bad way to start off, children.

It seems like tiny government-forged microbes of death inseminated me early last week and whose virulent offspring made pate of my gastric system for a few days. It illustrates the truth of at least one modern colloquialism:

Shit happens.

Anyone who knows me knows I do not trust the government-sanctioned medical system. Too many dear friends have succumbed to the horrors of unwarranted surgeries, biopsies, headshrinkings, and assorted butcherings. I will not be one of those fragmented people, God bless them. Instead, I trusted my health to my dear friend Diane Lake, a brilliant homeopath (as well as an amazing filmmaker) whom I have had the pleasure of knowing for the last 6 years. She has left me an assortment of natural enzymes who in combination have brought me back from the brink of what felt like certain death. Or at least grave continual discomfort. At least I don't have to worry about walking out of Diane's office sans a limb.

So, after hunting and killing my first meal in 16 hours, I return, placid, a little lighter, but at least in one amalgamated piece of flesh.

So, I say we get started. Though in a softer release. Cordova Light, as it were...

I suppose for you to care about where we are going you should know a bit about where we've been. Or I've been. With you, though you weren't necessarily aware of any of it.

This will get easier, I assure you...

OK, let's be reasonable about this. Beginnings are always the most fragile of times for anything. Here again, we prove not all cliches are without merit. So, let's start somewhere random and see what happens...

Let's take it at parochial school. St. Monica Catholic, Dallas, Texas, 1971. My earliest memory was of absolute fear and dread. The first day of kindergarten my mother literally had to pry me off of her right thigh and push me into the bushes while she leaped into her 1969 white Grand Prix (I hated that car, and for good reason, but we'll get to that later...) and sped off to her lover, some greasy Anglo guy who lived in the Bachman Lake area a decade before it was overrun by aberrant racial groups and the people who hate them.

I was bawling like the young child I was and I remember people simply standing around looking at me like I was some escaped pet. My parents both worked full-time and in a way I've always admired them for it. It did absolutely NOTHING for their already rocky relationship, but still I admire their go-getit-tivity of consumerism that immediately adhered itself to my psyche. But at least they were able to send me to a moderately expensive private school that would totally warp me for the next 8 years of my fledgling life. And there I was, on my maiden voyage, my mother more interested in her 'BIG O' than in the state of my fragile little impressionable mind (which was completely aware that she was having S.E.X. with someone other than my father), me screaming my fool head off, and gargantuan nuns in black (none of whom looked anything like Sally Field) turning and lumbering towards me like giant hungry frogs... Ah, yes, school daze begin...

It was around this time that the nightmares began as well.

Three nights out of five I would wake my parents screaming at the top of my lungs. It was always between 3 and 4 am. I remember some of what the dreams were, but only in frightening flashes of images like out of Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It was so strange...

In my dream I am watching a man sit on a park bench (which is peculiar in itself because as a child I was never really exposed to 'park benches'. I mean, this is Dallas, not New York. Very strange that that particular object was always in this re-occurring dream...) Well, I can see a male sitting there. Suddenly I feel mounting anxiety coming from all around, like something cataclysmic is about to happen. The irony is that this person does not sense the danger! He looks up and something overcomes the entire scene. He and I and everything around us are suddenly thrown into a dark whirling vortex. Flashes of colored light and the smell of acetylene fills my senses. I can feel myself begin to shrink, my hands, my eyes, my blood, my skin, getting smaller and smaller. I can feel gravity start to weigh heavier on me as I rapidly become the size of an amoeba. I can see cellular walls rise up before me and become Cyclopean skyscapes in a matter of seconds. I am the size of a virus. Claustrophobic waves are racing through my body and I'm crying out into stellar nothingness. I am choking on the vestiges of my own humanity, the universe is crushing me down into a speck of ectoplasm, a globule of DNA buried beneath the corpses of a billion dead stars...

And I am awake... thrashing violently in a space faintly familiar. My parents are screaming AT me to try and quiet my bellowing. My little throat is bleeding from the strain of the on-going primordial death shriek... And though I tried so hard to convey in insane blubberings what I was experiencing night after night to my parents, my limited vocabulary always left me completely dumbfounded at how to share this horrific experience with anyone.

That's when I began reading in earnest. So I could tell people about the horrible things I see when I close my eyes...

Apparently, I have always had a knack for communication, whether I had command of the language or not. Yes, even in my sleep. At 3 and 4 years of age I would not only talk in my sleep but apparently have full encounters with people that would only further the impression that "Johnny just isn't RIGHT..." My mother told me of one time she got up in the middle of the night because she heard sounds coming from my room. Now, being a good American mother with her own itinerary, I always had a television within arms reach. During the day I would spend hours watching Jack LaLane work that body and his hot assistant who came on and handed him towels occasionally (probably the catalyst of my first volitional hard-on), the "Doris Day Show", the aforementioned Sally Field in 'The Flying Hun"- er, I mean, "Nun", the sparse trappings of "The Price is Right" and the ever-intriguing Afternoon Movie. So, my mother being far ahead of her time (she probably was the one to originate the idea of using the blasted thing as a babysitter) had a small 10-inch candy-apple red SONY placed firmly in my room. I remember it looking like a space helmet from Space: 1999. (But that is in retrospect because that particular show didn't premiere until 1975 and ran thru 1978.)

Anyway, back to the story... She stopped short and stared at the faint glow of light escaping under the door. She could hear voices whispering... And she swears she heard a muffled laugh. When she finally opened the door there I was sitting Indian style with my eyes wide open staring at a test pattern on the television screen. She stepped into the room, I turned, looked her straight in the eye, and smiled.

Creepy...

And then there was the night that I got out of bed, walked through my parents' bedroom (that they just happened to be sharing that week), opened the sliding glass door, walked through the obstacle course which was my mother's garden room, opened the outer door, and proceeded to attempt a midnight swim in our unnervingly kidney-shaped pool before my father literally snatched me in mid drop and whisked me away to a land of shouts and reprisals.

I guess I wasn't boring as a child, either...

That was the early seventies and my parents had had more than enough of one another. My father had rescued my mother from the cruel hand of her Navy-trained father, Rudy, and inadvertently found himself married with a child.

But that is the beginning of another story...

I have found that I must distribute information slowly. Otherwise, you miss it. I mean, who among us appreciates something that we don't have to work for? Certainly not I. And we are so very much alike...

And to answer your question, the reason I hated the Grand Prix is because while riding in it with my mother the cocksucking door flew open on two occasions and I ACTUALLY FELL OUT OF THE CAR WHILE IT WAS MOVING! The second time, an 18-wheeler was two car lengths behind us and just barely stopped short of making me a grease spot.

Fucking car...

(Wear your fucking seatbelts...)

Anyway... Yes, I could tell you the formula to reach Nirvana right now, but you'd never follow it. You'd get it mixed up with your new Tantric Sex manual and the next time you had an orgasm and saw God, you'd actually believe you were a saint or something. I'm afraid not.

There will be no misinformation here. I promise you.

Besides, the truth is so fleeting, so easily obtained that you'd wouldn't recognize it without the heaps of drama you slap on everything you ingest. It's fast food with no nutrition that we gorge ourselves upon... In Western civilization we are all too caught up in our lives, our jobs, our relationships to ever get to that quiet place where enlightenment resides. We run around stressing about things that mean nothing at all and then wonder why we're so miserable. Instead of focusing on the problem, we focus on talking about our feelings... For fuck's sake, maybe that's the problem, instead of DOING anything, today's television analysts have us believing that knowing one another is the key to happiness, knowing oneself, discovering oneself. It's a crock of shit. It's all about CREATING oneself, making decisions on what we WANT our lives to be like, watching people who have what we want, and emulating their behaviors. Simple formula. But we are too caught up in how bad we feel about being so fucking lazy that we forget to get off our asses and do something about it.

I feel like a proctologist surrounded by all these assholes.

As a child I experienced anxiety that I could only have known at a cellular level. It was a voice speaking to me out of the abyss and the only reason I heard it at all was because I WAS LISTENING. Yes, it was tantamount to hearing voices and if I had been living in the 1400's there's a good chance I would have burned on a cross as a heretic for my sensitivity, but it has made me what I am today: a bitter, angry, sensitive man... Lost in the chaos of American life... (cue music)

And now it's Labor Day. Yet another fucking reason to eat, get drunk, and make complete American morons of ourselves.

Christ, it's always something. It's either Valentine's Day or it's Veteran's Day or it's Mother's Day or it's Trash Day or it's Treehugger Day or it's SOMEBODY'S Fucking Birthday or it's Bring Out Your Dead Day or it's Lame Ass President's Day (oh, wait, they'll create that one NEXT year) or it's Dead Minority Leader's Day or it's Rich Old Woman's Day... Jesus Christ Flambe, will it ever fucking stop??

Probably not.

Well, ladies and germs, I'm outta here. I'm going to let you guys off with no homework tonight. It's a holiday (another fucking holiday) so I'll let you slackers do what you do best. As for me, I have a billion and one things to do before I leave for California on September 22nd. I'm going to accompany my valet JR (stupid fucking initials...) while he vainly searches for funding for his next sexploitation film. I figure I can get some sun, get a little ass, see some bands, and do a couple of remote publishings while I'm there. Mix it up a bit, as it were. But until then I'll be here in Dallas sweating balls and making calls. This entry was story time. Next time, we'll just pick up the old scalpel and turn the volume up a bit...

Watch yourselves out there, my children...

Love, always

JC♠