42

9.11.12

The day starts with light drizzle but soon gives way to sun.  At six this morning I uploaded my first video, -a one minute video- on youtube.  So, Americans remember the day.  A lot of people have their birthday on this date, tied with an event that changed the world forever in an unmistakably bad way.  That’s a bit of bummer, ya know.

Huge clouds with cool gusty winds come and go, projects around the place abound when the weather is good, so let’s work.  Why am I not working right now?  I am, sort of, if writing can be considered work, work that is, which goes in the infinite black well of the world web.

So, what do I remember?

I finished playing a round of golf on a sand course with Mike Douglas from Muncie, Indiana.  We walked into the clubhouse and a fuzzy television was set up.  The bartender, an Irish fella, and his wife were the only others there, along with two dogs.  The station was from Oman and the picture showed a feed from ABC when suddenly the second plane crashed into the second trade center behind the television reporter.  “What the hell, what the hell, holy shit.”  Mike was a week away from flying back to the states and we joked it’d probably take him longer now.

Back at the flat I didn’t have a television nor had I computer so I went across the hall and watched it on Joe B’s set.  I eventually called my folks who as you might imagine were terribly distraught.

The next day all the teachers met and our coordinator, Brian Grim, told us to leave the classroom if any of the cadets said or did anything inappropriate.  While my relationship with the young men from Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates was good, such an earthshaking event like this could turn all upside down. 

The cadets at the military college were, no coincidence, pilots in training.

I walked into the class and the 24 men came up to me, shook my hand, hugged me, ‘sorry sir, so sorry’ an accumulation of fear and apprehension vaporized instantly and I postponed their weekly quiz.

And that was it, the beginning of the end and the beginning of the new.  There are many for sure who will point out that the consummation of time as we know it and the fate of a country, singled out,  like the US, has no connection.  The end of the world and the beginning of a new one isn’t exclusively for Americans, perish such imperial blabber, but it was, is, a harbinger that for the last eleven years we have seen humanity and nature take notorious turns for the worst and as we speed our way both ways the super symmetric moment is at hand, when the monotheistic faiths and the Buddhists and Hindus and Shamans  will be taken care of in their own way through the scientific discovery of life’s origins. 

And the big question for me, what will happen if nothing happens?  Life as it is goes on and on.  I can’t go on like this.  I can’t.  There is nothing to look forward to if everything that happened to me turns out to be nothing more than an induced trip that went on far too freaking long.

The sun rips through the mountain, cool breezes, cool shade.

A system approaches from the east.  Bengali rain reaches the mountain and spits furiously.  Sunset is forty minutes away, the gloom settles in, nine men working on the painting and painting and one door is hung, another cabinet is built, for whom and where, Didi and I clean up the south end of the garden, piles of wood scraps and chunks of plasterboard are taken to the lower garden and dumped for who knows how long.  Suraksha arrives home looking like she ran up the mountain, poor kid, face red, she shares a coke with me.  God bless her.  The rain falls a little harder.  My favorite time of day, thunder ripples.  If you have to live alone live where the weather changes every day. 

Here is something to consider while you search for God, a man on a cusp does not have a better half.  He is who he is and sees everything in black and white. Another life for the cusper isn't necessary because a cusper has what he needs, he just doesn’t have enough of it. 

Fog slides up, dead calm it is, “time is so short I’m sure there must be something more…”  Tell me about the coincidence with Coldplay.  There wasn’t nothing personal about this one, was there?

The band doesn’t fathom the spell they are under and what the message channeled means to them.  Given in wide interpretive lyrics, listened to my hundreds of millions of people.  A former colleague said, when I asked him about the lyrics of ‘42’, poo poo’d it, said he prefer George Michael and all his silly music. 

I’ve spoken so much about that coincidence in Abu Dhabi I’m sick of it.  How many times must I replay the thunder strikes and pouring rain, sitting in back of Dave and Alison’s car on the way back to Al-Ain, the misfits reveal their grateful deaths and I knew this wasn’t of my doing.  I posted the cosmo’s call on my mac book website and emailed it to everyone in the university. 

You see the Arabs knew where I was going.  I was looking and I was finding the meanings to everything and the inevitable that occurs when we get to the end. The clincher came to me as I peaked, as enlightenment of the most irrational kind or the truth all faiths wait for.

For what is truth to God.  What is truth for God?  And what good is truth if promises aren’t kept or are delayed for no damn good reason at all. 

You think a car is driving down the street screeeeetching brakes, metal to metal but here they’re Himalayan monster katykids.

Induced enlightenment.  Is that a contradiction?  On the road to Srinigar I picked up a young woman from Elmira, New York (she was shocked I guessed correctly as was I sort of) and she didn’t think taking a short cut to Enlightenment was necessarily bad. Your intentions weren’t to escape.  Your search accelerated faster than time, and no one expected it would happen this quickly and that a 2700 year old Caucasoid Shaman would perform a three day puja in my living room through me FOR CRYING OUT LOUD. 

Who needs help here more than me?  Oh…there are a lot.

Say, whatever became of Dr. Laura, the mysterious ex woman.  I stopped looking for her.  She was the first coincidence, a dramatic holy lord kind of coincidence and then the devil took her away just like that.  The devil.  Yes, the devil.  God wouldn’t do such a thing.  Cosmological collusion: when your consciousness is higher than it ought to be, you see the absurd, you see the game.  You also find help, St. Francis Xavier, the Buddha, Job. 

I used to think how could any of this be, what truth is there, and then, while in Salalah , I read Joseph Campbell and I’ll be humbled, I’m not the first.  One of a thousand faces on the journey to truth and love and it’s never bloody fair.

Sorry for whining sometimes.  I’d like to be trekking now and then it rains a little harder.

There is only one person I know who saw I was not who I then believed to be, he recognized the switch but saw the original…and told me. 

Undercover Catholic