Better Than Dead

I have written about weird things before but for the purpose of this project I am going to repost and rework those posts under the “all weird things” tag. This is the first of those posts:

We’ve all probably had a number of things in our lives that made us go “huh.” I know I have. I embraced the weird some time back, and even though I always try to find logical explanations before accepting anything para-weird, there is always going to be stuff that skirts the edge of rational and . . . other.

One such incident happened when I was about thirteen at our old house in Venice, the one I grew up in, which was in itself a strange place full of odd corners and unusual atmospherics. We lived on a huge lot with a big house on the front of the property occupied by our landlady. Our house was a little ramshackle place with four front doors because its basic structure consisted of four beach cabins strung together to make a house. (Beach cabins: those things from the early 20^th century set up on the sand where people would go to change out of their street clothes and into swimwear so they didn’t have to immodestly walk from their vehicles to the shore in “scanty” clothing.)

A prodigious backyard sat behind our little house in which my father grew a legendary vegetable garden every year. A large but very old and dilapidated shack sat at the very back of the southwest corner of the lot where my father kept tools and such. It hadn’t seen paint in centuries, it seemed, the wood chipped and splintered and that wonderful grey barnwood patina people pay big money to acquire these days. Between the back of the shack and the next property over (a dairy processing plant) was a passageway about five feet wide. My father put trellis up on the shed back there and grew banana squash, letting them crawl up the trellis rather than spread across the ground. I liked to sit back there in the summertime because it was always cool, even on the hottest days, and smelled loamy and of growing green things. It was one of many small, urbanized sacred combes I had on that property—but not a perfect spot.

We had the dairy processing plant to contend with, for one. Just across from the growing banana squash was a two-foot high concrete boundary marker topped by an enormous chain link fence—at least twenty feet high—that ran the entire length of the back end of our property. The fence was loose enough at the bottom that I could push it inward and sit on that concrete ledge to stare at and smell the growing things, wiggle my toes in the loamy earth, and think my solitary thoughts. Just the other side of the fence on the dairy property was a massive ice freezer and ice crusher machine. Again, it was at least 15-20 feet high, but seemed larger because the boundary marker was part of an elevation of the land between our property and the dairy. It towered, to say the least. Another fence sat behind the southern end of the thing, as well. A very narrow passageway ran the length of this monster, maybe three feet wide at most. A grown person would have had to walk sideways to go back there. There was a long freezer compartment (maybe 30 feet?) which held big blocks of ice, and on the front end a platform and some ice crushing machines. The dairymen hauled out these blocks of ice, crushed them (usually at about 3 a.m.), and loaded it into bags so they could pack their trucks (parked along the northern length of our property) and keep their dairy products cool while they made their early morning deliveries.

(The ice crusher was also part of a harassment campaign because the dairy wanted to force our neighbors and our landlady to sell the property cheap so they could gobble up the entire block—but that’s a separate story. Suffice it to say, it didn’t work because we were all extremely stubborn and adaptable poor people.)

Anyway, I was in the backyard proper one day, lying on the grass the other side of the garden, reading (though I don’t remember the book) but also feeling restless. That kind of restlessness that’s an itch just beneath the skin. A disease common in early adolescence, I believe. I put the book down wondering what I could do with that restlessness when I became aware of—how to put this?—another consciousness inside my brain. Yeah, I know. I’ve only experienced such a thing a few times in my life, mostly in connection with premonitions, but it’s a very distinct feeling. A restless itch of the mind, if you will. It was telling me to get up and go behind the shed to my sacred spot and if I did, something would happen. There would be a gift there for me. It scared me, frankly. I remember thinking that I didn’t want to be kidnapped by aliens or other things, but the consciousness was reassuring and insistent. So I got up, walked through the garden, and behind the shed.

I stood there a minute thinking, “Okay, I’m here, now what?” I walked down to the end of the passage where our property ended and the low fence of our southern neighbor started. I turned around and looked back the way I’d come but . . . nothing. Then I glanced to my left. Lying on the ground, just the other side of the chain link fence, was a black, leather-bound notebook, maybe 6×4 inches. It looked brand new so I reached under the loose links at the bottom of the fence and pulled it through. It was a spiralbound notebook and full of crisp, new ruled paper—and completely blank. No writing inside, nothing to identify an owner. Like I said, an adult would have had to walk sideways along the passage beside the ice crusher, and this notebook was deposited at the very end of the freezer compartment about a foot from the other fence that ran behind the monster. It wasn’t something someone could have dropped from the platform. They would have had to purposefully sidle down that passage for it to be there. It’s entirely possible that someone could have slithered down there to take a secret whizz (although why go so far?) or maybe someone came back there to spy on our and our neighbor’s property (given the underhanded nature of the dairy owners) but . . .?

I dunno. All I know was that I was delighted with the notebook. Although I had known I wanted to be a writer since the second grade, I was flailing around about it at that stage of my life and getting a lot a flak from my mother about how impractical my expressed career goal was and what a foolish dream and etc. That notebook seemed like an important piece of encouragement to me at the time. I wrote a lot after that, despite discouragement. I’ve never really stopped, although I have had a couple of bouts of prolonged writers’ block wherein that restless itch beneath the skin became agonizing. Writing has always been the cure for that.

And remembering this incident also reminded me of something I encountered recently in my reread of Patrick Harpur’s Daimonic Reality:

I have long thought of my art (any art, all art) as an act of worship—or if that’s too strong a word, an act of gratitude and devotion. To whom? The Universe for giving me this means of scratching that itch? Maybe. It doesn’t even matter if it’s good art or bad, whether or not you’re acknowledged publicly in galleries or publishing houses and the like, the act of doing of art shows the Universe that you have the passion and the practice of that devotion. The doing is the important part. That’s why I’m an emotional wreck when I’m not doing that work and why I’m always supremely grateful when it comes back to me.

That notebook long ago was something of a talisman. I may still have it buried somewhere around here, though I haven’t seen it in years. But like any talisman it was good for the time in which it came to me and lasted as long as I needed to look on it and be encouraged. It was indeed a gift, whether from the Universe, some mysterious being, or from some random dude taking a whizz out behind the ice crusher.

RIP Mr. Terry Jones, one of the pillars of my faith.

*
After two weeks and holding of fighting with my drug plan insurance over a medicine which keeps me alive that I was running out of I finally used GoodRx to buy it out of pocket. It wasn’t cheap but it gives me a three month grace period to sort things out with the insurance. Insurance is nothing but legal extortion. But even with the hassle I know how incredibly lucky I am to have such a plan. I won’t get back that out of pocket expense, but I do expect things will get sorted eventually and I will get help paying for this medicine. I know many people are not that fortunate.

Not only that, my milk went bad before the pull date.

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Life is never going to be exactly as you want it to be. There’s always going to be some little zit on the end of your nose that makes you look at life cross-eyed.

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I really need to get some new cats. It’s been a year and clearly my brain has rotted with Kitty Need because when Betty White came on TV on her birthday I said in kitty voice, “Is da Betty White girl.”

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When it rains at night I like to turn off all media and just sit there reading while listening to the rain.

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Sometimes my life seems like the bumbling slapstick sitcom dads of the 60s.

Pick something up from the floor, lose control of it, have it fly across the room, walk across the room to fetch, it kick something else, stub my toe and send that flying, bend over to retrieve the other thing and have it fall out of my hand again. You know, the usual.

Sometimes I even hear an opening theme soundtrack while I’m doing it.

(Which is way before the time of many of you and very American teevee sitcom.)

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Next time you think corporations or billionaires care about you as an individual human being remember that soylant green is people.

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Well that’s embarrassing. For quite some time I’ve had a tag for my blog of “aesthetcism” when what I truly meant was “asceticism.” Hoist on my own Picard.

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Public service announcement: don’t get the shingles shot unless you’ve got a couple of days to spare for feeling like crap.

(You should definitely get the shingles shot if you are of a certain age because a couple of days of feeling like crap is way better than the shingles.)

I’ve had three friends who were “taken by surprise” and it was a very unpleasant experience. Months of misery. One of them had what they call internal shingles, which means her nerve endings were on fire for months. Horrible.

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When you know you’ve used VRS too much: you are leaving a voicemail for a friend and at the end of the sentence you say, “Period.”

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Writing is the thing I most want to do in the world and yet every day I reach a certain point where I say to myself, “Have I written enough that I can stop now?” Sometimes I push beyond that point if I think there’s still water in the well. Other times I know the well is dry and I’ll have to wait until it fills up again overnight. The urge to quit is always there, sometimes more insistent than at other times, but always whispering to stop.

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You know the worst thing about Hellier? I have hundreds and hundreds of books and I’m at a stage in my life where I’m trying to slim down the library because I don’t have room for all this and Hellier is forcing me—forcing I say—to buy more books! So many damned books!

I was reading a recap of Whitley Streiber’s new book, A New World, at http://radiomisterioso.com/2019/12/10/whitley-strieber-a-new-world/
and something reminded me of the God helmet/Estes method session with Dana and Connor in Hellier S2 :

“He said that they ‘communicate completely differently than us’ without ‘an evolved language.’ Strieber’s experiences led him to conclude that they lead an existence that is nearly unfathomable to us…”

I’ve been doing research reading on fairies the last couple of weeks for the current WIP. I admit that watching Hellier Season 2 (now available, along with season 1, for free on YouTube and hellier.tv) has inspired me even more, although this post is only tangentially about Hellier. What I say below, certainly, can’t be applied to the Hellier experience, but I can’t help seeing parallels between Faery and aliens. I am far from the first to see these parallels. My first exposure to this idea was in Passport to Magonia by Jacques Vallee back in the 70s. Hellier moves in the same dreamlike terrain, weaving through the twilight world of UFO contactees, abductees, and experiencers, as well as many other strange and wonderful things.

In folklore, things with the fairies (a term you can take throughout this post to apply equally to aliens, goblins, and trickster characters of your choice) can be both true and untrue simultaneously. They can be the human dead, and not the human dead; of this world and not; sinister and friendly. The bodies of humans can remain where they are—in trance or dreams or a death-like state—and their souls can still be off traveling with the fae.

Which, if you think about it, adds a whole ‘nother dimension to the true/not true stories of alien contactees: both the current crop of “alien abductees,”* I believe, and the old-fashioned contactee stories of people like Woodrow Derenberger (he of Mothman/Indrid Cold fame) and George Adamski (who claimed to have flown to the Moon and other planets with Nordic aliens). When you combine that true/untrue with the notion held in folklore that fairies often favor humans who transgress human laws and play fast and loose with human truth, it brings even deeper dimension to these accounts.

However, there are two things that the fairies of folklore will not tolerate: people who lie to them, and those who tell too many of their secrets. So a mortal may find great favor with them—may even, one supposes fly with them to Lanulos or the Moon or be shown great secrets and marvels—but the second they transgress those fairy rules, they will be punished. Perhaps the golden medals they received will turn to cheap tin knock-offs; perhaps their lives will become a horrorshow of hounding by the press or (maybe even worse) true believers; perhaps every transgression or tall tale or prejudice or human fallacy will be laid bare before the public and ridiculed. Whom the fairies elevate, they can also cast down without mercy.

*ETA: I didn’t mean to imply that people reporting alien abductions are either fakers or liars. There seems to be something genuine going on there, and sincere belief on the part of most of the experiencers, but at this point it’s difficult to know precisely what’s going on except to say it’s tricksterish in nature.

TV Show pitch: This Old Crone
Like the PBS seres, This Old House (the original remodeling show), but featuring the transformation of an old crone rather than an old home. It should be hosted by the person who really knows how to do the work rather than the half-assed dilettante hosebag. In this series, instead of covering up the flaws in the crone, we shine a bright spotlight on them so that anyone, including the crone, can learn from them. And the eccentricities of construction will be celebrated rather than trying to turn them into something sleek and modern. Repair work will be done, of course, but with the knowledge that decrepitude is inevitable and the only sure and certain principle ruling the Universe is entropy. Rather than mourning this, the show will encourage us to accept it with as much grace and dignity as possible and learn from it, as well. But we must also remember that if entropy rules the Universe, irony is its only begotten daughter.

Everyone’s path is their own. No path is superior. Everyone has to find their own way. The path of quiet contemplation is as valid as the full-throated war cry. Anyone who judges your path isn’t as secure in their own as they think they are. One person has trouble crossing a room without pain; another climbs mountains. In the end, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is the flame in your heart. If it dies, you’ve failed. If it’s still burning, you’re still burning, and you’re where you need to be.

One of my ancestors is named Mary Polly Armor and I always want to read that as Mary Polyamory. #BecauseThatsJustTheSortOfBrainIHave

What’s the first major news event you remember in your lifetime? I was going to say the assassination of JFK but it’s really the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember those drills, our young teacher herding us little bitty kids into the cloakroom to shelter. I remember her crying each time and I didn’t figure out until later that it was because she never knew if we were hiding out because it was real and the bombs were on the way or if it was just another drill. I was terrified and didn’t really know why.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the notion that paranormal activity is caused by places being built on Indian burial grounds. It’s quite prevalent in paranormal research and I’ve also fallen prey to the thought of vengeful native spirits. Lately, I’ve reconsidered this. It’s as essentially racist as the Ancient Aliens/Van Daniken notion that primitive (read “people of color”) societies could not possibly have invented the wonders they did—it had to be gifted to them from Space Overlords. The Indian burial ground notion has even pervaded popular horror movie culture. The one exception to this that I can think of in popular culture (rather than supposedly legit research) is the movie Poltergeist. The dead folks in that movie were just vengeful dead folks, not vengeful natives. I can’t think of such an exception in paranormal research. It makes me feel guilty that I even considered the Indian burial ground scenario. Although I’m not sure my white guilt is any more helpful than white appropriation or white nullification of culture. Mostly I realize it’s not about me except for when I can work for positive change.

Here near LAX we got a gentle rolling from the July 5th 7.1 earthquake (downgraded to only 6.9), but it did go on for a very long time. Sometimes they are gentle at first then the big whammy hits, so until things stop there’s always the fear it will get bigger. One of my neighbors was standing out in her front yard screaming, however, which I thought kind of extreme but it takes everybody different. I did feel seasick afterwards, though.

The only thing I know is that whatever negative thing you are when you’re young, you will still be that negative thing when you’re old, only more so. Unless you do a s*** ton of work on yourself between youth and age, if you’re a young rage monkey he’ll be in old age monkey; if you’re a judgmental young twat you’ll be a judgmental old twat. The good news is, if you’re a thoughtful, considerate person when you’re young you’ll most likely still be a thoughtful, considerate old person. The seeds of who our selves are planted at the moment of our birth.

I think the dictation on my Word program must be Scottish. It never wants to capitalize the name Ken.

I lived a block from the Sidewalk Cafe in the 80s. We often ate there in the day time, but knew to stay off the Boardwalk at night: too wild & dangerous for girls on their own. It sounds like things have changed—and not changed: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/05/08/a-night-with-a-bouncer/#.XRlOldiNsgk.twitter

I have to confess that as much as I loathe Ancient Aliens, it’s a good show to have on for background noise when I’m not feeling very well. I can read Twitter while it’s playing and look up every once in a while to yell very rude things at the screen. #NeverSaidIWasntWeird

I don’t feed the crows every day. But every time I do feed them, the day after one of them will perch on the rail near my open front door and yell at me to feed them again. #LoveThemCrows

The Detectorists – a lovely, gentle, funny show. One of my favorites.

I have a terrible confession to make. I hope you’ll still be my friends once you hear it: I like the lumps in cream of wheat.

1. Let me thread you a story… (1-26)
2. Christina Lovejoy, town curmudgeon, takes great pride in her work. She’ll crank out a grumpy face & cynical comment for many occasions,
3. but she don’t rightly hold with raining on the parades (or birthdays, weddings, and the like) of common folk.
4. She mostly saves her curmudgeonliness for when people in power are acting like jackasses.
5. (Although it did come in handy that time the town caught Excessive Jubilance Disease a few years back.)
6. “Resistance is not futile,” Christina is fond of saying, often using a mock-robot voice. “Resistance is essential.”
7. Take, for instance, that time President Turps & Vice President Pinche passed through Portalville on their way to an economic summit.
8. Secret Service was out in force, of course, & nobody had a problem with that. After all, big men need protecting from public opinion.
9. But just the week before Prez Turps declared he would build a great big ol’ wall around our portal to keep out illegal aliens.
10. VP Pinche just nodded and gave his lord and master an idiot grin (cuz the man couldn’t find his own rear with both hands) and mumbled
11. something about subversion and perversion and conversion. Couldn’t rightly figure what he was driving at but it sounded sinister.
12. Thing is, couldn’t none of us remember seeing illegal aliens come through our portal, just the regular grey and Nordic variety,
13. plus assorted critters from the Multiverse. But they’s somewhat of this town’s lifeblood, if you know what I mean. They keep us lively,
14. and honest, if I’m being honest. Christina saw it just about the same way. She stood in the middle of Route 40 as the motorcade
15. came through town. The Secret Service swarmed to clear her out of the way, but she presented them with her grumpiest of grump faces.
16. Halted them dead in their tracks, I can tell you. Couldn’t get within ten feet of her. The motorcade had to stop.
17. “I mean the president no harm,” she told everyone. “But I AM going to speak my mind.”
18. All the tinted windows in the president’s limo spontaneously rolled down at once so he could hear what Christina had to say.
19. “You can try building a wall around our portal,” she said, “but you should know we are a small town surrounded by big power….
20. “Really big power, like HUGE, and it would be bad, very bad, and sad, very sad, if you did anything so rash.
21. “That kind of power can’t be contained. It ripples out underground, spreading from this town out and beyond,
22. “to places you can’t even imagine, like the hearts of good people, to the selfless and the courageous and the compassionate—
23. “those things you & that Pinche with you have only heard spoken of & never felt yourselves. You can’t stop feelings, can’t stop ideas.
24. “So I suggest you give up on that wall or you’ll be swallowed in an ocean of contempt that will drown you. Big water, big, big water.”
25. Christina stepped out of the road, the president’s windows rolled back up, and the motorcade went on its way.
26. But ain’t none of us heard any more nonsense about walling off the portal.

Random quote of the day:

“It is possible, therefore, that the encounter experience is a contemporary form of an ancient mystical knowledge or gnosis, that is, knowledge that comes from the reality of visionary or revelatory states, that are also taking place in an actual “space” of the soul, or subtle vehicle. Such experiences also make it imperative that we expand our dichotomous worldview to include once again these other levels of reality, that in fact are by no means new, but recover an ancient multidimensionality.”

—Virginia Goodchild, Alien Contact Experience and Ancient Traditions

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Lucy and Ethel, Justin Bieber, or the Kardashian Klan. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known.”

—W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

 

 

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“Let’s say that a ten-lane superhighway is being built next to [an] anthill. The question is: would the ants even know what a ten-lane superhighway is, or what it’s used for, or how to communicate with the workers who are just feet away? And the answer is no….If there is [another] civilization in our backyard, in the Milky Way galaxy, would we even known its presence?…There’s a good chance that we, like ants in an anthill, would not understand or be able to make sense of a ten-lane superhighway next door.”

—Dr. Michio Kaku, “Parallel Universes, the Matrix, and Superintelligence”

 

 

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.