Peace On Earth? A Shroud of Melting Verglas…

It feels good to be back here again, on the eve of the birth of….well, you get the picture. The whole thing is frozen in time. Time is for fools and businessmen who like to waste their time thinking about wasting time.

God was a sculptor. This whole trip is the end result. E.J. Gold once mentioned that Art consists of concentrated attention. He said the products of concentrated attention are the “shit” of the art. The shit is what we sell. Take this writing for example. My art occurred while I conceived of and wrote this. (More from E. J. Gold here.)

Actually, my art happened while I lived out the personally experienced personal experiences that became the memories that you now find mashed up and regurgitated before your very eyes. Don’t mind me if I vomit at you through the screen every now and again. The gag reflex has a way of alleviating deep belly tension, if you practice at it regularly. Don’t take my word for it…

It’s funny sometimes, how the directions find their way into my brain. Friedman is dead. He never made it through that frozen night in Minnesota. (read here to catch up) He got lost chasing after the cash I left in the snow. It weighed him down. He couldn’t run very fast. The minus 26 temperature combined with his frantic search to find the rest of the loot left him frozen in a pile of snow. He went insane with the cold. Erika found his half-naked body on her way back to the cabin the next night. She thanked him for collecting the cash, covered him with his jacket, and came back to the cabin by a roundabout way.

We had to burn the old log retreat a few nights later. No telling what kind of characters would scour those woods looking for Friedman. We took the safe with the vellum by snowmobile to another hideout on Lake Superior. That’s all I can tell you about the new digs, for now.

After Erika came back and calmed down a bit, we listened to one of her favorite songs. Erika likes still lifes. She says that masters of the still life do God’s work. I have no idea what she means by that, but I like the way her eyes light up whenever she repeats it. She says, “Every still life is absolute proof of peace on earth.”

I would add to that, “If the earth were covered in verglas.”

Now, after burning my favorite cabin last night, I agree with her. Perhaps she can teach me something after all.

I started to understand what she meant when the last bit of lyrics from this song danced across my neural networks.

We’ll keep working on the problems/ we know we’ll never solve/ of love’s uneven remainders/ our lives are fractions of a whole/ but if the world could remain within a frame/ like a painting a wall/ I think we’d see the beauty then/ we’d stand staring in awe/ at our still–lives–posed/ like a bowl of oranges/ like a story told/ by the fault lines/ and the soil….

Found Internet Object: http://www.copleysociety.org/exhibitions/view/1399/holiday_small_works.html

The illusions of movement, space, time, and memory all conspire to convince us otherwise. I stole a book from a small shop in downtown Duluth this morning. I set my cup of hot coffee on the glass case. The clerk was an older woman, in her 60s at least. The volume I needed sat on the shelf behind the counter. I got talking to her,

“Do you do much business here during the winter?”

“Well, we get a few kids skipping school and hiding out upstairs reading the comic books. They know their parents will never look for them in here. I like to let them roam around. If they made it this far, they deserve some rest, anyway.”

I chuckled in agreement. I like to use my hands when I talk, so I waved them around, “So where can I find the biographies? My mother told me I should read up on Nicola Tesla. Said he was a great man.”

She pointed up the staircase, and told me “aisle 23.”

I turned around a bit too fast. “Aisle 23?” My hand knocked the coffee over on the glass case. The expensive volumes under the counter would soon be stained and destroyed. The old woman scurried into the back room to get something to clean it up.

“Oh, I am so sorry ma’am! I am so embarrassed!”

“Don’t you worry about a thing, young man.”

I hopped over the case and grabbed the first edition I had been searching for.

A concordance to the works of Gurdjieff. Finally, I would be able to make sense of all the made up words he used in:

I have read that damned thing fifty times, and still, some of it makes no sense. Maybe it mirrors the parts of me that make no sense? Oh well, that is for another time. I ran out of the store with an embarrassed, “I’m so sorry, ma’am!”

When I got back to the lake shore hideout, I found Erika sound asleep on the bearskin rug. She had insisted that we take it with us before burning the old cabin. I agreed with her on that now too. It felt so wonderful to curl up in front of the fire with her on that old, familiar skin.

When I woke up the next day, I opened up the concordance. There, on page 111, I found the vellum I have come to expect in every book I steal.

It read, “…Nothing but God’s Shit.”

Existence is a still life, frozen forever in a thin layer of verglas.

The path was never a path at all.

How do I go on from here?

I’ll tell you. Back to sleep next to Erika.

Frances Benjamin Johnston (click for original location)

Tonight’s story takes place somewhere between the center of my brain and the far reaches of the cosmos, whatever that means.

I found myself frozen in time but still able to move. It felt bizarre to get trapped in my own memory palace. I had taken to studying memory enhancement, and David Jones recommended I check out these books:

Derren Brown’s book taught me how to build a Grand Palace in my mind, composed of buildings worn deep into my memories. Once I established this memory palace with daily practice, I could wander around in it in my head. I walked down streets of my childhood.

I lived on Lucia Lane. Lucia means “light” in Spanish. The Lane of Light.

Each building has a character all its own. The technique sounds like a cute trick for memorizing and counting cards. It is capable of far more than that. For one, it assists me in storing insane amounts of information easily. I can memorize anything I want in very little time.

After six long months of installing all kinds of expansions to the memory palace, I dropped it. I gave up on it and let it fade.

That’s when it happened.

I decided to hit the trail for a couple weeks in Wallowa mountains in eastern Oregon. I had all the gear I needed. Hell, why not? It was August anyway.

I remember nothing of the trip once I hit the trailhead, parked my Jeep, and set out for Eagle Cap. I went back to the summit register–a coffee can with a small waterproof notebook inside–Jack Bishop. I saw my name already scrawled on the paper next to the date 9.3.2003.
…

Suburban ranch home in Minnesota. Kitchen. Feeling. Mice ran around the vinyl floor in the kitchen. My parent’s divorced here. My stepdad made my Dad’s face bleed with his fists in the kitchen and entryway. The bedrooms held fun, sadness, prisons of childhood sins, and toy-filled gardens of Eden.

“Go to your room!”

How come we all get banished to our rooms? That made myself a place to run away from.

My sister’s bedroom, we sat on giant stuffed animals and rode them off dressers to the floor. The big stuffed dog named Henry. A giant turtle. We created adventures out of the sensation of falling. We threw ourselves off the dressers over and over again. We rode couch cushions down the stairs for indoor sledding.

So I got trapped in my childhood bedroom in my memory palace. This bedroom my parents banished me to. Mom used a washcloth in the door to keep it shut.

I had a bed with drawers under the matress in the side of a large frame. I kicked in the thin pieces of wood paneling at the base of it. Rage had gotten hold of me once my mom secured the door.

Every experience began to stimulate a memory in one of these rooms. I fell asleep.

I woke up in the kitchen, eating pancakes with my 9-year-old sister. We knew how to cook, even way back then. We played together all the time. I wandered around the house–one moment, empty. The next moment–filled with people….Aunts, Uncles, stepdads, relatives, dogs and cats, …I had gotten lost inside the river of my past, or somehow crawled into the folds of my own body of memory.

The bed had a hollow underneath it. Cobwebs in the corners fed my trembling–it took a renewed effort to crawl under there in spite of dark creatures spinning webs.

“Go to your room!”

Stomping feet pounded through the dark hallway, under a huge 3-foot glass globe, through the door on the left, slamming it shut behind me, I went to my room. That day, I discovered the hollow under the bed, my secret place. My ten-year-old muscles shook and shook. Aspen leaves a-tremble in a hurricane of my mother’s hot air.

I laid down at the tail end of the bed on the carpet, pulled my knees up to my chest, and kicked the slats until they splintered and fell into pieces.

My eyes got huge. I broke some unspoken rule. Trapped in my room, I still had my revenge.

How I woke up 20 years later with a stuffed lamb in my arms still seems unreal. The door would not open. It got slammed shut by mother twenty years earlier with a washcloth in between the door and the jamb to keep it closed. The house felt empty, but the intercom still worked. It had buttons on it that weren’t there when I was 10.

It had a list of names:

-Donnie
-Dad
-Mom
-Leslie
-Grandma
-Deborah
-Jorji
-Joe

and on and on, all the people who passed through that house when I called it home.

I left the intercom alone and sat on my bed for awhile. My feet hung over the edge, and sleep would not come upon me. Something told me to keep looking. Arising to open some drawers, I saw my old snoopy phone and Castle Greyskull near the closet. No dial tone. Time had stopped. All that remained was the house. Why, then, id the intercom start talking?

It was my sister Leslie’s voice, when she was 7-years-old, “Come to my room. Let’s play!”

I pressed the button, “Leslie,” and told her through a face of tears, “The door won’t open, I’m trapped in here.”

“Come to my room. Let’s Play!”

She said the same thing every time I pushed the button. No one was there to hear me. This house I found myself in was more of a grandiose recording than an actual location in space and time.

Compelled to keep pressing the buttons, parts of the room shifted after listening to each of the people speak. Some had more to say than others. By the time I decided to crawl under the bed and wait for something new to happen, everyone I had known over the first 10 years of my life had projected their movies through my brain and body, repeating over and over until the tracks started over at the beginning.

In a flash of brilliance, I remembered the folded piece of parchment I had stuffed into my breast pocket before I went to sleep that night.

I crawled under the bed and unfolded it.

A Hollow Never Exists. An Absence shaped by everything else, Such is man. Empty. Hollow. He never existed. Everything else gives him the illusion of a self. Absent, hollow, empty. In this way, you must proceed……

At that moment, my apartment started to extrude out of the ground and all around me.

The couch I had passed out on reasserted itself under my weary bones. I put the parchment away in my safe and went back to sleep.

-Jack

If you need to catch up, go ahead and check out my post here from last week, and you can also dig up a little more here.

So the lady didn’t get back to my cabin that night. I fell asleep until late the next night, when I awoke to the sound of scraping against the door, drowning out her angry grunting. She got the journal, but it nearly killed her to get it. Everything went as the script said it would. I still feel good about not showing her the script ahead of time, even though she still won’t talk to me now that she saw it. She won’t let me explain why I didn’t want her to see it, she just thinks that I kept her in the dark.

I wanted her to keep her edge, and none of the other pieces of vellum predicted an entire scenario before it had happened. Not to mention that the damned script itself said that I wouldn’t tell her about it until later on. Too bad the writing on the fragment ended with my escape from the bar. She would have never gotten involved if she would have known the importance behind following out the script exactly as I had found it.

I keep my fragments locked in a safe. A safe that no one knows about but me. Well, now you know about it too, but that doesn’t matter, really it doesn’t, because you can’t be sure whether or not I even exist, let alone the safe or its contents. Why, then, did I leave the vellum script out where she could find it? The cold must have really gotten to me that night. Not to mention losing all of that money in the snow. By the time I got back to the cabin, the chill, combined with astonishment at watching my life unfold exactly as the script read, all made me lose my cool and forget to lock up the fragment in the safe before she got back.

I didn’t expect to get so damned cold…and I didn’t expect to sleep for almost 24 hours. Something really got into me that night. I could not believe my eyes and ears as my reality began to merge with something I had already read…word for word, glance for glance, and hand for hand, as I kept counting the cards and piling up my money.

More than once I found my mind returning to my old faithful philosophy, “What the hell is going on here?” Yep, that’s right, my guiding philosophy in theory and in practice comes in the form of a question. How does that sit with you? It never fails to center me on the physical facts of my situation. Asking, “What the hell is going on here?” draws a dividing line between my imaginings, emotions and fantasies with the actual physical reality in which I often find myself. Although lately, even that reality seems anything but solid and predictable.

By the time she stopped hating on me for keeping her in the dark, I had nearly forgotten about my long coveted treasure.

“Did you get it?”

“Yes, but you have to tell me what the hell is going on here before I am going to give it to you.”

“Come on, I told you early on what you were getting yourself into. You chose to stay, and you continue to choose to stay. You coulda left with the money and the journal last night, and you know it!” I might have lied here. Everything I thought I knew went blurry after finding that damned scripted piece of my future. What if your whole life was predetermined–scripted–and part of it included that belief that you had free will?

“Here. Take the damned thing. I’m leaving. Now. For good.” With that, she left. She came back a couple hours later, after wandering around in the snow. I had walked because my car was buried in an 11-foot snow drift, and I didn’t care about getting it out. I worked hard to earn this month at my cabin. No distractions, no flights, no thievery. Just time to rest, enjoy the fireplace, and stare out the windows at the snow as it covered my car.

Thinking back to that night now, I have no idea how she got there in the first place. I know she walked the 2 hours from the bar. But how had she gotten to the bar to begin with? I started to think that she knew more than she had let on, but if that was true, she wouldn’t have gotten so angry about me not showing her the script. Unless….

Seeing her hurting pained me more than she would ever know. In bringing her up to speed about the fragments, the thefts, the global maze I had caught myself in, and the teaching that kept seeming to emerge from everything I touched, I was forced to relive my own painful awakening. I remember when I first looked into her eyes. I saw her smiling at me, searching to meet my gaze across a fire on a ranch in Oregon. I knew at that moment that she would play the role of apprentice. I stopped my searching and settled into the idea of getting close to her.

So much tension and pain, just waiting to be dissolved and converted into power. How could I tell her everything that awaited her? How could I tell her that my own awakening was still underway? When any of my teachers, and there were so many, tried to impart to me the knowledge of things that I needed to face, I could never bring myself to believe them. Just as she would never believe me if I had told her ahead of time the reason she felt so compelled to stare into my eyes.

You wouldn’t believe me either, if I told you why you felt compelled to read this, even now. You still think this is all some kind of story that has nothing to do with your life, don’t you? Of course you do. All is entertainment to you, isn’t it? A great man once said, “All is food for you, all is food for you.”

So, the lady threw Friedman’s journal at me. It bruised my left eye with a deep blue shiner, the same kind of blue she felt when she came back to the cabin that night she feigned a vanishing act. Everytime she ran away and came back, she left more of her false selves buried outside in the snow. Every terrifying view of reality that confronted her along her path left her feeling vibrant and more alive than she had ever felt before.

I suppose it makes sense that this journal left me with a black eye. I had to read with just my right eye. At first glance, it appeared that Friedman was just another innocent bystander in the grand charade unfolding before all of us. He wrote of his travels, of women, of business deals gone bad, and of his regrets and joys. Not much more or less than any other journal. Once I got to the end, I noticed a bulge in the back cover of the little black hardcover Moleskine.
There was nothing in the pocket. No, this was some kind of custom job. I peeled away the cover to find a tiny folded-up piece of vellum.

Why did Friedman have the vellum? Did he know about it? And how in the hell does every single book I get my hands on contain these fragments? At least this one didn’t have another script. It hurts my brain to try to imagine the motives and powers of the author(s) of these damned things.

I decided to share this one with the lady, since her hands had done the stealing this time.

“Pains and Fears? Caterpillars… In time, nothing but a sky full of butterflies.”

I suppose I could share with you a little about her. For now, I’ll just tell you her name: Erica. She doesn’t want me to tell her story for her, so I try to keep my mention of her to a minimum. I think she wants to tell it herself, someday.

Like I said, at first glance, that journal made it seem like Friedman had nothing to do with me. But once I pondered the message on the vellum and studied his entries in more detail, I knew just what I had to do next. Another week here in the snowy north, and then the lady and I would set off for the great plains of Africa, to find the sky full of butterflies and discover our next steps from there.

The toughest and most rewarding part of this adventure is having to take action before knowing anything about what might happen next…

For now, that’s all I have to say.

-Jack-

Have you ever heard the phrase, “Everybody Loves A Winner”? Well, my grandpa used to always say that to me before my wrestling matches in the 6th grade. I won a few matches and then gave up. Either way, no one seemed to give a damn. Now, my concept of winning and losing has transformed into a completely different beast. Most games people play happen to have a general losing effect on everyone involved. No matter who wins, everyone seems to lose.

Most folks don’t even suspect the existence of a game at all. Most have confused some arbitrary role or another as “life” and “reality.” R.D.Laing once wrote,

They are playing a game. They are playing at not
playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I
shall break the rules and they will punish me.
I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.

A hell of a lot of people out there would like to punish me for what I tried to do. It took fighting through and then finally abandoning some ill-fated drive to save the world by trying to expose people to some basic truths, but the more people I told, the more they hated me…so now, I keep things to myself, and I keep on getting deeper and deeper into all that surrounds me, inside and out.

So Grandpa said that Everyone Loves A Winner. Grandpa always watched the Chicago Cubs play baseball, and then he watched the stock ticker at the bottom of the screen on the news channel. In terms of baseball and stocks, “Everyone Loves A Winner” holds true. Everyone loves a winning stock, and everyone loves a winning sports team, though the real winners own stadiums, baseball teams, logo and merchandise rights, parking lots, and TV stations.

I like to make up my own games, and play by my own rules, while putting on a show that makes everyone else believe that I don’t believe that anyone plays games at all. One example of this arises in my theft of books from libraries around the world. No one at the libraries suspects that someone has left messages for me in the books, and no one suspects that I have shown up to retrieve the messages. You see, I have to take the books too, because the texts in which I find the clues provide a context for understanding how to integrate and adapt to the new information, and give me some idea of where to look for the next clue.

Sometimes I just get letters in the mail that tell me a library to go to, other times, I have to simply follow my gut, and it leads me to the right place. Although, I have a hell of a lot of other adventures besides just getting the books, not the least of which comes with traveling around the world and doing other heists to support myself and my adventures. The oldest book I took so far comes from around 1500. I’ll tell you more about that later on, but first, remember that saying, “Everybody Loves A Winner”?

I found myself at a blackjack table in a back-back-room in a bar deep in the woods of northern Minnesota in the middle of winter. The tall Red Pines popped and crackled in the 26-below-zero winds, and the smoke from the log-cabin-style bar’s chimney spread out flat just above the cabin roof and drifted away in thin strips into the darkness.

I had just learned how to count cards, and how to read a hell of a lot about people by what they wear, how they hold their tensions, what their faces look like, the sound of their voice, and all kinds of things you might never notice. I earned this education from a combination of studying Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories of that famous detective and techniques of olde time mentalists, with some hints and inspiration from the fragments of vellum that kept conveniently turning up in every single book I happened to steal.

Each piece of vellum got me deeper and deeper into this mess, until I learned enough to turn things around for me. The stakes got higher and higher, until I realized the stakes never existed in the first place. I will have to explain that to you a bit later on in my story, if at all. Like I said, I have tried and tried to explain some of these insights to people, but they get either angry or bored, or some combination of both, so in my own best interest, and in yours, I will just tell you my stories, and maybe someday I will share a bit more of the fragments.

One day I found the piece of vellum that would later prove to contain hidden inside it a script. The script described word for word what happened that day in Minnesota when I counted a few too many cards and won a few too many hands of blackjack after everyone had had a few too many shots of whiskey. Not everyone loves a winner.

I got out of there with all of my money, but I lost most of it running through the snow over the next couple of hours. My hands started to freeze, so I had to drop the sacks of cash I had packed up in such a rush just to keep my fingers warm against my belly while I ran. Once the lady gets back here in the next couple of days, then I’ll take account of my winnings.

It looked like most of the guys came out after me when I made a break for it with the bags of cash. If the distraction worked, she got outta there with John Friedman’s journal, and I will finally discover just how he fits into all of this. I spotted him so many times in so many places that I suspect he and I have some ties in Indra’s Net that I have yet to discover. Perhaps he knows more than he lets on.

Sometimes we have gone out for drinks, but the conversation never gets any deeper than talking cards or women. Well, after tonight, he won’t want anything to do with me. Especially after I dropped most of his $50,000 losses in the snow on the way back to my cabin. No one forced any of those guys to keep on playing. A sucker is a sucker, and Everyone Loves A Winner, right?

Well, at least my musical education set me up with more useful knowledge than my grandpa had for me. I could tell right when I needed to split before anyone reached for a pistol or a blade. I knew they wouldn’t follow me very far into the cold, anyway. Since the whole game was illegal, no one would call the cops, either. And we all agreed to never let each other know where we lived. That way, the games could get lively, but the players were more likely to stay alive to come to town for the next game.

The winnings didn’t matter as much as getting close to Friedman. Damn, that journal could hold the key to the next step toward resolving some of this madness. If Friedman knows what I know, why the hell would he feel the need to follow me? And If he doesn’t know, and he isn’t following me, who the hell keeps arranging for he and I to meet up all over the world?

Well, that diary of his ought to reveal something. I have seen him writing in it inside a cable car in Oregon; in a coffee shop in Shasta City, CA; in a revolving restaurant above Honolulu, HI; in a hash bar in Vancouver, BC; and nearly every country in western Europe over the past year. That little black book will add much to my collection, if not my direction.

The vellum script ended with me getting away in the snow. It might as well have been written by Kenny Rogers, since it so closely resembled his song, The Gambler,

You got to know when to hold em, Know when to fold em
Know when to walk away, Know when to run…

Now, time to warm my frozen fingers and toes on this fire, smoke a little, and drift off into a couple days of hibernation, until that fine woman strolls in with that little bit of textual treasure.

Ah, How I love my life in the Post-Apocalypse! Back to my bearskin in front of the stone fireplace. I wish you could join me. These frozen lakes covered in powdery snow reflect the moonlight in tiny specks in the eyes of beautiful women. Hell, they might work even in my own eyes, but I like to see myself reflected in my lovers’ eyes instead of in a cold, hard mirror. Flesh reflects flesh better than a mirror anyhow…

If only you knew what I know, you wouldn’t confuse fact with fiction, and fiction with your personality, and your personality with your true self. Oh well, it doesn’t really matter anyway. Enjoy the Post-Apocalypse, whatever you do.

This is Jack, signing off.