BRIEFING FOR AN ASCENT OUT OF YOUR NAVEL
and into... reality!

What is it and what are those weird noises it's making?
Reality slithers
it's alive, ALIVE!

I call on you reading this now to wake up to reality the way a sleeper awakens from one dream into another.
Come on, Sleeping Beauty, Come on, Rip Van Winkle, Come on, Ashley Saint Ives,
come sleeping sapling coiled in embryonic seed, come yoga mudra and do the dancing downward dog - pass through veils of perception as clean as a hot knife through cobwebs, gliding and gleaming towards steaming breakfast pancakes of the mind.

Genius is but well-tempered insanity, channeled through to pen and ink as the sex drive is channeled into capitalism.
Score one for our team! But you got to learn to not run to mommy with your A plus for the big dopamine payoff - you got to shoot that shit in yourself, pretty boy. Can't you show Patti Smith nothing but Surrender?
The true insanity knows this and entwines its heart with the mysterious, the otherworldly void that is not otherworldly we realize in an uncanny flash but is our home, and Iraq was just you all the time, moustaches and nooses, bags on heads and bombs in nurseries, all this was you all the time,
and Corporate podiums with insignia-bedecked officials reciting what is spoken into their hidden earpiece by off-screen power brokers; you are the podium, you are the mouth that speaks, the eyes that watch from the presumed safety of the dark, you are the hand that bombs and the hand that heals, you are the mouthpiece that speaks to masses and the mouth that speaks to the mouthpiece.

A shabby shaman shamus is no stranger to purification rituals, or poison for that matter; a shamus learns you got to take the good with the bad to get the facts, ma'am, man, Dennish Hopper on roybal or no -but this chick takes it all the time, can you dig that? Okay, I'm losing my train of thought here... put this book down and meditate on the principles of push me and pull you, the llama friends of Dr. Doolittle. Ah HAH!

You had forgotten all about them, hadn't you? Hadn't you better? I mean if you haven't already, because they're stupid? Got you again, judgmental freak. If you were here I'd slap you right about now and right about there. I really mean that, I'd slap the silly out of you, pronto. But you're not here, slapping the mirror just hurts us both. And now is. Now always is, but you can't slap it. General, you can broil it fry it send it to die in the trenches drowned in French's to mask the stenches, but you just can't slap it.

THE GAP BETWEEN THOSE WHO HAVE
and those who haven't - never existed.
I've been in therapy, it
gets longer every day... longer and longer - and to stay in therapy is to be like the astronaut in space--of self--the Bowman, the Kier Dullea ever reaching for that black obelisk rainbow. To not be in therapy is to live always without borders, to deny borders
as firmly as a mom denies her son the one thing he wants, as firmly as rain is fire's double, as firmly as trouble and lack thereof are one; the illusion of death, transcended at last. All eternity is faced either way, but first we build a nice castle, and put on the lotion, and absorb the baking lessons of great god the sun. Omm Omm Ommm,

We try--when the castle gets washed away by tides to come and you know it will-- to act surprised.