HOW TO COMMIT EGOCIDE - Life is a a Haunted Carny Attraction

1. WATER IS IMPORTANT

First thing if you are to come with me on this special journey to the other realm, where the ego has been brainwashed into committing suicide so the soul can live unfettered, you must drink water.

      *    Most trips to the emergency room could have been avoided if the ailing person had been drinking water instead of doing whatever they were doing

      *    Drink it down like a sailor drinks the air at sea.

      *  You were a fish once a upon a million years, and so, by law of fractals, will be again.

We hate water, don't we? (applause, laughter) I mean to drink, as it's so dull and unimaginative; we hate it like we hate our own relatives, our own ancient, dissolving saline and water selves in the mirror. Coke is so much better because it's dark and alien, so sweet and strange and exciting. But though Coke starts out as a ride in a stranger's car it ends in the light of the carnival midway as you exit feeling cheated from the super lame haunted house with half the papier mache monster windows unlit, broken, the chicken wire screen torn through by scuzzball vandal children, the shrieks of the damned tinny from a blown speaker cone, fuzzy with radio receptions...

But the reason why we block out the memory of death is the same reason we block out the memory of how dumb and so damn short that haunted 'house' was; two weeks and we remember that ride as a pretty good time; thirty years and it glows with a patina of nostalgia; what was once a cheap papier mache skull behind a mesh screen and surrounded by lights the flicked on and off as you walked past along a moldy plywood tunnel now becomes art distilled. The skull has a symbolic resonance! Ta dum! You see it reflecting in  the blackness of your pupils; you turn suddenly and see it in the form of some dude walking behind you and you wonder if maybe that dude's been behind you your whole life, waiting with the patience of a well-paid chauffeur for you to die, to step out of your current obscenely human form so he may escort you onto the next attraction.

The cool part is you're only pretending to be scared, to fool yourself, to make the movie more exciting. When you can't get around it anymore, dying was something you've really been looking forward to since the day after your birth. You left some unfinished projects back there in the void, and now you can catch up... 

That was what was so cool about the BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, it brought out the same feeling that Santa Clause once did. You knew on some deep level there was no Santa but it was fun to believe in him, to exist in the hazy realm of in-between belief and skepticism; so too we learned to fool ourselves into believing the movie really was found tapes from a disappeared filming expedition. This ability to "fool" oneself in order to get more of a "kick" out of the experience is part of what makes life grand. Without it, the images close in so fast and furious we are soon bludgeoned to blindness. We want to rattle at our chains, KONG-like but there are no chains. Chains cost extra.

The Muslim extremist enemy is free of this, free of images and doubt, he wants less, not more. We, on the other hand, want so badly to build him a McDonalds that we'll steal his water and hummus just to force him to try one of these savory burgers. He on the other hand, wants so badly to not eat this burger he blows himself and us-- up.

You have to learn to be your own master, otherwise the minute you earn your freedom you sign up with the first flashy new master who comes along, invariably alcohol and/or sex. The collected wages of six months at sea are drunk and screwed dry in a single shore leave. If the sailor's not shanghaied, mugged, killed, or just alienated as couples and fed people pass in the street like they have some place to go, he just wanders around drunk and disoriented until he finds his way back aboard or to some landlocked inn that seems to sway by not swaying under heavy currents. The first clean ship he can, this mate back to see goeth.

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. Easier said than done, I know. I can read flashy calls to action all I want it never works, I'm either 'there' or 'not there' - if I'm there those kind of words make sense and sing in the veins; if not, they just sound phony, pretentious, another two bit preacher telling everyone else what to do. I'd never want to lead the kind of people dumb enough to follow me, so I've never followed through on my periodic plans to start a cult. Even if I'm thunderstruck with a 'Whole New Way of Life' from on high ala frickin' Brigham Young or John Smith or whomever the hell, the first dry wind and I'm back on the couch, bong in hand, remote in the other, flicking away any grungy reminder of the real world..

But there is a way to spread the news without meeting the chumps - art, genius, writing (like this, hopefully) that tries to call itself out enough to arrive at some truth beyond ego. 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 into your arm rather than into the old world's brain. The true insanity knows this and entwines its heart with the mysterious, the otherworldly void that is only otherworldly--we realize in a flash--because it was too close to notice as our own self spread out in compass twirls. Iraq was just you all the time, mustaches and nooses, bags on heads and bombs in nurseries, all this was you all the time, scarecrow! Corporate podiums with insignia-bedecked officials reciting what is spoken into their hidden earpiece by off-screen power brokers - you, too. 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, and you are the bomb, Strangelove! Strange love indeed...

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, man, Dennish Hopper on Roybal, man, 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. 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, you two headed can't talk except to the man chattering in Chimp with Pimp NZ. if you were here I'd slap you right about now, and about the ass, and now as I'm rambling and unscrambling meanings within Lennon-head tripster talk to the animals non-sequitors. I really mean that, I'd slap the silly out of you, pronto. But you're not here. And now is. Now always is, but you can't slap it. General, like some kind of a super carrot you can broil it, fry it, send it to die in the trenches, but you just can't slap it, unless it's a bass, front. 

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THE GAP BETWEEN THOSE WHO HAVE

and those who haven't

been in therapy

gets longer every day... longer and longer  - and to stay in therapy is to be like the astronaut who is in space, 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 ocean sounds and cocoanut lotion, absorb the baking lessons of great god the sun. Omm Omm Ommm, and ya burnt!