Nigel Kneale's THE STONE TAPES and PTSD-- Theories of Residual Haunting Energy

Now it's common parlance for a very apt theory for hauntings as residual psychic energy recorded within the crystals and other minerals within old stone walls (in castles, especially), this can explain why older edifices such as castles and crumbling old mansions tend to be haunted more than plywood domiciles (unless said domiciles are build near major power junctions or rivers or above mineral deposits, aquifers, etc.

And maybe at the moment of your death, if it's violent and sudden enough, your terror and confusion can be so great that the moment right before your death you can unleash such a firestorm of latent psychic energy that you can create a rupture in the time-space continuum, like an LP with a note hit on a track that's so sharp and discordant the vibration causes the needle to skip out of its groove, and leaves that portion of your psyche behind, split off from the rest of your aura, to replay the same last few seconds or minutes of your life over and over - every new scream in mortal terror like the first, until even with a new record on the turntable that loop is still there, screaming maybe only loud enough to be heard during moments of high charge in the air (lightning storms, a child reaching puberty, etc.)

Either way it's fascinating to consider - especially if you follow the whole past life recovery phenomenon, lately taking off due to children and their parents being able to track down their child's past life via the internet - even to go and visit their old life's family--total strangers--and recognize them all by name, know where secret treasure is buried, et al. The unifying factor for them all is a brutal sudden shock death - one example even fell during 9/11; another was on the Titanic; another a Russian soldier who died in WW2, another a Navy pilot who went down in the Pacific. In each it's the idea that PTSD is such a powerful force, such a 'skip' on the album that it causes a stone tape sort of repetition even if the subject is still alive, and if dead it carries over --recorded in the soul and carried over, so that when the new album is getting started on the turntable the ghost of the skipping stone tape is still skipping on repetition in the distance, audible during the space between the tracks (when the child is asleep). Only by parental acknowledgement of the truth of this past life, its authentication in documents and information the existence of which the child couldn't possibly have known beforehand, can the kid move on (as in the very touching tale of James Lenninger).

Farther:

The Evolver Virus: Prometheus, The Dead Files (some date);

With a love that will echo through the Ages: Reincarnation, 

the Lost Lenore, SHE, Kate WINSLET, the Mummy, etc. (9/25/07)

American Grievers, Part Two: THE FOUNTAIN (2011)

Totaled Recall: THE HANGOVER (2009) and 

WHO IS HARRY NILLSSON? (2010)

Die like an Eagle: ENTER THE VOID (2009)

Prodigy: Alexandra Nechita, "The Petite Picasso"

Gremlins from the Kremlin (Machine Elves!)

If you've ever encountered 'machine elves' in your 'travels' you may be like me and fall out of your chair when you run past a semi-obscure Warners cartoon from the 40s, "Gremlins from the Kremlin," which has one of their weirdest songs, and weirdest animation, very very salvia / DMT. Was that shit just in the wind or was there an interdimensional disruption created by all the carnage where machine elves, the titular gremlins, spilled out of the leaky collective unconscious into 3D space time? Either way, it's startling - not necessarily what they look like, but their marching order --note the way they dance in tightlocked formation from an infinite point into existence, as if one being skipping across time's hexagonal slices, like a reality CatScan Dancer. Yeah, you've seen 'em!

If not - study yonder prop: here

Secret Dis/closure: WAVELENGTH (1983), and ROSWELL: THE UFO COVER-UP (1994)

It's always fascinating --even alarming--how few 'grey alien' science fiction films there are, making one wonder if there's any truth to the rumor that unless you're a big hitter like Spielberg, you better obscure your aliens appearance, and not make them too 'close to the truth' - the only ones who can do it without repercussion are the ones that don't try to be too realistic, and we wonder which came first, there's that rumor that the government took a picture of an actual alien and gave it to Toys R Us to make an alien doll with, an ingenious disinformation move as the real aliens would look just like the toy.



With the new Stranger Things on Netflix a kind of MK Ultra Truth reaching has begun, and maybe this movie is part of that disinformation campaign. If not for the box art and live witnesses (I found about this via The Secret Sun). If no other reason than Cherie Curie, the weird melancholic 'hushed' mood, and the Tangerine Dream music, this would be a winner. It's got more too.



Another one that seems very factual but never has been seen since it was out on--I think Showtime--inn the early 90s (I caught in a hotel room in NJ by accident). Having heard nothing/anything remotely involving a 'truth' to alien visitation up to that point, it was a pretty significant 'accident' in my life.

Terrifying Women Come in Twos

Only some lucky or maybe dead guys know about the weird pairs of alien women--they always go in pairs--hunting young men, or something.... if we take them up on their offer, we're never heard from again. Only those of us who've run the other way have stuck around to tell the tale. One of the few to get this just right is DECOYS (2004), a Canadian schlock film which uses the usual college freshman Night of the Creeps-style comedy to go with its pungent expose of the women predator phenom. I think they're related somehow to those kids with the black eyes who approach cars in the dead of night, to Bob and the dwarf in TWIN PEAKS, and so forth.


I know, you see... because I've wandered into the net of these weird twosomes before, three or four times over my long time partying career; always they were different women, always very unsusual in how sexually aggressive they were, how strange they acted, and how weirded out the guys who actually had sex with them were. Our freeloading charismatic grifter from the east, Scumby, shagged one and came out mere minutes later ashen, he said something was off about her body but never went into detail. He forgot about it; we forgot about it, blocked it out. What was up with these girls, wondered I? The last time I ran into them was at Earth Day after Scumby convinced me to take way too much acid - and man I was in a bad bad place; the prettier one (my one) came up to me and while everything else was weird anyway, including my reflection, she seemed like an image, like no attraction repulsion magnetism, but rather like a ghost vortex of desire- a beautiful hippy girl I can still remember her body, hair, the maroon color of her dress, but damned if I remember her face, or what about her sent me running in the opposite direction, apologizing over my shoulder - and me desperately single, horny and unhappy. I should have/ could have glommed right about that shit- but what the hell stopped me? What made her very allure seem like some dangerous trap?



What's weird is the schlub party guy is too weirded out by the hot girl in the bathroom - hey alien or no when a hot blonde chick attacks you in the bathroom it's rude to say no, but that's why DECOYS works, because guys are all talk - lord knows I was, but didn't know myself well enough to realize the con game I was running on myself. We all want to get with the right girl so bad and then some totally hot but something's off and we can't quite place it girl falls into our laps and starts mauling us and we're drunk enough maybe we can roll right into it before our defenses kick in.

But otherwise, something weird happens: we panic and run. It's the Lacanian objet petit a invading our orbit of desire; we're destabilized. It's like if the sun was our sexual longing for the right girl, that constant relentless ache where every moment not spend in the company of beautiful girls is like a knife in the heart twisting, the superego ranting in our brain about what losers we are, but then a beautiful girl suddenly lunges towards us, finally we'll get that desire but it's too soon, we're not ready, we panic, we run, and then coming out of it later, the superego moves from that fight or flight instinct to railing on us for being pussies and not going for it; it's almost like the superego did it n purpose, so it could beat us up extra hard about it later.

I don't know enough on this subject to make a judgment or hazard a guess as to what these women are all about, but when SNL recently did a sketch about a pair of blonde black-eyed aliens women at a speed dating party, I felt a pang of genuine uncanny terror. What is up with these pairs? Are they aliens, or just MONARCH 7 mind controled sex slave assassins who slipped their programming.

IN EYES WIDE SHUT...

The weird irrational behavior of the two models in the opening party, for example, along with everything else that goes on, can be explained through the maze of the mind control theory, as they want to take him "over the rainbow," presumably a well-known code for the world that is shown to subjects of the practice, leaving them a way to explain all the bizarre things that seem to happening to them, THE WIZARD OF OZ being one of the source texts for this kind of conditioning:

"The Rainbow--with its seven colors has long had an occult significance of being a great spiritual hypnotic device. Constance Cumbey, in her book The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow, which exposes the New Age Occult Movement, correctly writes, "The Rainbow (also called the Antahkarana [left] or Rainbow Bridge) (...) is used as a hypnotic device (p.261). 

"The Supreme Council of the 33rd" of Freemasonry has used the rainbow on the cover of their magazine. In a book teaching Druidism (as in Illuminati Druidism), The 21 Lessons of Meryln, the Rainbow is described as "A true sign of Magic...it exists in both worlds at once!" Elvira Gulch is a woman who owns 1/2 of the county where Dorothy lives in Kansas. She is shown later in the Land of Oz transformed as a witch.

Many of the Illuminati elite are rich and lead double lives. People who meet them at a ritual will see the dark side of these rich people. At the rituals, people are tranced from drugs, chanting, and mind control; they are "over the rainbow." - Fort Refuge

On the other hand, the two girls may be there to just set up the future problem between Bill and Alice, whose mutual attractiveness has surely caught them the attention of interested parties before, but like the single night of misadventure that opens A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, their marriage seems to begin at this party. (No one from Alex's violent misdeeds prior to the home invasion night gets revenge, for example.)

The figure who separates Bill and Alice originally, Nick Nightingale, has a name that symbolizes sleep (we always fall asleep alone no matter who is in our bed), and immediately after Bill is called away, Alice is hit on by her animus-representation, the Anton La Vey, and soon thereafter Bill gets drawn into a menage a trois any man would melt in his bones for. Now, in my book any good looking young couple is going to want to mingle and flirt and bask in the adoration of others at a party, and then they go home together and no harm done. What, are they supposed to just canoodle all night? Why even go to the party if not to strut? So why are they so cowed and confused by this attention they're receiving? Why does Alice seem to change into a different person, very coy, tranced out, and strange, the minute Anton approaches? Why are these girls so bizarre? Is that illuminated star by the door some psychic trigger to release their inhibitions, or is this just what really really good expensive champagne does?

In the end there's a weird symbiosis between the masked orgy Bill crashes and Alice's dream and the idea that Alice is actually the girl who dies (or 'has her brains fucked out' to use Sidney Pollack's vile terminology), begging the question: what is worse, a sex-saturated dream where you lose control and are violated every which way but which you are enjoying (she's the center of attention -- she 'belongs' there) or a sexual reality in which you are out of your depth?

As someone whose had a panic attack after being hit on by two spooky models at a 2006 Halloween party, I no longer envy and hate Dr. Bill the way I did when I first saw the film in 1999. I hadn't read Lacan then, and couldn't stand the fact that Bill's uncertain fog lets these two hotties slip away, and all the subsequent ones he loses, or even got them in the first place, or was so easily picked up the West Village streetwalker. I mean this isn't Atlantic City! But now I'm beaten down, broken on the wheel of time, like a scarecrow. If I had another encounter with those two spooky models I would still run away but wouldn't hate myself so much later. Why? Because now I've read up on EYES WIDE conspiracy mind control theorems.

Here's a detail I remember about those two girls who tried to pick me up but gave me a whopping panic attack instead (and this after I 'tested' my psychic powers by requesting in my deep meditation to pick up not one but two girls for a menage a trois that night)-- one was dressed as a dominatrix, the other wore a black bikini, had a perfect body, AND REPTILE EYES, though they were presumably contacts for her 'costume.' OR we were meant to assume so, just as we are meant to assume that all of the masks at the orgy in EYES hide human faces. Are reptile contact lenses on Halloween the perfect cover, allowing reptilian-human hybrids to show their real selves?
REPEAT FROM ABOVE (in the interest of derangement, I'm telling this story twice, as my dad began to do, like his grandfather before him, the same story over and over - for what it's worth.. I forgot I already wrote about it down here when I wrote about it up there, but... um.... it makes sense, since the women hunting in twos thing calls for it. As does my wry picture of THREE women (from DECOYS) as the top image. There's always time for deadpan self-satire.
If that's what that is...
--
Now that we're talking about it, I'm remembering a run in or two with another pair of spooky girls, hippie chicks (and one guy) up in Syracuse in 1987. They were gorgeous and way too sexually open for my prudish tastes, to the point I found myself backing up away from them and was not sure why, as I was hardly a virgin, or sober. I can barely remember what any of these two sets of girls looks like now, except that they were very sexy, and seemed possessed with eerie calm. If I did hook up with either set, would I even be alive today? And are all my subsequent peccadilloes just my long night of the soul trying to get revenge on womankind for making me feel all itchy and strange for my chickening out of these encounters? Were these girls even human? Was their whole mission just to seduce men and steal their DNA, and/or leave us with a lifetime of sexual anxiety that they could siphon off with their orgone harvesting matrixes?

My hippy house's resident freeloader Eric did sleep with one of those hippie chicks and was super weirded out afterwards. He told me that something about her vagina didn't look right, though he couldn't explain exactly what was so wrong about it....then again he's not a writer. One of them came onto me at an outdoor concert while I was tweaking out on way too much LSD and my dog acted all afraid of her and her beauty carved into me like talons; I could feel the emanating waves of open sexuality calling to me but I could see my mortal death as well. I heard myself muttering an incoherent apology and felt my legs carrying me away even as a part of me tried to take up her offer.

Plus, Bill getting called away before he can go 'over the rainbow' to deal with the OD seems to be implying those two girls meant shooting him up as well as whatever sexual stuff... and he may have wound up as comatose as she is. Even metaphorically it means he is spared the problems that plague a man beset upon by two hot women, a kind of all-encompassing panic-inducing mix of dread and desire that confound his ability to walk or think clearly (the awkward nervous banalities of their conversation reflects this kind of flushed disorientation). It is like a drug in and of itself, draining normal humdrum reality, the way, for example the music dies down and changes and the rest of the world becomes a blur when Maria and Tony's first spot one another in WEST SIDE STORY.

The Illuminati, Hypnosis, Paranoia, Schizophrenia, Kubrick, and Tom Cruise

Masters of the Fantasmatic Dimension, from left: Klytus (Flash Gordon), Dwarf from Twin Peaks, MC (Eyes Wide Shut), The Wizard of Oz, Evil Queen

In the end, the paranoia around the Illuminati is "which came first, the chicken or the egg"-style ingenious: if you let even a small amount of it in, you find suddenly everything clicks, and yet doesn't -and paranoia stars fusing with your skepticism. It's like hiding the fact you've been swimming by standing out in the rain. If anyone accuses you of swimming you just point to the sky, nature your ultimate alibi. In the Illuminati case, their ceremonies either mimic paranoid schizophrenic delusions in order to provoke split personalities for neural programming (a kind of mimetic mental magic) or their ceremonies are purely the product of pre-existing schizophrenic delusions / dreams / unresolved Oedipal tensions of the kind a kid will grow out of naturally unless he winds up hypnotized by an ambitious DA, or if he has an inherent genetic predisposition towards mental illness.

But what does it matter which is which?  aside from why everyone else seems to be having such cool sexy time but you? In the end we should be grateful for the trickle-down, because any other response than to dismiss it with a chuckle is self-defeating. How can you kill a serpent you can't even see? Why live in fear of an idea? That kind of thinking can lead to madness.

And let's boil it all down to basics: there's one ultimate signifier for all this: the serpent in the garden of Eden, or to use Kubrick terms, the 2001 Obelisk. Even the sexual trauma crimes of Humbert, Alex, Quilty, all come with this backhanded baggage leading back to that rat snake. We can only gain wisdom and self-reliance by having some higher intelligence 'blow up our spot,' to force us out the door of our parent's Edenic house, either via lies, a boot out the door, sexual molestation or some other form of brutal, traumatic, invasive ejecting. The military training in FULL-METAL JACKET is trying to achieve this same effect, to shape the lazy material of complacent man into something more advanced, and unfortunately (as per Nietzsche) nothing is more advanced than someone who is able to kill without conscience. Quilty empowers Humbert to kill him, as the drill instructor empowers Pyle, and Alex empowers the grotty old man in the alley singing for cutter, me brothers. They are evolution's bouncers, booting us out of any room, second womb, or early tomb we linger too long in.

"Oh? And what's so STINKIN' about it?"

Still I can't imagine the CIA or anyone getting it together enough, or feeling insecure enough, that they feel they need to hypnotize mass armies of hot girls to do their perverse bidding. Just having an endless supply of good cocaine is enough to get armies of hot girls to do your bidding, and a hell of a lot easier. And the first thing you learn in Lacan is that the drive is the circulation as such and therefore more than one orgy is a drag. The 24/7 availability kills the desire, and the whole round robin of desire becomes just more desolate post-orgasm blues.

But again, that's irrelevant. As per Zizek via Lacan (or vice versa), the Big Other's whole purpose is to remove the 'constituent anxiety," to make sure there is no "traversing" the fantasy which would dislocate the subject from its void-circumscribing orbit. In EYES WIDE SHUT, Ziegler's positing Dr. Bill as an outsider who will never be a member of this exclusive shadow society, no matter what mask he dons, is doing him a massive favor, because this forbidden society exists solely in order to exclude him, and thus perpetuate constituted (rather than constituent) anxiety. It's a gift, son! This lack of a gift is the best gift he can give.

A similar effect occurs with UFO crash sightings wherein the military steps in, harasses and bullies witnesses into silence, and reports it was a weather balloon or crashed satellite, then hauls it away never to be seen again. In doing this they perpetuate the revolution around the desire. They fan the flames of the need to know, and so perpetuate the illusion that they have this thing well in hand. If they announced a spacecraft was found, the world press would swamp them and create panic, but by simultaneously threatening witnesses and lying to the press they create a subliminal consolation. Instead of worrying about aliens we're angry at the government for not telling us the truth. We always feel protected when denied knowledge.

A key aspect of this fantasy-traversing orbit is the desire to 'retrace one's steps,' to find the fork where you and your fantasy parted ways (for we feel innately we were once within the fantasy rather than orbiting outside it). In EYES, this is what Cruise's Dr. Bill does the next day after his orgy dismissal; the return is always built into any orbit, with the illusion of linear time transcended. Danny retraces his steps in the Overlook maze snow; Dr. Bill retraces his ominous journey through the mask store; the star child returns to earth, presumably to drop down into the lap of the very same ape who had tossed the bone up at the start of 2001; Alex re-encounters all the people he beat up in the first part of the film. The old men get to hurl some spit and fists in retaliation, his poor long-suffering mom cries as he's kicked out by his replacement son, and the man who was forced to 'viddy well' his wife's defilement gets revenge by forcing Alex to 'auddy well' his dear Ludwig Van's colossal degradation; Humbert's visit to the pregnant, bespectacled, de-sexualized Lolita mirrors his visit to her mother in the beginning, and the shooting of Quilty both opens and closes the film.

This is why the ultimate realization scene for Dr. Bill is when the odious Ziegler begins to back up over his 'charade' story and he realizes he's met a man even more of a fake than he is. That's what nails him, more than the mask, which is just another reminder both of these rich elite's powerful omnipresence, but that it could be Ziegler himself who is the mastermind of all the things, right down to the call girl Mandy's O.D. which may be fake anyway. Is anything real at all? In clouding the issue Ziegler shows Dr. Bill the very painting of his fear, the refractions created by falseness and the empty cold of his cocksure grin, which its smug wearer presumes sweetens any amount of evasive bullshit.

This sounds horrible, but so what? We've been dealing with its trauma ever since mom first made us sleep in our own room, with at least one door between her and our quivering, longing self. But without that trauma, we're Norman Bates or worse. Without shadows all is pure light, indistinguishable from other light; there is no division between shadow and self anymore than one sunbeam can be portioned off from the rest, reserved to shine only on the elite. The introduction of evil into the world is inseparable from the introduction of choice, the possibility of free will. We all are welcome to join a yoga class if we want, and know the perfect grace and joy of breaking free from our 'programming' and merging with the divine through our breathing, but let me tell you, what a bore it is to live in that 24/7. I've done it, bro, and while I was perfect love and in the moment I was also very open to scammers, without the capacity for any resistance against temptation or exploitation... no wonder all the cult leaders end up committing all sorts of sexual abuses; they go crazy from being so free and yet so 'chosen up' as far as the light or the dark, so sure they know which is which - at first all the evil seems gone from their soul, but it's just sneaking around the back. When it comes, it's masked in heavenly light which the cult leader's ego never dreams might be anything but what he wants it to be. In denying he's still subject to root reptilian (Satanic) urges he gives them free choice of masks, so they come dressed as God.

(In No Way a) CONCLUSION:

We won't ever rise from our shackles of sleep until we learn to not judge those who keep us in the cave of Morphius. We simply need to recognize this is once again ourselves. We have to go back to Freud because if we boil it down to some exclusionary cult we're only choosing to exclude ourselves from our own story. We're kissing with a mask on. I'm sure the mask kissing connects to a Monarch MK-ULTRA program, but by now it's time to look inward for relevance rather than this arcane projection, the which came first, the paranoia or the conspiracy, and might conspirators deliberately invoke paranoia in those who try to unravel their secrets, and might the engendered paranoia be the whole point of those secrets.

LOOKING INWARD NOT OUTWARD:

The issue that sets the events of EYES WIDE SHUT in motion is really begun the night before by Nicole's feeling attracted to the Satanist at the party and projecting her desire on the screen of jealousy over Bill's two models. His evasiveness and and inability to admit he was turned on by those beautiful ladies is what drives her insane. The confession of love from the woman whose father just died mirrors this; loving a man she barely knows but marrying a blander version (a Tom Cruise variation with glasses) mirrors the two sides of Alice, who oscillates between wearing glasses and being her darker Mandy self. He's trying to find his own asleep wife, but he can't even find his own sleeping self. The double in the glasses represents the castrated, limited version of Dr. Bill, the one who is known, tamed, outside the realm of murky desire, the party Bill is trying so desperately to crash.

Bill has neglected this darker self, the Mr. Hyde, who could revel in this kind of sexualized madness, and so his nocturnal wandering becomes a sad attempt to find the real corollary, the place where sexual dreams are reality, i.e. Through the Looking Glass, because he has made no peace with his unconscious he grasps onto the white lapels of Nick Nightingale, his unconscious corollary, a blindfolded musician at the ritual, a nocturnal wanderer in between realms (for musicians at rituals can traverse both realms, conduct the orgies of the damned without taking part, i.e. the organist in CARNIVAL OF SOULS).

From left: Mary Henry (Carnival of Souls); Nick Nightingale (Eyes Wide Shut)

 Alice is more evolved because she encompasses both sides in one person. Her double is the drug abusing Mandy (they're both tall and have red hair) which is the only way it makes sense, since it's absurd to think that Mandy would even remember Bill if she was that zonked upstairs at Ziegler's party especially since he's wearing a mask at the orgy. Why even bother to warn him?

Personally, anyone who threatens me with rehab just because I pass out at a really dull party after giving a boring blow job for whatever vast sum, I say kill him.

-----

The Cockiness of Impotence

The saving grace of so much Kubrick is that he casts doubt on the truth of events in his films, creating space for them to be read as the deranged clinical sadism of an impotent egghead. Impotence is a recurring theme, from the fluoride in the precious bodily fluids in DR. STRANGELOVE (which as we all know pollutes our third eye reducing our spiritual awareness) to the lack of visible sex in LOLITA. The absence of the phallus, the impossibility of union with the objet petit a creates the desire, while for Dr. Bill the only sex he actually sees or becomes a part of is the sex witnessed at the masked orgy. He's cut off from everything by a cocky smarm that won't even allow him to admit he was nearly lured over the rainbow (just as Alice was nearly lured upstairs to the 'Renaissance sculpture room'). It's cocky boyish persona that is blocking his every attempt to stray from his wife, the internalized mask that cuts him off from all his desires on his magical night, so that the following day, retracing his steps, he finds that all the once open avenues are closed, and that he narrowly missed possibly contracting HIV, being killed, and so on. His wife's phone call saved him from contracting HIV (presumably this was Kubrick's meaning), the same way Mandy's OD kept him from going over the rainbow, and at the orgy Mandy saves him from presumably being killed. In each instance Mandy/Alice are hovering in the ether like a cockblocking guardian angel.

"I'd never belong to any club that would have me as a member." - Groucho Marx

Cruise's insistence on going to this masked orgy is itself cause for his exclusion, in the Kafkaesque double bind of desire. No one in the elite wants this rube wandering around like a freakin' Times Square tourist, maybe calling his frat buddies to come hoot it up, taking credit for its existence via 'finding it' bragging rights When a real nice party doesn't want you, and you know for sure you wouldn't be welcome, have nothing to offer, well, you deserve everything you get for crashing anyway. Maybe you should stay home and work on your attitude, Dr. Bill!

An example of this 'deserved exclusion' occurs in the first season, second episode of the X-FILES ("Deep Throat"): Mulder really wants to see what's at this experimental military airbase that has been causing pilot zombie suicides... he has the suspicion the pilots are going insane from test flying captured alien discs. Mulder is denied entrance to the base of course-- the signs are posted to keep out-- but he's really curious so he sneaks in. Then he's caught and brainwashed to forget everything he's seen. Man, he's so indignant about that. We're clearly supposed to think this treatment is wrong but since when does curiosity alone warrant you to trespass against clearly-posted and authorized keep out signs? Everyone knows the FBI is riddled with Communist spies. Mulder could be one of them. Who the hell knows? I've had parties crashed by loathsome cretins I'd never let in if their masks weren't on, preventing me to know who they are, and if I wasn't tripping so hard I couldn't ask.
The scariest thing was when at one of our last Halloween parties a HUGE guy came in wearing an ugly full head latex monster mask, I mean he just radiated menace, and me in my lysergic funk I could just imagine pulling his mask off and seeing something a hundred times worse... I was afraid to even talk to him let alone kick him out as he lumbered back and forth across our pad, chugging our whiskey and looking around like any minute he was about to get the boot and wanted to make sure he stuck it to us enough first.

I'm still traumatized about that godless night. So no, I have no sympathy for Dr. Bill. He doesn't deserve to crash this soiree for the very same reason that he wants so desperately to. In this instance I think it's because he's gradually realizing his cocky sureness, his rich cutesy youth, is drawing hypnotized gorgeous druggy models to him like flies, and he desperately wants to belong to the last club that won't have him as a member, to keep pushing it until he makes it to the top of the heap he thinks he's already at. By denying him entrance Ziegler/the Illuminati forces Bill back into his marriage, gives him something better, in the end, than knowledge, gives him fear of knowledge.

All along he didn't want to become Ziegler, the Primal Father, but to connect. The masks in the orgy are at least removable, but his doesn't come off until he finally breaks down and even then he overdoes it, sobbing to Alice, "I'll tell you everything." In other words, he proves he can't keep a secret, he can't compartmentalize. He's a Fox Mulder. If he could, then he might even be invited to join the orgy eventually. Maybe these women, even his wife, are tests of one sort or another, to gauge his strengths in compartmentalizing. But he can only deal in rational facts the way Fox Mulder can't accept the reality of a UFO presence and continually has to see for himself, and even then no amount of evidence is enough for him, he has to convince everyone to believe it too. Scully at least doesn't want to believe, regardless of evidence, while he wants to believe but regardless of evidence can't be satisfied.

Thus unquenchable curiosity is the sure sign you don't deserve to find out. Knowing the whole truth, without restraint or border would certainly be too much for us, unless we're ready to take it all in with a poker-faced calm, ready to watch our conception of a distinction between the real and the fantasmatic dissolve like the chimera it always was.

In the end, there's a weird symbiosis between that orgy and Kidman's dream and the question of which is worse: a sex-saturated dream you are enjoying (Alice's, where she's the center of attention -- she 'belongs' there) or a reality in which you are out of your depth, uninvited, and unwanted?

As someone whose had a panic attack after being hit on by two spooky models at a 2006 Halloween party, I no longer envy and hate Dr. Bill the way I did when I first saw the film in 1999. I was also kind of arrogant back then and couldn't stand the fact that he let those two hotties go, or even got them in the first place. But now I'm beaten down, broken on the wheel of time like a scarecrow. If I had another encounter with those two spooky models I would still run away but wouldn't hate myself so much later. Why? Because now I've read up on EYES WIDE conspiracy mind control theorems.

Here's a detail I remember about those girls: one was dressed as a dominatrix, the other wore a black bikini, had a perfect body, AND REPTILE EYES, though they were presumably contacts for the a Halloween costume. OR we were meant to assume so, just as we are meant to assume that all of the masks at the orgy hide human faces. Are the existence of reptile contact lenses allowing reptilian-human hybrids to take their human ones off without attracting undue attention?

Now that we're talking about it, I'm remembering another pair of spooky girls, hippie chicks (and one guy) up in Syracuse in 1987. They were gorgeous and way too sexually advancing, to the point I found myself backing up away from them and was not sure why, as I was hardly a virgin, or sober. I can barely remember what any of these girls looks like now. If I did hook up with them, would I even be alive today? And are all my subsequent peccadilloes just my long night of the soul trying to get revenge on womankind for making me feel all itchy and strange and guilty for missing these encounters? Were these girls even human? Was their whole mission just to seduce men and steal their DNA, and/or leave us with a lifetime of sexual anxiety over our cowardice, an anxiety that they could siphon off with their orgone harvesting matrixes? My roommate Eric did sleep with one of those hippie chicks and was super weirded out afterwards. He told me that something about her vagina didn't look right, though he couldn't explain exactly what was so wrong about it.... not a writer.

Another weird metatextual element to EYES is the way Kidman's off behavior mirrors both the aformentioned drugs, mind control and ALSO the breaking down of an actor through trust exercises and the Stanislavsky method. It's very similar to hypnosis, the repetition of phrases and other occult chanting mechanisms; they are all used in shamanistic ritual, hypnotic regression, occult indoctrination, and acting. So the issue is, why aren't these things overlapping more often, along with sleep paralysis and alien abduction, a whole melange of fantasmatic 'other realities' that invite us ever deeper into a magnificent madness maze? Aside from Kubrick, are there any other filmmakers this paranoid?

We get some of these links from David Lynch (are Audrey Van Horn and Laura Palmer both SRA-programmed sex toys?), One Eyed Jacks, the Roadhouse, and the mysterious room with the dancing dwarf could compare to the ritual spaces in EYES, as well as the Emerald City Oz room, the wicked witch's castle in WIZARD OF OZ; the lair of the evil queen in SNOW WHITE, and the leader's mask and hood resemble Klytus' from the 1980 FLASH GORDON (1980), which as we all know is bathed in Illuminati and Masonic symbolism.

Naval officers as signifiers of the subconscious (sailing the surface of the deep archetypal oceanic unconscious)

 For example, while I'm writing this CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG is on TCM, with an automaton girl standing before a series of mirrors (which they use in mind programming) singing that she's under a spell and waiting for her first kiss, an almost exact description of sexually subjugating mind control techniques (including occurring before an assembled audience of mysterious attendees, which mirrors our standard dreams of being exposed naked in a class we forgot to study for, etc.). In reproducing the iconography of normal subconscious dreaming, the programmers tap into the control state, programming as it were, their automaton women, the "standard pleasure model" ala BLADE RUNNER, DR. GOLDFOOT, etc. (see CinemArchetype #16 - the Automaton). I don't believe this was what CHITTY was trying to achieve, but it shows you that once you let this paranoid stuff into your mind, it mutates and transforms even dull children's movies.

Staged Programming, from top: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Clockwork Orange, Manchurian Candidate

I remember the first time I saw A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, my mom rented it for us when I was around 13 years old. it was the first movie I ever got to choose at a video store. I had seen the poster as a child and been intrigued by it, and imagine I'd see, you know, some boobs... which I had never seen outside of a stolen Playboy. You could certainly argue some kind of sick mind programming was underway for me, considering the horrors in that film were just not seen outside of a dirty movie house, I would imagine. I thought it was weird and was certainly shocked by the home invasion scene and the way we're not really supposed to have a clear 'rooting for' character, unusual in the (pre-cable) TV I was used to. But this was art. I had to figure it out.

But in real life, or at least the headlines, of 1980-1983 ritualistic abuse of women, children, people, kept coming. The horrors of Satanic panic coincided so perfectly with the dawn of the VHS that it's impossible to ignore. I still think we've only begun to gauge the effect of sudden availability of all these 'video nasties' (as the Brits called them) had on middle America. There was no ratings mechanism in play at all the first few years of the rental business. Stereo and TV and appliance stores were the only ones who rented out videos at first, and no one thought much about the traumas of TV violence because we hadn't really had any to speak of, a few shoot-outs on the cops shows aside. The home invasion scene in CLOCKWORK was a parallel to the invasion of these disturbing images into our house right at that moment, and we reacted.

I firmly believe that Satanic panic was a response to this new at-home availability of X-rated films and the flood of disturbing slasher movies and sleaze that had formerly been shown only on 42nd street or adult drive-ins. It was an undiscovered country we were gleefully exploring, unaware of the subliminal trauma accruing like waxy resin in our moral cortex.

I don't think these Satanic abduction reports are entirely fantasy. I think these cults do exist, but I don't believe most include seemingly normal families. Still, I am nonetheless fascinated by the phenomenon of recovered memories, the similarity between Satanic and alien abduction recall, and sleep paralysis.

To this of course I propose that there are levels between our ordinary collective reality (objects, spatial relations / time) and unconscious dreaming (Jungian collective unconscious, or the anima mundi) and in between the layers there is no clear line, but a grey area where one level can easily be confused for another.

COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS: Reality in conventional 3-D space time, i.e. global news, shared opinions, measured distance (You are there, I am here, the stars are light years away, etc.)

CONSCIOUSNESS: Emotions, processed input from the five senses, shaped to correspond to the collective; 'true' memory (We are all in 'this' together, the stars are within our reach)

------in between ------Hypnotic state of 'repressed memory' regression / recovered           memory, solidifying the subconscious (lower) into a reality (upper) memory, leading to a revision of one's concept of the collective consciousness as one's repressed desires from childhood are remembered as real. 

SUBCONSCIOUS: Repressed desires; Oedipal and Elektra complexes; incestuous or criminal desires; id; sexual dreams (we are all lying about our true natures, the stars shall be dominated by us one day)

COLLECTIVE SUBCONSCIOUS: Satanic orgies, incestuous fantasies / reality, sleep paralysis / repressed memories of alien abductions / bizarre ceremonies / demonic possession

UNCONSCIOUS:  Jungian Archetypes; anima/animus; superego, 'unfinished work from the past' (PTSD carrying over from one life to the next) dreams, personal devils, demons, angel projectors. (astrology, archetypal constellations, the stars are no farther than our fingertips)

------in between ------ Hypnotic imagery reflection, here caught between the universal                      and personal unconscious, dissolving ego into the collective; the oceanic; can recover memories from other people, past lives, channeling spirits. 

COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS: Anima Mundi; Collective Unconsciousness; 3rd eye reality (4-9-D nonlocalized intelligence); true hallucinations - i.e. matter appears as energy slowed, every movement or thought triggers myriad possibilities branching off like tentacles, aliens, transpersonal devils, demons (the stars are inside of us, there is no distance or space at all, ghosts, demons, angels are all visible and separate from any one of us, and yet joined to us)

-------
The question of 'is mind control MK Ultra real?' doesn't really make sense when approached pragmatically based on the theoretical layers of consciousness outlined above, because the figures in a subconscious dream (repressed sexual) mirror exactly the allegedly real figures in a repressed memory recovered during hypnosis. If one applies this formula to Salem witch hunts for example, the repression of their Puritan religion created such a hard wall between the subconscious and conscious that the pressure resulted in an autonomous complex, i.e. the subconsicous warps the floorboards with its built-up pressure and some of its contents burst out, like a broken sewer pipe, onto the conscious perception/reality living room carpet; since the Puritan mind has no means of discerning the real from the vividly imagined (Freud is more than two centuries away), it can only believe its own senses, its own intuition, and since the deep dark woods are such an unknown, and the fortunes and fates so dependent on random circumstances (no cure for diseases or crop blight), there are a lot of great screens for these dark unconscious sewer mains to project onto.

In other words these things all exist, but only if you widen your notion of what existence is, and you should. It's foolish to think that aliens only come from far away in big ships traveling through 3-D space. Do they ever sleep? Maybe to them our waking life seems to them so narrowed it's like we're asleep, while our dreaming selves are more approachable - and seen as the 'real' us! Why not?

I'm not attempting to dismiss the claims of SRA survivors, only suggesting that hypnotic regression / repressed memories occupy such a slippery slope between the levels of our consciousness that they expose the whole foundation of ordinary reality as a delayed reflection of the deepest level of the collective. In other words I'm saying the SRA memories might be false but consensual conscious reality may just be falser.

--

Later in his sojurn, Dr. Bill is harassed by a gang of B&T toughs for being gay (a real life 'accusation' he vehemently denies), which could be said to represent, in one of the few appearances thereof, the non-New Yorker young boorish weekend drinker tourist, a swath of kids who come rolling in on the LIRR and NJ Transit every Friday and Saturday evening that makes weekend bar scene collectively known as amateur night (cool NYC-ers enteratin at home or go to private parties instead). These are the morlocks, the droogies, the bridge and tunnel marauders, relying on their gang's drunken cheering for constant support, the type of dudes. It's that shove, however, I wish to mention, for it knocks him into an alternate state of reality for it's shortly afterwards he runs into the girl whose demarked as a prostitute by, apparently, the red door she takes him through, maybe because Kubrick thinks no girl would come onto a man in the West Village who wasn't? When Tom says while in her apartment, "Maybe we should talk about money." I wondered if she would have normally even expected or asked for any. In a way he shows himself to be as much of a tourist amateur night boob in this moment as the businessman who leaves a bunch of money for Diane Keaton in LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR. But has Kubrick really even been to New York City, ever? Is the red door a signal, as in ye olden times, or Amsterdam, that this is a brothel, of sorts and he just presumes its code here too? We know he reads a lot and that's often the surest mark of a man who doesn't party. If he'd done any serious drinking in the Village he wouldn't be so easily labeled as a doofus bridge and tunnel tourist like those shovers.

Of course that's the problem with filming a NYC movie in a UK studio. Kubrick did not think he needed to come here and absorb the unique flavors that may have opened his eyes shut in under 90 minutes. We're not all rich, Satanic, and successful or MK-Ultraficial sex zombies. Seeing this film in a New York City theater uptown, I could hear the disappointed sighs over moments like this shoving, the random pick-up by the hot model, the lispy hotel manager played by Alan Cumming, the choice of the very Jewish Pollack as the secret society member and hot hooker connoisseur (see here my rant associating his character here with his hooker enthusiast in Woody Allen's HUSBANDS AND WIVES) the bizarre fantasies like that he could get a cab to take him way out on Long Island, no matter how much he paid, and then make it back by dawn, on what is presumably a Saturday night, before Xmas no less. The time incongruity (it would take like two hours each way just to go a few miles and on a night like that, forget about traffic, it's bumper to bumper in and out all the way). Secondly, why the hell does he leave the prostitute in the first place if he's seeking a thrill? it's as if he keeps getting a life line which he's only too quick to grab and even quicker to throw back in pursuit of a thicker one:

Gayle: Do you know what's so nice about doctors?
Dr. Bill Harford: Usually a lot less than people imagine.
Gayle: They always seem so knowledgeable.
Dr. Bill Harford: Oh, they are very knowledgeable about all sorts of things.
Gayle: But I bet they work too hard. Just think of all they miss.
Dr. Bill Harford: You're probably right.

Here Harford doesn't even know if she's right but naturally he suspects it's true. "Just think of all they miss" applies twofold to the title of the film. How on earth can we think about all we've missed, unless of course we're talking about the associative process of hypnotic recollection of subliminal signals? Are the arcane symbols on the walls triggering an autohypnotic programming response in all these beautiful women? I wouldn't be surprised. All you really need to win the attention of a lot of hot models is cocaine. But a party like Ziegler's that shit is in the wind, and just a few trigger signs, like the star on the wall, indicate that there is something there that they all miss, that trigger signal that brings us into fantasmatic dimension.

"Nothing is ever just a dream, Alice." But then again nothing is ever just reality, and that's where the fantasmatic enters, for if you were to ask me if I believed in all the harrowing SRA recovery memories and conspiracy stuff on the web, I would say it depends on what you believe 'belief' is. I don't think that stuff necessarily "happened" in 3-D space time reality, but I don't think it was all a paranoid fantasy either. I think people who believe in it tend to get defensive if you talk about these phenomena in terms of psychology and myth but just because I don't believe this stuff is real I don't trivialize the unreal as being false. The fantasmatic dimension is in some ways even more real than our normal reality. The whole idea behind this being that there is an area of reality where collective experience--one set of sensory inputs grounding the other--works to prevent the supernatural from forming. Kubrick's entire filmography is about weening the human experience from the teat of this collective miasma, what the Hindu theologians call Maya, the goddess of illusion who spins her web around the eyes of men. In other words, these memories are in some ways 'truer' than reality itself! Once they are exposed, once the mind is free of the web, all is love and light, even death, decay, and suffering. Desire and fear are just the carrot and stick used to keep you circling around the track. Realize this and move off the track towards the center.

And of course this all has bearing on psychoanalysis, which in this case may read Ziegler as the analysand, 'performing' the role of the anal father, the 'one who enjoys' and excludes Tom Cruise from the mother's bed, denying his desire, playing the non du pere while flaunting unseemly wealth and power. Bill's beautiful boy face and confidence have gotten him just so far; girls fall in love with him in a heartbeat, drawn to his flawless 'performance' of a handsome young doctor, a 'normal guy' who misses a lot of things because he's continually called away to the next thing, a mirror perhaps to Kubrick himself who has clearly missed a lot of things by being so reclusive, though this is natural to someone with a high IQ or artistic bent, he reads way too deeply into everything, so his shoots are the longest in history, with 100 takes at a time of someone just walking through a goddamned door.

We know what he's looking for, of course, but he should know better than to try and find it.

Tell it Like it Isn't (thoughts on TOAD ROAD and my own very gaudy life)

Like so many former space captains, I genuinely feel that when I did drugs as a youth it was a grand experiment; my friends and I were artists, musicians, in a band, and part of a big Syracuse hippie scene. We did it to enhance music, inspire wild poetry and flights of fancy, we loved drugs and alcohol like Christians love Jesus and Virgin Mary; the drugs and alcohol bonded us and showed us the way forward. I wasn't even a musician when I joined the band. Drugs did that! We were hanging out and discussing what to do since the latest bassist flaked, when I hallucinated John Doe's bass snaking around on the floor towards me as if a holy finger. It was five AM, but we were still up by the time the music store opened; I was on stage with my new bass that very night, still wide awake, every note I played reverberating through my skeleton in great purple rings. 

If I wound up in the gutter, then AA, and I never became a very good musician, because I kept tripping rather than practicing, who cares? No shame in being the Syd Barrett / Brian Jones / Pigpen.  I looked good up there, man. Like I belonged. I felt that old John Doe bass up my leg feeling when I decided to risk my future chances at the pesidency by combining Hunter Thompson / Bill Burroughs-esque gonzo first person-AA qualification history to film criticism for this site. So I set out to validate my glowing memories of past psychedelic experience, depicted in film and memories of watching films based on lengthy past experience, and to bring that 'gonzo' style to advanced psychoanalytic film theory, to show that drugs needn't make you stupid, but smarter and that finally, that you could be sober for ten years, doing the whole AA spirituality thing, and not demonize past excesses or become a dour killjoy. 

Jason Banker's Toad Road reminds me a lot of the years above, with the chilling caveat that we looked great to ourselves, but to a sober older civilian we seemed, no doubt, decadent, loud, shocking, full of ourselves, and erratic; and in its amateur found footage style it reminded me of my own early films, on super 8mm; they started as slasher parodies and ninja epics while in junior high and ended up in college as chronicles of drunken binges in college. In one film I lost a drinking contest of doing 162 proof Devil's Springs vodka shots with our band's guitar player (only because he cheated - eating a bunch of pasta beforehand while I was already drunk and still drinking, though I'm sure I was being obnoxious). Fellow Jasper grabbed my camera and there's this shot of me in the hallway, face down in my own puke, while someone brings my desk light close to my face, back and forth. Of course we screened the film a zillion times so even now I know the scene by heart:

Jasper: We're here at the end of the drinking contest with our current winner, Erich Kuersten. Erich, Erich!, Erich, tell the audience, are you ever gonna drink again? 
Erich: (pause, rolls over on floor) N-n-not after tomorrow night.
Jasper: Here that folks? He says he's never gonna drink again. Erich how do you feel? 
Erich: I feel.. (starts to sing) I feel / Like I been tied / to the whippin' pole / tied to the whippin' pole /tiedoodawippapoe (pretends to pass out while Jasper and filmmakers laugh / cut to Jasper rolling a fat joint of worthless homegrown leaves - film ends)

 

Even that drunk and miserable in reality, having thrown up and lying on my right side on the filthy wooden floor in my own vomit, I was still acting drunker, faking a slur, for the camera and refusing to renounce booze. as the next night was a big party and, even in my deplorable condition, I was looking forward to it.

Chronicling one's druggy excess changes the experience, flattens it, nails it to self conscious 3-D space time. But if you manage to get really out there, it definitely helps but have some record of the beyond. Without the record, you will only remember it from one angle, and subjective filtering will gradually reduce it to a few mental images stacked in a mental box in a mental safe in a mental storage unit. It was once testament to my being a badass, it's now--to me--just looks like I was being reckless, sad and dumb.

There's a huge beautiful old grave yard adjoining Syracuse campus. In 1987, I shot a film of a shrooming odyssey there (it's on youtube, but I can't find it). A big rolling hill graveyard where few people ever go is the best place to be 'enhanced' or to bring girls or wander at night in perpetual despair. The night after I first hooked up with this girl in 1989, when I was a senior at the heart of my boozy, shroomy powers, we went to the the H.B. Crouse tomb, on a nice little sloping hill, perfect for laying around on with the tomb of a 19th century Syracuse mayor to prop our backs against. I had always been able to climb through the narrow windows of the stone edifice, empty but for a small altar and raised plaques. But when we looked through  the coffins had been broken into, likely during the dead of night, while she and I were hooking up; through the cracks of the shattered coffin you could see a skull with a thin layer of flesh over it, and long thin strands of hair... I thought instantly I should climb through to get this skull for an art project, but this girl said please don't. And because she was hot, I agreed. We left. I imagined a film where me hooking up with this hottie after our band's party cross-cut with some black-robed frat pledges breaking into a tomb and smashing the concrete slabs atop the coffins with a sledge hammer.

The next day we heard of a freshman named McQuain up in my old dorm, Flint Hall:

The police were notified after Mr. McQuain's roommate smelled a foul odor and looked in a pot of boiling water on top of a hot plate in their room. After seeing the skull, he alerted a dorm supervisor. 

The body-stealing charge, a rarely filed offense, is considered a Class E felony, the lowest-level felony, and carries a maximum sentence of four years upon conviction. Mr. McQuain told the police that he removed the skull from the John J. Crouse mausoleum Monday night and planned to use it as a model for an art class. Mr. Crouse, who died in 1886, was Syracuse's Mayor from 1876 to 1880. (NY Times, 1988)

It just goes to show you how hotness has its own premonitory powers, because in many other respects this beautiful girl was a real dope. I had actually been mad at her for not letting me grab it. She was so hot, though, and in this case, right, so I moved in with her.

After Toad Road I wonder... the hottie in that film and this girl I refer to were similar in hottie appearance.

Poetry was my thing freshman year, but in a very snide careless fashion. I was determined to prove it a lot of rot and prove is well that one might write gibberish, intentional nonsense, surrealistic automatic balderdash, and then, some subsequent evening, to the delight of some chippie, analyze it on the spot to mean some deep and abiding truth not approachable from any other direction. Meanwhile my depression freshmen year was so bad I'd wander the Syracuse quad late at night and stuff snow down my pants and my shirt and try to make myself throw up, just to feel that brief flicker of endorphins; my brain's miserly pharmacist had to be shocked and alarmed before it reluctantly opened its cobwebbed vault to disseminate into my neuron webs even the basic levels of joy most humans enjoyed.

But when I took shrooms for the first time at Student Union double feature of Yellow Submarine and Head in the spring of 1986 my life was changed forever. The door on the endorphin vault was laughed off its hinges. I was more or less struggling through a regimen of booze, music, socializing, cigarettes, micro-tripping, weed, sex, W.C. Fields movies, and writing, to keep that vibe alive in the subsequent decade. Even so, it eventually dissolved in my grip as if a life raft made of cardboard on a solvent salt sea.

One of my ancestors was once accused of having a blue boar come out of the woods and crawl into her window in Salem MA in the late 1680s. I imagine the witness to this as having some credibility: was she hallucinating on mushrooms, hunger, madness, or the ergot-ish mold of stale rye bread, as often happened accidentally in those times? Was she just malicious? Was it a hallucination that had underpinnings in transdimensional reality? Maybe there's a way to collapse the difference, wherein the brain stem reptilian vision of hallucination is and is not a conduit into higher intelligence, an ability to perceive the raw chaos of transdimensional existence.

Worse in some ways than jonesers, we dealt with buzzkuills like this a lot during our 'acid tests' my sophomore year.  Jonesers were annoying because they never brought anything to the table, but they didn't refuse it when offered either, and they knew it was share and share like. But the buzzkill is also worse than the wally, who is just plain clueless, unable to see or hear the music of the spheres. But the buzzkill has heard it, and stopped, often because his absentee parents found a joint in his drawer over summer break and sent him to rehab, mainly so they could go to Saint Barthes without him because if you know him, so would you, but now he's a holier than thou lecturer on mutating DNA and liver damage. But he still hangs out all the time anyway, usually because of a girl he likes who doesn't like him is too wasted and nice and young to just tell him to fuck off. She just wants to party, man. As Lou Reed once sang, "she wants to make love to the scene." I seem to the guy most annoyed by him, so he becomes an obsession.

I'm using the 'he' here because I'm describing also James' character, but I've also known the reverse: my sophomore girlfriend was this clingy insecure item, who lived to drag me away from parties right when they were getting good, so we could go back to her place and fool around, but she wasn't fooling me. Once or twice I had to lie next to her after we'd finished balling when it was only two or three AM, hearing the party still going on down the street or next door or downstairs, considering myself too much the feminist to get dressed and race back. But one night after a big show we played in this huge attic space, this other girl gave me fat blue-veined shroom stem as soon as I offstage and I washed it down with beer before my bitch girlfriend could see, and the girlfriend dragged me back to her apartment as usual...

But then, magic. The shroom kicked in right as our nightly fight began, and the psilocybin spirit gave me the strength to snarl "I'm going back to the party and if you don't like it then fuck off!" I ran out the door of her apartment to the sound of smashing plates, hurling salt and pepper shakers down the stairs after me, screaming so loud I could hear her all the way across the street, and right back into the warm and waiting arms of 614 Euclid, and the girl who'd given me the stem.

I'd never felt freer.

That stem was like a concentrated six years of therapy - it took one look through my eyes and said, well this shit has to stop, let's get out of here, and tell this bitch to fuck off.

So fuck off, James!

The thing you must know if you have not had one of these experiences is that the dimensions of a hallucination/vision are not the same. You can't begin to 'imagine' the hypercomplexity of infinity as it's represented to your third eye. You can only witness it, on a level similar to how you see and hear within your dreams, merged to enhance the outer view of the real. The combination of the two, when in perfect sync -- all three eyes, so to speak -- reveals there is no outside to these shapes, that's the thing, only fractals above and below the levels your senses can perceive, as well as in within that sensory spectrum.

When you get lost in the webs of the machine elf spiders you become aware of the great love and the great sense of security, but also of existential loneliness, and the thought of a finite event on the horizon, a realigning of good and dark forces - not in the fantasy where good guys win and bad guys vanish, because reality is a complex impermanence constructed and maintained moment to moment --nothing is permanent, and nothing ever dies for long. Good and bad must always be integrated, and/or disintegrate mutually. Any repression eventually swells and erupts into the thing that has repressed it. When all is good then the less good becomes the evil. Balance demands extreme counterweights. One must befriend and include the enemy -- you have to make sure the power stay fluid, let him win a few hands if he's behind. Otherwise, the game gets boring. 

That sort of thing is what makes allies for life, not the cessation of fighting, but the removal of fighting from the realm of fear and hate and into the realm of sport, of joy, of loving your enemy even as you swing your sword down upon his screaming children.

I offer these four things to keep in mind while chasing this golden ladder:

     1) If the full truth of existence, the inescapable Lovecraftian horror, was truly and totally comprehended, you would go insane - that's why your brain hides it from you. Your brain is set up so it can't abide this truth for long - in fact the whole brain and its blinders-based perception decoding is a defense against this realization. Be grateful then that you never find what you are truly looking for, because unless you've got a lot of experience with meditation and are in a good place emotionally, you will be as freaked out and panicked as an off-meds schizophrenic, or someone on a really really bad trip who can't ever look forward to coming down.

     2) There is no 'total truth' that's fixed in time and space - you can reach nirvana one weekend, find the Elysian fields and see beautiful suns, then go back the next and find just ruins dotted with ozone-bleached faun skeletons. A week passes like centuries in that dimension. Who knows why they were wiped out by evil reptilian interdimensional brigands? Did our precieving these realms alert the enemy? No answer is suitable. 

     3) When prophets speak of eternity in hell and heaven they really just mean timelessness. A minute can feel like a year when you are outside the time-space continuum and vice versa. The month I spent outside time and space in the fall of 2012 (triggered by the galactic alignment) lasted longer than the entirety of my life up to that point x two.

4)  We all wish we could live 'in eternity' somewhere nice - but the one constant of the universe - and all its parallel dimensions - is that absolutely nothing ever stays the same, and that by running from pain and pursuing pleasure, pain seems inescapable and permanent, while pleasure is fleeting and quickly forgotten. Reverse the strategem! You can never escape pleasure! All pain is fleeting. Enlightened monks embrace the most ungainly and humiliating chores as if gold. 

5) Avoid wallies, glommers, parasites, energy vampires, sleazebags, murfs, jonesers, copy-cats, nagging harpies, vultures, buzzkills, scammers, junkies and baseheads AT ALL COSTS. Cut and RUN.

6) Learn from the poor girl in TOAD ROAD: she so desperately needed to get rid of this glomming wally she vanished beyond the 7th Gate of Hell rather than endure him a moment longer! But do it with love in your heart, and above all firmness. Trying to be nice is a big mistake - they feed on that. If anything, tell them the truth about why you don't like them, and how they should change (get therapy, etc.) Tell them you want to help them get a therapist or into rehab or go to your church, and believe me, they'll keep away.