The following story was rewritten in the last week, or so. This is "draft05".
An initial draft was posted to
my blog (here), not too long after the relevent episode aired.
I will post my #GlowFair explanations, soon. :)
Detail pics of acrylic #painting on canvas:
"Miss LoonTrout Got A Crappy Boobjob. Mr. And Mrs. Crack-Penguin Pull Their Tired Old William Tell Routine. Nanabush Is Alive, And In The World." (2012 iteration)
A Shaman Story :
001 Special-Agent Fox Mulder ; Shaman.
A ...“I think that Fox Mulder, is a shaman, yo. He's been through some shit, but never got any, uhhh, training when he was young. He’s like one of those dickheads who take a stroll to the corner store and finds himself stuck in a horror of a universe with sentient, two-legged, two-armed, one-headed monstrosities chasing you around. That shit jangles the nerves, hard, like the spirits in your first tent....
... That boy sure coulda used a dose of the local botanical Ninjitsu... then, some prolonged, lucid dreamshitting; with, aaahhh appropriate orientation and training, of course.
... People think they can just drop ecstacy, channel a witch-doctor at the rollerdome rave and wear a fucking headdress, with sincerity. Think they’re fucking Geronimo’s ghost, but they’re smurf reruns ...”
b My cousin, Lefty, has some strange ideas about things.
Some folks say that he was going to be a medicine man, when he was young, “but, it didn't take...” or something. Any ways, if you’re hurting... ya know, for real, or not... He’s the kinda person you talk to.
But you gotta tell him the truth.
He can’t stand lies, because they warp the world around him, and he sees it dissociate in front of him, even as we live our confabulations,
right - in – front - of him.
a All my people are being pried from the Earth by advertisements, trends, social media, bad drugs, medicine, the dying of the living; instead of just acknowledgeing what is. The Milky Way is “no longer visible to more than 80% of North Americans”.
(https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jun/10/milky-way-no-longer-visible-to-one-third-of-humanity-light-pollution)
b If people have no way to personally confirm that they are suspended in a galaxy, amongst galaxies... Is it any wonder that some people don’t believe in the moon landing or “sciencey things” like human evolution?
a “In the latest episode of the X-Files, Mulder went on the shamanic voyage above the middle world, clouds and shit, thinking that he had taken “magic mushrooms”. He did not realise, at the time, that the new pseudo-Scully gave him a plac3b0.
Fox Mulder, he induced shamanic trance... “$6 bucks the hard way”*
and traveled to the underworld; in a way that Carlos Castaneda failed to do.
b Carlos had been too concrete in his earlier thinking and refused to follow the dancing hankerchief across the chasm. The old man was -not- happy.”
* “$6 bucks the hard way” was the most obvious and oblique and obnoxious and late teenish sexual reference I could come up with on the fly. I feel that it is something WSBurroughs’ish or HST... Some beautiful bullshit bravado. :) :Eric C. Keast
a “Ayuh. He couldn't give in to the power. It’s much like trying to chase the underworld through vision, the first requirement is discipline. I am pretty sure he still called himself a Shaman, long afterwards. I do not know if he ever flew across the chasm, or not.
b There wouldn’t be a goddamn hankerchief to help him out, the next time; that’s for fucking sure.
a I dont remember, ever reading about it in his books, anyway. Ya know... he mave actually done it... eventually, out there in the desert.
I thought he had disappeared, long ago, but then he reappeared suddenly, online, with a history and pedigree that I did not remember. That’s a very shamanic thing to do; but my brain is ruined with whiskey rot, spiritocultural scarring, body neglect, memory extractions and sad premises; so is not to be trusted with those sorts of recollections.
b It’s true. Either that, or someone in the Castaned Estate called his own self, a Shaman, being the Ghost Writers’ collective stand-in ego, legally, for the real thing.
Ya know.... unless Carlos wrote it himself. Pretty sure he’s dead, tho ...”
a Fox Mulder?
b Castaneda.
a “Ahhhhh... Anyways; Mulder's vision finally puts him in the shamanic canoe. Perhaps the most real moment of his life...
b More real than the Lord Kimbo encounter?
a That’s a really good fucking question. A real WTF episode, that one, ya know.
Good call, hard to say.
Anyways, he’s face to face with the conscious soul of the reluctant terrorist... and he is paralysed with astonishment.”
b “Terence McKenna says that dying from astonishment is the greatest danger of the DMT flash.”
a “He sees the guy in his vision, right -spoilers- who's basically a stapled lump of meat surrounded by sniffer dogs and bulging suits “back in the real world”, but there, he can gibber, gesture, spaz and cry... and he does, real garbled-like... Mulder leans in; not quite eyeball-licking range...
.... but is too amazed to make sense of it.”
b “Transdimensional, slash, astral-communication, without an established personal practice of the pursuit of internal peace, is hard. Unless you get the sort of psychic psychedelic injection, that William S. Ginsburg would invoke ; Justify his screaming, flying, gunslinger cum-stinkin’ teen-cowboy, barn-sodomy fantasies. That shit never hit the broader market, it was too... Middle Eastern, too Oriental... for the plebes. The aristocrats never gave it up, of course.
Too expensive for the rest of us.”
a “Mulder comes-to, in the hospital, and not in the good way... and EVERYBODY... is on his dick!”
b “I don't think that means what you think it mea...”
a “EVERYBODY!... is standing on his dick!!”
b “Okay, take it easy. Well... that's different.
She's on my dick, or he's on my dick just sounds sexual; it can't be helped, they're vague and suggestive...
But someone standing on your dick is painfully obvious.”
a “Mulder definitely got anal-probed at some time. He's been abducted by aliens... like, several times. And he spent... allottttaaaa time in Russian prisons.
It’s not a moral failing, you know. Prison love. Sometimes you gotta go along to get along. Like Lawrence of Arabia, you know: Smile and think of England.”
“That's got nothing to do with whether or not he's a shaman. Anybody can be a shaman. Not just perverts, victims and crazies.”
b “Well, I think that you need a certain amount of crazy. Real crazy, real natural-like. Not just ‘not being an asshole’ kinda crazy. That's not fucking good enough, nowadays.”
a “William S. Burroughs wrote of a man, disgusted with the way that the world had treated him and his retort was something like: You can't treat me like some greased and nameless asshole!...
That was beautiful and genius. It's a double entendre, without the component of innocence. It speaks to his debauchery and situational virginity; situational innocence, if not actual innocence.”
b “I don’t think that’s an example of a double entendre.
a No. It's a double entendre, without, the component of innocence. Syntactically speaking”
b “I don’t think that means. ”...
a So.... Everybody thinks that Mulder failed. The bad guys are winning and little blue-eyed children are dying, while he’s off packing fudge..
b “carrying freight”...
a ...for “Big-Shroom”.
b That’s right. Fox Mulder is a dirty mushroom-addict, at this point. Probably paying terrorists for mushroom fixes and clean piss (From young men farmed by a local Gamer Crew). That and running clown scams for the shroom cartel. The mushroom-backed, clown-whore racket has to be the dirtiest, lowest form of pimpetry known to man.”
a The polaroids, alone, will make you rethink having children.
b What. Wait. What, why?
a So’s they don’t grow up to run a clown-whore racket... Then it “all comes together”, of course. The brown guys get arrested. Like... all of them. In the hotel, the surrounding streets, the ice cream guy on the corner was arrested, and the nearest Koreatown was cleared out. I don't think he's banging Scully anymore.”
b “So... the metaphorical boat, the shamanic canoe, supplied real-world information?”
a “Yeah... Didn't you watch it?”
b “I think so. I'd still bang Scully. See her in that British mystery series about the buff, yet frustrated young scruffy Christian Greyish dude, whom is a serial killer and rapist?... she bangs everyone in that series. I bet she fucks him in the next season.
a “It was just a week ago. How can you not remember if you saw it?”
b Saw what?
a “The X-Files episode that we’re talking about.”
b “I don't have cable.”
a “Oh...
I bet that Mulder wouldn't be able to sleep, for days after that experience. His brain had been illuminated by the primal fire and vision and werehumans this season.... Well, one, anyways.”
b “Nah. Too grounded. He’ll be sleeping before the credits...
and never fly again.”
a “He's a secret agent, he flies all the time.”
b “You know what I mean. He'll probably cave in and join the cabal eventually...
a He could find a guide to show him the way through it all.
b I bet he smokes smokey-pole before the end of the series. Buys into the corporate probing of our collective anus, invests his RRSP and declare “depopulation is yummy!!!! Arrrggghhh!!! Thank you, Satannnnn....!!”.
Over and over.
a Whomever contracted the Georgia Guidestones says that we should stick to 500 million people to survive on Earth.”
b “Yeah. 500 million rich honkys, crackers, old boys and aristocrats. Ted Cruz is gonna wake up someday and be shocked to find he don't make the cut. Shit, they don't even want to take Bill Gates. ‘Is money’s too wet, still.”
a “I figure that Mulder has got to take the pledge, fuck a chicken carcass on video tape and kiss Geronimo's skull. Then they will make him Bishop of Padua or some shit. The Vatican will put some fucking discipline in that atheist.”
b “I like the new guy.”
a “The new guy?”
b “Yeah.”
a “... The pope?”
b “Yeah.”
a “You're such a victim.”
b “The entire reason that we're here, is to save your ass.”
a “Nobody asked you to... Wait. That’s not why we are here.
I think that I asked for pizza and weed, actually. Where's the pizza?”
b “I don't think that's relevant to our discussion.”
a “Ah, Bro. Really?”
b “I thought that you were dead.”
a “Why? How!?”
b “When I broke in, there was a definite whiff of rotten banana and santorum. Lots of it. Like the Banana Boat singer guy tried to dirty Sanchez a trucker at the Husky Stop and the waittress locked them in, turned out the lights and herded them to her dungeon under the fryers. I figured it was some sorta “pleasure accident”, like that guy from Kung Fu, so I finished it all. Where were you?.
a There's nothing like the horrors of a dark, mossy, earthy stone and mortar basement. Dirt floor, roots, burrowing invertebrates, rot, filthy life and... unquiet.”
b “Is that the place behind Theresa’s Minnow Shack?”
a “Ayuh.”
b “They got great nachos.”
a “Yeah...
b That basement is a portal into the underworld, but you really don’t wanna use it, unless you are already really fucked. But, if you have to, well... you are just more fucked, then.”
a “The Buddhist monks of Asia were supposedly able to enter the shamanic underworld through physical discipline and deprivation. First Nations peoples of North america would starve themselves into vision and the underworld. Discipline. It’s all about fucking discipline. The discipline of laxative. The discipline of the lash. The discipline of pain. The discipline of dream & body. Flesh and bone. The discipline of warmed blankets, IV drip and the discipline of steel.
The discipline of fist. The discipline of rope. The discipline of stone.
Discipline of Pleasure.
b “Bullshido. I remember trying to visualise my way into the underworld using techniques from that Micheal Harner guy. Harmer? No, I think it's Harner.”
a “How did it go?
b “ Not very good. I could enter the tunnel to the underworld, beginning with a distinctive crack in a certain cliff at the waterline; waves pounding me down into the tunnel, past the surface. But, most times, I couldn’t hold it. Too much reality weighing my brain down.
When it does work, I lose the focus and control of my eyes. The thread of that discipline were severed for me by culturecide and sexy missionaries.
I try and follow the path down, falling, flailing, tumbling. I fell into the Earth, burrowed down and could never stay the path. It spits me out as an irritant.
No discipline. No faith.
Not enough history, anymore.
a Tried it for years. Tried throwing chemicals at the problem, beginning with commercially available intoxicants.
Started with high-dose nicotine. It found the path, quickly, but dissipated fast and was useless for sustained navigation. Found out later that making nicotine water from cigarette tobacco is a bad fucking idea. Don’t do it.
I was determined to stick with plant medicines, preferably wild ones. But, even that felt like cheating.
Smoking Labrador Tea that had been cured inside moldy pumpkins induced shared telepathy in a group but couldn't get you to the underworld. How are you supposed to fly, if you can't reach the underworld?! Sure, it made for stupendous circle jerks, but nobody was reaching Nirvana, that way.
Dried banana peel was a bad joke until I found out about “wild banana”, but it was strictly for lucid dreamshitting.
b That 80’s sitcom actor from “Broken House” is wrong about them bananas being “god's natural dildo”. They're actually a delicious little Chihuahua. By which, I mean, that some Indigenous people spent thousands of years domesticating and genetically nurturing little, starchy seedpods into delicious handlebars of chimpy goodness. As one does, molding wolves into four-legged chickens.”
- Joint, whiskey intermission-
I was never able to follow the path, all the way down.
a Lucid dreaming escaped me. I hadn't dreamt a good sex dream better than the ones I had at 15. What the fuck was wrong with me? I tried drinking more, but that didn’t seem to help.
I went camping for a few weeks, and once I was able to get away from television, I became a participant in my dreams again.
I had become a viewer of my dreams. Watching my dreams and not being an effective agent in my own dreams, reduced to the viewer.
I woke one morning and unzipped my tent, to dozens of loon pairs in the tiny bay. This was very unusual, Loons are solitary creatures who prefer one pair of loons per lake, but will make exceptions if the lake is big enough that they never, really, have to see the neighbours. They had flooded my bay at the end of summer. The air vibrated with their calls, the tent thrummed with my heat in the cool still air and I knew... I knew, that if I reached out and grabbed a strand of the energy in the air that it would rip me out the tent and I would fly. No big deal.
I saw the Milky Way illuminate the horizon’s dark spiky silhouette across the bay and realised that I now possessed the ability to jump there.
I watched a satellite tumble against the stars and could now reach out and smite it from the skies. The feel of lightning in your palms is something you get used to, fast, but if you don’t have technique, it will dislocate your arms from wrist to shoulder.”
b “Did you reach out and grab the energy?”
a “Nope. No point. I already knew what would happen and had the certainty of finally achieving mastery of the underworld and the power of flight amongst mortals. I zipped the tent up and went back to sleep... after the bears left.
I don't think that Mulder claims any Indian blood. Unless he's part Navajo. The Navajo keep appearing in the X-files, for some reason.”
b “That was because of Scully. Some dirty old Navajo fell in love with her and went to war with the smoking man and made love to her from the dead. The Navajo figure prominently in the mythology of the X-files arc.”
a You take back that “dirty ol’ Navajo” remark, sir. I’ll let you know that Floyd RedCrow Westerman was a gentleman, an artist and a real heavy.
b That’s true. He was also an actor, you fuckstick. If Laurence Olivier could play Darth Vader, then Floyd could play a dirty old man.
a “Navajos, no joke. They came stomping out of the North like a mongol horde and cleaned out the whole Southwest before the Spanish were wearing diapers around their neck and travelling the New World.
I’m of the mind, sure, that they’re involved in that whole Chaco Canyon situation, too; either pooping in the fire, or sitting in the stewpot.”
b “Did I just say that an old Indian man made mad ghost love to Scully?”
a “Yeah.”
b “See. Navajos no joke.”
-cheesecake, tequila-
a “Do you suppose that Mulder will quit the FBI and become a witchdoctor... selling sweatlodge fingerbangs, dreamcatchers and sage bundles out the back of a pickup?”
b “I think the FBI has a pretty good retirement plan, even for official fuckups. Maybe he could try writing.”
a “I think the X-file writers will have him going “totally off-grid”, eventually.
b They already did; in one of those X-Files movies, where Scully is abusing some kid in the hospital and falling in with with a pedopriest.
a Yeah, but, I mean, more like some Grizzly Adams Roswell nut, tripping on Amanita-Reindeer piss, dictating conspiracy-theory podcasts into an analog dictaphone, mailing cassettes out to a third party remailer, who mails them to a third-party uploader.
I bet he's alot like the Californication guy after he lost his family in that DMT bongfire then goes “full Native” at the sorority camp.
b “Never go full Native.”
a Huu-hmm. Got that one right, brother.
---
b Did you ever hear of those white folks who hike up in the mountains, take strange dope, take off all their clothes, paint themselves glow-in-the-dark stripes, lube themselves up and run around the mountain trying to get abducted by aliens?
a Ya. So?
---
b Futures and pasts shake and merge, separate and disappear in front of his eyes and we don’t see a thing. The world is in constant freefall around him, a torrent of spacetime and rarely aware minds.
Most people think they know what the truth is, but all they know is relative truth. Relative truth is kinda like relative time and lightspeed; it depends on where you’re standing.
Actual truth is real, however. He sees part of it, but says noone can see it all, even on video.
a Just because humans spin overlapping and generally agreeing descriptions of an event, series of events, or the last five minutes doesn’t mean that you are getting the truth. Always watch the video and question the source.
b What if there’s no video?
a There’s always fucking video.
Most people don’t “see”. They narrate their surrounding.
When you see, you are less surprised, less anxious. The little voice in your head, in all of our heads, though, it is hard to shut off. Especially if you’re not really aware that it is not whom you are.
Terence McKenna called it “The Logos” of the ancient Greeks. Sounds of human consciousnous still being forged, echoing through the ages through literature. You are not the little voice driving your car, flipping your burger and typing your spreadsheet.
You. You have to live in reality. That’s your job.
It’s the job of the whole lot of yous to get your shit together. You do not have an accurate picture of reality in your head. It’s kind of our job to be a little crazy for everybody else. It doesn’t work if someone hijacks the whole species’ awareness by design and all your sanity as some kinda bycatch.
a You alls are muddying and shearing the world, at the same time, by spinning realities with your stories, your likes and your stupefactions.
That is my job.
That was my job.
Does Shinto worship Marshall McLuhan? Google it.
Fini
