“I’m Pulling Back the Curtain. I Want to Meet the Wizard.”

This week is a real 90s tinged, return of the mack, the return of the seething flame on the hedge vibe:

“So I'm back up in the game
Running things to keep my swing
Letting all the people know
That I'm back to run the show
'Cos what you did, you know, was wrong
And all the nasty things you've done
So, baby, listen carefully
While I sing my come-back song”

Mark Morrison - Return of the Mack

Look, I have been all broody and focusing on my death work the past couple weeks, so its only natural that snarlin’, seethin’ druid is let loose with paragraphs that contain cyanide. I’m “singing my comeback song,” because all y’all people who are ducking the death work and trying to live in that endless summer need a reminder that the darkness is descending. It’s coming whether you like it or not, and its our job to bare witness to its contours and experience.

Winston and I were on our “our legs only work when we walk” jaunt around the neighborhood.   Yes, Winston and I both have a history of “sports injuries” that date from our over active youths. Winston from overzealous attempts to eat chicken breast off people’s plates and me because I overdo every physical activity I have ever participated in. Even though it was only like 9:37 AM, it was about 4 bajillion degrees. Someone turned up the heat to incinerate both myself and my incredibly furry best friend. Winston was taking it pretty well while we shade hopped around. Little guy is an absolute trooper on his heart healthy walk. Me, I was irritable, not at my best.

We reached a part of my neighborhood where folks just don’t have sidewalks. They have literally poured tens of thousands of dollars, maybe over 100k, into their well-manicured, lush-green lawns; ornamental flowers; and assorted lawn decorations that demonstrate their sense of whimsy. Yet, a fuckin’ sidewalk is too much to ask for. See, I told you I was irritable. This one house was my breaking point. Winston and I were walking along when the sidewalk just abruptly ended. In place of a sidewalk, this house had decided to put two planter boxes and let the adjoining privacy hedges flanking their backyard fence overgrown to form a real fuck you barrier to folks trying to get around the neighborhood on two wheels or two feet. The message was clear from their choice: “Don’t walk in MY YARD, you plebeian.”

The sun was beating down on the pavement in the street to our right. Winston and I didn’t have a choice with our chosen shade hopping methodology. We walked right through that lush, shaded grass, feeling quite smug and haughty about it. If we wouldn’t be given safe passage on a sidewalk, we would take it on the grass where the sidewalk should be. Winston and I whimp’d out as we rounded the corner. The shade extended in the street and we took our leave to return to the street like the plebeians we are. Winston got the scent of something in the yard and went to check it out by walking a couple steps back into the yard. I took a deep breathe and looked around. That’s when I saw this mouth breather staring at me from their screen door.  It was an older woman in her early 70s who dyes her hair a weird shade of super fake brown in the most pedestrian shirt and pants one could find. She could have been a paid actor for all I knew. It was that creepily non-descript. Who knows how long she had been staring at me while mouth breathing from behind her castle gate of a screen door. We locked eyes and I refused to stop staring right back at her. Her eyes screamed, “GET OFF MY LAWN!” My eyes plainly replied, “make me, lady.” 

Could this be one of our breaking points? Could we be like D-Fens in the classic 1993 film “Falling Down” featuring Micheal Douglas and having a heat-induced breakdown leading us to leave our car behind on a LA Highway? I mean, who knows what she was willing to do. We know that she was willing to throw all simple concern for her fellow humans aside by sinking a boatload of money into her yard without putting in simple sidewalks. So, we know that she got some pretty anti-human values. About 4 years into the eternity our stare-off lasted, I decided to get a life and continued walking down the street, leaving her still staring at my inflatable body double I left behind. This is what the universe has felt like this week, a revolving door of unwelcome reminders of how annoying our society is. 

Taxes, like being stared at by some mouth breather, was another big slap in the face this week. Remember my constant, annoying marketing speak about going paid? The paid subscription model was supposed to launch this week. Well, in the process of getting everything set up, I realized that ya friendly hermetic druid needs like business licenses or something to operate a paid essay subscription service. So, scratch that launch and insert diabolical laughter.  Can I please give you all the minutes of your life I wasted while you read that marketing shpeal? Ugh, the irony of me requiring myself to write an essay every week for a year to prove to myself that I could go paid and then not researching taxes and licenses is comically absurd to me. It’s absurdity tinged with a feeling of defeatism. Of course the OCD guy would emerge from a personal hellscape of his own design to only have to navigate the bureaucratic process of ensuring I pay my pound of flesh for the $5 dollars I will make off subscriptions. Ok, it’s really not defeatist. I’m just calling in the accountants and lawyers to help me, so I will update you when I get all the logistics situated. 

I also suggest that you do not watch 3 hours of public meetings on your local public access station. Yes, I did that.  After a while your brain learns to read between the lines of what is being said and what isn’t. You learn that a significant portion of language used in public policy discussions actually means nothing. It’s just a facade or appearance that is built collectively and alluded to in policy discussions. It’s enough to leave you muttering like like Michael Douglas’ character Nicholas in “The Game” when he is infiltrating Consumer Recreation Services.

“I don’t care about Money,” Nicholas says, “I’m pulling back the curtain. I want to meet the wizard.”

However, that wizard doesn’t exist. The wizard is collective institution with a bunch of people pointing fingers at each other, but I can sympathize with wanting to be able to put a face to the person who is turning the screws on people. 

Your mind is a labyrinth. It’s up to you to decide whether that labyrinth is a sort of kafka-esque trap where one is assaulted on all sides by bureaucratic messaging or a contemplative pilgrimage. You get decide if you will be ensnarled by other folx telling you what’s important to think or care about or pursuing your own pilgrimage to find your truths, omens, and memories. I think of advertising, no-news journalism, two-party political nihilism (e.g., vote blue no matter who), and charasmatic, right-wing christianity (e.g., evangelicalism) or reactionary, conservative catholicism (see Denver’s Archbishop Aquilla who is suing the State of Colorado for the right to exclude LGBTQ+ kids and parents from their preschool) as examples of people trying to get you to play a game according to their rules and their view of reality. It’s doesn’t matter if you agree with them or not, as long as you agree to their rules of engagement. Yes, sometimes even dissent can get you caught in a whole cycle of thought and action that steals precious time for you as you engage in a battle where you didn’t even create the universe that you are operating in. That’s the definition of playing someone else’s game and being entrapped in their snare.

I just want you to be your own game master. I want you to make your own rules for the great pilgrimage that you would like to go on. I want you to prioritize your imagination, not what Gwenyth Paltrow at goop is trying to sell you. I want you to prioritize embodying and enacting your own values-based politics, not some dead-end choice between a false dichotomy. I want you to unlock the potential of your own mind as this Rosetta Stone that lets you turn down all that other noise and travel the pathway that your mind lays out for you.

This is probably rather obtuse and abstract, but it’s really just a simple process that comes out of me moving my body. I was walking the other day and that thought popped into my head, “your mind is a labyrinth.” Immediately, I was drawing on the contemplative symbology of labyrinths as these pathways we walk to some source of wisdom. I was all caught up in the blissful late summer morning experience of moveing my body in this simple way. Lost in that movement, the larger stories of our culture loosened and I found myself on my own mental journey back to the core of my own experience. That’s all I want for you. I just want for you to be free to take your own little trips with your mind and body in synch.

Anyways, we were a little all over the place this week. We were heavy on the MICKIE DUGGIE! LOL That will probably be the only time that ever happens, but we will never leave the 90s. It was just TOO good of a decade. Again, I will let you know about the subscription stuff. I got a meeting with the accountant on Thursday.

All my best, dear reader,

James

Ok, we shoulda talked to the lawyers and accountants first. We didn’t and now you get more free essays until we get all licensed up. Subscribe for a free weekly essay below.