Future On My Doorstep - Part 1

For some months now, even from the more settled days just before leaving my former residence to begin this Odyssey, I have been experiencing familiar but forgotten images - in both my dream life and while awake - of places and scenes that I've always known were in my future.  In my childhood I used to glimpse these same images with a casual wonder and was a bit surprised here at mid-life when they started to present themselves again.  Long ago in my adolescence I had discounted them by burying my soul.

Nevertheless, they appear to be back and only getting more vivid as what used to be the “future” seems to have dropped itself on my doorstep—and is knocking lightly at the door.  It is a visitor I'm trying to ignore.  But its gentle yet obvious presence just won't go away. 

I'm just a fool and it is in my nature have put off turning that doorknob; not ready for the enemy it will attract.  I'm not ready for what is to come, I realize I have to begin biting the bullet and facing the truth:  nothing is left for me in the conventional  lifestyles of the poor in spirit.   Still, left to my own low motivation in this regard, I would probably just sit down for the rest of my life with my back against the door, willing to put up with the proximity of this uninvited guest. 

Are these visions simply the inevitable resurgence of an original, involuntary reflection; a going-back to before the complexities of adulthood to finish comprehending what my boyhood-self could not grasp?  Maybe the boding revelation is stronger now, because it just so happens that I have involuntarily been “chosen” at this time to be Led off-stage and out through the complexity-curtain of a world filled to the brim with its own hubris. 

The devil has a little sister and she is a burnt monster with a festering hatred beyond all human conception.  Her moniker is, euphemistically referred to as: “modern life.”  She hides her gnashing teeth behind a prettily painted face, tireless and poised, ever-ready to consume all remaining residue of human naturalness and innocence wherever she might find them.  She is a succubus more dangerous now than she ever was in historic times, waiting for the rare chance to see a child of Light re-emerge within even one single man.  The child is special and in order to “fit in,” perhaps he once buried it deep within.  It is his neglected soul.  And he...is me. 

And nothing makes this twisted sister more lustful than smelling the soul's reemergence.  She harbors but one singular ambition: ripping it to shreds.  And even from thousands of miles away I smell the stench of her lust from below her waste...  She is following the future around the world from house to house—doorway to doorway—searching.  And now that the future waits on ME I know she must be approaching with great haste.  She tried to kidnap me twenty years ago—her and her brother.  She is loath to forget my past rejection of her.  And her big brother has detected a new opportunity.  That is why they keeping nudging their cousin trying to keep her awake as she still reclines in that back bedroom that I discussed some posts ago (see "Making dead Ends Meet").

A few years ago, after coming home from an uncertain hospital stay, I began to get brief but intense flashes, like personal archetypal impressions, colors and sparks of light I deemed to be from my earliest days.  I'd see a crayon and think of the first time I saw a whole box of crayon colors; all the potential that box held for expressing myself.  Particularly metallic colors, the trick of light as it is reflected off of copper, silver or gold.  Recuperating  at home, these impression made me think of Christmas decorations, tinsel, glass bulbs, or Easter baskets filled with tinfoil-covered chocolate eggs and iridescent plastic grass; anything that used to have “shininess” to it.  It made the false magic of those holidays HOLY-days.  There was something about the glint, the shimmer, the glisten that I just loved as a kid.  I was a bookish lad who could be left in one spot with toys or drawing utensils for hours, able to entertain myself through pure imagination.  I was content simply staring at something shiny or glowing, for long periods of time. 

Other memories come to mind...  My sister and I each had small spring-loaded alarm clocks rescued from the attic of my grandparent's house that had small dots of radium (believe it or not) painted on each number so they would glow at night.  Later in life I read an article about how many of the women factory workers who used to paint these clock dials eventually developed cancer and died prematurely due to radiation exposure.  But hey, that was “progress” in the industrial age!; born upon the tumor-covered hands and faces of young women who never had a chance to grow old.

I remember the Christmas I got a digital watch back when they were little red-lit digits - clock-radio style - was a real treat.  All the calculators back then were made with similar red glowing digits until LCD (liquid crystal displays) replaced them.  That was a sad day in my child-mind.  But I was happy again once those LCD's became  back-lit.  Seeing what is being done now with LCD technology (such as the very screen I am viewing as I write this post) would have blown my young mind.  My love of science stems from those days. 

I had a robot costume that my mom bought at K-mart with a little light bulb in the top of the mask, attached by a cord to a 9-volt battery sewed into the nylon belt of he shirt.  After the night was over I was quick to cut the whole apparatus out of the material and mask.  I played with that sucker continuously for days, shining it on different surfaces to see how it would reflect, clicking it on and off with the beat of music, touching it to my lip until it got hot, then removing it and letting it cool, and repeating the process over and over. 

My dad - who was a regional rep for Union Carbide and its subsidiary, Eveready, in the 1970's – came home with lots of cool promotional flashlights and other kinds of battery-lit fluorescent lights too.  They all went straight into my room whenever I could get my hands on them.  There was something so cold about fluorescent light, so blue and icy...  Every box store in every city owes its life to the bland rays of the synthetic fluorescent ceilings of the 1970's.  And what shopper hasn't had the grand pleasure of strolling through a 24-hour Walmart today at 3 am, in search of safety pins, feminine napkins or toilet paper and being illuminated from above by these frigid, flickering, often semi-burnt-out, glowing, mercury-filled, industrial, four-foot tubes of glory?  More progress I guess... 

I also LOVED any glowing object that I could “charge up” with a light and then turn off the light and to let it glow.  It was fascinating to me to see just how long the glow it would last.  I got a Frankenstein face with glowing eyes in a cereal box and hung it on my wall to observe at night.  Getting the glowing star stickers for my bedroom ceiling had to have been the highpoint of bedtime wonder.  When these objects got very dim I was never quite sure whether they were still glowing or if it was just an afterimage in my mind, or maybe just my imagination.  I suppose it was inevitable that I would be drawn to psychedelics as a teenager and an adult.

Most-beloved to me was the shimmer and shifting sunlight off tiny waves on the surface of water; what I've often called, “crystal waters.”  I knew even at my earliest wonderment that surely heaven must be filled with sunlit waters of this kind.  And this theory was partially confirmed in the hospital so many years later.  I will write a post about that experience eventually.

I don't know what it was about these things.  I guess it has to do with light in the most general and primordial sense; its reflections, refractions, the splitting of white light into color and the recombination of color back into the whiteness.  As I got a bit older and was able to travel with my family to different places, visionary-like images would flash before my third eye, catalyzed by the current scenes I was viewing then.  And it is THESE experiences that became the basis of what I have been seeing lately, spurred on by my re-awakening, post hospital.  All this leads me to the real subject at hand...

[For the next post in this thread I will delve into the specifics of these visions and images, along with my interpretation of what they might mean for me...and us.]