5. LEE COPPERHEAD'S ETERNITY BLOOZ

The following is a transcript of _____'s very candid audio notes (transferred from camera phone) chronicling the initial inception phase, as well as three character profiles, for the re-tooled "Deeply Damaged: Cautiously Approaching Death On The Shore":

Lee Copperhead was the childless, barrel-chested, unaccredited principal of a Messianic Jewish Pentecostal day school. He had no formal training or college degree, but his beard made him look supremely magisterial and I harbor suspicions that he got the job based on his patented Facial-Hair alone. His unfortunately deep-set eyes always seemed to be thoughtfully locked squarely on people's foreheads, just out of step with the eyes of whoever he was addressing. Being as that most student interactions with him were positioned so as he was behind them while he un-spared the rod, this quirk rarely impinged on effective communication. Naturally, he charmed the pants off Old Man and Old Woman.

One of the ways Lee implemented his own specific brand of micro-management was to burst into Hebrew class unannounced and declare that it was time to pick a girl and watch as she attempted to take the shape of various letters of the Hebrew alphabet with her body. He would be on hand to assist with the particularly dexterous positions, while simple letters like "Alef" could be admired from a distance. Sadly, he would administer back rubs with his weird hands which he, no doubt, likened as unto a carpenter's or something.

Lee's wife was one of two school secretaries, which, in retrospect, must be way up there with non-event jobs. The entire school, kindergarten through grade 16, was comprised of 30 kids, max. My eighth grade class had two students, me and an all-star contortionist. They had two receptionists. This was at the kind of school where kids jeeringly taunted, "Pride comes before a fall!" when you hit a double in kick-ball.

So, maybe you're the kind of camera phone that can deduce that Lee loved the young ladies, which is unfortunate, as his wife, the receptionist from earlier, appeared to be a good 25 years his senior. The way I imagine Lee now is having been a second wave modern Messianic Jew (there's a pretty significant gap between the waves of the 1st and 20th Centuries) and joining up right as the utopian 80's years of the Messianic Jewish counter-culture was tapering off. I'm sure the prospect of an easy-in to the community with a mature, sensual woman-elder of the compound was absolutely scintillating at the time, but no doubt as the idealism of the early 80's fazed out, and beards became less and less statement-oriented, the relationship had cooled.

Lee wouldn't be on hand for my 8th grade year as he got a case of the bed bugs and decided to run off with receptionist number 2 who, sadly, was much older than he. Mohammed married older. According to some non-corrupted biographical information, one of modernity's Shamans, the Viking of 6th Street, also had a penchant for strictly older women, and while there may be some room to draw a parallel between paddling kids and drumming, a blind street-genius Lee was not. That's not to say that he didn't enter into an authentic enlightened trance while hitting kids.

I managed to give Lee a pretty wide berth for a little while, but it was only a matter of time before he wanted to spank me.

One day in chapel I took it upon myself to share a vision with the school. Lee had just given a talk about obeying the teaching staff, and I was overcome with a vision of a bearded man standing on a mountain,

"And his tongue wasn't a human tongue, but a sword! And he used this sword to cut children in half like so many defenseless bed bugs! In one hand he held the thigh of a virgin and in the other a paddle, pointed towards Jerusalem! People would gather around because they assumed that all the blood at his feet was the blood of the Lamb, but it was actually children-blood! The blood of a million children's uniform pants! And the blood would not turn into wine! He would use his influence to convince people to give up their children to his tutelage! He made it rain toothbrushes so that there wouldn't be but one dirty toilet-bowl in all the four-corners of the earth! Because the earth is flat, and so it only stands to reason that it has four corners! And folksy punishments fly in the face of a culture absent of values! This false prophet was given authority over a small flock hidden way, way down in the valley where no one ever went, so no one could hear him sowing lies in the ears of God's children! But God saw him and judged his heart!"

It was obvious to Lee that my verbal exorcisms were not taking and, as he saw it, the only course of action God was leaving him was to physically assault the demons. I was in 7th grade and it would only be a few more years before even Old Woman would abandon this technique, so I was having none of it. Knowing that a physical altercation, other than a consensual beating, was beyond what even Lee was willing to dole out (the beard couldn't justify everything), and I walked on home.

Along the way, which passed through a few neighborhood backyards, I was stopped by Satan and, what appeared to be, a future version of Lee, shorn of his beard. He was no longer staring confidently at anybody's forehead, and an otter's jawbone hung limply at his side, like he was embarrassed of it.

"Servant! I have revealed myself to you in order to show that this man's future sin, which you won't be privy to until you're old enough to hear that kind of talk, completely disproves my existence! Now, we have something of a trip ahead of us."

4. DEAD SPIRIT ANIMAL RETURNS

Before sunrise I was walking a stretch of beach outside of Fort Bragg in Mendocino County, just starting to bore myself with thinking about how unfathomably powerful and mysterious the ocean is, when I came across my spirit-animal, Beached Sea Otter. In fact, it was a "real" beached sea otter, and I immediately panicked trying to grapple with what-it-is-exactly that generally moral people who once worked at a rainforest-themed restaurant are supposed to do in situations like this. Interestingly enough, my spirit animal happens to be a beached sea otter, but he really doesn't usually have at his disposal the kind of faculties necessary to compel me to do or learn much of majestic-anything in morbid ethical scenarios. He is in bad shape. Some kind of accident forever ago.

I proceeded to ask otter (when making reference to a spirit animal, most patented Alchemical Healing books-on-tape will make sure to clarify that one is never to place an article, such as "the" or "an", in front of it's man-name) why he'd never shown up in any of my Shamanic episodes at the MJP school.

He replied by grunting and nimbly twitching in a way I wouldn't have assumed gigantic sea-mammals can.

I never saw his face and couldn't really make out much of what he was saying, as his back was turned to me, but I got the distinct impression he had no idea who I was. Of tantamount importance to him at the time, I suppose, were the Camp Host's two dogs which were presently going absolutely ape-shit all around him. Bear in mind this is all quite beautiful-looking by virtue of it now being full-on sunrise complete with ham-fisted hues of purple and orange. Old Man was always diligent in impressing on me how sunrises and sunsets are objective proof of God's superiority as an artist.

"What message do you think God is trying to express through sunsets, Old Man?"

"He's saying, 'I AM THE SAME TODAY, YESTERDAY, AND FOREVER ! I AM UNCHANGING! HAVE A GOOD NIGHT!"

"That doesn't sound much like an artist."

"He is God first, artist second."

"I thought he was Jesus second."

"No, he's Jesus and God first. They count as one."

"So, you're saying his scope as a sunset artist is limited by people's expectations of him as God."

"God isn't limited by anything." Old Man said driving like a maniac on the unseasonably deserted roadway.

"Then God should get some outside perspective."

"God doesn't need anyone's help. Who needs help is someone who doesn't like sunsets just the way God made-"

Old Man slammed on the brakes and we hit a sea otter that just came out of absolutely nowhere.

"I AM AS BEAUTIFUL AS A SUNSET! THE DIFFERENCES ARE ARBITRARY AT BEST!," wailed the sea otter (non-S.A. article permitted).

Although what the sea otter had to say was actually quite profound, talking animals are sure-fire proof of demonic possession and Old Man sped off as I cast spells out the back window.

Then fifteen years passed and here I was with the answer to my question about where he'd been.

"Those aren't my dogs!", I called out, hoping he'd understand.

Feebly he said a few words in English I couldn't hear.

I started to make my way up to Camp Host's RV thinking that I might ask him to call Spirit Animal Control for the otter, and maybe his stupid dogs. The otters’ refrain grew louder and louder as I hurried up the embankment.

"No, no," Camp Host said, the smell of a frozen pizza cooking at 7:30 in the morning wafting into the cold, sea air. "He's at the mercy of the ocean now," he said wistfully. "The ocean is a powerful and mysterious thing."

"Unfathomably so."

It turned out my Spirit Animal was calling out "Kill me! Your father had to kill me and now it's your turn! Become the murderer! Become the father!" but I wouldn't know that until much later and it would be a long time before anyone would walk by there again.

3. BROOKDALE LODGE: A DARK CORNER OF THE HUMAN EXPERIMENT

"That's what dad's do!"

Was the unintentional punch line of a surprisingly lucid story about stealing a glass pipe from your step-son's friend.

"I wouldn't do shit like that if I didn't like him! Anyway he just got a settlement so he bought two cars (naturally). A '67 fuckin, (there was long pause here) Thunderbird and an 1817 Camaro that were just sitting up here on the hill and he just fucking went up there and bought 'em straight out. I had to give him a fucking a ride back to pick up the second one!"

The morning after, I was kicking myself for not getting to the bottom of the "settlement" specifics, but the way he said it kind of framed it like a local coming of age ritual.

"I mean, if you can't take care of a fucking sweet-ass pipe; look at this pipe! Hold that shit!" The pipe was warm and the approximate weight of a patented Hand-Gun. "How's he gonna take care of fucking two cars? He can't park 'em on my fuckin" lot! You know? What's he gonna do? Rent a small block of my yard to be his Wealth-Themed Car Park?" He laughed in a reminiscently pig-faced fashion and I only sort of saw why that detail was particularly significant, while simultaneously being deeply confused with the whole insistent "patent" and "theme" narrative device he seemed bent on employing. I wondered if this wasn't all just a bit obtuse foreshadowing, and I resented my stoned narrator's heavy-handed liberties.

"What's he going to do with the rest of the money?," I eventually asked.

"What rest of it?" We both laughed.

"He can have a vacation car."

Pipe-Guy contemplated this for a good minute.

As I examined the burnt DMTSS residue in the pipe, a gigantic Samoan dude came charging up the incline from the lodge entrance, attempting to propel himself up the gentle incline with one gigantic heft of his weight, only to lose momentum half way through and have to start all over. After three attempts, which I watched in complete silence for what seemed like a really long seven thousand years, he made it the 15 feet. He was teetering and glistening by the time he stabilized, coming to a rolling stop where we were sitting.

Pipe Guy bellowed, “This is the Captain, man! He has two boats!”

“Oh, yeah?” I asked.

The Captain replied in the wisest voice imaginable, “Vessels. Salmon, man. Got a place in Renton. You want my beer?” There was a steady stream of beer running through his beard and back into his glass.

“No, I took some mushrooms.” The words died in my mouth as I spiraled into a psychedelic shame spiral.

The Captain chuckled and farted empathetically, “Oh, man, I was scrapping mushrooms off some fucking... manure this morning. Yeah.”

Pipe Guy interjected in a panic of recollection, “Captain, man, tell him what you were telling me!”

The Captain took a moment to gather his thoughts and exploded, “Oh, man, he has to walk home uphill and I get to walk home downhill! See, he gives me shit because I have to walk uphill to get here, but when we leave I get to give him shit!”

We high-fived like two unicorns in a stabbing match.

This was, admittedly, a perfect arrangement, but I couldn't help but wonder if that wasn't the story Pipe-Guy had in mind.

The Captain lolled his head like he was catching satellite debris snowflakes, spread his arms and, after a few beats, howled at the sky before starting the easy walk home.

"That's what dad's do!"

That's what dad's do.

Brookdale is either a great place to make meth or the perfect locale for a an executive share-holder's trust-building retreat (last year's theme: "Be Everywhere"), depending on where your parts spend their time. The Brookdale Lodge is where biker gangs hold their initiation ceremonies in the haunted atrium; where a girl ("Sarah") drowned once. Right where the restaurant is now. I've never been in there when it was open for dining, and, unbelievably, one of menus, augmented with a few specials of my own design from a previous visit, appeared to still be in circulation. The fakest-looking real creek you've ever seen runs through the middle of the room. The Lodge is inundated with sex offenders who take up permanent residence and recreate in the parking lot all hours of the day, sexually-speaking. Strange, small groups of people in their fifties with the distinct look of real Satanists (black windbreakers, rings, sneakers) pull up, walk in through the back entrance and, after being inside for something like ten minutes, drive off. People franticly walk out of the surrounding woods to violently throw a coin in the wishing well before retreating immediately back. On a personal note, I once heard the voice of a young girl singing wordlessly as I walked past the rows of unheated rooms on my way to wait for the next day to come. Upon further examination, it ended up sounding more like Old Woman singing in her "wittle giwl" voice. Undoubtedly, she was smiling serenely as she held her knees in her arms and rocked gently on the bed, which, to anyone, is an infinitely more unsettling scenario.

Earlier that evening, before seeing the Captain off, I had the specific misfortune of watching as a varied crowd of very drunk, but seemingly benign, bikers, stoned caretakers, and patented Beach Bums turned into a leering rabble of Puritan huns, just loving the fact that an amateur stripper got sucker-pushed off of a 5 and a half foot stage by the meanest looking Pig-Face you've ever seen. The worst part was that the band playing, that everyone was there to see, and everyone was, presumably, in era-channeling, disbelief-suspending, harmonic fakery with, was "harkening" the sound of 1970's free-love and sexual liberation. After watching someone who was more or less an obvious ideological extension (or aesthetic inevitability) of their patented Band-Themed Sound get pushed off a stage by somebody who most resembled a Birther, one of them very un-groovily barked, "Thank you!" into the microphone before launching into a bass solo that was most likely about something.

Later, talking to the bartender, who seemed like the kind of lady who had probably danced on a few elevated surfaces in her time (the 70's), I mentioned how scary it was seeing somebody take a fall like that in high heels. Said bartender had been good enough to call her a cab and make sure she got home. Apparently, she (the stripper) had been the date of the local Marijuana-Food farmer, who was pointed out to me as being the individual high-fiving a group of what appeared to be, his patented Dune-Buggy riding Marine buddies, while joyously pantomiming, what could have been, pushing a large bale of weed into the back of a Hummer.

"It's just so sad," said the waitress, eyes down, busily wiping.

"I know, you'd expect people to have a little more sympathy, given the circumstances," I said, eyes down, busily talking.

"That's exactly the problem," she sighed knowingly. "Some people just don't care about anyone but themselves."

This had me feeling a little convicted. I had been in the kind of condition where all I could really manage, in terms of the rescue effort, was to stand agape, trying not to internalize what this whole sorry display said about my character.

"Yeah," I said.

"I mean, that slut was ruining the show for everyone!"

The next day I stopped at a Moving Sale on a turnout and bought a realistic-looking black windbreaker, some rings and a pair of sneakers for $6 from a stripper moving to a new apartment in Fenton. She was lovely and I hoped no one would ever push her off a stage, whatever the height.

A few days before and about an hour South, I had gone on a hike with a fellow I buy drugs from in Big Sur (more than once I've heard him described as "the quarterback of Big Sur"). Once we got out on some bluffs the quarterback pointed out the rolling estate of one half of the union who started the company Old Man works for. It struck me that the people who start these companies never begin with the dream that one day they'll own a $300,000 dollar home in a suburban-themed nightmare, conveniently located an hour drive from an urban-themed wet-dream. Fact is, they need people to work for them who assume that their dream is in some way congruent with the boss's. In Ordinary Reality, CEO's, shareholders, and Pant Otters want the patented Natural-Themed dream, but success, like most things we've been taught to value, is, like anything else we know, sanctified by scarcity. The people designing our gentrification want to live like Walden the Uni-bomber, hidden serenely up in the hills, oblivious to the stench of de-frosting death washing up at their multiple doorsteps. The bed bugs won't spare them.

2. METAPHYSICALLY DUBIOUS EXERCISES

The following is the recently salvaged, practically unreadable, wildly unabridged introduction for Reef Patent Co., Publishing Division's proposed memoir, "Deeply Damaged: The Prolonged Embrace Of My Sexually Alarming Spiritual Emergence" printed here in full:

There are few questions left unanswered for very long for a conscious bundle of organic light, but why I ever pretended I could speak in tongues is beyond me. When you have the kind of parents who don't bat an eye when you come home from your first day of school with tales of spiritual initiation rites into a fanatical Messianic-Jewish Pentecostal fringe cult with historically-revisionist Zionist political leanings, but who potentially could have been roused out of inaction if I had been expelled for refusing to engage in said metaphysically dubious exercises, it's obvious I made a woefully near-sighted split-second decision. By successfully mumbling something that sounded enough like the blessing that was sung by the class in lieu of the traditional American Otter Pant at the beginning of the day, I managed to convince my new teacher that I had was able to channel automatic Hebrew, or at least three words of it. This greased the axels of my first day a bit, and I was regarded with no small amount of wonder and jealousy by my new, less tongue-inclined classmates. There were, however, some formidable scatters in the group.

Each morning began with 20 minutes of mandatory prayer language chanting. I can't imagine what a stranger might say were he to accidentally walk in on a room full of traumatized youths darting their glassy, far-seeing eyes around while speaking gibberish to no one in particular. I used this time to whittle away the rough edges of my bit and do what I could to make it, or at least what I perceived to be, convincingly Middle-Eastern sounding.

My foray into language-based hallucination ended upon attendance of my first chapel service. Chapel was where I would experience the second miracle of my adolescence. First-graders raised from the cradle as Shamans were out in the aisles having convincingly terrifying seizures complete with tears and visitations from dead Grandpas and flying babies. Dancing was mandatory. Teachers would take shifts manually raising the arms of the non-compliant. The grand finale was an event that would loom large in the coming years; being slain in the spirit. Getting knocked unconscious made vaguely nebulous-sounding Hebrew (people were catching on) look nothing short of amateur, which, to be fair, it technically was. Being "slain in the spirit", (which will from here on out will appear exclusively in parenthesis), a potent combination of the power of suggestion, biochemistry, and showmanship, is patented Reality-Based Proof that one's God is real and moving, in no subtle way, through the physical world. Why a relatively powerful and wise God would choose to reveal himself to his followers almost exclusively through feats of strength (whether or not knocking over vomiting children can be considered much of a "feat of strength") in no way diminished being slain's general desirability.

This God bore more of a resemblance to the God of the Old Testament (the haughty brute) and the New Testament (the magician), than any I had been presented with prior and thus all seemed theologically sound. Of course, if you found yourself unable to black out on command there was undoubtedly some sort of demonic activity afoot. Demon expulsion was taught as something of a practical skill, similar to "shop" or "Spanish Culture", and my 5th grade teacher in particular had a reputation as something of a check-out line exorcist. How she was able to casually diagnosis demon possession as a likely cause for mundane aches and/or pains to unwitting strangers in line with her at the store must have been a miracle of tact in and of itself. Nevertheless, she reported a pretty impressive success-rate when it came to casting out demon-induced headaches.

All in all it appeared to me that God's sense of grandeur had diminished exponentially since the days of infanticide and frog rain, and was content to let the invisible armies of darkness and light do battle over concerns more or less of no consequence. Once you have crossed that particular ontological breach, the one where you believe God enlists the services of warrior phantoms to administer his will regarding the common cold, the world becomes a terrifying place.

In time, it was determined I had something of a demonic infection, a systemic manifestation of evil that had become so entrenched in my bowels that the services of the cult's premier exorcist were called in. Naturally, she started by asking the class to quietly provide a psychic barricade of prayer language, since we were more than likely about to come under heavy fire from a high-ranking demon prince-ling who was not about to let this woman compromise one of his strongholds of class disruption. The desired outcome of this ritual was my unconsciousness, and every able-bodied male in the class (of which there were about 6 total in the 4th, 5th and 6th grades combined, as the classes were) were on hand to make sure I didn't accumulate any new, demonically-inspired injuries on the way down.

I hadn't enjoyed my experience with spiritual espionage thus far, and wasn't about to compound expectations by attempting a realistic-looking "slay". After exhausting the average period of time that it usually takes for someone to whom God listens to determine whether or not this thing was going to take (which is never, ever contingent on their own intuition or skill in the case that it doesn't), she switched her attention to the squatting demons. Demons best respond to the phrase, "You have no place here!" and are compelled to reveal their title and rank upon the mere mention of Jesus' name.

This seems as good a time as any to profile one of my favorite characters from around this time: my teacher's son. Unlike the rest of us, who got to return home and enjoy something of a respite from the inner-workings of spiritual warfare, his whole waking reality was framed in a language typically reserved for fantasy, the genre. What made him even more un-tethered from reality was his weekend hobby: Civil War re-enactment. I wondered if he ever incorporated demonology into his Civil War narratives. I suppose Civil War battles are superior to Old Testament battles in terms of reenactment due to the fact that they were far more even-sided than the Israelites perpetually wiping out the Canaanites. All this to say, he was purely ethereal. Deeply damaged (this books' namesake) in retrospect, and stripped of any viable reality to reckon with, but a harmless soul. What happens when you cease to live among the rest of us cave shadows and stare directly into the sun? Well, you start with collecting disciples and end with being a political fugitive, though, you remind the executioner, that wasn't totally the point. If you really wanted to, you could make a tidy little metaphor for internal civil wars, which I will demonstrate in Chapter 12.

Coincidentally, this was right around the time that a young man's mind turns irreversibly to all things sex until the end of his days. I couldn't help but take note that these people were, presumably, procreating through a method that seemed a little base given their spiritual responsibilities. This certainly made it difficult for me not to envision the Judeo-Orgasmic fruit-bearing rites that were occurring in the mystery hours surrounding our interactions. Unless, of course, their offspring were being conceived immaculately, which if someone were to tell me was the case, wouldn't have surprised me at all. I couldn't decide whether or not they regarded sex as an unfortunate logistical inevitability in raising hypothetical offspring in-the-way-they-should-go, or whether they actually enjoyed it. The latter was unthinkable. It also seemed likely that intercourse would be unthinkably risk-laden, in so far as contracting demons was concerned.

And so, one of these fornicators was attempting to dislodge my demonic obstruction. One of the benefits of these rituals was the prospect of having the female quotient of the class laying on hands and interceding tenderly and melodically on your behalf. It was easy to read as far into the micro-movements that would occur during these events as you wanted. The repositioning of a hand, the brush of a thumb, and all the while knowing that their entire "being" was currently "being" utilized in the service of your patented Eternal Welfare State. It's possible that if you were able to relieve it of it's patented Psychotic Component, this exercise could do a world of good in a therapeutic context. For twenty minutes or so it was possible to leave the confines of, not only class, but the physical realm completely (when were we learning anything?). That this state can be induced under the most objectively false ideological circumstances has made me skeptical of self-induced altered states or casual drug use ever since. Someone transfixed on spiritual hypochondria brought on by burgeoning mental illness can have just as potent a moment of zen as a secular humanist hiker with a humble heart and an open mind contemplating Big Sur Co.’s Neon Poppies, if not more. In some ways, our brains are pretty non-discerning. The fact that in those moments I wasn't able to incorporate what I actually knew about the physical world into the likelihood that this experience was based in any kind perceivable truth frightens me.

"Shamanic" experiences really aren't all that different. A Shaman enters into an altered state, utilizing drums or chanting, in order to enter a Non-Ordinary Reality and bring back useful information for people who are too busy harvesting or hunting to sit around and do drugs. What I brought back from the Dreamtime was generally wrong or just compromised information that, maybe, was interpretively sound, but regardless of accuracy, usually served as pretty edifying to all involved. It doesn't hurt when everyone around you is willing to make tremendous deductive leaps.

A good example of some bad information derived from one such Shamanic experience was the revelation that on an October day in 1993 (the exact day escapes me; surprising, given the magnitude of what was to occur) the Spirit of the Messiah was going to fall on the earth in a way that was going to cause the largest simultaneous "slay in the spirit" on the books. In fact, people were calling it "2nd Pant-ecost", as it was expected to trump the original events of the Otter's Book of Ax. People were cautioned against driving or leaving the house, as there would likely be rampant spirit-induced pile-ups, and thus, school was cancelled that day. Old Man insisted on taking advantage of the liberated roadways, and drove around like a man possessed. As any historian (who's more than likely a born-again Christian/Energy Healer) will recall, the SOTM did not fall as advertised, but there were belief-defying accounts coming in from all corners of the MJP compound about people miraculously being knocked unconscious after someone prayed over them asking God to miraculously knock them unconscious. It was all quickly forgotten.

Speaking of fright, a few minutes into the ceremony I started to feel a vicious heat without warmth gestating in my stomach, without really being in my literal stomach. My vision began to darken around the peripherals as the color of the room grew paler and paler and all of a sudden I had the distinct sensation that someone else was looking through my eyes. Rightfully terrified, with the distinct taste of sulfur and ash in my mouth, I turned on the woman who dared speak the name of the Messiah in my presence.

"We are called Indignant and this place wreaks of the Blood! Fool woman, we were among the first defectors to follow the Morning Star into endless oblivion! We were inhabiting Kings of Old Earth before your line crawled out of the filth of Creation! We have served under Baal and El! We know curses older than the words of Christ! We have mastered evil that corrupts where your senses cannot follow! Do you believe that your God, apparently powerless or indifferent to evil will come to the aid of this boy faster than he who requires no convincing and bartering from the sun-burnt lips of man to display his contempt for life? Release us!"

I watched as the horned-up exorcist had an awful realization that somewhere down deep she had never really believed in demon possession. She enjoyed the mystery it lent to her life, and the fact that it's something you can engineer on children with fairly little resistance, because, again, she never actually had the faith required to believe that a real-life monster from the literal-locale Hell was ever going to, even proverbially, jump down her throat. Needless to say, this little outburst shook her sense of reality to the foundation. Reacting as anyone might, she immediately did what could be described as falling into a reverse crab walk directly into a row of desks and on towards the door.

Fifteen years later, the demons and I would look back and laugh. It is my hope and prayer for this book that my anecdotal dismantling of slow moving targets will eventually generate some profit in my life.

NON-NOVEL BONUS CONTENT: AFTERMATH OF FEW TOUGH CALLS

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7589205

1. INTRODUCTION, IF ONLY BY VIRTUE OF THIS CHAPTER'S NON-ARBITRARY LINEAR PLACEMENT.

To Whom It May Concern:

Included is my proposal for the hypothetical video game, "Bed Bug

Mountain." The following is a broad treatment, more characters and

a "tighter" wrap up for the "restaurant sequence" are in production as

of this date. The following synopsis is written in the voice of the

game's protagonist, a drug addled naturalist named _____. I eagerly

await any feedback you may have, and am always available to field

any technical queries.

BED BUG MOUNTAIN: FIRST TREATMENT

Unfortunately, Mr. _____ thinks, countless times a day the philosopher animal is faced with the dilemma of designating something as sacred or meaningless. It's fallen to us, as a race, not to merely exist and interact with the world as a physical place, he observes, but as one in which every material object is laden with spiritual abstractions, typically pertaining to us, and the things we should or shouldn't be doing with our parts. As the singing, dancing consciousness of the world, humanity can't help but revel in the assumption that the birds of the air sing solely to remind them of life's patented, antiquated, reality-based joys, he posits. Likewise, the, mostly hypothetical, mountains dutifully do little-to-majestic-nothing in order to put a metaphorical face on our steadfastness, perseverance, long-suffering or any other number of laudable, distinctly male human traits.

Mr. _____ removes his shirt and wonders what collective life-lesson will be gleaned from the inevitable bed-bug invasion. Will we be willing to realize that a colony existence of thoughtless duty and systemic flesh-eating is the universe's gentle admonishment that we must do whatever necessary to abolish our obsession with existential individuality? Will we take a quiet moment to brush them from our eyes and reflect on how traumatic conception is really just nature's still, small voice telling us that we didn't invent sexual violence after all? The ancient insects, Mr. _____ suspects, have maintained those mountains and cultivated those wild flowers in order to lure us up to where our size advantage is neutralized by the absence of a swift escape route, and chances are we'll ascend in thin numbers so as to capitalize on a little one-on-one time with nature's proverbial wisdom.

Mr. _____ is not one easily transported by themes, though he recognizes that the chief function of his compromised mind is finding the sacred in-between the fluctuating limits of animatronics. Mr. _____ comes to the conclusion that the lack of a natural environment has contributed to this. Very few of the spaces he inhabits bear the resemblance of anything that has existed for very long in a human vacuum, and the spaces designed to evoke that state strike him as acutely tragic. Even if said environs are designed by specialists, or scientists, or standard-issue authenticity-regulators (always wearing immaculately re-enacted get-ups of the visionary authenticity-regulators from the golden age of authenticity-regulation), they cannot escape the parody of the parking-lot and gift shop. Since, he reasons, people generally hate living the way they do, they put a disproportionate density of faith in the inherent power of nature and travel, subsequently thinking that if they can but just graze the hem of the robe, they'll leave a little less intoxicated by progress than they were when they planned that hike.

Mr. _____ removes his pants and does not think about his recent employment at a rainforest-themed nightmare. He does not reminisce on unloading unsolicited, non-ordinary, potentially-true facts about the rainforest on people while they try to order plaster buckets of ice tea. He proceeds to not think about lying to kids. He sits ape-like, oblivious to how many young people that passed through the nightmare's befuddlingly Caribbean gates he instilled with an enduring fascination with the natural world. He does not share the glory with the, long-extinct, lockjaw gorilla or the regal, yet suicidal-looking, cheetah. More likely than a cynicism concerning the drudgery of eating out, he unknowingly instilled in countless a wide-eyed wonder for wild, open spaces. Mr. _____ contemplates that as you get older your tastes and criteria for an appropriate approximation may improve, but it doesn't change the fact that, more often than not, most don't mind purchasing a fatally-edited synonym. Shielding his rapidly burning face from the epileptic glint of a million sparkling ice-tea buckets, Mr. _____ thinks, "There is something to be said for the fact that the places where we choose to consume often end up emitting messages not too dissimilar from own values." Under the influence of mild hallucinogens, as he is wont to do, Mr. _____ anthropomorphizes the restaurants scattered like satellite debris across the unknowable green-like depths of the valley:

"I long for kinder, simpler times when women were 'Ma'am' and men were 'Honey" and you could sit in a rocking chair and, for once, actually take your time digesting and thinking back on the hearty meal that was just lovingly hand-crafted just for you by a sweaty-browed farmer's daughter up to her elbows in biscuit flour."

"I care about protecting endangered ecosystems."

"I value that every neighborhood should have sort of a, I don't know, common place. Or public square. Somewhere where on any given night you can just walk in and know that there will be someone there that not only knows your name, but knows you. They don't mind when you bring in an entire baseball team full of kids drunk on victory with their kind-eyed, dock-working papas and the papa's wholesome fire-fighting boyfriends in tow. In fact, last year's championship trophy is right up there above the bar next to the photos of dead cops."

Mr. _____ thinks of himself as objective enough to acknowledge that these are all ideas commonly held by decent people everywhere, and that there's really nothing intrinsically wrong with finding yourself in ideological harmony with a place like that. He doesn't necessarily think it indicative of weak character or anything. It's possible, however, that over time, the process of becoming more and more accustomed to profit-driven ventures supplementing our lives with a little subconscious spiritual substance has driven our expectations way down, while subtlety inflating our expectations for what, you know, money can buy. For this reason, day-trips to parks he's always found particularly depressing. He dreads driving up to them, parking and then starting the walk across the parking lot to where the nature starts. As if he could be transported from the crushing mindlessness of automated living by virtue of a duck pond. Like a nature-themed restaurant where you can't buy anything. Losing his composure, he muses "There are no more mystical properties in de-contextualized nature than there are in looking a black hole in the face."

Since most people have taken the angle in life of putting what they'd like to do at direct opposition to what they actually do, it really doesn't come as much of a surprise to Mr. _____ that most people don't identify the peril involved in slowly dying of diabetes and bed sores as being quite as severe as the peril posed by the possibility of being eaten by a mountain bed bug. If given the option, he wonders, what would closet boy choose? ("Closet boy" being the philosophical device in which a non-nurtured human lives in a soundproof, pitch-black closet until he's an adult who can proffer untainted, instinctual answers to hypothetical questions.)

He contemplates his microscopic role in history.

He wonders if technology will eventually abolish our dependence on physical bodies, and longs for his consciousnesses to abandon the physical world. Quickly boring himself, his physical body falls out of the tree at a non-uniform rate while his consciousness hopes theme-restaurant induced obesity might be an evolutionary step in this direction. "Evolution always takes prisoners." he says to the bed bugs.

Thank you for your consideration,

Mr. ___________