Well, sir.

I tried my hand at a couple of intro-ductions to this – essays, by pryings and fiddlings with the keen edge of my fine-honed intellect, to loose the lock on the door through which I might draw you into a small space in my imaginal realm that I haven’t explored or explicated much, here or heretofore – but... it availed me not.

Which is to say…

I wanted to lay out what I would say today in a form and a format more comprehensible to the reader, a clockwork concatenation of structure and meaning more amenable to the mechanically-minded’s linear, step-wise digestion…

But, though perhaps I can’t speak for you, I’m not a machine-man with a machine-mind or a machine-heart, though I am the Great Dictator of this imaginal realm, or at least its essays, and so: what I say goes, and painting-by-numbers is a no-go.

So let it be said, so let it be written, so let it be done, and in a wise better-suited to my own heart’s delight: amen, if it be amenable to my muses.

Just playing.

I should not forget, nor should you, that when keen knives and heavy shoulders fail to open doorways to imaginal realms or their expression and depiction by way of art, a lyre and a paean will serve for a key; for if the walls of Jericho fell to the echoes of horn-blasts, surely the doors to imaginal realms will open to a voice raised and strings plucked in heartfelt evocation of the spirit of creative expression.

So, you’ll forgive me the florid eulogy, but I think I’ve got us through the door now.

Yes, sir.

But what I also wanted to say, as a corollary to that introduction – now having walked up the steps of the entryway and passed through the front gate, but not yet having entered that small space in my imaginal realm alluded to above – is that, though I think enough time has passed since my recent gold-panning in the commingled waters of the Stream of Consciousness and the River of Lethe that the presentation of this gold-nugget won’t partake of the same flavor of … mmm, surreal melding of cultural images and echoes, both high and low … I think it’d do you some good to hitch up yer britches, roll up yer trouser-legs, and wade in those proverbial waters before proceeding.

Context, dontcha know.

Haw-Haw Hog-Slop would be right place to start, though it’s the last in the series of essays I’m alluding to; but it conveniently links to all the other essays (and in their right sequence), which saves us both some time, if you follow.

Today, I’ll share another little bit of old writing with you – just a few throwaway lines from August of 2014, though to my remembering mind something rich, fertile, dense – a self-fructifying, quick-germinating nucleus for a fully-foliated essay.

Some years ago, I saw some website – at least, this is how I remember it – advertising a sort of guerrilla re-foresting project and their product to achieve it: seeds of nourishing food-plants nestled in the heart of ready-rolled balls of soil.

Just toss ‘em over your shoulder, Deucalion and Pyrrha-style, into the waste behind you, and in your wake springs up a new generation to carry the old one forward.

This is like that.

I alluded to it here: Court Order.

For about a year and a half, I worked a job I didn’t like.

You’ll have to glean the entire context for this, grain by grain, by wandering all the halls of this labyrinthine web of interwoven essays, and furthermore grind your own grist before making something more of it for yourself.

In this sense, I’m giving you the short end of the proverbial stick, though I will add that this kind of voluntary suffering and conscious labor is strictly salutary for you.

Anyway, since I know you won’t do that, it’s enough to say here that that year and a half was just after my having put off Higher Education (in the lowly, uneducated sense of the term) for as long as I could, finally conceding to shovel mountains of shit for a few years in the Augean Stables of the University of Maryland before moving on to the more suitable labors that that onerous one was a gateway to.

Though, as you might expect, I was the Top Student in all my classes and the University of Maryland was a top-notch public institution, that availed me not, in terms of alchemically transmuting those facts into my Earning a Sustainable Living Nestled within a Satisfying Career.

“Hi-diddle dee-dee

A hermit’s life for me:

A shaven crown and a rough-hewn staff,

With scanty grains ‘mid heaps of chaff!”

I didn’t choose it; the heavens ordained it.

Now, as I write, I find myself “in harmonic resonance with that life-note” again, though on a different octave, with the due and law-able modulation that entails – though that’s a bit of a side-track we won’t explicitly be going down just now.

Anyway, I was trying to jump life-octaves, so to speak, from over a decade of low-wage retail wage-slavery to … I don’t know what.

Let’s call it... salaried low-wage wage-slavery, in a more stable and better-dressed milieu, with the concomitant window-dressings of respectability all around me... all serving, ultimately and only, to try to shine proverbial shit.

As Master Gurdjieff taught, there’s no un-conscious evolution, and you can’t jump being-octaves without the interjection of a conscious shock.

Well.

Working in the mailroom at that courthouse was indeed a shock, and it did serve to kick me up to a higher life-octave, though I stood hemming, hawing, and toe-dipping on the lip of the chasm between octaves for a good while before taking the forced leap across the void between them.

I worked in the mailroom – a windowless room, tucked at the wall-end of the middle of the second floor, where I had no coworker or supervisor with me most of the time, where the work was simple, repetitive, and quickly done, and where, by nature of the work, everyone in the building (or their duly appointed representatives) passed through almost every day, at least once a day.

Everyone?

Yeah, pretty much.

High and low.

I’m talking about people working low-wage, low-skill, soul-sucking, mindless government drone-jobs – uneducated people, for the most part, and mainly from other countries or “minority groups.”

I’m talking middle-management clerical drones, as well as law-clerks, lawyers, and their ilk and like, kith and kin.

And I’m talking judges – active and retired, all the way up to the head judge. People with many fancy degrees from well-known universities, people making tons of money, living in fine estates on choice land, and, in a word, coming from and mingling with the crusty upper echelons of high society, no doubt with all that that entails, in the Eyes Wide Shut sense.

Everyone passed through the mailroom.

The judges and their secretaries and their law-clerks, to pick up their urgent mail or to make sure I sent it out.

The middle-management drones, for much the same reasons – to make sure they got something important, or sent it out, without muck-ups or fuck-ups.

And the low-tier, low-wage drones, mainly to pick up their department’s mail and take it back, or, in a couple of cases, to open and pre-sort it all in my office beforehand, since it was so much and since it would have to be divvied up downstairs, anyway.

Mainly, I’m talking about the Civil and Family Law departments, who got most of the incoming mail.

At the same time, these employees who sorted out all those departments’ mail seemed to like being able to get away for an hour or so a day, especially to a quiet corner of the building with no cameras, no supervisors, and a humble host who didn’t say much, unless it was something funny or some warm words.

As has been the case in every job I’ve worked, slowly, slowly, I found myself a silent magnet for the broken-hearted – and, again, the quiet corner catalyzed this inevitable process, – drawing a rotating configuration of bodies into my orbit, some becoming near and frequent “passers-by and hangers-on.”

One middle-aged woman like this, a heavy-set woman of Jamaican origin, told me, “You’re my therapist,” though I didn’t really say much to her.

She’d come and sit with me, sometimes for 30 or 40 minutes, and open up to me about anything and everything.

The funny thing was, when I first met her it was with a co-worker who was “showing me the ropes” and “giving me the tour.”

In his company – he was a bit of an overgrown man-child, an inveterate swaggerer and unrepentant middle-aged, married playboy – she came across as coarse, cold, harsh, distant. So, I assumed that’s just who she was.

But by the time she called me her therapist, I’d come to see who she really was – warm, soft, tender-hearted, giving, someone who took troubled young people under her wing to try to help them.

Though this takes us out of the flow of things for a moment…

After I left the courthouse, I traveled for a couple of years.

One cold mid-autumn night near the end of that time, while sleeping in a tent in the mud in that rainy season of northern California, I had a short, intense dream.

In it, this Jamaican friend of mine had a look of fright on her face and was silently calling out to me, though it seemed she was shouting.

Then, another coworker from the courthouse appeared – a young woman, a spiritual prodigy who helped me jump life-octaves and jump into that two years of travel – a calm, wise, and saintly presence, placing her arm around my Jamaican friend and sending a silent message: It will be OK.

I woke, wondering what it all meant; and since I couldn’t make sense of it other than it seemed strange and urgent – I sent my love and prayers to my friend and forgot about it for the time being.

Well, after these travels, maybe a couple years after that dream, I visited the courthouse to see a few people, one of them being that Jamaican friend.

When she saw me – I hadn’t told anyone I’d be visiting, – she left her desk without so much as a word to her coworkers, gave me a big, long, warm hug, started crying, and sat with me, holding my hand the whole time. She must have talked with me for 30 or 40 minutes – just like old times.

I noticed she walked with a cane, which she hadn’t done before. When I asked her about it, she told me she’d been in a serious car accident. I asked her when that was, and it turned out it had been right around the time I’d had that dream, on that autumn night in northern California.

Everyone passed through the mailroom.

Drawn by need, and sometimes by my silent magnetism, I think everyone who came into my ambit and orbit was subject to my influence and its many inflections and modulations; but not everyone came close enough or long enough for that kind of mysterious interaction I just shared.

Well.

True to form, this improvised branching off from the flow of associations for a roadside dalliance with flowers unexpectedly brings us closer to our destination, and by quicker routes and fewer steps than I’d planned…

But I would like to turn aside from the turning-aside for a moment, turning back to say something I’d meant to say first; you can’t step into the same flow of associations twice, but we’ll give ‘er a try, anyway.

Everyone passed through the mailroom.

But do you know what I noticed?

High and low, rich and poor, educated and uneducated – almost everyone at the courthouse struck me as sad, or unhappy, or stuck in a dead end, and drained of life, hope, and vitality.

It was a confirmation, in concrete form, of my half-formed intuition, which though spot-on as always, I was not yet fully fluent in the language of: which is to say, I already knew that money, and titles, and the trappings and dressings of respectability didn’t confer happiness, but boy oh boy, I got to see the evidence of it up close and personal, day in and day out, there in the courthouse mailroom.

Once again, and for the last time, I was trying to “do the right thing” – that is, what everyone told me was the right thing to do – and was finding that all that did was heighten and deepen my despair.

So, I left that path and haven’t looked back on it since then – except in moments like this, which serve an altogether different purpose from feeding the bottomless hunger of regret.

Though, of course, as I said here and here: following one’s conscience and heart into the wilderness is by no means roses, roses, even if its thorns do not sting the same as the ones on the worldly path.

Well.

I could tell you some more stories about the characters I met there at the courthouse, but it would be beside the point at this point. Maybe another day.

By now, I think, I’ve set the stage well enough to bring us to the climax of this two-bit, three-act dog-and-pony show, and to what I set out to share when I began.

So.

Given all that, I knew I wouldn’t last long at the courthouse.

Sure, people came into my ambit and orbit and received the benefit of my subtly jovial influence; but some came into my orbit and ambit and transformed me – such as my spiritual-prodigy dream-friend, who gently booted me across the chasm between life-octaves that I was toe-dipping at overlong.

I just wanted to say that so you don’t think I’m endlessly tooting my own horn to no effect, or plucking my own lyre, as the case may be.

I knew I wouldn’t last long at the courthouse.

Though my corner-office was a retreat from and for the rest of the courthouse-madhouse, if I wanted an hour of peace a day, I’d have to leave to find it. After testing a few spots out, I settled on the courthouse library as my lunchtime hermitage.

Though its shelves offered nothing of interest to me, it was quiet even as libraries go, and quiet, not words, was what I really wanted. So – it was perfect.

Of course, that still wasn’t good enough – still too much coming and going, talking and other energetic disturbances in the library – so I found the quietest spot I could, short of stealing a research-room: a far back corner on the second floor, with a wall behind me and to my right, a row of bookcases to my left, and stairs above me – that kind of staircase that is basically wall-mounted slats you can see between, if you know what I mean. I don’t know what that would be called.

So, I’d go back there for my lunch hour (after having eaten quickly first) and listen to music through headphones, or try to read, or just think about things. Usually, I’d half doze off after a while.

I wouldn’t tell anyone where I went, and I’m not sure many people saw me go there.

But one person did – one of the junior librarians, a fresh-faced young woman maybe nine or ten years my junior.

As I reflect now on when we first spoke, I can’t say for sure whether it was before or after what I’ll share in a moment – a non-submersible-unit of an image etched into the walls of a small store-house room in my many-grottoed Menegroth of a memory-palace, translated faithfully into words here for your convenience – but certainly, after that we began to talk, and to grow close, and even to spend time together outside of work.

Before that moment, I do think a connection had already been established, with or without words, and more likely without.

Why?

Because both before and after this, and more than once, the same thing happened, so that quickly I could discern the template and its taste when a hidden hand overlaid it on my life.

Which is to say, by some strange constellation of events and crossing of paths, a woman and I were brought together in a transitory time of my life, some sort of energy passed electromagnetically (though wordlessly) between us, and – after my having tried to avoid the inevitable afterwards – I got drawn inexorably into her own erratic orbit, had a taste of love’s lunacy, and, after having opened my heart and exposed her to its immoderate heat, saw her change faces and phases, slowly veiling her light in a retreat back out of my life and into nothingness.

And, as in the other iterations of this recurrent microcosmic cycle, here at the courthouse there was a turning-point, or a yielding-point, speaking of giving myself over to love’s lunacy – the image I alluded to above, the non-submersible memory-unit.

One day, I was sitting in my back corner of the library, where nobody ever came.

By then, this librarian-girl and I had connected, but, true to form, I’d been testing and teasing her, gently repelling her over-eager advances – ain’t nobody got time for that – so that frustrated, intrigued, and challenged all at once, at last she transmuted her lower-level advances to a higher octave, bypassed the head-based repartee, and brung out the big guns.

One day, I was sitting in my back corner of the library, where nobody ever came, and suddenly I heard a sound – footsteps.

Coming down the stairs, for no plausible reason that I could discern, was the fresh-faced librarian girl, in a short, bright red dress, which conspicuously exposed her shapely, shining, fresh-shaven legs.

Do you remember how I described the stairs?

Well-spaced slats you could see between, with me at the far end and a full view of anyone coming down them.

My librarian-friend knew I sat there – having seen me come to the library and disappear every day for lunch – and of course she must have known what kind of view my seat gave me.

So – I took the visit as the implication and invitation it was, and we began to spend time together outside of work.

Listen.

I’m not saying it got salacious, because it didn’t, and I’m not going to go into a lot of stories, because that’s not relevant.

But I will say that, though some aspects of this young woman’s beauty were unconventional, she had a lot going on for her.

She had a pure heart and a kind of naive innocence. She was brainy and bookish, and was better-educated than me, at least in the conventional sense.

She liked hiking and biking – so we did some of that together – and could even keep pace with me without complaint, an unusual thing in my experience.

She was artsy and creative and handy with crafts, from cooking to knitting to building furniture from scratch.

And she was a nice mix of curvy and fit, with a face you could spend a lot of time contemplating, in a good way.

Slowly, slowly, over some months, I felt and saw us growing closer, until, almost without notice, things turned sour and silent, and she began to veil her light and withdraw.

Do you know why?

Later, she told me, in a phone conversation I wish I could describe.

Though we had a good enough connection, speaking of our time together, to me it had a certain quality I’ve felt and observed all too often, and not just in romantic settings – all the masks never really came off. And I don’t mean on my part.

Well, in that phone conversation, as we talked, I felt an energy wake up in my belly, rise up to my heart and into my throat, and my body began to shake.

When this happened with another girl, a sensitive girl, she told me my feelings were so strong, too strong for her to feel.

When this happened with yet another girl, alluded to here, amid a huge group of her friends, no less – there was a moment of collective silence, a collective whoop of joy and laughter from her friends, and a stunned remark from her: “Wow, that was straight from the heart.”

Well, in the heat of that light’s full brilliance come out from behind the clouds, my librarian-friend told me, mask off, that although she had been attracted to and interested in me, what changed things for her was meeting my dad one day, when she stopped by my house after we’d gone on a bike-ride.

Some weeks before this, he’d broken his foot after falling off a ladder, which more or less immobilized him.

So I’d do everything I could for him – getting up early before work to make his breakfast and lunch and bring it up to him in his third-floor bedroom, then coming home to make dinner, prepare for the next morning, and clean everything up afterwards. And all that was in addition to navigating, deflecting, and attempting to transmute all the negative emotions my dad was going through during this time, since he’d been forced into a helpless isolation and wasn’t fully up to the challenge, spiritually speaking.

So, my library-friend saw, on the one hand, my dad’s foul mood and his taking it out on me, the only person other than himself he could take it out on, and on the other hand my not responding to it and instead bearing it meekly and trying to divert his emotions elsewhere and more fruitfully, as graciously as I could.

From my current vantage, I’d say I was undertaking conscious labor and deliberate suffering while bearing the fate-appointed yoke of filial piety life puts on all children, and all in the proper spirit.

But to my library-friend, it was something like, “I can’t believe you’re letting your dad treat you like that.”

The gap of felt understanding between us was so wide that I didn’t even attempt to explain myself:

“Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”

Well.

I can’t hold it against her.

It’s a sign of the times, or a symptom of the synthetic age our demiurgic cybernetic controllers have drawn us all into, at least for a little while.

So, that was that – for what it was. There was no second spring for that budding romance browned and wilted by untimely frost.

Around this time – late summer of that same year – my library-friend asked me if I would write a book-review for her.

As a little splash of color and an introjection of creative vitality into the drab, lifeless halls of the courthouse, she wanted to set up a little corner, by the library’s entrance, where they could display various employees’ “beach-read” selections, along with their Critical Appraisals and Personal Recommendations, expressed in Their Very Own Words.

She wore me down by way of pleasant urging, so I wrote something.

Around that time, I still thought Frank Zappa was someone to listen to (whether we’re talking about his music or his musings), and I had recently read his Real Frank Zappa book. So, that’s what I reviewed.

And, wouldn’t you know it?

Short as the review was, she cut it in half – a faulty judgment of a half-ripe Solomon, – in fact, cutting out all the flavor and the nutritive value of the thing, leaving only the last six, lean sentences as some gristle for the starving to chew on.

I remember that that made my blood boil, while it reminded me, as it reminds me now, why I never liked submitting my writing to “critical authorities who wield editorial power”: they have no taste.

Well.

Sometimes I think of this girl, now a woman, and wonder, and project my thought into imagination of what might have been.

I might be ungracious and say, she had no taste, whether in love or in writing, but I don’t think that’s entirely true or fair – certainly it’s not gentlemanly, though it hits close to the mark.

But I do think it would be right to say, she lacked discernment and courage where it counted.

I said earlier that life seemed to put me in this sort of circumstance again and again, and that I quickly developed a taste for recognizing the template’s flavor.

Well, another aspect of that is this – a sub-circuit in the recurrent microcosmic cycle.

Again and again, when brought to the anvil in love’s forge, these women break under the hammer it tries them with…

And then, some years later, in some way or another, they try to reconnect with what was, to reconstitute themselves into an image of what was, and to pass through love’s fire and under its hammer, only without breaking this time.

What I mean is…

They either call out to me singing some variation on the tune of, “Now I’m ready”…

Or they end up marrying someone who’s a version of me more suitable to their purposes, while resembling me sometimes down to fine and uncanny details…

Or else they just pine fruitlessly away, dwelling on what once was and could have been.

I saw a picture of this library-friend of mine recently, and do you know what I saw on her face?

A wide smile, full of bright teeth – but a smile only of the mouth and betraying a clenched jaw.

On the face, some deep lines of care I don’t remember, and set deep in it two dark, hidden eyes clouded by a deep sorrow and regret.

I’m not saying that what could have been between us is the source of all that, but I am saying that what I saw is a symptom of the lack of discernment and courage where it counted that I mentioned above.

Here, though in a quite different context, I talked about the cost and nature of following, or not following, the dictates of Little Miss Conscience.

Well, following, or not following, the dictates of love and the heart is the same.

You can weigh and measure the value of the heart’s promptings on the world’s scales, but let me tell you – if you live and love by those measures, though the payout in worldly terms may be the proverbial jackpot everyone wants to hit, sooner or later you’ll have to pay it all back in your own blood.

Elsewhere here, I reflected on a beach-picture of myself from 25 years ago; I said that, though I was handsome and athletic then, believe it or not, I’m more handsome, in better health, in better shape, and overall in a better being-place now than I was then.

How many middle-aged people can say that?

Sure, the prime won’t last and the sun has already taken a small toll on my skin… but that skin isn’t care-worn, while my eyes are still bright and unclouded.

What price would you pay, and what payout are you looking for?

Though the path I walk is thick and well-sown with thorns, surely it’s the right one to walk – the proof, and the tale, is written in my flesh, and is as plain to see as the solstice sun riding high on the crown of a cloudless day’s sky.

20 June 2025