Sneaky Feature in the Blue Lagoon

I can’t remember the day I was born, nor can I remember my first taste of fresh delicious mangos.  Bu I do remember the day my soul was wrenched from my body and I never looked at the world the same ever again.  Up until that fateful day, I always thought that Lilith was good listener.  She seemed so compassionate and understanding, she always knew the right words to say.  It turns out that she was nothing more than a Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold traitor to the fifth power.  That conniving nincompoop sister of mine, sat there while I poured my heart and soul out about my desires to be a soothsaying fortune teller, and then she blabbed to the whole school about how I was going to do it.

I can’t believe that I didn’t see it before that day.  She would always sit and listen to me talk for hours on end about everything, but when we were at school, she completely avoided me and pretended that I didn’t exist.  I just always thought that she was quiet and shy.  I never once saw her talking to another person besides me.  Boy was I wrong.

They say that this is the age of information.  But what good is information if you can’t do anything with it?  The whole point of having information is to use it to make life better, isn’t it?  Maybe it would better if only we could get that one bit of information that would really change it all. This bit of information is nearly every man’s secret desire.  What is it?  The future, of course.  Who wouldn’t want to know which penny stock is soon to make millions?

I have always wanted to know the future, and it started when I was very young.  There was always a lot of interesting things to read in great grandmother Mabel’s bedroom.  It was here that I discovered the directions on how to see into future.

In order to see the future, you must first understand that there is no time.  It just doesn’t exist.  There are only patterns and cycles that are repeated over and over again in an endless loop.

In order to see the future, you must completely understand the nature of dreams.  Dreams play back all of your hopes and fears in your sleeping mind.  Dreams are just things that you’ve seen, only mixed up in a blender.  Dreams aren’t just the past and present though.  They are the future.  But the only possible way to dream the future is to follow a constant pattern, a ritualistic routine that puts you in harmony with the Universe.  Follow the routine for thirteen full moons, and at each midnight full moon drink a decoction dandelion root.

I really wish to God almighty that it could have been just any routine, like pulling the lint out of your belly button every morning at six o’clock sharp.  But alas, it was not.  The directions specifically said that one must swim in the clear waters of a secluded lagoon every single night at the exact same time.  And this ritual has to be done, in the buff.  We actually had a lagoon.  It sounds magical and everything, but it was actually the rock pit that was filled with water.  It wasn’t all murky and disgusting, though  It was clear and blue like a giant glass of blue raspberry Kool-Aid.

Well, I decided, that I just had to see the future.  It was driving me crazy not knowing so many things.  I just had to see what was going to happen. I wanted to know if my long lost Aunt was dead or alive.  I wanted to know if my mom and dad would really fly off into outer space and take those disgusting Sumerians with them.  But the most important reason why it was so important to see the future, was because of love.  I dreamed that one day, a tall handsome man named Ronaldo would come to my little food forest and sweep me off my feet.  We would get married, swing from the trees all day long and eat hazelnuts and roasted lizard toes together.  Looking back, I guess I can see how so many people thought this was hilarious.  Yeah, it may have been real freaking funny, but it was my dream.  It was my happy thought.  It was my whole reason for living and then that stupid sister of mine goes and rips my heart out of my chest and tramples all over it like Wal-Mart stampeder at Christmas time.

I thought that everything was going quite well, thank you very much.  I had it all planned out.  Late at night, after all the Sumerians had gone away, and everyone was snug in their beds, I would tiptoe outside and walk to the darkest part of the forest where the lagoon was.  I was so secret that I didn’t even use a candle.  I just walked down there in the pitch dark, feeling my way through the trees.  I use a big stick to bang against the ground to keep the snakes away.  Seven months went by, and already I was dreaming at night of being in the lagoon.  It was already starting to happen.  I would dream at night about whole entire conversations with people, and then the next day, find myself in these conversations.  I knew that if I made it to the thirteenth moon that I would be able to see everything before anyone else did.  I would know all the answers on math tests, I would know in advance if someone was going to put rubber glue on my chair at school, and most importantly, I would find out when Ronaldo would come to be with me forever.

So one dark night while swimming I started singing the love song I wrote for my dream man.  I sang about his long mustache and broad shoulders, then all of a sudden, I heard someone singing it back to me.  I called out and asked if it was Ronaldo, and he said yes.  He said that he would make all my dreams come true and that he loved me.  But then, I heard giggling, and then someone turned on a flashlight and I saw thirteen kids from school bursting out in hysteric maniacal laughter.  One of them grabbed my clothes and ran off.  The rest of them followed and made fun of me by using the very same words that I spoke to Lilith with.  I knew at once that I’d been had.

All of a sudden, it all mad sense to me.  I realized at once that it had been Lilith the whole time, convincing them to play pranks on me.  No wonder they knew my every move.  No wonder they knew so much about me.  Lilith had been pretending to be my friend at home, and then she’d go to school and use her “little sister stories” as a form of entertainment.

So there I was, naked in the water.  When I knew that I was all alone, I climbed out and grabbed a few big leaves from an artichoke plant to cover myself up with.  But when I started walking, I realized I wasn’t alone.  I couldn’t see anything at all because it was too dark, but I could feel somebody’s presence.  I felt like someone was there watching me.  “Lilith? Is that you?” I asked, but I didn’t hear anything.  So I started walking fast, which wasn’t easy because I kept stepping on rocks and bumping into trees.  It’s hard to run and cover your naked body at the same time.

I walked even faster and I heard the somebody move closer to me.  All of a sudden he  grabbed me and pushed me down to the ground.  I could smell peppermints and licorice tobacco on his breath.  It could have bad.  I have nightmares about what very well could have happened to me that night.  But it didn’t.  Marcel was there, too.  He shined a light and shot an arrow into the leg of the guy who was attacking me. I’m glad he was there that night, don’t get me wrong.  I just can’t help but wonder, what on earth was Marcel doing out in the forest at midnight?

Space Cadet

They say that you should never give up, no matter what.  They say that if the going gets tough, you just gotta get tougher.  Who are “they” anyway?  And what do they know?  Sometimes, it just seems pointless and I just can’t go on any longer.  I feel utterly defeated and I just don’t have the passion go on.  So I just quit. I felt really bad about this for a while until I heard about this guy.

Jon Acuff wrote a book called “Quitter.”  He says that most really successful people are quitters.  He says that you should quit things that are getting you no place fast.

Going no place fast is like being in a spaceship traveling to the moon in a homemade space ship with no rocket fuel.  For some reason, that metaphor reminds me of my dad.

My dad built a rocketship out of scrapmetal.

You might think that this is a very strange thing to do, unless I told you that my dad worked for NASA, had a doctorate in rocket science, and was working on it with some of his grad students at the University in Manchester. Knowing that small bit of information changes your perspective doesn’t it.  Instead of thinking, dear God Almighty, you’re dad’s off his rocker, you think, wow…your dad’s a genius.

Of course it isn’t true at all.  But that didn’t stop my sister Lilith from casually hinting around with our affiliation with secret government projects. Having one lunatic weirdo in the family was enough for her.  She had to maintain some sort of dignity.

My dad never worked for NASA, and he doesn’t even hold a real college degree.  He won’t be orbiting the moon or flying to Mars anytime soon, because his rocket only managed to hover three inches off the ground before the big incident.  And besides, his reason to fly off the planet was much different from NASA’s reason.

My dad belonged to this weird group of astronomers who called themselves the Sumerians.  They believed that in the year 2012, planet X, AKA planet Nibiru  was going to enter our solar system, and throw the earth’s orbit and gravitational pull out of whack.  They believed that it would be the end of the earth when this happened.  There would be massive earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, and balls of fire would fall to earth from the sky.  The people of the planet Nibiru had contacted the head of the organization, Dennis Mitchel, via telepathy.  He was told the coordinates and date which he and his followers needed to get on a spacecraft and fly to the safety of their planet.  Since none of them actually enough money to build one of those posh intergalactic travel hotels, they came up with a plan to get the money.  It was called the X prize.

The X prize foundation is this non profit group that made a contest to award ten million dollars to the first non-government group who could launch a 2 man spacecraft into space twice within two weeks.  They wanted to motivate people to pursue space travel, and make leaving the planet affordable.  My dad and the Sumerians worked night and day for years trying to build this rocket.  They needed the money in the worst way.  They were bound and determined to get off this planet and they thought that this was the only way.

Of course, their biggest problem wasn’t building a rocket that could escape the atmosphere, it was getting the thing to launch into space.  They couldn’t use fuel, it was too expensive, and besides, grandmother Mabel wouldn’t let them use it anyway because she thought it was demonic. But that didn’t matter, because they all decided that they didn’t need fuel to escape earth’s gravity because gravity doesn’t exist at all.

It’s not what shines, but hides in the darkness that matter.  People don’t notice dark matter because it’s too dark for our eyes to see, yet it’s there and it’s pulling us down.  My dad and his crazy Sumerian friends decided that if they could get rid of the dark matter under the rocket, they could go flying off into space.  They didn’t know how they would stop once they got going, but that didn’t matter.

I don’t know why everyone was in such a hurry to leave such a beautiful place.  It was so wonderful on that mango plantation. It was so green and full of life, but nobody saw how wonderful it was.  They were too busy looking around at all the horrible things that were going on in the world, and all the horrible things that could theoretically happen.  But hey, to each his own.

These guys decided that they would send their rocket into space using dark matter propulsion.  Scientists have been trying to figure this one out for decades.  They might have figured it out a long time ago if Napoleon hadn’t burned down that big library, but that didn’t matter, we had other ways of finding out how it was done.

It’s no secret, and it’s so simple really, I just don’t know what the big fuss is about.  I’ll explain how it works.  There are these tiny subatomic particles, that are everywhere, all around.  If you look across the room and very carefully try to look at the air between objects, really concentrate and you’ll see that it’s kind of fuzzy.  No, I don’t need glasses, and yes I have 20/20 vision.

Anyway, these particles are pulling objects downwards towards the earth, like giant paperweights.  Remove them, and you’ll go flying.  You can move them any which way, but, they can only be moved by certain sound wave vibrations that don’t occur naturally.  These frequencies lie outside the range of human hearing.  Certain devices have to be built to make the vibrations that are needed to manipulate the particles.

I know that sounds totally crazy.  I entered the ones I built into the science fair in the ninth grade, and I made a fifty on my project because my poster didn’t have actual photos, and I didn’t use the scientific method.  And to make things worse, somebody stole all of my dark matter manipulating instruments while I went to bathroom, and I couldn’t even prove to anybody that they actually worked.

Lilith is her name, Manipulation is her game

This is my sister.

Lilith is her name.  Deception is her game.  If I had one word that I could use to describe her, it would be sinister.  But if I had two words, they would be con artist.  And, like all con artists, she had an agenda. This agenda involved publicly humiliating her very own flesh and blood. Yes, her agenda involved bringing me down.

Why did she do it?  It wasn’t for revenge.  No.  She did it for entertainment.  Life is boring for people in small country towns. There are no movie theatres, or pubs to sneak into.  All there is to do is ride your car slowly down main street at midnight and perhaps tip a few cows if you’re lucky.  After all the excitement is over, all there is to talk about is the incident where someone nearly fell down in a pile of steaming cow manure.  Sure, I guess that’s actually more exciting than most Friday nights that I’ve had lately, but it gets old after a while and people are always looking for something to liven things up.

This is where my sister, Lilith came in.  What she brought to those poor bored younglings at our school was like spiking the punch at an AA meeting.  Everyone knew it was wrong, but deep down inside, they all wanted it because life is just too boring without it.  Who cares if its bad for you, it’s just fun.

You see, I was, what they call…a scape goat.  A scape goat is the person that you can blame all your problems on.  Part of having a good clean conscience is knowing that you don’t make mistakes.  This is difficult, sometimes, because sometimes you get blamed for things, like knocking over someone’s chocolate milk into their mashed potatoes and gravy.  Naturally, you don’t want someone to think you’re clumsy and careless, so you just blame the scapegoat.

I was born to be the scape goat in the same way that some people are born to be artists and musicians.  Being the scape goat is a tough job, but someone’s got to do it.  Now that I’m older, I realize that if I don’t sit back and take the blame for everything, then there is fighting everywhere and nobody gets along.  I’ve realized, now, that I’m like one of those grounding poles at the gas station that you have to touch after you get out of the car or else you’ll blow up your car.  Yes, I know this all now.  Now that it’s too late.  But back then, when I was young, and didn’t understand the way of the world and the cycles of the universe, it just broke my heart.  And there was nothing I could do about.  Well, there was something I could do, but the consequences were far worse than just sitting back and taking it.  They say to turn the other cheek.  They say this now, because if you don’t accept the second slap on the cheek, if you fight back, you’ll get knocked down and kicked until you’re blue in the face and you don’t have any teeth left.  I still have my teeth.  But I don’t have my dignity.  But dignity, I guess, is over-rated.  But hey, I guess I’m just saying that because I’m bitter.  Sour grapes, right?

Yeah, let me tell you about Lilith.  Let me tell you about some of the stuff she used to do.  For starters, she was skilled in the art of manipulation.  I don’t know how she learned how to do this.  Maybe she took a correspondence course on the art and science of mind control.  Maybe she found some ancient text that taught her how to create a slew of minions that would follow her around and do her bidding.  Or maybe, she was a born natural.  I’ll never know.  The masters never give away their secrets.

But I can tell you one thing for sure, she was sly.  There is this Chinese mind trick used by corrupt cops and Nazi generals called “suggestion”.  Lilith, would use certain words to “suggest” that I was plotting and scheming against them all.  She would say things subtly like, “my sister has wiped her boogers underneath all the desks.”  Then she would casually mention that I eat my boogers.  And then she would just leave it at that and let the rest of the kids get all worked up about it.  She’d never say a word about it ever again.  And naturally, people believed because she seemed so utterly embarrassed by it.  Just for the record…I have never eaten my boogers.  I don’t even pick my nose.  But that’s beside the point.  She spread a much more horrible rumor about me than that one.

Route 66, went right through our town and those big semi trucks used to drive 90 miles an hour down that road because there weren’t any cops to pull them over.  Our town didn’t have any cops.  Our town was so small and insignificant that they just forgot about us, and nobody bothered to point out the error.  So because there were no cops, people used that strip of road like it was the autobahn.  And because of this non-stop reckless driving, a lot of cats got killed walking back and forth across that road.  Losing a beloved cat is a tragedy to  young children, but it’s worse to hear that the cat was run over by a semi-truck.  That’s just too bloody and evil to tell a kid.  Well, Lilith didn’t think it was too bloody and evil.

Lilith had this friend named Elsa, who had this long haired white Persian cat.  Elsa adored this cat.  She fed it liver and pate.  She painted that cat’s nails, for crying out loud and even bought it one of those collars that looks like it’s made of diamonds.  Well, one day her cat wandered out of the house and it never came back.  After a week went by, and no cat, Lilith came to her crying and told her that I had done it.  She told Elsa that I sacrificed the cat on a ritual alter in the middle of the forest, and then barbecued it and ate the flesh.  But to make things worse, she said she could prove it.

We lived on a 50 acre strip of land filled completely with not just mango trees, but every kind of fruit tree that you could think of.  Loads of people would come by and pick fruit and go fishing in the river, but we didn’t just have fruit trees and fish.  We also had iguanas. In case you aren’t familiar with iguanas, these are lizards that can eat their weight in fruit and grow to be six feet long. If you don’t get rid of them all, they’ll eat your fruit.
There was this family who would come by in the evenings and hunt iguana.  They had a taco stand a few cities over, and lizard tacos were just the craze.  So they’d kill some iguanas and take them back to their stand to grill.  But before they went home, they would always give a smallone to my great grandmother, and she would roast it on a spit.

So there I was, one evening, pulling the flesh from the iguana’s bones and nibbling at the meat, when lo and behold, I heard a shriek coming from the trees.   It was dark, and hard to see.  There was no electricity, and the fire had gone out.  Lilith had brought her friend, Elsa, and her other friend, Sheila, to prove that I was kidnapping cats, sacrificing them to the devil, and then eating them.  And let me tell you, people don’t look at you the same after they found out that you eat cats.  I guess it would be one thing to eat some random tom cat from the alley, but after that happened, everyone in the entire school firmly believed that their pet could be my very next victim.

You would think that they would be afraid of me, maybe give me the respect that a dangerous criminal usually gets, but alas, this was not the case.  I was still blamed for every broken pencil, bad grade, trip, and folly that happened at any given moment of the day.  I was scorned and put to shame unceasingly, and then ridiculed to no end.

 

I can’t get no disinfection

If you drop a toothbrush in the toilet and there is nobody there to see it, did it really happen?  Only if it wasn’t your toothbrush.  You can sterilize, disinfect and call a priest to exorcise  bacteria on that toothbrush, but it isn’t going to do any good.  You can boil that toothbrush until you’re blue in the face, but I can guarantee one thing.  You aren’t going to find one person in their right mind to brush their teeth with that toothbrush, because once something has fallen into the toilet, it’s never the same.

I, myself, am like a defiled dental hygiene product that has fallen into the watery abyss of a forgotten latrine.  I suppose I could blame everyone else, it would make me feel better.  It’s the noble thing to do.  When I blame myself I start feeling that life just isn’t worth living and I don’t care any more. In the summer, I leave buckets of water out for the mosquitos to swarm around and I don’t even put on mosquito repellant.  I’m fearless.  I’ll just walk right out into a swarm of those vicious little vampires.  I could get the West Nile Virus, I don’t care.

I’ve never told anyone this before, but I buy grapes that aren’t organic, and I eat them without even washing them.  Yeah, I’m crazy like that.  I guess you’re wondering why someone would go insane and put their life on the line like this.  I’ll tell you why.  It’s just the way I am.  I was just born like this.  I guess I was born with some masochistic gene that makes me want to go out of my way to torture myself.  That’s the only explanation I have for it.  That is, it’s the only explanation if I don’t feel like blaming others for my problems.  But if I were to blame someone, I guess I would blame my family.  It is a proven scientific fact that those first few years of life cause a lasting imprint on a person. This imprint will last a person their whole life and there really isn’t anything that anyone can do about it.  A strange person can try to blend in with society, but it doesn’t work.  Everyone has that sneaking suspicion that there is something that just isn’t right.   

Conformity is quite valuable in our society.  Everyone is trying to blend in.  Nobody wants to stand out.  Just go with the flow and everything will be hunky dory and peachy keen. Yeah, everyone knows this.  It’s common sense.  Mothers teach this to their children in order to protect them from embarrassment and ridicule.  Guess whose mom forgot to tell her that you shouldn’t bring zany ideas out into public? Yeah, that’s right.  My mother.

In all the madness and confusion of always trying to scrape together enough money to pay the bills and the taxes, I was sort of forgotten.  Yes, my very own mother was far too busy to teach me about life the, universe, and everything.  It’s the mother’s job to protect the young from harm, and if the mother isn’t watching her little goslings, someone else will.  My great  grandmother, Mabel, took me under her wing, and told me that my entire family had been enticed by the beast that was controlling the world.  Maybe it was true, and maybe it wasn’t, but how was I supposed to know right from wrong and good from bad.  I was just a kid.  I hadn’t seen movies.  I hadn’t read Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde.  All I knew were the fairy stories of yore, told to me from the only person who had time to help me tie my shoes.  Which, by the way were made from synthetic materials that came from petroleum that was made of the blood of the beast.  Those things had to go, as well as anything else that was made of plastic.

Had I been an aborigine living in the bush, this might have worked out just fine.  But I wasn’t.  I was a normal American kid who had to attend public school like everyone else.  I learned the hard way, that homemade leather soled moccasins were not a socially acceptable thing to wear to school.

 

No matter how hard I cried, no matter how many letters my great grandmother Mabel wrote to the school and the school board, they still made me wear sneakers to P.E.  They laughed when I told them about the evils of the unholy beast who wanted to take over the world.  They scorned me and put me to shame when I refused to sit in a plastic chair at a plastic desk.  Looking back, I don’t think it was such a good thing to stand up for what I believed in.  It sure would have been nice to have someone there by my side at school.  Someone who would be on my side and stand up for me.  But alas, I had no one.

Well, I did have a sister.   I wouldn’t exactly say that she was on my side.  She was the exact opposite of a loving compassionate sibling.  You know what that whore of Babylon did to me?  She told everyone that I used an out house.  Oh, sure it was true, and it seemed like a good thing at the time.  I was told that using the plastic toilet would summon a dark evil beast that would prey upon my soul.  It could have been true. Who knows.  Everyone is always saying that there is something wrong with the world today.  Maybe nobody has a soul anymore.  Maybe there really is a dark and evil beast who preys on those who use plastic.  Maybe it’s true, and maybe it isn’t.  But I do know one thing for sure.  If this sounds like madness; if I sound a bit off my rocker, then there is only one reason for it.

I am nothing more than a toothbrush that was dropped into a toilet.  After what I’ve been through, and after what I’ve seen; I will never be the same. I fear nothing.  I use public restrooms and I don’t open the door with paper towels.  I use my bare hands!  And sometimes….I don’t even wash them.

 

My name is Lucy, I grew up in Juvy

In July of 1807, Wallace P. Everett of Kingston, Delaware created a reprogramming system that could essentially turn a hardened criminal like Billy the Kid into a saintly demi-god like Ghandi or Mother Teresa .  After nearly a century of scientific research, they decided to but it to the test at St. Guadelupe’s Reformatory School in El Salvador,

All the girls in the study were released into the world and went on to do good works for the benefit of mankind.  All….except one.  But her case was quite unique.

This is Lucy.

When she was five years old, she set her house on fire.  Of course it was an accident.  Nowadays, people don’t leave a five year old child in the same room as  a kerosene lamp.  But her parents did.  She just wanted to see if her mother’s dress would catch on fire if she poured an entire bottle of rum all over it.  It turns out that alcohol is flammable.  It was merely an innocent scientific investigation gone wrong.  Her hypothesis was that rum is not flammable and will keep the dress from burning.  She had seen her mother put out a fire with water.  Since rum was a liquid and water was a liquid,  she assumed that rum could prevent a piece of fabric from catching fire if held over a direct flame.

There is a right and a wrong way to put out a fire, and some things just make the fire grow hotter.  It’s easy to put out a fire if you have all the right equipment and all the right training.  But if you start fire, and you haven’t been trained to put one out, then you better duck and cover, tell a grownup, and run to the neighbor’s house to call the fire department. Lucy knew this, but she didn’t do it.  She was terrified of her parents.  Her parents wanted to raise a perfect little girl who made no mistakes.  They believed that if you inflict pain upon a child for making a mistake, the child will associate making mistakes with pain and therefore never make mistakes.  Drop a dish, get a beating.  Forget that the spoon goes on the left with the knife while setting the table, get a cigarette burn on the palm of your hand.  Spill the milk, get on your hands and knees and lap it up.  Cry about it…get a boot to the head.

It was the intense fear of being punished that made Lucy too afraid to tell anyone what she had done.  She tried to put the fire out herself.  But it turns out that bed sheets just make a fire bigger.  So she hid in the wardrobe until someone came to her rescue.  It’s a wonder she didn’t die.  It was this terrible accident that pinned her for life as a deranged criminal.

When she was 15, she was involved in a scandalous love affair with the teenage son of the president of El Salvadore.  She was charged with rape, and treason against the government.  Her sentence was a five year stay at St. Guadalupe’s Reformatory school.  She’d been to orphanages and reform schools before, but this one was different.  This was the end of the line.

According to scientific research, children deprived of happy childhoods grow up not knowing how to function properly in society.  Bad childhood memories lead people to commit crimes such as murder and scandal.  Lack of love or the wrong kind of affection can cause girls to become ladies of the night.  The only way to fix these people is to erase the bad memories and give them pleasant ones.  There was a team of scientists and psychiatrists who began implementing this research on real criminal youths when Lucy went to live at St. Guadalupe’s.  She was the worst case they had ever seen, and they hoped that if they could change her back into a pure wholesome girl, they could change the world.

But Lucy didn’t want her memory altered.  She thought that she had learned a lot about the world and didn’t think she needed to loose the wisdom she had gained.  However, the only other choice was to be hung on the gallows in front of the city hall, for all to see.  Well, that wasn’t really the only choice.  She broke out of the reform school and went to live on the rooftop of a Chinese Restaurant where she continued her scandalous love affair.  When they caught her, she was three months pregnant.  They kept her locked up in solitary confinement where they continued to perform mind altering procedures that would ensure that the only childhood memories would be of peaceful spring meadows and blueberry picking.

But then one dark night, it happened.  She had to give birth and they couldn’t find a doctor to give her any way to ease the pain.  It was the worst, most gruesome childbirth that any of them had ever seen.  For three days the 16 year old girls suffered in horrible excruciating labor.  The blood and the screams were more than any of them could take.  After days of torment and agony it was finally over.  Lucy had given birth to Siamese twins.

These girls grew up and started the most gruesome drug cartel the world has ever seen.  She would kill parents and kidnap their children and force them to smuggle coconuts.  I know this because I have this Aunt named Dorcas who married a guy whose parents were killed by this lady when he was only eight years old.

Should I say this lady or these ladies?  I never know, they act as one.

The art and science of coconut smuggling

When my Aunt Dorcas was 15 years old, she fell in love.

Late at night, when her grandmother snuck away to cry over the shoes of her dead son, Aunt Dorcas would sneak away into the attic and dream of her true love.

Sure, lots of teenagers fantasize about getting a shiny new car, but with Aunt Dorcas it was different.  This car was her escape route from the funny farm.  Living on the mango plantation was like living in  a third world country.  There was no electricity, no indoor toilets, kitchen sinks, or telephones. They were living like monkeys in the trees. They were like the mountain gorillas of Zanzibar.   Aunt Dorcas knew that there was a better way to live.  She had communication with the outside world and knew that there was a world out there with toilets that flushed.

She had a dream that one night she could wake up and use an indoor toilet.  Images of bathtubs filled with candy apple scented bubbles filled her head.

She wanted one of those magical machines that would wash the clothes for you and leave them smelling April fresh, and she desperately longed for big electrical box filled with food that was already made.

Truly, there was an amazing world that was out there filled with fabulous luxuries.  And it was all out there waiting for her.  It was calling her name, begging her to leave the jungle and partake of all the riches that the modern world of the beast had to offer those who would only bow down and worship him.  And it would all be hers, if only she had a midnight black 1957 Chevrolet with red velvet seats and little purple pom poms dangling from the windows, and perhaps even one of those cute little bobble head dashboard jesuses.  That would be just groovy.

And then one bright and glorious day it happened.  There she was scrubbing  her  old flour sack dress outside in a big bucket of cold water and lye soap, when the car of her dreams pulled up.  It was like jelly beans had fallen from the sky and landed on her doorstep.  It was like magic, and she herself had made it happen with her mind, all thanks to the divine power of the Kundalini.

This is how she met her future husband, Don Pedro Sanchez.

She was fifteen going on sixteen, and he was seventeen going on dead at the time, because less than an hour before the car drove up to the mango plantation, Don Pedro had been shot twice in the stomach.  He had come there,  with his brothers, because it was the closest place around to get medical attention.  With this bazaar injury came their story to explain the horrible gunshot wound.

They were poor coconut farmers from Peru, and had driven thousands of miles to try and find buyers for their coconuts.

They said that they lived on a huge coconut farm and had grandparents, cousins, nieces and nephews that they had to support by selling these coconuts.  All they wanted was to live a life of harmony with their family.  “Family and love are more important than gold and silver and all we want is to care for them and support them.” So they said.

And then they came to this place and tried to sell their produce and were told that just a few weeks ago, the government banned imported coconuts because of the Peruvian coconut worm.  According to their story, someone brought some coconuts that were infested with worms that would spread and eat all the crops and even mutate and live in the intestines of cattle that people would eat.  The authorities feared it would cause an epidemic and told these poor coconut farmers to go back to their country.  The officials  tried to burn the coconuts because they were afraid the worms would spread, and then they shot poor Don Pedro when he tried to save the fruits of his labor.

Grandmother Mabel pulled the bullets out, sewed up the wound, and gave the poor gunshot victim some medicine.  She had no sympathy.  She told them they could support themselves just fine if they weren’t drinking the blood of the unholy beast that is taking over the world.  She explained how it’s so much cheaper to live on the land without modern conveniences and the beast is tearing families apart by tempting them with the pleasures of modern life.  She sent these evil doers of iniquity on their way.  But it wouldn’t be the last time she saw them, because them. Guess what the coconut smugglers found stowed away in their trunk a few hours after they left the mango plantation?

That’s right, it was good old Aunt Dorcas, and boy did she get an earful of scandalous information while riding in the back of that 57 Chevy.  It turns out that they weren’t just smuggling coconuts into the country.

The curse of everlasting boredom

 

 

In the beginning, when the world was new, there existed only the spirit world.

And everything was wonderful.  Everything was peachy keen and hunky dory and all the spirits gave glory to the Lord.  Halleluiah. Amen, brother. But it isn’t that way anymore, now is it? No. It’s not.  As you can plainly see, it isn’t that way at all.  You know why? Because it was boring.

And that is why the flesh was invented.

Of course it wasn’t actually invented the way that you invent light bulbs and internets.  This corporeal world that we live in just came into being.  With flesh, comes pain and suffering. The ancient people who lived in the beginning of time knew  that if they followed the signs in the sky, they could control the magnetic forces and the water that made the flesh of man.

Truly, all things made of flesh can be controlled by aligning the things you do, with the patterns in the sky.  If these things are followed, there is no pain and suffering.  The earthly world is wonderful and perfect, and the mangos just fall off the trees ready to eat.  The fish practically jump out of the water and leap into your hands.  It all works out perfectly and everyone sings happy happy joy joy all the day long. It’s all dandelions and lollipops.  Well, maybe not lollipops because they’re a synthetically made product and are probably nothing more than a modern byproduct of the unholy beast that wants to control the world, but that’s beside the point. Follow the order of the universe, and the forces of nature will be on your side and everything in life will be the epitome of sheer and utter perfection.

Being in direct alignment with the cosmos happens by accident all the time.  It’s rare, sure, but it happens. It’s the day that you finally get into the swing of things and everything just clicks and you finally understand derivatives and organic chemistry.  It’s the day you can finally flip the pancake into the air and catch it in the pan without it getting broken or all crooked or something. When there is harmony, the pizza is always the right amount of crispness on the bottom, yet, oh so chewy in the middle and the cheese is that perfect amount of dark golden brown.

It’s when everyone you meet points you in the right direction and everything finally goes your way. The Universe is like one great big sugar daddy pimp.  Do what he says, go with the flow…and the world is your oyster.  Lady luck is on your side and she’ll blow her magic pixie dust all over the dice and you’ll always win the game of craps.

 

But if you screw up, if you “accidentally” mess up and do something wrong like prune the rosebushes while the planet Mercury is in retrograde, you better run for cover.  Technically speaking, you can’t actually run from the universe, but you get what I mean.  Gardening on a Mercury Retrograde Day will cause the energy in your life  to become unsettled.  It’s like an earthquake in the world around us that we can’t see or hear right away. I wonder though, if God really wanted everything to be all perfect and hunky dory all the time, then he wouldn’t have invented a Mercury Retrograde Day in the first place.

 

 

 

You must understand that there are some people in this world who just get bored with the lame brained same old same old.  They want excitement. It isn’t good.  It isn’t bad.  It’s just the way things are.  It’s the way of the world.  People just get bored and want to liven things  up.  Everything has it’s price.  Some people would sell their souls to the devil, just for a chance to make thing.

This is Pablo Picasso.

When he was a teenager, he painted this.

I wish I could pain like this. Picasso painted this when he was like, 16 years old.  When I was 16, even my stick figure drawings look bad.  But then again, my father hadn’t been teaching me to draw since the day I was born.  Yes, that’s right, Picasso spent his entire life studying the art of science of making a painting look just like real life.  But guess what?  He got bored.  Really bored.  And so he decided that it was time for something completely different.

And so it was…out of order, came chaos.  The same thing happened to my Aunt Dorcas. She was raised in a world in perfect harmony from day one.  By the time she was born, her grandmother had read nearly ever text there was about how to align your life to create a perfect and beautiful place to live.  By the time Aunt Dorcas was in high school, she was sick of collecting poo from lactating cows and stuffing it into bull horns every time the moon was waxing with a waterman alignment of Saturn.   At every day and at every hour, there was a ritual that just had to be followed.  It was different for every day, and it was always based on the diagrams and charts that great grandmother Mabel spend countless hours formulating.

If Saturn is to the right of the moon, but lies in the vicinity of the constellation Gemini, it means that the summer will be wet, and will rain on exactly August the 24, the first day of Virgo.  This means that you must plant tomatoes on the first waterman moon in the waxing phase of scorpio.  It’s exhausting and boring if it’s just not your thing.  It wasn’t Aunt Dorcas’s thing at all, and she was the one that had to collect the valerian root and stinging nettle and mix up the solution.  It was maddening. She had to mix vortexes in a giant pot for an hour in order to send cosmic energy into the water for the first tomato fertilizer.  It was absolutely maddening and she didn’t believe any of the kooky old tribal books. Actually, she was just sick of being stung by the stinging nettles all the time, but since every one called her a whiny baby, she took all of her teenage angst out on the Universe.  You’ve got to blame someone, you know.

She didn’t care about a bunch of stupid plants. She wanted to go to the movies and see the creature from the black lagoon.

But her grandmother wouldn’t stand for it. She said that movies were a hypnotic mind control device designed by the beast.  Watching movies  will make people want to use plastic and destroy the earth.  Movies brainwash innocent children,  and keep them from  away from, the universe, the earth and mother nature.

Aunt Dorcas didn’t want to tiptoe through the tulips and sing in the rain that fell down upon the endless groves of mango trees, she wanted to have fun.  She wanted to wear high heels and plastic jewelry.

She wanted to listen to Elvis Presley on a plastic record player.  She wanted a 57 Chevy and a plastic bobble head dashboard Jesus.  She wanted to go on a road trip.  She knew there was more to life than fruit, fish, and composting.  She knew there was more out there, and she was bound and determined to have it. She knew what she wanted and she knew how to get it.

So she snuck off one day, when nobody was watching, and she found the ancient text of the Kundalini.  She was bound and determined to have everything that her heart desired.

The root of all tragedy is plastic

In the town of Monza, Italy, it’s against the law to keep your goldfish in a round goldfish bowl.  The government doesn’t want their fishy friends to develop a skewed perception of reality. Stephen Hawking says that even though a goldfish has a skewed perception of reality, he can still make legitimate scientific observations based on the patterns that he sees.

For example, if a ball rolls straight across the table, it always falls off the table.  The goldfish in a round bowl will see the ball roll in a curvy line before disappearing.  Or, here’s another example:  the round lady with one eye always walks up to the bowl and picks up a round package, and when she does this, food falls on the surface of the water.

The same theory works for people too.  Loads of people with demented perceptions of reality make calculated observations about reality.  Everyone thinks they see cause and effect based on the small portion of the world that they’ve seen.  Like my great grandmother Mabel, and her devout belief that plastic is an abomination.  It’s like a phobia.  Phobias aren’t genetic, they are caused by a series of events that the mind interprets into a sort of neurological allergic reaction of the mind.

This one time,my great grandmother Mabel caught Aunt Dorcas shaving her legs with a plastic razor.

It wasn’t one of those disposable ones like they have today and plastic wasn’t called plastic back then, it was called bakelite after the guy who invented it.  Dr. Bakeland.

This is Dr. Leo Bakeland. He’s the guy that invented plastic.

Because of his evil deed of inventing a way for the unholy beast to take over the world, he was cursed by God.  He died of a cerebral hemorrhage in a sanatorium and was buried in Sleepy Hollow.

And because of my Aunt’s evil deed, grandmother Mabel screamed so loud she popped the buttons of her shirt and threw a cast iron skillet clear across the room.  Had she been a baseball player or a sword thrower in a circus, perhaps Aunt Dorcas would have died that day and never married the Mexican Coconut smuggler who was in cahoots with the cartel.

No, she didn’t die.  The skillet smashed into the mirror of the medicine cabinet and shards of broken glass went flying through the air and completely covered Aunt Dorcas.  It took three months to get all the glass out of her skin.  I’ll spare you the details.  Aunt Dorcas loves to tell this story and just the thought of blood makes me want to pass out.

Of course, that was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.  That was one of many many plastic incidents in the house, and in all fairness, Aunt Dorcas swears up and down that she thought the razor was made of wood.  But you know, the lady has been know to bend the truth to fit her own conniving plans.  I mean, seriously, if she really was sneaking around, then why didn’t she lock the bathroom door and shave her legs at four o’clock in the morning?  Really.  The woman was shaving her legs in broad daylight with the bathroom door wide open.  Actually, now that I think of it, they didn’t have plumbing or electricity in the house back then, so maybe I need to have someone else besides Aunt Dorcas tell me their version of the story, because now I’m really starting to wonder where all those scars came from.

Great Grandmother Mabel, wasn’t born with a psychotic disorder, and it had nothing to do with a genetic defect or DNA.  She claims that every single misfortune in her life was caused by some sort of plastic.  Coincidence?  She doesn’t think so.  Actually, I’m going to have to say that if I did the calculations, I could come to the same conclusion.  Every single time something bad has happened to me, plastic was involved.  Go figure, maybe there’s something to it.  Who knows.

But you really have to understand that things were quite different back then, when she was born.  There was just nothing made of plastic out there where she was.  That is, there was no plastic until her firstborn son was born.  As a gift, her very own mother gave her a crate of baby bottles.  These bottles had rubber nipples…that were made from the blood of the beast. That’s right, petroleum.  She was told that all the high class mothers were doing it.  She was told that bottles are better.  So she fed her baby with a bottle.

But then something horrible happened.  A few years later, the poor kid got type 1 diabetes, and died.

It was horrible.  For years she would hold onto his little shoes at night and just cry for hours.  Naturally, she wanted to find a reason why it happened.  Her husband was a medicine man, and so was her father in law.  She lived with several people who had been know to cure anything and anyone.  They were considered miracle workers, and none of them could cure this poor little child.  According to the story, she was so utterly devastated by the loss of her child that they almost thought she might commit suicide.  They had never heard such wailing and gnashing of teeth.  Everyone hovered over her at every moment of the day just to make sure that she wouldn’t “do herself in”.  That’s when they all decided that maybe the poor devastated mother needed something to keep her mind offof her deceased child.  So, they brought her the ancient texts.  They had hoped that she would find the meaning of life, and perhaps, something to live for.

Like a maniac, she poured over these ancient writings and learned everything there is to know about life, the universe, and everything.  Deep down inside, she wanted to bring him back, or turn back time, or do something to console herself.  But all she found was a reason why he died.  It was because she stuck a piece of rubber in her kids mouth, and the rubber that she used just happened to have been made from petroleum.  Petroleum is made from oil, and according to legend, oil is the blood of the beast that wants to take over the world and cause chaos and madness.

She swore, from then on, that she would not let anything enter her holy abode that was made from the blood of the beast.  She was on a mission after that to stay the heck away from anything plastic.  Unfortunately, there was another terrible tragedy involving plastic many years later.

One dark and stormy night, when Mercury was in retrograde, a Tupperware salesman (woman, actually), was driving down the road past the mango plantation, when she got a flat tire.   She walked a mile in the pouring rain with two bags of her finest wares and knocked on the door of Great Grandmother Mabel’s house.  Well, her son in law, Bill, answered the door and let the lady in.  She told them all about how she was just coming back from a Tupperware party, and opened her bag to show them the new line of the most fabulous storage containers.  It was like bringing a keg of beer and a vodka still into a Southern Baptist Church.  Great Grandmother Mabel screamed so loud a window broke and rain came gushing down into the living room and the wind blew out all of the candles.  Tears started streaming from the Tupperware lady’s eyes and the poor lady nearly had a heart attack.  Even though she was scared senseless by my great grandmother, she asked to use the phone.  Well, of course she couldn’t call anyone, because they didn’t have a phone.  So naturally, Bill offered to give her a ride on the horse to the nearest gas station whenever it stopped raining.  That’s when Mabel got the broom and used it to push the lady out of the house.  Well, because Bill was such a nice guy he just gave the lady a ride home on his horse in the pouring rain.  He never came back.  They were hit by a truck when they stopped to put the Tupperware lady’s bags in the trunk of her car.

Had it not been for plastic, this never would have happened.

Drinking the Blood of the Unholy Beast

In case you haven’t noticed, the world is changing.  People are changing,

music is changing,

clothes are changing.

Everything is changing.  Change is a good thing.  Or at least that probably what Martha Stewart would call it.

It isn’t bad.  It isn’t good.  It’s just the way of the world.  It’s the way things are.  Go with the flow and learn to adapt or be weeded out of the gene pool for all eternity.

Old people are always going on and on about how the youth of today are screwed up and immoral.  After reading several hundred stories of long ago, I have come to the conclusion that old people have been saying this since the beginning of time.  I think that’s the sort of thing people just say when they get old.  Young people are just young and foolish and just haven’t learned the way of the wise.  They don’t have years of trial and error and experience behind their belts to make perfect decisions about life.

Even if you could be taught wisdom at an early age, if you haven’t been taught such things, whose fault is it?  It’s the fault of the older generation.  Perhaps teaching wisdom can be done, but it has to be done correctly.  You have to begin with the end in mind, and you have to know and understand the way of the world.

This is a picture of my great grandmother, Mabel.  She is not really a feather Indian, she just married one.  She’s actually Irish and her maiden name is Bigbee.  She followed all of the ancient tribal rituals, and read all of the ancient texts, except for the Kundalini, because an inscription is on the cover of that book and it clearly states “It is forbidden to read this text.”

My great grandmother, Mabel, for some reason, firmly believed that modern day society was innately evil.  She believed that the one true way to live was to follow the natural cycles of the Universe and to stay away from anything made of plastic.

She believed that plastic was the blood of the Beast that would one day take over the world.  And therefore, nothing made of plastic could be purchased, used or brought onto their land or there would be hell to pay.

Plastic comes from petroleum, which is just a form of refined crude oil.  In case you didn’t know, oil comes from the ground and is actually made from the remains of dinosaurs who lived many millions of years ago.  My great grandmother Mabel claimed to have read an ancient text that declared oil to be the blood of the beast.

According to legend, if the blood of the beast is extracted from the earth, it will awaken the spirit of the beast and he will reap havoc on the earth and cause chaos and war and destroy not only the human race, but every living thing on the face of the earth.  Why would a creature do such a thing?  For fame fortune and glory?  To rule the world?  What’s the motive, you may ask.  The beast doesn’t have a motive, he’s just a monster and likes to destroy things just for fun.  That’s why.

And that’s also why her children and her grandchildren were completely forbidden to use plastic.  Which I don’t think is all that bad, because plastic drives me nuts.  But then again, I didn’t have some deranged lunatic mother breathing down my neck at every minute of the day making sure that I wasn’t using plastic.

Actually, my mom and Aunt Dorcas were practically raised by their grandparents because their dad died when they were little. So they spent their early childhood being warned of the dangers of the beast.  They were told that using plastic was like drinking the blood of the beast.  They were also told that if you drink the blood of the beast, you become one of his evil minions and he will summon you to follow him.

The government forced my great grandmother to send her grandchildren to  school!  Can you believe the nerve?  She didn’t have her own car, so they sent a school bus that was filled up with plastic! And all the other kids at school were using plastic.  They had plastic clips for their hair.  They played with plastic toys and listened to plastic music on their plastic record players.  They kept their plastic jewelry in plastic jewelry boxes.  It drove my great grandmother absolutely bonkers.  She was constantly smudging them with white sage to release the evil powers of the beast.  She made them drink concoctions to release negative energy they got from riding in the plastic school bus.  And to make things worse, my mom and Aunt Dorcas were constantly sneaking around in order to use plastic.  They even went so far as to ask for running water and electricity.

Do you know what happens to people who are raised by control freaks who have believes that are the opposite of the rest of society?  Well, if you don’t already know, let me give you an example.

Okay, maybe that’s not the best example, because that’s just a made up story. But here’s a real guy who was raised by a crazy grandmother.

This is Charles Manson.

His grandmother was a religious fanatic and we all know what happened to him.  It’s no wonder my Aunt Dorcas finally flew off the deep end one day and cut the roses on a Mercury retrograde day.  And you can’t really blame her at all for reading the forbidden text of the Kundalini, she’d just heard so much about it, and really just wanted to see for herself if plastic was really an unholy substance that could cause a plague of locusts upon the land and an infestation of boils like no man has ever seen before.

I mean, seriously, I personally believe that the control freak mothering thing can have some serious side effects on certain types of offspring.  I have learned from careful observation, that this parenting tactic is not for me.

Aunt Dorcas vs the Kundalini

This is a picture of my Aunt Dorcas when she was 18.  She has that evil look in her eye.  You can just tell by looking at her that she is up to no good.

She pruned the rose hedges under the waning, rooting moon, when Mercury was in retrograde,  And everyone knows you should never do that.  She didn’t care.  She wanted to decorate her birthday party with roses and didn’t want to wait another day.

She was nothing more than an obsessive compulsive spoiled brat.  Because of her discordance with the Magneticon, the ancient Choctaw book of magnetic fields and planetary alignments”, she caused a cataclysmic shift in the universe that caused our whole world to come crashing down. For as we all know, one thing leads to another.

Just in case you don’t know, a waning moon happens the day after the full moon.  One day the moon is full and big and bright, and the next day, and the fifteen days afterwards, it just gets smaller and smaller until you just can’t see it anymore.  When the moon is getting smaller, they call this the waning moon.

You pull weeds and plant root vegetables under the waning moon.  Just for the record, it’s not scientology or voodoo witchcraft or old hillbilly proverbs of yore.  When the moon is getting smaller in the sky, it means that the water on the planet earth is being pulled upwards.  It’s like high tide at night on the ocean. Most of the water in the plants are in the leaves and branches during the waning moon, and cutting them during this part of the cycle makes them weaker and more prone to bacterial infections.

So if you prune the roses during a waning moon, it’s going to take them ages to grow back more roses, and they’ll most likely turn black with mold spots.  Okay, so what, right?  She screwed up the roses for next six months, who cares?  Well, let me tell you, up until that moment of time, everyone had been following the natural order of the cosmos, like clockwork.

On my Aunt Dorca’s 15th birthday, the planet Mercury was in retrograde.  This is the ancient Choctaw Indian’s special day that they didn’t cut any plant, pick any fruit, or dig any holes in the ground.  It’s kind of like the Jewish Sabbath day, in a way.  Anything planted on a Mercury retrograde day will grow distorted and deformed.

In fact, if you conceive a child on this day, its almost certain to become a Siamese twin.

So when Aunt Dorcas came trudging down past the catfish pond carrying a butt load of long stemmed red roses, her grandparents nearly had a heart attack.  They might as well have.

It was Mercury Retrograde day, so naturally they were out fishing. They weren’t fishing the normal boring way, like most people do with worms and bait, no they were bow fishing.  Remember, these are people who were descendants of the natives.

This is a picture of a guy bow fishing with a modern day version of a fishing bow

And this is my great grandfather, Chuck, son of Marvin, who planted the mango plantation that I was born on.

I never met the guy, you know why?  Because he’s dead, that’s why.

My great grandfather Chuck used a regular bow and arrow until that one fateful day, long ago.  Someone gave him a modern fishing bow that morning as a thank you gift for saving his daughter from a serious infection that she had.  Great grandfather Chuck did not receive proper instruction, nor did he read the users manual and guide to modern day bow fishing.

He just stood there by the catfish pond that was covered with Lotus blossoms and overshadowed by mango trees and tried to catch some fish.  Mercury retrograde day is the best day for catching fish, and also the day that you traditionally eat massive quantities of deep fried catfish.  You can fish on that day until you turn blue in the face, but you do not,under any circumstances, trim the rosebushes.  But Aunt Dorcas did, and my grandma saw her come trudging down the path with an armful of long stemmed red roses.

Well, my grandma screamed so loud that she fell backwards knocking over grandpa the instant he shot his arrow.  The arrow went flying forwards and then backwards again, slicing a chunk from great grandmother Mabel’s arm and hitting great grandpa Chuck square in-between the eyes.   And that’s too bad, because he was really the only person who knew what to do if someone should get plunged between the eyes with a sharp object.

Well, Aunt Dorcas panicked.  She should of ran for help, but since it was Mercury Retrograde and she chopped down roses on the wrong day, she wasn’t exactly thinking straight.  Her first instinct wasn’t to put pressure on grandma’s wound and call 911.  They didn’t have 911 back then, and besides, there weren’t any nearby hospitals to go to.  The closest doctor around was lying on the ground in a pool of his own blood next to an old lady who was in wild hysterics.

As a joke, when she was little, Aunt Dorcas’s grandfather on her mother’s side told her that there was a salve hidden in one of the caves underground that could heal any wound.  He told her that his leg had been cut off in the war, and he bought a salve from a traveling healer that grew the leg back.

Naturally, Dorcas believed the story, and nobody bothered to tell her it was just a bad joke.  It was just one of those tall tales that old people like to tell the naïve young children of the world and Dorcas had forgotten all about it until this moment in time.  All of a sudden, this story popped into her head, and she spent the rest of the day looking for this magic healing cream that could bring her grandfather back to life.

Although she wanted to be a hero, and truly believed that she could save her grandfather’s life if she found the salve, she was really making an excuse for herself to run away and hide from her crime against the cycles of the cosmos. She knew she shouldn’t have cut the roses down on Mercury Retrograde day, and she was well aware of the disasters such an act would cause.

She didn’t find any magic salve, though.   She found the forbidden text of the Kundalini.  She’d heard of it, she knew what it was.  She knew she wasn’t supposed to read it, but she read it anyway.  And from then on, things got a lot crazier.