Suspended Waterfalls and Constipated Clouds,

Dog Poet Transmitting.......

I went out to start my car this morning, so that I could get it over to the mechanic, in order for all of the things that have to happen to happen. The battery was dead. It’s been sitting for more than two months (I should have detached the cables but I didn’t). I connected it to the Touran to recharge it. After twenty minutes, I went out to start it and got no sound whatsoever; nothing. It’s a new battery from spring. This didn’t make much sense to me, so it’s in the hands of the mechanic, whenever he gets here.

I owe a reader the four CD set of my early musical works which are probably best described as a combination of Frank Zappa and Warren Zevon by way of Bill Hicks. They’ve been on my computer for as long as I’ve had one but they’re not there now. My copies of them are all in Italy. I’m already a month late on sending the CDs out.

Something important that I was hoping to get yesterday has gone into hiding on two fronts. If I were the kind of person to succumb to frustration and annoyance it would have happened by now because these examples are only a few of what’s been going on.

I’m heading south shortly, or intend to and all of my former plans for the location are back on the drawing board but I won’t be going anywhere without something to go there in. There was over a month of uncertainty leading up to the recent freedom to relocate to la bella Italia. I’d be there now if not for that …but one thing follows another, except in my case where one doesn’t follow another unless it’s not related to it.

I keep getting things like this in the mail. My house in Italy isn’t anything like this but we’ve wound up paying more for it than this, even if there is more land and olive trees. It happened because I’d come to believe that Germans are the most honest people I’ve met, until I met an unscrupulous con artist named Christophe Emschermann, who finessed us like the rubes we turned out to be.

I published my first novel through a Crowleyite publisher named Moog Morgan who owns Mandrake of Oxford Press and who spelled the title of the book on the spine, the cover and every page of the book three different ways AND left out the final edit. It took a year to get that fixed with this guy treating me like shit every step of the way. He tells me he owes me no money because he only sold so many books. I find many more used copies for sale on the internet than he says he sold.

I signed with CBS/Sony through Bernard Stollman of ESP Disk and he let his wife ignore the DAT masters and copy the material from a warped old cassette and then process it in such a way that the majority is incomprehensible and then released it into every Tower Records outlet around the world where it sank like a stone. My contract with them expired a long time ago but Bernard continues to offer my work for sale on his ESP Disk website. I complain for him to remove it and he might do so for a week but then puts it back up again. I’ve heard from the heirs to a lot of black jazz artists from the sixties and before that talk about how Bernard has stolen so much of whatever there was to take from the income generated by the sale of these icons.

I’ve got other stories like this that lay like broken paving stones, to demarcate the upward surge of my illustrious career. It’s been one long passageway to humiliating failure without cease and I guess I should be proud of that. I’ve got stories that run the gamut from the Grand Guignol to the merely tragi-comic. I can’t remember them all but I’ve sat back a time or two in contemplation of the chronic ironic and surprised myself at the things I have forgotten.

Then there are the ordinary, inexplicable, every day things such as I have already mentioned. These are counterpointed by the predictions of various astrologers who wanted to do my chart or wound up doing my chart, which talk about an abondanza of ships, coming into port, laden with blessings for me that are too numerous to count. One of them shows up every few months to tell me something but then disappears again before telling me anything and I shake my head and grin as I gaze off into the invisible with a look of profound understanding in my eyes that signifies nothing.

I live in a world where this sort of thing is debated in this kind of a manner. That is to say that it defies everything true about the subject that thousands of years of tradition in pristine systems states to be otherwise. I live in a world where things that would embarrass me, more than the worst moments in my life ever have, are heralded as great works of art and a prevailing measurement of the greatness of our culture. I live in a world where the worst motivations and appetites from the darkest moments of former times are bundled together like bad software in the hearts and minds of our leaders in every theater of operation.

I’m not complaining. I have no reason to complain. I found the only thing worth finding and it’s integrated with my life in a way that answers every important prayer and fulfills every real need that might ever arise. This is a true and sincere statement and it makes my tedious progress through a world of absurdity and obstruction a laughable affair. It’s the reason I’m writing this today.

We need to remember, when opposition is as great as what I have only superficially outlined today, we must be doing something useful, because everything else is not only useless but malefic or else… you’re cruising on the Titanic and the iceberg is still enroute. We need to remember that periods of unexplainable opposition are an indication that something extremely promising waits just beyond the trial period of our testing. If we fall victim to the pressures of the moment, we wind up back in the Greyhound bus station waiting area and the promise of another long and uncomfortable ride.

I remember being enraged at the unfairness of my life and the many times that a rock and a hard place faced an unyielding wall. I remember the alternative choices that weren’t acceptable alternatives. Only the wild unknown, of burning bridges into one more ‘make it up as you go’, seemed acceptable but I will never know now. The ‘might have gone that way’ highways disappear once another choice is made. We can look back with regret on what never happened but that’s about as useful as succeeding in the world of the moment, which is not going to be with us for that much longer.

I’m writing this because I suspect I am not alone in this regard. For most of us it is just a matter of degree. The pressure is all about our being forced into compliance with the thing opposing us. This pressure is universal in its intent to compel us into the seeming safe but suffocating blanket of the familiar; the treadmill, whetstone, grinding wheels of what wears away everything valuable that we possess.

Conversely, there waits the ever present unknown, brimming with possibility and uncertainty. There lies mystery and the suggestion of all the dangers that come with risk, in the face of what we know nothing about. We’ve never learned anything important without some travel in those zones. We’re prohibited by our survival mechanisms from chancing the opportunities that grow our faith, which is the universal passport in the wilderness of our hidden self and what lies behind the appearances of the world.

I never had a choice about this. I guess I will have it say it was my destiny. The result has been that I have discovered the unknown to be far safer than the known, that all of us assume we are informed about and have done no more than misidentify. We are in the unknown no matter where we think we are and that is a key piece of information that seems to elude nearly all of us.

I’ve found my invisible friends to be far more reliable and helpful than any of the friends I could see. I’ve found the unknown kingdoms of our being to be safer and more predictable than anything out here. No one can ever effectively communicate the truth of this to another. It remains for each of us to discover whether it is true or not.


End Transmission.......

Visible sings: ♫ The Tangled Woods ♫
The New Shangri-La (almost 1100 members now)