A lone wanderer comes riding down the cold, dark highway...
On a little Honda motor scooter.
The half-moon snickers loudly behind his back.
A shrill wind is whipping against his face.
He can barely see through the mist on the road.
It is Dogstar, the main character...
Of this tale which is about to unfold before you.
He has been riding for a long time.
He does not know where he is.
He can barely remember where he came from.
He has no idea where he is going.
He just has to go.
Dogstar is wearing his army jacket...
His cheapo Space Age L.E.D. Woolworth's watch...
His sun-glasses purple-tinted...
A purple haze surrounds him.
He passes an abandoned roadside stand.
A decrepit sign hangs above it, swinging rustily in the west wind.
"Eat It and Run" it says.
Towards the west behind a purple cloud, is concealed a silvery cigar-shaped object.
Other-worldly beings in it study Dogstar from afar.
They have been watching him for years...
This particularly interesting sample of the humanoid species.
Dogstar sees faces in the mist...
Faces of a past he has left far behind...
Faces that he is desperately trying to ignore and forget.
The faces leer sneeringly at him, getting in his way...
Dogstar concentrates on the lines of the road which he can barely see
He has no idea where he is going.
He just has to go.
Dogstar wanders in wild*eyed wonder along a summery dusty road...
Pulsating, shimmering corn plants exude exotic fragrances into the balmy night air.
Thousands of shrill insects rhythmically chirp their endless concert...
Throught the ceaseless night until the dawn's great finale.
Colored astral lights swirl in distant mists along the edge of the cornfields.
Lovely, lonely moon-spirit hangs beneath an ancient oak tree.
Dogstar's huge pupils take in this infinite array of sensory imprints...
This new night world, rebirthing into the darkness.
A strange sound suddenly emerges from the depths of mysterious forests.
Insects cease for a moment, wait an interval, then resume.
Dogstar pauses, looks up at the moon with a lovely crown on her head.
He takes a deep breath, slowly lifts up his arms towards her in solemn worship.
She is quite full tonight, bursting with lunatic light.
A brilliant yellow planet hovers near, keeping her company on her long nocturnal journey.
As though he were a plant gravitating in the direction of the sun....
He holds his hands upwards, fingers outstretched.
Breathing deeply, he takes in the lunar rays...
Feels them penetrating the palms of his hands...
Traveling down the arteries of his nervous system...
Into the inner recesses of his brain.
The rays of the moon produce a strange change in the quality of his consciousness.
It seems very silent.
It seems forever.
Dogstar communes with his Mistress in the Sky, achieving Lunatic Consciousness.
He wakes from an ancient dream...
Dogstar realizes that he has been standing for a long time like that...
Frozen like an ancient statue in a wild moon garden.
Reaching longingly at the mooon beams, he forces them into his solar plexus...
Into his lower abdomen, then his lower body, and finally down into his legs.
Moon roots he grows into the bowels of the earth.
For an instant, Dogstar, the earth, the moon, the yellow planet are in loving conjunction.
Dogstar shakes his head, pulls out of it like a swimmer out of ice cold water.
Question: What made that weird sound in the woods?
Question 2: Who was there to hear it?
The zenith of summertime:
Birds tweet raucously,
& wild-flowers bloom wondrously.
Green leaves avidly weave food out of sunlight & dirt from the ground.
Oh sweet miracle of livingness!
Dogstar takes a leisurely walk thru amazing mazes of backroads...
Stranded somewhere in the Town Forest of Jethro.
A bit lost; he wishes he could remember where that damned motorbike is parked.
The roads, not being very helpful, all look pretty much identical...
They merge into the One Archetypical Ancient Logging Road.
He passes a '57 Chevy.
There is a skinny guy in it wearing nothing but pink glasses.
He is getting it on with a ponderously fat woman.
Their fucking rocks the vehicle back & forth like a single raft on a stormy ocean.
Mosquitoes nibble seductively at the lobes of his ears...
The stuff he sprayed on himself seems to attract them even more.
"We love you, Dogstar," they sing shrilly into his ear.
"Your blood, oh, it makes us whirr and bite!" they whisper in dark passion.
While his body wanders lost, the mind of Dogstar wanders askew:
He ponders on the essence of plantness.
Plants don't do anything.
They are perfectly self-sufficient right where they are.
No sexual cravings have they...
Is this a curse or a blessing?
Nor have they need to fill an empty stomach.
They do not think about anything;
They sit still in utter meditation..
All plants do all day is just grow & photosynthesize.
They must take whatever comes along.
If some mobile animal gets a notion to nibble or gulp them...
If they wind up in sandy soil or in shade of a bigger plant, they're in trouble...
They can't change their neighborhood.
Never-the-less, Dogstar envies them.
In his next lifetime, he decides he would like to be an oak tree.
He will be a wise old oak tree & he would grow for centuries.
Thousands of birds & tree-rodents would make themselves...
In the home of his branches.
Hundreds of seasons would pass thru his being-essence.
Late it is... the long summer's domain wanes.
Full pale-yellow moon shines dimly through glowing haze.
Mosquitoes out in full force, vampires seeking blood-food of existence.
Crickets chant back & forth jamming thru the long muggy night.
Little people play hide-&-seek in pale moon-lit fields.
On nearby High-Way 23, an occasional huge truck roars by.
A furtive rabbit desperately dodges giant multi-wheels...
Blinded by a fierce blue light unnatural .
A few miles up, a prominent neon-sign flashes on, flashes off, until dawn's early light.
"Cloud 9 Lounge" cheerfully shouts the sign to the world at large.
Magnanimously the sign sings its implied invitation to all who pass by:
"Come in for a few drinks, a few hours of respite from your worldly toil".
"Cloud 9 Lounge" is a combination topless bar/restaurant.
Perched next to it, is Motel 23.
Hot, sticky, unbearable is this night.
Mammoth moths like lemmings commit ritual suicide...
Banging madly against the rear screendoors of the restaurant kitchen.
Attracted like Stoics to the light unattainable within.
In this sweltering back-room of Cloud 9 Lounge, fans uselessly buzzing...
Dogstar performs his menial functions.
Up to his elbows he is in dirty dishes.
Up to his ankles lie uneaten scraps of bad food.
Food is not the primary attraction of Cloud 9 Lounge.
Dogstar is utterly benumbed on barbituates & codiene tablets...
Not prescribed by a licensed medical practitioner.
His hands robotically circumscribe motions over the dishes...
Barely cleaning them passably...
Dishes appear like alien objects in his grasp...
Dogstar feels not a thing.
Dogstar is washing the dishes.
He is up to his upper arms in gallons upon galleons of filthy, greasy dishwater.
He feels like he is lost in some obscure section of the ocean.
How the hell did he get shipwrecked in a place like this?
Oven-hot it is...
An old shivering fan works and strains futilely...
It shudders to its uttermost limits only to entropically blow fumes of hell.
Endless stacks of dishes, cartons upon cartons of glasses piled up...
Every couple of minutes, the waitresses bring in more.
The fat cook snarls and scrapes grease with tattooed arms on the oven.
Like a demon in the inner circles of hell, he tends his sizzling fires.
All he wants to do is get out of there and lay back with a six pack of beer...
Watching morose late night channel noise on the little black and white t.v.
Dogstar's girlfriend comes in with an armload of dishes.
Her name is Stella Telestar.
Her bare breasts sought after by many a patron...
Glisten with the sweltering of dancing before their hungry eyes..
Snuggling up to him, she presses one of her medium-sized breasts into his arm.
"Working hard?" she whispers to him.
"Yeah," says Dogstar, "Real hard," referring to the condition of his penis also.
"We will have to get good and high when this is over."
"Yes, that is a very good idea. Finish whoever you're getting off tonight...
Drop by my place... I'll have lines of power powder on the mirror...
Superlative mind expanding music... Flashing lights of sensation going all night long."
"Great! Can't wait. See you in a while."
She gives him a kiss and hurries back out...
Into the general miasmic hub-bub of leering customers, making lewd propositions.
Dogstar shakes his head and continues washing.
He takes a yellow pill out of a container in his pocket...
Washes it down with some stale beer in an unwashed mug.
He turns up the nearby college radio station louder...
Drowning out all the peripheral noises...
The cries and whistles of "Take it off! Take it ALL off" in Cloud 9 Lounge.
How in the world did he manage to wind up in a gig like this?
He was once such a good boy, he minded his manners, he made good grades.
Surely he could do better than this.
Oh, what cruel karma to dump such a destiny as this upon his suffering mind and body!
This is what Dogstar usually does when he gets off work:
It is somewhere around 1:00 A.M. - 2:00 A.M.
The light of a bright blue steetlight outside shines into the room.
Dogstar stumbles in... Turns on the red, blue, green, & purple lights...
He has them all over the place.
For added effect, he snaps on a strobe light.
Carefully, somewhat paranoically, he pulls down the shades and closes the curtains.
He then proceeds to get a beer out of the fridge...
Pops a pill... Fires up a bowl of sweet psychotropic herb.
If he feels right in the mood, he may toot a line of cocaine...
But only if his paranoia level is down.
Religiosly, in the center of the room, he lights a single yellow candle.
He likes to stare at the unfolding mandala patterns it makes...
When he flies free in the heights of consciousness.
He puts on headphones so not to attract the nosy attention of neighbors...
Inserts a record on the turntable...
Sits back in a ratty tagsale armchair that has a faint smell of cat pee.
At last, he can lay back and get into it.
Immersed in headphones pumping pulsating soundwaves into his brain,
He is in his own self-composed reality.
The night passes by, his neurons are dancing...
To the pulsations of Space-Age Electronic Super-Cosmic Machine-Music.
It syncs rather nicely with the strobe light and the flickering of the candle.
Visions of Divine Electric Light unfold before his inner eyes.
In this condition, he will stay up until the first rays of dawn...
Creep past the curtains into the room.
He drifts off into a weird dream-state in the chair.
The wires of the headphones are his umbilical cord.
Dogstar avidly sucks on the juice of the music like milk gushing through his momma's tit.
Dogstar becomes one with the dreams...
The mind of every conscious entity on the whole Planet Earth.
Perfectly, he understands everybody, and forgives them for their digressions...
They simply cannot see it... He forgives himself likewise.
Like a gigantic amoeba... He extends psychic feelers all over the Vastness of the World....
Into the Great Beyond.
Beyond the boundaries of this limited Home Planet, shoots off Dogstar...
Beyond the inertias of the Home Stellar System... Beyond the edge of the Home Galaxy...
Beyond even the edge of the Base Universe.
In a Cloud 9 all of his own is Dogstar.
Perhaps it will be orienting to have some idea of where all this is happening.
It's happening around a typical small town in New England, called "Wheatfield".
Wheatfield could just as well be "AnyWhere, U.S.A."
It would make a nice Norman Rockwell painting.
Wheatfield has a white steepled church, a post-office, a little free Carnagie library...
A rustic general store with all the basic essentials.
It is all quite miniature and all painted a wholesome Puritan-white.
It is like a set of perfectly matched teacups with absolutely no chips.
It even has a park, called a "common", with a statue of a native revolutionary hero...
Who died for the local citizenships' supposed "freedom".
Basically it is a farmer's town.
Not much industry brings in income, with the exception of a rancid meat-packing plant.
Mostly corn & cigar-tobacco is grown around there, on its relatively wide, flat lands.
Wheatfield, like many other towns with that appendage "field"...
Lies close to the Connecticut River, with its vast valley of fields.
The Connecticut River has been there for hundreds of millions of years...
Long before humans beings came & changed things so drastically.
It'll probably be there long after the human beings have gone, too...
Albeit somewhat more polluted.
Ice Ages have come & gone; mountain ranges have risen & eroded...
The Connecticut River in different forms has thrived steadily throughout it.
Once upon a time, tropical cycadic fern-trees grew here...
Dinosaurs gleefully participated in earth-shaking wrestling matches.
Their growls and groans echoed throughout the valley with tall jagged mountains.
Then their day ended, the glaciers came flowing down the Connecticut River
It got too cold for them and they died out...
The tall mountains wore down into rolling hills.
Little furry mammals popped out of the bushes to take their place.
From the little furry mammals, a species of sapient bipeds evolved.
The first of the sapient bipeds to live around here arrived about ten-thousand years ago.
They were a very primitive kind, did not have much in the way of civilized artifacts...
They lived very much in peace and harmony...
With their fellow lifeforms...
the other plants and mammals around there.
A few centuries ago, from the other side of the world...
Another sub-species of sapient bipeds with skin white came along in ships.
They forced the more peaceful group of skin red away with guns they had.
In 1776, a group of them founded the town of Wheatfield...
It was back then a morass of swamps & vines & poisonous snakes & dangerous cats...
But the settlers took care of that.
Things haven't been quite the same since.
Seven miles down from Wheatfield, across the Connecticut River, is University Town...
Here serveral thousand students temporarily reside...
They spend a lot of their time in pursuit of pieces of paper called "degrees".
These supposedly will get them "jobs".
"Jobs" are work contracts for pieces of paper which can be exchanged for material goods.
They also devote a considerable portion of their time:
Drinking, partying, going to see bands, dancing, getting laid...
Changing their neurological structure with recreational drugs.
This is all part of their preparation for the "real world".
"Cloud 9 Lounge" & Motel 23 are within the boundaries of the township of Wheatfield.
The majority of the citizens of Wheatfield heartily disapprove of its existence...
The disreputable characters who tend to reside in Motel 23.
They would not like Dogstar very much if they knew what he was up to.
The citizens think the female humans baring their breasts and often their pudenda...
Is an utter blasphemy on the face of the earth...
They call this "sin", which means roughly the same as "taboo".
The word "sin" is derived from the name of an ancient Moon-Goddess named "Sinn".
This Moon-Goddess was threatening to a patriarchal culture who took over society.
Interestingly enough, the majority of the male inhabitants of Wheatfield...
Who in the light of day advocate the place should be condemned and shut down...
Also go there late at night to have a few drinks...
They are actually there to view the partial or total nudity of the females there.
Even a few lonely women who go there, desperately seeking being laid ...
A substitute for love, a caricature of companionship, to exchange their sex for amenities.
Quite typical of the human species is this kind of double-thinking and hypocrisy.
Dogstar lives in one of a row of cottages behind Motel 23.
He inhabits cottage No. 3.
Stella Telestar lives around here, too, a few cottages up from him in cottage No. 9.
The rent is relatively low for the era and area, though somewhat more than it should be...
Considering the punctured inhospitable state it is in.
It goes up exponentially each year.
Dogstar, however, lives rent-free...
He has a barter arrangement with the management...
In exchange for permission to remain on the premises, he washes dishes.
He also gets to consume all the beer, steak, and fried food he can stand to gurgitate.
Sometimes he does a little maintenance work on the property, though this is rare...
Since the management is rather apathetic about that.
It could be worse; it could be better.
Once in a while, Dogstar takes a trip into University Town...
Sells some recreational drugs to students for a little pocket money.
He does okay.
Sporadically, he gets money from a trust fund left to him by a rather eccentric Grandpa...
He accumulated capital from sale of a device...
An offshoot of life-long attempts to create a perpetual motion machine.
His Grandpa departed from the physical world five years ago, God bless his merry soul.
Dogstar may not be drinking champagne & gorging himself on caviar...
At least he is not living homeless in a garbage bin.
As long as he gets a hit of dope and gets some junk to stuff in his stomach...
He's contented as a stray cat on an old pee-stained mattress.
The cottage is a single room with a kitchenette.
Generously furnished in this habitation are an inventory of:
A plush armchair from a tag sale...
A single rickety table which serves simultaneously as a table to eat on or a desk...
A bureau with a bunch of scrappy odds & ends on it & in it...
A cigarette-burned stained brown rug...
A single bed with one leg too short.
Outside the front windows lies a rather charming view of the motel conglomeration...
The rear exit of "Cloud Nine Lounge" filled with piles of garbage...
That hasn't been taken away in years.
Through the single dusty fly-filled rear window is exposed a bit more aesthetic view:
Some mountains across a wide field of corn...
A glimpse of the Connecticut River in the distance.
Dogstar generally tends to keep the front shades down and the rear shade up.
In a corner of the rear of the cottage, there's a tiny bathroom...
With a rust-stained sink & toilet bowl, & an extremely narrow shower-stall.
What serves as a kitchen is a 2' by 2' fridge just large enough...
For a six-pack or a package of frozen food.
Beneath it is a little stove with two burners that sometimes works.
Of course, as an almost obligatory addendum to the decor, there's a few holes in the walls;
Wind creeps and whistles the the cracks; it helps with the ventilation.
All in all, it's not a bad place.
It might be added that Dogstar's place is filled with stacks upon stacks of books...
These mainly deal with science-fiction & hefty magician's tomes on the Occult.
Dogstar is always searching for the Answer, the Philosopher's Key to the Universe.
To him, this is a highly entertaining activity.
He has a stereo set from a department store & plenty of somewhat scratched records...
By unusual esoteric rock/electronic musicians unknown to the general public.
His walls are lined with topographic maps of surrounding landscapes...
For at least fifty miles around.
All the special places he likes to go are marked in yellow and red.
It appears like a chief general's depictions of his campaign strategies.
It certainly looks better than the wallpaper...
A peeling zig-zag pattern unchanged in decades.
He's got some weird posters up there, too, even on the ceiling.
On the ceiling directly above his bed is taped a big picture...
Three Egyptian pyramids buried in the desert sand, shot in green.
There are Escher paintings, prints of surreal artists.
These posters are the mark of Dogstar's individuality...
His territorial pee-pee on the home tree.
Upon awakening in the morning...
Dogstar occasionally whistles in amazement...
At this space he has fallen into.
Dogstar takes a break from his rancid chores.
He sits by the bar in the lounge, idly sipping a beer.
To increase his amusement, he pops a yellow pill.
That will help him to take it a little better.
He stares somewhat contemplatively at his reflection in the mirror over the bar.
A stranger with long hair, full beard, eyes of pain looks back at him.
"What am I doing here?" he wonders.
Stella Telestar dances nakedly upon the stage utterly be-tranced...
Shaking the ripples of her body, gazing outwards at nothing at all.
Long, dark hair cascades down to the small of her back...
Over absolutely immaculate medium-sized breasts, a well-proportioned rather enticing ass.
All in all, she has the right qualifications for the job...
And displays them to the full capacity.
Horny businessmen, farmers, tractor-trailer drivers...
Taking time out from their mundane livings...
Escaping frigid nagging wives & shoddy home-lives with spoiled wailing kids...
Gaze forlornly at her as if at the portals of Heaven.
Fervently they wish they could insert engorged penises into the quivering vagina...
Detached from the person, displayed like dancing meat...
On the surreal stage of spinning stars.
A few can't stand it anymore, they hurry off to the bathroom stalls...
To masturbate themselves to some momentary gratification.
Some who have seen it all are bored stiff.
Stella Telestar does this kind of thing to work her way through college.
A few lines of coke from avid customers is nice, too.
She is majoring in business administration and when she gets that degree...
She will never look at the inside of one of these places again.
It's better than typing all day or doing telephone sales.
After her set is over, Stella takes a seat beside Dogstar.
To the dismay of the desperate businessmen all around...
She whispers a heated proposition into his ear.
She slides a hand up his thigh into his growing crotch.
What does she see in that... that... dishwasher?
Dishwashers do not have a very high status in human society at this time.
Dogstar, however, has a certain underworld status.
That night, when they both get off work, the two stars come together as one.
Radience flashes in the heavens from their conjoining.
Free from the bonds of societal structure, they are in Dogstar's cottage.
Green & red lights shimmer while a strange, space music...
Some obscure European group plays with a loud montone humming in the background.
Stella/Dogstar have shed their encumbering clothing...
They partake of forbidden drugs, passing the pipe and the mirror back & forth.
They do peculiar things to the bodies of each other, things they would not do in public.
Stella slides her skilled, moistened tongue up & down the length of his penis...
For additional tantalization, she licks the crevice of his ass.
Dogstar is simultaneously reciprocating by swirling his own tongue around & round...
Within the innermost interior of her cunt.
He licks her ass, too.
He pushes his head in as an attempt to to crawl back into the Great Womb.
Stella gets atop of him & sits on him, sliding his organ of fertility deep within her...
She slowly moves up & down, then faster & faster...
Stimulating her clit rather voraciously...
Bringing herself to panting orgasm.
Dogstar manages to hold it back that time around.
He rather enjoys watching her ecstasy.
They change positions.
She gets on all fours.
Dogstar rubs his face into her ass and cunt, while fingering her.
He finds the pungeance of the earthy smells stimulating.
Like a panting horny dog, he slithers into her from behind.
He fucks her most beastially.
He slaps her ass, strokes her body, and watches her fine well developed body writhe.
It's time for something different...
Stella sticks a finger dripping with slippery vaseline up his asshole...
While massaging his prostrate gland from within...
She swirls the tip of her tongue around the throbbing head of his penis.
Then, having her stand upright with her back to the wall, Dogstar kneels before her...
He looks up lovingly at her as though she were the Great White Goddess...
He inserts three fingers into her cunt and one thumb into her asshole.
Sweetly he licks her pink clitoris of desire.
Stella moans & gasps, immersed into it...
Her cries and whispers fill the room.
Stella stands and props herself up with two hands on Dogstar's unmade bed...
Dogstar proceeds to pump himself in and out of her...
Like huge waves crashing on a distant beach.
Their taunt muscles tighten for the final tidal wave of this sexual storm.
Grabbing two hefty handfulls of ripe breasts, he pumps increasingly faster.
He shudders with sudden violence while her cries reach a peak...
Muscles tighten like ropes being pulled in.
He takes an eternal moment of pleasure from another plane...
Squirting oodles of noodles of a greyish-white genetic material...
Into her accommodating receptacle of quivering juices flowing down her legs.
They lie in bed and take a rest, sweating and breathing heavily.
"Gee, that was fun," said Stella.
"Yeah, we'll have to do it again sometime," said Dogstar.
Oftentimes male & female sapient primates do this dance...
Designed to be quite pleasurable so that the chance may occur...
Perhaps they may make copies of themselves...
New generations taking a shot at it...
Spread a whole fucking race all over the planet...
Quite a compulsive cycle it is.
Oh, where did this all begin?
Where will it all end?
Does it just go round & round in some sort of endless cycle?
Dogstar was born at midnight upon a desolate, rocky beach on the West Coast.
There was a little party going on around a huge bonfire.
His mother was a 50's-style beat-nik.
She was rejecting the medical hospital birth-style of the time...
No, white walls and strap machines and anaesthesia for her!
She was going to have this baby birthing naturally in the great outdoors.
His father could have been any or all of the various artists, con-artists, drunks, mystics...
Psuedo-mystics, writers, would-be writers, jazz musicians, drug addicts...
& other assorted riff-raff or societal dissidents present at this party.
Most of them, at one time or another, had balled the mother.
After all, this was a dedicated group of anarchists with a firm belief in free love.
They practiced what they believed.
They were laughing, passing the pot around, drinking wine out of huge gallon jugs...
Dancing free-lance and nude around the fire.
They cheered/chanted Dogstar's mother onwards to the Great Separation:
"Push! Push! Push!"
Dogstar's mother was working hard at it.
She sweltered and eagerly guzzled down any wine or pot offered to her.
Being a mother wasn't easy.
"PUSH! PUSH! PUSH!" yelled the exultant crowd, getting increasingly tipsy.
The wind blew harder and the waves grew higher.
Meanwhile, Dogstar was doing his damndest not to get born.
No way he was going to go through this again.
He wanted to be back in that nice Space-Between-The-Lifetimes...
Back in the Calm Colorless Void.
What did he do to deserve this?
He had seen a preview of what this life was going to be like...
He didn't want to go through with this one.
However, the Powers-That-Be edged him on.
Like someone who just signed the papers to buy a guaranteed bomb...
He had no choice.
"PUSH! PUSH! PUSH!" screamed the crowd.
The tip of Dogstar's head emerged from the womb, then popped out.
Upon taking his first breaths of the polluted air of this planet...
Dogstar wailed and wailed.
He was annointed with wine...
Pot-smoke was blown into his face.
They wanted to see if they could get this baby high.
A saxophone player idly played a few opening riffs.
"What are we going to call this kid, man?" one of the beat-niks pondered...
Contemplating the swirls in a seashell.
Another beatnik started playing bongos.
"Like, this is a real happening, you know?"
A beatnik looked up at the sky for inspiration...
He noticed a brilliant blue white star glowing brightly in the Southern Sky...
Intensely outshining the others.
He pointed up at it & yelled:
"Hey, look! There's Sirius up there! It's, like, you know, a sign, man!
That's this kid's sign! It's like a portent from the stars!"
"Sirius, huh? Didn't somebody, Aleister Crowley maybe, say...
The Egyptians had a thing about this star? Like, they worshipped it, man!
They didn't know what to make of it because it kept wandering around in the sky...
Like, you know, a stray dog, so they called it the 'Dogstar'."
"Yeah, cool! Like we don't know what to make of this, so let's call this kid 'Dogstar'!"
"Yeah, like wow, man, anything for the happening, you know?"
A would-be poet drunkenly pounded on bongo drums and chanted:
"Oh, Sirius, Sirius burning bright!
Fill us with your blinding light!
Dogstar, Dogstar born this night!
Strays and wanders out of sight!"
They drank & partied & played music & chanted free-lance poetry & danced all night long.
Dogstar, in his baby body, cried and cried...
He wished there was a way he could back out of this...
Now he was going to have to go through this whole damned thing all over.
What a way to go.
Dogstar was a strange kind of kid.
He never fought.
He never played games.
He neither wept nor smiled.
He just sat on the beach all day...
Looking out at the endless ocean...
Watching the shore slowly erode away.
He had no hopes.
He had no aspirations.
He had no memories.
There was no end to the number of waves that just kept coming in.
A distant ship appeared on the horizon, then disappeared.
Dogstar is sitting on top of Warlock Mountain.
He is up at the last flight of stairs on an abandoned fire tower.
This is a place he likes to go to every once in a while.
It's about thirty miles from his cottage in Wheatfield.
He rode his motorbike up winding backroads filled with unrepaired potholes...
Through uninhabited forests miles around.
He finally climbed a white-dotted trail to make it up here.
It's not a bad view today, though a bit hazy in spots.
There are some other mountains a lot like this one in the distance.
There's one that's really big, towering above the others, north of here.
It's so high, it's peak is bare of trees; it looks like a miniature alpine.
That is the Big One.
The little town of Warlock is nestled below.
It's very picturesque from up here.
The mountains on the horizon are a faint tint of blue.
Sometimes, a light wisp of wind blows.
Towards the west, the sunset is approaching.
Horizon-clouds are turning light orange.
Dogstar takes a few puffs on a joint he brought along.
He spaces out & wonders how he got here in the first place.
It sure seems far away from no-where here.
The wind begins to blow a little harder.
The trees restlessly sway & rustle.
There are a few red leaves on the maple trees.
It's getting cooler; autumn is approaching.
Now, the view has become crystal clear.
The horizon mountains are the color of the depths of the ocean.
The sun turns red & dips into the horizon.
Dogstar chants a sad song to its departure...
It is his farewell song to the light and warmth of the season and the day.
He stares awhile at the pulsating after-glow.
This time of the day hovers with mystery.
He climbs back down through the darkening woods to his motorbike.
Dogstar's mother traveled around a lot, & she dragged Dogstar along with her.
They were always somewhere different all the time.
Sometimes they would spend just a night or two somewhere...
Sometimes it'd be a few weeks, or several months.
It might be in the city, a strange town, in a rural area, on the West Coast or the East.
Utterly unpredictable was this gypsy existence of non-conformity.
Dogstar had hazy recollections of riding in filthy, smelly buses...
Or riding in backseats of strange, hot, stuffy cars roaring noisily along endless stretches...
Desert highways, while his mother did something with some male stranger in front.
They'd make funny gasping noises.
She always had these different men with her.
Dogstar could never figure out just what was what.
He was just along for the ride.
Anywhere, everywhere went they, like migrating birds caught in strong winds...
Without a home...
Cruising up & down the coasts, east & west across the wide country.
One time they were in New Orleans, another time in the Outer Banks of North Carolina...
Another time in Vancouver, British Columbia, endless, nameless places.
It was so confusing & unsettled.
At pre-arranged pick-up places, she received checks from her father...
The moderately successful inventor.
In his constant attempts to invent a perpetual motion machine...
Occasionally he came up with something useful that made money.
She also got some income & various freebies from male strangers.
In a pinch, she could always get herself & the kid Dogstar...
Some free meal & a roof over their head for the night...
All she had to do was offer her still gorgeous body to any male passing by.
They wanted something from her...
She wanted something else back from them.
For hours, they transacted their business behind closed doors...
Dogstar fiddled around with things in the next room.
Dogstar was told not to bother them which suited him just fine.
There was a lot of gasping groans from within those doors.
It was a bit baffling to the young pre-pubic mind of the child Dogstar
He supposed that was how things were done.
Dogstar was left to his own devices... He did not play but lived inside his head.
He pondered upon the source of his self, the construction of the universe...
Stuff like that.
Dogstar is sitting way out in the middle of a distant field....
Stoned as a stone sitting on a stone.
Sitting crosslegged very quietly, hands folded demurely in his lap..
He observes a butterfly mating with a flower.
How appropriate they are to one another.
A cricket hops up on his knee, grinning at him goat-like with its juice-drenched mandibles.
It looks almost human, the way it stares at him so inquistively.
Perhaps it is.
It could they knew one another once upon a time.
How nice to meet again!
This is a nice place to be.
The sun is so warm.
It is so peaceful.
Why not go just stay here forever & never go back?
After an indefinite amount of time, soaking in endless summer sunshine...
Dogstar asks himself the 4 basic metaphysical questions:
"What am I doing here?"
"Who am I?"
"Why did this universe come into existence?"
"What will happen after I die?"
Perhaps these questions have no answer.
Perhaps we just make it up as we go along.
Maybe we know already, but deliberately chose to forget for the meantime.
It makes things more interesting that way.
While the Dogstar is wondering and pondering...
On the far edge of the field...
A bird exchanges limbs on an oak tree...
As though that were all there is.
By the time he was five years old, Dogstar's mother had had it.
She was getting tired of traveling around all the time.
She wanted to settle down a bit, get some roots down, & besides...
It was about time for this kid to get some education.
She got it in her head she wanted to be an artist.
She wanted to be an original, surrealistic artist.
Monet, Dali, and the Dada School were her influences.
Her first project was to do a surrealistic depiction of the Tarot Cards.
The Fool would be a wino on 42nd Street.
The Magician would be a scientist with a remote resemblance to Albert Einstein.
The Pope would be the editor of a pornographic magazine.
And so on.
She chose San Fransisco...
A stimulating setting for that type of thing at that period of history.
She played around with colors & forms.
Of course she insatiable had a line-up of male strangers over at her place.
They generally told her she was doing a nice job in exchange for favors from her.
She put Dogstar in one of those new fangled "free schools".
It was a rather liberal place with no formal grades...
Each kid just proceeded along at his or her own pace.
No rules there were and art was encouraged.
If a kid felt like drawing all over the walls, that was okay.
Dogstar learned the art of reading & writing very quickly...
He did not care much for math, but got good at it anyway...
Within a few years, he was reading lots of books on a higher level than his grade.
He was particularly interested in science and philosophy.
He had the idea that he'd like to be a scientist or philosopher when he grew up...
He'd come with some Grand Unified Theory...
He would explain everything & he would win the Nobel Prize & be world renowned.
He thought it would be that easy.
(O how far was the Dogstar to wander off course...
From the High Heavens to Mundane Planes below!)
Weird he was for a kid his age.
He didn't like sports & could see nothing in it.
He avoided the fighting socializing of other male kids.
Television didn't interest him one bit.
He liked to read all the time...
He amazed the librarians by the stacks of books on diverse subjects he checked out...
He consumed books like other kids did with hot dogs & cones of ice cream.
He tended to make the best progress of any kid in his group.
He had adult-like conversations with his teachers.
He felt he had more in common with the adults than with the other kids.
His mother aided & abetted in his education, too.
She took him to coffee-houses to watch beat-niks play jazz & recite avant-garde poetry.
He got to see Kerouac & Ginsberg in the peak of their prime...
(Before the trauma of being widely known ruined it all.)
He watched the best minds of that generation become wrecked by madness & other aids.
He got to see the weirdest and wildest art & listened in...
On the most non-mainstream music of the time.
He saw "Ban the Bomb" rallies as they flared up into a nation wide movement.
His mom had a lot of strange books on the occult...
By the likes of Colin Wilson & P.D. Ouspensky & Madame Blavatsky...
Particularly fascinating he found these .
These are the influences which are to shape the nubile young mind...
The wandering Dogstar straying far off the course from the mainstream.
Quite readily he took to them...
Like a young bird jumping off the tree for the first time, learning to fly.
Like a Space-Man in the Voidness Interstellar.
Dogstar's Grandpa was a raving eccentric.
He was always inventing things that no one else could think of.
Like some crazy Santa Claus, he was always jovially shaking with laughter.
The whole world seemed remarkably hilarious to him.
Once a year, Dogstar & his mother went up to visit this veritable old crank.
It was like a pilgrimage.
He lived by himself on the top of a high mountain in the Sierras...
In a solar-heated house which he invented himself.
Nobody wanted his patent for that back then.
They thought there'd be plenty of oil & coal to burn forever & ever.
Now orders were coming in for the design.
Dogstar's Grandpa's place was filled with all kinds of weird gadgets.
His Grandpa was constantly trying to come up with...
The ever-elusive Perpetual Motion Machine.
Like a Mad Medieval Alchemist seeking the Philosopher's Stone...
Which would grant immortality and absolute power...
He plugged away at it till wee hours of the night.
The irony of it is all he had to do was look around...
At the Universe in its Total Perpetual Motion:
Really, it was already invented.
In his various trials & errors, he hit upon lots of other things.
Some turned out serendipititously to be of practical value in the real world of mortals.
He sold the patents to fund his True Search.
Dogstar & his Grandpa had a lot in common.
They had long talks about all kinds of things:
The future of the world & human society, new scientific hypotheses...
The origin of life, reincarnation, psychic discoveries, Altantis, Mu...
The Unified Field Theory, quantum physics, perpetual motion...
Mostly things the average person had little or no interest in.
Open-minded were they to any & all possibilities...
Quite careful they were about investigating it.
Dogstar's Grandpa laughed & laughed until tears came to his eyes.
"You're a chip off the old bio-computer, my boy," he hooted.
"Yessirree, you got the same weird genes as the rest of us."
Why am I here? Why did this universe come into existence? Why is there so much suffering? Why can't it be better? Why is it that no matter how much I ask... I never seem to know...
Y? Y? Y? - + \ / \ / ! ! * Why is it that I feel so compelled to ask 'Why?' Why did I write this poem?
By the time he was 12, Dogstar proceeded to go through some mysterious changes...
It was time for his biological being to shift gears to a new mode.
His voice got deeper, he grew taller, and hairs sprouted around his genitals.
In the presence of human females, his penis would unexpectedly inflate.
This inflation felt very good and made him want to be around human females.
His body was programmed that way.
His philosophical speculations ceased to interest him as much...
Girls did.
Dogstar got laid for the first time when he was but 13.
His partner, Lela, was only 12.
(12 + 13 = 25; 2 + 5 = 7.) (Numerologically significant? Yes/No.)
They sneaked into a bedroom & were curious to find out...
What each other's bodies looked with no clothes on.
What they saw looked intriguing, so they decided to try touching...
The odd protuberances & cavities...
Which made them respectively male & female.
That felt quite good, so they tried rubbing their bodies together.
The warmth of bare skin was a nice sensation...
Just as an experiment they tried to get Dogstar's protuberance into Lela's cavity.
It turned out to be a good fit... and felt super the more they did it.
Instinct took hold of the driver's seat while rationality was left stranded hitchhiking.
Something exploded pleasurably like a mouth full of bananas.
When it was over, they decided they wanted to keep doing it.
That year, they had a rather intense affair.
It made them feel like real grown-ups.
Then Lela & her parents had to move away to New York City...
They wept and gave wilted flowers to one another.
Of course, they gave each other a great lay.
After Lela was gone, Dogstar got drunk for the first time...
A strange dizziness overtook him, giddly everything spun round & round...
He threw up all over the place...
He felt very sick the next day.
He tried smoking cigarettes & they made him cough a lot at first...
He wound up nicotine-hooked, a habit he was to struggle with the rest of his life.
He learned to say four-letter words like his peers; it made him look tough.
He was a real cool dude, cussing & smoking & fucking & drinking!
Dogstar smoked pot for the first time when he was 15.
He did it with some peers out in the back of the school during lunch recess.
When it hit him for the first time, he laughed & laughed.
He became as a little kid all over again.
What a Joke everything seemed to be!
The following year, he ingested L.S.D. for the first of a great many times.
Wonderful colors & intricate geometric patterns everywhere spun before his eyes...
The Eternal Mandalic God-Flower was Here & Everywhere!
Dogstar was now ready for HIGH SCHOOL.
It is mid-September & it is a cold, rainy day.
It has been raining huge dollops from the heavens...
Unceasingly for days & days now, it rains.
Huge, ponderously heavy, dark-grey clouds constantly flow across weary skies...
Coming from the infinite West, dumping prodigious loads...
Wet, awfully wet water on the poor abused hamlet of Wheatfield.
The cornfields are soaked & muddy.
To get out there, you need waist-high rubber boots and rafts.
The banks of the Connecticut River overflow...
Half the roads are washed away.
Farmers curse by their woodstoves & wonder what the hell they're going to do.
There is nothing to do except hang around indoors...
And wonder when it will all go away.
It's better than getting wet.
Dogstar sits crosslegged on his single bed situated towards the rear of the cottage.
Steadily gazing out the rear window, he ferociously watches...
Constant rain falling on the cornfield...
Like a cat waiting for a mouse to emerge from its hole.
Meditating, breathing very deeply...
Observing the various trivial & important thoughts...
Flickering by in his head like a bunch of sideshows down a busy street...
He clings to none of them, puts no value-judgements on their worth...
He passes them with a deeper intention.
Breathing very deeply, pushing the air into his lower abdomen.
Frantic pounding of the rain on the cheap roof...
Yet it is somehow very quiet in the room.
There is a cat in the room...
It is a stray cat which Dogstar has taken in a couple of days ago.
He discovered it rummaging thru garbage cans at the rear of the restaurant...
Its vibrations called to him & he took it in.
Both strays in this world, they are very compatible.
The cat stares very intently at Dogstar...
As Dogstar intently stares at concentric circles overlapping in a puddle in a cornfield.
While Dogstar meditates on the transience of his thoughts...
The cat meditates upon Dogstar, purring deeply all the while.
The more absorbed becomes Dogstar, the more intense the purring.
Dogstar comes out of it...
His time is up...
After an indefinite interval of, he sits at his rickety table & writes in shaky letters:
THE BEYOND TRANSLATES INTO MIND...
MIND TRANSLATES INTO ENERGY...
ENERGY TRANSLATES INTO MATTER.
Dogstar shakes his head & wonders where that came from.
Like demons rattling their chains...
The rain continues to pound on the roof.
When Dogstar was in HIGH SCHOOL...
He learned all the tricks of the trade.
He learned various internal psychological & physiological effects & affects...
The entire cornucopian pharmacopia of various psychoactive chemicals.
He learned how to talk circles around 'straight' people in positions of authority...
Those elders who suspected what he & his peers were into, but could not prove it...
Quite a bit of hostility there was towards this kind of neurological experimentation.
You name it, he did it:
L.S.D., STP, MDA, hyper-super-amphetamines, reds, yellows, black beauties...
Purple Haze, Sunshine, Windowpane (the purest), belladona, hash, ganja, opium...
Cough syrup, glue & cold pills when nothing better could be found.
If it was a chemical that caused any change in mind, daringly they took it.
He and his peers were walking neurological laboratories...
Self-induced guinea pigs in a constant experiment on their nervous systems.
Needless to say, this caused all kinds of mutations, either to another level or to death.
To the confused consternation of many authorities...
He & many peers began to grow their hair long.
To symbolize the visions they were having on hallucinogenic drugs they were ingesting...
They wore weird and colorful clothing with wild patterns.
They wore jewelry & beads reminiscent of primitive cultures...
Once prevalent in America & Africa.
War & violence did not interest them.
They did not want to cut their hair or wear ties and long dresses...
Or work at the pointless jobs of their predecessors.
In a makeshift way, they invented their own kind of music with electrical instruments...
Amplifying it to extreme levels doing drugs while gyrating madly to the rhythm.
Uninterested in becoming part of the larger society...
They went off to create their own communes.
A strange shift was sifting in the collective mind of humanity.
Quite a liberation there was in sexual mores at this time.
Letting go of monogamous values, people would sleep with anyone they felt like, .
In one year, Dogstar balled 17 girls.
People were going around naked at concerts & painted their bodies in swirling colors.
The elder straights gnashed their teeth, made tougher laws, & bashed heads.
Dogstar got a motorcyle & experimented with riding with a motorcycle gang...
Defying the law, giving it the finger.
He wore a black leather jacket with a Grateful Dead Death-Head on it.
On a disastrous combination of speed, STP, & downers...
He wrecked his bike one night...
Putting an abrupt halt to that lifestyle.
He dealt drugs, made a complete fool and ass out of himself...
Selling 'scag' (heroin) to straights in the street to make fun of them.
How he managed to avoid getting killed or busted back then is an utter miracle.
For this kind of self-destructive lifestyle...
He was considered by his peers to be some kind of counter-cultural hero.
He was regarded as if a rock star, the height of status among his peers.
Ah, such was the mad folly of youth!
Dogstar sits atop of a high & dry hill.
The rainy season of a couple of days ago is over.
Seated upon some boulders upon a steep incline...
On the edge of a cliff above a power line.
It is a good place for a view...
The power lines cut unnaturally straight up & over the jaggedness of ragged mountains...
Such a high-energy spot to be...
All that yummy juice flowing through high strung tension wires.
Looking into the distance at other jagged mountains.
One mountain about 25 miles north of here towers over the rest of them.
That's the Big One.
So high, much of its peak is above the treeline.
From everywhere it is seen, a Mt. Fuji of New England.
A chill wind blows morosely in trees behind & around...
Dogstar puffs thoughtfully on a joint, shielding it in cupped freezing hands.
Wherever the wind blows, a low moaning howls in the woods...
Could be a hollow log in there somewhere.
This is the first day of autumn.
As if on cue, the trees on all mountains everywhere have picked this day...
Beginning the long process of changing colors.
As far as the mind can perceive:
Bright red, deep purple, pumpkin orange, mellow yellow, fading shades of green.
The ferns a cripsy brown, dying out on the frosty nights.
Crickets have ceased their final Death-Song...
Their souls gone to the Great Beyond.
Birds pack it in for the long journey South...
V-shaped flock of honking geese fly by...
Vanished in the distance.
Towards graduation from HIGH SCHOOL...
After considerable scrambling of neurological circuits...
Dogstar began to come down.
Having had his adolescent spree, it was time for him to be doing some serious thinking...
What was he going to do with the rest of this mortal time alloted to him?
What will he be when he grows up now that he is practically there?
In the meantime, a very unusual thing was going on in the country...
Dogstar happened to have the fortune or misfortune to be living in.
In some obscure tropical country...
A foreign war was being enacted by the United States Empire...
No doubt for vested interests of its own.
The people who directed it had nothing to lose...
Many young men who had no part in this decision were ordered to fight in it.
This, of course, was usual in the history of nations up to that time.
However, this time, the young men had no inclination to fight in it.
This is not usual, perhaps the first time in the history of nations that such a thing happened.
Previously, young men simply followed orders as a matter of course.
"HELL NO! WE WON'T GO!" they roared in the streets.
For this, they were bashed and put in jail, forced to go against their will.
Dogstar was one of these.
What is going on here?
Out of mortal necessity, Dogstar became involved in politics...
Though he was not so naturally inclined.
He & his peers learned from informed sources the U.S. Empire was not to be trusted.
He became the editor of the school newspaper...
He wrote fiery tirades against this war - & all wars in general.
He advocated the dissolution of all national boundaries.
On May Day, he and his peers stormed the capital of the U.S. Empire...
They yelled their dissent at the old fart who was the temporary Emperor...
Demanding he pull out the troops in this distant tropical country...
The Emporer called the guards and washed the blood off his hands...
Figuring some tear gas & a night in jail would demonstrate his power.
When Dogstar returned, he found he was accepted in a nearby university...
He considered he'd major in Psychology, a unique combination of science & philosophy.
He wanted to understand what makes humans do such strange & contradictory things.
He was all excited about it.... He would find the cause of violence & cure it.
This was not to be... One day, his order to go to the war arrived in the mail.
He was due to report for his physical on May 23, 1972.
Dogstar tried everything.
He tried to flunk his physical.
He faked a limp, but no medical confirmation there was for it.
He considered passing as a homosexual, but then discovered they were accepting that...
They even had a special platoon of sadistic queers.
He deliberately tried to flunk the mechanical aptitude tests...
His "wrong" answers turned out to be the right ones.
He screamed & raved in the halls trying to pass as crazy...
The army psychiatrist remarked that was a perfectly normal reaction...
Considering the stress he was in.
He said he was doing some pretty heavy drugs...
They assured him they'd get him off that once he was in basic training.
No matter what he did, they passed him anyway.
It was as if they were out to get him.
The United States Empire wanted people like Dogstar eliminated.
People like Dogstar knew too much.
They were too aware, too awakened.
The United States Empire couldn't have that.
The dissidents and weirdos had to be weeded out.
The war was a perfect excuse to do that.
If the dissidents & nonconformists made it thru the intensive brainwashing...
That process called "boot camp"...
If they had any remnant of their original minds intact...
They would be at least be killed in the war.
The United States Empire had the perfect risk-free venture.
And the Capitalists who backed the war would get plenty of slave labor...
A wonderful source of costly illegal drugs keeping them illegal to raise the prices...
Some oil fields over there to make them richer.
He tried to get a student deferment, but it was the year they ended the college deferment.
The U.S. Empire did not like intellectuals getting off scot-free.
His number was precariously low: 23.
Dogstar went to the draft board & applied for C.O. status.
It was a little late for that, too.
A resume of the mock trial:
"What is your defense?" inquired the expressionless crewcut colonel...
Presiding over this mock trial, the draft board court.
"Religious," promptly replied Dogstar. "I am a Universalist Mystic."
The colonel looked up something in a huge black book.
"That doesn't appear to be listed here in the Registry of Valid Religions," he commented.
"Is this some kind of screw-ball cult you're involved in?
Something, ah, un-Christain, I might add?
"Are you one of those devil-worshippers who advocate taking drugs,free sex...
Among other unpatriotic activities?"
The other officers lewdly loudly guffawed...
Like rabid police dogs, they were going to tear this impudent dissenter limb-to-limb.
With heavy beer breath, another officer inquired:
"Do you have any, ah, biblical justification, Mr. Dogstar Universalist Mystic...
"For refusing to fight for your, uh, constitutional right for freedom of religion?"
Considerable sarcastic emphasis he put on the final words...
The standard operating procedure for C.O.'s.
Scare 'em out of their wits till they shit in their pants, that's how to do it.
Dogstar was ready for this.
"Yes, as a matter of fact, there is quite a bit of material here...
Exhorting against the practice of war. Let me read you some of this."
Opening up a pocket bible with premarked pages, Dogstar quoted:
" 'THOU SHALT NOT KILL'.
That's one of the ten commandments, there, sirs, quite unconditional, I might say."
" 'BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS...
FOR THEY SHALL BE CALLED THE CHILDREN OF GOD.'
That's from the Sermon on the Mount, in case some of you don't know."
" 'AND IF A MAN SHOULD STRIKE YOU...
VERILY I SAY UNTO YOU, TURN THE OTHER CHEEK'.
I believe the founder of your religion said those words.
" 'AND IT SHALL COME TO PASS...
THEY SHALL BEAT THEIR SWORDS INTO PLOW-SHARES.'
That's a rather well-known prophecy of Isaiah."
Slamming the book shut like a good lawyer, he drove in his final point:
"Could anything be more clear & direct? You undoubtably call yourselves Christains...
Yet you continue to gun down pratically defenseless people in other countries."
Not a few of them ground their teeth in seething fury.
"Now that's fairly high & mighty talk, boy...
But what would you do if a couple of thousand commie gooks came charging after you...
& you had a machine gun in your hands?"
"I would put the gun down & try to communicate with them I have no ulterior intentions.
Besides, all that wouldn't be happening in the first place...
Since it was you who started that war over there."
That was too much for their limited minds.
Unsympathetic were they to Dogstar's Way of Peace; they had ears & heard not.
Quick was the unaminous verdict:
"Application for C.O. status denied."
They thought he was just a sniveling coward, trying to squeeze out of a tight spot.
In truth, Dogstar, along with many others, were far braver...
To refuse to do what they know is wrong...
Than those who unthinkingly followed orders of the mass mind
It is far easier to go along with the mass mind than it is to resist it.
The U.S. Empire intended to deprive Dogstar, & many, many others...
Of their freedom for two years...
They would be coerced to kill other members of their own species for this "freedom".
In an obscure South-East Asian country...
No one had even thought of until recently...
A war was declared.
Perfectly, it served the Empire's purposes.
According to the dictates of the Empire...
War was a basic necessity for the stimulation of the corrupted economy...
Many lucrative contracts it had with armanents industries...
For which the Empire would tax its populance to pay the bill.
The Empire, of course, would pocket a sizeable cut of this.
Temporary mock emporers, once their terms were served...
Having followed the orders of the capitalistic interests which pull their strings...
Would be rich men for the rest of their lives.
This was called "freedom".
Dogstar didn't want to fight in this war.
Nobody wanted to fight in it.
Nobody wants to fight in any war.
Only governments have something to gain...
And they would not need to go to the front lines.
Governments exist sheerly for the perpetuation of their own power...
And wars are a useful method to gain absolute control over the populations they ruled.
Meanwhile, continuously scanning the Planet Earth in this particular stellar system...
Extra-Terrestial Beings observe such irrational activity.
Why sapient bipeds don't simply put down their weapons, cease to kill one another...
And just take it easy is an utter mystery to them.
We appear to be quite inanely insane to them...
This is why they have made no overt attempts to communicate with us.
They consider: What if we had their kind of technology?
They shudder to consider what we would do with it...
Madly we would plunge around the universe...
Blowing stars & planets to cosmic dust.
They are testing us:
To see whether we'll get through this without blowing ourselves up first.
Stay tuned for the next episode of Dogstar & the human race.
It was on a rainy day towards the end of summer...
When Dogstar discovers the caves.
The caves are somewhere on a back trail...
On the north-east side of Warlock Mountain.
They burrow right into the side of a cliff up there.
They are immense...
Far into the bowels of the earth go they.
No sane man would want to go to the spaces they lead.
It rains very heavily.
Dogstar sees the caves & takes shelter in them.
Someone has camped here before.
A khaki curtain hangs over the entrance...
A circle of rocks & the remains of a fire...
An opening in the ceiling where smoke can waft out..
A huge pile of wood stacked towards the back.
Imprinted on the walls & the ceilings are ancient-looking paintings:
Mandalas, triangles, circles, spirals.
Further back, are paintings of primal men hunting a mastodon.
Is this real or is it just another illusion?
The rain pours down in torrents.
Little rivers wend their way along the floors of the caves...
Trickling downwards to God knows where in utter darkness below.
For lack of anything better to do...
Dogstar builds a fire in the stone circle.
He tosses wood in & observes the burning.
Like the cavemen of old...
It is very comforting to be there.
Dogstar ponders on matters philosophical...
Far more entertaining than stereo or television...
This is the way it ought to be.
Dogstar considers:
If the going in the outside world ever gets more than he can bear...
Like a bear, he can always come to live here (^^^).
So secluded are these caves, no one would ever know he was here.
In case of a world-wide holocaust...
It would be the perfect place to take refuge.
A mental note Dogstar makes of this... Days of destruction may come yet.
The overseers of the boot camp were experts in brainwashing...
Dogstar and other unwilling subjects in this experiment in re-conditioning ...
Were rudely incarcerated .
Without an instant of relief, they were worked to death.
Like sheep, their heads were shorn of long hair...
Forced to wear tight uncomfortable uniforms at all times...
Forbidden to masturbate, required to sleep with cold steel guns for lovers.
They could only pee and shit when told to.
Like cows, they ate garbage sloppily dished out in mess halls.
They were not to speak & compare experiences.
They could be spoken to by higher authorities, but they could not speak back.
If they dared to break these rules, they were:
Punched in the stomach...
Kicked in the balls...
Smashed in the face by the butt of a rifle.
The guardians of the boot camp were certified sadists...
Experts in creating pain & misery.
For refusing to address his commanding officer as "Sir"...
Dogstar was commanded to do a thousand push-ups.
If he faltered, his kidneys were kicked in by steel-toed boots.
For failing to agree that the U.S. Empire is...
The Greatest Goddamn Country in the Whole Fucking World...
Dogstar was put on K.P., forced to wash miles of stacks of dishes.
He was forced to crawl beneath miles of barbed-wire with live bullets flying over his head.
Some did not make it - they were written off as pansies who didn't deserve to live.
He was ordered to stab slant-eyed dummies with a bayonet while shouting:
"KILL THE GOOKS! SLASH THEIR BELLIES! BASH THEIR BRAINS!"
If he didn't like to do this, he would be strapped to the whipping post ...
A bleeding example to the others.
He'd be forced to spend weeks in a dark hole with crusts of bread to eat.
The sadists particularly liked to see drawn blood.
After the lights were out at night, Dogstar sat under his blankets...
Reading the Bhaghavad-Gita by flashlight....
Somehow that seemed appropriate for him.
Constantly, he inwardly meditated and silently chanted mantras.
This was his way of deconditioning the conditioning.
He looked at it as a unique spiritual discipline.
In the mess hall, he would eat no meat.
Despite the joshing and jeering from his mates, Dogstar remained detached.
On weekends, however, to further break the conditioning...
Dogstar went with his buddies into town.
They got very, very shit-faced.
They yelled & cursed about the goddamn fucking army.
They went to topless bars & X-rated films...
Paid rancid worn-out whores to give them cheap blow-jobs.
They blew all their weekly pay on beer, cigarettes, dope, uppers, & downers.
They fought & beat their heads against walls of cheap motels...
Threw up undigested steak & fries & fiery liquor all over the bathrooms.
After all, this could be their last fling with such things.
Any time now, they would be shipped off to the endlessly escalating war in 'Nam.
It was very possible they may not live to see the end of their term.
Better get your licks & kicks while you still tick.
In the bloated death belly of a carrier plane...
Dogstar & his buddies were flying in style...
Over towards alien shores of the Pacific Ocean they flowed towards an uncertain fate.
Forced to fight in some goddamned shitass tropical country...
About something they didn't really understand & could hardly give a flying fuck about.
All they wanted to do was get this thing over with...
And they hoped & prayed they'd live through it with all their physical appendages intact.
Like soldiers beneath the martyred Jesus, some of the guys played cards.
They gambled their homes, their wives, their cars, their motorcycles...
Their bank accounts, & their girlfriends.
After all, what the hell did they have to lose.
What the fuck does it matter if they were going to be blown to bits?
Some sat around in a circle, smoked high-quality reefer...
They were silent, but they giggled a lot...
Like blushing brides on their first date.
One guy huddled in the back & silently wept.
He wondered if he'd ever see his home again.
Dogstar said nothing.
He merely stared out through a crack at the glittering ocean below.
Maybe he'd live; maybe he wouldn't.
It all wound up the same way anyway.
But there was one thing for sure:
He'd be damned if he'd kill another living, breathing human being, if he could help it.
This was to be the ultimate test of his integrity.
He'd prove those fuckers wrong.
Dogstar & a few other unfortunates on the Wheel of Fate...
Happened to wind up under the command of Lt. Jim Jones.
Lt. Jim Jones was a grade-A psychotic sadist/killer.
Under other circumstances, he'd be a psychopathic criminal...
He would gun down dozens of innocents just for fun...
He'd wind up in the maximum security wing terrorizing other inmates.
In another reality, he would be a perfectly tyrannical cult-leader in a three piece suit...
Dominating his followers by sheer force, making them die for his cause.
Here, as a henchman for the U.S. Empire, he fit right in.
Lt. Jim Jones liked to kill people.
It was a very special hobby of his.
He got a certain weird pleasure watching them die.
He liked the sight of writhing guts.
He even masturbated over the image.
There was once a time when he cut a pregnant Vietnamese woman in half with his M-16.
Just for good measure, he fired another round into the fetus.
It was just a demonstration of his powers.
One-and-a-half less gooks in the world.
"This is all in the interests of protecting our precious American Freedom,"
He obligingly explained to the horrified on-lookers...
With a gleam of fascination in his mad eyes.
"Better them than us," was how he justified such brutal actions.
It just so happened around this period of time...
They were going to be sent on a special mission into Cambodia.
It just so happened around this period of time...
The voting citizens of the U.S. had no idea that there was any war going on in Cambodia.
Isn't that interesting?
How open is the U.S. government with the population it controls!
About this, the soldiers were not allowed to write home...
Or communicate in any other way with those they left behind...
Not that they actually knew.
This was all in the interests of "National Security", it was blithely explained to them.
Thus, they went there, having no idea what country they were in....
It was all the same to them.
They were ordered to shoot to kill anything yellow that moved in the jungle.
Lt. Jim Jones gunned down the gooks & grinned.
Truly, he was in his element here.
Dogstar was determined not to kill anybody.
Whenever there was fighting, he kept in the back & stayed out of the way.
He fired over the other side's head or at a tree or something.
There really wasn't anything he could do.
If he died from his inaction, well, that was that.
Once, up in a tree, Dogstar caught the eyes of one of the 'enemy'.
They were both the same age, about eighteen.
He looked just as scared & bewildered as Dogstar.
Neither of them wanted to be there.
They gave one another a soul-full look in the eye...
They gave a barely perceptible nod to one another...
A sign of mutual recognition of one another as two helpless humans...
Trapped by powerful societal forces entrapping them...
Swept in the whirlwind of this insane war neither of them declared...
Silently, they agreed not to fire upon one another.
One sultry day in the jungle, the inevitable finally happened.
Lt. Jim Jones noted that Dogstar was not following his orders.
He was not killing the 'enemy'.
Lt. Jones did not like this kind of defiance of his tyranny.
He called Dogstar over for a friendly little confrontation.
"I bet you're one of those chickenshit pacifists, aren't you?"
"I've been watching you; you can't fool me. I can see how you're firing over enemy lines...
What's your name anyway, private?"
"I am Dogstar, sire."
"C'mon, give me a break! Is that your real name, private?"
"Yessir, given to me at birth, your Highness."
"Hmmmph, you're probably one of those hippie faggots.
I bet you were one of those chickenshit protesters overseas.
"You know, Private Chickenshit Hippie Faggot...
I've got a good mind to start calling you 'Dogshit', because that's all you are.
"Now, you listen here, Dogshit, & you better listen real good...
We're here to KILL those goddamn commie gook V.C.'s...
When you're in my platoon, you're gonna kill 'em, too.
"Did you get that, Dogshit?"
"Yessir."
"Tomorrow, we've got a little clean-up operation to do to make this fucking world safe for
democracy so faggots like you can have your freedom to protest this war. We're
gonna hit another village, & when we get there, I'm gonna put you right up front &
you're gonna get the honor of holding the napalm launcher. I'm gonna be right
behind you to make sure you don't fuck it up. You're gonna pull the trigger & aim
right at 'em between the eyes, & you better do it right, 'cause if you don't, I'm
gonna pull my trigger & a bullet's gonna go into you, & I'm gonna report to
headquarters you got stupid from smoking dope or something & you got in my
way. Is that understood, Dogshit?
"Yessir, I understand real well, sir. I understand that you're nothing but a lowly-evolved
killer ape, sire. You & your kind are going to be extinct in the next century. That's
what I understand, sire."
Lt. Jones did not have a very extensive vocabulary and did not know quite what that
implied, but he did have a hint from the tone of Dogstar's voice that this was some
sort of impudent insult, so he reacted by giving Dogstar a swift kick in the balls,
knocking him to the ground, then walked away feeling his manhood vindicated.
As Dogstar lay there writhing in agony, clutching his groin, he suddenly realized...
He hated Lt. Jones more than he ever hated anyone in his life.
He was in such pain, he felt like he wanted to kill somebody.
At that moment, he made a solemn vow that he was going to kill Lt. Jim Jones.
That festering pimply asshole didn't deserve to live.
The Day of Judgement had arrived.
This was the day of the Supreme Test.
The orders given to the platoon was to destroy the small village.
Its population was composed largely of old men, women, & children.
The villagers' only defense against the Americans were:
Sticks, stones, a few spears, & slingshots.
Lt. Jim Jones loved it.
He couldn't wait to see their guts spill.
M-16 on the ready, Lt. Jones harshly whispered into Dogstar's ear:
"All right, Dogshit, this it it! You're gonna kill those fuckers & you better do it!"
"FIRE!" he yelled.
The inhabitants of the village stood helpless in front...
Looking at him with beseeching eyes...
Resigned to their fate like cows going to a slaughterhouse.
In their short lives, they'd been through all kinds of shit:
Monsoons, crop failures, starvation, disease, changes of governments, wars...
This would merely put them out of their misery.
The Americans were going to kill them & there was nothing they could do about it.
Is this how the Jews regarded the Nazis during the Holocaust?
Dogstar shook his head & lowered the launcher, he couldn't do it.
He'd rather die than do this.
"FIRE!" screamed Lt. Jones in a tizzy at Dogstar & the platoon.
"FIRE! GODDAMMIT! FIRE!"
The other men consented with Dogstar, they, too, put down their weapons...
It was really too much for them.
ARE YOU A BUNCH OF YELLOW CHICKENSHIT COMMIE FAGGOTS?
FIRE!, I SAID! FIRE! THAT'S AN ORDER!"
They merely looked at the ground.
Like a wild wolf confronted with a helpless hare...
Lt. Jones could no longer restrain himself.
Possessed by his adrenal glands, slobbering like a mad dog...
Lt. Jones forgot everything else in his frenzy to kill...
He ran in front of Dogstar into the village...
With his rattling M-16, he began chopping down the villagers...
Mowing them down, the enraged chainsaw murderer, still sreaming:
"FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! KILL THOSE GODDAMN COMMIE GOOKS!"
Dogstar watched this & considered.
He had an inspiration.
There was one consistent word in Lt. Jones' orders he was at last gladly going to obey.
He picked up the flame-thrower, aimed, & fired.
Lt. Jim Jones suddenly went up in flames...
He was a flaming inferno screaming his last words:
"FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!"
Thus, Lt. Jones went on to his pre-destined fate.
He burned in his own Hell of Flaming Violence.
The villagers stood open-mouthed & astonished.
Never had a thing like this happened before.
This simply was not in the script.
His buddies couldn't believe it either.
Suddenly they all cheered, gathered around Dogstar, & clapped him on the back
Everyone of them had privately wanted to do what Dogstar had just done -
To kill the order-giver rather than take orders.
At last, they were free.
No longer did they have to take orders.
The order-giver was dead.
"Platoon No. 73, do you read me? Over... Platoon No. 73, do you read me? Over...
"I repeat, Platoon No. 73, do you read me? Over...."
Thus blared & crackled the two-way radio over & over again like a broken record.
"Aww, shut the fuck up," commented an ex-member of ex-Platoon No. 73.
With his M-16, he blew its transistors out.
They left the shards & fragments of the non-functioning radio behind to rust in the jungle.
They were now officially "missing in action".
They acquired a few kilos of prime ganja & a pound of pure heroin from a nearby village.
It was a minimal amount of American money, a lot of money for the seller.
They figured they'd cross over to India & sell it to some dealer there.
They'd live like fucking kings, man.
They could each get a harem of Hindu girls well-versed in the Kama Sutra...
They'd give them expert blow-jobs and know the expert positions of prime sexuality.
A few guys decided to sample just a bit of the heroin.
After all, there was plenty to spare.
They decided they liked it quite a lot.
Without telling the others, they helped themselves to it again & again.
It was nice stuff, helped them forget the pain of jungle existence.
They wandered westwards through the jungle towards the border of Cambodia.
They did heroin and smoked ganja.
They were having a jolly good time being free of any government whatsoever.
They were a tribe of anarchistic bandidos.
One day, when his buddies were living it up, laughing & shooting the shit...
Dogstar had an abrupt feeling in the pit of his bowels...
He hurried into the bushes to take care of it.
There was a sound of machine guns behind him.
It was an ominous, unpleasantly wet sound.
Cautiously, quietly, he slowly stalked through the bushes back to the path.
From 100 feet away, through the openings of the bushes, he noticed...
His buddies were now lying on the ground, dripping full of bullet holes.
There was a small band of Viet Cong gathered there.
With inscrutable Oriental grins, they poked through the baggage...
To see what nice things these Americans were carrying.
To their joy, they discovered the ganja & heroin.
Now they could sell it to some rich American dope dealer...
Make a lot of American dollars.
They'd get out of this miserable country & live like heavenly emporers.
They'd go to America & get themselves a harem of lovely American concubines...
Just like the ones in those sex-rated Hollywood movies.
Dogstar, now bereft of the company of his fellows...
Wandered in abject despair through the twists & tangles of a strange jungle...
Having no connection, no idea where he would go.
He crawled beneath man-sized elephant leaves & over gigantic bunyan roots.
Mosquitoes & leeches conspired to cover every square inch of his exposed skin...
While his uniform rotted in the incessant rains & sweltering sun.
With calm, green eyes, inquisitive tigers gazed at him...
Idly wondering if this strange biped in their midst would be good to eat or not.
They sniffed & followed him, huffingly purring...
Checking out whether he was armed or not.
Dogstar was simultaneously lost & bewildered.
He was literally a man without a country.
United States helicopters buzzed carefully over him...
Checking every bit of ground with infra-red sensors & radar.
Dogstar lay low in the bushes, keeping very still with leaves covering him...
Praying the mad whirling would go away.
Whenever a team of Viet Cong passed by, he was forced to do likewise...
Hoping they would neither hear him or smell him.
The same operating procedure went for U.S. troopers.
How ironic, nobody there was he could trust, nobody he could turn to...
All of his very own species was now the 'enemy'.
He may as well be a wild beast - & he couldn't even trust them.
He stayed off all paths & roads.
He stayed away from all human habitations.
He crawled tediously around the edges of rice-paddies, slithering through muddy slime...
Hoping the farmers wouldn't see him.
They spoke a strange high-pitched rapid-fire language...
He certainly wouldn't be able to communicate his predicament to them.
Depending on who they went with, they'd probably turn him in...
To either the V.C.'s or the U.S. Empire.
He had absolutely no idea where he was.
Just to keep in a more or less consistent direction, he headed towards the westerning sun...
Eastwards was where all the fighting was going on.
He had to get out of this damned war-zone...
Anywhere...
Where people were relatively peaceful and sane...
If such a place existed on this planet.
He learned to have bananas, ants, & roots for dinner every night.
If one is hungry enough, one will eat anything.
He sat in trees & dined with his fellow monkeys.
They did not seem to mind his presence up there...
How they howled with laughter at his behavior!
This sapient primate hanging out with his ancestors!
At least, he could trust those monkeys better than his own kind of primate...
Those apes with over-sized brains they never figured out how to use properly...
Who had powerful weapons & went around killing one another all the time.
He felt like Tarzan of the Monkeys.
Dogstar was way out there.
He was precariously close to the edge.
He didn't know where he was.
He didn't even know what year it was anymore.
He was getting weak from near-starvation.
His nerves were jangled from being a fugitive from the whole human race.
There must be someway out of this.
One day, he noticed an odd multi-tiered structure high on the top of a mountain.
It was a Buddhist temple, a small remote monastery of some sort.
Hmmm, he thought, if he could get up there, they might put him up & feed him.
They ought to be nice people...
They were supposed to be above and beyond the affairs of the world...
There was some clause in their religion that they had to be compassionate...
& charitable towards all living beings.
Yeah, they'd treat him right, if he could get up there.
It was a very steep mountain.
It was getting very difficult to take one step after another.
The ground spun before his eyes.
He struggled through some brush for a while, climbing around a few small cliffs...
So precariously perched he might fall right back to the bottom...
He nearly did a couple of times.
Then he came to a path.
It wound upwards in a spiral around the cone-shaped peak where the temple rested.
He had to stop & rest every couple of steps.
He sat down to rest again.
There was an extensive view covering the distance he had come.
It spun round & round in circles.
Dogstar felt like the whole earth was one large merry-go-round.
He even heard an idiotic piping carnival music in his head.
He was so weary of the struggle.
Like a tree crashing to the floor of the forest, he toppled to the ground.
His face lay in the dirt...
He did not bother to get up.
Why not just lay here & let the flies & ants have their way?
It was so liberating to give it all up...
The raucous sound of a tropical bird crawled into his ears.
Hot equatorial sunshine burned his skin alive.
He hardly breathed.
He was in critical condition.
Towards sunset, a monk found him that way, unconscious on the path...
He went back to the monastery & got another monk & a pallet...
They were used to finding victims of the war.
They carried him the rest of the way.
They took him into the monastery infirmary.
They took care of him & nursed him back to consciousness...
Feeding him intravenously at first, then giving him bowls of rice-soup.
They knew how to handle this.
There was a lot of it going around.
Dogstar came to.
He was lying on a mat on the floor.
An old Buddhist monk was the attending medic...
He was sitting crosslegged on a pad in the corner, rocking back & forth...
He spun a prayer wheel & hummed a mantra...
Praying for the soul of this mortal being in his care.
Dogstar called out to him:
"Where am I? Where is this place? What am I doing here?"
The old Buddhist smiled & put a finger to his lips.
"You are in war-shock," he spoke gently, "You must take it easy.
Now that you are awake, I will tell the Master to come see you."
He got up & left the room.
A temple gong rang in the distance.
Another Buddhist monk wandered into the room.
Presumably this was the 'Master'...
Though he did not appear differently dressed than the other.
He stared at Dogstar in silence for a moment.
The silence was long & made Dogstar uncomfortable.
"Who are you?" he finally asked.
"Where is this?"
The Buddhist smiled & did not speak.
There was a peculiar light in his eyes.
Maybe he didn't know English or something.
Then in the pit of his stomach, he began to chuckle...
Perhaps he regarded this as some kind of joke.
Finally in carefully translated perfectly unaccented English he spoke:
"I am Llang Llong.
"This is a special Zen Buddhist monastery.
"At least, that's what it appears to be.
Again, he made that weird chuckle.
"This, you see, is a refuge from war, from the madness of the world...
"From the burden of ordinary concerns.
"We are here to discover what it is to be Real.
"That is why you are here, too."
Suddenly Dogstar burst into tears:
"Please... Please let me stay here! I can't go back out there again!
It's so fucked-up out there! It's so horrible! They're all killing one another off!
I can't go through with this anymore!"
The Master calmly gazed at him with wide shining eyes...
Eyes like an innocent deer grazing in the forest:
"It is no accident that you stumbled upon this place.
"We were expecting someone like you.
"We need an American to teach.
"It is good that you perceive the insanity of war.
"This is rare.
"What we are here for is to discover what Sanity is.
"Would you like to join us?"
"Yes! Yes! Of course! Anything than go out there again!"
Llong Llong smiled peculiarly.
"Good! We will begin training tomorrow morning."
The next day, Llang Llong took Dogstar out to the garden.
He gave him a water bucket.
He told him which plants to water & where to get the water.
"Water each one of these plants...
"Think lovingly of each plant...
"Ponder the significance of the plant in the scheme of things."
"Simultaneously meditate on what a perfect world would be."
Llang Llong instructed him to sit in the middle of the rock garden...
At the peak of noon for one hour every day.
"While you are thus positioned with your back very straight...
"You will breathe very deeply...
"Attempt to sense a spot one foot away from the tip of your head...
"As if it were an extension of your own body.
"Breathe in taking energy from the earth like a tree absorbing water through its roots...
"Breathe out giving energy out towards the heavens above...
"If you succeed in this, you will feel a fountain coming from out the top of your head...
"Reaching towards the ceiling of the skies.
"You will feel the whole sky as an extension of your head.
"Then you will feel roots coming out of the base of your spine.
"Then imagine the whole earth as an extension of your own body."
Llang Llong planted a seed in the middle of the garden.
"This will be your plant.
"You must nourish it & tend to it & provide optimal conditions for it.
"Each day, you will come here for an hour...
"Fix your gaze steadily upon this plant...
"Watch it grow.
"First, it is a seed...
"Then it will have leaves...
"It will burst into flowers...
"The flowers will give birth to more seeds which will make more copies of itself.
"You will meditate upon the totality of this process...
"From its original beginning to its ultimate end.
"You will see there was no beginning & there is no end."
One day, Llang Llong gave a lecture to Dogstar...
They were sitting crosslegged on cushions facing one another.
"You are a mutant. No, not a genetic mutant. You have undergone a mutation of the
nervous system. Let us say you are a neurological mutant.
"This is due to a certain drug you've been taking that has recently been distributed by
agents of ours on this planet. There has also been an increase of electromagnetic radiations
generated by your new technologies.
"There are certain genetic predispositions involved, it tends to affect cerebrotonic persons
to a greater degree; other humans are not quite as affected.
"Throughout the history of this planet, there have always been a majority of humans, the
old breed, who are not especially interested in creating anything new. They tend to accept the
existing societal structure, no matter how stupid, absurd, or oppressive. Indeed, they usually
oppose anything novel.
"Then there are the other new breed of humans who do question the existing societal
structure & propose something better. These are the ones who invent new things, have new ideas,
the creative artists or scientists, the innovators. As things stand now, these are the minority.
"There is always an irony here. The new breed is generally put down, often killed or
tortured. Yet after their lifetimes, their innovations are finally adopted, unfortunately in twisted
versions, and become worshipped by the majority as major figures in history. The old breed does
not always use the innovations for the best purposes, but no advances in human evolution occur
without the new humans.
"Because of the population explosion, there are now more of these mutants than usual, and
perhaps their synergistic combination of energies can save the species in the nick of time. As you
are well aware, you are living in a very decisive time. Your species will either blow itself up or
transform itself into an unbelievably wonderful technological utopia. As things lean now, it is
more likely that it will either blow itself up or destroy the life-support systems of this planet. But
perhaps you neurological mutants can stop that.
"The war that is going on out there is a very decisive one in terms of the further evolution
of your species. What is happening back in your country is quite unusual in the history of the
human species. For the first time, significant numbers of your kind are actually refusing to
participate in this peculiar madness called 'war'. Your country in particular is breeding large
numbers of neurological mutants.
"What is also interesting is that, if this war had happened just a few decades ago, there
probably would have been a huge world war over the event. The reason it isn't so now is
undoubtably because of nuclear weapons. It is no longer possible for larger countries to attack
one another directly as they had do so freely in the past. The leaders are aware that to do so
would mean using the nuclear weapons which would destroy the other & themselves.
"Yes, there are definitely signs that your species is undergoing a massive transformation as
are you on a personal level. You are the microcosm that affects the macrocosm."
Dogstar decided to ask him some questions:
"Llang Llong, I am a bit curious about something. How come you know my language so
well? Most of the natives around here can barely speak but a few essential phrases. Instead, you
have a vocabulary on par with a University professor.
"Another thing that bothers me is you keep referring to the human species as though you
were something else."
Llang Llong smiled that mysterious secretive smile again.
"Very good, Dogstar. I knew you had a perspicuous perception.
"To answer one of your questions, when you arrive at the level where I am, you will see
that knowledge is literally infinite. There is no end to the totality of what can be learned.
"To answer the other, we here are not natives of your world. This set-up you see here, the
Buddhist temple and all that is a disguise. We have transcended the human condition, thus cannot
be said to be of that species anymore."
Dogstar felt the hair rise on the back of his neck and a cold tingling up his spine.
Another talk by Llang Llong:
"I have stressed to you that while you are watering the plants, you must imagine a perfect
world. A perfect world needs constant attendance like cultivating a garden; it takes much
patience! This is one of the most important mental exercises you can practice. You can do this in
the midst of the most mundane chores.
"Just think about it; the very act of thinking about it creates a change in the collective mind
of your species. What would a perfect world be like? How could it be changed so that it is better
than it is now? Imagine a perfect world where no one is left out; all people get everything they
want & need. Imagine a perfect world where technology is in perfect balance with the harmony
of earthly nature, yet provides plenty for all. Imagine a unified planet - without separate
countries, yet there is diversity, without strife, without war.
"It must be emphasized that a perfect world is absolutely possible on this planet now, if
humans would become aware of that. The main reason the world is so bad now is humans
assume it has always been bad - & thus it will always be so. By such negative visualizations, they
unwittingly participate in making it so. This happens both on personal and collective levels.
"You would be amazed at the power of your thoughts. Your thoughts create the kind of
reality you find yourself in - &, believe me, there are far better realities than this one. This is a
reason so many spiritual disciplines put such emphasis on learning to focus and channel thoughts.
It is the difference between a laser beam of coherant light and scattered photons which go
whichever way they will.
"Simply meditating daily on what a perfect world would be like will have an eventual
effect on conditions as they now seem to be. Change your thoughts & you will change your
conditions.
"First comes the initial thought. From the thought, there is a visualization. The
visualization will generate a certain energy. Finally that energy will manifest in the realm of
concrete action.
"From the seed, emerges the shoot. From the shoot, emerges the branches. From the
branches, emerge flowers. The flowers will give birth to more seeds.
"Focus on that & you can't go possibly go wrong."
Another Llang Llong discourse:
"This entire universe that surrounds us is basically a conglomeration of three basic forces:
"Positive, negative, & catalytic.
"These three forces correspond more or less to what your scientists would designate as
protons, electrons, & neutrons, although they are finding even more elementary subdivisions
which still correspond to these three forces.
"The first force is positive. It is the active force.
"The negative force arose automatically as an antithesis to the positive force. It needs a
positive center to exist, passively relying on its existence. It is a force of inertia, though it
becomes active through its attraction to the positive.
"You could say this is the origin of the male/female dichotomy which arises in biological
life. You could also consider this the yang/yin principle.
"The catalytic force arises to be a mediator between the first two. It is called "neutral" on
the atomic/subatomic level. It both 'match-makes' them & enables them to come to a compromise.
It is a director of the formation of all things, a 'mind' of the universe. Biological life could not
have arisen without it. Biochemists will tell you the most important biochemicals are the catalysts
which direct all changes in development.
"Varying combinations of these three forces make up all the various elements &
combinations of elements in this universe.
"The combination makes this stuff that would be called on this plane, 'matter'. Matter
manifests itself in four basic states: solid, liquid, gaseous, & energetic, which incidentally
corresponds to what your medieval alchemists referred to as 'earth', 'water', 'air', & 'fire'. They
were more knowledgeable than your history gives them credit for.
"There is really no such thing as an absolutely solid particle, by the way, contrary to what
your physical senses indicate. Your physicists will tell you that, too. All that you see around
you, all that you are, is varying combinations of these three energetic forces, flowing together like
different currents in a stream. It could be regarded as a Vast Hallucination, which your brain
gives an apparent order & solidity for convenience.
"This is what the ancient Buddhists & other esoteric Eastern philosophies meant when they
said this world is an 'illusion'. They, too, knew more than conventional history gives them credit
for. They did not need elaborate instruments and complex mathematical formula to discover this -
all they did was pause & take a really good look at it for awhile. If you take a REALLY GOOD LOOK at
it, you will eventually see it is not quite as orderly & consistent as it seems to be.
"Actually, this will be the basis for the next stage of your training. Next time, you are in
sitting meditation, take a REALLY GOOD LOOK at any object in front of you, stare at it continuously
without blinking for a long time, & observe what happens."
Dogstar decided to give it a try.
He would take a REALLY GOOD LOOK at the phenomenal universe.
He'll try anything once.
At noon, he sat at his work-station in the rock garden.
He took some very deep belly breaths...
Breathing with the lower abdoment, as prescribed by the monks.
He watched his thoughts go by, detachedly observing them like clouds in the sky...
Neither getting caught up in them nor condemning them.
For some reason, an image of a strawberry ice-cream cone appeared in his mind...
Like a ghost, it hovered there, then floated benignly away.
He closed his eyes, feeling the ray-tendrils growing/glowing from the peak of his head...
They expanded into the distance the the blue sky.
He could sense a few clouds up there and greeted angels with their harps...
What lovely music they played!
He grew roots from the bottom of his spine...
Felt them penetrating deeply into the bowels of the earth,
Breaking open rocks, feeling the hot magma in the interior.
He acknowledged his unity with the organism of the entire breathing planet...
It was breathing with him.
That exercise done with, he opened his eyes & went on to the next one.
He was to pick out something to stare at.
He chose a rock in the garden randomly lying ten feet away from him.
He started staring at it.
He continued to breathe deeply.
He did not blink his eyes or move them.
He felt something very peculiar/familiar about that rock...
It became a living being for him, an old friend he hadn't looked up in ages.
He continued breathing deeply & staring intensively at it.
Waves of rippling light emanated from the rock.
It was glowing.
Cross-currents of different waves formed into geometrical patterns.
The waves of light grew increasingly intense.
The field surrounding the rock became a peculiar ultraviolet.
Somehow, everything disappeared in a swirling haze of a bluish-white light.
It was like an entity-less Void.
Dogstar shook his head & snapped out of it.
That was a little too much for him.
Llang Llong continues:
"This entire phenomenal universe you see around you is naught but a hallucination of the
senses. One's entire perception of what is 'out there' is dependent upon the kind of sense organs
one has, how those sensory impressions are filtered & categorized in the nervous system, & what
level of complexity the brain operates on.
"A worm doesn't have very much sense except a sense of touch. It only knows what it is
immediately in contact with.
"A bee sees the world as an array of inter-linking hexagons. It is able to see ultra-violet
light & its world is a series of varying shades of whitish-purple.
"A dog sees but a blur of black & white, which it cannot make out very clearly. It can
make out the general size of the blurs; that's about it. However, its sense of smell & hearing is
extremely keen. It lives in a world of smells & sounds, by which it orients itself.
"Human beings see solid three-dimensional images in a variety of colors with clear-cut
boundaries. Their sense of hearing is next in clarity, but their other senses are relatively weak.
Since they have larger brains, they also define, categorize, & judge what they see & hear.
"More advanced sapient beings perceive the world as interlaced energy-patterns
continually inter-acting with one another.
"Sapient beings on a somewhat higher level of consciousness see the universe as a series
of thought-patterns.
"Thus, you see, it is all very relative. For different beings, there are different ways of
experiencing, which is the same as existing in different realities. A human, a dog, an insect, a
worm in the same room exist in very different overlapping realities.
"Your own personal reality is determined by how you put together the sensory impressions
in your head. This is where the mind comes in. The mind makes the reality.
"You, incidentally, can be trained to perceive higher levels of reality."
"If this is so," commented Dogstar, sitting at the feet of the Master...
"Then what is Reality REALLY like?"
Llang Llong did not say anything for a minute. Then he started chuckling...
His chuckles echoed throughout the room.
"Ah, Dogstar, I knew you were a ripe one. You have asked a very good question. But,
you see, I cannot answer that for you. At the stage where you are now, it wouldn't mean anything
to you...
"You can only experience that for yourself."
Dogstar was perplexed, disappointed like a dog who didn't get his treat.
"I can give you an important hint, however:
"To truly know Ultimate Reality, you no longer merely perceive It;
"You ARE It."
"There are four basic planes of existence:
"The physical, the energetic, the mental, & being.
"Those on the physical plane are into doing things. To them, only solid things are real.
Most worldly people are on this plane. They are the active, practical type, who would tend to be
into things like athletics & physical brawn.
"Those who prefer the energetic plane are into feeling. To them, emotions are more real
or important than solid things. A few of them see through the illusion of solidity; they see that all
things are composed of energy. These are a minority. Artists, musicians, poets, monks, &
magicians tend to occupy this plane.
"Those on the mental plane are into thinking. To them, thoughts are more real than
anything else. They seek for an underlying pattern behind things. They are also a minority.
Every once in a while, one of them might discover that thoughts determine the reality.
Philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, writers, & sages tend to occupy this plane.
"Those who have gone beyond all planes are into BE-ing. They experience the Unity of
All. To them, only this Unity is Real. They are rare. This is the state of Buddhas, Christs,
Mystics, & Enlightened Ones.
Dogstar went to the Master in a very distraught state.
He was on the verge of tears.
He couldn't solve the Koan he was given.
The Koan was: "What do I have to do with all this?"
"Master," stated he, the disciple in crisis...
"I can't understand any of this...
"I can't figure it out...
"I give up - please give me the answer...
"What do I have to do with the state of affairs in this world?"
Llang Llong gazed directly at him.
"Look into my eyes," he commanded.
Dogstar did so.
Llang Llong's eyes looked similar to a lion gazing at its prey.
The pupils of the eyes became whirlpools swirling around & around.
Dogstar dived in, & started spinning in circles down into the Grand Central Vortex.
The whirlpools became vast spiral galaxies.
Dogstar became Lost in Space.
Everything in the room disappeared...
Dogstar was a tiny point surrounded on all sides by Endless Space.
He was all Alone.
It was like he was the Only One in the whole Universe.
A disembodied Voice spoke within him:
"You are the Motive-Force which sustains this entire Dream that is the Endless Universe."
It was over.
The Grand Meditation Hall came back into focus.
The Master was smiling.
The lion had a satisfied look; he had a good dinner.
Dogstar was back on his feet again in a world that had apparent solidity...
Though he couldn't be sure of that...
He'd never be sure about it again.
He'd doubt all that he had believed before.
He had gone over the Edge...
The Voidness of Ulimate-Infinity had swallowed him whole...
And would never let him go.
One day, Dogstar popped the Big Question:
"Tell me, then, Master, what is the Meaning of Life?"
Llang Llong stared into Endless Space.
He sat so quietly, he almost seemed to disappear.
A fly buzzed restlessly in one corner of the Grand Meditation Hall.
A loving & attentive monk caught it, carried it in cupped hands, setting it free outdoors.
There was a seeming Eternity of Silence.
Llang Llong finally replied:
"It is this:
"TO DO, TO FEEL, TO KNOW, TO BE."
For an instant there, the floor seemed to slant slightly.
At that moment...
Dogstar Saw...
A Glimpse...
Of the Infinite Light.
For awhile, Dogstar did not see things the same way anymore.
The trees, the flowers, the mountains all seemed transparent somehow.
Solid things just didn't seem to have their usual solidity anymore.
Hard it was to discern what was within his skin from outside his skin.
He would pick up a rock & he could perceive an ancient history...
Oh, the weight of vast oceans it once upon a time lain beneath!
Molten lava from primeval volcanos...
Avalanches of crumbling mountains.
The song of birds...
He knew their language!
The tweeting sound of joy at the rising of the sun...
Their love for one another manifest.
Watching a sunset from the top of the mountain...
Dogstar heard a Grand Symphony of Colors in his mind!
Sitting alone in the middle of the forest at midday...
Dogstar listened to Echoes of the Voice of Silence.
The flowing of a stream...
The dropping of a fruit from the branch of the tree...
Monkey grabbing a banana...
It was all a movie & he was the film-maker.
When monks conversed following meal-time...
He would have the impression he put the words in their mouths.
He was witnessing a Creation of his own...
He had fallen right smack into the midst of it.
"Is this what Enlightenment is, Master?" he asked Llang Llong.
"Is this what it's all about yet?"
Llang Llong pondered.
"Maybe," he replied in his usual enigmatic fashion.
He added:
"Contrary to popular belief, there is no final Enlightenment.
"It just goes on & on in continually-changing variations.
"It never happens the same way twice.
"Yet it is still the same."
Finally, the day came that Llang Llong called Dogstar into the Grand Meditation Hall.
All the monks were gathered there & seemed very expectant...
As if it were someone's birthday party or some grand occasion like that.
The Master seemed peculiarly happy.
"The time has come for you to go back," he announced jovially.
Dogstar was gravely disappointed.
"Aw, do I have to?" he wailed.
"I was just starting to get into it."
Llang Llong & the monks roared with laughter...
This was the best joke they'd heard in a long time.
"Now, now, don't take it like that....
"After all you can't remain in your ivory tower of enlightenment forever...
"It is easy to be enlightened in such isolated circumstances as these...
"Now that we have imparted to you a glimpse of REAL TRUTH, you are needed...
"Out there in the evolutionary struggle.
"Believe me, your very existence out there will have an effect on where it's all headed."
"I must warn you, it will be somewhat exasperating at times...
"You'll lose it; you'll forget everything you've learned...
"Only to relearn it in a new way...
"Besides, Enlightenment is useless unless one can maintain it in the midst of the world."
"But don't worry about a thing. After all, we had to do this, too...
"It won't be as bad as you think. Things are changing quite rapidly now."
"And if this will give you any comfort, Dogstar:
"No matter where you are, no matter what you go through, I am there with you.
"Nothing you gain is ever really lost.
"It will seem like a long, long time, but rest assured, we will meet again, in some realm...
"Or the other.
"So... See you later. Bye, bye now."
With this final discourse done, Llang Llong gave a dismissing wave of his hand.
The Master & his merry monks all waved good-bye...
Like a bunch of clowns on a kiddie show...
Fading out on the T.V. screen of life.
Briefly, their faces resembled those of hierglyphic black dogs...
Shades of Anubis, the Egyptian Lord of the Under-World.
Weird.
There was total absolute blackness.
Dogstar whirled around & around in Absolute Space.
Then the T.V. screen came back on again, warming up.
What re-appeared was the midst of Saigon in 1974.
It was the Great Frantic Evacuation.
Hello, Everybody! I'm the Author of this mess.
I suppose you're wondering what's going on by now.
Gee, to tell you the truth, I just don't know.
It just sort of happened that way.
Yes, yes, I know, this could be merely a literary device...
Thrown into the middle of this book...
A frenetic attempt to rescue what is becoming an increasingly unbelievable plot.
Could be, could be.
We Authors actually make it up as we go along.
Which is the same way the Universe evolved...
So some would say.
I may as well confess this isn't a realistic novel at all.
You've probably come to that conclusion by now.
It's a Mythological Prose Poem.
In a Mythological Prose Poem, all kinds of things can happen -
Magic is possible, things such as:
U.F.O.'s, Twilight Zone Episodes, Unusual Altered States of Consciousness...
Or the main character simply vanishing from one scene & re-appearing in another.
And Fiction is the Ultimate Magic!
I'm the God of the Universe of this Book!
So there!
(The Author sticks a fictitious tongue out at the audience.)
So stay tuned for the next weird episode of Dogstar.
When the going gets weird, the weird get going.
Don't worry; I won't interrupt this delightful page-turner again.
This will all work out for the best.
I hope.
(I pray.)
Dogstar was just dropped right into the middle of it.
He couldn't understand what was going on.
Hideous masses of troops & South Vietnamese refugees were quickly scurrying...
Like ants whose hill had been kicked over...
They were all pushing in competition to get into helicopters...
To board transport ships, loading last minute supplies onto them.
They all were going the wrong way...
Heading away from the country they were supposed to conquer...
Not towards it.
Dogstar wandering in dazed war-shock, disorientation...
He felt like he'd been hit on the head in an alley after having too much rice-liquor...
All his money was gone & he couldn't remember the identity in his wallet.
What were all these people doing in such a hurry?
He couldn't see how he fit into this picture.
"HEY, SOLDIER!" yelled an officer, overseeing the evacuation...
Noting the out-of-place Dogstar spinning in circles.
"Where's your platoon, soldier?"
Dogstar just stared at the officer quizzically.
The officer appeared to be some kind of robot to him.
He wondered where his wind-up key was.
"What the fuck is wrong with you, soldier? Don't you know this war is over?
We're getting the hell out of this dip-shit country! What's your name, soldier?"
Dogstar only shook his head & wept.
He didn't know.
He didn't know anything.
The officer was yelling some sort of incomprehensible gibberish at him...
He couldn't understand the language.
The officer called over another officer for a second opinion.
They examined him & questioned him, but the lost soldier appeared speechless.
"Yeah," muttered the second officer. "He looks pretty far out of it to me....
Must be shell-shock or something. Been getting a lot of those. Get the shrink over here."
An army psychiatrist came over to peer into his head with a flashlight.
He shook his head somberly.
Another hopeless basket case of the war.
He got out pages of paper with lines & fine print printed neatly & wrote things in it.
The lost soldier would be shipped to the psychiatric ward in the State.
Just another casualty of the war.
Nobody seems to understand what I am.
Nobody understands anything I say.
Nobody sees what I see.
It's as if I'm in a different world from the others.
Maybe I am.
Dogstar was in the Hopeless Case Ward.
He heard trains rumbling, reverberating inside his head...
Twenty-four hours a day, they ran nonstop.
They had a cosmic ring to them...
Tracks ran to the edges of the universe.
The sound of the trains were fascinating...
He wondered what magic places he could be transported to...
If he'd only dare to hop on.
The ride was free.
He was a single point of abstraction surrounded on all sides...
By impossible trajectories of Infinity.
A single atomic quantumic fragment that was once part of the Dogstar...
Drifted across Vast Expanses of the illusory sense of a room with whitewashed walls...
Journeying for Light-Years like a dust mote glimmering in the morning sunshine...
When the nurse cheerfully raised the shades.
Aurora Borealises shimmered around people's heads...
Changing colors with their moods...
Jagged fragments around the insane ones.
A beast with the body of a man, the head of a bull kept following him around the halls...
It tip-toed right behind him breathing beast fumes down his neck.
It made obscene faces at him & sniggered.
Nobody else seemed aware of it except Dogstar.
He thought about all his experiences in Vietnam.
Was it all some sort of prolonged hallucination?
(Hadn't someone named Llang Llong said something about that?
Dogstar could only remember huge eyes, swirling colors...
Drowning in watered plants he must love.)
Dogstar doubted and doubted, folds upon folds of doubt...
Like yet more laundry that must be folded, unfolded.
Had he been here all along?
My God, how time flies!
(Like circling birds on a high mountain ready to peck his starving body...
His salvation lies in the Buddhist temple just ahead!)
(Monks like grinning gorillas hand him bananas for their version of manna from heaven.)
(Llang Llong, save me!
Llang Llong, why has Thou forsaken me?)
And every day, the man in the white coat & tie comes to have another look at him...
Carefully scrutinizing the contents of his head.
The man is disappointed with what he sees in there.
The huge mountain of a head with moon craters sadly shakes from side to side.
Ponderous fingers write orders to the nurse.
New miracle medications must be tried out on this guinea pig from the war.
The subject of the experiment matters not, only the method counts.
The pills & shots they gave him made him feel dizzy & woozy.
His vision became blurry & sounds sounded mushy.
He saw strange patterns weaving on the walls.
It was impossible to talk coherently.
He lost his appetite.
His condition appeared to be getting worse.
The doctor took note of this & shook his head.
He wrote out a prescription for a stronger dose.
(Llang Llong, forgive them, for they do not know what they do!)
Meanwhile, a pointy-eared demon hung out in the corner of Dogstar's room...
Another transformation of the bull.
He sniggered uncontrollably at his plight...
Enjoying the suffering of the matyr Dogstar...
From whose arms lingered the stigmata of shots to comfort his pain.
Down the echoing corridors of the Hopeless Case Ward...
Where Trains of the Cosmos ran...
Two male nurses dragged a madman, yet another unwilling victim.
The madman looked like a Black Muslim Sufi.
A Fiery Illumination shone in his eyes of sheer conviction.
Thinking perhaps there is something to be learned here...
Dogstar dragged his feet to follow this scene.
"I AM GOD!" the madman screamed, the madman raved.
"NOTHING YOU CAN DO WILL ADD TO ME OR SUBTRACT FROM ME!
"FILL MY HEAD WITH ELECTRICITY, YOU FOOLS!
"I AM ELECTRICITY!
"THIS IS JUST A BODY YOU'RE DRAGGING DOWN!
"THIS ISN'T THE REAL ME!"
"I AM EVERYWHERE!
"I AM EVERYTHING!
"I AM EVERY ATOM & MOLECULE IN THE UNIVERSE!"
But they, only following orders, did not listen to him.
What madmen say has no validity in the reality of sane people.
As they firmly strapped him down, the Black Muslim Sufi continued...
He screamed & raved & laughed loudly.
They pasted electrodes on his head...
And gave him another round of the Sacred Juice.
The Mad One Illuminated jerked up & down...
Veins sticking out from his neck and arms...
Kundalini Energy pulsing up & down his spine...
Bouncing up & down on the operating table, he begged for more:
"I AM THE LIGHT WHITE, SOURCE OF ALL COLORS!
"GIVE ME MORE, YOU FOOLS!
"THIS IS MY DIVINE FOOD!
"SHOCK ME INTO PARADISE!
"AH HA HA HA! AH ALLAH! I AM ALL-AH!"
It was not long before Dogstar realized that if he ever wanted to get out of there...
He better start playing the game right.
After all, he didn't particularly want to spend an unending existence of:
Drugs, tasteless food, sadistic doctors & nurses, & shock treatments.
He better start acting "adjusted".
He better pretend to share the general consensus reality.
Or they were going to keep him there for the rest of his life.
Though the food tasted like boiled ashes, he ate more heartily & praised the cooking.
He attended daily occupational therapy, wove baskets, made ashtrays...
He arranged dried sadly wilting wildflowers of despair.
He swore to them he loved going there...
Yes, it was the perfect outlet for his creative yearnings.
He cracked utterly stupid jokes...
Which he picked up from the kiddie cartoons in the paper...
Talked about the weather...
Who was going to win the next presidential election....
Blah, blah, blah, idle chatter, keep it as trivial as possible.
He playfully goosed the nurses.
He talked only about down-to-earth things...
Careful to avoid saying anything un-ordinary or mystical.
This was not always easy with the trains in his head...
The patterns on the walls...
That damned sniggering demon on his back.
He kept his medication under his tongue & spit it out later.
That helped a lot.
As his head gradually cleared up...
He kept bugging the good doctor as to when he was going to get out of there...
Careful to be patiently diplomatic about it.
The doctor would try to trip him up...
His livelihood depended on having a certain number of cattle patients there.
Dogstar had to restrain his urge to yell at him for his freedom.
He told the doctor he sincerely wanted to rehabilitate himself...
Find a job & a niche in society...
Get married to a nice woman...
Make life-long downpayments on a house, a new American car...
& an endless series of insurance policies.
He kept a mass marketed happy face on to disguise himself.
After a couple of weeks of this good behavior...
He was pronounced more or less "normal".
They would let him out...
He was to see a therapist in the out-patient clinic once a week...
An ex-madman version on probation.
Sure, anything, anything you say, Doc...
You pimply faced script-writing motherfucker!
They gave him some passable street clothes & a little play-money for the "real world".
Finally, the door was held wide-open for him.
Unbelievably, he was free!
And this is how Dogstar emerged from one kind of Hopeless Case Ward into a larger one:
The Grand Hopeless Case Ward of the World.
He worked pretty hard at it.
In a large city on the coast of California, he found himself....
Washed up on the rocky shores.
Every week, he went for a friendly visit with his witchdoctor...
He was careful not to reveal the demons that possessed him.
Like a good boy, he got registered with a Veteran's Rehab Program.
He even managed to score a job in an electronics factory.
With Vietnamese immigrants, he inserted products into stale boxes all day.
Joining some fellow human debris, he got a share in a cheap rooming house...
They drank a lot of beer & farted together.
He managed to get a cheap motorcycle.
He managed to live like this for six months - until bonny spring hit the town.
Like a good squirrel, he saved up some monetary nuts.
He announced to his shrink he was cured & that was that.
After being confined for so long in institutional prisons, he was ready to move on.
He was going to do some traveling.
Dogstar, the reformed rehabilitated Vietnam Vet, went on the road.
The idea of traveling across the country on a motorcycle seemed romantic to him...
Especially with the advent of spring.
He kicked his jump start.
He was speeding out of the dullness of normal living.
Dogstar went to all kinds of places & did all kinds of things.
It was his way of celebrating his new-found freedom.
No longer did he have to just take it...
Rather he preferred to take off.
He hung out with some Indians in the South-West deserts...
They partook of the peyote rite & chanted all night before the sacramental fires.
He pissed off the Grand Canyon & rushed stoned down its rapids.
In a roughnect Texas bar, he drank firewater, coughing & spitting.
He sampled the pleasures of whores with sickle-moon doors in the streets of New Orleans.
He went for a raft ride along the Mississippi, calmly fishing.
He conquered Pike's Peak in Colorodo.
In shrill winds, he gazed across vast rolling hills of prarie grass...
At the chain of Rockies on the horizon.
While passing through Tennessee, he got shot at by a bunch of rednecks...
Who considered him a "long-haired nigger-loving peacenik".
He cruised along the Blue Ridge Highway in the Appalachians...
Taking time to climb mountains every now & then.
Flashing cruisers stopped him a few times on the Jersey Turnpike...
Perhaps they envied his freedom.
He attended poetry readings at coffee-houses in Greenwich Village...
They chatted about existentialism & mysticism with intellectuals all night long.
The whole time, he didn't really comprehend what he was doing it all for.
Like the hurdy-gurdy man making his monkey dance for a few coins...
The question kept bouncing in his head:
What did he have to do with this?
One time, in his various travels, Dogstar dropped in to visit a well-known commune.
It was a pretty big place for a commune.
It had a couple of thousand people.
The people on this commune believed that the end of the world was coming.
They were always busily planting gardens...
And building solar houses...
And hauling in materials for the compost heap.
The barrel shower was busted & they hadn't been washed for weeks.
Their leader didn't work very much.
He just took it easy...
All he had to do was claim he was the reincarnation of:
St. John of the Cross, Alexander the Great, Nietzsche, & Jesus Christ.
That usually did it...
He made it sound so convincing.
He heard voices from God telling him the end was near...
They better hurry up before it's too late.
He fucked every woman in the place...
The males tolerated this because he was so holy.
He also took a lot of cocaine, heroin, and L.S.D.
That was for his visions.
The people of the commune had to work hard to support his habit.
Meanwhile, a kid was playing with rocks in the dirt.
They just let their kids do whatever they wanted.
Another kid was dropping a cat on a see-saw.
The cat screamed.
A third kid rocks a crumpled garbage can back & forth.
He kept laughing as he did it.
He thought it was all so terribly funny.
Towards summer's end, Dogstar came a-chuggalugging into New England.
He kind of liked the quaint, small-village feel of it, so he thought he'd stay awhile.
He was getting bit burnt from the wind-swept road and the riding season was ending...
It was time to settle down.
He found a major University...
In University Town, the typical college town with a alternative stores & weirdos...
Just the kind of thing Dogstar liked.
While he was at it, he'd just take advantage of his Veteran benefits for education...
And try out a semester or two.
He wanted to see what being a college student was like.
It wasn't a bad life:
He would get drunk/wasted/fucked-up/fucked at dorm parties in tall skyscraper dorms...
And heave his guts filled with beer & pizza over the balconies.
He got to hear some pretty good & unusual music on stereo-sets of fellow students...
The music had gotten a lot more sophisticated since he went away.
Stoned-out, he & fellow-students stayed up to talk about a lot of novel ideas until dawn.
They were somewhat in awe of his years in Vietnam...
They were just kids just out of their parents house for the first time.
He avoided jocks.
He didn't get a whole lot of studying done.
He figured out it wasn't actually necessary to put much effort into it...
He developed a skill in bullshitting with professors to get good grades.
It wasn't very hard; all you have to do is use impressive-sounding big words.
The whole time, he couldn't really figure out what it was he wanted to major in.
Psychology was sort of interesting, but most professors were Behaviorists...
He didn't like what they were doing to those rats in the mazes...
It reminded him of some chilling experiences in the hospital.
Some of the Psychology professors didn't even believe in "consciousness"...
Although it was right there in their heads, they called it an "epiphenomena of the brain".
He had a lot of arguments about that with them.
No, Dogstar could not get into that.
He was more interested in finding a way of achieving...
An Altered State of Consciousness Forever.
Drugs certainly helped...
But somehow he thought there should be a better way.
(Shades of memories... A lost Buddhist temple in the mountains...
A man with shining eyes and a knowing chuckle.)
All they were dealing with at college were words, not reality.
He wanted to find Reality.
Finally, after two years of exasperation, he got tired of the whole thing & dropped out.
He wanted to pursue some private illegal studies of his own.
And this is how Dogstar sort of muddled into the situation he is in now.
He was looking through the paper one day & saw this ad:
"Dishwasher desperately needed. No experience necessary. Little
pay, a small furnished cabin & food offered."
Dogstar went for it.
It sounded perfect for his purposes.
Dogstar is sitting on the wall in University Town.
A seat-high stone wall is built along the sidewalk on the main street of downtown.
Many students go here to sit & chat & contemplate the scene & act weird & score drugs.
Dogstar is selling drugs to students & High School kids.
Anything you want:
Uppers for studying & rapping...
Downers to sleep & mellow out...
Pot to have fun with your head...
Occasional heavy hallucinogenics to go to the Other Side.
Once in a while, someone sits beside him to make the score.
Money discreetly slides towards Dogstar beneath a cupped hand...
Out come the concealed goods from a little satchel tied to Dogstar's belt.
It is Columbus Day.
A few hundred years ago, this dude called "Columbus""discovered" this continent.
Things just haven't been the same ever since.
It is a chill, windy day.
It is well into the autumnal season.
This is the season which made Dogstar decide to hang out in this region.
The colors are so amazing!
A crisp, golden leaf tumbles against the base of the wall.
Someone takes a seat next to Dogstar.
Dogstar looks over to see who this customer might be.
It's just a sparrow.
It tweets at him like a kid sticking out his tongue.
Not far from the stone wall, Dogstar watches two dudes argue in front of the post office.
"EVERYTHING IS NOTHING!" yelled one.
"NO! EVERYTHING IS EVERYTHING!" screamed the other.
"Little do they suspect," remarked a nearby rather amused midget...
"They are both right.
"And yet they're both wrong.
"Here is your riddle for today.
"How can it be this way?"
Past an estate with well-manicured apple trees, apples rotting at the base...
Dogstar rides up the steep dusty dirt road.
Turning off on an even steeper log road, downshifting to first gear...
He wonders if his bike can make the rest of the climb...
He gets off and pushes his bike into the woods, ties it quietly, discreetly.
He isn't really supposed to be in this place...
"No Trespassing" signs tell him to go away.
Fuck them.
He slides beneath a gate which also has a large "No Trespassing" sign.
He climbs up a very steep rocky road.
He gets to where the microwave tower is, the reason the gate is there.
Turning to the right, he hikes along the ridge of the mountain.
He passes a clearing filled with cut-down logs, some sparse woods...
Where once upon a time there was a cow pasture:
Now raspberry patches with big boulders reside there.
He samples a few raspberries.
They are filled with wholesome wildness.
He sits on a boulder & lights his peace pipe.
Onwards through the woods he moves, over a few fences...
Finally to the high field, his intended goal.
Sitting on the comfortable wiry grass, he gets a little more stoned, gazes at the view.
He looks over steep mountains he pushed his weak-powered motorbike to climb.
It took him quite a while to get here, but he likes it.
He sees Wheatfield in a valley in the distance beyond the steep mountains.
He can see the dorm & classroom towers of University Town.
He looks up & down the horizon at all the mountains he has been on.
Towards the north-east is the Big One, hovering above the others.
Very peaceful up here.
With the blue cool of the day...
Dogstar lies down & sails away with high cirrus clouds.
Dogstar is taking a nap on a distant hill.
It is far-away & so peaceful there.
It is good to leave all those nasty worldly problems...
behind.
He has come a long way just to get here.
He has fallen asleep.
A couple of miles away, his subconscious registers the sound of gunshots.
It's hunting season again.
The bastards are shooting anything that moves.
A wispy, feathery insect lands on his nose.
Dogstar is dreaming...
Of Indian summer sunshine...
Falling warmly on his face.
Sitting crosslegged on the high field...
Dogstar contemplates the Big One, 27 miles away.
Warlock Mountain is south of it, 10 miles closer.
The Northern Mountains are a few miles southeast of Warlock Mountain.
7 miles south of the Northern Mountains, is Jethro.
5 miles south of Jethro is Dry Hill.
Dogstar has it all figured out.
It's a thing he likes to do, see how all the different mountains fit together.
He weaves them into a pattern of his own making.
He pulls out a battered, wrinkled soggy joint from his shirt pocket...
He gazes at it oddly for a moment...
He lights it and takes a few puffs, holding them in for a long time...
He swallows what is left.
Now he's in the right mood to be here.
The strangest thing happens:
From three different directions, three cats approach Dogstar.
The cat on the left is blue-black.
The cat on the right is spotted-black.
The cat in the middle is striped-yellow.
Question: Does this have any metaphorical significance...
Or is it merely a coincidence?
In unison, they approach, then ten feet away, they sit.
They keep their gaze straight on Dogstar.
They meow in unison.
In cat language, they meow in a chorus:
"What are you doing in our field, strange human?"
"Who are you, strange human?"
"Where do you come from, strange human?"
"Why did you make this, strange human?"
In perplexity, Dogstar shakes his head.
He does not know how to answer them.
An immaculate day of windy multicolored hills:
Dogstar is setting off for a visit to the Tower.
It is constructed of dark stones.
No one knows when it was built or who built it.
It looks just like "The Tower" in the Tarot card deck.
Slowly, as if sneaking up on it, Dogstar approaches it.
It's on top of a very steep hill -
Not far from the high field that is the domain of the cats.
Lots of litter scattered around the bottom of it -
Randomly strewn beer bottles, cigarette butts, candy wrappers, discarded rubbers...
The usual debris of America.
It kind of spoils the Gothic effect.
Dogstar lowers his head to get through the entrance arch.
It is dark in there.
He makes his way step by step up the circular spiral stairs.
Each footstep echoes loudly.
Every story or so, there is a small window to look out.
He arrives at the top balcony.
He smokes part of a marijuana cigarette.
A wind is blowing.
He strolls around in slow circles up there...
Takes in a panoramic view of the Green Mountains in mid-Vermont...
Wheatfield & University Town in the southern valley...
A little factory town at the foot of the mountain...
Higher mountains towards the west.
He hears the sounds of trucks on a main highway below...
The rumbling of a two-mile cargo train passing through the factory town.
As usual, the Big One's over there hovering northeast, above everything else.
Dogstar stretches his arms out & turns around in a slow circle.
As he turns, he loudly proclaims:
"I EMBRACE THE TOTALITY OF ALL THAT IS."
He announces this towards the four primal directions:
North, West, South, & East.
He does this three times.
His mission accomplished, he heads back down.
From great heights & vistas, Dogstar is coming down.
He had just witnessed an incredible view.
It was atop of a ski mountain in mid-Vermont.
He could see into the Adirondacks in upstate New York from there.
Like a tiny hill in the distance is Warlock Mountain.
He saw the Big One, oddly shaped from this new perspective.
Keeping his eyes fixated on a distant light-blue horizon...
Dogstar carefully picks his steps down the steepness of the slope.
Thigh deep is the crinkly grass/boulders, pits to trap ankles everywhere.
Some places the angle borders on cliffs...
Those who ski here in winter are either brave or foolish.
Dogstar is wearing his army jacket & his purple glasses.
His itty-bitty bike is a thousand feet below in the ski lodge parking lot.
He can see it down there, tied to a telephone post on the edge of the lot.
It's a fly speck of blue on dusty sand.
He looks worriedly upwards at the sky.
Some billowing clouds are forming, looking ominously pregnant.
He hopes/prays it won't rain.
It was a nice clear day when he started out several hours ago.
You can never tell what weather will do in high mountains.
Despite his fervent wishes to the contrary...
Drops of cool wetness start to fall...
Lightly, then increasing in force.
Cursing, he takes his pack off, whips out his poncho, puts it on.
As the drops get larger, a mother deer & her child gaze warily...
Peeking at Dogstar from behind huge jagged birch trees.
They have huge cute brown eyes.
The kid deer is fascinated by this human.
It leaps out & follows Dogstar for awhile like an amiable puppy.
It wants to go with him.
Dogstar has a better idea.
He'd rather be the deer & remain behind.
It'd be nice to just live here all the time, graze on plants...
Be washed by the rain, not have to work at a job.
But the deer prance elegantly off into the forest...
And Dogstar has to return.
Lost, confused is the Dogstar far off course from its appointed flight.
With the fall of night, the rain falls even harder.
He had wandered down the wrong ski slope.
The ski slopes all had names like "Wanderer", "Space Cadet", "Star Trek", or "Ripped".
(But none there were named after him.)
How was Dogstar supposed to know which was which.
Somehow, someway, he wound up on a paved road...
In the midst of prime Vermont territory amidst a suburbia of alpine condos.
His feet are sore from all the walking...
Teetering in the rain, he wonders if he can take another step.
Those condominions probably cost $100,000/apiece.
Maybe even more.
Abominably rich are the ones who own these:
Stockbrokers, N.Y.C. lawyers, corporation managers, government officials...
Cocaine dealers, mafia men, capitalistic whores of all kinds.
This is where the richest people on the East Coast partake of their vacations.
A big shiny black car with "U.S. GOVERNMENT" plates slowly cruises by him.
One of the black-suited men within carefully studies him through binoculars.
He whips out a camera & takes a shot.
Dogstar, wearing his soaked poncho & mud-caked army boots...
Comes to a rapid conclusion he better get out of here fast.
He could easily get arrested because his annual income is less than $200 grand a year.
He has no idea how far his bike is from here.
He has a creepy feeling of being very out of place here.
Despite the pain in his feet, he starts running.
The black car slowly follows him as though escorting him out.
It glares radioactive headlights on him.
Oh, cold, dark, miserably stormy night this is!
Dogstar is on Rt. 30 somewhere in the middle of Vermont.
He finally discovered his bike & is returning from the huge ski-mountain...
His head filled with grandeur of the visions up there.
He's having quite a few unanticipated difficulties.
It rains torrentially & there are pockets of fog on the road.
Through riding glasses dripping with water, he can't see a thing.
All he sees is a wall of light ahead of him.
Snakelike, the road slithers curvaceously beside a stream bed.
He nearly slides off the road a few times.
He nearly hit a bridge.
The rain falls heavier forcing him to crawl slower...
A line of cars behind him grows more impatient...
They honk horns to tell him to hurry up.
Oh, whatever possessed him to come out this far on this fool's journey?
He sees a motel.
"ROAD'S END BEND" it says.
Momentarily he considers checking in...
A dark, wet, straggling stranger out of the cold sheer night...
It would be the perfect setting for a weird gothic novel.
But he doesn't have the money...
Nor does he like the name.
He continues to suffer.
He nearly hits a telephone pole.
He skids to a stop next to some obscure Fix-It Garage.
It is a town with the peculiar name: "HARMONYVILLE".
It doesn't seem very harmonious now.
A dog belonging to the mechanic who owns the garage barks voraciously at him.
Dogstar can't really blame the dog.
He'd bark, too, if he saw himself like that - a ghost in the fog.
The mechanic who owns the garage...
Is doing some welding work on a pickup truck inside...
Fiery sparks light up the slippery darkness without.
He calls the dog in & slams the garage door shut.
It is so rainy, Dogstar has to remove his glasses...
They're too wet to see anything but a blur through.
He rides very slowly.
His poncho flip-flaps in the rain.
It's going to take him forever to get back.
He finally arrives at the town called "HADES".
That lies by the upper curves of the Connecticut River.
He decides it's time for a break.
The worst part of the journey along those curving roads back there is over.
In the center of Hades, is a Dunkin' Donuts place.
He just wants to get a cup of coffee.
He stands there, dripping in his poncho, but the waitress will not serve him.
They all avoid looking at him.
A man who looks like a pale zombie gawks loudly at him.
Deciding he doesn't need a cup of coffee that bad...
Dogstar gets out & continues on his infinite journey to No-Where.
Spaced & distant among the Northern Mountains...
Dogstar wanders.
He has lost the thread of some mission long forgotten.
Hundreds of feet above the Connecticut River Valley, he is on a plateau of flat mountains.
He follows a powerline up to where there's a good view.
Lost in thoughts & daydreams, he is somwhat.
Above his head, fifty feet away, are millions of volts of zippy electrons...
Thrillingly zapping their way along the wires...
To flow into electrical devices of humans to keep them in light & heat.
As he navigates over the rocks of the powerline road...
Dogstar ponders on what a nobody he is.
He's just a dishwasher in a dipshit restaurant.
Is this what he spent his whole life for, just to wind up like that?
Suddenly, some quails leap out of the bushes & hurriedly flap away in sheer panic.
They must have thought he was a hunter.
They have good reason to be afraid of strange humans.
Dogstar looked up at this spectacle...
Then returned to his internal philosophical mutterings.
What's so wrong with being nobody special?
No matter who you are, no matter how rich or famous you get...
You're going to die anyway.
In the due course of millions of years, if not before, you'll be forgotten anyway.
Even if you were the biggest going thing on earth during your lifetime...
No one will even know who you were geological ages from now.
Your bones will be miles under the surface.
So what does it matter whether some guy labelled with the name 'Dogstar'...
Who might manage to live some six or seven decades (if he's a good boy)...
Achieves anything in particular or not?
It's all just another instance of the ego trying to find an extension...
Beyond its own basic impermanence.
That's what Llang Llong would say.
(Who's Llang Llong? A dream from once upon a time?)
Dogstar finds this a peculiarly liberating thought.
He doesn't have to be anyone special.
He can just be what he is.
He reaches the sitting place where the view is.
It is very nice today.
Red & golden autumn leaves are drifting down everywhere...
As Dogstar drifts with them.
Dogstar is staying up all the long night.
Sitting crosslegged on the carpet, he gazes at the slanted floor of his place.
He is staring intently at a single candle flame.
It seems to burn for eternity.
Dogstar has taken some powerful soporific drugs...
Not recommended for public consumption by the law-makers.
The dose he has taken is so large it does not make him sleepy...
Rather the effect is stimulating...
He's even hallucinating a bit.
Dogheaded beings from a sideways profile dance in the shadows of the walls.
Dogstar is utterly S-P-A-C-E-D O-U-T.
With eyelids half-closed, he does not feel the slightest hint of physical sensation.
Dogstar carefully studies the flame.
It is flickering with the pulse of his thoughts.
He listens to the Everlasting Silence.
He journeys into the vast Spaces-Between-The-Universes.
He slips off into the Universe of Anti-Matter...
Where the colors & attractive forces are all backwards...
Yang becomes Yin...
And vice-versa.
All night long, there is a persistent tap-tap-tapping on his rear window.
Dogstar resolutely ignores it.
It's probably another auditory hallucination.
The cat is purring deeply.
Lying Sphinx-like before the candle, it also watches the candle-flame.
It's really getting into it.
Meanwhile, on the four walls & ceiling, energetic lizards writhe & slither...
In & out of the skilled hands of the dog-headed beings.
There is that tap-tap-tapping on the window again.
Dogstar is on the south end of Lizard Tongue Mountain.
Hades, a depressed little Vermont factory-city is on the other side.
It was a nice day & Dogstar rode up from Wheatfield to Hades.
Crossing the Connecticut River on a metal bridge made of see-thru holes...
He could see cross-currents of the upper Connecticut.
He parked at the base of this mountain by a roaring stream.
He huffed-puffed his way up a series of switchbacks to the overlook on top.
Sitting on a rock, he had some reefer.
He could see right down on Hades...
All the people looked like ants hithering to & fro their hellish business.
To the west, he could see the Green Mountains...
Among them, that damned ski mountain where he'd gotten in so much trouble.
He got an idea to try cutting straight through the trees to a rock quarry on the other side...
He'd been able to see it from afar as he was riding towards there.
It didn't seem like it would be that hard.
He wound up whacking the bush caught in a mult-directional snipe hunt...
Through dense shrub he went, up & down gulleys full of rocks...
He risked his life to climb the final cliffs.
Now, scratched & sweltering on high bare rocks, it is very peaceful.
He can see down the stretch of highway by which he'd approached.
He can see Warlock Mountain a few miles away.
Towards the east, is the Big One, as usual.
The Connecticut River slithers from side to side towards its ultimate merging with the Sea.
Dome-shaped mountains linger in the east, apparently uninhabited.
They look mysterious.
He is surrounded by gnarled stunted oak trees, only 5' high.
How he managed to get through that tangle is too much for him.
What a long trip it's going to be to get back.
The rock out-cropping hovers over a gulley full of huge man-sized stones.
It once did business, but now it is abandoned.
Dogstar likes it that way.
A couple of crows keep hovering over the spot.
Dogstar lies on the rocks & gazes up at them.
"Caw, caw," hoarsely cry the crows.
"Caw, caw," hoarsely cries Dogstar back at them.
He & them had a common language...
Stray wanderers in a misunderstanding world.
An abrupt sound, loudly crunching, crackling from within the bushes, only 30' away.
It sounds like something big...
Dogstar freezes apprehensively.
It comes closer, sniffs, mutters, then crunches away.
A cigar-shaped flying unidentifiable object zips behind a cloud.
Dogstar is taking some time off.
He is sitting in a place called "Duke's".
"Duke's" is a seedy tavern in University Town...
Frequented by students & locals who have nothing better to do.
Sometimes he comes in here to sell certain yellow, blue, & red pills to patrons...
Who have nothing better to get high on.
He helps himself to his own stock, watering them down...
With Duke's infamous washed-up beer.
He orders a cherry brandy to kill the taste of the stale beer.
A lot of the patrons of Duke's, having no better entertainment for the moment...
Watch the bar T.V. flicker its images.
On the T.V., there are some politicians arguing about something or the other.
Each of them believed they could achieve salvation of the world & American society...
All you had to do was vote for them.
They both sounded like they were saying about the same thing.
Another pointless hum-drum election is coming up.
Somebody says, "Fuck this shit", & changes the channel for a sports game.
No one stops him.
On the bandstand, the featured attraction of the night tunes up & comes on:
They're not too bad.
Here's a list of the cast:
The drummer is a Mongolian idiot drooling on the set.
The lead singer is a paranoid schizophrenic lady...
Convinced there are agents in the audience.
The chorus girls are psychopathic hussies brandishing carving knives.
The key-board player in charge of the synthesizers is a grinning megalomaniac...
He is the conduit of God.
The lead guitarist is a manic-depressive; when he's manic, he's great...
But when he's depressed, he just plucks one string over & over.
The bass player is a low-key catatonic with a vague death-wish...
Laying on the floor gazing at the ceiling.
The piano player is a gibbering hebephrenic...
She randomly plays anything all over the keyboard.
The trumpet player has delusions of grandeur & struts his stuff.
They all met one another & got together at a local mental institution.
The shrinks thought it would be good occupational therapy for them...
To get out every now & then to play for the general public.
The attendants are on hand with dripping hypodermics & straight jackets...
Just in case they start wigging out on stage.
It does happen from time to time.
Though they don't always play in tune, sometimes they pull it off.
Then they really get into the groove.
Yet again, night has fallen upon him..
The days are getting shorter sooner than expected.
Dogstar walks along a dark, narrow highway.
He went off wandering & isn't sure where he tied up his bike this time.
He was on some path & wound up here.
The temperature is dropping rapidly.
He can see his breath turn to frost.
There's hardly any traffic at all way out here.
He comes around a bend, then notices on the top edge of a mountain:
A glowing globe slowly becoming bigger...
The full moon rising over pitch-black October mountains.
He stops & watches it.
It gives him illumination.
He sings the Moon-Song to it.
He goes on.
Where the hell is that damned bike?
He'll be here all night looking for it.
He stops half-way across an old bridge.
A swiftly-flowing river-stream below it gurgles, burps.
Dancing clouds gallop across the face of the full moon like errant horses.
It is alternatingly dark, then light, like a strobe-light in slow motion.
It has interesting effects on the rippling waves of the river-stream.
He looks up at the dark, awesomely steep mountains.
Nobody lives in those mountains.
Too strange are they for humans ordinary.
The glittering stream tinkles all night in the moonlight.
Dogstar is downed-out in his place.
It is day-time & he does not feel like going anywhere.
For 3 hours, he sits very quietly, very patiently in the same armchair.
Every single muscle in his body is absolutely slack.
The perfect meditator he is right now.
Not a thing does he feel.
A nice way it is to be.
He stares out the rear window.
He is looking at a branch of an ancient oak tree...
That oak tree has been here for a long time...
Biding its time through the seasons by the field's edge.
A solitary autumn-baked leaf flutters, teeters back & forth...
On a single branch Dogstar fixates his gaze.
It is the last leaf on that branch.
Tenaciously it clings, refusing to release the security of the branch...
And with its departed brothers & sisters, fly free.
Dogstar stares intensively at that single leaf...
His whole life depends on it.
It has become extremely important...
That he be a witness to that precise instance when that final leaf will drop.
But it never does.
Like crazed bats, other leaves fly all over the place...
Yet that leaf hangs on.
This is a good way to meditate, Dogstar considers.
He takes another pill.
Fatigued by this silly game, he closes his eyes...
He sighs deeply in the pits of his lost soul.
What will become of him?, he wonders.
How did he wind up this way?
Is there anything more than this -
To spend his days contemplating falling leaves?
When he opens his eyes again, he looks at the branch.
The last leaf is gone.
Dogstar is atop a crag-mountain in eastern Massachusetts.
He is some sixty miles away from his temporal dwelling in Wheatfield.
Wheatfield is way over there behind some mountains on the western horizon.
It is a short but steep climb to the top of this mountain.
He pauses to catch his breath & looks around.
No trees there are up here.
Naturally bare, a crag of rocks with lichens & short stunted bushes.
The view has a cold clarity.
Far to the northeast, is a range of other craggy mountains...
Going on & on & on.
He climbs to the top of an old boarded-up fire tower...
It has fallen into disuse decades ago.
Fierce & cold are the northern winds up here.
With each blast, the tower shakes precariously forth & back.
The steps of the tower are rotting & there's a few missing railings.
Dogstar is risking his life to be doing this.
It would be interesting to get blown off & away into the vastness of the view.
It would be a good way to die.
Despite shrill winds whipping about...
Dogstar manages to get a joint briefly fired up...
Before the wind snuffs it out again.
Just to inform anyone else that he has been up there...
He takes out his Swiss army knife...
On the topmost rotted board, he carves in shouting letters:
"DOGSTAR IS HERE!"
He climbs off the tower, avoiding missing steps.
It was well worth coming all this way just to get here.
The Big One is closer from here...
It predominates the whole northern horizon.
A ring of crag-mountains leads in a circle up to it.
All the mountains are golden-red./
There looks like a chance of rain.
A few miles away, it is raining, & there is a rainbow.
A rainbow is a good sign./
Towards the west, where Warlock Mountain is:
Huge V-shaped flock of honking Canadian geese head south for their winter vacation./
A pattern everything has...
Confusedly, Dogstar attempts to discern the warp/woof of it all./
Dogstar sleepwalks his way through the darkening woods.
His bike is tied to a huge birch tree somewhere in there.
He doesn't really know where the hell it is.
Did he take the wrong fork back there somewhere?
An abandoned field magically appears in his path.
He pauses, looks up at the sky.
Silver sliver of a waxing crescent moon...
Head-dress of the horny Goddess...
Journeys towards the reddish-amethyst horizon.
Venus is up there, too.
Venus is shines so brightly this year...
A small spot-light in the sky casting subtle shadows.
They hover above the horizon like moths in the headlight.
Venus & the crescent moon lovingly conjoin.
Venus is right within the twin points of the moon.
What mysterious astrological significance could this portend?
Far from the witnessing of humans, in distant fields...
In the open, come little elven creatures.
Excitedly, they point at this spectacle in the skies.
In spiralled circles, they dance, singing gladly...
Playing chattering music on pan-flutes.
A great celebration must be held.
Tonight, the Elder Ones shall rise again.
Randomly aimlessly Dogstar wanders on his motorbike.
Perhaps he will wind right back where he started.
He explores a sandy road among some higher mountains west of Wheatfield.
He wants to find how close this road will take him to a mountain...
Which intrigued him from afar in the lowly lands.
He's not sure what it or he is going to do.
Maybe it's just a logging road.
It turns out to be a long driveway to someone's farm.
Nonchalantly, cows idly munching in a smelly manure-filled pasture look up at him.
Apples drop rotting to the boulder-strewn ground.
A huge dog barks ferociously with carnivorous teeth.
It starts to lunge after him.
Drats, he took the wrong turn again.
There seems to be a lot of half-formed roads like this up here.
A farmer comes out of his barn with a pitchfork.
Dogstar is frantically trying to turn around...
The wheels of his bike sinking into quicksand of the road...
Slurping eagerly, the sand must be a half-foot deep.
The farmer stares suspiciously at Dogstar, wondering who the hell he is.
Dogstar has often asked himself that very same question.
The farmer swats off flies buzzing all around him.
He can't figure out why a stranger on a funny-looking motorbike...
Would come all the way up here just to go back.
In a state of Fusion, Dogstar & Stella Telestar are locked.
For two hours, they have been sitting crosslegged in sexual intercourse.
Dogstar's testicles are tied so that it is impossible for man-seed to come forth.
Stella writhes back & forth, breathing rapidly...
His Lucifer inserted in her inner juices.
Her inner juices flow & flow.
Her eyes closed, she is in another dimension of reality.
She is about to come again.
She has come about 23 times so far.
Curiously, the cat gazes on this...
It purrs heavily...
It likes what it sees.
Dogstar is plunged deeply into the Inner Female Void.
It sucks in all that is male & upright.
Tremendous amounts of neural energy...
Snap, crackle, & pop upwards...
From the base of his spine into his brain.
He sees Stars & Stripes Forever.
Fusion - not a bad way to generate energy.
Dogstar finally makes it to the Big One.
The ride on his little motorbike took him 2 hours.
Chilly winds blowing from the north-west all the way...
Pushed against his pull as he diligently overcame the resistance.
Cool, clear, autumnal day - ideal for this pilgrimage.
His ears still ringing from the ferocity of the buffeting winds...
He gets off the bike at the base.
He ties his bike next to a sturdy tree in the parking lot.
His blue helmet with the cosmic symbols becomes hidden...
Behind an ancient stone wall in the woods.
Huffing & puffing, he climbs up the steep path with human-sized boulders.
Half-way up, the trees cease to grow.
All craggy rock in this zone, laced here & there with hardy scrub-bushes.
Huge cliffs tower all around.
The stalwart mountaineer Dogstar scales to the top.
Gusts of wind threaten to knock him off in places.
Reaches the peak seemingly unattainable...
He turns & looks all around at the view.
An utterly magnificent vista fills his vision...
A panoramic view of all of New England.
He can see every hill & mountain he has been.
So high it is, he gets the blast of the jet-stream.
As though he were a high-flying eagle, he can see for a hundred miles.
In olden times, Indians came here for their Power-Visions.
The whole thing is a Power-Vision.
This would be a good place to die...
Letting go, merging with the rocks, blowing away with the wind.
Dogstar stretches out his arms.
He turns slowly around, facing outwards at the view.
Pivoting on his feet, he turns four times.
At each turn, facing each of the four directions, he intones:
"I ACCEPT THE TOTALITY OF ALL THAT IS."
This being done, he spends an hour observing the totality...
Photons of unknown northern lakes, remote mountains reach his eyes...
A single crow sails in circles around the peak, glorying in its freedom.
It is sunset.
It is All-Hallows Eve.
Manifestations of the Great Pumpkin God lay burning on every doorstep.
Meanwhile, Dogstar is atop Warlock mountain.
Below, through branches of bare trees...
The small and isolated village of Warlock can be seen.
To the setting sun, Dogstar is humming a farewell chant...
In three long sustained notes in a major-minor key.
Through hazy clouds over late autumn mountains so distantly deep-blue...
The sun bleeds fiery-red sinking...
Then it is no more.
Suddenly the temperature drops several degrees.
Cruel winds pick up their pace.
The clouds turn pink, then purple.
In the Four Primal Directions, Dogstar looks all around...
Inwardly, he pays homage to the North, the East, the South, the West.
Nestled in all the hills, street lights of distant New England towns wink on.
Blinking on/off hypnotically, radio towers on other mountains broadcast for the masses.
The long night is falling.
It is time to go.
Resolutely Dogstar zips up his insulated pseudo-leather jacket.
He puts on his riding gloves to get them warm.
It will be a long walk back through the dark forest.
He is prepared; he has a flashlight.
A long, bitter-cold ride it will be back...
To the warm hearth of his little cottage in Wheatfield.
Through multi-colored swirls in the dark...
Dogstar makes his way back apprenhensive...
For strange crunching sounds follow him in the bushes.
Dogstar is on his way back to Wheatfield.
He is somewhere around forty miles from "home".
Along winding backroads & over hidden mountains.
That is the route he has chosen...
Now he will have to ride it out to the end.
Dogstar is riding his motorbike along a bumpy road full of ruts.
He is not far from the town called "Jethro".
He wishes he didn't choose to go this way.
The ride is wearisome.
By the town dump of Jethro, he stops to take a piss in the weeds.
Junk just lies there in utter inertia.
The junk isn't going anywhere either.
Dogstar gets back on his bike & proceeds onwards.
For some reason, it keeps swaying back & forth.
It's bumpier than usual.
Oh, no!, anywhere but here!
He has a flat tire.
Ragged clouds blow over the face of a nearly full moon.
There are occasional raindrops.
What a place to be.
Fortunately he has some stuff to blow his tire up with.
If it'll work, that is.
On the gravelled road, he gets on his knees to squirt the stuff in.
He becomes aware...
How surrounded he is by miles & miles of dark woods.
Lost in a vastness he cannot ponder.
Through "Personal" ads in a local alternative paper...
In some vaguely vain eternal search...
Dogstar is looking for connectedness with someone out there...
Forgetting it is already connected.
One ad reads:
"LEFT-HANDED, CLUBFOOTED ALBANIAN GENIUS COMPUTER
PROGRAMMER SEEKS MUTUALLY COMPATIBLE SERIO-RELATIONSHIP WITH
HUMANOID SIRIAN TRIPLE-AGENT. LET'S FUSE IT. EXTREME DISCRETION
ASSURED. TRIPLETS NO PROBLEM."
Another ad reads:
"THE ENTIRE 'OBJECTIVE UNIVERSE' IS AN ELABORATE HOAX. IT IS ALL A
MASS HALLUCINATION OF THE SENSES. WAKE UP BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE!"
--- THE SOCIETY FOR CONSCIOUS EVOLUTION."
That one sounds vaguely familiar, something he had heard before.
A third ad reads:
" 'REALITY' IS A COMMUNIST CONSPIRACY, BY WHICH THEY WOULD LEAD
US INTO THEIR GRIMY, TOBACCO-STAINED CLUTCHES. DON'T LET THEM FOOL
YOU! ALSO, PAY HEED, THE JAPANESE ARE CONVINCING-APPEARING
HUMANOID AGENTS FROM SIRIUS, INTRODUCING THEIR INNOVATIVE
PRODUCTS INTO OUR SOCIETY IN ORDER TO UNDERMINE OUR ECONOMY &
THUS TAKE OVER THE WORLD. WATCH OUT! BOYCOTT JAPANESE-SIRIAN
PRODUCTS!
--- THE IMPERIAL COMMITTEE TO NUKE THE WHALES."
Whew, what a bunch of tricksters.
Another ad reads:
"I WISH SOMEONE OUT THERE WOULD LISTEN! I WISH I COULD FIND A
VOICE IN THIS DESERT OF MADNESS I COULD BELIEVE IN! I AM SO ALONE AND
NO ONE WILL CONTACT ME!" (There is no box number.)
A fifth ad reads:
"DOGSTAR, DO NOT FORGET WHO YOU ARE! YOU MUST FIND YOUR
MISSION IN THIS WORLD!
--- LLANG LLONG"
Dogstar could not decipher all this.
Putting his head in his hands, he wept silent tears of agony.
His cat looked up at him in sympathy.
Dogstar rides slowly on the side of the road...
His motobike does not go fast on the highways.
So chilly is it he can barely endure.
Dogstar the fool to ride so far...
When he knew it was going to be this cold.
Tightly, his freezing hands hold on to the handlebars.
They are clenched sticking to the metal.
His body is frozen forward.
Somehow he gets the idea that the highway is tilted lopsided...
And that he is riding upside-down...
In a painting by a surreal artist.
The tips of his fingers are in utter agony.
He still has twenty miles yet to ride.
On a very curvaceous part of the road...
Three huge trucks bunch up in a line behind him.
Dogstar thinks he is seeing triple in his rear-view mirror.
He doesn't dare look back.
He rides over to the side of the road, but they never pass.
Steadily they pursue him, constantly shifting gears up & down.
They growl like mechanical monsters...
Breathing dragon fumes of carbon monoxide down his neck.
Finally, he pulls off on a side-road & watches the caravan go by...
Wonders where the hell all those trucks are going at this night hour.
They're all unmarked with any kind of company identification.
Perhaps they're going to dump nuke-waste from a power plant in some forbidden spot.
Or worse.
Who knows?
Maybe it's better not to know.
Dogstar shivers & holds on.
The closer he gets to "home", the further away it seems.
He continues to ride...
Wondering if he will make it...
Or wind upside down in some rightside up ditch.
As a point of reference, he follows the evening star & the crescent moon .
Once in a while, Dogstar would look through the papers at the job ads.
It was a perfect thing to do while taking his daily shit on the bowl.
As someone fascinated with what his shit looks like...
He just wanted to see what was there.
He was getting awfully tired of washing dishes.
But, even before he glanced at the ads, he knew it was hopeless:
There's nothing there for him.
There's no place in society for the likes of Dogstar.
Very little was there he could not do...
But it was useless to apply...
They wouldn't hire him.
He may as well be a slubberdegolian from a planet strange.
He was a Vietnam Veteran with a dubious discharge.
They were afraid he'd go berserk on the job...
Gunning down the boss...
Raping the secretary...
Holding innocent bystanders as hostages...
Demanding a million dollars & amnesty...
A debt owed by society for his suffering.
He might do that anyway...
He would gun down the personnel interviewer ignorant of the job requirements...
Rape the female guardian at the front desk...
He'd bust down their glass walls.
What could he do in such a world?
It must be his karma.
He can only work at places like "Cloud 9 Lounge"...
Where embarrassing questions are not asked.
His past can go fuck itself as far as they are concerned...
Just as long as his hands are functional enough to move over dishes...
Give them a semblance of cleaniness for customers who don't care...
That's all they want from him.
Looking forlornly at the job ads, Dogstar shakes his head.
Like a penniless vagrant peering at jewels & diamonds through the window...
He knows how utterly beyond his measly means it is.
It is designed so he has not a chance.
Wandering staggeringly in the streets of University Town...
Dogstar keeps glancing frantically behind him.
Somehow he has this funny idea that he is being followed.
Could it merely be some kind of drug-induced paranoia?
Yet, every time he looks behind him, there they are again:
Three 4' high Japanese in yellow trenchcoats.
One wears red glasses.
One wears yellow glasses.
The third wears blue glasses.
Wherever he sits, they sit next to him.
He goes into a store to browse at magazines...
They are browsing next to him...
They seem to be very interested in computer magazines.
He sits in a cafe to have a cup of coffee...
They sit nearby...
Ordering what he did.
He sits on his usual place on the stone wall in the center of University Town.
They are sit on a bus bench on the other side of the street from him.
They gaze directly & avidly at him through their colored glasses.
They pull out notebooks & rapidly scribble observations in them.
In the midst of the Universal University Town...
On a street corner...
Stands Dogstar.
He is waiting for the light to change.
It is taking it forever to do so.
Since he started waiting, the sun has moved imperceptibly across the sky.
One of the three Japanese (they've been following him for weeks now)...
Gets next to him (why won't they leave him alone?)...
Slyly nudges him. (O the audacity!)
Holding a purple telephone with flashing lights towards him, he says:
"O.K., Doggy-Star, you are urgently wanted on the phone."
"Oh, yeah, okay, that's right," replies Dogstar, as though he were expecting this all along...
He picks up the phone.
He takes a look at the Japanese man...
Briefly he notices that through the lenses of his colored glasses...
Are no pupils at all...
Just spirals spinning around & around & around...
On the phone, a couple of odd melodies beep-beep on the line.
An alien mechanical voice utters:
"O.K., Dogstar, the jig is up:
PREPARE THYSELF FOR 'A MESSAGE FROM BEYOND'."
This sounds very interesting...
Before Dogstar can ask for further details..
The line is a dead hum which grows in intensity.
The hum is like a bunch of robots chanting "AUM" together.
The Jap is gone & so is the phone.
The sign across the street flashes frantically in red:
"RUN... RUN... RUN..."
Unusual things come over Dogstar:
He would throw bottles in the garbage, watching piles grow...
What a waste of glass...
Perhaps he should recycle the glass.
After his daily bowel movement, it occurs to him:
That's five gallons every time of perfectly good water...
Then expensive processors wring all that shit & toilet paper out...
From thousands of shit-loads a day...
All just to re-use it.
Why not just shit in cans, let it dry, & fertilize the fields with it?
Just think - with all the wind blowing here...
A huge wind-generator would provide the juice to run this joint...
Why be dependent on some central power plant?
He keeps compulsively turning out the lights behind him.
He shuts off the heat whenever he leaves.
He sits down at dinner for a hamburger feast...
His paltry pay rations for washing dishes...
How horribly a bunch of cows died for him...
Slaughtered like Jews at Nuremburg...
The imagined screams of those cows make him lose his appetite.
No doubt about it...
Dogstar is getting the New Age Flu.
Dogstar is looking out his front window before he has to go to work.
He is looking for his cat.
He also wants to look at a certain tree.
He wants to count how many leaves are left on it.
A funny-looking man tampers around out there...
Wearing a white hardhat & a black cape.
He walks around with a red-tipped stick...
Wires & a meter box is attached to it and his helmet.
He points the stick at different parts of the ground...
At walls of the buildings.
He stops, takes some notes, snaps a picture of that part of the ground.
He repeats this for each cottage.
He spends a bit longer than usual around Dogstar's cottage.
He jots down a lot of notes.
There's something here that particularly interests him.
He snaps a picture of it.
He takes out measuring tape...
He measures the distance from Dogstar's cottage to the nearest garbage bin.
He sorts through some stuff there.
He snaps a picture of the garbage bin.
He jots down some more notes...
Then gets into a massive black Cadillac with "U.S. GOVERNMENT" plates.
He makes a long call on a radio-phone.
He drives slowly away.
Dogstar feels oddly paranoid.
He wonders if he should go anywhere today.
Dogstar is riding the last bus out of University Town back to Wheatfield.
A free bus system shuttles around for the benefit of students of University Town...
Dogstar freely takes advantage of it.
Too cold are the nights for him to ride his motorbike.
He can pass for a student.
He has that requisite oddity of appearance.
He has had a night out at the movies...
In what was once the acting theatre...
"THE MIND PARASITES" is about vampires in the collective unconscious of humanity
which will take over your mind if you don't watch it.
"LILITH" is about a woman who will drive you mad if you become hypnotized by her
beauty unearthly.
He likes weird movies like that.
The last bus to Wheatfield is nearly empty.
Not many people go there at this hour.
There's this one nerdish-looking guy trying to read Shakespeare...
Probably an English major.
He would find no use for his degree in the outside world.
He is frowning at something he reads in "HAMLET".
Carefully he underlines it.
A chubby loud-mouth extravert is trying to get some females interested in him.
He can be heard all over the bus.
He is bragging about his various exploits.
Despite his best efforts, he doesn't seem to be getting anywhere.
Everybody else is silent & withdrawn.
They've had a long day & all they want to do is get "home"...
Wherever that is in this uprooted world.
A quiet cerebrotonic, wearing wire-rim glasses...
Avidly turns the pages of a book called:
"GAMES MONKEYS PLAY".
Someone in the back of the bus idly picks strings on a guitar.
No one is listening.
Along the pitch-black highway, the last bus to Wheatfield grinds its gears...
Is it in anger or despair?
Dogstar leans his head against the window & goes to sleep.
On a borderline wintry day...
In the warmth of Dogstar's place...
The cat sleeps.
Purring very deeply...
It is...
Completely in tune with its breathing.
Perfectly satisfied...
It is...
With where it happens to be.
No worries...
No future...
Does it have.
No past...
To analyze...
To cogitate.
No guilt...
At paths not taken.
No wonders...
About how...
It happens to be...
Just where it is.
It dreams...
Cat dreams...
Wrapped in the ragged blanket...
On the old armchair.
With perfect ordinary-ness...
It is.
On a discreet business trip, Dogstar rides the bus into University Town...
Scheduled for a meeting with his connection.
He needs to get a supply of drugs again.
He can't live without Them....
But can he live with Them?
The three Japanese agents dutifully take the seat right behind him.
They had waited for the bus with him.
They just won't leave him alone.
Dogstar vaguely notices his reflection in the glass window of the bus.
His hair is getting long again.
He wonders about cutting it...
It wouldn't do to look too conspicuous...
Considering the business he was in.
His pupils are black orbs.
His fingers are continuously twitching & trembling...
A gnashing & grinding in his teeth.
Withdrawal symptoms come to haunt him.
If only those goddamn Japs would stop staring at the back of his head...
They are directing laser beams into the back of his skull.
Is there any reality to this...
Or is the whole thing a paranoid hallucination?
Across the aisle of the bus from him...
A bespectacled student is carefully studies a book...
A very important exam is coming up...
And the student will have to convince his professor he knows what he's talking about...
The usual academic psychobabbling.
The title of the book is:
"IS GOD REAL?"
That did it.
Dogstar had to laugh out loud.
If they only knew what he knew.
(What was it he did know?
Was it somewhere back in that strange area of tropical mountains...
Where once he was so lost?)
Then again, maybe it would be best not to tell anybody.
Along the base of a mountain near Wheatfield, Dogstar is riding .
He has just climbed the mountain & now he is heading back "home".
Very intense is the cold...
Each mile that rolls by is sheer torture...
How distant is that remote cottage in Wheatfield.
He is rides up a slight slope.
He downshifts gears.
Abruptly below, there is a nasty snap.
His bike comes to a rude halt.
Cursing his existence, he gets off the bike to see what has happened...
He would hate to be stuck out here.
Mystery-ously, the chain has neatly broke in half...
As though with a hacksaw, someone had cut it clean through .
Now how the hell did that happen?
Dogstar halfway suspected sabotage.
But who would want to sabotage him?
Does his bike have a poltergeist?
Over hill & dale...
Cumbersomely he pushes his bike back to his place...
Cursing his fate...
Feeling utter exasperation with his world-state.
Was it his anger that had caused the accident...
Or did the accident cause the anger?
Where did the cycle begin?
Venus shines brilliantly in the evening sky.
The crescent moon is setting redly.
Mars, pissed-off planet of war, scowls balefully...
At the pontifications of this mere mortal below...
Who has lost yet another war on the battlefield of life.
It must all be in the stars.
It is mid-November.
It's the time of the year when:
The winds get very fierce & chilly...
Carrying in giant shiploads of snow clouds from the west.
Every here & there, a couple of snow-flakes fall...
Just the beginning of the great winter portending.
Late in the night-time which falls increasingly sooner...
Dogstar wanders along the edge of a vast recently mown wheatfield...
Only in the relative backyard of his habitation.
The harvest has been gathered...
The weary farmers have tossed their mud-crusted boots aside...
To toast their toes by their woodstoves.
Only Dogstar roams there now.
At this hour of the night, no one knows why he is out there...
Not even Dogstar.
The moon is nearly full.
A farm & its cozy lights shine in the distance.
Occasionally a pick-up truck passes by on a nearby backroad...
Its occupant leisurely listening to country-western music...
Sipping on a volatile substance in a Mason Jar.
None of that for Dogstar...
He takes a toke from his peace pipe.
Far away, a stray dog barks fervently at the sound of the boots of Dogstar...
Crunching on frosty mown grass mixed with old fallen leaves.
Other dogs join the first dog.
At this blasphemy they hear in the field, they start howling
Their masters wonder what the hell they're all barking at...
Briefly leave the comfort of living room warmth...
To yell out the backdoor at those damned dogs to shut up.
The barking dies down, then starts up again.
Way out back there, Dogstar grins in the moonlight.
His teeth shine eerily.
Nobody knows he is back there but him.
He is but a shadow in the distance.
Standing in the field behind his cottage...
Dogstar is knee-deep in the first snow of the season.
Flurries rushing quickly in...
1st Class Delivery...
Fresh from the North-West.
The snow steadily swirls/whirls in...
Clouds coalescing along the ground...
Piling up in row after row of drifts of death...
Monuments erected to the end of fall.
Abjectly Dogstar gazes across the field at the West Mountains...
Towards where it's all coming from.
This was bound to happen sooner or later.
Everything is stark black & white now.
The snow is brings out the sharp edges...
Too brilliant to look upon.
It has a certain inevitability about it:
The day of judgment comes...
Dogstar's cat disappears.
Apparently, it had had enough.
Who could blame it?
Who would want to live with an out-of-fringe character like Dogstar?
No evidence of it remains...
Other than a set of tracks going out on freshly-fallen snow.
The tracks go out to the edge of the field in the back of Dogstar's cottage.
Then, at the edge...
They just disappear.
What does all this mean?
The temperature is 30 degrees.
The sun has set already.
Dogstar has sung his last song to a setting sun...
On the peak of Warlock Mountain...
In union with the vastness of what he sees.
Dogstar is coming down now.
It is only 4:30 P.M.
A shimmering-red afterglow lingers eternally on the crystalline-blue horizon.
Venus is shines brilliantly & lovingly...
Illuminating subtly the leaf-encrusted path with her yellow rays.
Steadily, Dogstar foots carefully his way down a steep rubble-strewn path...
Lined with cliffs that converge so close...
He vaguely wishes he were a little less stoned & it was a little less dark.
He hugs close to the cliff, as though for dear life.
Oh, why didn't he bring a flashlight?
He passes the caves.
All around are huge boulders laid there...
By mile-high glaciers which once passed through.
That was only thousands of years ago.
Dogstar stares at the layers upon layers of crushed sea-shells...
In the walls of the caves.
Dogstar shouts into the inky darkness of the interior:
"IS THERE ANYONE IN THERE?"
No answer except an avalanche of echoes.
The leaves are ankle deep now.
Venus is behind him.
Strange misty lights wander in the woods.
It is getting hard to see anything.
Then, in the nick of time...
Through the bare trees...
The full moon rises.
It is now November.
The wind is blowing harder than ever now.
There is a low muted howl among the bare trees.
Only a few hardy oak tree leaves continue to cling on.
The rest have departed to the ground to become fertilizer for next spring's growth.
The sap of all the trees have returned to the roots.
The trees are fast asleep now.
The birds are gone now; their song can no longer be heard.
Squirrels get in their nests, their nuts all gathered, & prepare for their long bedtime.
The bears curl up in their caves & begin to thrive on their summer fat.
Human beings huddle near their woodstoves, or those more civilized turn the heat up.
Never-the-less, the Dogstar continues to ride on...
The High-Way stretches on & on, ever beckoning.
He will ride & ride until he can't ride anymore...
On this Fool's Errand...
This maddening Infinite Journey to No-Where.
Icicles form in the crevices of his face.
He can't move his hands anymore.
He doesn't have any idea what he is doing here.
He has lost the thread....
What will rescue him from this vast labyrinthine maze of illusions?
He sees the face of a certain ancient Zen Master...
Forming continuously in front of him in the beam of his single headlight saying:
"This entire phenomenal world is naught but a mass hallucination of the senses."
Whatever that is supposed to mean.
Forever & ever, he has his eyes set towards the End of the Infinity-Line...
Painted with a white too intense to look upon...
In the middle of the High-Way...
Always lying so enticingly...
Just beyond the very finite range of his headlight-beam.
Click HERE to go on to Part II. - Crashing