Iraq, American Soldiers in Iraq, Werewolves of Paraguay and War: El Luison

"The wild dogs of Najaf, Iraq, ate well this week." Those were the words I heard on Fox News Channel just before I went to sleep as I followed different accounts of what American troops experienced in Iraq. Now it is sometime past 3 am and something is breathing next to my bed - an animal presence. I look over and see three black dogs looking up at me. Something is warm and hovering just over my body, something is pinning the duvet cover down around my legs. I feel my temperature rise, and I am filled with strange longings mixed with dread. With a start, I awaken completely.

For audio, please click here & start at the 4:00 minute mark.

http://beyondutopia.net/podcasts/luison.mp3

I'm not quite awake, but I'm not asleep. It is night. I am not sure of the time, or even of the place. I've been traveling a lot lately, and it's not unusual to wander around for a few seconds in that space between wakefulness and sleep and not quite know where I am. That does not bother me. What does bother me is the sense that there is something in the room with me. Red glowing pinpoints of light. Is it a smoke detector? The sound of the fan partially masks the sound of soft exhalations.

I'm in the Legend of Sleepy Hollow territory, but I'm not familiar with any werewolf tales around here. Is there a folk tale or myth that describes what I've just experienced? If there is, I'm not familiar with it, at least not where I live, a couple of blocks away from the "20 Mall" with a Dunkin Donuts, Price Chopper, Blockbuster, two local banks, Subway, Magic Wok, Eckerd, and an open 24-hours CVS pharmacy. I'm in the U.S., but I'm suddenly thinking of the small, poor, landlocked and largely unknown country of Paraguay.

In Paraguay, folklore met urban legend in Sombras en la Noche, an X-Files-inspired television series that was making a big splash in November 1996, when I arrived in Asuncion, the capital, for the first time, in order to give a few lectures on American film and literature and to start investigating Paraguayan women's literature. One of the members of the audience came up and introduced himself to me as Carlos Tarvajal, a Uruguayan film director working in Paraguay. He screened several of the episodes for me at the Universidad Catolica in Asuncion, and I was instantly fascinated. From a U.S. standpoint, Sombras en la Noche was a pretty low-budget affair, with hand-held cameras and film that looked more like something shot for a reality television show. Actually, come to think of it, it was a precursor of reality television, or a cousin of Cops, since it purported to document things that really happened in rural Paraguay.

The most popular episodes had to do with a small town plagued by a luison, a werewolf-type creature, but many times more ghastly. Drawn from indigenous Guarani folklore, the luison is a hideous wild dog-like creature with razor-sharp teeth and red, glowing eyes that feeds on cadavers it takes out of crypts and tombs in the cemetery. Even worse, after feeding on the flesh of the dead, it turns its eyes on the living, and feeds on them as well. The luison devours the soul of the living, and thus toys with one's fate. The luison lives among the townspeople as a normal human being during the day. However, one a full moon, he reverts to his beastly form, leaves his home, and begins feeding in the cemeteries. http://members.tripod.com/lio/mitolo.htm

To fully understand how and why Paraguayans consider the luison to be the most horrible of the creatures of the forest, night, and dreams, it is helpful to have a basic familiarity with Paraguayan folkloric creatures. The indigenous peoples of Paraguay are the Guarani, who lived in the forests, jungles around Iguazu Falls, and chaparral (the "chaco") region in what is now Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay. Their influence has remained, and in fact, Paraguayans have two official languages: Guarani and Spanish. The Guarani language is similar to Anglo-Saxons in that it creates nouns and adjectives by combining concrete nouns. Abstract concepts are related to concrete examples, which create a very metaphorical (and thus poetic) language. States of being are often expressed in terms of transformation, where an individual undergoes a metamorphosis and becomes a creature. For example, animals of the forest are thought to be able to metamorphose into a physically altered state which often corresponds to their inner condition.

What makes the luison much more ghastly than the average werewolf is how the myth became reanimated and changed with the devastating Chaco War, fought for three horrible years (1932-1935) between Bolivia and Paraguay in the arid, semi-desert Gran Chaco. Although Paraguay won the war on paper, the cost in human life was staggering. Fought in the inhospitable lands where there are numerous tropical diseases, poisonous plants, snakes, scorpions, insects, and animals, stinging thornbrush, quebracho, and absolutely no potable surface water, the suffering of soldiers on both sides was grisly. There was no way to bury the dead, which rose to a total of 100,000 by the end. Many died of malaria, thirst, heat exhaustion, and infection. Both nations were desperately poor, and could not afford to get adequate supplies to the troops. As the commands of both sides made suicidal decisions, the wild dogs came out at night and fed on the bodies of the dead and dying. More nightmarish than seeing one's dead comrade be eaten by a wild dog, was to see a wounded fellow-soldier being gnawed alive. The luison had returned, with a monstrous intensity. When the surviving soldiers returned home, they returned with stories of luisons. As poverty, hunger, economic collapse and war stress set in, more died of tropical diseases. Buried in the above-ground crypts in glass cases, it was easy to imagine a wild dog with supernatural strength, razor teeth and the ability to shape-shift. I could see the luison tearing the flesh of loved ones, and the preying upon the hopes and dreams of the living.

"It was a way to explain post-traumatic stress syndrome," explained Luisa Moreno, a Paraguayan writer familiar with Guarani traditions, whose short stories and poems written in both Guarani and Spanish incorporated folklore. In addition, she had spent two years investigating the sad state of public mental health care in Paraguay. "Instead of saying that he was suffering from depression, or having a psychotic break, you can just say that the luison stole his soul."

It was not hard to believe. It was a good way to save face in the villages, particularly when it was fairly hard to disguise the weird behavior, the propensity to roam around at night, to scream at shadows, hear voices, howl at the moon, weep at nothing, sleep in cemeteries.

I had not thought of luisons for several years, until August 2004 and the bloody battle of Najaf, Iraq, fought in and around crypts and above-ground tombs holding the bodies of the Muslim faithful.

"The wild dogs of Najaf, Iraq, ate well this week." That's what a young Marine told a reporter covering Najaf. Photographs showed exhausted Marines sleeping in the dark shadows of crypts and tombs.

The Iraqi insurgents, who did not have the ability to recover their dead, dying, and wounded, left them in the streets where they fell. The Marines said that wild dogs fed on them, gnawing off arms and feet. The dogs even lurked in the shadows as they were finally able to bring their dead out of the street. Did the Iraqis have werewolf or luisons in their folklore or mythologies? If so, certainly those beliefs would be resuscitated in this nightmarish slice of hell.

"The stench of death is overpowering," said one Marine sergeant. I wondered what would happen, sometime in the future, if the smell of death would trigger flashbacks, horrible memories. I remember attending a wake in Asuncion for a young man killed in a car accident almost a year to the day that his older brother had been killed in an accident. Ordinarily, the bodies are buried within a day, but it was Semana Santa and no one could find his father, who was somewhere in Argentina. No one wanted to bury the poor man's only remaining child without his knowing, so there was the mother awake now for three days straight, her voice hoarse with weeping, kneeling at the side of her son, and Tia, kneeling also and chanting the rosary, tears dried on her face. I went to pay my respects and was shocked at the odor. Despite the meat-locker chill of the funeral home and the banks and banks of carnations, gladioli, lilies, and other flowers, nothing could disguise the smell of putrifying human flesh. Even now, when I smell something similar, I am immediately transported to that scene, and I can't control the flood of thoughts and memories.

There were wild dogs in the streets of Asuncion. Not many, that's true, but they were definitely there. One little black, skinny one was hiding in an open storm drain. He looked hungry and I tossed him a chunk of chipa guazu, a bagel-shaped Paraguayan corn and cheese bread cooked in earthen ovens and delivered to street vendors during the early dawn hours. A big piece spilled out of my bag. The dog scooped up the small piece and then darted to the bigger piece next to my leg. He brushed against my ankle, causing me to jump in surprise.

"Don't ever pet a wild dog," said Tia. "They carry diseases and other bad things." There was something in her voice that caught my attention and made me think of the luisons. Don't pet a wild dog. It could be a luison, a descendant of one of those tragic and doomed Chaco soldiers, destined to roam the streets and howl as it scavenged scraps and realized that no one, just absolutely no one would ever pet it. It could turn on you. It could bite you. And, it could steal your soul.

Late at night, when the memories flood my mind and my heart, sometimes the only way I can deal with it is to drive, drive, drive under the full moon or go to the gym the instant it opens at 5 am and run on the treadmill until the anxiety subsides. Why do I feel this way? How do I account for it? Do I say that I was brushed by a luison?

And when the young Marines battle the demons invoked by smells, sounds, and images, what will they do? How will they account for it?

Just say they were brushed by a luison. Everyone will understand. And then, pray, pray, pray for them to get their souls back.

(this first appeared in E-Learning Queen in a slightly different form)

Yes, I'm Over the Handlebars (Again)

Downloadable Audio file / Podcast: http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/handlebars.mp3

I saw her clip the wall, literally fly over the handlebars of her bike onto the cement bike path.

Oxygenation in the stream: roiling, churning bubbles effervesce upward, outward, away. They hit the rocks, turbulent and then they splash, wet energized spray into the air.

Fish thrive in pools of pure bubbles and charged water as the molecules break apart, release energy into the stream, into the ether - the zeit-stream, if you will … and when those charged particles come together, it’s raw, pure convergence, and your mind flies with it, marshaling forces for ongoing and ever-undefined forays into the unknown.

Weren’t you once complacent? smooth laminar outpourings of thoughts, dreams, ideas, material liquid self, and then you hit the rocks, where the light hits the spray of water, and you could see the full spectral flow – the purple blue green yellow orange red of a bright, proud rainbow.

I saw the whole thing – in fact, she rolled like a pro and ended up 3 or so feet away from where I stood. She was bleeding at the elbow, and there was a gouge in her helmet. A lesser cyclist would crack a shoulder, snap a fibula.

It was on the Boulder Creek bike path where it splits into a “Y” – one arm goes under the Folsom Street Bridge, the other to street level. I was sweating, taking the half-mile hike to Benson Hall on the Colorado University campus in high heels, tight skirt, ridiculously expensive Donna Karan pantyhose tights with waist-level elastic that sprung itself useless after only ten or twelve hot water washings…

Boulder Creek churns down the mountainside, cold and yellow and filled with the bacterium of existence. Under the Arapaho Bridge a “stream observatory” had paused the day before to peer through porthole plexiglass windows inserted into a reinforced concrete wall (part of the bridge).

Watch the fish? Watch the bubbles? Champagne? Mountain Dew?

Breathe in. Breathe out.

You don’t know where you’ll end up next.

“Are you okay? You really know how to take a fall.”

It was all I could say. She stood up. Amazingly, just a scraped elbow. No medi-vac to jet to the nearest hospital, no ambulance to transport the body to the morgue.

Flash memory: South Canadian River (Oklahoma), summer 2000.

Dirt-biking involves a different kind of flow – dunes, quicksand, braided stream in drought conditions.

Dirt bike hits Jeep.

Jeep wins.

16-year-old dirt-biker lying broken on the ground. The next morning’s Norman Transcript gives it a mention on page 3 under “Fatality at River.”

It was not easy to accept that the sweet-faced person I saw lying crumpled on the sand was dead.

Thank God my Jeep was not that Jeep. Mine was one that was simply there to explore the dunes.

Who would ever think that when you popped up on the dune, you’d run smack into a dirt-biker with the same idea, just with two wheels and no exo-skeleton (unlike the Jeeps: 4 wheels, replete with fully hardened exoskeleton).

****************************

So let me tell you about Camp Cimarron. It was the all-girls summer camp I went to when I was 10 years old. I was a Campfire Girl, just “flown up” from being a Bluebird (for second and third graders). The camp lasted a week. I had just finished the 4th grade. We slept in cabins. We took classes, but I remember very little.

In contrast, the three years I went to the Baptist Camp Nunny-Cha-Ha in the Arbuckle Mountains are very clear to me (grades 4, 5, and 6). It was also very different than the large Arrowhead-type Camp Kickapoo (Kerrville, Texas), where I stayed for 5 weeks. Camp Cimarron was less about the other campers, the counselors, the people, and more about the place itself: the river, the sand, the water, moon and stars and hot, dry air at night.

My favorite place at Camp Cimarron was a sand bar next to a cutbank on the barely-flowing except in flood Cimarron River where the river had eroded the bright red Garber-Wellington sandstone. Ledges felt like large nail files. The sand under our feet felt like rough, hot, calloused hands rubbing the arches of our feet and the spaces between our toes.

One night, we camped out under the stars. Bright starlight. How could anyone possibly sleep? New moon, no city lights – the Milky Way looked like fog, and the nearer and brighter stars were celestial river sands, sinuous and meandering in and out of consciousness.

Infinity comes to you in the form of restless, half-dark, half-light mind, when you’re sleeping rough, stretched out on a yoga mat under a cotton sheet, wondering about life, love, the smell of night, and creeping hot breath of scavenger birds and coyotes.

What do you do when you’re ten years old and you already know that the feeling you have when you’re touching the earth, feeling the hot, dry wind, and hearing the soft slip of waters over sand, will haunt you every time you close your eyes?

**********

There is an obligatory “full circle” element here. I need to refer back to the woman I saw take a dive over her handlebars.

I need to discuss the oxygenation process, and the way that turbulence engenders life and creative self-expression.

It’s not very appealing, though, to construct such a nice, tidy narrative.

After all, I’m sad, and I’m not happily oxygenated by the combined behavioral determinants of gravity and foolish optimism.

I’m aware that the place anyone takes themselves when infused with euphoria has to do with their perceived need to retreat back to their own minds, into their “happy places.” It also has to do with what they do to trigger euphoria.

If it’s an exercise addiction, it’s one thing. If it is all about expensive, commercialized products (“solutions”), then I think the persons are involved are sacrificing their hearts, minds, and futures.

Is it worth it? You decide. I can’t.

The breeze was cool during the meeting. Their hearts trembled in anticipation.

Oxygen, turbulence, pain, hope.

It was the perfect way to push oneself over the handlebars of life.

Videographer: Dave Feiden

http://youtu.be/YgdD8yXIP8A

Route 66 Rest Stop in the Texas Panhandle: New Technologies & Encounters

First, I want to apologize for the wind noise -- it is, however, the Texas Panhandle! Sorry about that, but if you can slog through, please share your thoughts / experiences in the comments section.

Here are thoughts that the Route 66 truckstop brought to mind-- New technology leads to unexpected encounters. It's been that way from the very beginning.

Let's think about it, Route 66 was built because of emerging, evolving transportation technology. People became mobile, and they also met people and had encounters they never envisioned before.

Today, communications technology and social networking are also leading to surprising encounters -- with people, ideas, places.

Earlier technologies, such as navigation technologies in Europe, as well as what I like to think of as "financial technologies" (early stock / trading companies, limited partnerships, in and after the Renaissance).

Now we're in all kinds of new technologies -- we blink our eyes and we miss five or six iterations. Does it matter -- at least in the way we structure our "technologies of the imagination"?

Route 66 Rest Stop Series: #3 - Route 66, Kitsch, Memorabilia, and the Artifacts of Recollection

When we stop along the road at historical sites, what do we encounter? How can we use the experience to reflect upon what it means to explore connections, and what kinds of memories and emotions are triggered? The American love affair with the car has shaped the American imagination, from Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby to Kerouac's On the Road and all the wonderful road films.

Please post your thoughts, and lists of truck stop experiences, memorabilia, food, music that you find unforgettable (either in a good way or a bad way!) -- if you have Route 66 experiences, that would be especially nice.

Murder, Suicide, Self-Immolation Clusters: Observations

I often wonder about strange synchronicities and repetitions -- things that you start to see once you know the history of a person or a place long enough and well enough.

In the case of a person, it may not seem to remarkable that the same things seem to happen to them -- after all, they're making choices, and the choices are going to align with their tastes and proclivities, right?

In the case of places, it's sort of different. It makes me wonder if there are certain vibrations or resonances that create a situation where people behave in similar ways. I'm not talking about the obvious things -- people go swimming near bodies of water, or do daredevilish things near cliffs. I'm thinking of something that causes people to behave as though certain places were haunted, or that there might be the presence of spirits that compell people to behave in certain ways.

Case in point: Norman, Oklahoma

I've been in touch with Norman and Norman's history to be able to detect patterns -- even without a very extensive analysis, and without reaching back into history.

For example, there seem to be "murder - suicide clusters" in certain places in the town. For example, my parents' house adjoins two homes where people either committed suicide, committed murder, or both. The "murder suicide house" was built in the 1960s -- it was an ugly yellow two-story ranch house at the end of a long drive. Their lot was long, and the back part adjoined my parents' lot. I would never have known about the history of the house, except that my parents wanted me to purchase the house in order to secure the acreage and to have adjoining lots. I might have been interested -- the price seemed relatively reasonable -- except for the knowledge of what had happened there. There was no way that I would occupy a house where a doctor, who, receiving the news of terminal illness, decided to kill himself and his severely disabled wife.

That house was next door to a house where, 30 years or so earlier, a suicide had taken place. It was the mother of one of my classmates. I think it happened when we were in 5th grade, but I may be wrong. It could have been when we were in junior high school. At any rate, it was most definitely a tragedy. I had no way of truly comprehending it at the time, and I'm not sure I would be able to do so now. It's very disturbing.

Another violent cluster exists on the west side of Norman, near the edge of the South Canadian River. Back in the 1960s, two teen-agers were murdered in their car where they were presumably making out. It became the "Murder of Lover's Lane" and achieved a bit of notoriety for the fact that it was widely believed that a corrupt, dissolute cop had killed them. Why? Who knows. He was known to have been a kind of voyeuristic "bad cop."

How is this a cluster? I had not thought of in that way until a few weeks ago, police dug up a woman who had been murdered, ostensibly by her lover (and not a bad cop), and then buried in the back yard of a house for sale that had been unoccupied for more than eight months.

What linked the two? Crimes of passion. Crimes of perversity.

In the case of murder/suicide, I'd say they were crimes of despair.

I recently watched the TV footage of all the immolations sweeping north Africa, and I was reminded of images from Vietnam, when Buddhist monks immolated themselves in order to shock / horrify the populace to realize how civil war was, in essence, self-immolation -- exceedingly painful and ultimately self-destructive. Needless to say, the gesture fell on deaf ears.

However, immolation sort of gained a foothold in the U.S. during the 1960s -- not because the self-immolators wanted to show how they were a sublime metaphor for what was going on. No, the American self-immolation gesture was almost always something else -- an expression of despair and self-hatred; a cry for help gone horribly awry; the ultimate narcissistic gesture not to say self-loving, but to say that my pain is bigger than anyone else's, and I have to express it in this over-the-top, grandiose way -- and -- oops, well, it hurts, and, oops -- it's fatal.

I deeply respect the Buddhist monks' view. I only wish they had not felt the need to kill themselves to get their point across (a point which was never gotten across anyway). Yes. Civil war does the same thing as setting yourself on fire. You burn. You suffer extreme pain. You ravage your body. And then -- either slowly or less slowly - you die, and people don't care that you suffered and died. So -- the end question is, why even bother with civil war? Why start it? Why not resist violent confrontation? If you wonder what it will do for you as a culture, just witness the monk's immolation. That's the dominant metaphor. Don't forget it.

People who see patterns are rarely rewarded unless it's a pony at Saratoga.

People who see the big picture metaphor in a person's work of art or self-sacrificial gesture of resistance are few and far between. They tend to be fellow artists or writers -- they don't have much political clout.

I don't know what to say except to express the opinion that to sacrifice oneself in order to create an enormous, all-encompassing metaphor usually ends badly. So, I say, just don't do it. Say what you need to say, but don't hurt yourself. Focus on the sweetness of life. Of course, that's hard to do when you're feeling so much existential pain that all you can do is resonate with the great, global weltzschmertz / world pain that, in your own living, breathing experience, is overwhelmingly painful.

Don't give up, my friend.

We've all been there. For a guy, it might be a gun. For a women, it might be pills and an eating disorder. The weltzschmertz takes no prisoners.

But, somehow, patterns do. So, my thought is this - if you find yourself in a very destructive pattern, consider moving. There have to be "lucky" places as well as haunted and cursed, right? Go to a happy place and heal. Then, take stock of your life an think about what you might do in the future.

I'm at that point, and it's surprisingly pleasant.



A video shot at a rest stop on old Route 66 in the Texas Panhandle.

SkyBook - Yesterday's Facebook: A Page from Tinguely's Journal

Podcast: http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/skymaps.mp3

Does it ever seem odd to you that many of the world's civilizations were pyramid-builders?

How did they all happen upon that particular architecture? Every child who has ever experimented with blocks has found that the most stable edifice is a pyramid, so perhaps it's not so earth-shattering as it may seem that so many people decided to try their hand at a pyramid.

But still, why is it that they seem to have so much in common?

What if the solutions are in the stars?

Let's think about this.

Back in 1,000 BC, the stars were absolutely brilliant. They were bright. The constellations were in your face. Imagine the night of a new moon. The moon could be so bright there could be moon shadows. It's hard to imagine from the vantage point of today's cities.

Brilliant stars, maps in the skies. The night sky was so fascinating I'm sure that during the new moon people dragged around exhausted during the day after staying up all night watching the skies.

What were they watching?

What if they were looking at star-based blueprints? What if there were blueprints for buildings, structures, etc? Okay -- and let's get more extreme -- what if the sky was yesterday's Internet -- a shared repository of image-based knowledge. Images blended with oral traditions. It was a scary time. Very little was written, scratched in stone, or carved into cuneiform.

Forget mp3 files. Forget avi. Forget everything that could be made dead, like paper.

With digital spontaneity, are we more like the star-gazers than the Francis Baconian "New Atlantis" Royal Society types? A printed page is static.

Oral tradition and knowledge gleaned from the ever-moving skies are fluid, and aggressively mediated by society and human desire.

Knowledge gained through social networking is fluid, ever-evolving, mediated by human desire (and tools -- technology).

Tools of transmission: technology.

Ancient technologies? Tools of transmission? What were they?

The stars themselves, but oral tradition -- frozen (and ultimately misrepresented) by glyphs, cuneiform, diagrams, art.

At any rate, it's food for thought.

Ice Storm and a Body in the Backyard

podcast: http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/snowbound.mp3

Last week, they found a woman’s body buried in a neighbor’s backyard. Granted, it was not a next-door neighbor, and it’s true I did not know her. Yet, I felt a grip of sadness blended with revulsion. Her children said they never liked the woman’s boyfriend. The woman’s mother said she knew her daughter loved the man who eventually killed her. The four-bedroom, three-bathroom red brick house in the once expensive neighborhood did not look like one where you’d find a body – it’s a mere mile away from multimillion dollar homes. But, that particular house (on a nice corner lot) had been sitting vacant for 8 months, and the ex-con killer was a “friend” of the owner of the house. Some friend. There had to be more to the story than met the eye.

When the huge ice storm rolled in, it came accompanied with thunder and lightning. Ice fell from the sky as flashes of light and loud cracks of thunder made an unsettling prelude to the foot of snow and inches of ice that would soon coat the entire countryside.

Electric ice.

The guys at the office building refused to clear the snow while it was still loose and fluffy; consequently it turned into an ice brick at least four inches deep in front of the doors, on the steps, walkways, and the porch.

Ah yes, and I was reminded of how much I love / hate snow and ice; it’s so lovely to see it pile up, and it’s nice when it’s so cold your nose burns when you inhale. Snowboundedness has its charm. It’s interesting to see how your mind goes into different nooks and crannies when you’re feeling contemplative, thoughtful, uninterrupted except by your compulsions to raid the refrigerator one more time and to run through the array of movies you can stream on hulu.com and the latest youtube videos. It’s also nice to lose oneself in podcasts, especially the ones that tell us people’s stories. Revelations, confessions, unveilings: it feels as though it’s happening to me – I’m crawling through the dark, wet basements of my own heart. And still, the ice beats against the window.

We’re getting used to these rough storms.

We need a new narrative for the twenty-first century. The old political and economic narratives are just not working.

Could we say the same thing about the psychological and sociological narratives? Oh yes, I believe so.

The connectedness we claim that occurs with social networks is really disconnectedness. Don’t you see it?

Yes? No?

You read this and you think you’re connected to me, and I hope and pray I’m connected to you, but I’m really just connected to thoughts I throw out there to the cloud, to be (I hope!) ever-present, ever accessible. And yet, it means that they’re always out there intensely ephemeral and I’ll never really take possession of my own thoughts, my own essence – and I’ll never really touch you. I’ve lost that ability. All I have is the ability to envision the concept of touching. But you’re not really able to get into my heart the way you once were able to, and I’m not able to crawl deep into your nerve endings.

We just aren’t that raw any more. We have the soft armor of “the cloud” which keeps everything nicely phantasmic (isn’t that what we should, by rights, call the images we see, the noises we hear, and yet can’t really embrace … can’t ever really put our arms around their vital, beating hearts – all we get is this nice, infinitely echoing simulacra).

But there are some narratives that seem to be utterly timeless, even though we would prefer them not to be –the apocalyptic narrative, for one.

I was once loose and fluffy but somewhere along the way, started to melt, refreeze, then melt again.

The cold draft curls itself around the floor, the walls, the sliding glass door, which is surprisingly clear considering it’s 2 below zero out there in the cold, dark Tulsa night.

If I say I have real feelings -- I still remember -- what will you say?

I used to look at life in one way; then started to look at in an utterly different manner. What changed? All that empty space in the sky? I’m not entirely sure.

Emotional freefall.

I used to let myself leap off various intellectual cliffs, with little or no regard to the fact I might not ever come down. Groundedness was not something I particularly desired – to be weighted down without those soaring thoughts that took me out to distant planets seemed to be one of the saddest facts of consciousness one could possibly imagine.

There are still things I won’t tell anyone. I won’t share the night panics, the dark fears in the middle of the night, the refusal to let anyone ever enter my home or my apartment unless it was to clean, repair, or to go with me as I grabbed my keys, purse, and computer on the way to a road trip of the mind.

It was cold tonight when I made my way across the frozen street. I had almost forgotten the way that snow crunches when it approaches 0 degrees Fahrenheit. You take the chance to walk across the street with nothing but your wits and your ability to slide on wet, uneven ice that grips the asphalt.

This morning, I saw a man walking down the snow-packed side street, relief flowing through his eyes and his entire face. He had a 12-pack of Budweiser still in the plastic bag from QuikTrip. Did the blizzard have the unintended consequence of propelling addicts and alcoholics into unwelcome detox? I could only imagine the discomfort of cramps and hallucinations in the 3 degree pre-dawn hours.

Breathe in deeply even though the cold air burns your nose.

It takes courage to do what you’ve done all your life. You’ve examined your own thoughts with the idea of developing the ultimate “urtext” to knit together all those distant hot suns that twinkle like cold little nightlight stars in my heart and my mind.

You’re letting yourself think your own thoughts, listen to your own mind.

I’m not there any more. I prefer to let the workplace exigencies dominate my own narratives; in other words, I’ve become an approval seeker, and I have substituted the security of a predictable cause-effect relationship (customers want a product, I deliver it, they reward me with a pat on the back, and I happily eat the treat tossed my way) for the randomness and unpredictability of thoughts / emotions. I’ve learned to discipline my mind. I have learned to marshal my emotions. I’ve learned to manufacture “bliss.” And, I’ve forgotten how to be a human being.

In the early twentieth century, the possibility that we’d build robots that would eventually supplant and rule us was a terrifying possibility. We were, as factory workers, quite inferior to machines. Later, androids become not just more physically predictable but also more cognitively agile.

Then came the bionic men and women of the popular imagination.

Now, with our tools, we are already bionic. We don’t even need genetic engineering and medically engineered implants and parts.

It’s easy to think of ourselves as invulnerable as long as we’re on the inside looking out to drifts of snow and cold, dark skies.

But then, the frailties kick in. We get bronchitis. We get the flu. We pull tendons and we aren’t able to assert ourselves in the same way. Do we get kicked out of The Cloud? Do we become invisible, except for the false self that gets the most hits?

I’m not sure how to ask you these questions. You asked me if I’d come apart if you left me (died), and we both know the answer is “yes.” Is the fear of loss any reason to avoid being together? Yes, of course. That’s how it is these days. If things can’t be perfect, we’ll just stay in our web-surfing haze.

Obviously we need to learn how to enjoy the pain of our own humanity. I’m not very brave. So we must enjoy our lives now, no matter how trite that sentiment might seem. That’s what it means to be brave.

Despite the permanence and impermanence of The Cloud, you and I are neither permanent nor impermanent. We just run, run, run trying to outdistance the awareness of our existential condition.

And, well, I feel sadness for the poor woman whose body was buried in the backyard of a soon-to-be foreclosed house.