Chapter 33

“In the summer of 04, I was living in a little trailer on the bank of Lake Payette in the mountains of Northern Idaho working as a dive leader pulling this nasty weed called milfoil from the bottom of the lake. I hated the stuff, and hate is a strong word, but I took a vow that I was going to do the impossible and rip every piece of it out before it sucked up all the oxygen. That was the same summer I stood on deck with my long hair wearing a speedo which got more attention than our noisy bilge pump.”

Boy got up and stretched and walked around the little rock escarpment out of site.

“Every day I would climb into my wetsuit, put on my boots, pull on my gloves, and shiver every time I stepped down onto the dive platform at the bow of the dilapidated pontoon boat as the mountain water filled my boots,”

“What’s a wetsuit?”

“Doc, this is going to take a long time if you interupt...just want you to be clear all right? Here, light this,” and The 420 Woman handed him a funny looking paper stick.

“What is it?”

“Same thing without the tube. As I was saying, what a fantastic feeling that was. As I hit the water the back of my wetsuit let in a surge of cold that felt like someone was pouring a cup of icewater down my back, and as I would sink down to the murky bottom to pull this noxious, disgusting weed, mother of the stuff that now tries to bite your fingers when you extract the weed, the water in my suit would slowly warm, but never enough to be considered very comfortable, epecially if I stopped moving for longer than two minutes; however, the discomfort that I had can never be described as anything other than a feeling of pure contentment.

“For a little over three hours a day I would listen to nothing but the beautiful sound of my bubbles and take absolute pleasure in the fact that there was no one down there judging me, no one down there criticizing me, no one that needed anything, no one that wanted my attention, and no bullshit that clearly used to fill up the confines of my day imprisoning me in a world that never made any sense. Just me and my bubbles. For the first time in my working career I loved knowing that I didn’t have to listen to orders, just babysit an Air Force trailer as I woke up to the brisk mountain air, the calmness of a glass lake, and that damn cold water where the only sound I could hear was my bubbles as they rose to the surface carrying my jumbled, rambling thoughts away to a place where they would never be mentioned in the recesses of my mind ever again. Slowly the crap that entangled my heart was issued a search warrant in those bubbles that would break the surface and dissolve as they met the warm rays of the sun.

“What was it like?” Doc asked easing back into his chair. He was glad for once that someone didn’t want him to talk.

“It's amazing what you can learn about a town's garbage. There was a place at the point near the marina called Mill Park where they toppled the old logging mill that sunk to the bottom. At the bottom off the point, laying at about thirty feet, one hundred foot trees that would take four people's arm lengths to wrap around were stacked and crisscrossed, entangled in the old logging machinery that looked like the beams and chains of an old rollercoaster, and in the murky depths I would descend thinking about the lockness monster running up my back as I reached between the beams to pull this nasty weed. The worst feeling that made the dive completely and utterly worth it was thinking that one of the logs would roll down on my arm and pinch it off sealing me in a watery tomb. What a pleasant Zen thought, especially ontop of the reality that my topcrew members sat on deck smoking joints and sleeping under the sun. I didn’t care though. If one of those logs would have rolled down onto me, or the Lockness Monster finally found me, it would have been hours before anyone would have known anything was wrong. While I was down there in the murky depths not being able to see as the silt was churned up, I thought about a samurai warrior meditating and everything was right with the world.

“What was it like back then, I mean, if you are as old as you say?” “Living in the mountains in a park where ponderosa pines stood over one hundred and twenty feet tall made it almost impossible to have bad days, especially in a place where everywhere you looked flowers grew brighter and bolder than anywhere I had ever been, brighter than the lilac fields that I once walked through in Hokkaido. Every once in awhile there were bad days though. I was fighting off...this feeling...it had carried it with me from the city trying to escape it. I felt alone there, although I had never felt more alone than I did living in Detroit. I had friends, I had lots of friends where I lived, but no one that could appreciate living in the mountains in a tiny trailer with a television that had three channels, a town that lacked a mall, a movie theater, or a string of bars where you could drink your worries away. Detroit, my Detroit, was a town of a thousand Cheers but no one really cared enough to help you move, lend you money, or cherish the fact that you were calling them in the middle of the night because sometimes you couldn’t wrestle them, couldn’t put them to rest...I saved one, over the years. Just one that keeps my feet on the ground.

“As silly as it sounds, waking up to the calm and peaceful beauty was nothing compared to hitting the fifty-six degree water of the lake and sinking down to a place where nothing mattered, where there weren't any malls, where there wasn’t anyone telling me how I should live, or no news of the world and all of her glorious attrocities. There was nothing down at the bottom of the water, nothing but the milfoil, a lake full of garbage, the sound of my bubbles and imagining all of my personal crap being carried away by them, and me. I would feel my adrenaline surge as I thought of the Lockness Monster...and I was at peace.

“At the first part of the season, before the tourists came in droves, I was diving with this ex-navy diver who had the craziest stories of bouncing around the world in the seventies, selling hash out of seaside bases and stealing military vehicles from compounds to carry parties of crazy divers to strip parties and drug fests. For the first two weeks I shared that trailer on the lake with him, so for fun we came up with a hundred dollar bet to see who could sink a golf ball from one of the hundreds we found at the bottom of the lake muck into the dingy that was tied up fifty yards off of the small beach in front of our trailer. He got the closest bouncing a ball off of the side of the inflatable raft one sunny afternoon after we beached the pontoon boat for lunch.

“I found it funny that the diver, who was neurotic anyways about smoking pot, didn't even know about 4:20. So I asked him the question?would you rather be high at 4:20 in the morning, or 4:20 (16:20) in the afternoon? I always thought 4:20 in the morning was better. I picked it up the year before when I started listening to Crazy Game of Poker. I started acting really stupid in front of the mirror posing, staring into my own eyes, and dancing around the house celebrating 4:20 burning on the very minute and always making the people that were about ready to pass out light up with me.

“When I didn’t have to give a piss test anymore I went crazy with 4:20. I wondered why pot smokers in America picked April 20th of all months as the weed new year, but would still plan every night from about 4:10-4:30 taking a serious moment, closing my eyes and trying to think about nothing at all listening to Crazy Game of Poker with a smile on my face. I meditated, just about every night to a song that made my inside vibrate with happiness. I meditated on the facts of life while I slowly prepared for my nightly ritual looking at the poster of Buddha I had; but after awhile, after my eyes got lost inside of myself I would always open then at 4:21.

“Ontop of working in the lake I got a job washing dishes in a newly opened restaurant because it went along with the very appealing theme that I really didn't have to talk to anyone, and no one really wanted to talk to me either with the attitude I had. It was great. Back in the disthtank I would put a cd in the player and lose myself in the mindless act of scrubbing the burnt potatoes out of the creases in the pans, and with every cell in my fingers that turned to water logged mush I would scrub more of the crap away from my heart that had collected over the years. It was very Zen.

“I had a few friends there, a few that could keep a conversation who worked in the restaurant and I dated a girl that worked there as well for a few weeks. The sex was good, although the after hours and empty pints that we drank over and over again still left me feeling very empty in lots of ways. After more time and getting to know everyone in the restaurant and some of the guests I was unwillingly pushed up to the front of the house where I had to rub elbows with some of McCall's elite, kiss ass for tips as I did through university even though I vowed when I left Detroit from the cover job where I extracted information that I would never do it again, and look clean cut and perky which I really couldn’t stand. Nights when I walked with a lot of moneyin my pocket with my adrenaline pumping I would yearn for the dishtank where I had nothing to do but listen to music, let my beard grow, and talk to no one while ever so slowly try to be an insignificant fly on the wall scrubbing a half eaten batch of clam chowder from a soup pan. I stopped seeing 421, and one night when I was burned with grease I realized that I was still moving too fast.

“Through all of this I was still partially tied to a girl that was living back in Detroit that I just couldn't get rid of. I’ve never understood women. For some reason I always knew that I was never going to find her again. The one that I lost. Her persistence, didn't help either; I remember I ended it one day only to pick up the phone two days later not being able to stand the fact that she had been calling me 30 times a day. Picking up the phone was the only way I felt I could get rid of her; it’s not like I ever lied to her and told her I loved her and promised to stay. She always knew I was leaving. In Detroit we had a great time, but I was off to find out why the world worked the way it did and finally go off to sit on a rock and think about why fishermen were fishermen and lawyers were lawyers. I think that maybe I was the one that was naive, so, I played along thinking that we would eventually drift apart and she would finally realize that I wasn't planning on coming back east, only carrying on west to search for the dreams that I had always wanted fullfilled?like going off into the world and seeing where I would end up. Like trying to figure out why I have always felt the way I do about things.

“I didn't want to be caught with a girl when I was sleeping with another women in town obviously when Detroit girl came out, although one of the restaruant owners saw us while we were driving inside the parameters of the four square block city center, so we drove way outside of the city limits after that. My fourth of July weekend with my Detroit girl seemed to rekindle our flame, or distort four letter words again altering my head making me think that maybe I didn’t really want anything to do with women. For some reason I knew that I was never going to be able to be happy that way. And one day it was ended.

“In the end, the only person I was left to talk to was a fifty-three year old woman named Mary who was the park's self-appointed president that lived two trailers down from me she was fighting to help save the trailers from the bulldozer plows. Around this time I heard about the park directors and how they were going to turn the fifty year old trailer park into a more eye appealling real estate venture for a bunch of greedy white men getting rid of the eye sore on one of the most scenic lakes in northern Idaho. I found work taking down snow roofs around the village because I wanted to feel like a local and have two jobs. I decided that my soul would benefit even more if I worked on donations because the ninety year old couples that had been living their entire lives there couldn't afford to have their snow roofs removed, let alone move the outdated trailers out of the bulldozer’s path. Mary and I got along well at first, although she talked even more than the diver did and I had to caution myself that if she stopped me in the street the next twenty minutes was going to be spent trying to come up with good excuses to go somewhere.

“She was completely melodramatic, which was extremely entertaining all at the same time, yet one of the most fascinating people even though I tried to avoid her. That was wrongly described which I later came to find out. She wore a bright red Mickey Mouse tee shirt the entire summer and as much make-up, not to metion the same color make-up, that a clown would wear. Always had a whistle around her neck and never showered, back then you could shower five times a day if you wanted and the water wasn’t black...” he said taking the joint from Doc’s hands, “do you know that just last week I got a letter from a friend that said they had just found 450 year old seeds that had been sealed in wax. The inscription in this jar was?To my family who I had to leave. I just hope that my God helped you understand.”

“It was what helped unify the world,” Doc said slow, watching a wind blow the remains of a building.

“Was that a structure?”

The 420 woman smiled.

“Yes, it was. If you sit here for awhile you will see many thing fly by. The winds of the North bring garbage down from their pile. It’s quite entertaining actually, wouldn’t you say Boy?”

And Boy came from around the rocks carrying a tray of hot green liquid.

“ ‘Quite.’” He said as he handed Doc the liquid. He the hot brew that was bitter and sweet, a taste that he had never had the pleasure of drinking.

“The fact that she didn’t shower I passed off to the fact that she was a Basque and had lived on a farm her entire life. Inside her trailer she had banana boxes full of things that she bought in CAR LOADS from dollar stores stacked in every corner and knew where everything was which was amazing because there were hundreds of boxes. She didn’t have a trailer, she had a warehouse. Trying to avoid her never worked too well because she knew my life, my schedule, and the fact that the only place I liked going to on a regular basis was a hotspring out of town where I once scored some hash with the Detroit girl from a guy that worked there, spawning yet another crazy story about a guy I went back to find again, one that could move as swiftly as a Scanner SHIP wind. One of many that I met when I was there.

“Every night when I went out on my porch to watch the sunset I would wear my earphones and blare my music loud so that Mary would know that I didn't want to be disturbed or talk to anyone. There was more than one occasion when she tried to talk to me and I pretended not to hear her because I didn't want to be stuck for twenty minutes, sometimes an hour if you let her in the screen door. At the beginning of the season I would sometimes listen to her ten different times in a day, but hearing different versions of the same story more than once wasn’t my idea of a great time.

“As the rest of the summer rolled on there were days when I would talk to a girl in my crew for more than two minutes, but other than that I would hide behind my earphones, and listen to my bubbles, and I was perfectly happy not talking to anyone. The more I kept my mouth shut, the more crap got hoisted from my heart. I dodged the ringing phone most nights hoping that Detroit girl would quit calling. It felt...horrible. I just knew that I could never come back. I knew she was never be able to move. But some nights I would get really lonely which would sometimes get the better of me and command me to pick up the phone. Eventually I tried again to end it and it led to a pregnancy scare at the end of July that brought us closer together for a bit. The closer we got the more weed she sent and the weekends for me were spent smoking all day long, wandering around the mountains taking pictures of flowers and writing my brains out thinking how maybe I did love her...but I would have never known. I would stay up past my 420 moments again missing them by only a minute, and never wanted to see what I was meant to see. I was scared to see who I really was.

“Detroit girl started sending me packages with Greatful Dead music that she copied from live shows when she toured around the country seeing them, as well as love letters and more and more weed.

“I thought it was funny, but I could slow down so much that I could walk above the trailers along the beams staring out at the lake and wondering when I was going to miss a step and fall through breaking my back on the floor below. I couldn't even see staight, but I would climb up the latter ontop of scaffolding to remove snow roofs where I could again revel in the fact that I could listen to music, not talk to anyone, and swing a hammer in a mechanical enough way that my mind would cruise on autopilot. I could work slow enough and efficiently enough to keep myself safe enough so I wouldn’t fall off of a roof, yet with every step I imagined my death, so pure, so tranquil it would be.

“Right around this time I was pulling weeds on an afternoon dive in the muckiest part of the south end of the lake near the Sherriff’s Doc when I blacked myself out from all of the silt in the water which was nothing too serious, a common thing. I got a bought of vertigo there, under the water, which I had only gotten one other time in my life and didn't know which way was up. It lasted longer than usual on this occassion, and as it did I imagined in all of its entirety a Lockness monster sinking its teeth into the side of my neck. I almost bolted in any direction looking for the surface, which I only did one other time was on a night dive in Lake Malawi. That night I didn’ t know where the black sky or the water began or ended. I held on for a moment longer until I broke free from the cloud that swallowed me into a sun ray that lit up the milfoil, a divine light, which is still a brightness that I can't describe, and the scared, mixed-up, confused feeling I had my entire life was instantly erased. If I think back hard enough I can almost picture myself crying inside of my mask at the fact that the disgusting milfoil that I grew to dispise was my savior, glowing a passionate brightness in the sun's rays. Everything was all right and I understood that there can be beauty in anything, pressence in absence, even in a single weed that fractured at the end of the growing season and made a hundred replicas of itself slowly sucking every molecule of oxygen out of the lake. I think that was why these...things...picked it.

“Towards the end of the season I avoided Mary at all costs because her drama was getting extremely harder and harder to hear or deal with and became borderline rude with her trying to end her crazy babbling and inconsistent stories. Maybe I just didn’t want to hear it. I got stoned more, climbed high above the ground where my life grew so slow that I could work at a steady pace for a long period of time knowing that no one could say anything about how fast I worked because I was working on donations, climb down, smoke another bowl and watch all of the crazy thoughts rush through my head at a pace that was ten times faster than my hammer. My thoughts would roll down my arm and erupt from the whack of my steady arm never to appear again. It was very Zen. 421, woke me up most mornings which made the calmness I felt in the lake slip away inside of me. I only felt anxious. I tried to tell the Detroit girl what was happening to me. But the only thing she could do was cry on the phone.

“I traveled back to The Rock City where I confronted my father who believed me to be a "fuck-up" wanting so much to tell him about the life he didn’t know about. But still he didn’t understand. That night I cried my eyes out feeling a power and a freedom I had never felt before, like a weight had been lifted off of my chest. The Detroit girl came home from work, we made love, and smoked the rest of the night. A few days later after botching my flight I took the bus back across the country with a bag of weed that was so good there were times I thought I was talking to God. I helped a blind girl that sat in front of me from Louisville to Salt Lake City around which gave me the luxury of slipping behind a dumpster every once in awhile without anyone REALLY thinking I was a bad guy. I got back to my trailer with nothing to do, but hit golf balls, smoke, and take down more snow roofs. I just needed enough money to get to the next diving job in Hawaii dodging the changing mountain weather after a two and a half day adventure seeing the real America, one bus stop at at time.

“My mind started wandering more and I stopped talking to everyone; when I went to the store or the hotspring I wore my headphones listening to music not caring about anything. My thoughts got more intense until I couldn't stay in the trailer anymore by myself and drove around most days and nights searching for something regardless of the rain or the fact that the strong weed made me swerve on the road a few times which I had never done in my life. I felt scared. I felt I really WAS around God. Mary became an ear sore and I would dodge her thinking that I had a “weed” problem, or that the ever present thought of having social anxiety disorder was more of a reality than I originally suspected. I started talking to Detroit girl on the phone even more and freaked out when my phone was turned off at the trailer that I was willing to do anything to stay connected. At the time, she was my only link to the outside world. I started writing 20 page letters to her pledging my undying love during the interim period, and the more I did, the more weed she sent. I really believed that I loved her, stoned or sober. And then 421 started on happening on things other than a clock.

“One night...one night it scared me so much that I drove around aimlessly with a glare over my eyes until I pulled the car to the side of the road and cried for a few hours. When the tears dried and the snot was dripping out of my nose I drove to a church as fast as I could but found it locked up, no lights, and no answer when I beat on the door. I paced around the parking lot for what seemed like an hour until I said in my mind that I was going to bail on this feeling I had unless someone, a priest came out right that instant so I could cry to him. I turned the next second and a man and woman were standing in front of me asking what I needed. It wasn’t a priest. I said I needed to talk to a priest, but they told me there wouldn’t be one until the next day. So the next day I went to a priest and had confession for the first time in fifteen years. He asked me what my sins were, but I told him I had no sins, I was coming to him because there was something I felt I had to do; I didn’t know what it was but I told him that I was scared to death. I saw his eyes come down to the necklace of the hemp leaf I had around my neck and told me that all men have sins, but I didn’t like the way he said it.

“I had conversations on the roof with another guy that was taking down roofs as well. Feeling the warm sun and chilly mountain air blow through a deserted trailer park that was built inside of the presently deserted state park weeks after the tourist season ended listening to stories about having to dig himself out of his two mile long driveway for five days. I thought about how silly he was not to have had snow chains on or a bigger vehicle if he lived two miles in the middle of nowhere, but thought about how Zen it was. I started longing to be there more, in Idaho, going back and forth between wanting to watch the leaves change color and snow start to fall around the mountain lake and going back to Detroit. I could have built a snow roof over my truck, bought some cross-country skis to travel into town and dig deeper and deeper into what had been bothering me for a long time.

“The weather changed, my thoughts got even more wacked out and I started to feel even lonelier than I did at the beginning of the summer. I switched from taking the snow roofs down for Mary after I almost got into trouble with a lawyer, to taking them down for the state; however, after trying to work around the cold mountain rain, realizing that the small amount of wages I was making wasn’t going to come to me for another month, and the fact that there were now two people living on the lakeshore plots between a gigantic boulder of bad energy that had attached itself to the wind that blew off of the lake. There was one trailer that seperated us, and one day, I decided on a roof that I was going to pack it up and move back to Detroit, only temporarily of course, before the next diving job I had in Hawaii. I was still on a mission to fullfill my dreams, but I also wanted to be with the girl that kept sending me the weed that convinced me I was talking to God that I thought I could love. 421 was everywhere now.

“Go pee,” Boy said to Doc, who got up with a tear in his eye. He returned and took the joint out of Boy’s hand who held it up without looking at him. And then The 420 Woman continued.

“About halfway home from Idaho I stopped in Denver to see an old roommate and reminisce about a haiku I wrote there in January, and Detroit girl called and told that she really WAS pregnant. Thinking back I think that the first thing I said through a gigantic grin was that I wanted to name it Herhim until we could come up with a better name. That night I bought a bag of weed from a guy named Pete which was a Zen moment because I realized that I was on my way back east and not west like I had originally planned. Still to this day it makes my head twirl at the uncanny coincidence. I smoked a blunt for the first time and sat out on the porch all night stoned and happy trying to figure out the next 20 years until my brain almost popped.

“Breakfast the next morning consisted of a good size bowl watching Gladiator. When the general spoke of Elysium Fields before the opening battle I started to think that the name Elysium, a place in ancient Greece believed to be where a person finds eternal happiness, was a perfect name for a girl. We could’ve called her Ely for short, I thought, and I soon forgot about the next twenty years and kept thinking about going to lamaa's class feeling like I was already sitting in an Elysium Fields. They didn't smell like anything, didn't taste like anything, and didn't look like anything, yet they filled my senses more than they had ever been filled in my entire life. My yin put on some lipstick while kickboxing to mozart thinking about past lives as my yang baked cookies wearing an apron made after a moment of self discovery. Or vice verse. I exhaled and all was right with the world, all was completely right with the world and the dreams that I had when I left for the west were immediately fullfilled. I thought about my father's generation and how he drank coffee to wake up in the morning and how my generation drank energy drinks to stay awake and realized that I was thinking of a song that I had been humming all day that put me into an Elysium dream.

“The next day I couldn't wait to get in the car and drive home with a newly purchased bag of weed thinking of a daughter or a son running and screaming around the house. It was a moment of utter contentment, yet I knew that it was an idea that I had to get used to, but I was almost more excited about the idea of a daughter because I had already thought of a perfect name. It made me laugh thinking that I always go with the first thing I look at on a menu, the first choice, the very first thing I think of that would be for me is what I would always order, regardless of how many other items I look at after that. My mind is always made up for the simplest, most important things, from the very first moment. And by this time 421 was just about flying past my face everywhere I looked.

“When I got there it was a reunion to remember. But for some reason, I knew it wasn’t going to last. I started looking around Detroit staring everywhere with a beautiful haze in my eyes seeing nothing but the Elysium Fields I had always wanted, as my mind melted into the blindness of nothing. For small, split-second moments I was seeing flashes of light when I started my meditations closing my eyes listening to music everyday. The flashes I saw seemed to signify to me each time I closed my eyes I was crossing a threshold into my mind that I call “after the split-second flash”. Both areas weren't different in matter, space, dimensions or cosmic time, and there is no clear indication whether the “after the flash” area was a good area or not. The "after the flash area" was just a symmetrical area of unmeasurable or undefined time where another twin moment was born.

“I’d stare into a magazine not really knowing or caring what I was looking at because I felt a warmth inside that I had always read about. It wasn’t like a contentment...it was a feeling that went farther than that, like everything was truly all right, everything was finally and truly all right where I felt like I had a purpose. I wasn’t just happy with the moment, I was happy with all of the moments I had ever had. I was at peace. No matter what happened I knew that I would never need to worry about anything ever again because I was going to be a father. That feeling alone could erase any miniscule problem that I had in my mind. And everyday I closed my eyes and meditated on nothing I took comfort knowing that I had lived my life like I had always wanted to live it and even though I would never be able to do everything I have always wanted to do I had always done what I wanted to do up to that point. In that moment I had a Zen moment and a moment later I grew up.

“We drove around to figure out a wrong turn she had made one morning when we were fighting and landed right in front of a billboad that read 421 E. Kemper Rd.”

“She saw it too, although she scoffed at it thinking that I was just talking crazy about 421 as I had been for the past few months

“I started a list that had all of the songs that I was listening to that were 420, 421, 422 and 428...”

“Did you say 428?” Doc said shivering and looked over at Boy who looked down at his feet that were up on his thighs.

“Yes, Doc, yes I did. And 422. I will get to those. They were in columns by what moments came at me, or rather, what songs my computer would shuffle to out of the 1400 songs I had on the player the moment I was thinking or singing the song. I started having actual moments everyday where I would feel like I was having deja vu as my moments were happening while I was happily loosing myself in a new song that I had once failed to recognize was 4 minutes and 21 seconds long.

“And one day, my God took them both,” she said, as if she were reading it out of a book. “I found a moment of Zen when I looked on the internet by chance one day about a Shinto God in the Japanese culture that protects the children who are part of the unborn, infantacide, and abortioned children. Then I realized that Himher's soul was and has been on a cycle that I can't stop. It sounds sort of like the most heartless form of cognitive dissonance that sometimes makes me feel like throwing up even now when I think of it. I can only say that it is what it is.

“I moved in with my mother after that...I did nothing. One night in my mother's basement I put my music on, meditated, and cried while singing like I often did and woke up The King of the house which I didn’t know at the time. I didn’t know I was crying so loud. The next morning he came down at 7:30 in the morning to the laundry room, my room, yelling at his son who was fifty paces behind him. I couldn’t see him from behind the sheets I had hung from the ceiling but watched him through the crack. I stared at the white sheet that hung from the ceiling at the foot of my bed noticing that after two hours of sleep it was particularly white that morning as the sun shined in from the basement window in my face. One night prior I drew all over it when I thought I was going to go insane, and liked the fact that I had a sun right in the middle that was even more yellow in the hypnogogic state surrounded with quotes from Emerson, Einstein and Thoreau. Out of disbelief and confusion, not from being annoyed, I went upstairs later that morning and turned down his music he had blaring on maximum volume. He turned it back up, left it on when he left the house, and I closed my eyes and thought of the pair of ear plugs that I had in the car from Idaho that I used on the top deck of the pontoon boat with the bilge pump. I went and got them and went back to sleep. A Zen moment.

“I started walking around the house with my hat down low over my eyes so that I could hover with glazzy, beautiful eyes while 421 passed by my eyes. I gave it a moment of recognition and nothing more. I didn’t give a shit. During this period in my life I started listening to Cat Stevens and my jaw almost hit the floor when I heard the shortest and most beautiful song of my life?The Wind. It was me. And I cried.

“I sat down and listened to that song for twenty three minutes straight, one song after the other one night. I know it was twenty three minutes because on the last chorus of the the tenth or so songs I opened my eyes after closing them at 3:58 and smiled. It was a Zen moment and I cried for a long time.

“421 came and went every so often in my day in some form or fashion, but after awhile I stopped being afraid of the clock and going out so I did a little at a time. I saw 421 every once inawhile, but not as frequently as I did when I was living with Detroit girl. I started seeing 420 more instead and thought about what it would be like to be a lion and walk around with a mane growing over my back down to my hips, what it would feel like to walk into a room with three females and let everything go. I thought about a claw coming across my face and scraping me under the eye while I fought to climb ontop enjoying myself thoroughly when I was overtaken. Or vice verse. I wondered what it would be like to be able to wake up next to three lionesses and smile because I was the Alpha. I am sure that in a past life I was a lion, maybe even a lioness. Freedom is freedom however you look at it.

“I thought about the Wolverine #93 where Wolverine hoped up ontop the bar with a pint in his hand, stood up straight to look into Juggernautt’s eyes, scktt'ed his claws to Juggernautt's chin and said, "I can smell that you don't want to get into this". I realized that I wasn’t going to feel right about myself if I didn't hop up on the bar with my Adamantium shimmering in the dissolved light either.

“It made me think about Junior High School when I used to be partnered up against Paul in tackling drills who outweighed a big eighth grader by a hundred pounds. Everytime I was paired up with Paul who ate a loaf of bread for breakfast I would tell myself that I would only hurt for a few seconds if I ran into him or he ran into me; after that I would be unconscious and my body would heal itself, so I always chose running into him. Maybe I could make him hurt too. Once in a training drill, during the spooky years, the man that stood a head above me used to tell me that I could hit harder than he ever felt.

“Through all of this I started to recognize these signs as something bigger than the same sequence of numbers happening at the most random times and places on a daily basis. They all didn’t happen every twelve hours on a clock like they used to, but all the time now. I overcame my fear and my feelings turned to arrogance. I started to get a big head thinking that I was a mesiah being sent messages from God or something.

“I thought back to a highschool picnic I was once at, where "we are free" and thought about the palm reader that said I would be traveling until I was 47. I smiled thinking about the poem "I Will See the World" that I had written a few months before in a class when I was bored. A Zen moment.

“It was about that there are times when I believe the cosmos is aready written. For the past ten years I had always wondered if I was going to fulfill the palm reader's vision, or if I was just going to wander the way I was supposed to and define the cosmos for myself all while I traveled the world.

“I resolved that I was going to grow my hair all the way down to my ass because the longer it got during the time in my mom’s basement, the better my life got even though I could not stop crying. For some reason the longer the hair the less crap. I wore these jeans that were for someone a head taller than me that I’d bought at an outlet store only because they were five bucks, one of three pair of pants that I didn’t give away to Goodwill, and cuffed them like a kid used to wear in the fifties, with my Dock's that my aunt bought me one year on Carnaby Street, a tee shirt, and a hoodie feeling retro. I started slicking my hair back at this job I got across the river in Canada dressing as a penguin at this ritzy hotel feeling like I was Superman and Clark Kent, Jekyl and Hyde, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton.

“I was usually written up but didn’t care. I realized that I had no control when it comes to hair gel, but, in fact, am way out of control with it. Somedays one of those little bunches of hair would pop up with such determination bursting from a glob screaming "what the fuck are you doing?!" as it tried to escape,” she stopped speaking for a moment and looked over to see if Doc was still awake.

“I’m still here...just listening,” he said with his hand covering his head.

“I once looked down in the fifties cuff of my jeans and found an ecosystem of "stuff" that fell in there during a wash week--bits of hemp chord, tiny beads, part of a note, and a little bit of potting soil so I decided to start a real ecosystem at my house. So I bought a venus fly trap (Dinonaea Musipula) , an orchid (Phalaenopsis), and two Milacanthropis junealus that I stuck in with a banana peel in a garbage can with a grow light. I called them Milacanthropis junealus (MJ) but were really known as Cannibus sativa. The genus species name I made up thinking that The King would never know when I showed him my journal with all of the scientific writting. I really was making an ecosystem; it was essential to my existence at the time, the only thing that made me smile on a daily basis.

“After coming home from meeting a guy at work on another day whose birthday is April 21st that talked about hydroponics and ventilation, who wants to be an activist for NORMAL and has insight to all of the drug laws in just about every state, I laughed inside sitting on my homemade bed in the basement thinking about how he told me that he had been born one day late and was upset about it because he missed 4/20 by a day. I thought to myself that I wasn't upset about him missing 4/20 AT ALL. I was more at peace than anything else resolving to quit thinking about everything and just go with it. I really didn’t care anymore who gave me shit about how I lived my life, so I resolved to keep doing what I was doing, living by my gut and letting my music take me where my heart wanted to go. Just like in The Wind.

“I thought about how if and when aliens come to this world they would most probably be instinctively be warriors because only competition makes things strive harder evolving socieities, competition in your soul and with your neighbors. Thier technology flourishing in their world first is probably because of a story like one of their moons was taken over by other aliens and they had to do a black ops mission from their planet to retake it. I thought that the moon was probably in shipping lanes or some new law of the heavens. That thought took me back to one of the only times I spoke out in college, in front of over 300 people in a huge lecture hall, to answer a Law of the Sea question--that soveriegnty was three miles from shore which was created to protect a country from how far a cannon could be shot from a ship during the days of wooden vessels. I have to be vague about the year because I really hadn’t been paying much attention before that point.

“I worked outside doing something mindless again thinking that it was a kick ass day. That night after I got home I had a piece of 2X4 that I threw up on the plastic deck tables to cut smiling contently and when I knelt down to cut it with a handsaw I realized that I hadn't marked it yet; however, there was a line that was already there, a line that I hadn’t drawn because I forgot a pencil in my weed induced state across the board exactly where I needed it, and I ran inside really quickly to see if I was lucky. 4:20 was on the stove in the kitchen. I went back to the wood, cut it and walked downstairs to find that it fit perfectly where I needed it.

“I started humming a song one day and didn't even think anything of it when my computer shuffled to it the next moment. The length of the song was four minutes and twenty one seconds and I chalked it up as one of the latest "421 moments". Some examples of other times I was at my computer doing the same thing when the same thing happened. May I?” she asked Doc as Doc crossed his legs. It was a small mind transfer.

[(IC) means downloaded internet copy

“4:20 moments” Voices Carry by Till Tuesday (IC), My Hero by the Foo Fighters from The Color and the Shape album, Solzbury Hill by Peter Gabriel (IC), and American Woman by Lenny Kravitz from the Austin Powers Soundtrack.

" 4:21 moments" Who Makes You Feel, by Dido from her Life for Rent album, Gravity Rides Everything by Modest Mouse from The Moon and Antarctica album

" 4:22 moments": Shake that Body by Technotronic (IC), Say Cherie by Martin Sexton (IC) My Hero by the Foo Fighters (IC); All the Love in the World by The Coors from their In Blue album

" 4:28 moments": Mr. Jones by Counting Crows from August and Everything After album, Secret Garden by Bruce Springsteen (IC), Yellow by Coldplay from their Parachutes album, Landslide by Fleetwood Mac (IC), It Keeps You Runnin’ by The Doobie Brothers, Wading in the Velvet Sea (IC) Mock Song from Round Room, and Piper from Farmhouse albums, all by Phish.]

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