Sanctuary sanctorum...

They’ve been part of the human legend for a long time now, and if they’ve been part of so many different people’s legends then it’s fairly likely some elements of those legends are truly part of the human condition.  I’m talking about those with the strange abilities... the psychics, the prescient, the empowered and the aware.  All the things of the mind that defy a full explanation in trial by causal logic, and yet equally defy a full acquital and dismissal by the same court.  The mysteries as they’re called.  My thought today has to do with the life experience of those who are the source of those legends, they who superlatively sane or shattered soul crazy must live with such  perceptions as part of their life.   A couple of posts back I was speaking of my favorite character in the Matrix movies, The Oracle.  I suppose I’m still wandering a bit in that thought, trying to fit my version of reality into some perspective to allow me, limited to five senses and an imagination, to actually have some idea of what it would be like to live with six senses, or seven, or perhaps so many they just blend beyond counting. 

What would it be like to try and grow up with such things part of your world? To be all of two and a half the first time you perceived your parents having sex, not with your eyes or your ears, but with some sense that echoed both momma and daddies’ physical responses through your body?  It didn’t really hurt, but, then maybe it did?  There ya’ go Siggy, why don’t you and L. Ron  work out the dynamic on that one.  Come on Jung, step up to the plate, don’t let them sex maniac perverts beat your time, why don’t you tell us how far back you’re supposed to pull after the time when you were almost four and riding in the grocery cart hoping for lots of tasty little fruity things in the big colorful box when you looked across at the momma type looking the other way and her fear of what the daddy type does to her at night hits so hard you piss your pants for the first time in two months? Try and imagine being a little child the first time you’d perceive such things.  Try and imagine how hard it would be to deal with such things when you’d have such a small amount of understanding compared to such a huge amount of raw data.  It’s totally intimidating, really.

But at least you got an early start on understanding, that might be easier in some regards than say getting to be twelve like any other twelve year old kid and then finding out that hey, not only is there this brand new thing called the hornies, but every time they show up the whole fucking sky might as well be paisley pop tarts because dammit, you saw it there and then just three days later there it was on the ground for real and it’s happening more and more and it’s always three days, never two, never four, always three... soon enough you’d be going no, I don’t want to know that, or that either, and would you stupid fuckers please be careful before... nope, to late.  Likely enough soon enough you’re hiding in anything and everything you can find that has half a chance of shutting down the damn ticker tape in your head because when the ticker tape has been running for to long then really strange shit starts happening and the other folks are starting to notice it only happens like that when you’re around?   How long before you’re literally blowing in the wind rather than be in any one place long enough to cause someone harm?

No, I don’t think being one of those whose life crosses up with the mysteries would be all that enjoyable, not after ten, twenty, forty years blowing in the wind before you feel yourself being called into some odd place and she has such strange eyes and fuck, you can’t feel her at all, not even a smidgeon, hell, while she’s looking at you everything goes silent, and she smiles at you so soft and tender and that smile is suddenly the most terrifying thing of them all because it’s then you hear the winds of limbo in your soul ripping at what’s left of your sanity and you know, you know that of all the people you’ve ever met she’s the one who knows what she’s looking at.  Then she holds out her hand and that’s the most terrible moment of your life while you’re looking at the warm comfort she’s offering and trying to decide if you’re brave enough to follow her in or strong enough to walk away.   

Pondering Wax...

This is a free write vent... read, or not, as suits your fancy.  It’s just a ramble where I’ll let the world stand for my confessor.

At the moment I’m looking at a bottle of whiskey.  It’s good whiskey, my whiskey, I earned it.  But I haven’t opened it, the wax seal is still intact.  If you know your whiskeys you know what kind it is, but that’s no big deal.  It’s whiskey, and good whiskey.  But that’s not why I’m staring at the bottle. I’m staring at the bottle wondering if it’s wise to open it yet. 

You see, I earned the whiskey scrubbing down a kitchen prior to turning in a set of keys.  Now I am NOT someone who gets a cheap thrill out of working sponge mops and oven cleaner and buckets of pine-sol solution, nope, not even if my helper is a sweet thing wearing a tiny little French maid outfit with no panties and a cut-away corset top where she has to be careful not to get her nipples in the suds, which she most definitely was not. Sorry... no French maid outfits in this story.  Nope, scrubbing kitchens is not enjoyable work. I’m sure somewhere in that ever more massive lexicon of kink the fetish folk maintain there’s some fancy acronym for them who feel differently, but that ain’t me.  Scrubbing kitchens is just a chore needs doing from time to time, and since the gal whose chore it was by rights was scared of the job semi-chivalrous dinosaur that I am I volunteered to work mercenary for a bottle of whiskey.  I figured what the whale, if I don’t drink any more whiskey than what I can earn in barter scrubbing kitchens I’m damn sure not going to hurt myself. 

But if I’m honest about the whole affair there was more in play than just that bottle (which was simply the first thing to pop to mind when I realized I had to ask for something lest QB, the lady who needed the help, conclude I am  host and home to some sort of domestic fetish, opening the possibility of her starting rumors to that effect which allowing for the fact there’s a couple of gals who’d really, really like to get their hands on me might end up with me owning season tickets for this years theater of the absurd.  No thanks, not this year sweetheart.  Maybe next year, but not this year).

As close to Omega as I'll ever post

You see, at one time the kitchen in question was Omega’s.  The little pad has changed hands at least once since then, finally ending up with the keys in the possession of QB, the woman who is, or at least was, as close to the HFFIC of Omega’s circle of lifestyle folks as is ever formally defined.  But a set of wandering keys didn’t change anything, for me going back in there was like that line in Leonard Cohen’s great song Hallelujah, you know “...baby I been here before, I know this room, I’ve walked this floor...”  Some of the more intense hours of my life went down in there, I’ve got memories six axle heavy tied to that little pad and the lady who used to live there.  Never got tied down to a kitchen chair, still have my hair, but... yea, and definitely hallelujah, or close enough for me.

A True Love's Dream...

The image is, or soon will be, part of the story of Sha Haisat and Keyanna... one of Keyanna’s dreams where the intensity attracts First’s or Second’s attention, this perhaps the first time where out of concern for her safety they attempt to make contact with her while she is asleep.  They are after all almost pure intellect, they really don’t know that much about dreams and dreaming. Fortunately for them all Keyanna is quite comfortable in a state of lucid dreaming, to hold a conversation there is not a thing of great effort for her.

First and Second are immensely curious concerning the new variety of floating nodes now occupying the surface of their planet, and the Keyanna node is a fine specimen who seems as willing to converse with them as the new fixed node of their own kind their convention assumes they will parent, a node that somehow took on the structure and memories of the once floating node Sha Haisat. 

They are aware Sha and Keyanna consider each other as prime edges, that the relationship endures beyond the mysterious conversion of Sha from a floating node to fixed node is a thing of great fascination for them.  As the days of Keyanna’s retreat run on awaiting Sha to mature enough to speak with her directly they hold many conversations encapsulated within Keyanna’s dreams, it seems a polite thing to them, to  leave her waking hours free to tend to her survival, and to contemplate what she’s learned... where they learn so much as well.

The Oracle on Elm Street...

Life Outside the Matrix

The Matrix series were great movies.  Well, the first one was great, the second and third could have been better, fewer special effects, more deep thought, but yea, for mainstream Hollywood still pretty good stuff all things allowed for.  Easy seen they were to their generation what the Kubrick/Clarke collaboration on 2001: A Space Odyssey was to my generation, movies that make you step outside the box, at least for a little while.

The Oracle and the Architect, Neo and Smith... classic stuff, those two pairs.  I’d liked to have seen, heard, more from the first pair.  Now Neo and Agent Smith are the quintessential opposites, the savant hacker become cyber warrior matched against the soon to be viral rogue hunter-killer program, entities who shared enough in common to be true enemies of the deepest sort.  But the other two, the Oracle and the Architect, they were both programs, appeared even closer and far older adversaries. Somehow they felt... divorced... to me.  I’d love to know their heritage, their version numbers.  The architect who built the matrix, and the oracle who understood the humans, and the humans influence on the machine.  A fascinating balance of power.

As time has run it’s been the Oracle I’ve found the most fascinating of the characters.  She was in charge of keeping the humans safely engrossed in the illusion, I’m fairly sure of that.  Which means of course she had to deal with the full spectrum of human abilities, the random mutations and evolutions, the statistical outliers that genetics will throw.  She had quite a job, she really did.  The most fascinating facet of her job would be dealing with what the humans themselves never really understood, which is where she would derive her power that even the architect would be compelled to defer to, at least in degrees.  Bottom line is the Oracle is why the Architect would almost have to believe in God.

IF it is allowed the human legends have some basis in fact, the mystical and the psychic, then those functions would still be resident and active in the humans powering the matrix.  If you allow they’re present in humans whose life is not what it appears to them (when examined from outside the parameters of that life) then for a matrix style relationship between the human and the machine to function smoothly those abilities would need to be accommodated in the grand scheme of things.  You know, what do you do with the little boy who likes to make the spoon bend and twist and dance, driving every checksum routine right into utter crash and collapse, and the Architect himself right into insanity? (they did everything but give him the name he’s know by in our history ;-)  The answer is quite obvious, if you truly understand the common humanity beneath the uncommon ability.  You bake him cookies.

That’s what I said, yes.  You bake him cookies, and you show him love, genuine love based on the most benign wisdom available.  Yes, he’s the most dangerous thing in your reality, but he doesn’t know that, not really.  And so long as the love he feels is warm and nurturing, so long as it is genuine and gentle and just he’s not likely to.  There’s no motive for him to reach beyond just playing with the spoon.  A spoon size anomaly the Architect can accommodate, but one the size of a city, a planet, a primal law of physics?  No, those would be beyond even the Architect’s abilities.  Or the delightful little girl, who’s really a subroutine at risk of being terminated, the little girl who puts the colors in the machine made sunsets, the little girl program who is in her own right so terribly close to human?  How do you keep her from writing the truth in the sky for all the humans to read?  Same answer, of course. 

These thoughts are why every time I meet a strange woman, not just someone whose life story I’m not familiar with but truly a strange woman, and she offers me something to eat?  I always wonder if there’s more to that cookie than Pillsbury had anything to do with.  Just me, my private wonderings and perhaps superstitions. The Oracle was a program, a massively powerful program, at her level she could appear to the humans as virtually anything, even some uber hot Lady in Red if that would be the best line of approach to defuse a risk. 

I’m not saying I think I’m living in The Matrix the way the brothers presented it to the world, but then again, there’s an awful lot of things from the history I do know that would explain out quite neatly fit to some analogy of that relationship between the Oracle and the Architect.  The Oracle was most definitely my favorite character.

The Mustering of the SoulMarine - or - dharma and Who?

Ok, the semester is over, time to evaluate what was learned, time to process the intel and see what the reconnaissance mission brought back.  There’s a fair amount to wade through, and the ancillary data is rapidly becoming very interesting indeed. Since there were no casualties beyond wear on the boots all and all the mission was worth the price (although in dollar value that price is grossly inflated over the last run, but go figure... education is a business, the commercial side of the academics, and the current mission statement of that business is to remove a college education from the average American’s dream as just to damn expensive for what is gained... they’re not fooling me on that point, they’d like to reestablish their elite status after what the G.I. bill of WW2 fame did to it).

The last essay was submitted last Wednesday per instructions by email, so, should this post pop up on a plagiarism search? Hi  Mr. Instructor B, hi as well to Dr. D. Sorry to get your hopes up but yea, Cyranos DeMet is my pen name and I can prove it.

As I’ve said in more than one post the purpose of the reconnaissance was to get a feel for what part, if any, the education system is playing in the spread of the perversions consuming the American culture.  Well, let’s just say they’re damn sure not doing much to oppose it.  Why do I think that?  Several factors.  The first was walking on campus and over the very first cup of student union coffee finding in the campus paper an editorial by a psych student proclaiming himself a gay-tolerant Christian followed not an hour later by the instructor walking into the classroom blowing the same thought with enough personal derision to make me think of a berserk Aegis system (Navy fleet air defense) firing on every passing cloud.  He was putting A LOT of lead in the air. 

But that was just the first day, and kind of peripheral to my cause anyway.  I have no real grievance with the gay folk, not for simply being homosexual, particularly if it’s a psychiatric thing and not psychological.  It’s more difficult, but you can be homosexual and still be a good person.  Not an issue to me if the Oklahoma State Cowboys want to accept the New York kind of cowboy, the New York cowboy just like the Yankee women will figure out soon enough they don’t need to be terrified of the size of that thing in the local cowboys’ hip pocket.  Contrary to their travel agent’s innuendo it’s actually a can of snuff, not a condom.  Anyway, enough sarcasm, I’ll call that even for what I had to sit through the first day with a strait face (puns fully permitted).  What I won’t call even is what happened at the end of the semester.