I met the old man in white again last night, the one who resembles Bukowski. We talked awhile, but mostly we drank beer.  He told me to keep everything hush hush, so I am not going to tell you any more stories of the amazing things about him or his powers.   He had my mind spinning.  It was weird, strange; I was very ill at ease at times.  Moments of clarity hit me like they hadn't in years.  In the late 70s I became a shaman.  Not by choice, but by calling.  I could detect the undercurrent of my shamanistic energy bubbling when I talked to him. 

Thinking back, he saw it, I'm sure that he knew the minute he saw me.  That was why he came right over to me even when his friends were telling him, "No, stay seated, you don't just reveal what you do to perfect strangers."  I thought that I was a shaman cloaked by shadows, but a faint glow must still be there because his keen eyes detected it. (see previous blog for more on the old man in white)

I spent a few years in Africa and learned some of the ceremonies that constrain and/or focus these powers. I drank a lot of chicken blood, spoke with the ancestors, and honed my senses. I spent more years amongst the Cubans in Miami and saw how the Santerias manage the gods.  I practiced in my own way from time to time.  In those days I had the vision, the eye, the clarity. Lately, I keep to myself a lot.  I can't bear to be with people. It's not that I don't like people, but I see, I hear, I sense too much.  It's part of the curse of having shamanistic powers.  My actions become instinctive. I think that I can channel the power positively, but things often backfire, turn out wrong. I don't trust myself. I fear what might happen.  So I stay hidden and paint or write.  Better to let the force flow into the plywood that I paint on or the plastic keys that I type on.  Unleashing that energy in a random uncontrolled way can be risky, can be painful.  I don't want to hurt anybody.  I drink heavily trying to dull my vision. I knock back my third shot of tequila, "Here's mud in my eye."

I've said enough, I've said too much, so I'm changing the topic, NOW.  I met a radiant young blonde the other night at the same bar.  She was with a large group of yellow haired folk; moms, and sisters, and kid brothers.  The men in their lives must be back home in Amsterdam or The Hague with their fingers or something else stuck in some dike.  The one sitting closest to me looked like an angel, really, no kidding, but without the wings.  Everyone was having fun drinking beer and laughing.  The rap version of 'Staying Alive' by the Bee Gees was booming out of the speakers. The house was rocking.  The place was jumping.  We were all doing some funky chair dancing, getting into it, getting down with that funky sound. 

That's when I noticed that the angel kept looking over at me.  It didn't take me long to strike up a conversation.  She had a light moka tan so I asked, how long have you been here, 3 days was her reply. "Damn, that's a good tan for 3 days, You got any white bits left? Can I have a peek?" She flashed me a smile and a quick look at part of her uppers. Oh, baby, baby, baby, why you tease me like that? I bite my hand.  So I find out that she is 19, got most of the tan at the salon back in Holland, and wants to find work as a waitress at one of the bars along the beach.

I've been sitting at the bar a few hours and I had a few back home.  By this time naturally I gotta pee, water the flowers, so I go to the men's room. (In the fantasy version of this story, she gets up and follows me there, and we do unspeakable acts of an extremely perverse nature)  I get back to my table and fuck what do I see – 4 studdly Portuguese guys huddled around her.  C'est la vie. I used to get depressed when confronted with these situations and ponder suicide, but a few drinks and a few cigarettes usually satiate that craving. I switch from beer with tequila shots to straight whiskey on the rocks.  Which reminds me off this gem of a story.

You can buy anything on ebay.  A bunch of writers are doing a charity auction and hocking immortality (they are so humble).  They'll make you a character in their next books. Steven King's offer looks particularly attractive. He warns, "Buyer should be aware that 'CELL' is a violent piece of work, which comes complete with zombies set in motion by bad cell phone signals that destroy the human brain,"  Then he adds, "Like cheap whiskey, it's very nasty and extremely satisfying," adding that if the buyer wants the character to die, it must be a female name.  What a fucking dork.  He steals a quote of mine and can't even spit it back properly.  It's not cheap whiskey. It's cheap sex. There ain't nothing satisfying about cheap whiskey.  It usually tastes like iodine and the next day your head feels like some monkey is boring holes into it with a Black and Decker power drill. Cheap sex is something you can savor for a long time.  And cheap sex 'is' satisfying, well at least more satisfying than no sex at all or sex with your grandmother.  I did have cheap sex with a 'friend's' grandmother once which wasn't too bad, but that's another story for another time.

So, Steven let me throw you a scene for the movie version of the book and try not to screw it up this time.  Soon to be Zombie Girl, mid-western high school corn fed cutie, Christina Applegate from 'Married with Children', gets infected by these bad cell phone calls.  The bimbo deserves it though cause she's working for Dial-A-Wank and talking dirty for hours to little boys who have stolen daddy's credit card and are ringing up mega bills at $2.95 a minute while they pull on their knobs and shoot their loads into a hanky. Soon Bimbo Zombie is cruising the streets of Chicago looking for some dick to suck and some souls to steal. 

She walks aimless down a busy street filled with late night thrill seekers.  She is scantily clad in tattered denim shorts that expose the cheeks of her fine little tush.  Her halter top is damp with perspiration from another of those Chi-Town killer heat waves.  The shirt clings tight to her body like a latex glove on a corrupt customs inspector's hand. With her arms out stretched doing the zombie shuffle her areolas and nipples can be clearly seen through the light white fabric of her top. Christina Zombie Girl is on the prowl.

Guys stare at her. Women stare at her.  They know she is a zombie but they don't care.  They've seen plenty of crack heads in worse condition, so a few zombies roaming the city don't merit most people's or the news media's attention. (A fatal flaw in their thinking which leaves this growing phenomenon unchecked until it reaches epidemic proportions.) Besides everyone knows that zombies are easy.  Christina Bimbo Zombie enters a disco.  The music is loud and the bass is thumping hard.  Lights are flashing everywhere.  The smoke machine is billowing. CBZ and some other zomboids are dancing frantically as the re-released Michael Jackoffwithaminor retro hit 'Thriller' blares through the sound system.

Suddenly, she stops dancing.  She is covered in sweat, her halter top wetter than ever.  She walks over to a dark corner where 4 college jocks are sitting.  She lifts her leg and swings it across the low table knocking all the drinks in their laps.  She plops her ass down in the middle of the table and slides out of her shorts. Spread eagle on the Formica she looks them in the eyes, rolls her tongue around her lips and says, "Hey big boys, you want some cheap zombie sex, it's very nasty and very satisfying."

America is a land of illusion.  Reality is hard to find even on Reality TV. No one's dreams and fantasies are any less real than another's. We hold on to these illusions, dreams, and fantasies because there is nothing else to hold on to.  People used to hold onto God and the God fable.  But that's passé. God is passé. God and his anointed or appointed ones used to make the rules. Thou shall not diddle with your neighbor's dog in a homosexual fashion. Today, everything is relative. There are no real hard and fast rules. Dogs beware. Even sanity is relative.  King's book will undoubtedly be a best seller.  People will drive to the mall in their gas guzzling SUVs to buy the book and some t-shirts with someone else's name on them.  The war for oil goes on in Iraq.