New Mexico July 14th, 1997

(Animal Stage (Abandoned) #2, 2011)

We're all cursed in the end. Some more than others. And that's the balance. Sometimes it's easier to imagine that we all lived lives before this one, and that the balance of life is not determined by the lives that we currently live but the lives we have lived and are living. It is easier to think that how wicked and twisted our lives are that we must have done something equally wicked and twisted in another life, sometimes going as far as thinking what if one was Hitler in another life, Jesus that would suck. But if that theory was true, I can imagine you'd be the world's most unfortunate soul if you had in another life been Hitler.

I remember once writing about that feeling of past lives, how life itself is so full of different phases and periods and divisions that the borders of one reality to the next, how one's mentality changes throughout a lifetime can sometimes feel as if one has lived previous lives. When I think back at my childhood in New Mexico it almost feels like another life, and even further back when I was living in Canada that life recesses so far back it is prehistoric. But to spite the time and the places in-between, I still don't imagine them as another life, no, but some memories that have been forgotten, that could be just as much dreams as lived experiences that are only conjured up by flashes of Deja Vu. There is a certain type of uncertainty that is associated with those memory flashes, this confused memory. Somewhere in all that mess of tangled memories, forgotten and distant is a childhood, are dreams, and are memories that one either wished to be forgotten or your mind simply shut them out, tragic kingdom forgotten.

I'm not the reincarnation of Jim Morrison but I did once witness a road accident in New Mexico as a child. And on that day I did once witness an Indian fellow die as our car passed by in slow motion. Looking out the backseat window, I saw people crying and a man covered in blood and dirt looked at me, but looked beyond me, endlessly, staring without a blink or a breath. He died looking in my direction, and like Morrison I wonder if his soul entered mine, through my eyes, the windows or THE DOORS to the soul. I have yet to forget about that day, just like a lot of the things that happened in the desert, I just find them less relevant with a life in the city, where there is nothing sacred nor haunted, to spite how historical a site may be, the hairs on the back of my neck have yet to be moved and the only goose pimples I get are from the cold heart of winter or stepping into the polluted waters of Lake Ontario.

Something occupies my soul, I was a child when that man on the side of the road died, and I was changing everyday, but something unnatural and perfectly natural in a supernatural way changed me from that particular point of my life. Just like how my boyish voice changed over night into a young adult voice. I swear it did, I had been at a punk concert the night before and was screaming and pushing and kicking, going crazy and wild, and the next day I had lost my voice and when it returned the following day I was a man. This thing that lies within me, that changed me that day in the summer of 97' has been the source of inspiration as well as spirituality within me. But I often wonder if it could have been a curse, a curse that isn't black and white with bad things being death and direct results but something like a slow working poison (it was far more twisted than that). The string of cause and effect was so complex and so extensive that it was impossible to trace other than going back to that particular day in the summer of 97' when it all started and recount each and every tragic and less-tragic event since. For years I believed I was cursed to remain to walk this earth alone, but then started to come across beautiful creatures that would walk along side me for some time, that never completely dissolved. Perhaps my curse isn't my curse per say, but the curse of the soul that is exists within mine, thatthat Indian is dead and yet living within me. I can name off 50+ dispositions I find myself in, that the word hybrid and in-between-ness is like breathing, I am neither inhaling nor exhaling nor holding my breath, I simply am in that brief pause between, in a temporary space that the likes of infinity hang out in. Nomadic, the mind is split between the right and the left, the borders of the soul and the body are undefined and obscure, the race I run is few and far between, I am the crack and the rumble, the moment after lightning the moment before thunder. The unspoken saying that exists between the glass half empty and the glass half full. And somehow I let this betwixt feeling invade everything else, that even the way I saw things were split, I lived and breathed a parallax view of the world. And perhaps I never had a choice, that what existed within me was me, a me that I had no control over, just like almost everything in my life, if not the entire shebang. I was born, given a name, put in a place, and grew up around certain people and all my primary establishment as a human was made without my choice, without my say-so, so how much of me remains original, of my own doing, that my choices haven't been preconditioned? The curse grew more complex, further I travelled along the belly of its length the darker it got. Something existential about the whole thing blew up, and at that point I decided to quit. Yes, to give up. What has been done is done, what is going to happen will only just happen, and if I were to die right now the world will still carry on, just as it was before and after me. The curse though will continue, I imagine that is was something far greater than me, my life, and even the people that were mixed up with it. That even before that dying man who sent the curse spiraling into my very soul, the same curse that had entered him, and it enter the thing that was the host before him, and so forth. No one could be blamed for cursing who and that, I just wondered which poor child or thing I'd curse myself. How the curse would resonate within them, change them, would they too lose their boy or girl voice over night, and will feel in-between just about everything. The crack would be back, and the crack was perfect word for it, the bottom side of humans once was an uninterrupted mount of flesh, such as the back until some point of history the curse introduced it's self to our species and split the two legs apart in two directions, and when early Man tried to sit he sat between two great divisions, where they met was a great blade, and the blade broke the even flat of the bottom of Man and produced a crack. We would never be the same, we started to wear underwear from that day on, though in those days it wasn't called underwear just a lion cloth then robe then something else then underwear. We decided to hide it, shameful of our disposition, our indecisiveness, and most of all, ashamed we were cursed.

The world is divided by two hemisphere, where as one half has winter the other has its summer and vice a versa. The toilet boil water flushes to the right in one hemisphere where as the other half it flushes to the left. I often wonder if people tend to walk differently in the southern hemisphere from whose of us who walk in the north. There is night and day. Tea drinkers and coffee drinkers. Lovers and haters. Birth and death. North Korean and South Korean. Going uphill and going downhill. Rockbottom and Rocking the top. Flying and falling. Sleeping and being awake. Being happy and being sad. Feeling full of hope and empty and hopeless. We live only in the present and yet we are divided by what just happened - what did happen, and what will happen. The present only last for that brief pause of time that is invisible to the eye, and as soon as we see it it is no longer the present but the past, if we try to anticipate it it is the future. And if we focus too much on both the past or the future we will miss out on what is right in front of us. There are a million Hallmark quotes and there is a million more, you can probably find the answer to life in all of that, but we choose not to taken by a cheesy little card written to a mass audience for times where we can not think of the right words to say ourselves.

I reach a point where I find myself as an adult, in a car, in New Mexico, but instead of being in the backseat I am driving, and we are slowed down, there is an accident ahead, we see flashing lights, and a broken parts and smashed up cars appear beside us. Through the window I swear I see the same old Indian fellow from years ago, he is even wearing the same things, looking the same after all these years, and I wonder to myself, has he been here all this time, or is this some sort of roadside attraction, something synthetically acted out day in and day out like the Waterworld show at Universal Studios. There he is, Kevin Costner, the man in the other vehicle is Dennis Hopper, and we watch the protagonist die, but this time his soul, his curse did not fly into my eyes and into my soul, not this time, something leaves me, and I feel light and lighter as something heavy and sticky leaves my body and enters his. His eyes roll back and an eagle above shoots up into the sun, eclipsing it for a moment before I realize I am staring at the sun. I turn to my passenger and grab her hand, I tell her everything is going to be ok, she looks back at me, confused, and doesn't say a thing, we ride pass the accident and soon forget it entirely.

We are at a crossroads. I slip the words beneath my tongue in a secret exchange I keep to myself.

(low whisper) "See you at the crossroads, crossroads, crossroads."

The eagle flies on heading north to what appears to be an endless landscape.

"...So you won't be lonely."