(Outer Body Experience, from We Soon Be Nigh!, 2012)
The call came from all around. It was dark out with barely a blue cast to the sky and silhouettes of the trees. Our breath was smokey and all I could do was remember the act of acting like one were smoking when their warm exhaled air met the cold air of the outside world. It sounded like a howl, perhaps from an animal perhaps from a human, either or it was wild and that's about all that mattered.
We called it, him, her, the thing, the Shotcallah. His face was of fur and his eyes beamed outwards like a light tower does in a dark and stormy seascape. His teeth were yellow like years of smoking and his breath and body odor were surprisingly tame. When we brought Shotcallah out and about he would attracted all the attention, from all walks of society, and he would provide. Hooting and hollering, howl and hiss, he tore the clothes that looked wrong on him off and ran around with his hairiness. And somewhere in all those chaotic moments of wild versus the unwild was whether or not he was a he or if he was a she we stared and waited at its crotch for its garbage to show itself from out of the wild bush.
Never did we find out, and eventually we stopped wondering and let Shotcallah be simply and rightfully, Shotcallah. Of no gender, race, or housey home. And that was that.
To be wild and yet to be tamed.
When I came from my home country to here I had a set of rules that I lived by. I would behave a certain way and saw the world a certain way. Those have surely changed. Back in the motherland I'd sit in the backseat of the car and watch the city at night. The lights falling on the contours of the car's reflective paint job and all was quiet but the radio that faintly played in the background. I remember the illuminated fastfood sign, and the warmth of fried food sitting and waiting to be tore at. I felt at peace and realized in that moment, one of those moments that I had a gift. That gift was perspective and it gave me insight into the world outside of my normal eternal situation. I would constantly try to externalize myself with others. I would imagine life through their eyes and become them. I'd learn their history and try to piece them together. When I was with them I'd see myself through their eyes and think of how I sounded, how I looked, was I saying the right things with the right tone? Who were they at the time I was talking while I was trying to figuring out who I was? When drunk the sober half stayed and held me up and listened to my voice, my words, my tone as I spoke to others, or how I behaved while purchasing a burger and fries with two tacos. I was listen to that kid and watch over him as he fell asleep. When he was high I'd be there as well, I'd make sure he remembered every eureka thought and made sure he wrote down everything. I was there when he was about to make bad decisions. I was always there, as two, we were together, always.
I never got to do Peyote while I lived in the desert, nor did I do acid that one time. I never was arrested nor did I ever really get caught (only assumed and looked at with stern eyes knowing, he did it, he really DID do it). But all the horseplay is done and I have moved many times since and have met so many people, been to so many places, and have experiences a grander sense of being since. One day I can wake up as a thirteen year old boy and realized that the past thirteen years of my life were all a trip. That my coming to age and coming to AGE were a cheap gimmick to storytelling. But forget all that and let's mediate on it. Imagine waking up and realizing that that ordinary life you were living was just one long short trip? It makes it extraordinary, it makes it fantastic, and bleeding in meaning. And why can't it be.
I have never stopped throwing my eyeballs at things and seeing the world at a different angle. Nor has the guardian angel of self projecting self stopped watching over me. I barely know you and yet we are no longer strangers. And perhaps we were never ever ever strangers, that we had met before, and not in another life time but this: we have met each other through the people we have known and experienced, we know life as life and from the very example of our own life that we are in tuned with it -as it flows through our body and is all we are. Life. Can't you see your life in a riverbed? Can't you see it in the wind as it shakes up the branches and the leaves struggle to hold on? Can't see it in the weeping of weeping willow, the striking hawk, the roar of a lion, and the blood of an elk? When wine is blood and bread is flesh, when a circle is the soul, a circle is a bond, and a circle is the world. When we are wild and at peace because we were never unwild nor tame. When we step out of our tempurpedic beds and realize what is on the surface and what is deep within, so deep it is lost in flesh!
That which you realize, THAT which you are, is exactly that, you and are, in being, as just that, you are looking somewhere else but what is inside is all that matters. When it all comes back and you realize you were always looking at yourself as you looked out to see yourself. Like a pat on the back, like a kneeling friend to help you back to your feet, that hand that holds the door open, those hands that cut your steak up and feed you, even when you are too old to be fed. That was you, silly. Be good to yourself.
And so Shotcallah yelled out at the night, smiled, peed himself, and smiled some more and waved his big furry arm as his body became another shadow to the moon. The trees rustled with the wind, the song in my heart sang, and I was feeling pretty good. Warm from the liquor and drunk from life we all retired in the cabin next to the woods. The end.
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