desert mountains

Many years and decades later…

he sits atop a sand colored, house-sized pile of rocks which is itself perched, rather regally, he’ll think, atop a scrub pine- and bouler-strewn promontory situated three-quarters up the side of an 11,000 foot mountain. His relative insignificance, driven home and made perceptibly real by the mass upon mass upon which he perches, feels curiously comforting as the sun melts into the boiling heat waves of a horizon a hundred miles west. In his mind, superimposed upon this blue and yellow and rose canvas, he sees his own life inching forward at a glacial pace as though a course on a tattered map—a course which he alone will chart, which he alone will track, to its end. Wherever that may be, he’ll wonder again and again.

A course which, though tandem at times—paralleling the lives of his nuclear circle—is nonetheless a solo journey. As all courses are, he’ll muse. I am my course. I am what I am. A ray? A line? A plane? All these? None of these? A single line on the page, wandering to and fro, back’n forth, yet always moving from beginning to end. Or vice versa, he’ll guess more or less correctly.

The sun’s equator dipping below the horizon, he feels a whisper of a cool breeze on his neck and feels the goose bumps on his bare arms as he watches his life’s map become desiccate and crumble like ancient oak leaves suddenly heaved skyward by the churning gusts of a stormfront.

He’ll look up and stare, as on that bluing canvas the first stars began to materialize overhead, and watch the renewing winds vaporize and carry off into the void the sum total of his life’s journey; and the chart with it; and he becomes one again with the Om. With the Cosmos.

He wonders silently as the arctic pole of the solar disk sinks reluctantly into a sea which is somewhere off beyond the vantage of his eagle’s nest, yet whose salty smell will ever be there at the ready when called upon.

He wonders how different, really, are we: from the computers which we create…in our own image. And, for that matter, how different: from the gods which created us…in their own image.

The rose fades to pink, the lavender to blue; the night bloomers somewhere down there in the creeping darkness of the oasis spread their velvety wings and soak up the universe of dark matter as it flows by like so many dust motes in a photonegative. Above, the blazing pinpoints (with each their own army of theoretical angels singing praises to their masters) flicker like Christmas lights viewed from the mountain top.

…in their own image, he thinks. And he watches as the answer fractalizes and spirals inward—toward some hopeful vanishing point out just beyond the memory of that bubbling horizon—spinning into the singularity into which all questions must eventually fall into in order to be answered.

IN THE BEGINNING

IN THE BEGINNING….

…there was Chance. Some pointyheaded types have beleadened Her with the unwieldy and somewhat uppity moniker of Statistical Probability, but She likes Chance. Fact is, She’s not all hellfired up about the whole capitalization thing. But we do have EuroEnglish conventions. So Chance it is.
Anyway, as we were saying, in the beginning there was Chance. And She was thinking one day: Hmmm, what are the odds….and then She thought that if She introduced another dimension (Let’s us you and me we call it Time, She said) and voila! Suddenly all the theoretical possibilities which exist rushed outward in polar opposite directions—diametrically opposed, of course, so as not to throw everything out of whack before it even gets rolling—from the spark of that thought, and the universe, as we currently attempt to understand it, banged (or burped) itself into being.
Ahhh! Interesting, She said. And then, approximately two/thirtyfivetrillionths of a second later, before she knew what hit her, the dark matter and the light matter began to separate. Right there beneath her metaphorical feet! And, not at all unlike that lusciously deadly Utah powder, it began to slide beneath her feet. (Think: soil liquefaction. Eh? mm-hmm) and next thing He knew She was no longer in control of this new thought experiment He created.
And, well, in a nutshell, both hell and highwater, and everything else came on like a Tucson flashflood.


Things had calmed down quite a bit before the boy Justus clambered off the filthy twin Cessna and was promptly set upon by at least seven species of invisible flying insects. Not that they were actually invisible; it was the grimy salty sweat already pouring into his eyeballs that gave the damn little hemophiliacs free run of the boy’s exposed epidermis.
“Ow! Shit!”
Whack! came the hand that feeds.
“Don’t let me hear you say that again, young man, or you’ll get your mouth washed out with soap.” Justus father: William Piease: 1930—2001: born New Farmington Valley, Nebraska: higher ed’d Holy Warrior College (2nd runner-up valedictorian, vice pres of New Crusaders Missionary Fund, second tenor New Crusaders Missionary Fund Choir).
1st paying job—Assistant Pastor, 4th St 1st Assembly of God, Henry’s Wells, Navajo Nation, SouthWest USofA; $650/mo; rectory included, no car, no insurance: married Wilma (short for Wilhelmina) Proletare: Justus comes along exactly 9 “lunar months” later (said Wilma, grinning, eyes averted).
Listen young man, she growled without ever so much as twitching her permasmile, Jesus didn’t so much as say ‘shoot!’ It’s about time for you to start acting more like Jesus. Isn’t that right, William dear.
Well, Wil, I’m not so sure we oughta be comparing the boy to Jes—
She spun and hissed, still without ever twitching her smile: I told you not to dis…en…fr….urgggh! Don’t contradict me! Ever!
It wasn’t her fault, really. It was her bad time. And, as if that nasty little femmedemon wasn’t enough to deal with, the three-day non-stop series of flights, buses, cabs and donkeys had been rough on her. Womanly woman she was. Her skirt was dirty and her hair had fallen somewhere back around Camaranaol. He told her to forget about it, that nobody down here gave a heck what she looked like. The nuclear lasers shot from her eyeballs at him told him that probably wasn’t the best of consolations he could’ve chosen.
Lest the dear reader (hopefully there’s been more than one) misunderstand: Jehovah and Chance ARE NOT the same deity. Heaven forbid….it. Forbade it, actually. A long long time ago. Well, actually, Moses forbade it. Approximately 3500 years ago. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Or, roughly translated and even roughlier butherphrased: thou shalt have no other gods before Me.

owl kgjn w[erj gpsod (ancient Bedouin)

2.
Why in the world would God send me to this Godforsaken place?
Not a great opening sentiment for a missionary, nor even a missionary’s wife, one might think. But it didn’t so much as phase her, this seeming incongruity. Her consciousness had evolved with the peculiar ability to erect a firewall, so to speak, between her spiritual life and that running commentary which, in most cases, informs our ideas, concepts and, in the end, most importantly, the decisions which we all make. Indeed! Even those decisions we make at the subconscious level—that psychospiritual aquifer flowing beneath the sometimes choppy, sometimes placid, surface of our wonderful thumb-smashing/cigar-smoking/orgasm-having/tax-paying day-to-day reality—are so informed.
Seriously. Listen to this one. One day, in an uncharacteristically lucid moment, as a sophomore at Holy Warrior, on a Friday evening, Willy (her nickname), buzzed on two Schlitz bulls after having ingested a small amount of cannabis for the first and last time, and being completely and naively unaware of her stonededness, she saw the sum total of her knowledge not as a neatly organized hierarchy of intelligently sorted data (how she normally thought of her mind: a filing cabinet for God). No, she sat there giggling and staring and sipping the foam off the warm backwash of her Schlitz and staring out at the desert sunset. She could see (so to speak) her mind as more of an ever-putrifying effluent sloshing back’n forth in her corroded cranium. Flowing flotsam of foaming folderol threatening to drown her consciousness: in social taboos; to crush it between the tentacles of her inextricably rooted religious dogma; to suffocate it beneath sitcom laugh tracks. In her mind, she could see and feel her life as though it was one big purplish cow pie squeezing up from between the toes of Satan. And she reflected on the fact that her life was one of –otherness.
Some other place, some other time, some other job, some other man, some other child, some other home, some otherbody’s bank account. Some other life. Yet, in that vulnerability which getting potted brings on, even the concept of heaven……(is there anything other than the concept of heaven?) …was almost gigglable.
Almost? you ask. Obviously you weren’t raised in the Assembly of God Church. You try growing up in that jungle of ghosts and goblins and ultimates…and...oh, what's the use.
It does get better, though. Hopefully….