Tapestry Dance - Three

In the beginning…

In the End Times…

In these times we live in…

Our opinions are brought forth regarding all of them. Opinions we have learned to cultivate from the best of literature, the best of history, the best of divine inspiration, the best of interpreters of these things and also the worst of all of them. The debate continues. So does the acrimony and fanaticism. What can protect us from becoming overrun with it when it achieves critical mass?

When something happens which is not explainable by means we can identify, or objectively understand how to become a cause of, we consider it magic. We encourage children to believe they can be magical, we claim that they are, we enjoy the belief that magic can appear to conquer our difficulties; while we openly ridicule anyone who claims or can even demonstrate that they are in some way magical, or that they reside within the influence of magic, or that the experience we share needs to be interpreted within a ‘magical’ context. We find ourselves subject to historical and political opinions about what kinds of magic we can ‘permit’ in our lives and the extent to which we can take it literally.

When magic appears in a person’s life, we place labels upon them according to the nature of their influence on us and the fears we carry. We call them angels and demons, we call them witches, wizards, sorcerers, mystics, lunatics, criminals, and saints; perhaps we paint them with the personalities of historical characters from religion and mythology. We test them for satisfaction of our expectations of a character from existing myths, or for the appearance of events required to satisfy a prophecy.

The mistake in all of this is to place more importance on the satisfaction of our beliefs and expectations than the truth of our shared experience.

There are many ‘scriptures’ which begin: “In the beginning…” A problem with this is that the earliest of these known to archeology were created within the last twelve thousand years or so; but the history of humanity, and life itself, is considerably longer. There are many problems with any belief in those three words. Meanwhile, all of these ‘scriptures’ presume a time-frame of the spirit of God, and all of spirit itself, as eternal – from a time with no beginning projected forward to a time with no end. In response to this, we preserve ‘prophecies’ which make projections of the events and personalities populating narratives of ‘the End Times’, while we make no end of debate over meaning and the extent to which we are to believe or disbelieve anything specific about any of them.

If we find ourselves within an experience which sufficiently resembles any number of prophecies, a social conflict inevitably appears. We live in a culture of skepticism and empiricism, while we also live in a culture which protects religion politically. Within a time which resembles prophecy, a belief in the religious significance of our experience is both attacked and defended by not just atheism but also religion itself. A device of science and social-will among secular interests which might contribute to such a circumstance may also be used by all parties to discredit its religious significance, to the extent of tragically ignoring what truth might still be found in it. Meanwhile, the momentum of a belief in prophecy may consume and destroy any more subtle growth in wisdom which might otherwise be discovered in the experience.

Any conflict between social events and an expectation tied to beliefs or ideologies which we defend becomes a lever which influences emotion and behavior. Because of the differences among us as individuals and as members of schools of belief, these conflicts can become amplified and our emotions and behaviors can become further distorted. In a time where we suddenly find ourselves in an experience we can interpret as magical or prophetic, these conflicts can become dangerously amplified again. All of this demonstrates the need to closely examine our beliefs and ideologies in light of what we strive for in protecting them.

There are many sources which discuss Love and Fear as the prime polarities of emotion. We can easily place Love and Fear at opposite ends of a rubber band in our imaginations, then stretch it out and place ourselves and each other somewhere within the area we have imagined, which then becomes the wellspring of our behavior and personality. There are those of us which find passion in defense of either extremity within ourselves and each other, while others defend a balance between them with equal passion. The relative presence or absence of passion now becomes a ‘y-axis’ in a description of our emotion, behavior and personality. Meanwhile, we could extend a ‘z-axis’ through time, and interpret the personalities and evolution of ourselves and each other through trends among oscillations of these aspects of emotion and motivation.

This serves as an example of the beginnings of an epistemological methodology which I began describing as Domain Theory almost two years ago. For better or worse, it became popular to debate Domain Theory within a context of rhetoric which was tortuously polarized, while the debate was over-laden with an ever-growing mountain of boiling, steaming issues beyond reasonable limits of discussion; and I became enslaved to the resolution of the entire discussion on pain of death. To this day I have not become able to escape the debate anywhere I have been able to go for any length of time. The answer I present to this, which people persist in ignoring, is that Domain Theory has absolutely nothing to do with rhetoric, and the entire discussion is a dangerously irresponsible and disgusting insult to the opportunities which led me to begin developing it. Meanwhile, within the advance of a telepathic social-reality, I have become able to guide people into becoming almost-safely accustomed to the experience, so now I have a duty to step past that particular issue and resolve the social awareness of something which people have dangerously misinterpreted.

We can say that emotion influences behavior. We can also say that beliefs of all kinds influence both. If our experience suddenly challenges our beliefs, then as human-animals we do have the irrational ability to choose to defend either our beliefs or our experience. This choice then aggregates into our social will and behavior. It obviously becomes necessary to defend ourselves and each other within a context of adaptation. We find ourselves needing a way to parse changes in our social-contract and beliefs in order to prevent the creation of a massacre. That need is the spirit in which I began looking into “Domains of Belief,” and ways of interpreting ‘populations’ of influences within a personality, a community, a culture and a juxtaposition of any and all of them. A body of rhetoric applied to such a body of considerations is unable to draw conclusions at all, to say nothing of ones which can be trusted. The bulk of considerations shatters the effectiveness of rhetoric.

Whether religious or secular, we each carry idealizations of the personalities of God, angels, demons, prophets and others within our various mythologies and histories. These idealizations begin from sources as various as scriptures, the writings of many through history who claim to have channeled them, and comparative and fanciful writings which may have any of a number of reasons for having been created. What we often ignore is a few basic facts of history: writers are strange people, and so are leaders and other interests who make it possible for histories and mythologies to be published. A further observation can be made of writers and artists who have used neuro-toxic materials in writing and art throughout history. The visions of prophets and dreamers can also be interpreted in the context of neuro-toxicity. Put simply, writers and artists get high, they can be superstitious and fanciful, and often they just don’t know that they have been poisoning themselves. Meanwhile, it is documented that leaders from every culture have had political motives for either championing or stifling religious beliefs and writings. Stories within religion have become gathered from oral-histories which began before the creation of written language, and then curators of these stories tacitly accepted the natural tendency of these stories to become distorted through generations of retelling.

Prophecy is a special case within scriptural sources. Consider a person who may be considered divine, or heretical, or at least a subject of discussion, who begins telling people of a dream which describes the distant future. What means would the dreamer have to experience and interpret such a dream? If personalities which are already known from history are included, what assurance would a future population have of the authenticity of the subsequent experience? History teaches that people are skeptical of the experience of prophetic personalities and events, and conflict always appears. Another confusing aspect of prophecy has to do with a few properties of prophetic dreams.

A prophetic dream, by its nature, is a communication among dreamers which passes through time. A dreamer observes a dream or a number of dreams passed back through time from one or a number of dreamers. The experience of life is different for such “dreamers from the future”, as is the personality which interprets their experience through dreams; while a prophet in the distant past likely doesn’t possess the language to describe what they find in a dream accurately. It becomes an obvious fallacy to expect to be able to interpret a prophecy in literal terms. Many prophecies also mention a secret which a prophet might protect in the retelling of their dreams. I would suggest that for a future population to make various presumptions about life based on a prophecy, the purpose of prophecy is fulfilled within those presumptions. Meanwhile, if the prophecy stands as a warning of difficulties which human nature would inspire someone to defend themselves within, the prophecy might stand as a warning against allowing a certain outcome as much as it might stand as a statement of destiny.

All of these influences contribute to our individual and social experience and response to living in what we perceive as prophetic times. Meanwhile, we are left to compare the bubble-gum cards of mythological personalities with the names and social-network profiles of people who become thrust into the roles of those mythological personalities. It is our presumptions which protect a tension and the mechanisms of conflict associated with prophetic times.

Tapestry Dance - Two

Here is a scenario. One day, you ask the universe – or perhaps some specific part of the universe – a question, and it answers directly…but not. The answer becomes a reflection of the interest and intention which inspired you to ask the question. Over time, the answer becomes a growing emotional response to the interest and intention which inspired you to ask the question, and that answer came from many who observed the internal discussion and could not resist the urge to interject. The progression of events became a heated debate, fueled by more observers and salted with the beginnings of divergence of opinion, unaware of what began the discussion. The universe should not be able to punish you for asking an innocent question.

This was the ‘first’ scenario I experienced, telepathically, fifteen years ago. It happened in a context where the world around me demonstrated no awareness of what I was experiencing, but "minds within my mind" closely resembled the identity and a plausible hidden agenda to influence among people I was already familiar with. I decided to deal with the world on it’s own terms, while speaking openly about the fact of my experience and some observations, if not-so-many details. I endured seven years of becoming familiar with this scenario's  intricacies. I’ve also, now, endured a few years in which I could look back on it while other matters became more prominent.

Here is a second scenario. One day, the universe – or perhaps some specific part of the universe – asks you a question, and it asks directly…but not. The situation is not so simple then, because the quick-answer becomes the question which the "universe-whom" asked the question seeks to inspire in the next who asks. The question the universe asks becomes an individual threat by becoming a social threat. A social process becomes initiated, then grows and mutates away from any defense of relevance to the original question. The universe should not be able to punish you for not satisfying a demand to protect indefensible assumptions about you.

This was the ‘second’ scenario I experienced, and I still can’t make up my mind how much of it I saw coming. I don’t care, because it has been a very long time since I have had the luxury of giving a flying fuck about anybody’s ideas about determinism. We would all be dead if I hadn’t dealt with it dismissively. Not everyone tries to think that hard. That isn’t to say that I wasn’t also compelled to deal with things intelligently. In this case, I knew I had to push the world to deal with the experience on my terms, because the only future I could let myself seek required that those around me be protected by my experience and awareness of what influenced them. We could only learn a delicate emotional dance, and I needed to begin with the most brazen and dangerous personality-play I have ever attempted; because I knew what was coming, and people needed to become liberated, then focused, in their response to it. The consequence of failure would have become anarchistic slaughter.

I exposed early work with a couple of epistemological models I was exploring when this began, and was subjected to the deliberate sabotage of them in everyone's behavior. There has been discussion of whether anyone should be allowed to hear about them again, but I feel that the genie is out of the bottle and the damage needs to be prevented from recurring. People respond to telepathy from the context of their existing beliefs, without always seeing the dangers of them, while any kind of atheism ignores the dangers that atheism presents to any atheist's unwillingness to believe anything.

Divergence of opinion is dangerous when opinion is defended in flagrant disregard of the best evidence. Divergence of opinion becomes a polarization of emotion which becomes antagonistic and violent if the danger of it isn’t recognized and contained. Telepathy amplifies this hazard due to its intimacy, and the extent to which divergence of opinion is able to expand this hazard.

I am not the first to imagine our social relations as a tapestry of consciousness, or spirit, or to consider the meanings of a distinction among them. Because of my experience I chose to focus on various facets of the way relationships become polarized, the value of either avoiding or seeking a polarization of relationships, and the characteristics of intimacy and defensiveness which would contribute to polarization. I considered the ways in which waves pass through a tapestry, or through a fluid; saw it as interpretable as emotion which either sustains a comfortable calm or becomes a storm; and considered how the best condition might be sustained or restored through a sudden adaptation. I considered the ways in which one might sabotage stability for selfish aims; then conversely how such sabotage might be contained, diverted, diffused and subdued. It needed to become something understandable to children.

A tapestry becomes understandable while visualizing waves within it. A pebble or a raindrop moves the surface of a pond, but teaches nothing to either the pond or any witness.  A quilt of personalities connected by various kinds of relationships, faced with a disturbance within any one of those personalities or relationships, will amplify and sustain a ripple through everyone-else's lives which will reflect within the domain of that quilt in any number of ways. Such ripples may become either healthy or destructive. We may know each other, or we may not. A meditator heard the drop, saw the waves, then thought, "Which pebble? Which raindrop?" A sudden transition from a ‘normal’ sense to a telepathic sense would become a shock. If, suddenly, anyone who felt their own  lives through the lenses of family, work, leisure, attraction, reputation and mobility became naked before the world, everything they might have relied upon would become a hazard.

There is nothing good which can come from a growth in fear and it is foolish to avoid noticing obvious sources of fear. One of them is religion, which I describe only as a body of beliefs which come from a historical source of a body of beliefs, and a will to learn how to live amongst a body of people who are still willing to defend any such body of beliefs. Learn set-theory now, not only because of mathematical reasons. Start over, and learn set theory for epistemological reasons. A wise protagonist can imagine and curate an indeterminate "antagonist-set" which describes and contains the population of defenders of beliefs which don’t necessarily claim a divine, authoritative or accurate source, while remaining influential due to a cultural comfort with such beliefs. Such a protagonist may also curate any number of indeterminate sets which fall within a "defender-set" who share common-cause with the protagonist. It is necessary to interpret every one of any sets within this application of set theory dynamically, due to the dynamism of human behavior and motivation. So-many bodies of beliefs become threatened by changes in perception which render them either partially or fully indefensible. We fuck this shit up more and more together.

Because I’m a martial artist, and because I like making things understandable for children, I describe perception in terms of "The Mask of Zorro;” as a lesson, a swordsman’s-metaphor of the ‘Master’s Circle’. We seek to have a complete sense and command of a circle which tightly encompasses our flesh, then arms reach out, we gradually expand outward in awareness, only if the practice becomes as reliable as our sense and command of that which is intimate. If we objectify our visual, auditory and tactile senses and the dimension in which we can rely on these senses, and then experience a comparison with a similar telepathic sense which may distort senses of location, identity, proximity, emotion and intention, we discover difficulties of adaptation. Our social contract needs to become adjusted to protect the safety and integrity of our relations with each other. Existing beliefs then become a threat to the protection of such an adjustment. We know we need to change and we are in this together.

A specific kind of threat which exists in religion is so-much of prophecy, so many idealizations of personalities and identities from history, so-much protection of an obsessive requirement that all of these expectations be fulfilled and satisfied. If people defend their beliefs against the truth of their experience too far, the fanaticism just naturally escalates conflict. I can fully describe the arguments which discredit many assumptions, but few believers of anything want to hear that they must let go of something they have believed since they were children. What I have discovered is a means of interpreting how we have striven to protect history, and also to distort it, either superstitiously or deliberately. Another thing I have considered is a comparison between the depth and breadth of any actual experience of life in the universe, and the distorted fragments of dogma we interpret it with.

Since money and influence are no less considered objects of piety in our cultural tapestry than gods and devils, the advance of a telepathic awareness needs to consider the juxtaposition of the complete set of such influences, and the degree to which they become conflated within any particular voice. But how the hell do any of us analyze all of that shit? No way man…until I started playing with a notion I call Domain-Theory. Then I suddenly had to be crazy enough to socialize discussion of it, because everything started happening too fast. Somebody dumped a beehive of rhetoric over it. I must emphasize that Domain-Theory and rhetoric can’t play in the same school-yard without killing each other and anyone who gets caught in the battlefield. That might have become all I say about Domain Theory here, because I’ve already pointed at the danger of it, but people have heard of it anyway so I’m compelled to provide damage control.

It is the hidden dangers of telepathy that I intend to address very carefully. A personal attack can either be direct or it can become an attack on the perceptions a person is surrounded with. Telepathy may allow specific very subtle kinds of attack which people need to become able to recognize and defend themselves in the face of. What is more important, though, is for all of us to commit to never allowing ourselves to attempt such attacks, because of the immense danger of them.

In all cases, what defends each of us best is a personal will which refuses to betray our core values in our behavior. If I hear an unrepentant psychopath say, “don’t blame me, the Devil made me do it,” I can respond directly, “no, you let the Devil make you do it.” My experience is such that I can rely on myself not to act with an intention which betrays my core values, having repelled attempts to invoke such betrayals consistently. If I hear any number of influences strive to deceive or extort my intentions into self-betrayal, my experience has also led me to methods of discovering true intentions so that I can restrain unwanted responses. My need of this is less, now, because very many influences which have striven in those directions have been contained or eliminated. But what is needed now is to prevent certain circumstances from creating new destructive influences. This requires a deeper understanding of what we perceive as ‘magic’ and issues which relate to it within personality, culture and influence. “Angels” and “Demons” become interpretable within these beginnings, rather than the fairy-tales of history. So do personalities which gain reverence or awe from outside observers, and those who listen to them.

I have become characterized as a prophet, an angel, a mystic…any number of kinds of criminal, and a “demi-god awareness” for the obvious reason that those who wish to establish my insanity only need to discover which ego-trip I might let myself fall for; while those who defend me seek to defeat any dispute of their best opinion. I can ward off interest in any such ego-trip by simply saying that I saw a clear need to defend people from something they couldn’t anticipate as well as I had, and I behaved according to the necessity. Meanwhile, I have observed people demonstrating abilities I could never have anticipated any of us acquiring, some of which I appreciated more than others. What I could not ignore was that warriors would become warriors, pushy people would become pushy, submissive people would become recalcitrant, and all of them would become each other in some way. Bullets don’t carry ideology, nor do those who dispense them, but re-tellers of every tale always establish an ideological context – often a delusional one. Meanwhile, I might become expected to fulfill an anticipated identity or events of a prophecy, and people might strive to protect or refute that expectation, while never caring what I think of any of it. I can never blame myself for that. It’s all Rock and Roll.

Tapestry Dance - One

I had a dream or two. So what? I thought about many things and studied many things. So what? I didn’t finish college, and I decided to become something other than what I studied, without bothering with the formality of education again. So what? I had many premonitions of things which have since happened very much as I anticipated. So what? I became trapped in the necessity of defending the populations of several cities from descending into madness and slaughter in order to defend my own future. So what? I am a storyteller who is now compelled to protect the privacy of people who’s affairs are already misperceived by too many people, while remaining able to be a storyteller. So what? If anyone hears this response from one of the voices from my past, it reflects a rivalry best ignored.

Two years ago, a woman wanted me to become her new husband. I decided I didn’t want to. She wouldn’t believe me, and returned a number of times to persuade me. I discovered a way to persuade her not to return again. She discovered a way to persuade my social circle to persuade me not to return again either, in spite of the fact that she was never a part of my social circle before. People sometimes have motivations which are not clear at first, as I had already discovered in the past.

A long time ago I went crazy. I heard voices in the skies, across the room, in my ear, mocking and condemning me for things which refused to reflect reality. I went for a very long walk, intending to escape something I knew I couldn’t, while finding strange, blue, mocking faces in objects and clouds everywhere I looked. I gathered a few bags of garbage along the sides of roads for someone to pick up. Eventually I returned home under threat from the voices I heard that I was constantly under threat from snipers, then waited in the yard for my roommate to return home and have me sent to the hospital, with the assertion that I must move out immediately. People sometimes need to establish boundaries in order to protect their homes.

I decided not to die, after considering whether I could become either a benefit or a burden to the world. My decision was based on what I anticipated in the future, and what I saw of the beginnings of it at the time. I took atypical antipsychotic medications, fully intending to abandon them eventually against the doctors’ belief that I would never be able to stop, because I knew I would eventually lose the ability to protect my life if I protected the dependency. I also refused disability coverage to eventually accept a job which I held for nine years, with a few others along the way, because I did not want to become trapped in the regional economy and culture. I can now confirm that it was a trap to later accept disability when I collapsed a disk in my neck which pinches motor-nerves, but it still became a matter of survival to escape that trap. I guess I have escaped where survival is concerned, but I know there are things I have never had any ability nor desire to escape.

I was successful at weaning myself off the medication after seven years, while also becoming successful at deconstructing the mechanisms of my experience of psychosis. Current practice is to use medication as a substitute for counselling, so I am glad to have gained that ability over time. Another reason I am glad to have gained that ability, is that it prepared me to cope with the nightmare which I now stand in the memory of. But that is not why I am writing.

I knew I had changed much by the time I left the relationship, and I immediately decided to explore it as an artist and philosopher. I noticed people were behaving differently towards me already, but I chose to just reflect the most natural, pissed-off response to the whole experience, while also distancing myself from bringing her name into it. I explored the tension between sexuality and abuse. I wrote poems and made speeches. I strove to gather friends as a fence against her return, but something was strange. My thoughts became the topic of gossip around me. Parts of my routine at home also became the topic of gossip around me. I silently tossed ribald thoughts off at life and found them reflected in people’s conversations and gestures everywhere I went. I made satire of comparing my own embarrassments to those I could imagine among those around me. I became the self-financed performer of the most popular show I had ever done, which became a frustrating thing for a veteran musician like myself to accept. It became obvious I was in deep shit. I kinda was before she showed up, but now it was becoming clear we were all in deep shit, and I began including warnings in my satire. The time I had vaguely anticipated since I was a teenager had arrived.

I’m no bible-thumper now, but when I was young I felt compelled to give it a good read, since it made the people around me so much more explainable. I did that with a few religions, and a few cultures, over time. A prophecy which stuck with me was, “Days will come when what was hidden, will be revealed.” I thought to myself, ‘what would happen if suddenly everybody knew everybody else’s private shit?’ This is obviously too much of an awareness for any of us to contain consciously, but it seemed a likely reason that people would tacitly agree to overwhelmingly flip-out. Another bit from several prophecies, was the instruction to a prophet to keep some revelations secret. Like I said, I eventually broke free from happy-pills and psychosis. The reason I succeeded is that I refused to let myself become trapped in religion, or any other assumptions. Eventually, I’ll explain that.

After I left college, I became a stage technician for several theatres and festivals. It was kind of a fluke. I volunteered for the Calgary Jazz Society, because I was into jazz, and after a couple of festivals, a production manager suggested I go talk to someone at the Calgary Center for Performing Arts. I guess this is the early-life history lesson. I broke my arm on a show after three years at it, and convalesced in a cheap coffeeshop across the street from the concert hall with a bunch of art-freaks. They kinda became the population of most of my future, but I’ll basically leave that alone. I cut my cast off after two months to work on a film, because I needed the money. I then became a nude model at the art college, and then a street musician for a number of years. I wanted to devote myself to practice and people watching, young idealist that I was. It was the nineties. None of us were good enough for the world in the nineties anyway.

Another relationship I had left previously found me in a frighteningly tight rental-market, needing to move. I volunteered to be a sound technician in an edgy nightclub, which happened to be the frontage of an inexpensive building. One of the things which kept it inexpensive was the noise from my gig and three other neighboring bars. Another thing which kept it inexpensive was an influx of dealers in crack and pills, who invaded at the same time as we were invaded by construction workers and others willing to work in the petroleum industry. I was offered a reference for an apartment, to escape my relationship then. I suddenly found myself as a popular sound technician, in a popular nightclub, on an unpopular street, living in an unpopular building. Outside, it was the heart of Calgary street crime. Inside, it was a technology park housing one of the pioneer internet radio-stations at the time. I cultivated a guarded comfort among nerds, music hounds and thugs. My boss of the previous nine years was driven to sell his business by a vicious shift in business costs, as I had anticipated. Rock and roll, relationships and Calgary are all examples of a vicious game.

Although I was born in Calgary, my first memories are from school-years in Victoria. I played ambulance because my dad was a paramedic. He also ran a deli for a number of years – I helped him make dozens of meat-pies a day, and slept under the pizza oven they cooked in with my younger sister. A loft at the back of the shop stored various supplies and jetsam, and a short railing revealed a strange floor which glowed faintly. I remembered the Six-Million Dollar Man walking on something similar once, and so I decided to give it a try and fell through the false ceiling to land on the freezer in the front of the shop. Eventually I became able to breathe, and chose not to try it again. I was also a fan of Shazam!, who took instructions from the Elders at the beginning of every show. I kept an abandoned gerbil-walking ball on the dashboard of the stationwagon which resembled Shazam’s telepathy-with-the-Elders-thingy, and mentioned their advice not to go underwater when my dad took me for swimming lessons. It only took me a day to become an avid swimmer, but I don’t have a lot of fat to keep me afloat so it’s a bit of work still. I studied first-aid and became a volunteer at hockey-games. I studied magic and did a show at the hospital once for the children’s ward. I read a Cracked magazine article on how to be a teenager while I was thinking about gravity one day, and later while I was playing I decided to jump off the carport with a coathanger in the back of my t-shirt in order to practice a roll-manouver. The coathanger was to ‘teenager-ize’ my posture. My friends thought I was crazy. I went fishing with them on weekends and brought home bass-fish for dinner as often as I could hack the cold. I never wanted to leave Victoria, except that a kid who taught me how to fight also taught me some other things which only a kid who was in grade seven a couple years too late would be interested in. The innocence of childhood is a myth quickly destroyed in the experiences of greeny, rivalry and slumber parties if nothing else. Dad was working out of town too much by then, climbing out of debt, and it was decided we would move back to Calgary.

I was a skinny, quiet kid who thought about everything. I could read anything by the time I was in grade three. I felt like I could see the future, and couldn’t accept the egotism of it. Dreams were mostly just dreams, but sometimes they were vivid. I thought about super-powers, like any skinny kid. I thought about divinity, but I could never take it literally. Any rare taste of the air of a church was an insult to the whole idea for me. I lifted weights, climbed hills, walked everywhere and went through three hernia surgeries. I played football on a quilt of front-lawns one day and ripped my knee apart, also resulting in surgery. My grandfather was a surgeon, so I kept studying everything that happened to me. I was frequently re-injuring myself, so I decided to become some kind of ninja so I could teach myself not to be such a klutz. I was right into the spirituality of it, the superpowers, the duty. I learned guitar and had a band in my basement, so I learned all the other instruments too, except piano. I got to thinking about sensitivity. Over time, I got to thinking about telepathy. When I was a street-musician, musicians I played with were often unpredictable, so the idea of telepathy eventually became handy. I don’t need to know what I’m going to play before I play it anymore.

I think of epiphanies as moments when stress reaches the point of fracturing into unstoppable, gut-wrenching laughter. Starving through an endless walk, hitchhiking through the misfortune of being left at an infamous on-ramp near Chilliwack – think escapable-penetentiary and the many kinds of cow-shit in the world – eventually finding an apple on the shoulder of the road with a quarter cut out of it, not bruised, shortly before sleeping through a ride with a speed-demon all the way to Kelowna. Hiking from a day of apple-picking for six miles in sweltering heat to take a free shower at the racetrack, then arriving at camp smelling the freshness. Many disturbances attempting sleep in a tent: morning sprinklers in an orchard reciting, “shit shit shit shit shit shit pthh pthh pthh shit shit shit…”; a deer poking it’s head at the wall as if contemplating an invasion; the tire of a truck rolling over the entrance and almost crushing my head after an overnight security shift, in what seemed a well chosen campsite at a festival. The driver turned out to be one of the drummers from one of my old bands.

About a week before I was first admitted to the hospital with psychosis, I was enjoying a show with a couple of rather intoxicated companions. For whatever reason, one of them became increasingly aggressive, while I somehow became able to believe I had superpowers, comfortable as I was with premonition. I projected this insane, overbearing love at the guy, who suddenly faded out for a moment, then forgot his train of thought. Soon after, the woman sitting across from me was describing something she was descending into despair over, and I repeated the projection, with a similar result. When she came-to, she began, “hey, you know, I see you lookin’ at me, but just don’t go there, you don’t know what I’m like…” to which I replied, “that would depend on my intentions. I don’t have any intentions right now.” She just began crying. I don’t deny I’ve always been prone to getting signals crossed. I finished my drink and left.

The bar I did sound in was a keep, in defense of the cultural refugees of an overheated economy. The hard-drug community was as openly antagonistic toward us as we were toward them. In later months, with increasing frequency, a stranger would infiltrate and push me aggressively to begin dealing for them, to which I always responded with brazen hostility. Among the ‘members’, we generally sneered that they were all amateur narcs. Then I began working with and frequenting a wider network of events, while I found myself faced with the same aggression there as well. It was too obvious my reputation was under attack, while I just carried on. I committed to defending my father from what I saw coming in his life: he would hit a snag switching from disability to Canada Pension; but on top of that, all his roommates abandoned him at the same time, leaving him in charge of the lease. My sister and I were polling assisted-living residences who were happy to tell us about a list of phone-numbers, refer to their waiting list and offer us some fundraising literature. I cajoled people I was working with to move him into the basement-suite I was left with in a similar way; while the gas and internet were cut off, the landlord was out of town, and we had to heat the place with the oven in a February cold-snap. A month later we found him a home through the Legion, although he wasn’t a veteran. I did a midnight move, I forget where. I began to forget a lot of things. That’s life on the move.

I eventually moved in with an old friend’s ex-boyfriend for a year or so. We played guitar and talked about philosophy. I had recorded a CD a few years before and began working towards a second one, while the woman who wanted me to marry her came and went, to the extent I could control anything. I was half-finished the titles I had planned to record when everything became impossible. Since then, people’s adaptation to the telepathic experience has been the only thing I could allow myself to focus on. I’ve had to protect everyone else’s survival in order to protect my own. The dance of it has become a study in catch-22. I need to protect everyone else's privacy, while I’ve completely forgotten the experience of privacy. Now, two years later, the question of who-dunnit is someone else’s question. I remain focused on our adaptation to telepathy. Lesson one: You have to have a sense of humor.