flying

by Foozler �Sage� Obi wan Aboinker

It�s not easy to remain open to the bizarro in an age of starchy rationalists, bean counters, and puffed-up academics, all of whom demand of the universe that the numbers always add up -- and run for their blankees when the equations fail.

But the old saw holds true: �The universe is not only stranger than we imagine -- it's stranger than we can imagine.� What is available for knowledge and experience is bounded only by one�s tolerances of sanity and pain. If you�re not open to whispers from the Cosmic Joker, then of course he�s gonna skip you, and move on.

In quest of the Ultimate Foozle I have seen sufficient spooky shit go down on this planet to maintain a healthy respect for both the unknown and the unknowable.

I try to rein that respect in just short of dumbfounded awe, not because such events don�t shock me into slackjawed drooldom -- they do -- but because awe is ultimately a state of submission, leading to reverence � and me and the reverend don�t get along. Awe inspires worship and belief � and me and �belief� don�t get along either. If humans were meant for belief, we wouldn�t have bodies capable of experience. We'd just channelsurf this painful promenade from somewhere in the ether. As for worship, I find that it impedes understanding and leads to dead-end, dominant-submission relationships -- and that's definitely not for your old friend Obi.

In this vein, I have rifled the grab-bag of miracles, cosmic practical jokes, synchronicities and astonishments of the past few decades and report below, to best recollection, a representative encounter.

A few years ago I was visiting an old military buddy at his home in northwest Arkansas, near the Pea Ridge battlefields of the Civil War. We'd worked together as medics during the Vietnam blunder.

I had been living in a trailer in Mountainair, a tiny town in the high desert of New Mexico, southeast of Albuquerque. My interests there included tangoing with the black madonna, hobnobing with the ancestors, puzzling over the coniunctio, and trying to sweat out the old Stone.

No, I won�t get a job.

Anyway, my buddy and I hadn�t seen each other in twenty-some years, and we spent long hours sitting in his garage, smoking Strain �E� shrubbery and laughing about our adventures in The Day, all of which must be omitted here for legal reasons. Once my attorney affirms that the Statutes of Limitations have run out, well, I�ve got some real whoppers for ya.

Now this old boy�s wife had relatives living in the way-back of the Ozarks, I mean stick-deep, what the locals call Booger Holler -- de rigueur trailers, skinny animals, sump ponds, the whole schmear. Not White Trash, just plain and poor. The missus' grandmother had just died, leaving her nonagenarian grandfather mostly on his own. She was planning a trip into the hills with my buddy to visit gramps, and my buddy got to telling stories on the old man. Seems the coot was a free spirit of the first order.

Somehow gramps had discovered that my buddy was -- unlike Weasel Clinton -- an inhaler. In true pioneer fashion, the old man refused propaganda about the Evil Weed, and in his nineties deemed the moment appropriate to explore the Devil�s Fruit for himself, and pop his bud cherry. Gumption.

While the women were busy yakking, my buddy rolled a fattie for the geezer and sent him to the chicken coop � and truly the henhouse is the proper site for initial encounter with that sweet, jealous, sticky lady. He lit up and had an enjoyable experience, which he had no desire to repeat. He just wanted to see it firsthand, for hisself. Gramps wasn�t much on belief either.

I said I appreciated the old man�s cojones, and my buddy casually tossed off the following epilogue. In the wake of the death of his wife of some sixty years, the old man had just unburdened himself of a lifelong psycho-spiritual gallstone. My buddy wanted me to hear it straight from the old man. He said I was possibly the only person weird enough to get a handle on it.

Now as I said, it happened that much of my eighteen-month stay in New Mexico involved research into discordant phenomena, including continuing investigation into the spiritual and ritual practices of Mesoamerican civilizations, particularly those of aboriginal northern Mexico. I might have been one of perhaps a hundred people in the hemisphere not prepared to write off the story as the ravings of a grieving, attention-starved old bat.

When the old boy dumped his tidbit of looniness on his family members, they weren�t quite sure what to think. He was never a yarn spinner, nor a drama junkie. His brother � also still alive � not only backed the old man�s story to the hilt, but lately had begun expressing a similar urge to divest himself of the tale.

Now there are some tall-tale-tellers in the Ozarks, but this guy wasn�t one of them. He was like most folks up there � so down-to-earth that the worms knew him by first name.

So off we drove into the Ozarks, and a couple hours later I was sitting with my buddy and the old man in a tiny, cluttered room at one end of his trailer. Calmly and without affectation he laid his strange story out.