flying2

Seems that during his late teens the old man and his brother were traveling by train in south-central New Mexico, during the 1920s. The train stopped in the middle of the night and nowhere, so folks could get out, stretch, take a leak. The old man was returning with his brother from a trip into the northwestern New Mexican mountains � trapping or mining, I don�t recall which.

He and his bro wandered out a tad into the Sonoran, gazing out into the starry night, and drained their lizards. Gradually from the darkness a ball of flame appeared, and began to flit about. It was followed by a number of other fiery globes � something like what science-types call �bolides.� The balls floated and zipped around in a strange kind of pattern. The old man said the globes moved about �playfully.�

The train hooted and the stars winked. The boys stared. Then a few of the globes approached the boys, flitting up close and retreating.

Now I was with the old man up to there � I�d seen worse personally. But directly the Weird turned Pro.

Turns out that the balls of fire were transparent, and whenever they came near enough, the boys could clearly see inside them. And inside each of the globes was � and here I quote the old man himself � a �brown woman.� That�s right. Not grey aliens, not Sasquatch, not Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise, and not Tick, his long-lost coon hound. " A Brown woman.�

Oh-kee-doh-kee.

The boys watched in amaze as the senorita-filled fire bubbles capered a few more moments amongst the cholla, then wandered off like Glinda�s globe from Munchkinland.

Flying Foozle Femonema, I�m calling it. Stickin� to it, too.

My freak, of course, was that �brown women� flitting about the Sonoran in luminous globes not only made sense, but a perfect kind of sense. Hoo boy! I knew from experience that when it started to get like this, it was best to just hold on for the eight-count and make no bargains with the bull.

No, I didn�t fall offa the turnip truck yesterday, friends. I worked in the legal profession for a decade, if you need credentials for analytical thought. Hell, I even graduated from college, with high honors � not that it proves anything these days � a rhesus monkey could make the Dean�s List in dumbed-down American academia.

This was not a likely context for an ego play. This was a truly bereft old man who had just lost his life partner � but not his mind. He was clearing his psyche of some anomaly from his youth that he didn�t understand, but intuited might be important. He wanted this little Beast off of his brain before he went underground. And that was it. He related the details without fanfare, and without any of the tell-tale signs of psychological inflation. He didn�t make himself out as the hero of the story. He didn't embellish wildly. Just straight reportage. Both he and his brother (who was not present, but corroborated) thought the incident peculiar and remarkable, but did not consider themselves nor their roles in it special or "spiritual."

Now friends, I�ve been on every snark hunt this world has to offer. I worked at Ground Zero in a mental health clinic, and have witnessed (and occasionally enjoyed!) the ramblings of those poor-souled schizophrenics, lost in the personal or collective unconscious. I�ve heard every come-on on the continent, from door-to-door siding salesmen to girlie-bar-barkers for Mexico City clip joints.

Artifice rarely escapes me, and there was nothing manufactured about this old coot. If he�d tried to Spin some musty web about alien motherships or ghosts or something from the pop collective I�d have grabbed the WhupStick and nailed his hoary shit to the wall, grief or no grief.

But no. He outs with a mondo bizarro rap containing information he can�t possibly know. Even the fantasy of the events he described is not in his ontological framework. One must possess the tools of fabrication if one wants to weave certain tales. There is no book he could have read, no movie he could have seen, and no story he could have overheard to lead him into the land he described to me.

He has never heard of Toltecan sorcery, nor of the ethnographies, rituals or world-views of the indigenous peoples of what is now northern Mexico and the southwestern U.S. He does not know of the letters of the Spanish padres who wrote back to the Crown of the �devil worship� of the "Nagals" � by which they meant the shamanic naguals of indigenous Mexico. Neither the name of Robert Graves, nor any of the multitude of names for the Dark Goddess prophesied by Graves, would have made the least sense to the old boy. The phrase �Philosopher�s Stone� would not have rung his faintest bell. He would figure it was something upon which he could sharpen his tractor blades.

Brown women flying inside globes of fire? No. It�s just not in his psycho-mythic universe. It�s not the kind of rap that impresses the fellow geezers down at the Elks or Grange, even if he could have fabricated it, which I do not accept for an instant.