Nano Day 5 - Still No title as of yet...
Nov. 6th, 2007 12:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joegodaNo spell check, no grammar check, nothing but words, words, words....
For my Capitani, and whoever else reads this drivel
Now that I think back to the conversation, I remember that I sounded so much more casual than I really felt. I think it's something we all do, change our styles of thinking, change our styles of behavior to fit the person we're talking to, to fit the situation we're in. It's something I've noticed in myself time and time again.
When I'm by myself, I tend to act and talk like nobody special. I think of myself as just an old guy, maybe an accountant, very unassuming, nothing that would stand out in the crowd.
Put me in a situation where things might get tight, and I acquire, because acquire is the only word I can think of, I acquire a whole other set of personality traits. Casual, sure headed, positive that good things will happen and whatever comes along is easily taken care of. And I think this regardless of how tough it gets. That's when I'm with someone else.
Put me in the same situation when I'm by myself and I become grumpy and irritable, mean and spiteful. It doesn't last long, just long enough to do a five minute rant about the injustice in the universe. After that I start to laugh at myself, because when I get angry, I can be pretty darn funny looking. After the rant, I laugh at myself because really, there isn't anything we can't live through, no matter how tough, and if we don't, then it doesn't really matter, does it? I laugh at myself because laughter is the best way to counteract the shadows in our lives, and believe me, I've got shadows.
Right then though, with Angelina, I knew that whatever happens, I was going to be a short, bald little superman and take care of the situation. Because I could. Because maybe the universe had put me in such and such a spot at such and such a time with such and such a person who was in the very trouble that I, and only I, could get her out of.
Then again, all that could be just very rationalized bullshit.
The drive up I-25 from Raton was quiet and dark, and it was obvious that we were in the foothills of some really big mountains. The drive reminded me of traveling through the Ozarks, with its turns and twists. At one point we kept pace with a train, hauling freight. The tracks run parallel to the interstate, and since I love trains I matched my speed to theirs and pulled up close enough to see the lights in the cabin. When I could see the engineer, I honked my horn, twice. He looked over at me and waved, and blew his own horn. I waved, not knowing if he saw me or not.
"Why did you do that?" Angelina asked me.
It was the first thing she had said since we left the truckstop. I figured she was in reflection or meditation or something. She was looking out the passenger window, looking far off into the mountains, into the night. This was okay with me, since I tend to drive pretty much in silence with the only noise being my own crazy brain chattering away.
"Because it's just something I do," I told her. "Two strangers, passing in the lonely night. We may never see each other again, and it's just like saying 'Hello there. I know you're alive and I'm thankful for it.'. Ocean going vessels, before the telegraph, used to blow their horns when they would see the lights of another ship at night. It keeps the dark away."
"Ah," she said, nodding. "Just so." She turned back to the window and continued her mountain watching.
Trinidad, at ten at night, is a sleeping town of just under ten thousand. It's well kept, the streets are clean, the buildings are something like a hundred years old and a place I definitely want to get back to some day.
We checked in at the Frontier Motel & Cafe, just because I liked the name and it had a vacancy sign that was lit. Besides, while out traveling, I like breakfast. I don't eat breakfast normally, I feel it's a waste of time and there's other things to be doing. But traveling is a different thing. A breakfast grounds you out, gets you in touch with the local earth and people and gives you time to contemplate what the heck you're doing and what your next move will be.
I only got the one room at the motel. I'm a cheap bastard in the best of situations. Money is hard to come by, and you never know when you're going to need a little extra. I had not planned on having company on this trip, so being frugal would be the best I could do.
It never occurred to me to ask Angelina if she had any money. It's just not something I do. In fact, to ask feels to me to be extremely rude, though I know that it's probably not. I think it's something I got from my parents, probably my father. If I had asked, it would have made the whole trip easier. Shared expenses are a good thing.
Angelina was very subdued. Up to Trinidad, she spent the whole time speaking very little. I tossed my bag on the chair, turned on the Television, and turned on the History Channel. It's how I get the room used to me, and how I let the spooks and little folk know that I'm here. I asked Angelina if she was all right.
"No, not entirely," she said, laying back on the queen-sized bed. "I'm very tired, and I'm worried about Daniel and his wife. They were good friends. They ARE good friends."
"Hm." I hummed. "You think something bad happened to them?"
She nodded. "Yes. I'm thinking they may be dead. He said that they were going to try to meet us on the road." She shook her head. "I don't know how they could. They don't know what you're driving, they don't know what you look like." She started to tear up. "They don't even know the route we're taking."
"Sure they do," I said. "You told him that I wasn't going in the direction of Las Vegas, remember? There's pretty much only one other route to take, and that's up through Colorado Springs and then turn West."
"They don't even know I'm riding with you."
"You know," I said with a bit of sarcasm in my voice and my eyebrow raised, "if you keep thinking this way, nothing good will happen. Negative brings negative, positive brings positive."
I sat on the bed next to where she lay. I put my hand on her knee to reassure her. It was a strong knee. Not a lot of fat in that knee, for sure. I pulled my hand away, gently. I didn't need the distraction my brain was taking me to.
"I think it's a fair assumption to believe that Daniel, knowing that I bought you food, and knowing that I had to have heard your side of the conversation, would think that I, being the gentleman you described, would have offered you a ride. I am, after all, going to Oregon, and you are, after all, a damsel in distress."
Angelina rolled over onto her side, facing away from me. Neither of us made a sound for a while, and the History Channel was talking about the discovery of gunpowder in ancient china.
Minutes passed and I got bored. I don't mind deep discussions about things that trouble, but there's just so much I can take before I want to do something else. I stood up from the bed, crossed to the window and opened the shade. I looked out at the street lights with their diamond glare and let my mind drift far, far away.
I was looking for something, but I had no idea what. It's that weird part of my brain I try to ignore. Unfortunately, this was a situation where I needed that part to do it's stuff. I decided, after a minute of looking at nothing, to go looking for anyone that was connected to Angelina. It's not that hard to do, once you have the knack. You just just tie what I call a person's signature, something about them that is distinctive and unique to their personality, and let it ride your consciousness like a whirly-gig on a kite string.
My grandfather taught me about whirly-gigging kite string. All you have to do is take a rectangular piece of paper, put a hole in it's center, slice from and end to the hole and slip it over a kite string while the kite is flying. The wind will take the paper and move it up, and up, all the way up until it meets the kite.
I miss my grandfather at times. He was a crotchety old coot, nice to folks, gruff to his grandchildren and would sometimes slip us a quarter when grandma wasn't looking so we could buy a soady pop. That's what he called a Coke or a Pepsi or his favorite, RC cola. A soady pop. I learned what Playboy was in the back of his old dodge when I found a magazine he had left there. I was probably all of six or seven. I didn't care much for the naked pictures of the women, but I was entranced by the Vargas Bunny Girl. I think that was when I first fell in love with the female form, and comic book women. Yes, I have a thing for two dimensional women. Just another of the odd quirks of being me.
I stood there, at the window, and captured Angelina's voice in my mind. That soft and sultry sound that had a distinct Romanian or Slovakian flavor. I added to that her eyes, brown and almond shaped, tipping up at the corners and crinkly when she smiled. Her nose, long and slender, with delicate petal shaped nostrils that flared when she laughed. Her mouth, long slim lips, drawn back from straight teeth with tiny fangs. Her diamond shaped face framed with long brown hair. I added this all together and sent it up with the whirly-gig attached to the string of my roaming consciousness.
I can't really do it justice to explain it or describe the feeling when my mind goes a-wandering. On some television show I watched years ago, they called it 'far-seeing', but that's not it. I think, if anything, it's more like 'far-sensing', like trying to sniff out a gas leak in a crowded building. The ancients used to call something like what I do, scrying, but that's not quite it either. I'm not looking into the future, and I'm not trying to see signs to direct me. I'm just out there wandering, trying to find a lost scent.
From my viewpoint, it kinda looks like this: I look at something that allows me to unfocus my eyes. It can be anything as long as it's blurry. Like streetlights through a window sort of blurry. Once my eyes truly unfocus, which is harder than it sounds, the blurriness is replaced by ... I guess the best way to describe it is a haze. A haze comes over the world and I can toss my mind, my consciousness out onto something like a wind and go riding that wind out into the world.
I don't see the countryside likes it's a big aerial view. I see the world, when I'm wandering, like it's colors and lights and shifting mist. Like everything shines and shifts. I call what I see the signatures of life energy from just about everything that has life. The earth itself is like that, full of life, everywhere you look. The misty parts are the dead parts. Roads, buildings, mountains, except mountains are literally teaming with life, so it's like watching a fog full of fireflies. Buildings are alive too, but they look like tall fountains with dots of sparkly fires.
That doesn't even begin to explain what I really see. That's just kind of an image so I can translate. If you add that everything is connected in someway, and I mean everything, then you get this tremendous crosshatching effect that just makes it more confusing to try to describe. Everything is connected, some greatly, some minorly, some hardly at all, but it's all connected and sharing energy between each other like sending signals over wires.
Now, when I go looking for something specific, I send my whirly-gig up to where my 'eyes' are, and I look to see what's connected to it, and how strong. That is, if I have a whirly-gig to send up. If I don't, then I have to construct as best I can an image of what I'm looking for and hope that the signature I've created matches pretty close. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. And it's not something I do very often because it tires me out something fierce.
But on that night, with the coolness of the window pressing against my forehead, I wanted to see if I could find something very specific. I created my Angelina Whirly-gig and tossed it out there to see who or what was connected to it. I figured a little extra tired was nothing compared to having a mopey and depressive woman in the car.
I heard a shifting from the bed, and my kite of consciousness snapped that direction. Angelina was sitting up and looking at me. She was all manner of Indigo and Blues and Red. At the center of her colors, she shone white. She was a good guy, after all, though that didn't surprise me. Very spiritually based, too. The Indigo and blues were clear indication of that. The white... the white is just purity of spirit. Reds are ... well, reds are just life. Everyone glows red.
I held up my hand, trying to caution her to be still, be quiet, daddy's working. She did good. She didn't move, she didn't ask me what I was doing. She just watched. I ignored the feel of her eyes, the feel of her own personal energy probing me and went back up to my kite.
The beginning is the important part. Getting the kite up, setting it to the wind, holding the string taught and holding onto it, that's the big part. A distraction can cause the wind to die down and the string to go limp and the kite will come fluttering back down to land between my eyeballs. Or worse, which would be for the string to snap and there you go, drifting across the universe, unable to find yourself. They make places for folks that have done that. Sanitariums. Not for me, thank you very much. I hold my string very tight.
Once the kite is up, though, it's very hard to shake me back unless I just want to come back. It's addictive to be up there, free of this world, soaring amidst the winds of living souls. It's exhilarating as any roller coaster, first good night kiss on the first date, having hit your first home run every could be. There in lie the danger, of course. The curse of the Lotus Eaters.
All across the land, lines and mist and colors and lights shifted before my gaze. I felt strong, invincible, all powerful. It was an illusion, of course. Physically, someone could take a bat and bash my head it while I'm doing this. Granted, I might have a seconds warning, some sound of movement might alert me, but still... ever try to stop a baseball bat that is swinging towards you in under a second?
I've heard talk about setting wards and guards and protective spells and crap like that. I've also heard cries of "Why didn't it work? It should have worked" That's the problem with this stuff. You get to depend on it, and sure enough, someone will pick your pocket while you're out drinking tea. This stuff, this metaphysical mumbo-jumbo is just like any other crutch. Eventually the bully down the street will kick it out from under you and there you'll be, crying out at the world at the injustice, oh, the injustice of it all. There's just not a lot of sympathy there for me. It's also why I don't spend too much time doing it. There's a lot of bullies in the world and only one of me, and I like me a whole lot better than I like them.
Here's another downfall: Helping heal the sick. See, once you find out you can sniff out stuff with this supervision, you also start to discover that you can transfer this energy, though the wires to other folks. You can literally heal the sick, make the lame walk, the blind see, all that stuff. For a price. For every bit of work you do, a bit of you goes with it. For me, to heal the sick means that I take the sick energy from the person or thing, replace it with my own energy, and let the universe do it's thing. See, sickness is keyed to the area it's supposed to be. If it's in me, and supposed to be in you, then you get better, and the sickness withers and fades because it doesn't belong in me. That's the theory, anyway. I found out the hard way that cancer is no respecter of persons, and it gets really nasty before it finally withers away. I don't do that anymore. Everything has a price, you see. Everything. And I lost my baby brother regardless, dammit, and I still miss his skinny ass.
So, I was flying my kite for Angelina, looking to see what was looking for her and hoping that it was Daniel or someone like him. You might ask why I didn't just look at Angelina, herself, and follow the lines from her to wherever. That would be a fair question, and my answer would be fairly simple. How many things are YOU connected to? You personally. Millions and millions. But an image of you, a construct that is like a memory, something that is not you, but is something that only certain things or people are connected to... that is useful. That's a whirly-gig. That is something that is connected to YOU, but not to you physically. It's connected by someone else thinking of you, holding you in their minds and their hearts, and the stronger they know you, the harder they think of you, the more solid the connection. Right now I figure there are only a few people whose lines would be like tree trunks, reaching out to the memory of Angelina.
And of course, there are probably some people that think this is full and total baloney. To them I say, "Whatever floats your boat, chum." There is no requirement in my life that anybody believe in anything I believe. All that matters is that I believe what I believe. The rest of you go muddle through with what you believe the best you can.
There were, most definitely people looking for Angelina. There were three threads as wide as a Saturn rocket connected to my whirly-gig. These were what I was looking for, these were people that knew her, and knew her well. Two of them shot off to the great Northwest. Probably her folks, if I was guessing, and I was. One of them headed Southwest. It was a greenish, cyan looking thing, shot with sparks of bright yellow and white. Green is the color of healing, so whoever this was connected was either hurting really bad, or extremely worried.
I took a bit of my consciousness away from the kite and tossed it downstream, following the Southwest route. The speed of thought is supposedly the speed of light, but how long did it take you to read this sentence? Moving your mind is not super fast, it takes time. Faster than walking, faster than driving, faster than the fastest jet can fly, but still, it takes time.
Now, I've played this game with a friend of mine a long time ago. I found her thread and followed it back to where she was, and I told her what she was wearing and what she was doing and blah blah blah. It's a parlor trick, but an important parlor trick. She was a friend, someone I knew personally and she and I had been intimate. That in and of itself builds a very strong connection and makes that bit of 'far-seeing' possible.
Someone that I don't know, someone that doesn't know me? The most I can do is follow the trail and get a snapshot of what their energy looks and feels like. It's not like I can pop in and say "Oh, by the way, are you Daniel?" That's for the Lucky Charms guy, and frankly, any one that says they can do project themselves to any thing or person that they don't know... well, let's just say that they'd have to pop in on me to prove it. Still, I can tell if it's someone that intends ill or intends good. That's a simple matter of the level of icky from the energy.
Good intentions feel good, they feel calm, they feel like laying among the flowers on a soft spring day. In short, they don't feel bad. Bad intentions feel cloying, sticky in a nasty way and make me nauseous. Simple, huh? If I don't throw up, then everything is cool.
Oh, and by the way, energy is neither masculine or feminine. Those are human concepts. Energy can be destructive or constructive, and sometimes it can be both at once. If you want to call a force of energy 'Goddess Energy', or 'Godhead' or Zeus that's fine, but you'll have a very hard time convincing me that energy is anything but energy.
I followed this Southwest trail to where it ended, which was a slow moving mob of greens and whites and yellows, and hung here, watching it. From the signatures around it, there was another person with them, dimly glowing in the mist of what may have been an automobile. Automobiles have the spiritual signature of a rock. Less than a rock, actually. They don't shine, but they do move and shift when in motion, like a clump of fog. Whoever was the traveling companion wasn't doing very well.
I pushed my spark a bit closer, to see what I could see. The dim one was not sick, they were hurt badly. How bad, I couldn't tell. The other was pushing a lot of energy to the dim one and was sustaining their sick friend as best they could. I couldn't tell if the dim one was going to wink out or not, so I focused on the one doing the pushing. The colors smelled kind of like old socks, musty and worn. That's the smell of worry to me. Worry rubs and rubs and rubs till it's threadbare. I moved in a bit closer.
The bright one surprised me by reaching out and touching me. This does not happen, in a general sense. Energy can pass very closely to each other and never know there someone else out there. It was a bit of a shock, and I felt my spark, that tiny bit of me, flinch and grow calm. The reason why it calmed is because the other, the bright one, sent calming stuff my way. Good intentions.
The only way that the bright one would even sense that I was there was if they knew me, or knew of me. I had to make a guess and I guessed it was Daniel, who knew my name and could pick up my own signature just from the brief conversation he had with Angelina. And yes, it can work that way. If you describe a friend to me, give me a name, I can seek them out. I can't do much if they aren't expecting me, but if need be, I can reach out and feed them energy, or in some cases, change their luck factor. They'll never even know I was there, unless they are really sensitive.
Luck factor, by the way, is just how the individual mass of energies that make a human interact with the rest of the universe's energies. If you cry out that all your luck is bad, guess what? It's all bad. If you change that, and decide that your luck will be good, then good luck you'll have. You may not win the lottery, you may not meet the man of your dreams, but generally your life will not suck as bad as it might. And sometimes, sometimes, you might just win that lottery. My brother wins quite often, not a lot, but enough that it's gotten him out of a couple of tight places. His secret? He knows he's going to win. That's it, pure and simple. I don't win the lottery, but then I don't play the lottery. And kiddies, that's the secret to life. You can't win if you don't play.
I went on the assumption that it was Daniel, who I had known briefly through Angelina's conversation. He spoke in a foreign language. That's not a big deal, because conversation between spiritual energy, and I use the word spiritual very loosely, is non-verbal, and non-visually image based. Non-verbal images are the things you see in dreams, things of no substance, but still communicate. They aren't pictures so much as they are the essence of a picture. Like a picture stripped of anything that makes it a picture so what is left is just the thought of a picture. Got that?
So I 'talked' to Daniel, very briefly, because that will tire me out faster than anything. I pushed my little whirly-gig at him, with the essence that she was safe and signed it with my signature. I saw a bright blue flash of surprise by my touch back, and I also sent calming stuff back. Good intentions.
To show my good faith, I pushed a bit of energy to the dim one, saw a bit of blue surprise, and saw the splash of green healing spread just a bit. Now that they had my signature, they could figure out who I was. It's a dangerous thing to give anyone your signature, especially if you don't know them well. Signatures are how people and things can find you. Sometimes nasty things that you don't dare to remember once you have survived them, or they might find you again.
Knowing that I had been adrift an awful long time, probably minutes now, I knew I needed to get back to home base. I let go of Daniel and flowed back to where my kite waited, still drifting among the soular winds. It's rather hard to quit floating there. It would be easy to just stay and drift and fly and be, where nothing hurts and there is no hunger and there is no sadness. The downside to this is that the body, back on planet earth would probably die. So, you push yourself back down the line, remind yourself to breath, blink your eyes a couple of times because your eyeballs have dried out and the world comes rushing back into your ears and eyes and nerves. Sad, but that's the way it is. Life, for all it's goodness, hurts. All the time.
"Daniel is coming this way." I said to Angelina, turning back towards her. Before she could say anything to me, I asked her if there was someone else with him.
"Maybe his... mate," she said.
"Mate? Wife? Lover?" I asked.
"Daniel is gay," she said.
"So?" I answered. What a person did with their sexuality is not my concern. "Mate? Wife? Lover? Friend? How close are they?"
"Very close," she said. "Daniel and Matthew have been together for a very long time. Why?"
"Because one of them, either Daniel or Matthew is very ill, possibly dying. The fact that they are so close will increase the odds of the other one living to get here." I walked to the bathroom and splashed water on my face. I looked into the mirror and saw my eyes, bloodshot and very, very tired.
"What did you see?" she asked from the other room.
"I saw that they were headed this way," I said, sounding more gruff than I intended. God, I was tired. "If we're lucky, we'll see them tomorrow, or the next day. They are moving very slowly and they don't know where we are."
I didn't tell her that the bright one could probably find us because of my signature. It's like a homing beacon. If you've ever felt your loved one walk in the room without you seeing them, or knew who was calling on the phone before you answered, you'll know exactly what I mean. When he gets near me, if he reaches out, he'll feel me before he sees me. I really don't like that. I really don't.
"They'll pick up speed once they get out of the city, I'm sure." She sounded happy and sad and nervous. "How badly is the one hurt?" she asked, worried.
"Pretty badly, I think." I needed something to eat, something to drink and I needed to get to sleep. It was past midnight, and it was time that I recharge. The way I felt, I would probably sleep ten hours straight. "I think they'll make it, though. The feeling that I got was that the other, the one doing the driving, was helping as much as they could." I went to the door. "I hope there's an all night convenience store near by. If I don't get something to eat soon, it's not going to be pretty."
"I'm coming with you," Angelina said, close behind.
"Whatever," I muttered. I was out the door and into the van before she finished locking the door. I had the van started and was backing out before she had her seatbelt fastened. When I get hungry, especially after doing one of these stupid out of body things, hell won't have it until I get something to eat. And I don't really care what it is.
For my Capitani, and whoever else reads this drivel
Now that I think back to the conversation, I remember that I sounded so much more casual than I really felt. I think it's something we all do, change our styles of thinking, change our styles of behavior to fit the person we're talking to, to fit the situation we're in. It's something I've noticed in myself time and time again.
When I'm by myself, I tend to act and talk like nobody special. I think of myself as just an old guy, maybe an accountant, very unassuming, nothing that would stand out in the crowd.
Put me in a situation where things might get tight, and I acquire, because acquire is the only word I can think of, I acquire a whole other set of personality traits. Casual, sure headed, positive that good things will happen and whatever comes along is easily taken care of. And I think this regardless of how tough it gets. That's when I'm with someone else.
Put me in the same situation when I'm by myself and I become grumpy and irritable, mean and spiteful. It doesn't last long, just long enough to do a five minute rant about the injustice in the universe. After that I start to laugh at myself, because when I get angry, I can be pretty darn funny looking. After the rant, I laugh at myself because really, there isn't anything we can't live through, no matter how tough, and if we don't, then it doesn't really matter, does it? I laugh at myself because laughter is the best way to counteract the shadows in our lives, and believe me, I've got shadows.
Right then though, with Angelina, I knew that whatever happens, I was going to be a short, bald little superman and take care of the situation. Because I could. Because maybe the universe had put me in such and such a spot at such and such a time with such and such a person who was in the very trouble that I, and only I, could get her out of.
Then again, all that could be just very rationalized bullshit.
The drive up I-25 from Raton was quiet and dark, and it was obvious that we were in the foothills of some really big mountains. The drive reminded me of traveling through the Ozarks, with its turns and twists. At one point we kept pace with a train, hauling freight. The tracks run parallel to the interstate, and since I love trains I matched my speed to theirs and pulled up close enough to see the lights in the cabin. When I could see the engineer, I honked my horn, twice. He looked over at me and waved, and blew his own horn. I waved, not knowing if he saw me or not.
"Why did you do that?" Angelina asked me.
It was the first thing she had said since we left the truckstop. I figured she was in reflection or meditation or something. She was looking out the passenger window, looking far off into the mountains, into the night. This was okay with me, since I tend to drive pretty much in silence with the only noise being my own crazy brain chattering away.
"Because it's just something I do," I told her. "Two strangers, passing in the lonely night. We may never see each other again, and it's just like saying 'Hello there. I know you're alive and I'm thankful for it.'. Ocean going vessels, before the telegraph, used to blow their horns when they would see the lights of another ship at night. It keeps the dark away."
"Ah," she said, nodding. "Just so." She turned back to the window and continued her mountain watching.
Trinidad, at ten at night, is a sleeping town of just under ten thousand. It's well kept, the streets are clean, the buildings are something like a hundred years old and a place I definitely want to get back to some day.
We checked in at the Frontier Motel & Cafe, just because I liked the name and it had a vacancy sign that was lit. Besides, while out traveling, I like breakfast. I don't eat breakfast normally, I feel it's a waste of time and there's other things to be doing. But traveling is a different thing. A breakfast grounds you out, gets you in touch with the local earth and people and gives you time to contemplate what the heck you're doing and what your next move will be.
I only got the one room at the motel. I'm a cheap bastard in the best of situations. Money is hard to come by, and you never know when you're going to need a little extra. I had not planned on having company on this trip, so being frugal would be the best I could do.
It never occurred to me to ask Angelina if she had any money. It's just not something I do. In fact, to ask feels to me to be extremely rude, though I know that it's probably not. I think it's something I got from my parents, probably my father. If I had asked, it would have made the whole trip easier. Shared expenses are a good thing.
Angelina was very subdued. Up to Trinidad, she spent the whole time speaking very little. I tossed my bag on the chair, turned on the Television, and turned on the History Channel. It's how I get the room used to me, and how I let the spooks and little folk know that I'm here. I asked Angelina if she was all right.
"No, not entirely," she said, laying back on the queen-sized bed. "I'm very tired, and I'm worried about Daniel and his wife. They were good friends. They ARE good friends."
"Hm." I hummed. "You think something bad happened to them?"
She nodded. "Yes. I'm thinking they may be dead. He said that they were going to try to meet us on the road." She shook her head. "I don't know how they could. They don't know what you're driving, they don't know what you look like." She started to tear up. "They don't even know the route we're taking."
"Sure they do," I said. "You told him that I wasn't going in the direction of Las Vegas, remember? There's pretty much only one other route to take, and that's up through Colorado Springs and then turn West."
"They don't even know I'm riding with you."
"You know," I said with a bit of sarcasm in my voice and my eyebrow raised, "if you keep thinking this way, nothing good will happen. Negative brings negative, positive brings positive."
I sat on the bed next to where she lay. I put my hand on her knee to reassure her. It was a strong knee. Not a lot of fat in that knee, for sure. I pulled my hand away, gently. I didn't need the distraction my brain was taking me to.
"I think it's a fair assumption to believe that Daniel, knowing that I bought you food, and knowing that I had to have heard your side of the conversation, would think that I, being the gentleman you described, would have offered you a ride. I am, after all, going to Oregon, and you are, after all, a damsel in distress."
Angelina rolled over onto her side, facing away from me. Neither of us made a sound for a while, and the History Channel was talking about the discovery of gunpowder in ancient china.
Minutes passed and I got bored. I don't mind deep discussions about things that trouble, but there's just so much I can take before I want to do something else. I stood up from the bed, crossed to the window and opened the shade. I looked out at the street lights with their diamond glare and let my mind drift far, far away.
I was looking for something, but I had no idea what. It's that weird part of my brain I try to ignore. Unfortunately, this was a situation where I needed that part to do it's stuff. I decided, after a minute of looking at nothing, to go looking for anyone that was connected to Angelina. It's not that hard to do, once you have the knack. You just just tie what I call a person's signature, something about them that is distinctive and unique to their personality, and let it ride your consciousness like a whirly-gig on a kite string.
My grandfather taught me about whirly-gigging kite string. All you have to do is take a rectangular piece of paper, put a hole in it's center, slice from and end to the hole and slip it over a kite string while the kite is flying. The wind will take the paper and move it up, and up, all the way up until it meets the kite.
I miss my grandfather at times. He was a crotchety old coot, nice to folks, gruff to his grandchildren and would sometimes slip us a quarter when grandma wasn't looking so we could buy a soady pop. That's what he called a Coke or a Pepsi or his favorite, RC cola. A soady pop. I learned what Playboy was in the back of his old dodge when I found a magazine he had left there. I was probably all of six or seven. I didn't care much for the naked pictures of the women, but I was entranced by the Vargas Bunny Girl. I think that was when I first fell in love with the female form, and comic book women. Yes, I have a thing for two dimensional women. Just another of the odd quirks of being me.
I stood there, at the window, and captured Angelina's voice in my mind. That soft and sultry sound that had a distinct Romanian or Slovakian flavor. I added to that her eyes, brown and almond shaped, tipping up at the corners and crinkly when she smiled. Her nose, long and slender, with delicate petal shaped nostrils that flared when she laughed. Her mouth, long slim lips, drawn back from straight teeth with tiny fangs. Her diamond shaped face framed with long brown hair. I added this all together and sent it up with the whirly-gig attached to the string of my roaming consciousness.
I can't really do it justice to explain it or describe the feeling when my mind goes a-wandering. On some television show I watched years ago, they called it 'far-seeing', but that's not it. I think, if anything, it's more like 'far-sensing', like trying to sniff out a gas leak in a crowded building. The ancients used to call something like what I do, scrying, but that's not quite it either. I'm not looking into the future, and I'm not trying to see signs to direct me. I'm just out there wandering, trying to find a lost scent.
From my viewpoint, it kinda looks like this: I look at something that allows me to unfocus my eyes. It can be anything as long as it's blurry. Like streetlights through a window sort of blurry. Once my eyes truly unfocus, which is harder than it sounds, the blurriness is replaced by ... I guess the best way to describe it is a haze. A haze comes over the world and I can toss my mind, my consciousness out onto something like a wind and go riding that wind out into the world.
I don't see the countryside likes it's a big aerial view. I see the world, when I'm wandering, like it's colors and lights and shifting mist. Like everything shines and shifts. I call what I see the signatures of life energy from just about everything that has life. The earth itself is like that, full of life, everywhere you look. The misty parts are the dead parts. Roads, buildings, mountains, except mountains are literally teaming with life, so it's like watching a fog full of fireflies. Buildings are alive too, but they look like tall fountains with dots of sparkly fires.
That doesn't even begin to explain what I really see. That's just kind of an image so I can translate. If you add that everything is connected in someway, and I mean everything, then you get this tremendous crosshatching effect that just makes it more confusing to try to describe. Everything is connected, some greatly, some minorly, some hardly at all, but it's all connected and sharing energy between each other like sending signals over wires.
Now, when I go looking for something specific, I send my whirly-gig up to where my 'eyes' are, and I look to see what's connected to it, and how strong. That is, if I have a whirly-gig to send up. If I don't, then I have to construct as best I can an image of what I'm looking for and hope that the signature I've created matches pretty close. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. And it's not something I do very often because it tires me out something fierce.
But on that night, with the coolness of the window pressing against my forehead, I wanted to see if I could find something very specific. I created my Angelina Whirly-gig and tossed it out there to see who or what was connected to it. I figured a little extra tired was nothing compared to having a mopey and depressive woman in the car.
I heard a shifting from the bed, and my kite of consciousness snapped that direction. Angelina was sitting up and looking at me. She was all manner of Indigo and Blues and Red. At the center of her colors, she shone white. She was a good guy, after all, though that didn't surprise me. Very spiritually based, too. The Indigo and blues were clear indication of that. The white... the white is just purity of spirit. Reds are ... well, reds are just life. Everyone glows red.
I held up my hand, trying to caution her to be still, be quiet, daddy's working. She did good. She didn't move, she didn't ask me what I was doing. She just watched. I ignored the feel of her eyes, the feel of her own personal energy probing me and went back up to my kite.
The beginning is the important part. Getting the kite up, setting it to the wind, holding the string taught and holding onto it, that's the big part. A distraction can cause the wind to die down and the string to go limp and the kite will come fluttering back down to land between my eyeballs. Or worse, which would be for the string to snap and there you go, drifting across the universe, unable to find yourself. They make places for folks that have done that. Sanitariums. Not for me, thank you very much. I hold my string very tight.
Once the kite is up, though, it's very hard to shake me back unless I just want to come back. It's addictive to be up there, free of this world, soaring amidst the winds of living souls. It's exhilarating as any roller coaster, first good night kiss on the first date, having hit your first home run every could be. There in lie the danger, of course. The curse of the Lotus Eaters.
All across the land, lines and mist and colors and lights shifted before my gaze. I felt strong, invincible, all powerful. It was an illusion, of course. Physically, someone could take a bat and bash my head it while I'm doing this. Granted, I might have a seconds warning, some sound of movement might alert me, but still... ever try to stop a baseball bat that is swinging towards you in under a second?
I've heard talk about setting wards and guards and protective spells and crap like that. I've also heard cries of "Why didn't it work? It should have worked" That's the problem with this stuff. You get to depend on it, and sure enough, someone will pick your pocket while you're out drinking tea. This stuff, this metaphysical mumbo-jumbo is just like any other crutch. Eventually the bully down the street will kick it out from under you and there you'll be, crying out at the world at the injustice, oh, the injustice of it all. There's just not a lot of sympathy there for me. It's also why I don't spend too much time doing it. There's a lot of bullies in the world and only one of me, and I like me a whole lot better than I like them.
Here's another downfall: Helping heal the sick. See, once you find out you can sniff out stuff with this supervision, you also start to discover that you can transfer this energy, though the wires to other folks. You can literally heal the sick, make the lame walk, the blind see, all that stuff. For a price. For every bit of work you do, a bit of you goes with it. For me, to heal the sick means that I take the sick energy from the person or thing, replace it with my own energy, and let the universe do it's thing. See, sickness is keyed to the area it's supposed to be. If it's in me, and supposed to be in you, then you get better, and the sickness withers and fades because it doesn't belong in me. That's the theory, anyway. I found out the hard way that cancer is no respecter of persons, and it gets really nasty before it finally withers away. I don't do that anymore. Everything has a price, you see. Everything. And I lost my baby brother regardless, dammit, and I still miss his skinny ass.
So, I was flying my kite for Angelina, looking to see what was looking for her and hoping that it was Daniel or someone like him. You might ask why I didn't just look at Angelina, herself, and follow the lines from her to wherever. That would be a fair question, and my answer would be fairly simple. How many things are YOU connected to? You personally. Millions and millions. But an image of you, a construct that is like a memory, something that is not you, but is something that only certain things or people are connected to... that is useful. That's a whirly-gig. That is something that is connected to YOU, but not to you physically. It's connected by someone else thinking of you, holding you in their minds and their hearts, and the stronger they know you, the harder they think of you, the more solid the connection. Right now I figure there are only a few people whose lines would be like tree trunks, reaching out to the memory of Angelina.
And of course, there are probably some people that think this is full and total baloney. To them I say, "Whatever floats your boat, chum." There is no requirement in my life that anybody believe in anything I believe. All that matters is that I believe what I believe. The rest of you go muddle through with what you believe the best you can.
There were, most definitely people looking for Angelina. There were three threads as wide as a Saturn rocket connected to my whirly-gig. These were what I was looking for, these were people that knew her, and knew her well. Two of them shot off to the great Northwest. Probably her folks, if I was guessing, and I was. One of them headed Southwest. It was a greenish, cyan looking thing, shot with sparks of bright yellow and white. Green is the color of healing, so whoever this was connected was either hurting really bad, or extremely worried.
I took a bit of my consciousness away from the kite and tossed it downstream, following the Southwest route. The speed of thought is supposedly the speed of light, but how long did it take you to read this sentence? Moving your mind is not super fast, it takes time. Faster than walking, faster than driving, faster than the fastest jet can fly, but still, it takes time.
Now, I've played this game with a friend of mine a long time ago. I found her thread and followed it back to where she was, and I told her what she was wearing and what she was doing and blah blah blah. It's a parlor trick, but an important parlor trick. She was a friend, someone I knew personally and she and I had been intimate. That in and of itself builds a very strong connection and makes that bit of 'far-seeing' possible.
Someone that I don't know, someone that doesn't know me? The most I can do is follow the trail and get a snapshot of what their energy looks and feels like. It's not like I can pop in and say "Oh, by the way, are you Daniel?" That's for the Lucky Charms guy, and frankly, any one that says they can do project themselves to any thing or person that they don't know... well, let's just say that they'd have to pop in on me to prove it. Still, I can tell if it's someone that intends ill or intends good. That's a simple matter of the level of icky from the energy.
Good intentions feel good, they feel calm, they feel like laying among the flowers on a soft spring day. In short, they don't feel bad. Bad intentions feel cloying, sticky in a nasty way and make me nauseous. Simple, huh? If I don't throw up, then everything is cool.
Oh, and by the way, energy is neither masculine or feminine. Those are human concepts. Energy can be destructive or constructive, and sometimes it can be both at once. If you want to call a force of energy 'Goddess Energy', or 'Godhead' or Zeus that's fine, but you'll have a very hard time convincing me that energy is anything but energy.
I followed this Southwest trail to where it ended, which was a slow moving mob of greens and whites and yellows, and hung here, watching it. From the signatures around it, there was another person with them, dimly glowing in the mist of what may have been an automobile. Automobiles have the spiritual signature of a rock. Less than a rock, actually. They don't shine, but they do move and shift when in motion, like a clump of fog. Whoever was the traveling companion wasn't doing very well.
I pushed my spark a bit closer, to see what I could see. The dim one was not sick, they were hurt badly. How bad, I couldn't tell. The other was pushing a lot of energy to the dim one and was sustaining their sick friend as best they could. I couldn't tell if the dim one was going to wink out or not, so I focused on the one doing the pushing. The colors smelled kind of like old socks, musty and worn. That's the smell of worry to me. Worry rubs and rubs and rubs till it's threadbare. I moved in a bit closer.
The bright one surprised me by reaching out and touching me. This does not happen, in a general sense. Energy can pass very closely to each other and never know there someone else out there. It was a bit of a shock, and I felt my spark, that tiny bit of me, flinch and grow calm. The reason why it calmed is because the other, the bright one, sent calming stuff my way. Good intentions.
The only way that the bright one would even sense that I was there was if they knew me, or knew of me. I had to make a guess and I guessed it was Daniel, who knew my name and could pick up my own signature just from the brief conversation he had with Angelina. And yes, it can work that way. If you describe a friend to me, give me a name, I can seek them out. I can't do much if they aren't expecting me, but if need be, I can reach out and feed them energy, or in some cases, change their luck factor. They'll never even know I was there, unless they are really sensitive.
Luck factor, by the way, is just how the individual mass of energies that make a human interact with the rest of the universe's energies. If you cry out that all your luck is bad, guess what? It's all bad. If you change that, and decide that your luck will be good, then good luck you'll have. You may not win the lottery, you may not meet the man of your dreams, but generally your life will not suck as bad as it might. And sometimes, sometimes, you might just win that lottery. My brother wins quite often, not a lot, but enough that it's gotten him out of a couple of tight places. His secret? He knows he's going to win. That's it, pure and simple. I don't win the lottery, but then I don't play the lottery. And kiddies, that's the secret to life. You can't win if you don't play.
I went on the assumption that it was Daniel, who I had known briefly through Angelina's conversation. He spoke in a foreign language. That's not a big deal, because conversation between spiritual energy, and I use the word spiritual very loosely, is non-verbal, and non-visually image based. Non-verbal images are the things you see in dreams, things of no substance, but still communicate. They aren't pictures so much as they are the essence of a picture. Like a picture stripped of anything that makes it a picture so what is left is just the thought of a picture. Got that?
So I 'talked' to Daniel, very briefly, because that will tire me out faster than anything. I pushed my little whirly-gig at him, with the essence that she was safe and signed it with my signature. I saw a bright blue flash of surprise by my touch back, and I also sent calming stuff back. Good intentions.
To show my good faith, I pushed a bit of energy to the dim one, saw a bit of blue surprise, and saw the splash of green healing spread just a bit. Now that they had my signature, they could figure out who I was. It's a dangerous thing to give anyone your signature, especially if you don't know them well. Signatures are how people and things can find you. Sometimes nasty things that you don't dare to remember once you have survived them, or they might find you again.
Knowing that I had been adrift an awful long time, probably minutes now, I knew I needed to get back to home base. I let go of Daniel and flowed back to where my kite waited, still drifting among the soular winds. It's rather hard to quit floating there. It would be easy to just stay and drift and fly and be, where nothing hurts and there is no hunger and there is no sadness. The downside to this is that the body, back on planet earth would probably die. So, you push yourself back down the line, remind yourself to breath, blink your eyes a couple of times because your eyeballs have dried out and the world comes rushing back into your ears and eyes and nerves. Sad, but that's the way it is. Life, for all it's goodness, hurts. All the time.
"Daniel is coming this way." I said to Angelina, turning back towards her. Before she could say anything to me, I asked her if there was someone else with him.
"Maybe his... mate," she said.
"Mate? Wife? Lover?" I asked.
"Daniel is gay," she said.
"So?" I answered. What a person did with their sexuality is not my concern. "Mate? Wife? Lover? Friend? How close are they?"
"Very close," she said. "Daniel and Matthew have been together for a very long time. Why?"
"Because one of them, either Daniel or Matthew is very ill, possibly dying. The fact that they are so close will increase the odds of the other one living to get here." I walked to the bathroom and splashed water on my face. I looked into the mirror and saw my eyes, bloodshot and very, very tired.
"What did you see?" she asked from the other room.
"I saw that they were headed this way," I said, sounding more gruff than I intended. God, I was tired. "If we're lucky, we'll see them tomorrow, or the next day. They are moving very slowly and they don't know where we are."
I didn't tell her that the bright one could probably find us because of my signature. It's like a homing beacon. If you've ever felt your loved one walk in the room without you seeing them, or knew who was calling on the phone before you answered, you'll know exactly what I mean. When he gets near me, if he reaches out, he'll feel me before he sees me. I really don't like that. I really don't.
"They'll pick up speed once they get out of the city, I'm sure." She sounded happy and sad and nervous. "How badly is the one hurt?" she asked, worried.
"Pretty badly, I think." I needed something to eat, something to drink and I needed to get to sleep. It was past midnight, and it was time that I recharge. The way I felt, I would probably sleep ten hours straight. "I think they'll make it, though. The feeling that I got was that the other, the one doing the driving, was helping as much as they could." I went to the door. "I hope there's an all night convenience store near by. If I don't get something to eat soon, it's not going to be pretty."
"I'm coming with you," Angelina said, close behind.
"Whatever," I muttered. I was out the door and into the van before she finished locking the door. I had the van started and was backing out before she had her seatbelt fastened. When I get hungry, especially after doing one of these stupid out of body things, hell won't have it until I get something to eat. And I don't really care what it is.
