joegoda | Nano Day 23 - Trippin the Vortex

For Capi and the Readers

Her story went like this:

Dad, one James Thomas, born in Seattle, was a philosophy major, something that I've never really been able to understand. I, personally would love to get paid to do nothing more than wonder about the whys of the universe, but I will be darned if I have any idea where you get a job like that.

His main course of study involved study of old gods, like those of the Norse, the Romans and the Greeks. He was looking for the connection between these archetypes and what they meant to the psyche and philosophical development of the human race. He was following the train of thought that all of the gods were repeated in each of the separate ideologies.

Besides writing a paper about how the early gods popped up all over the globe, from the Mayans to the Chinese, he also had a theory about these gods. His theory was that they weren't gods at all. They were humans, but they were enhanced humans. How were they enhanced? He had no clue, or, he had a number of clues.

There were stories of herbs, medicine, spells, animals... you name it, that created abilities in a normal man that would appear to give him the same abilities, or some of them anyway, that the Gods displayed. There were devices that were created thousands of years ago to throw lightning. There were devices also created that would allow people to fly. It was his belief that these stories were more than just stories, and these devices could be duplicated. It was his belief that man could be come God.

Dad was also heavy into LSD during the early seventies and late sixties. He had followed the rumors of Government experiments on college students with a religious fervor, until he had a revelation. It didn't matter. If the Government did experiments, it just didn't matter. Instead, he turned his learnings, as meager as they were, into experimentation. On himself.

He found the rumors of mind altering and psychic enhancement to be true, but only if the drug was used in heavy quantities and daily. He almost died, Angelina told me. He lay in a drug enduced stupor for a week, his body wasting away, growing weaker.

His mind, though, was running through the Universe, running the numbers, playing the galactic odds and having some hellacious visions. It was in one of those visions, he told her, that he found the key.

Something snapped into place, he woke up and he started the process of healing. According to what he told Angelina, he was able to draw from the very earth the energy he needed. He no longer needed to eat, he said, though he could if he chose to. He found he could see and manipulate the fields of energy around him to do as he desired. In his mind, he had achieved his wish. He had become like a god.

That was only part of his wish, though. He wished for a hierarchy of gods and goddesses. He wanted a family.

When he turned thirty-six, he found the woman that he would marry, a lovely young medical student named Mary Wilson. He wooed her, under the guise of being a completely normal computer nerd, made very rich by some wise Silicon Vally investments. She fell in love with him, or who she thought he was, and agreed to marry him.

On their wedding night, he slipped her some very powerful LSD, and made her go through the same trip he had gone through. When she came back to the world of the non-stoned, he shed his nerdish disguise and explained to her what he wanted.

Angelina didn't have any details about how he did this, and I didn't ask my obvious question, because I knew she couldn't answer it. My question was this: If he was able to manipulate energy fields, why didn't he just do it to his wife and change her to the goddess he was wanting?

I do have a partial answer. There's this free will thing. Yeah, I know, it's a religious concept and not one I'm totally comfortable with. However, I know from personal experience that there is something in the human mind that cannot be bent by another's will.

I have a few friends in the BDSM community who will argue with me. They will tell me that it is possible to have total control over another person. They can argue with me all they want, but they keep forgetting one thing. It's all play. And it's all done with the permission of the one being submissive. The strongest player in the game is the one who says "Yes, Master", because without the slave, the master is pretty damn powerless.

It's the human mind, with its intricate and odd patterns of vibrations, that cannot be controlled. It's the human spirit, with its indomitable capacity to be beaten down and rise up again, that cannot be manipulated. We're pretty resilient, after all. That's one of the things I like about us.

But Dad and Mom had formed a bond. Mother was apparently so much in love with her husband that she loosed all control she had and turned it over to him. Love is like that, I guess. And, according to Angelina, her father returned the love in kind, so the two became inseparable. God and Goddess, born by the wonders of modern science and ancient mysteries, and joined at the heart.

It was lovely story, and there was more.

Newlyweds James and Mary Thomas set up a household near the town of Prospect, Oregon. The choice was done because it was halfway between Crater Lake national Park and Gold Hill, Oregon. Gold Hill, Oregon is where you go if you want to get to see the Oregon Vortex.

I really hate it when the Universe shuffles its karmic deck and designates me as the Joker. It's something that I got used to, but it doesn't mean I have to like it. Synchronicity is a bitch.

Anyway, Mom and Dad, now ensconced in the Oregon wilderness, decided to create their dynasty. The concept was fairly simple. Since LSD bonds well with DNA, it can be transmitted through the genes and the resulting offspring will carry some, if not all of the very same modifications of the parents. If both of the parents carry modified genes, sort of like supergenes, then the children will have a better than average chance they would have supergenes too. It's a basic recessive - dominant thing.

Michael, Daniel, Raphael and Damien were all born within thirteen months of each other. The four boys were brought up believing that they were special, that they were the supermen of the human race. Dad brought the boys up to assume their godlike rolls, giving them training in the classical myths of the Gods, the sciences of the earth and the universe, the language of mathematics. Mom tried to teach them some of the social niceties, art, music, literature, but Angelina told me that her brothers did not feel they needed to know social niceties. They were born to rule and society would bend to them, not the other way around.

Great. If there's one thing that I really don't like, its a god that has no sense of where the salad fork goes.

Angelina came along when Michael was ten. She was an accident, she told me, and her father tended to treat her like one. Her abilities didn't appear at puberty, the classical time when the body goes haywire and all sorts of changes take place. In fact, she appeared to not have any god-like talents at all until recently. She admitted that it was something that took her by surprise, and something she didn't trust.

Angelina was hoping, she admitted to me, that it was a fluke, that what was happening to her would fade and go away. She didn't want to be a goddess. She just wanted to be a girl, a normal, regular girl.

Which brought us to this Anthony, and his family.

Being a normal human being, she did what anyone does when they are faced with a family that pretty much ignores them. She hid. She hid in plain sight, in books and daydreams, and when it became available, she hid in the Internet.

Sure, her mom doted on her, tried to teach her the same things she tried to teach the boys, and Angelina did pick up a bit of the artsy stuff that her mother taught. But there was enough drama in the family, fights between mother and father, and the constant oneupmanship of her brothers, that little Angelina faded into the background.

Angelina found that, on the Internet, specifically chat rooms, she could be whoever she wanted, and her family could be whoever she wanted them to be. She pretended to be a normal, if a bit poor, girl living in the hills of Oregon. Anyone who asked her about her family was told that her father was a used car dealer and that her mother was a nurse.

It got worse when she went to college. Having been home-schooled for her entire childhood by a goddess mother, her education was more than enough to allow her to have the scores to get her into whatever university she wanted. She chose the University of Oregon at Eugene, so she would be close to home. Somehow, though, I got the feeling that the University was chosen for her, so that dear old dad could keep an eye on her.

In college, she learned that she was pretty, that she had feelings, like any other normal girl. She brought home a few potential beaus, but somehow, every one that she brought home met with an unfortunate accident. She became a very lonely little girl, not wanting to subject any of her potential friends to a very real death. Though she had no proof, she knew in her heart of hearts, that her father and brothers were behind the accidents.

And so, she turned back to the Internet, to hide and become someone else. And that is where she met Anthony, a year ago. A couple of months later, she admitted to him that she had lied, and though she didn't tell him everything, she did tell him about her life and how she felt.

Anthony and she shared something in common, she told me. He, too, felt ignored by his family. He, too, felt an outsider among the rest of the family. And, he too, wished desperately to find someone who he could relate to.

The two continued chatting for the next few months and came up with a plan. She would run away to meet him in New York, and together they would disappear. Begin anew and create a normal life for themselves.

All wonderfully romantic, but also incredibly stupid. Anthony was a rich, spoiled kid, just like she was. Neither of them knew what it was like to actually have to work for a living, having had their lives handed to them. They believed that it was going to be nothing more than a matter of wave the wand, rub the lamp, and the genie would give them whatever they needed to survive. Love would be enough.

Anthony was like her more than she bargained for. Though not gods or even LSD users, his family was a very large coven of Old Crafters. Old Crafters are sort of like Wiccans, but older still. They tend to look down on Wiccans with the same disdain as papermills look at tree huggers. I've been involved... no... I've stood on the sidelines of some of the Old Crafters / Wiccan arguments. Not pretty things, no sirree.

Old Crafter do a great many things that Wiccans would never do. Blood sacrifices for example. And that's just one of the more recognized and nicer things. There are other, far darker things that an Old Crafter could and would do to achieve their goal.

And that is where the conflict in this story comes. Anthony, the dejected son of a Matriarchal society, who apparently has no desire for the black arts, and Angelina, the neglected daughter of a modern Theocracy, who apparently has no desire to be a godhead met and fell in love. The parents found out and, of course, found the other's family to be objectionable, which I understood to mean threatening.

When the two young lovers were discovered, words were exchanged. Threats were made. People being people, each trying to gain a bit more ground. In other words, two strong psychic powers that didn't like each other grew very quickly to loath each other.

Anthony's family had no wish for world domination. They just wanted to control what they were already controlling. It was, from what Angelina told me, her father that decided that the witches were a threat. Something about forces beyond his control just seemed to tick him off, so he said a few things that were probably not politically correct.

That, more than likely, made the witches angry and, I promise you, a really strong Old Crafter who is angry at you is a worse survival bet than being stripped naked, covered in A-1 sauce and tossed bound into a lion pit.

According to what Angelina told me, her father originally threatened to take Anthony's life. When that didn't create the effect on the witches that he had hoped, he upped the ante to include the entire coven.

In retaliation, the witches told him that if any action was taken on his part, if any member of the coven was harmed by him, they would cause the earth to shake with such a force that all of the west coast, Oregon included, would vanish into the Pacific ocean.

Hatfields and McCoys, all over again. Did I believe it was possible? Well, I'd seen some might strange things in my life. I had been involved in some of them. Possible? Sure. Probable? Maybe. In an infinite universe, anything can happen, and it probably will.

The important thing was that Angelina believed it, so whatever I believed didn't really matter. I was headed to Oregon anyway, so what the heck. It wasn't my fight. Or, at least, I was hoping it wouldn't be.

I recognized, believe it or not, that I had defeated her brothers in my dream. I also believe that it was a fairly true allegory of the real world, meaning that, yes, there was a battle where I could have died, and it would have killed me in the real world. But understand, it was MY dream, which meant my rules. Nobody knows my dreams as well as I do. My dreams are my playground, they are where I live when I'm not here, in the waking world. They really didn't stand a chance.

If I had been on their turf, it would not have turned out as nicely. If they were anything like what they appeared to be in my dream, then I was, at that time, pretty sure they would have put a world of hurt on me.

On the other hand, I've mixed it up with an Old Crafter. One. Singular. I feel that I was pretty lucky to get out with sanity intact. I'm not so sure there's not some psychic time bomb ticking away in me that won't go off just because of one reason or another. It's one reason I don't date... well, that and I'm still married.

I do not want to get between a coven of Old Crafters and whatever the heck got their dander up. I'll take a pissed off God any day, rather than a pissed off coven of Old Crafters. Women are much more nasty when angry than any man. Men, in comparison, are wimps. Men just bash things with bigger and bigger clubs. Women plot, they scheme, and if the have the capacity and ability, they do, always, get even. And better than even.

And sometimes I wonder why I live alone. No, I really don't.

Our discussion, or rather my listening and her talking took quite a bit of time. I learned to appreciate all the experience I had picked up while driving through the Arkansas mountains, because all the twisty turny roads that I drove there were just a precursor to the roads I drove through these mountains. There were times when the best interjection I could do in response to something Angelina had said was "Uh huh" and try to not fall off the mountain.

The mountains of northern Nevada and Southern Oregon are beautiful and marvelous to behold. I would love to go back there sometime, camera in hand and take a leisurely drive through them. I really would. But the more Angelina told me, the more determined I was to spend as little time as possible with her family. They were not folks I wanted to be chummy with.

And it was cold. We drove up mountains and down mountains that would have made a goat proud of me. I had the heater going full blast and every snow field I saw just made me shiver. Frost had formed on the windows while we were up, and it melted when we came down, but it came right back the next up we went.

But it was lovely. Truly it was. Part of me keeping the van on the road was, admittedly my fault. There's a part of me that has to look, to see, to be a part of. We passed within spitting distance of some of the most crystal clear lakes I had ever seen. There weren't many trees as high up as we were traveling, but what trees there were had such a vivid green to them that I almost cried from the intensity.

Highway 95 turned into highway 140, also known as the Denio Highway. By the time we had reached Denio, I was ready to get out of the van, stand on the side of the road and just look. Here, I felt, was where the world began. Here was where the entire rest of the country grew from.

I could feel the age of the mountains in my blood and it sang to me songs of my ancestors, the ones who came before any of us had names, the ones who crossed the great sea to be here, to explore and open new lands for their families. My heart beat with the slowness of the stone and my blood sang with the purity of the mountain lakes.

Yeah, I was in love. It was, and is, beautiful country. Some day I will get back up there. When it's warmer. Because, beautiful or not, it was just too darned cold.

We made it to a town called Lakeview, which, though small, was large enough to have about two dozen bait shops and hunting supply places. It also had an airport, though it catered to only the little pond hopper Cessna types. Lakeview had an incredible view to the south, Goose Lake, which is where it got its name.

It was in Lakeview, four hours out of Winnemucca and just about three to go that I decided that I was hungry. We pulled over for lunch at a little cafe called Honkers, right off the Fremont Highway. Honkers is nothing like Hooters, in case you are interested. Honkers is for geese. Hooters is for owls. Honkers is done in a goose hunting motif, whereas Hooters is primarily Nascar, I think. I've been to Hooters once, exactly the number of times I've been to Honkers.

We sat at a booth, because I like booths and I ordered a cheese burger, fries and a chocolate malt. Angelina ordered a BLT and a coke. We ate and we thought. It was getting close to the end of the road and we were both involved in our own thoughts.

I was dipping my fries in my malt when I felt the tingle on the back of my neck. And I was hoping for such a quiet meal.