Long Division

Who are you now? and now? and now? There's something to be said for gaining a level of consciousness that can sustain an awareness as moments provoke our various personas. Maybe for me the chances of this happening are roughly equal to the chances of seeing a rainbow. As I clean out the medicine cabinet I see something of an inventory of these ghosts and their projections. There's a can of hairspray that hasn't been used in a decade at least. I vaguely remember the insecurity and complex of fixations experienced by the person that felt the need to buy it, this enormous can of crap that is at least 99% full. I could go on a long time about the flattened, toxic world of living within the complex in which perfection is evidenced in the shape of one's hair or the values of the DOW - as distinct from the Tao - but all I need to say is Hairspray and laugh a long, demonic laugh.

A bottle of children's tylenol brings me back to another kind of terror, a child sick, the precious perfect thing nature somehow made sick with God knows what in the night. I have to control this evil, I turn to liquid tylenol, the concretized masculine that gives me a sense of control over turmoil. Later someone tells me that acetominophine has been proven to be useless. There's an old bottle of calamine lotion.  I'm reminded of exploring the forests near my house in Virginia years ago, somehow I got poison ivy all over my face. My relatives seemed to come to conclusions about how a adolescent girl might get poison ivy all over her face but nothing like that happened. I have absolutely no idea what did happen, I'm just that unconscious. The steroids I took to reduce swelling so I could open my eye better were long ago fully consumed.

Here's something less nightmarish - I bottle of powdered white clay that I've used on bruises, rashes, and for infections. It's like the silt from the Blue Lagoon, where I've never been although I remember other people visiting it. It's calm and strangely understates its pervasive kindness. When you paint clay on yourself, your are in a vastly different state from one who is compelled to apply hairspray. You are over and undergirded by a mineral matrix that intricately, suddenly and compassionately silences the unreal.