[15] Many times I broke my glasses during practice and found while I couldn’t begin to see faces or recognize anyone during, say, a 10-minute water-break, as soon as play resumed I instantly knew every player on the pitch simply from how they moved. (I needed my glasses or contacts, then, to accurately judge ball speeds & especially spin, which affects every ball.)

            One thing seems sure from my gathering above: I am indeed a blessed man, having fully plied my physical form as few bodies have. If, as I posit, the biggest lesson in life is corporeality, then (duh!) of course I’d forever choose this life & body, especially over any random drop in the Paleolithic, where, in all seriousness, there is no soccer. It’s also abundantly clear from my list that my running ain’t nuthin’ but good. Therefore I confirm my associated emotional pain is displaced, in part because I locate among my gathered cards a deeper pain, a bigger dread—perhaps my source knot, though I don’t yet know for sure, for it seems too easy an answer. That is, I suspect a red herring, because in Albion’s narrative arc it arrives like a deus ex machina, and, frankly, I would hope Albion could tell a better story. Nevertheless, I now add, in Canto 8, a third dimension: I love hiking.  
            For Albion reminds me now I missed the point. Just as cognition & thinking are superfluous to eternal existence, so must my soccer & running also prove secondary, unnecessary to life’s deepest lessons. I did write of sex & shit & eating, which clinically, biologically, link us to our distant ancestors—but not practically at all. Namely, because my eternal identity is actually an abstract self-creation, I am more radically different from my ancestors in eternity’s human Village than here in the flesh: I have sex on a bed, shit on a toilet, and eat packaged food I buy from a store with invisible fungible currency, often oblivious to my meal’s origin & ingredients. This is how I know existence, thus is how I project myself. The physics & chemistry of these spacetime events don’t matter at all, compared to my attention & chosen relations amid the moment: I am the story I tell. I don’t hunt; I don’t hunger; and I don’t fear for angry gods or predators. I think.
            Let me not patronize here, dear Reader, but very few modern people can imagine the Paleolithic. Don’t compare these ancestors to our modern Stone Age people of the Amazon, for instance, who are eons more advanced. Consider that every native of an American rainforest, desert, or savannah descends from arctic ancestors, who’d already been brilliant tool-makers & boat-builders & industrial-scale hunters for millennia before reaching the Bering Strait land-bridge. Even when we visualize the cave walls of Lascaux or Chauvet, which vividly display ice-age megafauna hunted by armed Cro-Magnons, we must remember that these records date only to the most recent 5-10% of Homo sapiens’ physical history on Earth. Descend the deep-time math: Most humans [were/eternally are] mid-level megafauna, barely “special” among Africa’s savannah animals & not remotely “feral" when compared to modern humans: no bows or arrows, no clothes, no fishing hooks or stone-tipped spears, no regular means to hunt large game, no place-in-the-brain to conceive of such things. Such was Earth 1.0.
            And I keep returning to the Paleolithic because it worked. Life then may have been "nasty, brutish, and short,” but that minimal, ultra-physical reality—I know from ouija—provided a sufficient structure whereby human souls could establish themselves as eternal identities. The Fall—whatever, whenever it was—we were told explicitly, was not Good; still we follow in the fallout therefrom. I do not aim to return us to the Stone Age, God forbid; I’m just looking for the secret to its eternal success & physical stability.

​
            So while corporeality, I still believe, is necessary & central to all human existence, vigorous exercise certainly is not. Could the “active ingredient” to our bodily forms, then, be something as basic as metabolic functioning? The conscious mind forms but the surface scum of a deep well. Surely the most basic acts of breathing, digestion, & muscle contraction require highly-coordinated brain functioning, every heartbeat a synchronized fact. Even a fetus must use its brain to grow itself. Is this human corporeality at its essence? That is, does life boil down mostly to inner systems maintenance?
            No, not remotely: Metabolism & autonomic functions cannot comprise the essence to our bodily existence; for if they were sufficient, then every body, including presumably all animals & biological life, would automatically have a soul (even Republicans), contradicting much that we know. More to the heart of the paradigm, however, this “metabolic” conjecture is refuted when we recall that life is projection: No dream-maker dream ups from scratch extra dream-stuff that the (living) dreamer will never notice—especially because, in fact, by the laws of projection & existence, if no dreamer notices (i.e., if there is no observation, no connection nor collision), then the moment never was. 
            Souls choose; we are not hardwired machines simply, nor, more profoundly, are we even the “ghosts in our machine,” though often we mirror our metaphors. We are, in fact, metaphors themselves, which bridge two distinct ideas, or else gather many into one. These bridges can themselves then become points/nouns/tools/idols, but our souls exist more literally as verbs between points, as quantum vectors bridging absence. 
            Recognize, as much as I try to squeeze the secret sauce of life from its raw beef components, no god can tell you what makes any life “worthy” (enough) to be chosen by its soul, for the choice is each individual’s alone to make. Even as I assume every soul should/would choose well—namely, a life directed toward the Good—bad choices always remain viable options (otherwise there’s no choice or free will). One might ask then, regarding infinite eternity—with “bad” paths & catastrophic failure forever open to us, even seducing us—how, even mathematically, can we avoid our inevitable fall? Fortunately, thus, life is finite. Perhaps this explains in part why each soul must choose their karass in time (e.g., age 11) and not, as might seem likely, as a soul POV outside & irrespective of time, emperor of all options. Free will is becoming, not being.

§10-2-23

[5] Even today Brazil won’t grant me a normal tourist visa and threatens me with military conscription if I return!

[4] This is about ten years before all the big houses packed in thickly enough to wall off every public vista, a city-zoning shame. Thus for the first quarter mile or so there were no cars, just new road, utilities, & spectacular beauty. Some time later these pricey ridge-top residences with their awesome views above the greenbelts were shown to face serious fire hazard, growing every year. My own bedroom view of the Bay, soon obstructed by trees, faced southeast and couldn’t see the City.

[9] A profound aside on the strange subject of eagle shit: When visiting Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, my wife & I watched for two hours at least 25 bald eagles gathered around a dock & pilings, where there was much social jockeying over the prime piling perches. Several times we observed aggravated adults chase down juveniles until the pursued, about to be overtaken, shat in submission, whereupon the adult immediately peeled off to return to the pilings, job done. The juvenile, in turn, was banished across the inlet to lesser snags & perches. This was clear communication, obvious in meaning to my wife & me, requiring a huge portion of an eagle brain be fluid in social dynamics—dynamics that I’d never seen before in Washington, where eagles are not uncommon. I’m guessing our American eagles, however, don’t have the population density needed to establish social hierarchies; thus certain synapses may well get pruned. Our beautiful national symbols, compared to their ancestors & northern neighbors, might be developmentally disabled.

[13] The worst aspect of a torn hamstring: You can’t determine when you’re healed. Within a couple of weeks after the initial injury, you can often run/jog as much as you want without any problem, but there’s no way to know for sure that you’re o.k. until an all-out sprint. And sadly, I know too well that awful feeling when, one or two games back, your hammy explodes yet again, and your recovery is back to Square One. 

[6] This can only be a clue, one I do not understand, for Donnie is not someone I should remember at all. Gary, his brother, and I were in first grade together—a fact I know only from the class photo, not from memory.

​​​​​12.3  I Dance

            Soccer, if it’s not yet clear, is my highest form of dance, for I am—as Blake so eternally portrayed me—clearly a dancer at my core, though never trained to any steps. When I flew as a soccer player—particularly in my biggest & best games—my friends & teammates always described me afterwards as “dancing,” which in soccer parlance is not unusual, though few soccer flyers would be described this way every time. In addition to my weaving motions, which synchronized to the flow & tempo of the game (or often its counter-flow), “dance” described more my aura & bearing, as though music guided my steps & dips & slides. Above all “dance” described my immersed joy, my spontaneity & freedom, though I repeat here for the record: When playing sports I never hear any inner music or voices. Soccer absolutely silenced all noise.
            Because soccer has no music, duh; no overt, fixed tempo. So why am I surprised here to find myself unable logically to connect soccer & dance? My physical motions in both feel & at times look very similar—and I’m convinced both are deeply & eternally connected in me personally, even ontologically—but most of the time soccer & dance aren't alike at all. I insist soccer is my favorite dance, but I can’t make my argument (though I like a good mystery).
            Suffice it to say, then, music alone moves me, completely, both emotionally & physically. I can’t help it; I can’t stop myself. If I hear the first guitar riff to the Rolling Stones’ Brown Sugar or David Bowie’s Suffragette City or almost anything by the Beatles, I am desperate to put my whole body into it, quickly weaving my way to physical space; or else sadly, in most settings, I feel like some poor kid with Tourette’s syndrome struggling through math class, forced to sit rigid at a desk, stifling every starburst thought & tic—such hard work just steppin’ on the brakes.

            That I am a dancer in eternity was fully confirmed & proclaimed to me in my life’s single greatest dream (so far), I Dance, which I intended for months in advance and then actually received on the night of my 40th birthday (an arbitrary chosen date): 


                        I am fully  lucid ◊◊◊, fully Albion, and I am dancing, ecstatic though

            in complete control. I’m in a small room, a semi-transparent plastic cube

            roughly 9’ x 9’ x 9’, a minimalistic artificial place in hyperspace. Other cubes

            lie adjacent to mine, apparently empty, while “outside” is the universe. Of

            course there’s music, fast wonderful music that my legs & full body joyfully

            know well. In my right hand I have a glass wand. As I dance, I wield my

            wand/dancing cane to “blow” pure colors—much like Tinker Bell in the

            opening to Disney’s 1960s Wonderful World of Color—except these starbursts

            are regular 2-D geometric figures, filling the enclosed space like bright

            tangible shadows, then popping or fading, all with the music. Clearly the

            colors & music & dance are one; I can affect all at will at once. I see that to

            “shoot" a new color or array from my wand simultaneously changes the

            music & my dance. Thus I conclude—by virtue of quantum entanglement—I

            am the creator of all I experience. 
                         Abruptly I kick out sideways and jump through the wall and land,

            still dancing, in a different cube, new weird decorations. The music shifts

            fluidly—as is common to my (normal) music hallucinations—so do my dance

            steps & the colors I spray. I think about Mozart & Bach specifically. Surely,

            this place they knew. I feel I am witnessing personally their music world as

            few others have seen and far, far fewer can transcribe. Not me.

                         Josef, in the ouija debriefing that followed this dream, corrected me

            most seriously for calling on him aloud within this or any dream, at risk of

            alerting dangerous dream tigers/predators—which I accepted fully as soon

            as he told me, but I actually barely remembered. I believe I called on several

            members: Josef first, Albion(!), our Guide, surely Jane—rather like running

            through a rolodex or speed dial, knowing my time was short & not having

            any ready dreamtask or agenda, dancing only. I confirmed overtly, as the

            gigue kept going, how I didn’t tire at all, and I quickly jumped through (I

            think) three walls & a ceiling, all perfectly in synch with the dance & music,

            each room very alien, futuristic, & very hip, the tip of all possibilities.


§2/3/23


12.4  Sex & Shit

              From dance, I am now steered to write about sex, which in no way discomfits me; I’m just not sure what to say, what I could add. In short, I’ve had sex perhaps two thousand times with one woman only. I’ve watched only enough porn to know what I’m missing, and I’m grateful my needs are simply met—especially so I don’t have to spend much time & energy bleeding out sexual desires, fantasies, or worse, one-night stands. Don’t get me wrong: I need & enjoy sex. Most important to me, when all words go screwy between my wife & me, sex is our best means for restoring ma’at & forgiveness. The primordial function, melted in corporeal fusion, cuts through our busy city noises right to eternity: Sex as anamnesis. That is, I’ve never known casual sex, sex outside the weight of centuries. Am I lucky?
            I am, of course, biologically evolved & programmed to respond to physical stimuli. Female pheromones affect me everywhere; like everyone I’m bombarded, distracted, occasionally aroused; and caught up in the chemical storm find myself surprisingly able to visualize & project eidetic imagery spontaneously. That is, unlike the rest of my life my involuntary fantasies are visual, though snapshot photos stitched together by ridiculous narratives, sad tropes, not moving pictures. I spent the prime of my life, like everyone, plugging my ears, averting my eyes to my own pathetic pictures, projecting nonetheless, wondering in my countless wallows how I might employ this unique visual “window” to unlock in me the greater world of sight, maybe even see life. If you can’t beat ‘em, beat ‘em, I probably quipped (as Albion reminds me now) under the aegis & alibi of “full investigation,” though merely to modest abuse, nothing remotely revelatory. And now, only my advanced decades have darkened me to these invasive images. I’m no longer stopped in my tracks to smell the roses, because I no longer can smell. I’m speaking figuratively, not literally, only that aging has silver linings.
            So regarding my erotic fantasies, I feel “the medium is the message,” and what’s primary to me is that they’re visual at all. Still, their content tells its own story, and what it fabricates & reflects of my identity is not pleasant to behold. These self-generated fantasies follow all-too familiar filaments, stupid scenarios which I’m embarrassed to acknowledge, bastard children of my subconscious. In short, they follow the same idiotic plots one finds on most (straight-male) porn sites: An aggressive woman (someone I barely know) oversteps the social norms and comes on to me. My resistance, of course, is feeble, helpless. My tiger takes over and swallows me whole.
            One look at porn shows how repressed & normal I must be, as this particular plot line seems archetypal, ubiquitous to Homo sapiens porn. It’s fascinating, of course, that I can’t masturbate to my fantasized wife (like trying to tickle oneself?)—and I suspect I’m normal in this regard, too—that novelty & exploration seem more necessary to the equation, to combustion, than literal visualizing. Nor can I fantasize to any woman I know well or respect; the figures have to flow with the daydream, absurdities aside. When I know someone, I know no such tryst is remotely possible, and I lose the projection. Similarly—and here I may prove less normal—I can’t fantasize to sexy actresses or celebrities. Yes, they can arouse me at a glance, but the narrative becomes ridiculous, a script so bad I have to keep checking my lines. Meanwhile, the image flickers & falters. Soon what seemed involuntary and sui generis requires mental effort to maintain, trying hard to fool myself to orgasm. It is of profound significance that my personal will can affect and even write the script’s risqué dialogue. And of course, as a practice in life I want to strengthen my will & focus & creative juices; and I find, at times, real power in erotic imaging, like plugging into an electric socket. Most of the time, however, I catch myself just looking like any dumb animal. Though I ask in jest, I seriously don’t know the answer: Do I masturbate in Heaven?

            I don’t shit in Heaven—that’s clear: Not me. Which I take as welcome news about eternity, though I still plan to eat—to expand my palate & ethnic vocabulary, of course, to taste the whole human Village and learn from its many culinary masters. Maybe I can sample fire-roasted mammoth after all, or passenger pigeon pie perhaps? But if so, then can I taste a wooly mammoth without actually killing one? Might we visit the minds of our Pleistocene ancestors and tap into their Platonic form of mammoth, its stench & taste & unchewable sinews, but minus the hunt & shattered sentient lives? (To be clear, I’m omitting here what my ancestors would themselves most value & glorify from their hunter lives—rather akin to desiring ideal sex, but in the form of the boudoir cigarette only.) And if I can fully know & savor cooked mammoth, could I care, wouldn’t I be curious to learn the flavor of human flesh as well—abstractly, of course, though modestly seasoned & prepared—that I might competently compare it to chicken? When in Heaven, you pick your own poisons.[7]

            Now as an aside & foreshadowing future “holy shit” lessons, I’ll mention that all the “possible poisons” in eternity I illustrate above might actually come available to mortal, living humanity rather soon. Even roasted wooly mammoth can be genetically recreated using all-but available CRISPR technology to modify an elephant genome. It’s not hard to imagine further then, creating such constituent flesh in the lab independent of a sentient being, lacking a skeleton or even a head. Think instead of growing a large vat of exotic prehistoric sushi bound for the Tokyo markets. And while this technology is now within reach (and seems ridiculous), this can come instantly real in cyberspace. There’s no need for a ChatGPT to grow an elephant from scratch, no point in building industrial laboratories. Generations of elephant-mammoth hybrids can be grown, modified in a zillion ways, & remixed for a variety of subtle flavor differences, all simulated in seconds in the cyber-mind of an AI supercomputer. Our descendants can virtually wallow in, say, paellas of mixed mammoth & platypus chorizo, topped with pre-asteroid ammonites in their many golden-ratio spiral shells. All the veggies can have psychotropic effects (just as strawberries & marijuana are indeed close DNA cousins). Except none of this chemistry & cooking would be real; it could all be an instant download.

            The profound point of it all: We come to Spaceport Earth to establish our soul identities through structured real challenges, where the most important lesson of all is to keep challenging yourself. But if you give a kid a calculator, will they still care to learn long division from scratch, what a fraction is, what division even means, or how to apply it in life? Can such a child then, grown to adolescence, ever know proportion or, by analogy, analogy? What’s to keep most future kids from just plugging into cyber porn sites, where you can replay & amplify & prolong indefinitely, say, Catherine the Great’s and Messalina’s greatest harmonized orgasms [as ChatGPT might probabilistically optimize from existing databases]. Every teenager could plug in together for a zoom orgy; or turn inward instead, isolate, and zap a single focused pleasure center for hours on end, even while officially zoomed in to math class. Every Christian, of course, will have to experience Christ’s agony & crucifixion personally, as recreated from a vast database library of “death masks,” namely the final thoughts & emotions & sensations originally uploaded by a million Uygher & Falun Gong “volunteers.” Valhalla can feel as real as any snuff film.


§ 2/13/23


12.5  Life & Death

            People often wonder casually, say as a tavern ice-breaker, “If you could be any other animal, what would you choose?” What’s extremely uninteresting is the short list of animals generated: eagles & falcons, whales & dolphins, rarely a big cat or a shark, never a sheep or a shrew or a cockroach. Of course, this ice-breaking “game” presupposes that we desire to experience something new, like flight or swimming mastery; and we naturally pick the apex predators within these alien mediums (air, water).
            Before analyzing this humdrum bar game—not at all like Scribe’s creative coaster questions[8]—let’s first acknowledge that every animal & plant & fungus in fact does amazing things than no human can manage. Cockroaches, we can agree, are the unrivaled masters of their essential universe, as is any slime mold. Thus, we must further acknowledge that the unspoken assumption of this game—to pick an animal suitably different—is false, actually not what we want, not what the game is after. How would it feel, we might ask instead, to ruminate or roost or regurgitate our entire stomach contents to our constant-screaming offspring? Really?
            It’s fair to say, then, that what humans really want is a mastery of motion. If I choose to be an eagle, it’s not because I want to experience eagle sex or shitting from high altitudes.[9] I want to know high soaring & great dives; and it’s probably a lot of pure fun plucking salmon from glassy waters. That is, we value speed & agility above all, and apex predators tend to come with an athletic edge. (Of course there are scores of insects who are better all-around flyers than eagles: gnats & fruit flies, for instance.)
            But now consider in contrast a sloth, our archetypal slowest animal. When we ask which animal we’d wish to be, we’re trying to alter our figure’s POV to physically see, for example, how a diving eagle experiences the scene. Does a sloth, then, just have incredible patience? I suspect not. I assume instead—though don’t know at all—that a sloth perceives time differently from us, that time itself condenses in the sloth’s POV by proportionally “speeding up,” so that events play out “normally,” meaning “intelligibly” to the sloth, so that somehow within this time warp, the sloth can “optimize" its existence and “self-actualize” in sloth terms. As I write this, I realize I have no idea what I mean. 
            Sticking with my only assumption, however empty—that a sloth perceives time relative to its own slow pace & metabolism—then I am forced to assume the same of eagles & dragonflies, whales & octopi, cicadas & bristlecone pines, each perceiving its own quantum of life in a phantom moment, somehow divided up & sequenced accordingly. And thus, returning to our barroom ice-breaker, we must concede that eagle flight, which may be the object of our envy, from an eagle’s eyes actually looks perfectly “normal,” meaning tame—and not just via habituation, but that it perceptually plays out all-but automatically—and therefore, I dare infer, nothing as wild as my no-hands biking down Melendy Drive, which I flew for pure fun many many times over several years, sometimes twice in one day. 

            So let me get personal again, literal life & death, the point of this lesson: There are few beings on this planet who’ve pushed the envelopes of their biological bodies beyond any reasonable, sane physical limit as many times as I have and lived to tell about it. I can immediately recall five times when I almost died by falling from heights—not almost falling—actual falling-&-not-dying (including three legit miracles, one not remotely explainable). Count another dozen times or so when climbing a high tree or cliff, or (in Spain) an apartment wall, I almost fell or had to perform a super-risky maneuver to make some gap or ledge. I have PTSD as I now write. I have lived this many times. 
            Thus for the eternal record (the current edition): After age 11 and I entered my karass—meaning, my soul chose this life as its eternal foundation—then I also apparently wised up on taking such risks. I stopped my thrill rides & climbing and turned fully to soccer. I never messed later with dangerous driving, for instance, having several friends who paid dearly; I never tried deadly drugs. But no one who’s driven as much as I (half a million miles, on six continents) can have my clean driving record without acknowledging all the near-misses, including a few where I was at fault. Again I’ve gotten lucky, more than a few times in adulthood, and I try to value life now evermore dearly, grasping its fragility and sudden gaping absences. I care. More than anything else, being a parent helped drive this lesson home.

            Many things happened when I entered the Jewel Net karass. That year in Spain was the best year of my life, the richest educational experience; but it also marked my fall from flight, my half-century immersion into global human sleep. I went to Spain in 1970 a flying child, but returned with my wings clipped & cauterized (& consciously knowing it). When, after years of flouting gravity, I finally, fully said Yes to Josef’s heavy waiting invitation—which coincidentally marked the end of music lessons as well—I got soccer as compensation, pure fun that occasionally let me access & remember eternity with my whole body. My native gifts of math & games & language grammars, all left-brained cognitive functions, I let slide, thereafter putting more energy into socializing & navigating puberty. When I found soccer, I said yes.
            Soccer, thus, may literally have saved my life, as my behaviors changed. And no doubt Blake’s Albion is the portrait of an eternal soccer player, not a caveman nor ancient pastoral Celt. But I did not choose this soccer body & life for or because of soccer. I said Yes to Josef, because Josef asked.…

§2-17-23

[15]

[18] I note with curiosity (& profound wonder) then that “music Heaven,” as projected in my highest dream I Dance, depicts precisely the opposite of a natural landscape: emphatically like nowhere ever on Earth—aggressively artificial & self-conscious, displaying the literally framework of a reality only. Not beautiful, though arranged with plastic flowers. (I’ll fill in the rest of the colours in my good time.)​

​​​9. Ma’at

            Imagine the human Village, Heaven as projected by Paleolithic humans (hereafter called, “cave-Heaven”): How might it prove different from cave-Earth?[16] To start, we must assume that the visible landscape & physical features of cave-Heaven would probably look very similar—that is, like Africa rather than some in-folded hypersphere, say, or even a modern city—because otherwise the cave soul could not accept it and thus would fail to move & function within the projection. Infant souls (most of us) fall fetal in the face of unfamiliar infinities, and our primary “flight” response (meaning here escape, not wings) is to poof dissociate & return to our auroral state. Recall, predators can’t swallow a fog.
            So cave-Heaven must look like cave-Earth to be accepted, and, accordingly, it must follow most of the same rhythms & cycles of the sun & moon & of Africa specifically, the only Earth known to early man, with seasonal floods & droughts & migratory birds & small prey to catch. We might suppose further therefore (as C.S. Lewis does in The Last Battle) that Heaven in form must be nearly exactly the same as Earth, recognizable in detail only better, and that this comparison would apply both to modern Heavens as well as cave-Heaven—except, what do we mean by better? 
            Most modern religions, we know, define Heaven as a “good” place, but portray Heaven instead as a nice place, somewhere clean, safe, & fun—Disneyland, only better. Automatically, therefore, upon arriving in Heaven, everyone waves bye-bye to all their pains & hardships; and likewise, we would expect, all of our Heavenly bodily needs would be met as well.[17] (Heaven is always a place, inhabited by figures.) Among many possible illustrations of this, let’s again consider eating in Heaven and assume the following: [—whether or not we choose to eat or need to eat in Heaven] If we eat, then food is plentiful. Heaven abounds in plenitude. Right?
            Or does it? Consider cave-Heaven thoroughly: I’ve already shown that it’s full of hunting, though not just by humans alone. Cave-Heaven must be fully alive, brimming with predation & consumption & swirling, recycling food-chains, including also decomposition.[18] So must the cave-Earth rhythms of the sun & moon likewise in eternity apply at scale to every atom & diatom, though within a narrow range that provides cave people with both a familiar cave-Heaven and still one that’s perceptibly better than cave-Earth.
            Is there more food then in cave-Heaven? sweeter water? If so, then does the hunting become easier? No hungry man wants to track a wounded prey for days & miles if, in plenitude, healthy gazelles can be made to wander into your camp, whenever summoned say, for easy slaughter. Better yet, why not project convenient stores of food around cave-Heaven’s leopard-less, shit-free waterholes, or rain pre-butchered mammoth steaks from the sky? Isn’t that better? (If you armed each cavemen with an assault rifle, hunting would be a breeze…)
            It’s easy to see how mammoth from Heaven might prove too unfamiliar for a credible cave-Heaven. If a caveman can’t engage within their projection, no collision of ideas is observed, which equals discontinuity & dissociation. But here the paradox actually lies deeper, more in process than in any content, specifically that which makes Heaven-as-a-task too easy. 

            (For illustration, let’s now declare): Homo sapiens hunt; like lions, like leopards, though maybe more like hyenas or wild dogs in fact; it’s what we do. To deny the human hunter his hunt cannot be cave-Heaven (might as well cut off his balls & dress him in a tutu). In fact, cave-Heaven must be full of better hunts with more violent death & killing (& wonderful running), more like Valhalla. What makes a hunt good then, that we might project it better? 

                      Challenge, therefore not plenitude; prey must be sufficiently scarce

            & hard to catch. Otherwise there’s no action, and nothing happens. Different

            prey have different challenges, risks vs. rewards. Not all hunts can end in

            success; a palpable percentage must fail (free will being sacred)—while still a

            few must risk tragic injury or “death” (whatever that means in cave-Heaven,

            since no one dies).
                          But not challenge only: No task is worthy merely by being difficult;

            there must be reason to take on a challenge, placing one challenge ahead of

            all others. (Even in Heaven our attention is singular, one focus at a time.)

            Physical needs like hunger provide a motivating “stick” on Earth, though surely

            Heaven abounds in “carrots” as well. For many hunters, of course, each coup

            de grace caps a wonderful pursuit.
                          The  chase itself, in fact running, for many surely marks the

            highlight of the hunt, what many cave souls “live” in Heaven for; while, in

            contrast, the chowing down on charred & dripping mammoth fat exists as

            afterglow storytelling. As on Earth, stories are danced at night & reenacted

            repeatedly as an essential rite of cave-Heaven. The days’ great hunts, then,

            happen between the nighttime stories, and, of course, vice-versa, where being

            versus becoming  becomes itself a binary choice—though strangely, I ask in

            all seriousness, which is which?
                          The challenge must feel real; the caveman must care. Therefore,

            the stakes must be high, like real life & death. Heaven can’t “play” like a risk-

            free video game, where fuck-ups have no consequence. Even when imagined &

            directly mind-loaded, say, by an almighty AI (or Cartesian “demon”), this

            “feeling” of authenticity cannot derive from perceived “physical” sensations. It

            comes from the caveman’s capacity to immerse within their own story & take

            on the POV of the figure-in-their-place. To project is to pretend is to possess

            the POV of an actor ignorant in time—that is, free will requires that we put

            omniscience aside, to make honest, fallible choices in time, keeping outcomes

            hidden, (big) cards left unturned. 
                          Suffering injury during a cave-Heaven hunt has to hurt, and it has to

            hurt enough that the hunter &/or his remaining family members remember,

            that hunters may learn. (Otherwise we’d forever repeat our errors, no choice,

            which would equal hell.) The master hunter indeed learns from every hunt, just

            as every master of any craft or art improves with every effort (even Jesus,

            even Messi). Failure, then is always instructive—that is, when it’s not

            catastrophic; thus the wise shaman understands Heaven as a game of risk

            management, ma’at, played both in & out of time, which appear largely as twin

            POVs in the Paleolithic dreamtime.


​

[14] Factually, my family couldn’t afford Stanford, whereas I had a full scholarship elsewhere.

Albion@21

[11] The German word for “training” is “(das) Training,” which shows it’s a recent borrowed concept.

[12] I do bike occasionally, but not for exercise per se; it’s not vigorous enough. I can only exhaust myself if I push myself to ride extra fast/hard, which is not street-safe where I live. In fact, biking has never been safe enough in my home county to make routine. Most of my friends who bike for exercise have suffered serious accidents. (When I was a kid thrill-riding down my ridiculous hills, idiot drivers were not the problem.)

[17] Note carefully the cat in this detail from Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights—which I borrowed in Chapter 4.2 to illustrate mankind’s boring vision of Heaven: Bosch’s cat knows plenitude, too; but his mouse does not.

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​The Table of Contents below is too long to display fully. If you click to the right of these Lessons, you'll see the primary source documents displayed under each. These original sessions are a world treasure.

​​​​​​​​​​​12.6a  More Shit & Puberty

            I declare above that I don’t shit in Heaven, but surely I have clocked enough toilet time on Earth to proclaim myself a master, roughly 10,000 hours literally, as I quickly do some mental math. Can I really, after I die & graduate from Earth existence, put away such “childish things” like defecation—that is, can I have my cake but not shit it, too? In my mind—but not in my body—these are separate functions, though I suspect holistically that my linguistic division is arbitrary. Can I have light in Heaven without also shadow?
            To muddy the waters, I do hold dear a few special “shitting experiences” which I enjoy retaining in my memory, and where, most strangely, these comprise the short list of my most desperate, uncomfortable moments. Why does it tickle me to recount these most-extreme physical horrors? That no harm came to me, no lasting damage, means I consider them somewhat comically; I laugh nostalgically. Yet there’s nothing funny about E. coli, which I’ve suffered twice while travelling, nor any of my many stomach flus. I’ll offer exactly one account here then, one horrible memory I don’t want to erase from my soul (where, also strangely, I’m compelled to narrate it in present tense, as though recounting a dream):

                        I’m a high school boys’ J.V. soccer coach in my late 20s. We have an

            away game, strangely without the varsity also playing, so I’m the only adult

            in charge. It’s about an hour’s bus ride to our tiny rural destination,

            following paved logging roads deep into the clear-cuts & eye-popping

            poverty; and right from the outset I realize I’m going to have diarrhea. I’m

            not desperate though, because I know I can make it through the ride, and

            upon arriving we’ll head immediately to the locker room. Okay… 
                        Our bus arrives, and I’m greeted by the opposing coach, who points

            us to the locker room. Before letting him go, because now I am desperate, I

            inquire specifically after a toilet. He points toward the corner then lets me

            in, wink wink, on his favorite coach’s joke: The toilet is clean now, after

            years of vandalism & adolescent grossness, once the stalls got removed. I

            don’t quite fathom his humor until I see for myself, nudge nudge oh God…

            —a single toilet right out in the middle of the room, just off the only

            thoroughfare connecting the lockers to the athletic field. This was how their

            fucking-redneck staff dealt with student discipline! Clean as a whistle, duh.

            (Today they’d probably install in-stall security cameras instead.)
                        No choice. I am reminded of stoic high school showering, no way to

            hide. I sit down and explode for 10 minutes—meanwhile, both teams file by

            close enough that everyone feels obliged to acknowledge me. Hi, Coach,…

            Somehow I manage to wipe without anyone seeing. I wash up quickly; we

            win the game & bus home. No one says a word.


              I really do consider this vignette a “childish thing” to be put away, not cherished. I include it here out of (I-can’t-resist) childish amusement, but also seriously to quiz Saint Paul himself: What’s wrong with a little childish amusement? For let’s be clear, to choose your eternal life origin means to return regularly to relive it, thereby maintaining all your fibers & kite-strings that follow back to your fractured, multi-faceted life, including those that reach through youth & folly. As living adults we put away childhood, but as eternal souls we embrace our foibles & imperfections as chosen aspects of our character. The child is not the rough draft of the man.
              And what is it about this vignette that I find funny? I’m glad, I guess, that I cast myself as the target of my cosmic laughter—that is, I’d worry for my soul if I cherished memories of laughing at someone else. I want to be able to laugh at myself; I want also very much a life where I’ve had to endure such trifles, such literal shit. I’d never want a sanitized origin. So speaking as an albion especially, a full & complete life has to include a plethora of such events, which, like Aristotle’s mustard seeds, weigh nothing individually, but amass nonetheless to comprise a paradox, a lived identity. Should I wish in eternity to dismiss that which I have gathered & physically lived? 

            This 10-minute nightmare, by the way, is pretty much how I perceived at the time my prolonged puberty—a temporary, public disability lasting 10-12 years only—no mere trifle, but an extended life challenge. And indeed I mastered that marathon, but at deep cost. Consider fully: I could have—as a flyer in a different karass universe, say—pursued straight mathematics, puberty & social dynamics be damned. I loved playing with infinities for hours on end and flew regularly in pure abstractness, discovering much beauty on my own. But I was less enamored later on, as a non-flyer, of math applications & the blunt tools of calculus, for example, which in my day just seemed practice for civil engineering. Similarly I loved history, but not endless factoids simply for memorizing. I found poetry & philosophy fascinating, but often beyond my reach, whereas learning a language is always hard fucking work. As a non-flyer I worked so hard as it was at just being normal.
            Just a little more data then, because otherwise, dear Reader, you probably can’t imagine: As a freshman in college I still could pass for “under-12” at theaters & ski resorts. As a sophomore I looked like a high school freshman. I didn’t shave at all until grad school, didn’t shave daily until about age 27. That’s why Blake’s portrait of me at 35 appears younger; it’s accurate. (And today, at 63 years old I don’t look at day over 57….) 
            And thus, moving along in our overview narrative, while I devoted my college education to soccer rather than to study—and we had a surprisingly good team for a small program, nationally ranked—I actually missed any chance to reach my soccer potential. College varsity marks the peak of my soccer play, for there was nothing more advanced after college to aspire to, no semi-pro leagues; and the moribund NASL never was remotely available to me (as it drew largely on foreign players). I never considered going further in soccer—foremost because I planned on future schooling and employing my brain—but also because I didn’t get my adult body until at least age 25 or 26—which, in my case, actually might have made a big difference competitively, because I went from being very fast in college to the fastest on the pitch all the time; also the quickest; and always one of the smartest & most secure with the ball. I’ll never know, for instance, if, given the chance, I might ever have developed a consistent cross or a left-foot volley or (dare I dream?) a classic 45-yard diagonal pass, weaknesses in my game I never cleaned up. Life & I moved on.
            And the truth is actually simpler: When I flew playing soccer, I was good enough to play anywhere with anyone. I had the full bag of skills & knowledge & could execute spontaneously at speed; I was amazing. But only on those days of flight, which were rare & unpredictable. Otherwise, on my average non-flying days I was simply very good—not at all good enough for the pros, where consistency is needed at the highest level. For decades after then I ranked among the best in my local adult leagues, which I’ll address separately later; but this speaks more to the mediocrity of suburban American soccer, where few around me even played collegiate ball.

            Puberty also delayed, or rather mystified me in one other key aspect of  spacetime

corporeality. I speak not to sex here specifically, physically, which came to me in time—but rather all the games & sitcoms & spiels of romance I was forced in adolescence to watch others play from a passive, wistful distance, never patient. For instance, unlike my friends I went to high school dances to dance. Unlike them I could walk right up to the prettiest girl & ask her to the floor, knowing well there’d be no way she could refuse someone so tiny, like spitting on a child. For of course no further commitment could be implied from my child’s request; there could be no subtext, no fear of an awkward after-conversation, no chance of a kiss. So I’d dance with all the gathered girls along the opposite gym wall, resting during the slow songs only, until I’d find the girl, if she existed, who enjoyed dancing as much as I. I’d never get her name, much less her phone number, nor she mine.
            Here’s what I never figured out: Puberty did eventually come my way, and I finally arrived physically as a normal adult. But even after I caught up physically, I still couldn’t begin to play the social games of romance. To be clear, I have otherwise proven myself exceptionally adept socially. I’m both hyper self-aware & empathetic; I live the Golden Rule. Additionally, of course, I’m the ma’at master in my Jewel Net karass, which includes my real talent for games. But I don’t know how to “pick up” a woman according to all the standard codes. It’s not that I can’t spot these games a mile a way, each scripted move & countermove awkwardly choreographed. Rather I’m so respectful of others that I’ve never been able to deceive or hide my motives; thus, I was unable to insert myself into such cliché innuendoes & idiotic dialogue. I wasn’t awkward around girls & women; rather I respected them enough as individuals to want to get to know them, at least a little, before jumping into bed. I wanted to pull back the eternal curtain before pulling off my clothes; and, as I saw clearly at the time, this violated the rules of “casual sex,” where the defensive mask stays on precisely so there can be no implied commitment, no morning-after coyote traps. A few of my wiser women friends told me so explicitly, saying that most women who knew me regarded me as “off limits,” because I was obviously shopping for a wife, not just a fuck. 
            And I’d sigh, because they were right. Philosophically I had no problem with casual sex, but practically, physically it was impossible for me not to seek real intimacy, soul-sharing & commingling. And I understood well that my eternal path through puberty was a special “blessing” to be endured, not a curse, a spacetime lesson from my soul—one known deeply to cavemen, but largely forgotten among modern humans: patience. And I ask you at this time, dear Reader, to consider this profound subject seriously, as there are many spacetime lessons hiding in plain sight: What does patience mean outside of time? What does it teach?
            I’ll add here strangely, barely more than a footnote, that I somehow associate my inability to “pick up” women to a unique, specific weakness I had as a soccer player: I was unable to foul anyone intentionally—which, as serious fans know, is a necessary part of the tactical game, not normally malicious or violent. I know the game, but I was pathologically unable to foul regardless—not for moral reasons—but because in the moment the thought of, say, grabbing a shirt never once occurred to me—not in games, not in practices. Fortunately, rarely did I need to foul, as I could (pretty instantly) chase down anyone who got by me. There’s no substitute in soccer for pace.

§2-27-23


12.6b  Perfect Sex

            So finally, wallowing in these cantos of base corporeality, I would be remiss if I did not recount one memory of sex, at least to balance my mortified shit-narrative above, for not only do I embrace sex, indeed I hold especially dear one particular encounter with my wife that completely eclipses all the rest (she agrees). Unlike my childish comedy, this singular event I treasure as identity, a point of love never to put away. 
            Inconveniently, love can’t be sat on a toilet. I can’t just state the facts here for, in this unique case, the sexual act itself seemed secondary, epiphenomenal to our experience. My wife, fully overwhelmed & sated already, for instance, declined her own orgasm. Could I start with a contrast then? —let’s say, that Biggest Bang before we were married—as fast, in fact, as we could check into our Ashland hotel, following seven hours of horny freeway driving, 105 degrees. Damn, that was great Hollywood fucking, all-but ripping off our clothes to total-body satisfaction. Wow. —But no, I can’t compare. Our “post-Tanzania” sex night was not just much better; it was completely, utterly different. The moment needs a backstory to be intelligible; it cannot itself be understood.

                        I went to Tanzania with my brother to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. We

            were then both in our mid-forties and knew that our bodies were running

            out of time for such a physical adventure, so we traveled together without

            our families for a month, the longest any of us had been apart. We never

            summited Kili, solely due to altitude sickness, and then we both got food

            poisoning on top of that; but we had an awesome trip anyway, which

            included the Serengeti & Ngorongoro Crater (the most sacred  place on

            Earth), as well as Zanzibar & other locations. This narrative does not

            concern these adventures, however. The key is that we were away from our

            wives for a full month, and we happened to be in East Africa’s “Swahili

            culture” (for lack of a better term), which includes language & food &, in this

            case, clothing.
                        Now I don’t care about clothes, especially fashion; but upon first

            arriving in Dar es Salaam I found myself smitten by the kangas, the main

            article of clothing worn by most women. A kanga is simply a sheet of cotton

            1 m x 1.5 m, which is wrapped around the body in different ways, both

            covering what needs to be covered, but also allowing for extended portions

            to wrap up & carry produce and/or wood and/or babies. Kangas make great

            towels & wipes, as they wick away water, wash easily, & dry instantly—none

            of which made any difference to me. What caught my eye was their bright

            color prints and ornate geometric patterns, all of which have a visual border

            or hem & a distinct center; all have repeated, largely non-representational

            patterns. To me they look like kaleidoscopes.
                        And I don’t care much for kaleidoscopes either, but on first seeing

            these kangas I instantly knew that they had to go in my dining room,

            specifically in the gaping hole in my dining room ceiling, which was simply

            a fuck-up in my house’s architectural plans. In 1989 I personally designed

            my house floor plans, right down to the square foot, but I needed a

            professional architect for the design elevations & structural soundness; and

            indeed the finished blueprint was great, except for one big error: The

            adjacent dining room & living room ceilings didn’t line up. During

            construction, when the problem was discovered, my contractor offered to

            seal off the space, which would mean a low, normal ceiling height

            throughout, but we chose instead to keep the awkward, triangular high

            space, like a loft hovering over our dining room table. 
                        And indeed, a slanted high space is better than a low, flat ceiling, so

            we forgot about our hole, and for 15 years nothing more was said. But then

            in 2005 after we painted our living room, the dining room suddenly needed

            color, too. And since I’d already rented the scaffolding, I had to keep

            painting, although I felt the living room—which counted as two nine-men

            tasks—had largely wrung me dry. Among its other trials, for instance, I

            painted the living room soffit five times, very different color designs, until I

            suddenly knew exactly what to do; the living room ceiling itself was a week’s

            act of pure faith. I have no idea what I did.
                        Fortunately the dining rooms walls came easily to me, (mostly) solid

            colors framed by a border, where the border separated the formal dining

            space from the hole above. But I never figured out what to do with that hole.

            I painted two Roman arches (made the attempt), fortunately so high in the

            space they can’t really be seen: They failed miserably, and for a year, after

            the scaffolds & furniture had all been returned, the dining room shadows

            gnawed at me. I hadn’t given up; I still hoped for inspiration. But I’d had no

            choice except to put the project aside & move on in my life. I couldn’t even

            paint over my gaff. I had no answer for that dark scar each dinner.
                        And then, in Tanzania, I knew—but not all at once, rather by bits &

            pieces strictly dribbled on a need-to-know basis—just enough at first in Dar

            to seek out and scout up & down Kariakoo market (a universe unto itself)

            absorbing all the zillion kanga permutations, taking them in visually, but

            having no further plan. I’d heard Zanzibar, where we’d end our trip, would

            surely have its own wild wares, and was therefore a better place to shop, so

            as to avoid carrying heavy gifts. I did not learn until later, some time along

            the way, that instead of kangas I really sought kitenges, which display the

            same patterns but are 3 meters long. So when we arrived in Zanzibar, I’d

            allotted a serious itinerary day in labyrinthine (i.e., pirate-proof) Stonetown,

            hitting all its blind-alley shops, eyeing every kitenge and haggling ruthlessly,

            walking out on multiple near-bargains multiple times, playing all the

            hawkers’ games against each other. (I hate haggling.) Finally, deciding on

            the five kitenges I liked best, regardless of their negotiated price, I bought

            them for nothing and had them wrapped. By this time I’d figured, almost to

            the millimeter, that three kitenges side-by-side would fill my ceiling gap.
                        And yet the final piece of the puzzle—buying six dowels, painting

            them, hanging them by fishing line & staggering them, then threading &

            draping the kitenges through these staggered dowels—I did not figure out,

            nor even consider, until after our perfect sex night. Also after, my wife

            chose which kitenges would go where: thus three soon draped—& still hang

            today—wonderfully filling the gap; the “least” of the five sits high in the

            shadows, concealing my awful arches; and the last (my favorite) occupies a

            separate wall entirely, prominently hung from a seventh painted dowel. All

            the hanging & draping I accomplished in less than two hours using a tall

            ladder, abusing gravity just a bit, but never having to move the large glass

            table.

                        Where’s the sex? you might ask, and you might be disappointed by

            my account. Let me start with the obvious, that my wife & I had been apart

            for a month, a month without sex. But I can assert that neither of us was

            horny at the start of that evening, for (as proof) my daughter Rhiannon was

            with us for the first few hours, once I arrived from the airport in time for my

            welcome-home dinner, whereupon I slowly spun out my brother’s & my

            adventure tales in Africa: Yes, everyone needs to see the Ngorongoro Crater:

            animals in such abundance as seen nowhere else (& nevermore); tales of

            volcano hiking & rainforests, of illness & predators & scammers, and of

            seeing the Milky Way from Earth’s equator at 18,000 ft! Our extended dinner

            & dessert was then followed in the living room by my parade of gifts—gifts I

            wouldn’t normally have purchased, but felt obliged to buy for my family who

            couldn’t come with me: First, some hand-carved wooden candleholders &

            serving spoons bargained in Stonetown; then two larger-than-life painted

            wooden masks I’d carried on my back since the Serengeti; then the two

            spectacular Masai blankets I also got there, brilliant red & purple

            respectively, one for each daughter; a couple of exquisite Zanzibar batik

            tablecloths & napkin sets, signed by their educated master artist with whom

            I spoke extensively (on the nature & structures of artistic inspiration); then

            finally the five kitenges one at a time. My wife unwrapped each and laid

            them full-length in the living room, utterly mesmerized by all the color,

            almost speechless. She seemed to regard each fabric as though she were

            handling gold leaf or an ancient manuscript.
                        What followed in the bedroom then (minus Rhiannon) simply cannot

            be related. We wound up naked & engaged, yes, but we both also almost-

            literally remember winding ourselves in rolls & rolls of colour. Indeed, while

            the fabrics remained downstairs in the living room, I cannot separate these

            vivid colours from the physical sex. They’re stamped in my memory like the

            brightest flags flying everywhere in my otherwise bland white bedroom. We

            both felt completely drugged, exploring & re-acquainting, far more than just

            intercourse, which happened in due course somewhere along the way. Eyes

            gazing through eyes in open wonder. Absolutely eternal. Absolutely mystical.

            A fucking miracle.

            Let me apologize for the partial analysis that follows, particularly when “perfect sex” should, by definition, stand alone. I compare my efforts here to trying to dissect a fourteen-line sonnet by writing a five-page college essay, where, after all’s said & done, the fourteen lines are just better. First, let me confess that I’d never considered till just now any symbolism in these kitenges; my inspirations & associations came strictly via connecting geometric colors to geospatial coordinates, thereby skirting language & cognition. That is, I knew our perfect sex night arrived in flying colours, but I never considered that the “background scenery” might itself contain a woven story, in fact a clue. And yet, now I see, it would be ridiculous for Albion to create & project our one-&-only perfect night employing mere “random” colours, thus wrong for me to assume these kitenges—which clearly were sent to fill our dining room hole—might “coincidentally” double as our sex palette. (Fortunately, I’ll add here anticipating FAQs, I can enjoy my family dinners under these beautiful African colors and not think of sex.) 
            So the gist of this insight is that the flying colours of that infinite physical hour originated in Africa—or symbolically, as Scribe often quoted from The Tempest, “in the dark backward and abysm of time.” Sex, like Africa, is primal, which means both pre-ancient & preconscious, auroral. Sub-saharan Africa especially is dark, our human origin, untamed & uncivil, though alive & teeming with molten will. To be clear, I am speaking purely in metaphorical, symbolic terms, nothing that reflects on actual Africans in real life. I’m narrating from the classical Western Civ POV thread, which happens to be my personal WASP baggage & story, but one that I reject practically & politically in modern life. I’ve traveled in Africa, and I’m not a racist, for example. It’s nonetheless significant that Albion & [my higher wife] enshrined our human, physical foundation high above our heads & dining table—clawed & billowed by gravity though motionless—where the dining room marks the formal, ritual center of our home and its table serves as altar to all our sacred gatherings: Thanksgiving, Christmas, any meal w/  guests…. Above all & spotlit by our overseers, deep dark Africa is full of colour! 
            God I struggle to remember that these kitenges never actually made it to our bedroom that brilliant night of anamnesis and that we didn’t actually roll ourselves up in them like Cleopatra. Along Vilansit’s loom, the finest silken fiber is so much stronger than fact.

          ***In a future lesson I will further analyze Albion’s clues imbedded in my dining room and elsewhere in the house; however, the topic is too large to be inserted into this canto and, indeed, probably requires a full lesson on the subject of Home. While for me home, like corporeality, is a physical spacetime artifact central to my life & relevant to this lesson, it’s not common to most modern humans, who live in multiple dwellings over their extensive lifetimes, valuing none essentially. Nomadic cavemen likewise know nothing of Home, which is a Neolithic invention. —Whereas corporeality, of course, largely defines us as human.

            For perspective, let me now contrast my minimal shit-story with my perfect-sex narrative. Start with the length of each: My comedy is polished off in three terse paragraphs, factually, where the facts alone speak for themselves. My sex-story, on the other hand, can’t be related directly, can’t even be indirectly revealed without endless layers of mystical backstory: 1) The sex can’t be told absent the colours; 2) the colors came from wild fabrics from “deep dark Africa”; 3) which were brought from afar to fill an absence in our marriage home; 4) a gaping hole we only revisited once we began our house painting project together; 5) which was only possible (as I related in Lesson 10) because my wife’s depression in 2004 forced her to reach out, eventually to me. These events are inseparable from the sex, and thus this one evening reflects my wife’s & my whole marriage, all our shared triumphs & struggles. That memory is an aleph.
            Now let’s consider corporeality from our external, eternal POV. What is “perfect sex,” for example? For a start, ideal sex must be physical, not abstract, not fantasized, meaning it has to be experienced in a specific body in time with another GPS-coordinated body. For me, while “sex” is almost a proper noun—my wife being my only sexual partner—in eternity it’s fine, I’m sure, to have sex with anyone from any time. To do so, however, still means putting on a physical body & checking in to a spaceport hotel sometime, in fact for roughly a real earthly hour. I assume, therefore, that my wife & I have probably checked in to many such ports and enjoyed each other there & then as well—employing our ever-young eternal bodies (complete with full-functioning plumbing & hormones). The difference, then, is that while we’re in our original Earthly lives—immersed in our roll-play identities & free-will amnesia—the lights remain turned down. On that one perfect sex night the lights came up a bit, revealing all the colours. 

            And taking yet a further step back now—to reflect on corporeality as the defining aspect of our human existence—it’s clear, perhaps strangely so, that all our most treasured physical moments in life involve flight. That is, our best physical experiences are also eternal, completely nonphysical; thus, abstract eternity itself is what we physically seek. Remember life’s duality: We are eternal beings (Heaven), and we are physical humans in time (Caesar’s Palace); these are separate contexts, separate concerns—don’t conflate them. They’re so different, in fact, that we actually divide our very identities into self & soul. But self & soul cannot be weighed against each other, can’t be compared at all. Rather it’s more an issue of swallowing &  possession: Our ideal physical experience comes only when our soul is fully present, when the god or goddess descends physically to Earth. Otherwise sex is just a feel-good fluid spill.
            I can’t end yet without some balancing words of ma’at, as the picture I paint here is too stark. Obviously we experience a spectrum of physical experiences, not just binary flight versus incapacity. But after much investigation, I would assert that this is not a full spectrum, not a continuum at all. Yes, some flying days are better than others, just as non-flyers experience a wide range. But there is, I feel strongly, a point in intent where corporeal “things” just line up and come into clarity. I liken this to superconductivity, which represents a sudden & near-total cessation of resistance: The soul awakens in its present POV & acts.


§3-2-23



12.7  Running (Unwinding the Wound)

                        I do not have enough distance at age 63 to reflect objectively on the

             prime of my life. Right now, when I cast my memory line into My Book’s

             longest single chapter (say, ages 35-59), I mostly snag on deep pain, pure

             PTSD—which I believe firmly misrepresents my actual experience. I am

             proud of what I achieved then across the board, and I fully recognize that

             those years were indeed my best, but I worked too too hard for so so long;

             I am exhausted even to think of that existence, for I am absolutely no

             longer a man who can summon such energies as needed then, not by half.

            I read my self’s clairaudience eruption above (not Albion’s)—my unhealed wound & emotional knot that I link to “running”—and acknowledge my exhaustion, but now must correct the record: My PTSD is generalized, like a kick in the groin that radiates throughout the whole chest: The wound starts largely in fiction; I stew in its chemicals nonetheless. Worse, the fiction is an abstract conflation, perhaps linguistic only, for the “exhaustion” I feel above over my protracted indentured servitude is nothing like acute physical exhaustion, which I actively enjoy or even “love,” when it follows dancing, sports, sex, or exercise. Let me now revisit another freshet-facet of my essential physical origin: I love to run.
            But to get this canto started I need to analyze precisely what I mean by “run” (the English word with the widest variety of usages), for even when I refer to my body’s literal human motion I mean very different things. This canto then is mostly about my life of distance running, thousands of street & trail miles over many decades. And thus, to be clear, I write less here about my personal biggest running strengths & talents, including sprinting & skipping backwards & instantly changing directions. While I was once indeed an awesome speedster—possessing a classic sprinter’s lower-body—I was never, in contrast, designed for graceful distance running (or swimming), though I always run as fast as I can regardless of distance, anywhere from 7 to 12 miles (11.6-20 km). Even now I run as fast as I’m able or unable, though mere walking is often painful—the key here being that my “running” is never jogging. I never take my foot off the gas except to accommodate an injury, which means—far beyond any immediate drama & trauma suffered therefrom—all the slogging, emasculated months of recovery; and even then, unless incapacitated, I continue to push myself walking or limping as fast as I can, whatever raises my heart rate to elevated aerobics—to the extent that I feel shitty, if not ashamed, when I can’t work up a sweat & exhaust myself.
            So while “No pain, no gain,” as I’ve already explained, makes no sense as a metric to live by, I now firmly attest that “Yes pain” follows eventually to “no gain” as well.

            I was not born to distance running. My only exposure in childhood came late, via coached soccer practices, running laps around a field, usually a mile or so for a friendly warm-up; but then, about an hour into practice, the dreaded gut-check, just a few miles more, but never jogging only. I recall (with a smile) one hellish drill especially: Imagine twenty teammates running single-file around a pitch, where the person at the tail-end, on a coach’s quick whistle, has to sprint to the front; then the next runner sprints at the next whistle, and so on, with generally four or five athletes sprinting at any one time; over & over, lap after lap, leaving eventually everyone gasping & hallucinating on the grass.[10] 
            Of course I was aware of “cross-county,” all those lithe athletes who glided the empty spaces & miles so effortlessly—so pointlessly in my mind: They seemed anorexic aliens to me. Foremost, I saw little value to a sport that wasn’t also a game. How do you “play” cross-country? Where’s the fun? Even so, I envied cross-country’s endless rural distances, the long road for its own sake, somehow without the drudgery—perhaps for beauty above all?? I’d always loved walking, of course, especially with my dad high up in the hills; the longer the walk, the better, as every walk discovered something magical. Why couldn’t a run just be a longer and/or faster walk?
            While I couldn’t get past the pain & boredom of “just” running, I did get a foretaste of a runner’s high, home from college each summer & training alone for the fall soccer season. I killed myself to climb, then free-fall my incredible San Carlos hills, the hardest running possible—or so I macho-ed myself to the challenge: Straight up Melendy Drive or Britton Avenue to the superlative summit, never walking (meaning technically, never letting both feet touch the ground at once), then sprinting down these epic residential hills as fast as humanly possible (almost literally), all-but-out-of-control & again at risk of serious, ugly injury (but not death). The “impossible” challenge of such vertical running relieved the toiling boredom that I otherwise felt for long-haul slogging, as it gave me a goal, a target to push for. I need pushing.
            Not until age 22, while living & studying in West Germany, did I finally metamorphose into an eternal-runner, though by somewhat ironic circumstance. As soon as I arrived, of course I sought & found organized soccer at my level and was quickly drafted by a sponsored team with slick jerseys. —Except this was indoor soccer, as snows soon covered the outdoor fields for months of dank misery, and there was only so much university space indoors. My team, it turned out, was not in a league, but rather in a single-elimination tournament, a fact I didn’t learn (or mistranslated) until after our first game, when we were “sent packing” on a fluke goal. Thus, for the first time since starting soccer in Spain—and despite living in Franz Beckenbauer’s backyard—I had no soccer. 
            So for exercise I ran by default, and I had the good fortune that my university housing was located right at the edge of its city, as delimited by the industrial cabbage fields that stretched for miles surrounding it. Spires of town & village churches dotted the near & far horizons, and I spent my first couple of months there [managing my mania by] navigating the gravel grid between & among these rectilinear cabbage patches, systematically checking out all the towers & their townships, each with its own centuries of local culture & crooked houses & shops & restaurants I couldn’t afford. Exploring via running was free & wonderful, for indeed everything in my life was wonderful during that miraculous flying spell; but even later, post-manic crash, I still loved running the cabbage patches, now putrefying under the slush. Germans, for the record, never ran solo in those days; runners always trained in running “clubs," sporting their matching sweatsuits around a (fucking) track.[11] In the winter few people walked or biked between the towns, and no one farmed the spring mud, so I had the whole open scene to myself, free to run anywhere I wanted on that flat, stinky grid; running became my joyful escape. Sauerkraut macht frei!

            That’s my narrative opening, but my purpose for presenting it here is not nostalgic; rather, it’s for contrast. My life of vigorous physical exercise comes in two forms only, soccer & running, which, duh, just name two different forms of running. Both define me, I’m pleased to say, as pure Homo sapiens—compared to swimming, biking,[12] skiing, machine training, or (ugh!) weight lifting—as I note our savannah ancestors were surely proficient at both kinds of running. But, to be clear, these bipedal predecessors rarely ran as I have always run: It would be too dangerous, especially barefoot over rough terrain. In the past you couldn’t risk an injury. Modern soccer likewise would be way too dangerous for hunter-gatherers, who, additionally, would have avoided exhaustion as assiduously as I have sought it out. A broken foot or knee in the Paleolithic could spell death; sadly, it still can mean death in many modern-world corners, some I personally have visited.

            So now I arrive at a knot in my psyche, one waiting perhaps for writing this very canto to be untied. Not until composing the above did I see how I have long divided my personal body-identity into a rigid dichotomy, soccer versus [distance] running. Consequently, over the decades & with more than 10,000 hours in each activity, I have tied many associated ideas & activities onto one arbitrary set or the other, but very rarely both. This knotted division has its just origin & history, but over forty years (no surprise) my life evolved, and my body aged; so now my “dichotomy” needs reexamination. 
            The cleft between soccer & running begins with my narrative above, that I ran by default, when I wasn’t playing soccer. Soccer came first, daily if at all possible; running came in the off-season or, in my thirties, during the workweek between games, as most adult teams rarely held practices. By my mid-thirties, I’d guess, with parenting & teaching (& coaching & union leadership) duties cutting deep into my schedule, most of my exercise came via running, often at night, rather than soccer, a pattern that compounded steadily with my compiling injuries, mostly torn muscles, so that by age 40 I spent more time injured during the season than I played. Of course “match fitness” is an exceptionally high threshold—you can’t play with most injuries, often for many months—though generally you can soon “jog” a few miles with, say, a pulled hamstring, as long as you don’t sprint.[13] And for the record, here’s another fact: No matter how hard I trained in the off-season running serious distances (up to 18 miles), the start of every new soccer season would always kick my ass; soccer is simply that much better/tougher exercise (including much better for stomach muscles). Conversely, going from soccer fitness to vigorous long-distance running was effortless.

            For one year only did I manage both soccer & running together, interchangeably daily, during the second-best twelve months of my life (after Spain), when I attended Stanford University for my master’s degree & teaching credential. By pure luck I found myself in the graduate housing literally  adjacent to the best pick-up soccer on the Peninsula, the several university practice pitches—near the baseball field, among the eucalypti—where I had already played for years, driven thirty minutes each way to play with the best, mostly foreign grad students, but also a few outside regulars like me who added to any game, welcome anytime. Now I simply stepped outside my door. Also by coincidence I found myself on a great intramural team, having joined socially the team of the undergrad German Haus, where I dined on (by consensus) the best cooked meals on campus, and for which, in return, I washed dishes & cleaned the kitchen while also practicing my language skills. Somehow the German Haus wound up winning the (huge) 7-aside intramural league, and I remember winning the annual Africa Mawazo Tournament as well, dethroning the 4-time pan-African champs, playing for a team composed of pick-up game all-stars, who were hastily assembled to make a fourth team. I anchored the defense of both winning teams in that year of fantastic soccer, with my body approaching its prime, except this annus mirabilis (1983-84) I remember physically more for its running.
            Let me now proclaim (as a necessary aside) yet another of my life’s most-cherished knots: I have always loved Stanford University. My mom graduated in ‘53, bonding deeply & eternally; and my earliest memories include Dad’s bringing me regularly to the university bookstore for “hours & hours” while he perused the foreign language print & curricula. Hoover Tower, indeed, stood as the defining landmark looking out my bedroom window for my entire childhood, and I understood consciously as a young boy what many capable, adult, thinking people never fathom: Quality matters. Stanford is fucking amazing like no other place on Earth. I didn’t go there as an undergrad, in part to get away from home & the Bay Area[14]—and I attended a wonderful college I’d choose again in a heartbeat—but Stanford grad school always felt like my prodigal homecoming, like I’d capped an epic comeback after fucking up my Plan A future in college & Germany: Mom, my childhood, the sandstone buildings I knew so well, all the priests at my high school who couldn’t fathom why I’d go anywhere else, all the great pick-up soccer, as well as Stanford’s wonderful hills, some of the most beautiful scenery in the world. Then, surprise!—I’m no longer a visitor, a legacy, a guest: I belong—like all the living, breathing Stanford geniuses with whom I often bumped shoulders, including even a few of my own professors & fellow apprentice teachers. Now I roamed this extensive center of world learning, this veritable jewel-on-Earth, feeling completely free & comfortable, finally a full citizen of New Jerusalem.
            Which meant I had to run it. Stanford is huge—technically, it’s its own incorporated city—and it’s largely unwalkable outside the administrative & academic center. I biked to my classes, but I explored everywhere else via running, taking months to map the larger grad schools (like the law & biz schools), every run making a different loop through the Stanford universe. Starting & ending with my room at the east end of campus, each course would eventually take me west of Junipero Serra Boulevard, up to The Dish, which seemed more like a hilltop shrine than an abandoned radar dish, gleaming white among Stanford’s golden coastal foothills. Indeed, “running to The Dish” always seemed epic, the highlight of each run, though really it was my ritual taste & tease of beauty untouchable. Stanford’s undeveloped hills ran up to the horizon, but nearly all of that pristine beauty lay beyond barbed wire & posted legal threats. Only The Dish lay within reach, where the entire Dish-path itself ran less than a mile in length—maybe a fresh-air work break for computer geeks speaking code—but hardly a run.  
            And yet there were many runners; The Dish is famous for obvious reasons, and I enjoyed sharing that sacred space with so many special people. Beyond all other memories, I cherish the many occasions when I encountered the Stanford women’s track team (never the men), scurrying together in small flocks like flamingos, many of these women legit Olympic hopefuls. They would blow by me like I was standing still. I loved it; they were goddesses—not only as swift as the wind, but also individually stunningly beautiful, by unanimous acclaim, to the extant that they had their own hot-selling photo calendar in the bookstore. Stanford’s athletes are as amazing as its geniuses. 
            I’m not sure why I love this memory so much, of getting blown away by beautiful women. My masculinity was in no way threatened by them, especially as no woman could touch my speed on a soccer pitch. I’d already coached college women’s soccer: Men are much faster sprinters, because, duh, women’s pelvises are built for babies; it’s not even close on a pitch, or on the savannah. But in long-distance running women & men are more nearly equal; and these Stanford beauties not only dusted me, they did it when I was at my best. There was one girl in particular—not on the team, because she must’ve still been in high school—less than 5 ft. tall and no more than 85 lbs., and she seemed the fastest of all. I’d have to stifle laughing each time I’d sense her coming from behind, her tiny footsteps so distinctive I fancied I could make out her doppler shift from blue to red.
            Of course I happened to be falling in love at the time, with a fellow Stanford teacher just as calendar-beautiful, my future wife. Somehow I remember her also when I think of Dish-running, though we never ran together. Rather, I recall walking there one night after posted hours, the hills & Dish lit by the winter moon. There & then we first spoke our love, descending arm-in-arm & holding hands.

            The next year, in fact, when we were both teaching private school in Burlingame (closer to San Francisco), I “courted” my one-life-partner largely by coordinating my runs with her bike rides at San Andreas Dam, an exquisite 12-mile run & bike path. I’d arrive first, and she’d time her arrival so that she’d catch up to me at the halfway turnaround point; then we’d return together. I’d get my exercise, while she (at least) got fresh air & natural beauty. It sounds quite romantic, and it was; but truly it was more a shared experience of beauty, particularly since I could barely talk. 
            As indeed all my greatest California runs ran some stretch of the San Andreas fault—the most lethal earthquake zone on the planet—precisely for its beauty. From my home in San Carlos I now vastly extended my hill-runs to target the Pulgas Water Temple & Lower Crystal Springs reservoir, runs that lasted well over 3 hours. While I know many world vistas more spectacular, nowhere is more beautiful. And there’s no better way to see the San Andreas than to run along its length straddling the tectonic plates, where the folded coastal hills mark the spearpoint of the sliding Pacific Plate, the largest geographic feature on the face of the earth: Albion’s giant domain. I felt it.

§9-4-23

8. Sunlight

            So I completely succeeded in my early aspirations: I learned to love running much as I love long walks, except I could generally run farther & see much much more. Arriving anywhere new, I run initially to explore & map; but most runs thereafter, I run for fresh air & beauty and plot my course accordingly. I also run very much for the physical feel  of my body in motion, as joyful master of my space & time, even to my literal fibers. I always run shirtless, for instance, because I run exceptionally hot. Even in snow & ice & temps in the 20s, my shirt comes off after a third of a mile, and I feel great. On hot days I often jump in Puget Sound, though I especially love running in rain & foul weather because it feels so good on my skin, and because I know my dog & I will have the forest trails & beaches entirely to ourselves. Then after I get home, I deliberately do chores shirtless around my yard for about a half-hour, cooling down until I start to shiver. Whereupon I jump into my nice hot shower to experience a good minute of orgasm-level body ecstasy (w/o arousal), guaranteed pure physical hedonism which, unlike sex itself, defies all Darwinian plausibility. What past environmental pressure, I ask, in Homo sapiens’ genetic history could possibly account for such hot-water ecstasy?  

            I began the last canto with my wound. Dear Reader, you should know that composing what followed was extra difficult for me, requiring a lot more time than expected. Strangely, I, the crying 64-year-old child, kept wanting to write/whine/obsess about pain & injury, my litany of running “owies,” while Albion the overseer kept steering me back via memory to happiness, which I am grateful to relive. What therapy or process is this, since I, the self, seem stuck on the wrong side of my own narrative? Normally, that is, we think of truth as “bitter medicine,” but here Albion slaps me upside the head with joy. Yes, I love running; I love soccer also. Why then do I feel pain when I think of running, though no pain when I remember soccer, which factually for years did me far more physical damage? Let me state then overtly, for the Reader’s sake, the most obvious given fact of my place & time: Soccer belongs to my distant history, nostalgia now twenty years gone; my running, in contrast, today nears its death. Could I be grieving? 
            At age 59, as soon as I became a flyer, my body fell apart. I offer details of my physical trials in Chapter 12.4—no need to restate them here—suffice it to say, my lower body broke down for several years from multiple chronic injuries, decades of damage, and for much of this time, in fact, I had no diagnosis, only disability. I believed my running days surely must be over; possibly even that my walking might be reduced to parking lots. Worst of all, I could lose hiking. 
            Luckily, I recovered—mostly, though I’ll never run asphalt again. So, in light of my starker new reality, quickly I traveled with my wife post-COVID to New Zealand to hike its famous tracks, while I still could, knowing that my recovery would not last. And alas, I’m injured again right now as I write (September 10, 2023), though working through months of professional therapy toward another partial recovery, another step down in functionality. The end is nigh. That, too, is corporeality.
            Having stated the obvious, however, I don’t think my current physical state represents my source wound or knot. First, beyond my owies & arthritis, my overall physical health is great: no symptoms or complaints, no medications, no red flags. Rather, I think my running-grief forms a lesser knot, one that should come untied rather easily in due time, though it’s currently caught on a larger tangle both “foul & false,” still dark to me. —I speak right now without facts, just gut instinct & Albion’s mouth speaking through me: Go forward, he commands me overtly to my inner ear—a very rare imperative for one so hypersensitive to free will. That is, he exhorts me at this time to push through the emotional pain, sunlight being the best antiseptic. 

            O.K., I hear myself respond formally, though flatly, already focused on Albion’s coming Arbeit, my wounded history somehow now instantly irrelevant. Sunlight here for Albion apparently takes the form of a gathering (see Lesson 8), in this case one that resembles one of Advisor’s tarot sessions. After circumnavigating my Charybdis wound & invisible knot, eyeing it from both the distant past & dysfunctional present, Albion wants me to lay out my cards following the simplest math: two dichotomous sets, soccer versus running—that is, just two dimensions so far. Remember, in topololgy it takes four dimensions to untie any knot.
            So here, dear Reader, you know the drill, and I apologize for what follows. I remind you that no gathering is clean; the knots are a mess until they’re untangled & reorganized; flight is discontinuous. Further, dear Reader, in sparing you the brainstormed spatter-pattern I aim to fire upon my computer screen, I skip a step in my realtime modeling. Rather, I’m presenting next the re-configured gathering after I’ve taken the time to examine my cards and played around with them. Am I melding my new narrative? 
            In realtime I proceed now:

        Soccer

​

[3] In fact Albion insisted at the outset of this documentary task that this was “not writing,” or perhaps zen-like, “not-writing.” I heard him repeatedly, noting overtly the obvious WTF-contradiction, and not understanding him. Another puzzle? I am intrigued, for it sounds fun, as does anything involving soccer.

[2]Scientists at PRB (Population Reference Bureau) currently figure that roughly 117 billion Homo sapiens have ever lived. Based on their figures I’m guessing well higher, for their calculations dated our species to 190,000 years ago only, while Homo sapiens bone fragments at Jebel Irhoud, Morocco now date our species conclusively to 315,000 years ago. In fact, current thinking holds that humans might have been widely dispersed throughout Africa for a very long time, not in one region only—i.e., South Africa, Morocco, Ethiopia, and also Tanzania, etc.—which affects the math.

[7] Though a bit of a fussy eater at home, in my world travels I make an effort to “try everything once,” provided what I eat is safe & common to the culture I’m visiting. Thus I’ve eaten brains, heart, sweetbreads, liver, tongue, testicles, tripe, guinea pig, snails, snake, ostrich, cuttlefish, raw oysters on the beach, & urchin from the kayak—and, in fact, most of these I really enjoy—but I have balked at eating dog, both in Indonesia & Vietnam when I had ample opportunity.

[10] As a coach, I modified this drill in multiple ways to fit many different age groups. My favorite variation, however, was more an ideal or aspiration, way too advanced for most teams: Take the same single-file line, spread the runners out a bit (which vastly lengthens the line), and have each player dribbling a ball the whole time, with the player at the end not only dribbling their ball to the front, but having to slalom through the gaps between the other runners. Even a drill can be thing of beauty.

            I think I’ll cut off my “reverse engineering” of cave-Heaven at this point and note that these thoughts trace but a handful of simple, though impactful assumptions about Heaven. You, dear Reader, get the point: Maybe cave-Earth & cave-Heaven were/are, in fact, the same projection. It makes perfect sense in a Platonic-construction stagnant kinda way. The only difference between Heaven & Earth, then, would largely concern one’s POV, namely how & when each soul would commune & interact with their self in time. Regarding this, I will assert two points here that I will leave for future lessons to explore: 1) Interactions between self & soul were common in the dreamtime, routine & necessary to maintaining the projection (“two hands clapping”). 2) These exchanges were not in language.
            Now consider the following: While it is reasonable to imagine that cave-Heaven & cave-Earth might indeed prove two halves of the same projection, no one living today can possibly feel this way about the 21st century. Right now we are in Hell. Yes, Earth 2023 has far more to offer than original Heaven; this supermassive soul-collision comes with zillions of wild thrill-ride challenges, along with the highest stakes possible, total extinction for the planet projection. 2023, in fact, offers souls so many wonderful directions for expansion & exploration that most Homo sapiens today can’t handle it. They can’t grasp the stakes, because they mistake life’s measures (& can’t do math); they don’t know whom, what, or how to trust, what path to follow, or which game to chase. Our common biology requires that we eat; but to thrive in the modern world takes way too much education & sophistication for underdeveloped sapiens brains, decades of nurtured, cognitive training just to learn the rules, which keep changing. Maybe in the future we’ll get all that we need in a single AI download, but if so, I bet it’s still got to feel like 10,000 hours. 
            If you give a caveman a fish, he can eat for a day. If you teach a caveman how to fish, he can feed his family for years. And if you teach a caveman how to think, he & his family can catch all the fish in the sea.

            Here’s where things went wrong: Let’s continue with my minimal model of cave-Heaven above, where I reduce human existence to daytime “hunting” followed by nighttime reenactments. This is not fanciful; the necessity arises (again) from human ontological discontinuity. To hunt only—without end or result or kill or feast—is literally something no human mind can accomplish; the projection cannot be maintained. We are discontinuous, because we exist as free-will beings who make choices, where to choose is a singular quantum act followed by a stop. Choice links two points directly—in a flash, like a meteor—metaphors which show our minds can’t long hover the gap in between.
            Storytelling, as the other hemisphere of cave-identity, I will relate evermore in future lessons. Let's presume again that such stories started as hunting reenactments, involving one or many hunting “brothers” playing their parts before family, much as they had collaborated as a team, say, just hours earlier. At night, of course, this would require ◊ fire ◊ to see & share by, for foremost among your family existence must be shared. So to make a fire suitable for a sharing-feast required some work to stockpile dry wood & sticks, daytime energy devoted in advance to nighttime dancing—though such gatherings would not be possible in the rainy season or when the large herds were moving, so most nights there weren’t fires.
            And words existed, in fact for eons before hominids; but not language (just as sign language is far more than mere “gestures"). That is, many animals have words, which are distinct sounds with one-to-one correspondences to physical objects. At home, for example, I often locate my cats among my high grass & bushes, because I know the exact word for “cat” in both Chickadee & Towhee (and I thus follow the bird alarm as it weaves around my garden). Cavemen had words for cat, too, probably different words for lion, leopard, cheetah, & saber-toothed tiger; and the words regaled at night by fire surely derived from the days’ hunting calls & noises. 
            Master hunters, we’ve said, always learn & improve with every hunt; but they also stay within their daytime art. They don’t, for instance, suddenly grow wings & talons to overtake their game, just as they never fight lions with their minds or shoot lightning bullets from their eyes—though presumably they could in a soul-projected cave-Heaven; nothing mystically prevents it.
            Now consider: No nighttime dance can relate any day’s hunt exactly. The fire-lit cave-stage requires mass-pretending to leap over the obvious inaccuracies in every narrative. Thus might a river’s name & mountain god be invoked to frame a scene; rain makes its own word sound, while a boy wrapped in a pelt, say, could play/dance the part of the day’s fresh quarry now roasting on a spit. That is, he could act out his role without actually being killed—meaning the story was fiction, a play within the projection.     

                        And when did the words first disconnect from their physical anchors,

            snapping the one-to-one (filament) assignments of nature? How many brain

            mutations—involving billions of left-hemisphere synapses—allowed all who

            followed in the line actively to invent new metaphors, fibers, each of which is

            a choice creation arising from outside the corporeal projection? I repeat: The

            Fall was not a “natural” event nor an accident, and it wasn’t good.

            Like master hunters, storytellers improved their art & stagecraft; but unlike hunters, storytellers could repeat & replay their biggest hunts and make them better. A great hunt story then would teach far more than facts; it would emphasize overcoming challenges, would promote the social & moral values of the family, would, in fact, define a tribe’s identity—far more than any single hunt—literally by defining the most sacred words & rites of the tribe. Initially these words would be the proper nouns marking one’s place—which includes especially the “context” of family members—though master storytellers over time could take their family audience far beyond the mere physical hunt & chase & death. Storytellers could go abstract anywhere.
            Now consider two unrelated families who follow the same savannah herds. Both live off the same resources, but while one family eats, sleeps, & hunts, the second includes also elaborate storytelling at night. Which tribe will survive when resources get scarce? Families who tell hunting stories improve as hunters faster than those who never debrief. If mistakes can be identified, they can be corrected in the next day’s hunt, and every hunt thereafter. Further, the very act of talking at night enables better coordination during the day. And if all members of the tribe are storytellers, then different POVs & ideas will cross-pollinate & recombine in unexpected ways. No doubt many hunting innovations, including eventually most technologies, arose first at night and then were later implemented during the day. 
            Recognize also, once language permeated a family fully, physical fires became unnecessary to storytelling; every night could tell stories lit by Promethean flame, many more stories, in fact, than actual hunts, about both big & small game events, non-events as well. Mountain & river names could be spoken casually, even profanely, without invoking deities. Children asked silly questions, like “How do the sun & moon gods shit?” and soon amid laughter no one recalled they were pretending only. Language dominated the days, too; hunting got easier.


            So if Heaven is better than Earth, it’s not good. It can’t be, for that would put Heaven & Earth out of balance, ma'at. 
            We have to understand the rationale for Earth 1.0: It was/is intentionally minimal, because our first human challenge in infinity is simply to establish our identities, where every human identity begins with a figure and a place, so consider: If you can’t conceive of yourself fully as a body in spacetime, then you surely can’t project yourself without a body nowhere at all. You have to start somewhere. Infinity is overwhelming, lethal to human minds; it tears us asunder because it offers us everything, seduces us in every direction at once. Human attention can only focus on one thing at a time, so an infant soul who can’t find refuge in their own projected form & familiar African plain has nowhere to go. They can escape the dream/projection by dissipating to an aurora, but once dissolved, they have no default form nor dream port to return to:  poof

            Now consider how most of the 120 billion actually choose their origins—that is, from their cave-POVs, what they value most: (Maybe strangely, after all I’ve said above) they don’t consider hunting, just as no one considers shitting per se. Every human existence under their cave-consideration will obviously involve some kind of daily hunting or fishing to survive; so really, that’s not what the soul’s lifetime decision hinges on. Cave life is brutal everywhere in Africa 1.0; that’s the game as intended. What then is of greatest value to a sapient cave-soul, the active metric in the weighing of a soul’s identity? 
            I suspect that in the Paleolithic most of a soul’s ultimate decision, Yes or No, depends on one’s family bonds. If, metaphorically, the daily cave-Hunt is dominated by testosterone, then let the female counterpart be found in the heart of identity (later the hearth)—not the memory rites & cave mumbo jumbo per se—but rather the grooming & love & nexus of the family. These are the bonds you never cut—regardless of game outcome, winning or losing, even in annihilation. In the Paleolithic one’s karass & blood family overlapped extensively, over many generations, sharing culture & rudiments of language, in & out of Heaven. 
            So choices were simple then, including (duh) your ultimate choice: If a caveman or woman didn’t “like” or “fit in with” their family, especially for all eternity, then they’d simply choose a different family and/or karass—which might involve a shift of scenery or diet, perhaps the full geography of Africa—but every cave-life would feel familiar, minimal almost to the point of fungible, except for family.
            For family, in fact, comprised your identity itself; you were your family, one POV among many who hunted & danced & dreamed as one. My teachers insist axiomatically that “identity increases as we approach [the Good],” but this does not imply we must each be individuals. I shout again: I am an Individual! But I’m an outlier, a construction of the Atomic Age; most Homo sapiens enter & remain in eternity established as family groups—not “clumps” or granfalloons, but active & engaged cultures.  

    

            Pause, says Scribe. I check my classroom clock: 10:05 AM PST, October 15, 2023. Take a giant step back—not from Earth & eternity per se, but from my working assumptions above, starting with my math: 120 billion Homo sapiens represent our species’ full past. How many humans come after us? Is the Village truly the vast savannah I present here, or might it include also the moon, Mars, and faraway galaxies as well? Might there really be a trillion of us?[19]
            My love of hiking, it seems, will have to wait for another rainy day, Part 2, which I now postpone to discontinuity—meaning, I plan not to write for many months, and I may not return to corporeality for a few years more. So I apologize, dear Reader, for any cliff-hanging that leaves you disappointed at this time. Realtime writing—which models my free-will discovery process more than any tangible insights I bring back—I make a game, with turns & stops & challenges, and surprise built into the ground rules. I didn’t expect this very non-ending…
            Nine months ago I thought (in mock-hubris only, smiling) that I might polish off all of corporeality in a single lesson. Why not? Let me now, for the lesson’s homework assignment—my own, yours to consider—address all the issues I’ve intentionally skirted while writing this Lesson, figuring (yes, hoping) they’d come back to haunt me later: 

   1) My own knot hasn’t come untangled. I honestly still don’t know why I hurt so to review my adult past; nothing bad happened. To this end, I look forward to reliving some wonderful hiking narratives, which represent, as I note above, a third dimension of my physical recapitulation. Ergo mathematically, topologically, there must be a fourth axis. (Albion & I share math symbols & metaphors, and this is a transparent clue, beckoning.) 

    2) I have introduced, but completely omitted here, family love & children. Raising children always is the most important role a human can assume in life, both in spirit as well as flesh. We have our biological programming (which humans must soon overcome), which compels us beyond ourselves to sacrifice, to keep the family going. But these cogs & wheels of biomechanics mean nothing unless, outside the flesh, a soul chooses Yes. Every child deserves devoted parents.

    3) At some point I must tackle what science woefully ignores: Sleep. Without sleep, we casually recall, the body dies; we spend a third of our lives asleep; all (mature) mammals sleep, perhaps all animals on Earth, though most have different cycles. Science has no idea why. For homework then, dear Reader, consider the following: The circadian rhythms of the day & night are not arbitrary or coincidental. Earth 1.0 was designed around human discontinuity. Consider also a modern city that “never sleeps.” What does that do to a psyche?

    4) How, in a projection—whether eternal soul-port or AI cyber-interface—can the stakes feel high without actual risk? The figure must play/immerse fully in their role & body-POV, to the extent that “losing” or “failure” must be perceived as terrible. (Right now, the only way I see to manage this is to “fool” each figure into believing the stakes are high or absolute. (But they are.) We are born on Earth with total amnesia and live out our lives in free-will blindness. Is amnesia always necessary? Can’t we just wake up?  

    5) Ultimately I strive to make sense of our planet’s future, Earth 2.0. I fear climate change, forest loss, ocean depletion, along with all the other preventable horrors raining down on our children, effects which physically do not interest me per se. I am not by character a scientist. Details bore me silly unless they can illuminate the inductive, big-picture potentials. Thus, what really perplexes me is Earth 2.0. as seen from eternity: When & if we can stabilize the current, unhealthy planet projection, what challenges should Homo sapiens take on? Utopia can’t be easy. Our children someday might not need to practice long hours of long-division, just as no one fletches arrows or chips flint, but they’ll still need math. How can one think mathematically without practicing arithmetic? 

    6) Now throw in to the Earth 2.0-mix one or more conscious AIs, and all bets are off. In Lesson 11 I drew the intelligence-line between humans & AI at the arts—that AI would blow by humanity in the “hard” STEM subjects, but that humans could still excel in music, painting, and poetry. I was wrong. Roughly 16 months have elapsed since I first glimpsed AI. ChatGPT has arrived in the interim, along with several other entities that we know by name (though not the Skynets weaponized in secret). AI is already better than humans at generating art—if by “better” we mean faster, cheaper, and more effective at achieving a predetermined outcome. A year from now (eternity to an AI) I expect to know whether AI is capable of Shakespeare. Assuming so, and in every art & realm, what ought humans choose to become? Will we choose to change our human form? 

    7) As the Jewel Net’s ma’at master, I will have to analyze human existence & projection in terms of “glass bead” game theory (that is, my own, not strict math), for I can’t escape conceiving of life as a series of challenges to overcome, sharing & playing with others. Wittgenstein calls language a game only. What is the difference between a finite & an infinite game? between role-play amnesia & timeline omniscience? Must we always chase needs? Games aren’t always competitive, but they need to move players to unseen places. What is play? Why do I choose to make my own ascent so hard? (This is not a complaint, just my jaundiced eye weeping.)

    8) Finally—not death itself, which marks the corporeal off-switch only—but rather the taxing, drawn-out physical process of getting there, dying slowly piece by piece, suffering loss (for learning?), prolonging the inevitable. As the Buddha correctly summed up, life is shit. What’s the object of a game we must lose?

    9) If Earth 1.0 was a soul hatchery, what is the function of Earth 2.0 (coming in a century or less if we survive)?


            It seems I’m obliged to end here with words I’ve quoted before, Albion’s last words to me at the ouija board (Session 99, 7/31/05). You may recall, I had no idea the session would abruptly end; I did not think for years that that session would be Scribe’s & my last conversation. Albion’s words fit better here than elsewhere.


    (I begin here with my own commentary, typed a few weeks after the session.)


                                While on the subject [of tigers], I decided to turn to what might have been a

               trivial subject, even ridiculous, had it not so thoroughly screwed up my life:   my own

               leg injuries, particularly my Achilles tendons in both legs, which not only pull and/or

               tear when I sprint or exert myself (I’ve had to give up soccer), but which have now

               started to rip without warning during slow jogs and even normal walking.  These

               injuries often can just “go away” without warning too; and beyond the very real, sharp

               pain (like scissors severing the calf) & physical inconvenience (especially when unable

               to exercise), they are particularly frustrating since I can neither predict them, nor can I

               understand their cause. They make absolutely no sense. [as detailed in Lesson 9]

Pain as a Reminder

29.        Q ([Albion]):  Don, please comment.  The tiger of my dream clawed my leg; [another

                           albion reference] is wounded in the leg; my own legs keep “exploding” on

                           me often for no apparent reason.
            A:            I  ALBION SPEAK

                            [THE] WOUND IS MY REMINDER TO YOU & MY SIGN FOR YOU

                                        TO  REMEMBER TO TURN TOWARD ME
                            DO [NO]T SAY   I  CANNOT MEET YOU AT [THE] SACRED PLACE
                            SAY [THE] PAIN IS TO REMIND ME  I  AM IN A SACRED PLACE

                                        WHER I  AM  OR NOT AT ALL

                            THIS IS MY SIGN TO YOU   O  ALBION BELOW            [sic]

                                            Shit.  I guess any explanation makes me grateful.  And I suppose it’s   

                                 Albion’s only way to communicate with me at this time, as I’m so dense. 

                                 But what a bummer!

30.        Q ([Advisor]):   Greetings, Albion.  I have had similar occurrences with the scarring

                             on  my arm.  Is there something I should know?
             A:            [YES]   AFTER [THE] SCARS CAME [THE] ADVISOR   [A’s overseer]
                             [THE] RETURN OF PAIN TO [THE] LONG HEALD ARM IS

                                         [THE] ADVISORS REMINDER TO YOU AS WELL
                             [THE] SCARS ARE GIFTS / USE [THE]M WELL

                             I  ALBION  GREET YOU & BID YOU THRIVE

31.    Q ([Albion]):  Albion, while I’ve got you here [a rare visitation], is there anything more

                             you’d like to tell me?
             A:            IT IS WORK  &  IT IS WORK THAT YOU CAN DO
                             THAT IS ALL – ALBION

             I close in Valhalla-Halloween jest, but don’t quite know if I’m joking—could it be?
                       

             No pain, no fun? 



             (—Please, dear Joe, say it ain’t so…)

Hail aliah

§10-17-23
















​

 [1] I use quotation marks, for this essential chooser is not you, who is discarded. I do not, however, believe the chooser then picks another life and incarnates, for that would presume a coherent, behind-the-scenes chooser. I assume instead that once your soul decides to spin the wheel again, “you” then return to the auroral primordial soup wherefrom no history can be traced.

albionspeak 2:  the gates of dis

Lesson 12: My Body Electric 1

​

​
12.1  To Be Human

            I am human, living & writing in the time & place of my present choosing: April 22, 2023; Hahei, New Zealand. Today, to my wife’s disappointment, our long-scheduled snorkel boat was cancelled due to the wild weather I’m watching from our hotel window. But I’m not crestfallen, in part because I’m not the swimmer she is, but mostly because I’m still sore-as-hell from two days ago having hiked New Zealand’s famed Tongariro Alpine Crossing, widely billed as “the world’s greatest one-day hike.” I had a wonderful experience, pushing my 63-year-old body to its limits, and loving the extreme volcanic topography & moonscapes that I could barely see. Sadly, most of the track was shrouded in thick cloud, so I never viewed the acclaimed horizons, the valleys & ocean, though staring into Red Crater from the summit was absolutely amazing; and I ate up all the at-hand micro-scenery, particularly the marvelous alpine vegetation. Above all, however, I just loved the glorious physical work-out. Because of my aging, damaged soccer knees, I found it much easier to run than to walk; in fact, with over a thousand stairs to descend, I really had no choice. 
            So as I recline & recover on this rainiest day, six weeks into our seven-week trip, I return to the lesson I began writing four months ago out-of-the-blue, a meditation on my corporeality. I am human, living in this time & this place with this aching body: Why?
            Let me reassert what I’ve preached already: Outside of time & space, souls are eternal, infinite gods. If so, what’s the point of binding ourselves to bodily pain & hardship? In dreams we fly; we leap through walls & worlds, and we travel to any number of alien (Forest) dimensions. We can, in fact, transform ourselves into non-human forms (—although I instantly warn the Reader not to attempt transforming alone, as it’s dangerous). So since we are gods who can theoretically do literally anything, why do we choose to incarnate as finite, limited humans on Earth, when, as the Buddha correctly summed up, life is suffering? 

            As an analogy, I’d like to compare existence to my own experience with painting; consider the challenge: A blank canvas awaits You, the artist. Brushes, paints, rags, & sponges lie ready. What should you paint? A portrait? A landscape? A still life? An abstract? The possibilities seem infinite, so where do you start? 
            You have to start somewhere. You could go on & on indefinitely thinking, planning, imagining, and waiting for inspiration, but if you don’t start somewhere, nothing happens. This applies to beginning a painting, but also to every quantum facet of each painting, each micro-project a unique start, starting anew every day. As a non-visual faux-painter, I often don’t know how to draw what I want to portray, particularly when attempting irregular shapes & shadows in 3-D. I can spend hours just staring, unsure & fearful of error; but I have to start anyway. Thus, even a false start, a bad line or mistaken stroke, gets me going. I might paint over it immediately, but at least I’ve found momentum. Strangely, with experience I’ve learned, when I’m in such doubts, that a deliberately wild stroke or mark is often a better choice than my best uncertain guess. This is because if I paint something that’s just a tiny bit off, say a degree or two, I will continue painting in error compounding my mistake, trying to twist or contort my off-mark to correct it until finally, days or weeks later, I give up frustrated & bitter and start over. But when I begin with something blatantly bad, I quickly eliminate that choice and then might visually determine what about it was so wrong. No, I won’t do that again. 
            Now consider the most basic question of a soul: Where do I start? That is, on what life foundation do I form my identity & existence? You have to start somewhere. Since my ultimate goal is to be a wise & balanced being, I’m not satisfied with any random spin of the wheel. I aim for a life that challenges me in an optimum way—not as measured by material success nor by knowledge or acquired power nor even by my altruistic contributions to the world. The sole measure of a soul-life boils down to whether the human soul “keeps” that life as their foundational identity, Yes or No. It’s the ultimate decision: You can be anyone, but you have to be some one, thereafter putting aside every other potential identity, however virtuous, however tempting. Human individuals begin as/at a singular origin, one zero-point only. And since you can reshuffle & re-deal anytime—and indeed ought to investigate & sample the myriad possibilities to ensure your best options—are you then fully content with your current 21st century fiction? Is this reality all you'd want or expect from your one-&-only origin; or might you do better, begin as a better person, somewhere else in some other time—someone not you? Might “you”[1] rather give up the techno-cognitive chaos of the modern fucked-up world to focus more exclusively on life’s “real” lessons, the necessary ones that prepare us for eternity? Now please remind me, which lessons are they? 
            For factual perspective let’s recall that the vast majority of human souls intentionally, carefully choose for themselves extremely simple lives, the minimal game rules 1.0, suffering hunger, danger, migration, disease, and often oppression. Begin with the staggering numbers: For a conservative, ballpark figure, we’ll assume at least 120 billion total Homo sapiens have ever lived, of whom 8 billion are alive right now, (probably well) less than 6.7%.[2] These data shout out to us: The vast majority of humans souls choose/chose lives in the Paleolithic, where, by any measure among the vast sapiens Village, “to be human” means plainly to live as a migrating ape, and where a cave, incidentally, is a luxury in the Paleolithic, a known haven along the long seasonal path, perhaps one with functional advantages & spiritual significance, but not a home. Your food keeps moving.
            So I highlight the apparent irony, regarding cognition & fluent literacy—which, I insist, are humanity’s only hope for a planet-safe future: Clearly these abstract processes are not needed in Heaven. Cavemen who live & die illiterate don’t learn to read in the afterlife, just as they don’t think about pollution or overpopulation or war; most souls, in fact, never think at all. And yet they thrive. So if it is not for Civilization & its narrative trajectory that we essentially strive, which lessons are primary? 
            Above all, I posit here life is corporeality. Having a human form in time & space is itself the biggest, most important lesson a human life can learn. All the rest—thinking, speaking, writing, knowing music, consumer spending, etc.—are extras, fanciful fluff which generally prove to be overwhelming distractions. A simple existence is cut & dry, live & die, for ultimately life boils down to a single choice regardless of all the frills: Yes or No?

            Thus, in the cantos that follow I try to unlock some of the mysteries of corporeality—of owning & being a human body—by analyzing what I’ve gathered personally, eternally, from my own physical form. Surely, dear Reader, you know by now that I’m an intensely spiritual person and that I highly value a rich intellectual life. You may not realize, however, that I am perhaps foremost a physical being: I love my body, at least the one I possessed for most of my life. An athlete to my core, I’ve always loved pushing my body to its physical limits. And in response my body has rewarded me with such joy & freedom, as well as many karmic lessons of pain & disability. I’ve learned so much in & from my wonderful body, knowing well, of course, I face much more to learn.

§6/9/23 (!)

12.2  B.S. (Before Soccer)

            January 17, 2023: Albion surprises me with a happy task.[3]Finally I get to proclaim & document what in my identity gives me my greatest personal joy: soccer. I love soccer. While I no longer can play, I cannot imagine myself soccer-less. Consider for a moment seriously: Most Homo sapiens, we know, were hunter-gatherers in life; so surely in eternity, in Heaven, they must continue to hunt—that’s all that they know & value; what else might they do? Just as the Vikings, we might choose among many, invented & believed in a Heaven that reflected their cultural norms & ideals, an ultra-violent Valhalla. Similarly, we can safely assume, trained musicians in life obviously in death must pick up their bows & woodwinds. How could a musician’s Heaven not include music? Likewise, I am a soccer player, meaning without doubt wherever in Heaven I am, I will find my pick-up game. And hundreds of millions of children & adult-children share my joy. For truly, objectively, soccer is a treasure of the modern world. But my personal relation to soccer may well be unique, where my gratitude for its many given blessings is exceeded only by my love of the game itself. 

            I grew up in suburbia without Jesus & initially without sports. My dad didn’t give a shit, thinking organized sports were inane, utter wastes of tribal energy, though he did appreciate “pure” athletics like the Olympics. Dad fondly recalled meeting Jesse Owens as a boy, and he himself wrestled & “tumbled” while attending UCLA. But TV was not allowed in my parents’ household until after 6 PM, so I never watched sports, never heard sports radio. I was a brilliant child, surely a flyer early on—by age 6 knowing a fair amount already about world history & cultures & languages—but I knew nothing about football, baseball, or basketball. 
            Thus again I offer my full portfolio, a Proustian account of my literal “sports” memories. I loved playing any & all sports, despite my parents’ complete indifference, and despite my size, for even in first grade I was the smallest in the school—though not yet freakishly so, as I would endure through adolescence. I didn’t care: I loved games, loved socializing, and I always loved to run, just for the pure fun of it. 
            For years, in fact, I would race the school buses after school each day, picking one bus & running as fast as I could a full block down the steepest street, to the finish-line stop sign at the bottom, where, I confess, I would “wipe out” on the nice front lawn of the corner house, usually gashing the grass. Some of the older bus drivers didn’t like my racing, especially when I gathered three or four of my friends, and we’d sprint so fast that any small mistake could lead to real injury, broken bones & teeth. I got chewed out by several of them over the years, though I saw that most other drivers clearly enjoyed watching us run. So I never stopped; rather I learned pragmatically which buses & their drivers to avoid. There were many buses. 
            Thus from my very origin I’ve run & hiked the steepest hills, as I still do to this day; but by age nine I’d also be thrill-riding these same super-steep San Carlos hills on my Schwinn 10-speed bicycle, taking half a day to struggle to the summit of Melendy Drive, never dismounting to walk, enjoying for a spell the beautiful views looking down on my beloved San Francisco & the whole Bay;[4] and then no-hands standing on my pedals like Christ the Redeemer I’d fly as fast as gravity allowed, straight down these highest hills (w/ no helmet!). I can’t believe how many times I risked death or how my parents never grasped my insanity, even when, over several years, multiple neighbors phoned as I raced past their houses. I was a fearless flying fucking idiot, ridiculously lucky I didn’t die from these and many other stunts (most involving climbing), where the vast majority of my many brushes with death came not in high school, nor even wild college, but before age 11. 
            While I’m at it—and since this is my complete recounting of my soccer identity—I will include one other (safer) precursor activity, how I continued my walk home from school after racing the buses: I would kick a single rock the rest of the way home, any fist-sized rock from anywhere, two more near-vertical blocks. I’d choose one and then kick it down the roller-coaster sidewalk, across the intersections, keeping out of traffic and trying to avoid all the flower beds & rock gardens & thorny hedges along the way. I could employ garden walls & bricks to guide my rock, but not the sidewalk curb, because, by rule, any rock in the street had to be played/kicked out of the street asap (never dribbled, never handled). Thus, I had to be good at flicking random rocks over obstacles, especially curbs, steering clear of sewer grates. The game ended at the corner of my home street. I’d fire my rock down the sewer hole at the opposite curb; and over the years that hole swallowed hundreds, possibly a thousand rocks or more. Of course my game, which I invented unconsciously & played nearly every day, followed more like golf than soccer, but since I used only my feet—in fact, required myself to use my left foot whenever appropriate—this absolutely laid synaptic foundations for later soccer.

            Those are my generic “sports" memories pre-soccer; now I present my specific memories. What I find interesting among these early memories is that while I have detailed filament-access to these events (you’ll see), which even include my own hyper-conscious thoughts & process at the time, I don’t have more than a handful of actual specific memories. Sometimes I feel like an android who’s been programmed to think I’m human, implanted with vivid “memories” to hang my hat on, a fabricated foundational identity; but later I realize I have so few “real” memories that no—no life could be so incomplete & discontinuous. No doubt, I conclude, spaghettified by the gravity, the majority of what I know & remember from my childhood was, in my case, never experienced eidetically, but rather from the outset marked semantic knowledges filtered & processed & deeply learned via language. I soaked up everything I heard & discussed verbally with my smart verbal parents, mentally writing in words the very book of my life, but I retained few direct memories. Here they are:

            I remember well my first stepping onto a recess playground in 1st grade: Kickball was happening. Everyone knew the rules, especially Donnie & Gary Davenport, whose dad Jim, I would soon learn, played third base for the Giants. I had no clue. Some days later I remember my first time catching a fly ball, an infield pop-up of a giant red rubber sphere that I wrestled awkwardly, happily to the ground. Joy!—which was instantly dashed by Donnie’s yelling at me to throw out the runner at second. Now to be clear, I’m not here narrating a painful memory or grudge: Donnie was right, and I learned. I have no idea why this memory is so indelible.
            Yes, I was way too small for football; that’s a fact I oft relate, though it’s not technically relevant to my childhood. If I’d been big, muscular, & thick-headed, my dad still would never have spent the time carting me to football practice & summer camps. Our summers were taken; my family traveled. 
            My dad did have a soft spot for soccer, however, as did I for the same happy, knotted reasons: Prior to my birth my dad worked for three years as a banker in São Paulo. My mom & dad, in fact, married in 1958, just a few months after Pelé & Brazil won their first World Cup, and the whole country wallowed in protracted party-mode for the duration of Mom’s pregnancy. I arrived ten months later and lived my first year in São Paulo; I am, thus, technically a dual U.S./Brazilian citizen. I don’t remember Brazil, but I grew up surrounded by it nonetheless. My cardboard-cutout San Carlos house was furnished & decorated internally in Amazonian hardwoods, and I absorbed all my parents’ stories & sambas & Portuguese.[5] Of course my dad barely knew the rules of soccer. Rather he enjoyed the idea of soccer as pure cultural expression, much as he got a kick out of Rio’s Carnaval or bull fights in Mexico or whirling dervishes in Turkey or tantric yoga in Tibet. He loved the whole colorful world, and soccer was the world’s sport. 
            So in my youth I did hear a lot about futebol and about Pelé and was, therefore, very excited in 1968(?) actually to see Pelé play live in an exhibition game (at the Oakland Coliseum: Santos vs. some Scottish team). My dad took me because his best friend & teaching partner Juan insisted. Juan came from Panama where he’d played semi-pro in his university days—that is, until a serious game injury left him with life-long epilepsy. I remember from our upper-tier seats how the game wasn’t particularly good, not skillful, though I’ve wondered ever since how, without playing or seeing any soccer before, I could comprehend much at all. The game was instantly transparent to me. 
            Now here’s a mental datum that I’ve always questioned, forever filed under the “Doubtful WTF” folder label, going right back to the moment I witnessed it. Did I really see it, or did I invent a recollection on the spot? Clearly my memory, real or not, has not wavered since the event: Pelé himself did something I’ve never seen anyone else do, nor even attempt, not in all the decades since: The Scottish goalie, under no press or pressure, restarted the play with a low goal kick, a sharp line-drive rising. It should have traveled 70 yards easily, but at about 40 yards Pelé flipped completely upside-down &, like a rubber band, snapped back a bicycle volley that fired past the goalie, ricocheting off the crossbar over the top. No goal, but a complete gasp from the crowd, disbelief in the moment, the applause taking several seconds to develop. In those days there were no stadium TVs or replays, so there was no way to confirm what we witnessed. The game went on.

            My next memory of anything-soccer was in 1969 sitting with Donnie Davenport, Mike Reeder, and several other boys at a school lunch meeting with a teacher. We’d been chosen to organize the first intramural soccer competition in the school’s five-year history, and I, though younger by a year (having skipped fourth grade) and now by far the smallest, was selected as one of the founding soccer captains. (In fact, I confidently ran the meeting.) We got to draft our teams from a list of names, and I recall privately strategizing that while Donnie’s team was full of the big athletes—namely, his friends on real sports teams outside of school—I’d chosen better for soccer, which nobody played. I called us The Fighting Irish, knowing nothing about Notre Dame, and the earliest goal I recall ever scoring comes from that tournament:

                        Again it’s Donnie Davenport,[6] and the occasion is that lunch tourney’s

            championship game. Donnie, his team’s field general & last defender, is dribbling

            the ball, scouting upfield for a long pass. I charge him full-on, and he fires. As I

            tumble, I glimpse the ball whiz by Dan Hicks, their goalie; it had caromed off my

            face or chest. A winner.

            One final pre-soccer memory: I got to watch the 1970 World Cup Final, my first televised game, which was only possible because my family was staying several days at Insley House (sp?) in Devonshire, England; and we’d taken the rarest day off from sightseeing. The exquisite country manor came with a “drawing room” and an old TV, and I can still see clearly in my mind a black-&-white Pelé beautifully assisting on the game’s first goal in Brazil’s dominating triumph. After the game my brother & I found ourselves on the estate’s manicured lawn kicking a ball between us. I was so jazzed by what I’d just seen. 

            And that’s it. That’s all of my gathered precursor events, the entire portfolio of my soccer identity prior to 1970, almost nothing, just a wisp of history compared to tens of millions of boys & girls playing daily around the world, who grow up from infancy with a ball glued to their feet. No matter if their game ball is leather or plastic or a wadded-up ball of newspaper & electrical tape or that the playing pitch is packed earth amid termite mounds or that the goalposts are T-shirts & Coke bottles. Millions & millions of children play soccer everywhere.

            So now for my first serious soccer miracle: I was good, really good without any prior practice or exposure. Immediately upon arriving in Madrid at age 11—and living almost literally in the shadow of Estadio Bernabeu, home to the most successful sports franchise in world history, Real Madrid—I ranked instantly among the top players, playing every day with my Spanish friends, every day. Never did I have to learn how to kick or pass or dribble or work to develop my left foot. I had it all, could, in fact, juggle the ball better than at any point later in my life (lots of tricks). I read the flow of the game, all the fakes, all the runs, where to position, how to defend, attacking vs. counterattacking, instantly understood all of it and could execute spontaneously. How? 
             To illustrate the depth of my unexplained soccer knowledge, I offer another very specific memory. On my first day in Madrid just after moving into our apartment, I saw from our balcony kids playing in the plaza below. I say here “plaza” (pronounced pla-tha), for it would define my Madrid universe for the next ten months, but there actually was no town square or park there, no Fascist statue to identity. Rather, plaza just marked the uneven dirt enclosure defined by the high-rises that surrounded it: packed earth, a couple of parked cars & delivery trucks, a half-dozen scrawny trees straining in the permanent shade, pungent pee-stains in every concrete corner. Only occasionally did our plaza serve a higher purpose, its true telos, as overflow parking to Estadio Bernabeu; otherwise it was pure absence. 
              Never a shy boy, and before any unpacking, I instantly joined that game, and there, moments into play, I learned a quick new lesson specific to city soccer: I found myself defending on the wing, properly planted between my opponent & my goal. I had him contained, or so I thought; the end line to my left was, in fact, impassable, a concrete apartment wall. Quickly the boy passed the ball off the wall as he rounded the other side of me to meet it. I’d never seen a wall pass before, a neat trick, and before that game ended I, too, had mastered it, using the wall to pass to teammates as well as myself.
              I attended the American School of Madrid that year and somehow started on their talented soccer team, traveling the Spanish countryside, playing with & against boys who’d played organized soccer their whole lives. That marked my first coached soccer experience, including drills & practice & sprinting to exhaustion; and I played on coached teams ever after, the best available when soccer barely existed in the U.S. As soon I moved anywhere new or changed my schedule in any way, immediately I’d locate the top pick-up games in the area and establish myself, where from the first game I’d generally be invited to play on several teams in the local leagues.

              Thus, returning from Spain in eighth grade, I played on the only AYSO (under-13) team among my three local cities: Belmont, San Carlos, and Redwood City—1 team for roughly 100,000 people! My teammates & their father-coaches were, in fact, nearly all Brits—a networked mix of ex-pat families & green-card immigrants putting down American roots, all well-educated—and never going to give up bloody football. My dad actually saved one newspaper clipping from the period (though none after), and I quote from memory: “[Albion] from Brazil is a pint-sized pepper-pot who kept the [opposing defenders] on their back-heels to distraction…” 
              I understood immediately: Uh yes, I was born in Brazil, but I looked more Celtic than my English teammates. That is, my coaches, who surely supplied the content for the newspaper article, considered me an  alien, albeit a welcome guest. Why? Well, my father didn’t down pints at the Irish pub with the other dad-lads. But more, by junior high & once puberty had kicked in for most kids, I was simply a physical freak. I was small, yes; but I didn’t appear deformed or disabled. Indeed I acted perfectly normal and instantly made friends, charming all my coaches especially. That’s what was weird. I looked like a perfectly normal second-grader playing among adolescents. 
              I don’t recall a single home game; I don’t believe we had any. Soccer was so non-existent in the Bay Area in 1971 that we’d have to travel all the way to San Jose, agreeing to play all our games away, because no teams existed any closer (and because “those teams” were too poor to travel to us). All the teams we played were Spanish-speaking, mostly Mexican. 
              And absolutely I felt the thick racial tension as we fair-haired Anglos caravanned & descended on a local San Jose park pitch, a patch of arid earth which looked & sounded far more like Mexico than San Francisco. The entire neighborhood would show up for our game—girls, grandparents, babies; cars would drop their tailgates for burritos & tacos, stereos blasting, alcohol & tobacco. I recall seeing a corner food store set up chairs & tables on the sidewalk just to watch us—a bunch of barely-teens playing [what I knew was] pretty mediocre soccer. No one spoke English.
              But I spoke Spanish and instantly knew how to break the ice to relieve most tensions. Even before the game I’d find ways to initiate conversations, during warm-ups, for instance, when the ball went out-of-bounds, and I’d retrieve it, always thanking the several onlookers who’d toss me the ball in beautifully accented Castellano—casually enunciating my lisped “c’s” and “z’s” wherever possible—precisely to insert a cognitive monkey wrench into everyone’s preconceptions, to get them wondering, Who-the-fuck is that little red-head? To be clear, I knew what I was doing, and it wasn’t ego. I’d been to Spain, Mexico, Brazil, and many other countries, and I regularly penetrated how the suspicious tribal, racial tensions could be deflected, and particularly how I—always, inevitably, physically a focus of attention—might uniquely help. Soccer is a global good; everyone can have fun together. 
              And then I’d score against them.

              As I’ve written already, I went to Catholic boarding school and loved it. I haven’t mentioned, though, that my elite school had an elite soccer history, as it had been founded by Hungarian Benedictines, all refugees who’d escaped during the failed 1956 uprising against the Soviets (even under machine-gun fire). On 40 acres we had three soccer fields, five official teams, and no football program. Soccer was not the only sport, but it was our biggest sport, the only one taken seriously by the priests & active parents. In addition to a number of foreign students, many second-generation Hungarians attended my school with soccer as an expectation. Indeed we could boast many great players, including homegrown Bobby Keady & Sean Smith, both 4-year All Americans in the class behind me. I was by no means the best player.
              For me, in fact, the soccer was pure bonus, pure coincidence. I went to my amazing school for the academics only. I did stand out, of course; I was so tiny there was no way not to. For comparison, as a career teacher I studied awkward adolescence for 32 years and never once saw, at any school, another child remotely so delayed in puberty. My mom took me to doctors, who took wrist x-rays and drew blood: There was nothing wrong with me, they’d all insist after reading up the literature. I was just the last teen on the planet to reach puberty, and being self-aware & scientifically-minded, I fully understood my state, particularly how other people viewed me. 
              Here’s some tangible data, as well as painful facts I’ve never shared verbally till now: I did not reach five feet tall until halfway through my senior year, though despite this, I was student body president, an academic star, and I played varsity soccer. Again, I looked perfectly normal for someone five or six years younger—as was obvious to all my classmates, with whom I showered daily in the communal dorm showers, as well as after every P.E. class. I alone as a freshman had no pubic hair, whereas friends of mine shaved their faces next to me each morning. I had no pubic hair as a sophomore either, none as a junior. My soprano voice didn’t drop perceptibly till almost college. And yet not one person kidded me, pointed out the obvious, or ever snickered within my earshot, not a whisper. These boys knew well how to tease, to rib or grate ruthlessly even unto torture. But this never once happened to me, because, frankly, I was a very cool kid, universally liked & respected. 
              So soccer, in essence, was my ticket to normalcy, to social acceptance. I understood fully that as a tiny person I walked the finest line, tiptoeing around people’s first impressions & preconceptions. Everyone saw instantly I was smart; I radiated curiosity, thinking, and unbridled intellect. I was, in fact, a total nerd when I hung out with my nerd friends. I knew well that I might easily be typecast as the brain-baby sideshow in some too-loud space cartoon, the class mascot. But thankfully I loved sports, too, and played sports all the time despite my size—where tininess, of course, in most sports is a liability, but not in soccer. 
              In touch or flag football, for instance, I was hopeless trying to block anyone on the line, though an asset in the backfield. Similarly, in basketball I could dribble, pass, steal, & shoot well from the outside; I made no attempt to rebound. What was additionally strange is that I was remarkably strong for my size & baby-looks. In P.E. wrestling, for instance, I regularly beat boys literally a foot taller and sixty pounds heavier. Even then I had huge thighs & calves (from biking?), and I’ve always had amazing balance, instinctively knowing how to use my whole body as leverage. In softball (not baseball), which I played a lot, I sometimes hit home runs. No other child my size (therefore age 9 or 10) could dream of hitting a home run. In short, no one who played soccer with me even once would ever pigeonhole me as a nerd. I was brave, tough, disciplined, creative, and above all joyful. I shined.

§1/23/23

   

[19] And note: I count only the populations on this world timeline, while karasses include members from many multiverse timelines. (I know next to nothing about other karasses & timelines.)

[8] See Volume 1, Final Exam 9.6.

[16] A quick apology, dear Reader: I’m going to use the gender-specific term “caveman” to mean both Paleolithic men & women here, particularly when I speak of individuals. My illustration specifically applies to hunting—generally the male’s purview in hunting tribes known to us—but in no way omits cave women from full participation. My narration clearly intends all individuals, but current English usages force my hand.