“You’ve got to hear this song, it’s beautiful,” said my Dad and I immediately new, trapped in the passenger seat of his car, that I was going to be subject to some totally gay music. “This is Barbra Streisand’s duets album. She sings songs with other artists.” I bit my tongue not to say, “No shit, pops, so that’s what a duet is?” The taste of blood in my mouth reminded me of the last time I went down on a girl while she was having her period. Immediately afterwards I had gone to the all-night Korean deli to pick up a snack and they called the police, thinking I must have killed someone, as my face was covered with blood. It took me a half-hour to explain to the cops that, in Vietnam lingo, I had merely been crawling in a Gook hole and had a mine blow up in my face before they let me go.

While I am somewhat of an anarchist, for the most part I do believe in the sanctity of “Driver is D.J.” and didn’t want to mess with that basic rule of quantum physics. I did my best not to rip into Mecha-Streisand and the best I could come up with was, “I’m not really a fan of Barbra Streisand.”

The song happened to be “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” sung with Neil Diamond and all I could do was ignore the running commentary by my father which consisted of, “Sad, huh?” and “Beautiful, no?” Even our CIA has the decency to torture its captives with waterboarding and not this agony! I was wishing for his sudden death and trying to figure out how I would grab the wheel, open his door and throw him and that shitty CD into traffic.

[http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/150168]

I considered saying, “Dad, totally not into it,” but figured the old man wanted to share this faggy song and why should I rain on his parade. Being audible was more than I desired but the volume my old man had it on was one click louder than torturous, which put me in that state of squirm-in-your-seat discomfort right before uncontrollably shouting at the top of your lungs, “FOR GOD’S SAKE, MAN, SHUT IT OFF!” I considered turning down the volume to a decibel level that would make it so I wouldn’t experience a convulsive twitch but thought that would make him know that he was the only one getting wood from Babs’ screeching and I chose not to take the baton out of his bandleader hand, despite how much I wanted to shove it up his ass.

When the song ended, my Dad said, “Beautiful, huh?” and I thought about for once in my life being the good son and saying, “Yes, it was really nice.” But my brother’s the good son. He would probably say, “Dad, why don’t you play me another song you enjoy for me and I will continue to jerk you off.” I’m the pain-in-the-ass son and the mildest thing I could come up with was, “It was okay but I’m not a big fan of Barbra Streisand.”

My Dad turned to me and I thought a tear might well up in his eye until he said, “Get the fuck out of the car, you little bastard!” I tuck and rolled and somehow made it to the side of the highway still alive. I was pissed off. Why didn’t he kick me out before having me listen to that GargantuShnoz monster’s shrill shrieking?

[http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/103727]

.

It’s alright to cry…Crying gets the sad out of you.

Raindrops from your eyes…It might help you feel better.

—“It’s Alright To Cry” from Free To Be You And Me sung by Rosie Greer (former huge NFL player)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqFuhCfb3Fk]

.

It was my first day in Florida and I was looking forward to an exciting week of eating, beaching, shuffle boarding, eating and eating with my parents. Jewish parents will wake you up at 9:00 a.m. and the first words that will come out of their mouths is where you’re going for dinner. I’m usually like, “Ma, if you’re not going to wack-off my morning hard-on, I want you the fuck out of here,” to which she always responds with the same, “You’re disgusting!” as she leaves the room. I wouldn’t really let her jerk me off, at least not without applying some Oil of Olay to those dried-out, pruney, age-spotted hands.

After pounding some all-you-can-eat-without-puking-and-if-you-do-puke-then-you-have-made-room-for-the-next-full-plate-of-food at the Golden Corral the night before and sleeping for ten hours straight and getting jerked-off by my mother, I was ready to hit the sandy beaches of Florida.

The beach ritual with my parents is always the same. I can imagine a National Geographic show where the narrator describes in a loud whisper, “Notice the settling down ritual where the female takes what seems like an interminable time to find a spot for the sunbathing ritual. And once she finds the spot, see how she bosses the male around as to where he should hammer the umbrella into the ground for the optimal shade coverage. This is done to remind him that she has his testicles in a jar stored high and out of reach back at home.” The narrator would know not to get too close to this wild female or else she would Steve Irwin him by thrusting the beach umbrella pole through his heart killing him instantly.

I sat in one of the chairs we brought and did some kriya yoga pranayama energy breathing, partly because I was in the mood and other partly to subvert the “another common settling down ritual…” which involves my parents asking me mundane questions, which are usually really comments disguised as questions like, “It’s beautiful here, isn’t it?” or “Very different from New York weather, huh?” or “Can you believe it’s March and you’re sitting on a beach wearing only shorts?” or “Did I do a good job jerking you off this morning?” to which I respond to any and all questions in the same way: “Dad has a much softer touch. Maybe next time you can take off your fuckin’ rings.”

I was facing the ocean, with a clear blue sky above, listening to the lapping of the waves, feeling the sand beneath my feet—even a yogi with A.D.D. could find Samadhi in this setting!

Near the end of my pranayama, my focus shifted from the meditative thought of, “Is it wrong to rub my penis against my yoga students when they are in corpse pose?” to the loud talkers behind me. I wasn’t annoyed in the least. This was not because I had transcended annoyance or because I was like, “Bless these children of God, they know not how loud they speak.” It was because the topic was somewhat interesting.

It was two girls talking, as opposed to “dead man walking,” and unlike what usually happens when two girls get together, where they spend several hours talking about menstruation and how cheap toilet paper leaves clumps in their cooch, these girls were talking about matters that some might call “spiritual.”

“I am agnostic: I don’t really know if there is a God or not. I just believe that if you do good deeds here, when you die you will be rewarded.”

I finished up my round of pranayama and went over to the girls. In the old days if I saw two young, cute girls I would have wanted to see if I could get laid. Today, the only “action” I wanted was to throw a monkey wrench into their discussion and see if I could break down the machinery of their minds. Hearing people talk on spirituality is clay pigeons to my ears and all I want to do is get out my shotgun and blow them to pieces.

“Hi, I heard you talking and I thought the topic was interesting. Do you mind if I join in on the discussion?” I assured them that I wouldn’t just sit there like a dog drooling and hoping someone would throw me a bit of food but that I may just drool a little and if either one of them had any food they wanted to toss in my direction that I would be very appreciative if they did so, rubbed my belly and said, “Good boy!”

I was going to offer the question, “If there is no afterlife, would you still think there any point to doing ‘good deeds’?” Many do “good deeds” just as a business. Christian soldiers think they’ll be able to take up residence on the sunny spot of the cloud if they convert some heathen Jews. Moslems think that they will bathe in rivers of wine and fuck 72 virgin girls if they blow up some heathen Jews. And even Jews think if they can work not to hate their annoying, money-grubbing heathen brethren that God will pat them on the yarmulke and tell them they’ve been a good boy.

How many Moslems would blow themselves up if there were no virgins waiting for them, not even a fat ugly drunk chick? They’re not committed to a Jihad; they’re just in negotiation for a life that is better than the current dog shit one they are living. How many Christians would bug everyone about Jesus if there were no pay-off in Heavenopoly money? How many Jews would not turn on the basketball game because it’s the Sabbath if they didn’t think that the peeping Tom God was watching them? Most religions are not religious, they’re business.

But the topic had moved on and so I had to relegate all of my brilliant “life as a business” monkey wrenches back to my tool bag, which I got from graduating the DeVry Institute.

One of the girls mentioned how crying was useless and served no point and that anger is much more functional. “When I have cried, it doesn’t help anything. I still feel sad and nothing has changed. When I get angry, I feel better.”

The other girl was like, “I totally agree. Most people don’t understand crying but everyone understands and accepts anger. My friends wouldn’t know how to handle me if I was crying and so I wouldn’t cry with them. But all of them understand anger.” and suddenly I felt like I was having a discussion on feminism in a room full of lesbian man-haters.

I said, “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but that sounds totally dysfunctional to me. If these people are really your ‘friends’ and you are sad and crying, I would hope that they would do their best to be there for you and support you and not be like, ‘Listen Whiney McTears, you need to get a grip!” If she responded, “I almost took that the wrong way, that you think I’m a moron,” I would have responded, “No, that’s the right way to take it.”

The first girl said how she was a real “task” oriented person and if it didn’t serve helping the situation, it just didn’t serve—and tears don’t serve. I said how if one’s parent died, tears wouldn’t help her to make the funeral arrangements but that they would probably help release a lot of grief and sadness from inside of her.

“People just function differently and I don’t function that way,” she said. I totally agree that people have different ways of acting and reacting. But…

“If you are trying to build a house and you are banging nails with the wrong side of a hammer, you could say, ‘Hammers don’t work for me; I just build houses differently.” But maybe your opinion comes from a limited understanding of hammering and if you explored more thoroughly how to use a hammer your opinion might be different.”

She told me how her parents never made themselves available and that in her family they didn’t really express their feelings with each other. I brought up a question about conditioning versus perceived freedom.

“We all like to believe we have free will but do you think that if your parents had opened their arms for you to cry into when you were feeling sad as a little girl that you would think the way you do today about the uselessness of crying?”

She acknowledged that conditioning does affect how we act today and probably had an influence on her but still couldn’t grasp how crying served any purpose.

But why does everything even have to serve a purpose? In our utilitarian society, if someone doesn’t serve the collective we think they are a “useless feeder,” to borrow a term from the New World Order that wants to kill 80% or more of the population. Why can’t we just take a walk without the “purpose” being to get anywhere? Why can’t we just ball our eyes out because we are sad and not think, “How is this bringing me to a better place.” Jesus F. Christ, if we wait to process all our thoughts before we express an emotion, we will be like a planet full of Mr. Spocks: a bunch of logical, pointy-eared bores who are very “useful” but emotionally dead.

“Some might say that you lying on the beach here and sunning serves no ‘purpose’,” I challenged. She came back that she had worked hard to “earn” this time to relax and that she enjoyed it.

I finally brought in my probably double their life experience into the equation. “Look, I do energy healing work which often involves people releasing stuff they’ve been holding onto for years, sometimes decades. I have had many people cry on my table and every one of them felt a tremendous burden lifted from them and felt phenomenally better after their tears.”

“Really?” the first girl asked. This is one sign of spiritual immaturity, having difficulty understanding or empathizing with something that doesn’t fit into your current modus operandi. To have to confirm that, yes, many people feel better after a good cry to someone seemed almost bizarre to me, as if I had to explain something as obvious as how many guys think taking a huge dump is as satisfying as blowing a load.

Early on in the discussion, she had told me how she wanted to get married and have kids. She said that her parents were never available for her and she wants to be available for her kids. I brought up child molesters, not for any “purpose” besides the fact that I like to talk about Catholic priests. “Many people who are sexually abused go on to abuse others sexually. I think it’s great that you have seen a pattern of behavior that wasn’t ideal for you and are committed to not repeat it with your children.”

Their boyfriends came back with the I.Q. rallying cry of, “We got beers!” and I was waiting for one of them to imply that I was macking on his girl, to which I would have responded, “Listen brother, I would much rather punch you in the face than fuck your girl.” But that opportunity never came; some of my best material gets lost on the cutting room floor. I thanked them for allowing me to join them in conversation and excused myself.

I sat back in my chair and faced the ocean. A thought filled my mind of a future where the first girl had a couple of daughters and a son. I saw one of the cute little girls upset about something adorably childish, like how she dropped her teddy bear on the floor or how someone picked on her in the playground. I saw this young mother, instead of opening up her arms and hugging her tearful daughter, telling her that there was no point in crying, that she should instead shout in anger at dropping the teddy bear or scream at the person who picked on her in the playground and how this “parenting” might help turn another small girl into a young woman who doesn’t understand the beauty in experiencing anything fully, even crying.

A tear came to my eye and rolled down my cheek…and I was grateful for the blessing.

I looked over at my parents sitting there, my Dad reading his paper, my Mom reading her book, and got up and went over to them. I hugged my father and thanked him for being who he was. I hugged my mother and said, “Thanks for not fucking me up too much.” She responded, “You did that on your own.” I thought what a brilliant lesson she was sharing with me, that we are all responsible for our own lives and until we stop blaming everyone else for our misery and start to accept that our lives are our own creation, we will never be able to escape the pit of despair that we have dug by our own hands. I then realized she was just being a bitch. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z05StkAKKF0]

I called this piece “The Crying Game” only in part because I walked in on my mother while she was taking a piss standing up [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T47kt6DuT-4]. Life is a game to be played and enjoyed—whether you feel happy or sad or miserable or glad. If you don’t savor each expression of consciousness that wants to be experienced, you are playing with only half a deck.

If you feel angry—be fully angry. If you feel sad—feel fully sad. If you feel sad and express it in anger, that is as stupid as if you feel happy and express it in sadness. This is not to say that if you are overwhelmed with happiness, you may not cry; this happens to me all the time. But those tears will be of gratitude and joy, a different expression than the ones that come when you drop your teddy bear on the ground.

If you don’t express the emotions that are being experienced, you will never know how to be fully happy. You’ll be like one of those pathetic New-Age “All is bliss” freaks who do their darndest to shut off any feeling that is “other than,” as if you can create bliss through suffocating frustration, which is trying to create peace through violence.

And even if you convince yourself that you do know how to be happy, because you read the secret to a happy life in the latest Eckhart Tolle book that Oprah is whoring, you won’t be capable of bringing those words from your dead brain to your living life. The sad thing is, you won’t even cry about this for you will have convinced yourself that you “know” what is right for you and you are “unique” and an “individual” and “crying is just not what I do.”

I’ll cry the tears you cannot, not just for all the suffering in the world, but for all the suffering that has not been allowed to express.

“And if the song has come out of some kind of madness, some kind of confusion, you will certainly feel good, but at a cost which is too big. Millions of people for thousands of years can be affected by it. You are relieved but you have not behaved responsibly. You have not behaved sanely, you have not behaved humanely. Your songs, your paintings, your dance will have all the qualities of your mind, from which they came.”

—Osho in A Taste Of The Divine (p. 89)

I was very concerned that I was a gay man, as not only do I like to shove random objects up my ass but I also like to watch Justin Bieber videos. To my relief I was able to rule this possibility out and instead conclude that I was just a pedophile.

Justin Bieber is 16-years old but looks like he is nine. He is a cute kid and I think he has an excellent singing voice. Sure I find it a little ridiculous when he sings a line like, “Whatever you want, Shorty, I’ll give it to you,” which is like hearing some little black kid taking the pacifier out of his mouth for a minute in order to sing, “You my nigga.” And when I hear these youngins sing about love, when the only love they have experienced to date is the love for their teddy bears and his mommies, the only reason I take my notepad out is to immortalize what will make me wet myself with laughter on the reread.

I also find it ridiculous how they dress little Justin up like a Barbie Doll. “We’ll give you pristine jeans that sag a bit, a colorful T, cover it with a button up shirt and give you a baseball cap and a hoodie to make you look like a rich kid from the suburbs who is trying to play “gangsta.”

I have watched “One Less Lonely Girl” [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHVhwcOg6y8] and “One Time” [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHVhwcOg6y8] about 20 times each. “One Less Lonely Girl” is a cute video involving a girl who does laundry while Justin just sits around drooling over her with his guitar, like a mouth-watering priest as he reviews the latest wave of altar boys to come through his parish. She drops a scarf and he sets up a bunch of signs and pictures and arrows leading her on a scavenger hunt to find her scarf that ends with him in a room with a romantic light set-up. When they dance as intimately as two kids at a Catholic school formal with Sister Superior enforcing the 1-Foot Between Genitals Rule, and after blowing my load even I feel like a pervert watching this while masturbating.

In “One Time,” Justin is playing video games with his friend in Usher’s house. Usher calls and says he won’t be making it home until later and so, unbeknownst to Usher, Justin decides to throw a big party in his house. When he puts his arm around some girl, I cringe at how awkward he looks only in part because she is like three feet taller than him but mostly because it reminds me of my high school prom when I first threw my arm around my date Lestina and thought to myself that if the roles were reversed, I would never give any cooch to his jackass. So when Serpico came in the room and I was lubricating my computer monitor with the white clumpy grease, I thought quickly on my feet, like Maxwell Smart from the old “Get Smart” television show. “Would you believe that just like how divers rub spit into their goggles to prevent fogging, rubbing jiz into the monitor prevents oil smudges when you inadvertently brush your cock against the screen?” She wasn’t buying it, partly because I had already used the old, “It breaks down oil” excuse to justify cumming in her face. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Hd2e_tRBlY]

She walked out in disgust, thinking me perverted for wacking off to 15-year old girls. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I was rubbing one off with the young, nubile Justin on my mind. And I certainly didn’t tell her that the reason I was with her was because with her buzz cut hairstyle and flat chest she makes me think I am banging a 9-year old boy and when I shout out during orgasm, “Take it, you cute little Pampers boy!” that I am thinking about a cute little boy who wears Pampers.

Serpico during one of her many bouts with narcolepsy

I had left to have a training session with a client and returned to my apartment at around 6:00 p.m. I had left Serpico alone in my apartment, clearly not learning any lesson from when I left Toad home alone for an hour and came back to her taking the liberty in that short time to interior decorate my apartment by moving everything into the center of my main room and taking a metaphoric dump on my floor [see “Hurricane Toad” at http://rebelyogi.com/hurricane-toad]

To my relief, the apartment was a mess—but it was the same mess as when I left. Serpico was asleep in my bed. This girl sleeps like she’s a salesperson for Sleepy’s Mattress. I think on this day she stayed in bed until about 2:00 and the nap that she took when I left the apartment had turned into another siesta that would make even a Mexican say, “Listen you lazy cabrona, get your ass out of bed!”

I let her rest while I prepared an assortment of food for her from the various rabbit snacks I had in my apartment. I made a yam soup, a nice sprout salad and a partridge in a pear tree. I wasn’t sure whether she liked partridge or not but it came with the pear tree and I really didn’t feel like negotiating with the owner of the herbarium.

Another hour had passed and it was about 7:30 now. I went in to lie down next to her. She woke up briefly and I felt like making love. “How about some sex?” I requested. Her answer was “ZZZZZZZZ,” as she immediately nodded back into unconsciousness. I learned in college that if a woman does this, whether through the influence of alcohol or exhaustion, that it means she has become a “Self-Serve” station and you have to do pull out your gas nozzle and start pumping her yourself. It was only after serving my third consecutive sentence for date rape that I realized that the “Self-Serve” experts might not have taken into account the legality of filling one’s tank by siphoning the gas from another car.

I decided to stay in bed with her and do some pranayama energy breathing exercises. Within a very short time I found myself just not in the mood. Sometimes you like lying around and being “mellow” and sometimes you want to be more active, whether that means fucking, dancing or fuckin’ dancing!

I got out of bed and went into the other room. I decided to do some yoga. I unrolled my mat and did about one position when sleeping beauty emerged from the room. I rolled up my mat and wondered now that she was in my life if I would ever be able to complete a task again.

“Were you doing yoga?” she asked.

I considered answering, “There’s a fuckin’ yoga mat on the ground and I’m standing on my head!” but thought it best to keep that thought to myself, reflecting on the time when a past girlfriend asked if I thought she was stupid and I responded, “You’re not stupid, you just constantly do stupid things that would reflect a pea-sized brain” and how my balls still ache reflexively whenever any woman bears her knee.

“Not really,” I said. And then I came up with a brainstorm, which really wasn’t much more than a brain drizzle. “I want to do a meditation with you.” She was game, until I described that it involved shaking then dancing then sitting then lying down.

“I don’t want to do that,” she snorted like a pig who turns to you and says, “Egg shells? What the fuck kind of slop are you feeding me here!”

Dinner, sex, pranayama, yoga, shared meditation—she was the messiah of plan fucker-uppers! I thought of the phrase, “the best laid plans of mice of men,” which only made things worse. I mean, what the fuck does that phrase even mean? If I were a mouse, my only “plan” would be to scratch my mousy balls. If I were in one of those laboratory mazes, I would plan to sit docilely until the scientist grabbed me and then bite that fucker for destining me to a life of mazery. I don’t know how “best laid” they would be. Unless, I suppose, Richard Gere shoved my up his ass.

I sat down on my couch and she thought I was pissed. I wasn’t pissed. Well, there was a little dribble equivalent to the “last drop” of urination in my underwear but it wasn’t a full-fledged episode of incontinence.

She got upset and thought I was mad at her. My Witnessing Self was like, “Enjoy your first fight, bitch.” At first I smiled about this, thinking he was calling her a bitch. When I found out he was addressing me, I wasn’t too pleased.

We got through this but one of my primary buttons was pushed. Not the button that doesn’t like its plans ruined. Not the button that thinks if a woman is talking that only means she should have a dick in her mouth, if not for the man’s pleasure than, like a baby’s pacifier, to shut her up. Nor the button that thinks everyone around me is an idiot. It was the button about being misunderstood, one often pressed for a man who speaks and writes in hieroglyphs while the moronic masses look at my pictures and say, “That’s a cow—I think he’s calling me fat!”

Because I am a real yogi and not a phogi, a phony yogi, I don’t run from frustration—I run into it. As I was sitting, I was aware that there was a sense of frustration that could be felt in my body like an active volcano that would never explode but was bubbling its fire in its midst, or like a penis that you stroke and stroke but will never blow any load that’s not yellow. I remained mindful of the body sensations I was experiencing—mindful meditation. I observed the thoughts in my mind and rejected the multitude of ones involving killing Serpico, concluding that to have to go to the store to buy Hefty Bags and carry her to the closest dumpster would be too much of a hassle.

But most of all, I reflected on what it was—what mind belief based on falsity—that had allowed my body-mind complex to feel less than fuckin’ cherry. I realized that it involved an attachment to structure, organization, plans but also felt a separation from this attachment, which is necessary to transform anything, for if you are fully immersed in for instance anger, it is next to impossible to reflect on anything but how to cause the most damage to the other that you blame for your self-created power surge that has fried your circuits.

They say that the way to make God laugh is to tell her your plans. While it is hard to function in society without making a few plans, for even the most enlightened person will never find you for dinner in a city of 10,000 restaurants without giving him the name and address of the eatery, the issue is not with the plans themselves, but with the attachment to them.

You plan to see a movie with your guy and when you get there you find it to be sold out. So deal with it, bitch (I’m still reeling from my Witness Self calling me that!) You plan to meet your friend at 6:00 p.m. for the Stupor Bowl and get caught in traffic and get there at 8:00 and miss the first half. You plan to have a long night of passion with your girl and when she opens the door wearing nothing but crotchless panties that, unlike with your last girlfriend, were actually designed that way and not the result of yeast infection gone wild, you jiz in your pants. [http://www.hulu.com/watch/47604/saturday-night-live-digital-short-j-in-my-pants]

It’s just a movie! It’s just a football game! It’s just sex!

So there was the button of “best laid plans” that was pushed but that button was only a small nuisance like a piece of toilet paper stuck to my shoe. My reflection on this made it clearer how while there is still a mild influence it can have on me, through awareness it was just a little bitch that was ready for a slap down (damn you, Witness Self!)

But to have Serpico look at me as just another member of the mediocre masses whose way of viewing and living life is just commonly idiotic, whose whole state of being is based on what is going on around him like a driftwood, was a button that was as large as those plugs in Frankenstein’s neck. Why a scientist who could sew a bunch of body parts together and bring them to life would have to have two large plugs ruin the overall presentation is beyond me. That is like a person who manifests from the ethers a large 7-course meal in front of him but always keeps a saltshaker nearby.

I am not a member of the mindless masses. In fact, I’d like to decapitate all the zombies whose heads are so full of garbage that their removal would probably have Al Gore make yet another made-up, unscientific claim about how this would drastically affect the environment. If anything, putting all that shit in the ground would fertilize it. And if you look at me in the dull light that can light up the walking dead, not only will you miss any understanding of Who I Am or any teachings I may have to offer, but you will also insult me.

Perhaps the day will come when I will say, “It is alright that you showed up late to my one-night only show” and the other will respond, “So you’re saying you will never forgive me and you think me a bad person?” and I will smile and say, “That’s exactly what I mean,” whether it was or not.

I won’t give a hoot, don’t pollute [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Zpz1k5Mv4o] about how I am interpreted, whether someone “gets” me or not, whether someone likes me or not or whether I even share anything inside of me or not. Then I can just sit around all day and lick my mouse balls and see if I taste cheese and oh, what a wonderful world it will be.

The park seemed to have a strange hush over it, as if God himself had shushed it like an unruly child. As I looked down the steps at the expanse of the night sky and the Bethesda Fountain and the lake reflecting the lights from The Boathouse, it was hard to tell if I was looking at a picturesque view of nature or a natural view of a picture.

When I got to my tree friend, I greeted him in the usual manner and leaned my back against him. He wrapped his arms around me and embraced me in a vacuum where the silence was deafening. It was as if I had entered the Creation of the universe and was at the “In the beginning…” part of the story.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.

And then suddenly my tree friend became God and said, “Let there be light” and a planet that was pregnant with possibility gave birth to Life. He pointed his conductor’s baton upwards and a slight wind arose and the rustling of branches broke the silence. Next he aimed his attention at the lake and a duck added his instrument to the music of the night. He then directed his stick into the distance and stirred awake the motor of a car. One by one he invited the musicians to join in and music started to fill the air and soon the once tranquil park was alive and thunderous with a full orchestra.

My tree friend was showing me how our ears have become deaf to the melodies that consistently play for us. By stopping the music altogether and then by adding one piece at a time to the ensemble, I could not only appreciate the song as if for the first time, but I could also discern each player who played their part in the Universal Company and what formerly sounded to me just like noise, now was a beautiful composition of harmony.

Each day we melt down individual contributions to the whole like crayons from a 64-piece set until they are a uniform brown mess. Lacking an appreciation for the coloring that each individual piece adds to the box, our drawings become nondescript. We seek Oneness yet in that Oneness we blind ourselves the ability to discern and appreciate our incomparable…and beautiful…differences.

And so we seek to limit the multitude of expressions of the spectrum—from Aquamarine to Denim to Navy to Turquoise—to only one ray of color that we call “Blue.” What was once a rainbow of manifestation now has become a uniform white light. And we are told that this is the ultimate goal, to come together and dissolve our uniqueness into blandness.

Without the individual trees, you don’t have a forest. Without the mountains and the sky, you don’t have a vista. And without the individual, you don’t have the whole.

My tree friend showed me that it is only when we honor each separate being as a part unto itself by listening to his music without trying to change his instrument or melody, that we can unite into a collective unit whose multitude of hues and shades and musicality can combine to draw any picture or play any song we can imagine from the infinite Source of our creativity.

He showed me that we are God and perhaps we have forgotten to start “In the beginning” and are trying to color our world with a brown piece of collective wax we call Oneness and instead of conceiving a paradise, we are creating a world of mediocrity.

“It is through the contrast of living in separate vessels that we [understand] our Divine connection more exquisitely.”

2012 Atlantean Revelations by Sri Ram Kaa & Kira Raa

I am known to have a mouth like the Energizer rabbit, not so much droopy with whiskers nearby, but one that just keeps going and going and going and never shuts the fuck up. My mouth was unparalleled, partly because I had 72 stitches in my upper lip from a guy punching me while wearing a ring and they just don’t run parallel anymore, but mostly because no one could keep up with the amount of verbiage that would spew out of it like a sewage pipe, minus the pharmaceutical drugs. That was, until I met Serpico.

She just doesn’t shut the fuck up. I’ve tried soaking and scrubbing but still—ring around the collar [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3N_skYSGoY]. I’ve even resorted to constantly asking her for a blowjob. She thinks it’s because I’m horny but it’s really just another attempt to get her to shut the fuck up.

Whenever you meet someone new, a psychological occurrence called “The Halo Effect” comes into play. This means that because you are so goo-goo eyed about the other person, you see them are perfect, despite all their very human fucking annoyances, metaphorically seeing them as having a “halo” over their head.

When Mary Magdalene saw Jesus she said, “You seem wise and have a nice beard—but I think I may just be experiencing the Halo Effect.”

Jesus replied, “No, I actually do have a halo.”

With Serpico, I don’t think she is some walking form of perfection…but I do find her perfect. While the top of her head seems to be like an active volcano, always spewing out scalding heat, I use it to keep my herbal tea warm. While her hair is really short and mostly buzzed except for in the front, I find it brings me back to the glory days at the Catholic parish when we used to sodomize small boys. And while her bush is so untamed that it looks like it belongs on a 70s porn star and would make one who has used a machete to cut himself through the Amazon Rain Forest freeze in fear like he’s just seen Medusa, it allows me to use that Weed Wacker I got on eBay last year that’s been sitting in a closet almost as long as Tom Cruise has. They say when life gives you lemons make lemonade. But that phrase doesn’t apply to those of us who were wishing for lemons and are totally psyched when they appear. Serpico is a lemon and I’m puckering…and loving it!

That being said, I have a challenge to deal with regarding her talking about all the “out there” stuff that only my immense sensitivity has prevented me from saying, “So, who gives a fuck?” I actually would say this if she paused long enough for me to get a word in edgewise.

While I can have verbal diarrhea that no amount of Kaopectate can stop from running—and I have plenty of thoughts and opinions—I don’t really take any of them too seriously. This doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes vocalize something passionately like, “Torturing animals for vanity by wearing a fur coat is wrong!” but on some level, if you pressed me you would see that I don’t think anything—even murder—is that big a deal. The soul doesn’t die; all passionate issues are just attachments; all judgments good or bad, better or worse, are just delusional envisioning of existence.

The real issue is that Serpico takes her thoughts seriously and I take no thoughts seriously. And it bugs me that she will fall out of connection with me while she immerses herself in a pool of illusory thoughts while what is real is sitting right next to her and staring at her lovingly.

Early on I shared this with her. I started to tell her that when her mouth moved as fast as Monica Lewinsky’s right before drooling Bill Clinton’s load on her blue dress, it made me feel distant but that I doubted she would understand why. She was like, “It’s because at those times I am more connected to my thoughts than to you.” I was like, “No, that’s not—uh, actually, that’s exactly it.”

Whether or not all of reality is just a lie and I’m sitting in a pod providing battery power for the robots that took over the world while dreaming I’m a man living an irrelevant life, to me thoughts are still much less “real” than human beings. And when we care more about a fiction within an illusion than a reality within a delusion, well, that just makes the whole thing look like an Escher sketch.

I no longer “need to know” whether the Star Beings created us from apes or not, either way, I’m still going to use the word “pussy” 53 times each day. I no longer care if some book or workshop contains the latest, greatest wisdom teaching or exercise; I’m still going to find it too boring to sit through. I no longer care if someone is an enlightened master or not, only if I find him or her entertaining. And I have no grandiose mission to save the world or even save myself, I’ve resigned myself to the fate the 42^nd Street preacher has told me is my future: burning in Hell for eternity.

That being said, I have concluded that while I might consider all this talk about 2012 and the “four different types of soul groups” trivial—whether Universal Truths or not—she doesn’t, and while I don’t care about facts and figures, or falsehoods and backgrounds for that matter, I care about Serpico.

While I may prefer to talk to humans with bodies over listening to channelings from Archangels, perhaps all this New-Age psychobabble is a vital part of her path and expression of her Self and, really, that is all that matters. Maybe she is some type of historian of reality and will be collecting all this painfully tedious, seemingly useless information to make a clear timeline for future generations who, unlike me, give a shit. Perhaps the future history books will talk of her like Josephus and talk about me like Joe the bum.

I even borrowed a book of hers on the whole 2012 Atlantean something or other, not because I really care to use the book for anything other than a paperweight but because I care about her and want to share in what she finds exciting. That being said, if I happen to find a dusty lamp and rub it and a genie comes out, I’m not wishing for money or power or for a remake of the movie Sin City with Jessica Alba showing her tits like she was originally contracted to do—I’m wishing for Serpico to shut the fuck up. Ah, who am I kidding, if I found a dirty lamp I probably wouldn’t even rub it clean, as it would then become an eyesore to the piles of dusty filth that has filled my apartment.

I was sitting on the couch with Serpico and her mouth was running a mile a minute. Topics included Altlantean technology, UFO motherships in the clouds, channeled information from discarnate beings—after this point I couldn’t tell you what else she said, as I was spending all of my mental focus praying to the Gods to strike her dumb, and by dumb I don’t mean stupid but without voice, as I already considered anyone who would talk incessantly about these topics a moron.

And then the genie appeared to me. In the background, Serpico was onto a new topic, something like “crystals matrixes” and “planetary grids”; unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find the “mute” button.

“You have three wishes,” the genie said to me.

“Have Serpico shut the fuck up,” I said without hesitation. And POOF, she was silent.

“You have two more wishes.”

“That’s all I really wanted. Just give the next guy five wishes.”

.

Shootin’ at the walls of heartache, bang, bang, I am the warrior. Well I am the warrior, and heart to heart you’ll win..if you survive the warrior….the warrior

—“The Warrior” by Pat Benatar

.

Scarred and battle worn

He continues to walk the path

Of the warrior

.

His image frightens many

For they have been told fairy tales

Illustrated with pictures of allure

Where only beautiful princesses reside

And handsome knights go off to fight dragons

And when they see a real live warrior

Face to face

He looks nothing like the artist’s rendition in the fable

.

His hair is knotted and tangled

for he does not worry about how he looks

only staying on the path of service

His eyes are bloodshot

from surviving on little sleep

mostly because there is always evil to confront

partly because of all the innocents who have perished by his sword

His body made up of muscle and sinew contains no extra padding

for he does not have the luxury of five-star restaurants

or attending “business dinners” that are none of his business

His skin has been slashed, cut, burned and bruised

from all manner of weapons

and so he looks like a walking map

with lines depicting the markings of the ridges and valleys

of the terrain he has covered so far

And his heart at times seems icy

for he will not allow it to distract him from his purpose

as it makes him vulnerable to attack

and it only seems to hurt all who it touches

for they want him to stay by their hearths forever

and burn with anger when he leaves to continue his journey

.

He takes lives that are useless

Like most swat a fly from their hand

And while pain is almost always left in its wake

a crater after a bomb

a tombstone forever marking its destruction

He never stops to mourn the dead

For the dead belong in the ground

And the living belong above it

.

It is a lonely path

That of the warrior

But he serves not himself

But a higher principle

And while at times he wonders what it would be like

to rest his blistered feet

to have a hot bath and a warm meal

and to have someone touch him

deeper than has been done

with fists and broken bottles and swords and empty words

to give him a kind smile

instead of spitting at him with saliva and curses and rocks

He never stops walking his path

For then someone else would have to do it

And he wouldn’t wish this life on anyone

It is possible that she is my shooting star but it was hard to see much of her all bundled up with her hat and gloves and heavy jacket. For all I knew, she could have had a fat ass under there. But what I saw looked cute.

The other man and dog left and it was just me and her. Even Abandon sat off a little distance away to give us some space. We started to talk about the coyotes that were seen in the park and even saw one there that night!

We walked and talked for about 3 hours. We discussed everything from family to metaphysics, and even a few things that can’t be mentioned in this children’s tale.

We had many things in common, from a sense of humor that had no boundaries, to minds that moved fast and to most would seem like madness. But not to us. We also had some serious differences. I taught yoga and she killed fireflies.

Well, that was when she was young; I don’t think she kills fireflies any more. But she did smoke—and I am somewhat of a health nut. And sometimes I like to slow down and she seems to always be moving fast. But regardless of our differences, we both seemed to enjoy being with the other.

She told me how she hadn’t found any man worthy of her attention in a very long time and even kidded herself that only Jesus was good enough for her. I have long hair and because I hadn’t shaved in a few months, I did look a little like Jesus, and she saw it as a sign.

She also loved my nose . Many have commented about my big blue eyes or my athletic body, but no one has ever mentioned my nose! But when she saw it she was like, “Honk!”

She also appreciated my spiritual insight and when she came back to my apartment and saw a picture of the immortal yogi, Babaji , she told me she really liked him but it was clear that she liked me even more.

There was one mishap when by mistake she nearly strangled Bandhi when her headphone wire got wrapped around her head. Abandon got a little spooked but got over it quickly.

The next day I shaved my beard and moustache off , for I was hoping to kiss her the next time I saw her and didn’t want an itchy blanket of hair between us when I did.

I don’t know how long she and I will last, maybe a month, maybe an eternity. All I really know anymore is that I don’t know anything. But I have welcomed her into my family, to walk and play and learn and grow with Bandhi and me, at least in the NOW. And right now… it feels good.

When Duck left for Peru, my third-eye vision saw the path that led to us ending up together as somewhat hazy. This indicated to me that while the future is not determined, it would require some serious energy investment from both parties to clear up this foggy future, that or I needed to go to the psychic optometrist for a third-eye monocle. I thought this might make me look like Colonel Klink from Hogan’s Heroes and was pretty stoked at the prospect.

Schultz: [Klink is in prison awaiting a possible execution] I have some good news and bad news.

Col. Wilhelm Klink: This time tell me the good news first.

Schultz: You are going to be executed in the morning.

Col. Wilhelm Klink: Then what’s the bad news?

Schultz: They aren’t giving you a blindfold.

She was in Peru and I was in New York; she was immersed in warm weather and I was freezing my ass off; if someone asked her the time, she would say, “Son las dos y media”; if someone asked me the time, I would say, “Time to buy a fuckin’ watch. Now get your bitch ass outta my face!” It was a regular West Side Story romance, minus the gang fights and singing and dancing and “Jets” and “Sharks” and flaming guy playing Tony in the movie. The question was, is the world ready for a modern West Side Story with a “Duck” quacking in Spanish and an “X” barking in Balinese? (It doesn’t make sense but it alliterates.)

After I worked and worked on communicating with her through the limitations of email and Instant Messaging and snail mail and an occasional phone call, it was clear that in communication, she was like a retard with a cork on her fork in order to prevent blinding herself when she thrust it into her eye. And she acknowledged this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P5qJAI9BIc

“I’m just a terrible communicator,” she said.

“Is that being sarcastic?” I asked, knowing that “It’s about time you admitted that!” would probably be as supportive as the 60-year old stretched-out bra that holds granny’s double-D’s pressed against her belly.

What she told me even a stillborn birthed in Iraq from all the depleted Uranium the U.S. dropped there would have understood to be obvious. And as much as I would have liked to have leaned back with my hands behind my head and said, “I think I have made my point,” with a pomposity that would make even the Wicked Witch of the House, Nancy Pelosi, look good in comparison, instead of gloating at my victory of argumentation, I just felt sad.

We all hope to “change” our partners into the perfect mate for us and sometimes forget that they are perfect just the way they are—although this may not translate as “perfect for us.” And to try and change someone into something they are not is one of the most dishonoring things one can do to another. I am all for working on relationships and believe that if you don’t, your relationship is bound to end like 50% of marriages do, in divorce, or be like the 49% that settle for misery or the 1% that are as brain dead as Terry Schiavo and don’t know if you just changed her diaper or gave her boobs a squeeze. But how much work is of value and when does it get to just banging your head against a wall and wondering why your headache won’t dissipate?

It wasn’t until I recently got back in touch with Gaia, a girl from Canada who I met online through a raw food personals site, that I was reminded of what I really needed: someone who was extremely conscious and giving and able to form a full sentence without at least a dozen grammar mistakes. And not only did I stop rowing towards Duck but I then started to row my boat to the shore, knowing that a fall that would make Niagara look like a water fountain was up around the bend. And while before I was willing to traverse it in a barrel for the slim hope that I would live to see her again, now I thought, “Fuck that noise!” and that I rather sunbathe on the shoreline than risk a muscle cramp from fatigue. 

I had sent her out a week ago some pricey raw chocolate, a flower I drew, a mala bracelet that I had brought to my Central Park tree friend for a blessing and a tiny framed picture of us for Valentine’s Day. She got it the day before Valentine’s, not knowing that at this point the sweetest thing I had left to offer was someone else’s chocolate.

She called me a couple of times on Valentine’s Day but I missed her calls. When we talked “in the box” of Instant Messaging, she asked if I was excited to see that she called. I had posted the day before on my un-blog The Emerald And The Ruby [http://rebelyogi.com/the-emerald-and-the-ruby.html], where the “Emerald” was Duck and the “Ruby” was Gaia and the gem lover who no longer found the Emerald to have the same brilliance was me. And my dwindling enthusiasm for the relationship was about as impossible to cover as one of those “North Star” pimples on the end of one’s nose. And for a guy who values truth more than just about anything, I replied like the cheating Thornton Melon, played by Rodney Dangerfield, in Back To School when the Dean of the university asked the obviously plagiarizing 60-year old newly-enrolled student who had donated millions to the school if the work he turned in was his own. “I can’t lie to you, Dean Martin. [Beat] Yes, it is.”

Valentine’s night, it was about 11:00 P.M. and I went to Central Park with Abandon. It was there that not only did I see they coyote that’s been wandering around the park for the past few weeks but where I followed Abandon up to the girl she had ran up to wagging wildly and jumped up onto, who was not only really cute but I would find myself spending the next three hours walking with talking about everything from metaphysics to megaphones (alright, we didn’t talk about megaphones but it was a nice alliteration, no?) And with her I could joke about anything and everything without fear that I would offend her or like an FCC censor she would hand me a list of things that I couldn’t include in my life show. While my fingers and toes started to get frostbitten from New York’s arctic temperature that would make even Al Whore admit that global warming is a farce, it seemed my heart was starting to dethaw from its cryogenic freeze and the high-voltage electricity that this girl was paddling was enough to restart it beating.

The next day, Duck sent me an email and asked me if something was up. Like Sherlock Holmes, she had put together a list of suspicions that included me going to dinner with a female on Valentine’s Day (who was a friend), writing The Emerald And The Ruby and my not seeming too excited about her calling me.

I wrote her back a long email and told her the truth, that while I could see at times where she was working on her communication with me, it seemed that a lot of the same issues we had discussed were continuing to repeat themselves. I said that while I could probably do without sex for a year until I saw her again, I doubted that I could do without the intimacy that doesn’t involve genitalia for that long. And the prospect of wacking-off while developing a brain tumor from my cell phone just didn’t seem to appeal to me anymore.

I also told her about Gaia and the Central Park girl and how they brought to the surface what I had been suppressing, that while I did feel a soul connection with Duck, there were needs I had that she was not filling. I told her that keeping the possibilities open for a possible connection at some undetermined time in the future while closing off the possibilities in the present was neither honoring the Universe or myself. I told her that while my love would not stop shining on her that I wanted to tell her the truth and not some modified version of it.

She wrote me back the longest email she’s ever sent me. She appreciated that I was straight up with her and while I felt there was some misinterpretation of what I had communicated, she got the jist of it, that while I was a dreamer, I could no longer deny my waking life anymore. And while her email didn’t directly say how hurt she was, I know it had to hurt popping a dream of hers that I helped to blow up.

Duck is a sweet girl and if there is any pain to be divvied up, I would request the lion’s share. Among other things, she helped to remind me that love is more important than the location I live in or any mission to save the world. She opened me up to dream once again and whether my particular dream involving her came to fruition or not, I was finally dreaming of something other than Al Whore covered in honey and placed in a large red ant hill and eaten alive. She also reminded me by her sensitivity to some of my humor that I need to be with someone with whom I can relax and be myself without having to limit myself to jokes about Barney the dinosaur in order to get a family approved G-rating.

In Native American tradition, there is the Heyoka, the sacred clown, who uses the medicine of Coyote the trickster. It is his role to make fun of everyone, including the Indian Chief, to make sure that no one takes him or herself or any situation too seriously and loses their ability to laugh at themselves. The sun may be baking and everyone is complaining about the heat and he will come outside wearing layer upon layer of clothes asking if anyone knows when the cold streak will pass. Or if there is a sentiment in the tribe that the tribal leader is not listening to his people, he may imitate the mannerisms of the leader in an exaggerated way, portraying him as a deaf mute, not only to help the leader to keep his ego in check but also to keep the unity of the tribe.

I am Heyoka and use Coyote Medicine. Unfortunately, in this society of the humorless most are like Sarah Pallin and think they are performing a civic duty by hunting coyote. But whether they are killing an animal or snuffing out the voice of one who is trying to help them to not take themselves so seriously, it is still an act of savagery. Pointing their guns or their fingers at the Trickster, their violence leaves blood on their hands.

By seeing the coyote that night, I was given a taste from my own medicine bag, for Coyote Medicine was reminding me to lighten up, that I was taking things much too seriously and needed to regain my sense of humor. He was also showing me that my Trickster humor is important medicine and that anyone who could not laugh with me was turning my medicine into poison, for them as well as for me.

When I asked Osho on the first day I met Duck if she was “the one,” he told me no. He said that we are compatible and could be happy together but that she was not the one who would add the perfect harmony to my heart’s song. And so I did what any devotee would do when his master told him something—I set out to prove him wrong. I would work harder, move to Peru, change my name to “Pancho.” But as much as I pretended that I would do anything and everything to be with Duck, I soon realized that I would not sacrifice Who I Am to be with anyone, Duck, goose, chicken or any other poultry.

And when I came back to Osho with my head down and told him he was right, he wasn’t mad at me for shunning his words and he didn’t rub it in my face with an, “I told you so,” for he knew that the only way to really know anything is to discover it for yourself through your own experience.

As sarcastic and heartless and mean as I can appear through the caricature of my online persona, I hate to hurt anyone who isn’t a Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, Atheist, Asian, black, white, gay, straight, bi, man or woman. But when even I try to fight the Universe’s current, I inevitably get smashed on the rocks and my flailing legs will usually kick someone else in the face. And when we grab onto another with a death grip too afraid to let go and ride the current, it inevitably leads to pulling the object of our affections under water and drowning both.

The worst part about it all is that Duck told me that she was going to drop out of receiving my un-blog, as it would be too painful for her to read about my love life. This will cut my readership by 50%. I would unsubscribe myself but then no one would read my stuff!

I was talking to Duck “in the box,” meaning the Instant Message box on the bottom right corner of my computer’s monitor. I put up with her tedious talk about her mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s and her dreams about enrolling in language immersion programs in different countries and her thoughts on the meaning of life. Finally I saw my chance to delve into something of real worth.

“So what exactly is it about anal sex that you have a fear of?” Higher consciousness, the coming shift in 2012, Tiger Woods latest shananigans—all these lesser topics could wait. It seemed a fair enough question and what she returned to me wasn’t a fair enough answer. In fact, it wasn’t an answer at all.

“I don’t want to talk about that!” Being the ever-sensitive companion, I ignored her.

“I mean, is it because you think it would be painful? Or do you think it is somehow degrading? Or did you watch too many seasons of the HBO prison drama series “Oz” about an experimental prison where more freedom was granted to the inmates and yet after every week of someone else being murdered or sodomized they still couldn’t ever come to the conclusion that the ‘experiment’ wasn’t working?”

“I told you already!” she said.

“Well apparently I don’t remember. Can you tell me again?”

She never told me and after a half-hour of grilling, I felt like the “bad cop” who had grown exhausted from his interrogating and was ready to call in the “good cop,” who would probably use a softer approach like, “Do you want a cigarette? Now let me just stick a finger in there.” While Duck charged me with being an anally obsessed jackass, I assured her that I was not anally obsessed, although I would concede to being a jackass.

To her the issue was about me sticking my schlong in her ass. To me the issue was about communication. I hadn’t had anal sex for probably about 8 years and before that another 8 years had passed before I got “Oz” on any chick. I had survived this long on a few breadcrumbs of anal and wasn’t really jonesing for an ass cheek sandwich. And besides, even if Duck was like, “Yeah, I’m in!” I probably wouldn’t be seeing her in person for at least another year, as it would probably take me that long to pay off my debts and earn enough money to fly in the luggage department to Peru, and by that time I’m not even sure if I will still be able to get an erection, let alone put some boogie in the butt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4le6Zr86ojs

If she just said something like, “You know, I am a little scared it might hurt, your cock being the size of an elephant’s and all,” I would have probably grabbed a peanut with my dick and stuffed it in my ass and dropped the whole issue. But saying, “I don’t want to talk about it!” is like plugging up your ears and saying, “I AM NOT LISTENING TO YOU! I AM NOT LISTENING TO YOU!” like a child having a temper tantrum, not an adult. I may dress like a child, play like a child, cry like a child and buy cereal just for the prize at the bottom of the box like a child, but when it comes to communicating with people, I do so like an adult. Some might disagree but these are only idiots who define adults as older, living dead people who don’t discuss anal sex.

We’ve all heard some cheesy broad doing the circuit, pushing her latest “relationship” book which contains the same tired old information that she seems to think is somehow innovative about how “Communication is the foundation of any good relationship,” while there isn’t a man alive besides some Japanese tourist whose slit eyes are hiding behind his Fuji camera who would bother to even talk to a pig like her, let alone fuck her. It’s not innovative, but it’s true.

If you are in a relationship with anyone—be it a lover or a parent or a child or a co-worker—and you can’t ask or receive a question without one of you plugging up your ears and ass, then that relationship will only survive if one of you is Helen Keller and the other one has Down’s Syndrome with eyes that are so far apart that he looks like a flounder. Add 3,700 miles to the equation and not even Einstein would say it’s solvable. I knew this was the beginning of the end for Duck and me, or perhaps that, like life, it starts to die the minute you take your first breath, and that I would have to seek anal—I mean, a significant other—elsewhere.