The time when I got lost in space

At that moment it was all crazy lights and shattered glass – the one time I fell asleep in the car, not behind the wheel that is but in the passenger seat. You see I can never sleep in the car but just that once I felt safe enough, content enough. Everything was going ok for the first time in a long time, free any easy and I was in good hands; just dosed off…

…and awakened, but only for a brief second, by tragic impact, the crash of black entropy from outer space into the bead of calm in the warm car. Probably more excitement than most people get thrown into their dreams.

The next thing, I was sitting in the passenger seat, surrounded by darkness, suspended in space and time, dangling over the timeline of my life. I could have dropped anywhere – saw the whole thing stretched out before me chronologically but could not find myself on it. So many things would happen to me over that stretch of decades, so many traumas. So many men. Which one was this?

The man before me was only a blip on the screen of my lifetime, a face I could not remember even then and certainly can’t now: just blankness except for the glowing orange of his spacesuit. Not a spacesuit, an emergency worker’s uniform. Seems there had been an accident. He wanted me to help somehow; I used to be a lifeguard and knew how to strap a man down to a backboard without twisting his head to control any trauma that might have been caused to the spine. Had seen it one time, or heard about it; it was a nasty business this spinal trauma, could turn you into a vegetable. I offered my help enthusiastically, as if helping to save someone’s life would give me a rhyme or reason, perched here as I was on this precipice of my own being, looking down wondering where to jump back in to the murky brodo of my existence.

But the guy was just getting agitated. I was not saying what he wanted to hear. Fear began to creep up my spine; confusion. My help was not what they wanted. Seems I was the one they were concerned about. He just kept telling me, “Don’t move. Just don’t move. DON’T TURN YOUR HEAD”. I turned my head back and forth, showing him that I could, looking down into the past and into the future, my youth and old age and all my trials and moments of contentment. There were short bursts of excited bliss: I could see myself travelling merrily along the Tuscan coast with a belly full, surrounded by friends and children – but that was surely still up ahead of this. Right now, I must certainly have gone insane. It had been coming for a long time. And now THEY were coming to strap ME down. Searching out there for something familiar, the night blackness just stretched forever. There was no escape, had to go down. “STOP TURNING YOUR HEAD! Matt, let’s strap her to the board right now, she’s confused. She’s going to hurt herself”.

From among the shards of glass the two men strapped me down as I helplessly called out to no one in particular. Slight memory of a possessive boyfriend who would certainly be looking for me; Charles Manson type, prone to fits of drink and drugs and probably wondering where I’d slipped off to. Surely he’d find me. They carried me over the crunch crunch of glass and asphalt and night sky to a waiting ambulance. There was a beautiful long-haired type already sitting in there wrapping and unwrapping his hand with a length of gauze, suffused with a dull yellow glow. Hand, bloody hand. He had a good build on him and gazed at me wordlessly as sirens blared in the distance. Another flash of memory: a skanky old apartment in winter, harsh florescence and smoke. Party. Lots of bad shit going on. I was trying to be noticed by a bearded guy playing acoustic guitar. Was it this same one? Who I thought at that moment was everything – my God, what the hell is he doing here, where’s, where’s what’s his name? … Finally I just came right out and asked (what the hell, I’m about to be locked up for my insanity alone and this is the only man who knows?). “Who are you?”

“Its me, Paul. Don’t you remember anything?”
“No, I’m insane.”
“Me too”
“You too, huh? Is that why you are here? And where’s Jim? I think that’s his name – do you know him. He’s bound to come looking for me.”

Paul fell silent. He began staring down at his hand and wrapping-unwrapping the gauze with increasing intensity. He looked concerned and suddenly I began to suspect that I had been dropped back into the wrong portion of my life – a different place on the timeline from where I had fallen off. Meanwhile, an engine started, followed by sirens, and a Maine State Police car ground off through the loose gravel at the side of the road – holy shit, what the hell am I doing in Maine? Insane in Maine; my throat began to tighten.

So I got up the nerve to ask him, “Who am I…I mean, what’s my name? Where do I live? Why am I in Maine? Does Jim know I’m here?”

He looked worriedly down again and swallowed: “Your name is Hope. I don’t know your exact address but you live in Upstate New York. You came here with me, don’t you remember?” The silent confusion in my eyes must have answered him. “Oh shit, you don’t remember anything do you? You left Jim, you left him for me – you wanted to get far away from him and that whole crowd around him so I took you away up here, away from everyone. We’re right outside Bangor right now – we just drove right into the side of a thousand-pound moose that was standing in the middle of the highway – it came right in through the windshield. I’m so sorry Hope, I didn’t even see it, it was so dark”. He started to cry softly, holding his fist; I began to notice the brown hairs clinging to my shirt.

“So I’m not insane?”

“Sure you’re insane, Hope. You’re just as insane as I am, but that’s not why we’re being taken away in an ambulance. We were really scared for you because you passed out and then when you came to, you didn’t remember anything.”

“What happened to your hand?”

“Oh, its nothing. One of the moose’s bones became lodged in my hand but its ok, they already pulled it out. I should be fine with a bit of physical therapy”. He was trying to sound brave but you could tell in his voice that he was in a lot of pain.

An EMT jumped in the back with us and put an oxygen mask down over my face…things got better after that… We started moving at lightning speed down the highway. As the ambulance roared, I lay there thinking, beginning to remember the things that had happed up to this moment in my life, and those events that hadn’t yet happened began to fade into the snowy white oxygen haze. I honestly couldn’t believe I had run away to Maine, had really run away after dreaming about doing it for so long – good for me. And here I was in a new incarnation and barely alive in the middle of nowhere but at least I was free.

Some People on This Floor (Part I)

Some people come into your life by accident, or perhaps out of necessity; but you pick them up along the way because they seem nice or useful. Others’ lives collide with yours with a dizzying cosmic force, sweeping you along in the mystery like you’ve just fallen into a swollen river. Emily fell for Bruno because he had a dark complexion and icy, infinite eyes. But lying here on the office floor, darkened by dusty Venetian blinds and staring at the constellations of dust bunnies on the ceiling, trying to read their fortunes, it seemed to her that she’d been swept into a deluge much bigger, more powerful and encompassing than anyone in the Channel Thirteen Duplication Department could have guessed. It certainly made live around office worth living.

“Why don’t we just get out of here and go out West?”…

“I have a meeting with Lisa at two”.

“No, I didn’t mean today”

“I have meetings all week” … “And then next week is new-intern orientation”

It had already been a red-letter day in the glamorous world of Public Television.

The Duplication Room had served as a sufficient backdrop for their fantasies of a western sky, perhaps better than the real thing. Flat on their backs on the cheap carpeting behind the Dub Racks, anything seemed possible, at least to Emily; she had once been an intern too – between that scared neophyte and the mature, professional woman she was on her way to becoming there was an abyss, but all could do was try; experience is all there is. And in the midst of all her tireless efforts in the Big City, his eyes kept flashing before her mind and egging her on towards destruction, just like everybody in this not-for-profit hellhole.

“Boy, am I happy to see you guys” Darlene, the Office Assistant, peered in at us as if the entangled afternoon lovers were the Way and the Light. Darlene was Emily’s neighbour in the vast sea of cubicles on which they all floated, except for the Executive Producer, who had her very own office (a set of three walls and a glass panel). Darlene’s greasy hair was matted and her desperation reminded Emily of an orphaned child who was being sold into slavery. She was the only one who publicly knew of these lunch-hour trysts in the Edit Room; ever since Emily had discovered that Darlene herself having regular liaisons with one maintenance worker named Omar, there had been nothing to hide. “Lisa keeps asking me to fill out something called a purchase order. What the Fuck?”

From what could be gathered, Darlene didn’t do a damn thing accept to have cappuccinos and peanut butter cookies delivered daily to their Department on Executive Broadcasting Director’s tab. For this, the entire office was so immensely grateful that all cheerfully relieved Darlene of all her other demented little tasks; Emily for one was happy to sell her soul for a few crumbles of cookie each day to this sad little 250-lb Mormon nymphomaniac from the South Bronx. Darlene was not human, she was part of the divine mystery of How We Get Through Work Each Day – and every divinity, even a minor one, has her due.

The shaft of harsh white light from the hallway was blinding: “Close the fucking door, Darlene”. Of course everybody on the floor already knew. But if they went all public, were that open about their exploits, Emily rightly feared that it would jeopardize the tenuous thread of civilization within entire Science and History Programming Department, maybe within all the Programming Departments or the whole Channel itself, and anarchy would ensue. Who could tell who would start screwing casually in the hallways, closets, Production Studios, Men’s Rooms? Darlene had already gone too far by seducing fucking Omar – wasn’t the maintenance staff universally off limits? Wasn’t Darlene really treading on the precipice of The Fall of Civilization As We Know It? Of was this just a bourgeois Upstate assumption? The door slammed. High heels growing fainter in the distance.

In their list few minutes of solitude and post-blunt-and-coital darkness before returning to their cubes, Emily’s thoughts lingered on Darlene and the delicate balance she painted between conventional reality and the utter absurd.

“You know”, began Emily, although nobody was listening, “Darlene used to work in psychiatric hospitals before coming here. She told me all about the interesting people she met in there, and all the hot guys that were in there because of women. One guy was blonde and young and looked like Brad Pitt, but he’d had a breakdown when his 45-year-old chiropractor girlfriend dumped him for an even younger Iranian guy.

“Another guy she told me about was really young, like 15, gorgeous, and she told me he seduced her. I don’t really know if I believe that, or who seduced who, but Darlene ended up sneaking into the Quiet Room with him like two or three times a day. Finally, he convinced her to break him outta there, and he went to live with her at her house. She said she was really in love with him.

...the softness of snoring arose next to her; she continued...

“But after a few weeks, all was not bliss…he apparently began doing strange things around the house – funny thing that, a psychiatric patient behaving bizarrely, but it came as a big shock to Darlene. Nobody at the hospital ever suspected she was the one who freed him, but one day she came home and found he’d killed her cat in quite a gruesome way, and had painted pentagrams and strange messages about Satan on her walls. That night, she said they had the best sex of her life, and when she woke up the next morning he was gone – he’d gone back to the hospital and was there in the Rec Room when she arrived at work. And he’d already told everyone about his two weeks of vacation at Darlene’s house. She was fired after that.”

“That’s a pretty fucked up story”, a voice from the dead came from beside her on the floor. “Now, I can understand why television would be the natural place for her to work after that, but my question is why would he go back – why would he want to be locked up again?”

Emily paused, thought. “Darlene didn’t say. I guess he liked it in there after all. Maybe he missed the structure. Maybe Darlene’s cooking was just that bad, and he had no money to order in. Anyway, he was crazy, right? You’d have to be crazy to WANT to be stuck in an institution day after day”.

“Sure, like we are.”

Snapshots of Rome in winter

There is a definite feeling of exhibitionism there -- but not only; a grand burlesque show in which anything goes back stage. How quickly it fills me, that something-more-out-there, and how everything else pales by comparison. Once more there seems to shine through a tiny shaft of light, a crack through which we can reach that celestial dimension. But like always it is only an illusion; we are earthbound, tied to our bodies and to our ridiculous circumstances of the banal everyday. Connected only by dreamtime -- not to each other, but all at once to the mysterious farce in the abyss through some threads in our unconscious -- yet we are keenly aware of each other's presence. One day, we will reach again that fountain, and have a second chance.

...Contemplating those ancient figures from the Zhou Dynasty up on Quirinale -- an army of the dead -- moved me to tears and brought me to the realization that there is nothing more. That all there is is what we see in front of our eyes. It is only how deeply we choose to perceive it. There is nothering else out there, nothing invisible. The dreams are just a reflection...



For Rome's alcoholics, life is simple. It all boils down to obtaining a box of wine -- cheap and freely available at any supermarket. With a few extra coins, one can also grab a few slices of salami at the train station. With these precious items and a blanket on the floor, Trastevere Station's resident hobos can enjoy a fine morning trying in their own enigmatic way to drown out the heartbreak, pain and emptyness that we all find pooled up inside at the bottom of our souls each day. Whether they are more or less successful than those of us in fret to board the daily train nags at me as I bustle through, stopping off at the market to buy my: (i) bag of salad; and (ii) frozen pasta for office consumption. In the end, I imagine, the pain still eats at all of us, but it is those of us sitting warm and snuggly at our PCs reviewing the Annual Performance Report whose souls are truly devoured.

Loneliness can blanket you in this city of everyone and everything, even when you've got your own son tucked right inside you.