A Wonder

Last week I was talking to my friend who lives in Alaska. He is an electrician and was here for a visit. His company sends him to islands off Alaska to install wiring into hospitals so they all can link to the grid. He told he some horrific stories that are now burned into my psyche.

He said it is humbling and makes you be of service to humanity. I suppose people like us are more acclimated to Death than most. I used to be a floral designer and walked into the wrong door delivery service flowers and was face to face with a man cleaning off a severed head.

When things become real... they are remembered as surreal.

His best friend used to work at a crematory. He told us a story of how they have to monitor the process by watching through a peep hole. Vividly he describes that everyone at one point heats up until the staples burst in the chest and a bouquet of intestines explode into the air in a grand finale.

I've seen a lot of dead bodies. They didn't seem very real to me. Looking at them. I always wondered how different cultures handled Death. It interested me. Even more so it interested me the people who take these things on as a life style. Intriguing. The unlikely hero.

When I lived in Chicago a friend of mine, my next door neighbor, was slashed to death 50 times in the neck and chest by a crack head who broke in to her house with his friends looking for shit to steal and pawn. When I got the phone call I ran through the trees to her house. Her mom was sitting in the back of a police car. I sat next to her and she looked into my eyes and cried, "She's gone."

It was horrific having found her daughter in a bloody pool. Everyone walked around as if in a trance. I remember a guy with a camera asking questions in our face and me and Tony pushed him away. Both him and I almost killed him. He was just doing his job. As was the policeman. The church even volunteered to clean up the mess in the house. Somebody has to do it. Some... Body.

It is easy to live in a dream world... in our heads. Cut off from life on Earth. But what a waste. Why did you bother to get a body if you weren't going to use it. To love it. To pleasure it. And were in history did it all go wrong? When we decided to hate ourselves. Life is too short for that crap.

Mortality. You can't help but wonder.

I am an explorer. I loved travelling around to different sites to deliver flowers. Every time I walked into a new job site I would scope it out. In the kitchen behind the wedding, the doors in the mortuary. Flowers took me on quite the wild ride.  It was life. In the moment. In all its parts. Everyone working together to make life as we know it comfy cozy. There are no little parts, only small people.

We were the people behind the scenes. The people that made it all work.

It is a delicate balance. A ballet. I use to be an insurance agent. The owner of the funeral home down the street would come in and only talk in whispers. Every service he performed was in a silent reverence. I could never understand a word he said. But I would watch him speak and think of what goes on beneath his home. Where the bodies were kept. I always wondered why we display people's bodies. Does making it more real make it easier to grieve? Does it shock life into us? Or does it simply scare us?

I get more and more emails everyday people all over the world asking me to do readings for them. Some offer to pay... most don't. I don't want to just be another Tarot reader. Why help one at a time when one little people make big fires? I guess I am holding out for the Big Fish. 

I am 29. I don't feel 29. I don't feel any physically different from when I was 21. Honestly. 

Everyone is at the tip of their toes. What is it? It is breaking dawn. The point is... we are looking forward. With everything that we've got. Looking for ourselves on a deep profound level. Saying no to what is not and making room for the best that is yet to come. 

“Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

What an adventure. Wouldn't you say?

So the question is... What do you want to do with your precious life?

Travel and Teach. 

I am so grateful for this time I have spend studying at home raising my kids. But I have put myself into something I love that is for myself. As they grow, they can reap the benefits of my hard work. And hopefully learn to do the same for themselves. I might only have this one life to be Mandy Flint. But I am going to rock the shit out of it and go out in a flame of glory. 

Well, that is.... if I figure out what it is. 

*Curtain Please*