I wonder which Bill would find more egregious: Real Time
friend Darrell Issa’s botched game of Texas Hold’em as he is forced let go of
Holder or (ha!) impeach him… or the rapid fire succession of synchronicities I
would like to rub his nose in. Perhaps he can take solace in the fact that documenting,
cataloguing and transcribing them all is becoming quite an endeavor.
I don’t know which is more miraculous; the fast and furious
succession of magical poetry I’m experiencing, or the bold ass jokes Bill gets away with… “Obama looks like he’s fucking his dog?”…and “It’s hard to look at
Chris Christie for VP and not think number two!”
In Don Dada Obama’s New World Order where chemtrails are
turning the skies white (this conspiracy I saw with my own eyes), Bill’s turbo
boost mouth actualizes Republicans’ wet dreams of freedom from federal
tyranny.
I found another one:
So, let’s get to it and squeeze out the jism…
My last blog post was a video dated April 29th. On May 14th, way in advance of hurricane season, tropical storm Aletta appeared near Mexico. No one was affected but I gleaned it was time to write ‘a letter’. The serenade became even more melodic when Hurricane Bud threatened Mexico with a cat 3, or at least a landslide or two, while simultaneously on the other side of the Pacific, severe tropical storm Sanvu (sans vous – French for without you) traced its path on the sea and plowed over Iwo Jima… Bud/sans vous… how could I not fall head over heels over such pretty poetry?
On the May 19
th New Rules, Bill laughed at the religious
notion that “praying away hurricanes is meteorology”, while on May 24th our
weather expert Dr. Masters warned that “…the coast where Bud is headed towards
is very mountainous, flash floods and dangerous mudslides will be a concern
there.” On the 26th, Dr. Masters corrected himself: “There are no reports of
deaths or damage from Bud so far, and with only another inch or so of rain
expected from the storm, Mexico appears to have escaped serious damage."
It’s not praying away
so much as communicating a point… everything is interconnected in latent and
inherent ways - and it seems we’re seeing many illustrations.
During this time I had gotten word my Mom was feeling really
bad so there was no way I could write. After
a 14 year battle with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, this was the time to be
near her. On May 1
st I flew to Tampa.
Early on May 5th near St. Maarten, an air ambulance crashed right in front of my house, by the island of Tintamarre, now rebranded by the ‘Teinte a Maher’ episode.
There were no survivors and the search had to be halted because of sharks. I was far from home,
embarking on a long journey.
When I arrived in my parents’ Bradenton home I found her in
bed, barely able to get up. In a desperate effort to make her better, my
brother sent Mom and I to Mayo clinic in Jacksonville to undergo treatment with
the chair of the oncology department. Broo
spared no expense or effort to make us comfortable during the treatment, but in
the end she couldn’t cope with her worsening condition. While in Jacksonville,
tropical storm Alberto sat off the coast. Albert was our grandfather’s name… I’m sure he would have been very proud to see my
brother Patrick fight on Mom’s behalf. Pat and I are vegans (or at least flexatarians)
highly skeptical of conventional medicine, but my parents have a blind faith
for doctors so we did the best we could within those parameters. At $300 a pill
she was administered Revlamid, a derivative of Thalidomide, the birth defect
drug of the fifties. Thalidomide was developed by a Nazi physician;
supposedly he wasn’t
consciously
aware of its devastating effects on the unborn. Since several years it’s been
regurgitated as a cancer drug. It was supposed to strengthen her immunity.
Not surprisingly though, the Revlamid didn’t work, but the
cancer industry billed the government a nice chunk of change on her behalf. Her
doctor, as with many others at Mayo, is from Pakistan. It was ironic to see the
best minds from that country treating the most fortunate in the western world
while the CIA targets Pakistanis with drone attacks and won’t apologize for
killing innocents. Everything is interconnected in obvious ways too…
Here are pictures of One Ocean hotel in Jacksonville taken
with my lovable friend Edit, as well as some shots of the forest around Mayo. Notwithstanding their
real or perceived agenda, the setting is first rate.
I was enjoying being close to Lily, talking to her about the
transitory nature of life and suburban Jacksonville’s abundant oxygen, while
she kept asking me to watch Cramer and jot down synopses of the show. Since I can remember her life revolved around
the stock market – like so many others she took a hit in ‘08, but she hated the
idea of selling, to the point that Europe’s economy dictated her moods.
In the meantime, there was no way to organize anything
resembling a letter. While carrying a dinnertray down the hall, I had to snap
a picture of this newspaper cover:
I was scheduled to return to St. Maarten on May
21
st but Liliane’s worsening condition made me reconsider. On the
evening of May 20
th I decided to postpone my return, since at the
time I was the only one to look after her. Late in the day the situation turned
critical when she stopped eating altogether. I called the paramedics and they
brought her to the hospital with pneumonia. That same night, a major earthquake in Modena,
Italy split the Emilia Finale clock tower in half at the midnight mark (Emily... my middle name).
Ouch! I can’t write and I now can’t even come home! That
reminded me of Katrina in 2005. At that time I was in Montreal convalescing from a 6 year
bout with chronic fatigue, and some weeks before the hurricane I was trying to
decide where to move: close to my parents near Tampa or back to St. Maarten,
where I lived since 1990. Between the devastating hurricane in New Orleans with
my name on it and a TV show I saw on Animal Planet showing cats devoured by
alligators around Tampa, I knew I had to go back to St. Maarten. The next super
wicked hurricane on October 19
th was called Wilma (will ma?) and I did in fact
take the plane back to St. Maarten on November 1
st.
The hurricane synchronicities and May earthquake in Modena are
not directly related to the events in my life… I understand them better as
poetry. Actually the Italian earthquake happened in the middle of a fracking
zone. That’s the most probable cause.
Once Lily got to the hospital, they gave her massive doses
of their one-trick-pony antibiotics, and she was never able to get up again.
Nurses tended to my mother and she asked me to go home after all, to
deliver furniture to a large villa I was decorating. Under every circumstance, her work ethic was impeccable.
I arrived back on the island May 21
st. On May 25
th
another tropical storm formed, Beryl, which hit land right in Jacksonville where my Mom was. Bear
ill… of course, she did this without ever complaining; but also a double play
on words… a little mother-in-law jökull, teinte a Maher.
Life was very difficult at this time. Patrick and Edit were
with Lily but she was getting ever weaker. On May 29
th typhoon Mawar
off
the coast of Taiwan and Japan summed it up dramatically.
Liliane closed her eyes for the last time on her birthday,
June 1
st, which she shares with Marilyn Monroe. The morphine they
administered finally ended her suffering on June 2
nd at 8:00
pm.
Half an hour later, two 4.1 earthquakes struck off the coast of St. Maarten.
They happened 59 miles below the sea so there were no
damages reported, but I underwent a drastic transformation when they hit. I
went from total depression to an exuberant joy I couldn’t contain. I had to get
off the phone with Pat and absorb the sheer power of love shining within me. In
the previous years, Liliane came to St. Maarten several times to see me and
the latest house she made possible with her boundless generosity. She came down even when she wasn’t well
enough to travel. That night, she roared back and the earth shook. All our life
we had a telepathic bond, each of us feeling the other’s state of mind even at a
great distance. Now, we shared her entry into the clear light. I enjoyed the phenomenal excitement until my physical energy waned and I drifted
to sleep.
The next morning I immediately began re-reading Ingo Lauf’s ‘Secret Doctrines of the Tibetan Book of the Dead’, a brilliant, intellectual analysis
of the ancient philosophy. Magic in my life began at 16 years old with the
first reading of ‘The Tibetan Book of the Dead’. As a hypersensitive, I feel it
right away when I eat something devoid of nutrition. On the other hand, I also
get instant gratification when something works… and this is the ticket!
On the plane ride back to Florida, I communicated its
contents to her; that the visions she would experience are manifestations of
her own consciousness. The initial blissful entry into the clear light would be
replaced by more or less pleasant visions… lifelike situations manufactured by
her own psyche to help guide her into the next incarnation, or even beyond, into
liberation from the cycle of reincarnation. As Ingo Lauf writes in excerpts from the book,
“…the moment of death brings before the spiritual eye the vision of the ‘clear
light’… which arises from the depth of awareness… (as) an all pervading radiant
inner light… a positive realm which lies beyond the range of words and
concepts… The greatest spiritual experience in the life of man takes place with
the highest intensity upon entering death... (In) the experience of
transformations… the disembodied spirit slowly finds its way through the subtle
forms of the clear light back into the world of visions and manifest forms… then
the transformation in the world of the dead is from the highest beginning a
constant materialization of the spiritual, until a new earthly form is
fashioned as the strong shell of the spirit…
If all the temptations of deceptive visionary images, which are continually
referred to in the texts as hostile forms of the intellect, can be recognized
as empty creations of one’s own mind and can be immediately penetrated, one
will attain liberation (from the cycles of reincarnation)… The path through the
bardo (afterlife) is determined by the karmic deeds of the previous life and by
the ability of the awareness to achieve sublimation and encompassing awareness.”
Liliane now had to work through her deep attachments. As a legal secretary her salary was modest, yet she sacrificed her entire life to provide for her children, namely me, as Patrick got an MBA. As a computer programmer he profited from Y2K to further his real estate investment career… while I toured the world with Jazz groups. To further her altruistic desire, she saved and scrimped, necessarily creating material attachments which I now believed clouded her vision towards spiritual emancipation. I ran these thoughts over in my mind, describing how ultimately visions could be pierced by letting go of her old identity to merge with the pure, clear light. This didn’t go over completely, I think, as my gaze was directed to a hand towel in the closet with a big L for Liliane embroidered on it! Over the next few days I felt she tested my feelings of attachment several times. As my step-dad Bob, a splitting image of Bill, packed her things to take back with me to St. Maarten, my favorite single crystal glass shattered. After 20 minutes of observing my detached resignation and complete nonchalance, he unexpectedly found an exact replica of the broken glass!
I imagine dying famous entails its very own complications.
Quite often, a red Cardinal would knock at Pat’s window. This happened a lot, once precisely as Pat mentioned her name. A little spooky for him, esoteric bliss for Edit and I!
The name of the funeral home also had me do a double take: Brown and sons, with one of the co-owners called Mr. Blizzard.
While in Florida I spent as much time as I could with family. What was immediately apparent is my brother’s deep love for his dog Gooch, similar to my adulation over my cats, one of whom is also named Gooch. It was interesting to note the next storm, typhoon Guchol, reaffirm how our worlds revolve around the Gooches.
The next typhoon, Talim on June 14th, didn’t take any lives, as Mawar had. In Arabic the word is a boy's name meaning "education". In Tagalog (Filipino) it's a girl's name meaning "blade" or "sharp". It also sounds like Tell him, and that’s what I do…
June 15th, just as Bob drove off towards the church in a car packed to the brim with Mom’s clothes, I noticed hurricane Carlotta off Mexico.... car lotta.... On June 19th, back on the Atlantic side, we had a benign storm called Chris. Before Bob married my Mom, he had a lady friend named Chris, and they remained friends after Mom passed. The fact the storm only swirled around a far corner of the ocean is a sign that Liliane did in fact accept Chris, and wants Bob to find happiness, although he himself prefers to stay single. The next storm, Debby, is a little more nuanced. Debby hit Florida on June 26th, soaking the state with relentless rain for four days. In French the word débit means withdrawal (pronounced with a silent T). The sky cried as Patrick started selling off her stocks, somewhat prematurely...
The most recent storm was China’s severe tropical storm Doksuri on June 28th. That day my ear was badly blocked. Since I’ve been diagnosed with hypersensitivity I’ve studiously avoided doctors, who don’t understand it, and I can’t take medicine anyway. That morning I tried every possible home remedy from sticking garlic cloves in my ear to rubbing alcohol and neem extract, without results. Finally I went to the gas station and involuntarily turned the steering wheel towards the doctor’s office. I ended up at the doctor’s and he successfully flushed the ear with water… I feel much better! The name Doksuri has doc in it, so I looked up suri and it means princess.
Bill’s latest tweet comparing Tom-and-Katie’s custody battles for daughter Suri with Sally Field’s movie ‘Not Without My Daughter’ reminds me of my trek home carrying Mom’s ash urn from arm to arm; she was heavy in the airport corridors! She’s with me now, in spirit and in our kitchen.
