Tickle

The world is still a cloudy fingertip swirl. Human beings have transitioned into blurred banners with dissipating limbs.  My chin protrudes almost a  whole foot closer to the staticky canvas of the computer screen, stamping my forehead with an anvil-heavy headache come days end. The keyboard is littered with twisted alphabetical insects that keep leaping keys. Contacts are en route, but I'm revelling in my incubation period--a time when I have to squint to see clearly, a time when both my wit and acuemen are not as keen. A time to allow the emotional chunky creative field inside my chest to fallow and fertilize and eventually harvest.

I was shuffling through the latest edition of National Geographic today, reading an article about the thermnoclear hearth known as the sun:

"By big-time galactic standards, our star is quite undistinguished. Sure, it's so huge that a million Earths would fit comfortably inside. And it's so dense that the sunbeams you see today began their journey from the center of the sun before the last ice age, taking hundreds of thousands of years to elbow their way out to the glowing photosphere before making the 8-minute, 93-million-mile (150-million-kilometer) trip across space to your eyes."

I was rustling the pages when I realized that I've always had a hard time looking at photographs of our snug solar generator....even on television. If I see a close-up of the sun beaming on NOVA  I feel like my eyes will swell and pop into refulgent glorious blindness.

I wonder if this fear, this apprehensive of being close, so close to the actual generator of the light is what stymies my own proximity with a godhead? Is what thwarts me from harnessing the reins of my creative stagecoach and whupping the dream carriage into an eternal gallop? 
 
Of course, I'm sure I'll be able to see clearly once my lenses arrive. There is no way in hell I'd live to see double digits if I were living in this continent three-hundred summers ago and had to tacitly depend on my sight for survival....how the hell I am going to spot and target a bison when I have a hard time making out my shoe strigs?

*

Previous siblings who have shared bunks with me in the formative toddler era are well aware that I'm the most ticklish lad alive. I make elmo squeals sound  like an aria. When I was a no largder than the size of a fire-hydrant Doctor visits were hell because everytime the nurse practitioner would thump down on the hollowness of my lower stomach, I would immediately begin to jowl in screeches.  My sister Beth (also the biter) would lash out her pointer finger in the direction of my abdomen from across the room and I would end up writhing in feigned titillating tears. She wouldn't even touch me, she would just point.

To the menatlity of both my Mara and my achilles, this psychological tickle wand is still quite efficient toady, as my crazy sister 'Blabber-Mouth "thanks for telling mom about the pot brownies" Beth is well aware of .

"Oh, Dave, look. What do we have here? Under my hand. Oh, no--could it be our little friend." 

Beth brandished her pointer finger across the holiday table in my direction. I errupt in laughter.

"Oh, no, Dave. Look at our little friend. Don't you want to play with our little friend?"

Somehow (?) Uncle Mike found out about my pointer-finger phobia (pointophobe). Uncle Mike just got royally screwed over by our last landlord and, as a creative retort, I engender this weird morbid soap opera titled WHO KILLED MAXIMILLIAN ZERVO (the name of our Italian ex-landlord).

During the last months, while we were moving, I would always commence with my WHO KILLED MAXIMILLIAN ZERVO schtik whenever we would move a rolled carpet or burrow boxed of books into a trunk of the car. Could Maximillian's body be in here? Everyone's ia suspect." I say, like I was talking about awounded J.R. in the mid-eighties.

"Stop that." Michael would always scoff at my mawkish humor and then one day, out of nowhere...bam....Michael orhestrated his pointer finger in my direction and quickly slashed a crisp slice of air and the next thing I know I am wailing with laughter.

Guess the concourse has a cookbook of lunar- phobias they allow only the finest participants to peruse. 

 I also keep hearing that feathery- tickled voice brushing off the still-life dust motes inside  my chest. The voice tells me to write. To write all the time. To not worry about what anyone says (let them worry about there own mock masterpieces) but to pour myself on to the contours of the page everyday, as much as I can. That feathery-tickle voice tells me to write for the school paper this pending semester. It tells me that I should read all ten of the course books for my modern fiction class in August (and peck out synopsis and possibly paper outlines for each) and concentrate on my senior projects, grad school applications, killer short stories and smooching with Hollywood pell mell in my screenwriting class that I take via LA satelitte.

The feathery voice also told me to sketch a docu-drama about william miller and call it THE KINGDOM WILL NOT COME BY EXPECTATION.

"You'll do a good job because you'll be divorced from it." The little sparrow voice chirps.

The title of the docu-drama is culled from a quote from Jesus from the (historically versacious) gospel of St. Thomas. 

(And this is a pending Joseph Campbell exegesis so watch out)

In Mark 13 the Christ's disciples inquire about the end of the world in terms of an prophetic red-calender apocolyptic event.

"Verily I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done.
Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away. "

Well that generation came to pass and the end of the world did not arrive so this passage was traditionally intuited as a mataphore...as if Christ was talking about the 'race' of mankind as a wgole.

In the Gospel acording to St. Thomas, the disciples inquire of Christ the same query, to which Christ responds:

"The Kingdom will not come by expectation. They will not say "see here" or "see there". The Kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth and men do not see it."

People of a cultivating earth-is-one-country-and-mankind-it's-citizen thread of spiritual sight no exactly what that passage means......

the key is of course, to pen a docu-drama that doesn't proseltyze, but one that shows an earnest man assiduously digging inside his chest for answers.....


The feathery-voice is telling me that I've been lodged in the library for almost thirteen hours and that maybe, a nap would be nice 

(smiles)
 -Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.
Luke 17:21