Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Parrotting, Jackhammering, and The Whole Friggin' World Explained!!!!

I got off the phone with Laura yesterday afternoon (HI) evening (WA).  We both kind of called it- having said everything we could possibly think of to say to the point of rapid-fire and reciprocated yawning- and I turned the lights out.  Sometimes we take saying “until we next have cellphone reception” a little too far, beyond the silence and yawning, to the point where I suspect we both feel silly for still being there (like we’re school kids and it's late at night), but we were rational adults this time.  


I awoke later in a violent fever.  I was shaking so hard I would have been unable to hold the cell phone, much less call for help on it.  There was “a forceful physical expulsion,” as if I had eaten rotten food, but that’s not why- as soon as the fever broke- that I started writing this.


I started writing this because of the fever-dreams.  


In the dreams I called out for an "old man," who turned out to be a South Pacific Islander of unrecognizable delineation.  He came and coached me through getting rid of, as he called it, “a bad spirit.”  Insert a bunch of bullshit imagery taken right out of Hollywood’s downloadable and pixilated screen, that poison-of-the-mind that we cannot unsee.  Forever and ever, Amen.


Anyway, the imagery was all hokus pokus until, after multiple trips to the head and bundling up in every item of clothing I brought with me and jackhammering the bedframe with my violent fits, the fever broke.  Instantly.  I stopped shaking, my face, hair, and pillow were soaked with sweat, snot, and tears.  The old man assured me I now knew what to do if the bad spirit came back, but he was no longer my responsibility.


At this point, contrary to what I thought I knew of fevers, the imagery turned…. um…. lucid?  And the entire time the images kaleidoscoped in my spent brain-jello, the old man told me his people’s history.


As he spoke I was catching a forming wave in clear, shallow water.  I was overcome with that thrilling rush only those who have caught a wave, no matter how fleetingly, know and recognize deep in the primitive marrow of their bones.  It curled over me, higher and higher, blotting out the sun with a diffraction of color, fish and birds swimming in the tunnel of water overhead until the wave became the sky itself, filled with towering thunderheads, light fluffly cumulous clouds, fish-scale cirrus and great sweeping mare’s tails- mere colors on the wave, rolling and growing ever-mightier along.


And I understood that I wasn’t surfing into land, but that I’d caught one of the great ocean swells, from her infancy, and it was alive.  I wasn’t washing into shore, I was navigating by the feel of the wave itself to another place, far away over the edge of the horizon.


It was then that I saw the bow of the canoe slicing the water (one of the canoes I photoed yesterday for design study, incidentally), and the old man explained canoes are male, and the sea and the sky are female.  That the canoe carries the sea and the sky, and without the canoe the majesty of the sea and the sky would cease to exist, and without the sea and the sky the canoe would be no more. I might have been in the canoe, I might have been it... whatever- that's not important.


He then concluded by informing me that the spirit that we banished was the “old me” I no longer needed to carry.  He was not welcome on the islands.  That we let him go and the “rage of war” in me should remain silent.  I laughed out loud when he said “welcome to the islands,” but truth be told, I think I was babbling in a horrible and meaningless parrot of the Hawai’ian language the whole time I was on fire.  Not even slightly embarrassing.  I hope I didn’t do that.  Really, really hope I just hallucinated that, too...


I wound down into common dreams of building a canoe using a method to fair the hull I had never thought of (which I am now anxious to try) with a friend who moved to the Philippines several years ago and two sailors (the giant ukulele-playing cook and the ordinary he smoked the hookah with on the stern of my last ship).

And now I am completely spent... there isn't much left to this tale, except I should have brought more of my Hawaiian shirts... I stand out without one on, here.

Sleep.  Take two.


This was the bow from my dream.... only it was yellow, and had a different name I tried, but failed, to remember.

Another modern design of the traditional canoe- I just liked it.  It wasn't in the dreams.

I saw many of these "shark fin" sterns (on left) and quite like them.  Incidentally, the canoe on the left is the color yellow of the ulua's bow from my dreams.

3 comments:

  1. Sounds like some bad shellfish. Dead crab will do that to you, even something that was cooked with it........ Useful hallucinations, though. Glad you're O.K., and at another level of consciousness for a while.

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  2. Powerful dreaming even without the hookah. Water, the sea, waves - all spiritual symbols, as is "the old man," the teacher, or creator, if you will. Meditate on all of it!
    Glad the fever and sickness are history. The Momster will worry about you, always, Twisted Sister will, too. Stay well and this time, sweet dreams.

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  3. I think it was something the dirtbag who had my quarters before me left for me.... I hadn't eaten a thing. Whatever, I am now stronger and more difficult to kill!

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