Green/Purple

Green/Purple

19 March 2005

This afternoon I woke up thinking about how I would respond to the blistering comments I received on Friday from the customer's review of my Source Code that I sent them earlier in the week. I hate how work invades my dreams. So once I regained consciousness I lay in bed for a while longer trying to think of things under my control, rather than work. Happy thoughts like puppies and smoked glass. It was disheartening how often the work thoughts invaded even these concentrated attempts at circumvention. Finally, with the cat tearing a hole into my bedroom screen window from the outside, I had to get up.

I walked to this block's WalGreens and purchased my Saturday breakfast of Arizona Iced Tea and the New York Times. The WalGreen's usually infuriates me by running out of NYT by about 10am so I was pleasantly surprised to find a copy. After reading it for a while on the patio, Alex came out of her room to remind me of my appointment with the hair designer she had arranged. I offered her a microwaved artificial hotdog (I was making two for myself - to go with the tea and NYT) but she declined and immediately went back to bed. Apparently she was tired of looking at the hideous growth that had overtaken the sides of my head. Since I myself am always up to a new experience, I accepted her arrangement and went off to my destined appointment at the place called "designing heads" on the corner of Alvernon and Fort Lowell.

While driving to hair place, I was thinking of all the things I would say as to explain myself. Such as "I don't care what you do to my hair, but realize I try to blend in with normal society, so don't make it too cutting edge. I don't want to be your doctoral thesis in advanced hair design..." stuff like that. I got I started explaining myself to a man at the front desk searching for my name on his palm pilot, when another guy, Glenn, asked my who I was here for. I don't know. My friend set this up. Is she Alex? Yeah, I said. So it had been set up and is now in motion. Glenn was to be my hair designer.

We went through all the usual motions, the shampoo (something tingly this time). Back to the chair. I usually don't talk much on the chair, but it turned out this Glenn guy is from the same area I'm from in Pennsylvania. And he's almost the same age as me, a year younger. His sister went to the same college the same year as I did (she was in Business so I didn't know her). And we ended up talking alot. We didn't really know any of the same people but we knew of some of the same people. I ended up telling him things about my life I don't even tell people on the third date. He told me how the Wilkes-Barre city councilman Al Boris had said he would like to strangle gay people, or something like that. I laughed and said "that's a good quote". And only after that I thought it might sound like I was agreeing with Al Boris instead of just relishing the correspondance between small town politicians and politicians on the National scene except for the big time politicians are a little more PR-savvy. Glenn told me yeah, it was such a good quote it made him decide to leave Wilkes-Barre. I tried to redeem myself by telling him how I went through gradeschool with one of the Boris children, and my sister with another, and how we had thought even then that they were Troglodytes (not that we can blame Beth for the sins of her father). And he agreed with me that yeah, they were Troglodytes.

Then I drove down to 4th Ave to the Street Fair. Parked the car, left the jacket in the car, it was sunny and warm out there. Put my backpack with my Vaio and the NYT on my back and started walking the strip. First thing that caught my attention was a guy selling hand crafted journals. This incredible fine purple with gold on the spine book caught my attention. Thick, incredibly textured cotton paper on the inside. I already have a journal that Alex gave me for Christmas, so I got this one for her. Mark gave me his card, in case any of you are interested it's www.thejournalguy.com.

By now I had already decided to get my cards read, something else I had never done before (except once on the corner of College and Pugh from some talentless hack in State College). My way of chosing out of the many is to engage the first I come upon. And let me tell the first I came upon is as good at Tarot as Glenn is with hair. Solaya is this incredibly beautiful and deep and open woman based out of the 305 area code, in California, I think. After explaining the difference between the 15 and 20 dollar reading she sat me down and asked that I take a couple deep breaths and clear my mind as she did the same. Before long I was alone with Solaya amidst a sea of people, some of them obviously disturbed, getting my cards read. The first card was the one I didn't pick but that 'wanted' to come out. She told me how intelligent I was. She told me how I relate to the world with my intellect but how I am now opening up to relating with my heart as well. She said I just had to learn how to 'let go'. She asked, you are in love now? I said, no, not with another. She seemed surprised and insisted that the cards said love, with another, a single real person, not some generalized love. She was quite empatic on that.

The rest of the day is a blur. I spun the KXCI Wheel and got a 15. Which means Spin Again. I spun it again and again got the 15. The man at the counter grew impatient and manually moved the wheel to '1'. I was already wearing my grey KXCI t-shirt I won last year when Heather spun the wheel for me. I asked for a red version of this same shirt but these only come in girls sizes. So I ended up walking away with a "Democracy Now, With Amy Goodman" shirt in XL. Then I stumbled across another t-shirt place and got a couple others. One is this black background with a big white maze. And at the top of the maze is a hapless stick figure, ready to wander, haplessly, into the maze. I think I will wear that to dinner tomorrow. When asked what does that T-shirt mean I will reply: This represents some strange new labyrith the likes of which no mortal has ever confronted. And the hapless figure is ready to step into it thinking "wow. a labyrinth. this should be fun." not knowing that he is stepping into his own eternal doom.

Episode 1: The Lady in the Bottle

Lately I've been out of sorts. I could and would shatter this bottle to release the ship from it's crystaline prison. But unlike Humpty Dumpty, put back together again. Thus we consult the "I Dream of Jeannie" Episode Index.

Season 1. Episode 1. The Lady in the Bottle.

When the rocket launch for a space mission goes awry, its astronaut, Captain Anthony Nelson, finds himself stranded on a desert island. There, he finds a beautiful antique bottle lying there on the sand. When Tony opens the bottle, he is shocked to find a beautiful, 2,000-year-old genie named Jeannie, who is now calling him her new Master and willing to grant him anything he wishes.

Space debris washed up on some sort of desert island (or 'planet', if you will). In the trauma of a crash, one is often left with amnesia. When pressed for the specifics of what led us here, "A rocket launch gone awry" is as good an explanation as any. The episode thus far conforms to experiential reality. IDoJ::1 apears to be leading us down the path of righteousness. Going further into this metaphor seems warranted.

The beautiful antique bottle, a thinly-veiled characterization of the mind, implies that the mind is a prison (no matter how lovely it appears). We are used to thinking that the body is merely an "ugly bag of mostly water" that the mind orders about from here to there. The wind through an open window that blows a mote of dust from one room of the house to another. But from whom does the mind take its orders? We realize we are neither our bodies nor our minds. So who calls the shots?

The beautiful, 2,000-year old genie conjures up Jung's 'wise old man'. Some sort of trans-dimensional aspect of Self that is available for personal conversation in times of need. The 'wise old man' seems to be able to answer such difficult questions. And the '2,000-year old' reference is obviously pointing to a Christ figure. But according to IDoJ::1, this genie is imprisoned within the exterior shell of it's own 'bottle'. Only something outside of itself can invoke it. Even something lesser and more barbaric than itself. Thus neither Jung's wise old man nor the Christ figure could exist outside the exterior shell of the human being. The ludicrous atrocities just keep piling on, one atop the other.

In Jung's mythology, this all colludes to make Tony the 'persona'; the entity apparently at the wheel. The one apparently calling the shots. But really just bumbling along from episode to episode. Tony wears his Military uniform with pride, taking his orders from his base commander, and never once questioning any of it. Tony is an empty shell of a man (just as the mind is an empty shell of Self). Yet even after he's found his Jeannie, Tony remains in a constant state of fear.

So Tony keeps the Jeannie imprisoned in her beautiful bottle until the weekly catastrophe is well past neigh. To save his own skin, Tony reluctantly calls forth the Jeannie. Yet always with great hesitation and reluctance. Tony remains ever fearful that his base commander will 'find him out' and expell him from his beloved Military. The biggest part of his secret shame is the Jeannie herself. It is strongly implied that if the base commander ever discovers Tony's Jeannie, Tony would be forcibly ejected from the Military, with great shame and gnashing of teeth and the series would be summarily Canceled.

The glove seems to fit.

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