Category: Head Tales

Head Tales

Casting Dark Shadows #1

Grand Providentia United

Chapter 1

~ Black Dogma ~

As a boy I often wondered exactly how dark the color black could get. I also wondered about the brightest white, just not as often. While being forced to sit on a metal chair at a cafeteria table in Catechism class, I made drawings of demons with a #2 pencil. Totally dissatisfied with the results of my creative efforts, I wondered where I could get the blackest pencil on earth. I imagined myself making a deal with the devil to get the blackest pencil, and once he had forked it over, I’d ask him to please sit still so I could capture his unholy likeness in my current cartoon style. I never did get the opportunity to cut a deal with the Master of Demons back then, and years later when I finally did, I’d already learned just how dark the blackest black was, so bargaining for a magic pencil no longer seemed relevant or appropriate. I’d come to know that the blackest black inhabits a place of no coming back, or if you do come back, you always bring some of the black back with you. Your shadow gets darker, your life-light gets dimmer and your chances of achieving sainthood grow slimmer. Absolute black is a living organism. It resides in the place where night terrors gnash their teeth and shriek their fury. It holds its rightful place within the infinite span of our cosmos at the gateway of every sucking black hole in the Universe. Now I’m left wondering whether every black hole in space might lead to the same Catholic Hell. Eternal damnation becomes a serious consideration when you’re raised to fear God, Satan, and fire. Isn’t it interesting though, that a fiery hell on earth seems more and more plausible when you factor in the onset of global climate change? I can’t quite remember – Is digression one of the seven deadly sins? If so, you can add it to my lifelong list of transgressions so I can atone for it later. Great balls of lightning, I must get back to the point! This narrative is not meant to be funny or fictitious, or even an attempt to entertain. It is a grave warning. It’s a metaphorical fable about what might happen to you, if you dare to go looking for the source of absolute black.

“Unwound”

I’m still sifting through the finer details (i.e., the charcoaled remains of my journey to hell’s gateway) in an attempt to find reason, or at least some semblance of rationale behind my decision to follow Darkness to its source. A central factor in my choice to set forth on a fool’s quest to find the origins of evil, was my premature introduction to the story of Jesus Christ. Like most of my childhood friends, I deeply appreciated my Catholic upbringing, on one day each year – December 25th. But when it came to Sunday morning masses and Catechism classes, I thought the toys and candies of Christmas fell short of sufficient payment, especially when I took into account the yearly quota of lost playtime hours invested. Halloween, on the other hand, asked for no penance or devotion, seeking only a one-night stand of some good old-fashioned gluttony and a propensity to play pranks on unwary adults. And at least the inventors of Halloween were forthright about its roots being firmly grounded in fear and morbidity. Halloween was, and is still, one of my favorite holidays. But the world doesn’t offer a religion based on Halloween’s moralistic principles, and even if it did, I’m sure my mother wouldn’t have approved. So, it’s back to Saints Peter and Paul church and my misguided interpretation of the story of Jesus Christ.

This is the first chapter in the first book of a trilogy I’ll be writing. The three books will be based on the true story of my lifetime (as yet unfolding…). Please feel free to criticize. But do be advised that I still have connections in the Kingdom of Absolute Black!

Head Tales

Casting Dark Shadows #2

Grand Providentia United

Chapter 2

~ Wicked Babies ~

Jesus said, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.” Luke 23:34

And maybe the Almighty Father did forgive them, but I didn’t. Even as an eight-year-old boy, I was convinced that they knew what they were doing, and they did it anyway. The life story of Jesus Christ that I was taught during those many hours of indoctrination into the Catholic religion, stirred in me an enormous internal conflict. I’m sure the reaction I had to the story is fairly common among children when they learn how Jesus’ life ended. However, when I began to internalize the teachings, I am certain that I was too young to understand that the “they” in Luke’s passage did not equate to ‘we’ in my life story. In a single misstep – a naive misinterpretation – I accepted an overwhelming amount of guilt and a huge burden to make recompense for the unspeakable atrocity we committed in the crucifixion of Christ. I embraced the idea that, ‘We knew exactly what we were doing, and we did it anyway’. Here was this miraculous human being who taught love and forgiveness, healed his brothers and sisters, openly accepted sinners and saints alike, and we decided he should be tortured and killed for daring to be different from the rest of us. I became secretly enraged by all of this. I focused the magnitude of that rage inward. It’s so strange to think that I identified more with the teachings of Jesus than I did with the teachings of my grade-school teachers, and because of that, I nearly destroyed my capacity to identify with either school of thought. This is when I started to wonder about the blackest black.

The troublesome thing about childhood wonder – it can lead you a long way down a path in one direction or another, and due to inexperience, you might arrive at a place of new understanding, a place where you’re no longer wondering about that specific thing, but you find yourself hopelessly lost about every other thing. I’ve learned that the distance between absolute black and the brightest white is relative to the number of gradations on a gray scale your current senses are able to perceive. Everything comes down to life experience. When I first began wondering about the blackest black, and when I started making my plans to challenge the unholiest evil, I was grossly inexperienced. Could I have used the word innocent here, instead of inexperienced? Absolutely not. There exists a similar ‘gray scale’ between innocence and guilt that I’m not ready to explore at this point in the story, and besides, one of the very first lessons I learned in catechism was that we humans are all guilty at birth. Original sin exempts us from innocence. If there is a completely neutral gray, a tone that is precisely centered between the blackest black and the purest white, and we insert the equivalent of that gray on the scale between guilt and innocence, the church teaches that we are already closer to guilt than we are to innocence, even at the moment of birth. It’s a bit of dogma that I’ve never been able to come to terms with. It seems unfair that the human race will never be free from original sin – and furthermore, never be eligible for a complete collective redemption. But I guess that’s where the story of Jesus Christ intersects with the story that I’m telling you now.

Down the Tube

The story of Jesus sparked in me a black/white obsession, but there were many other stories that fueled it into an internal raging inferno. So many stories of heroic avengers doing the right things, following the right paths, and coming out clean and righteous on the other side of their trials and tribulations. From the Holy Bible there was the story of David and Goliath, from contemporary literature there was Frodo Baggins from the Shire, and from Hollywood there was Andy Dufresne from the Shawshank State Penitentiary. I was disappointed in God’s failure to intercede on our behalf and infuriated with the devil for leading us so far astray. I vowed to avenge Jesus of Nazareth and every other human being that had ever been bullied, tortured, maimed or destroyed at the behest of Satan and his horde of demons. I would willfully confront the Prince of Darkness and demand full accountability. A disobedient speck of stardust countering the darkest forces of the Universe.

We all have our stories to tell, and I’m committed to telling you this one. If you appreciate the entertainment, please consider leaving a tip in the jar on the Donate*Contact page. Every small donation will help towards getting me settled into Savannah and ready for classes starting on September 11th. Thank you for your consideration!

Head Tales

Casting Dark Shadows #3

Grand Providentia United

Chapter 3

~ Curiosity Could Kill the Kid ~

When the pendulum swings toward angst, I am in the pit. To ride the pendulum back out of the pit, I must summon forth and exercise heartfelt serenity. When I was a child, I found it almost effortless to initiate, fluctuate, and regulate my spiritual energies, largely because it seemed to occur naturally. I would be completely bummed out in one minute and then entirely elated in the next. I was thrilled when we kids found a long-forgotten railroad bridge in the woods across the street from my house. It had deteriorated to the point that its wooden cross beams were seemingly only held together by the corroded steel girders and rusty tracks the workers had so long ago spiked into them. The trestle over the river had a short span and an even shorter height – its rails were perhaps only twenty feet above the surface of the shallow flow. Although there were some jagged piles of dangerous looking debris down below the span, crossing it was probably not a matter of life and death. But death was certainly not out of the question either. At least that’s the argument my dad would have used to scare me straight if he found out I was crossing that rotted bridge. At the age of seven, with three of my best friends cheering me on, I tiptoed carefully, and deliberately, over the span from the near to the far shore. As I remember it, my friends all chickened out that first time, meaning I had to return to the near shore almost immediately so we could stay together and seek out other brave new worlds and daredevil challenges until darkness fell. While the fear was definitely real in the moments of crossing the bridge, it was the recurring nightmares I had as a result of the crossings that turned out to be the most terrifying part of the experience. As the term recurring suggests, the dream was always the same – a Tyrannosaurus Rex chases me to the rickety hulk of the train trestle – for reasons unclear, the beast’s shadow is always scarier than its blood slathered jowls – I cross the bridge as if in a dream (I was), leaping expertly from tie to tie and avoiding the gaping black holes in its steel-strapped wooden ribcage – when I stick a solid landing on the other side, I look down, and there on the burnt coal ground of the far shore I find a cherry flavored Pixie Stick, unopened – I pick it up and start to pour the sugary contents into my mouth with nary a care about, or memory of, the dinosaur’s monstrous shadow or the fact that I’d even been having a nightmare. I suppose that’s how easily the pendulum swings when you’re just a kid.

Within a few years of that ‘First Great Trestle Crossing’, the local adults figured out how dangerous it was to keep the skeletal remains of that bridge in place. I reckon the Hope Mill property owner recognized the potential financial liability the dilapidated trestle represented, so he made it disappear. We children claimed to be upset about its disappearance, but deep down inside I think we were all relieved to some extent because we knew we would never be dared to cross it again. Before long, we had collectively dragged a few of the old timbers that the demolition crew had left behind to make our own bridge, this one being much closer to the river’s surface. For me, the deeper significance of the bridge crossing was not in the physical danger it posed, but in the spiritual and mental challenge it represented. I remember it as the first time I tempted fate – the first time I challenged the devil to strike me down if that was his big plan. I see now that his plans were significantly bigger than I could have imagined back then. So, the devil laughed openly at my baby steps, and it’s likely God could see that he’d soon have his hands full trying to keep this young fool from wandering too far into the absolute black. In my understanding, God is always smiling though. The Great I Am bears an embarrassment born of the haplessness of our willful ways, and is thoroughly amused by us, just the same.

The Arkwright Bridge (built in 1888) is a couple miles downriver from the trestle in this story. Although it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, it will likely be one of the next disappearing bridges in rural Rhode Island. The bridge was closed to automobiles in 2011 and then closed to foot traffic in 2019, after the death of a local youth who was diving off the bridge with friends. (Wikipedia)

If I could have seen the recklessness of my actions early on, perhaps I might have saved myself a decade of increasingly painful hardship. But as the devil has been purported to say, “Where’s the fun in that?” Besides, if I hadn’t gone searching for the devil’s lair, I wouldn’t have this wonderful story to share with you all. Lucky for you, I am one that needs to learn the hard way. As a child I tended to rise to the challenge again and again, even if it meant sacrificing every last shred of self-preservation and esteem I could muster. I was intent on finding the source of absolute black, and when I did, I would start to beat the demons back down inside of it. When the supreme leaders of both the black and the white forces heard of my plans, all of the Universe enjoyed a great big belly laugh.

Head Tales

Casting Dark Shadows #4

Grand Providentia United

Chapter 4

~ Attracting Ghoul Friends ~

For me, the payoff of a nightmare almost always comes in the moment of waking up. Especially if I wake to birdsong and sunshine. I can usually shake off even the most diabolical of night frights quickly in the light of day. But when it’s too early to get up and I know I’ll be going back down for more of the same, all I can really do is try to appreciate the entertainment value of my frightful nocturnal imaginings. There is a thrilling rush of adrenaline that comes when I awaken from a mind-bending vision of abject horror. When I was young, I gradually became addicted to that rush. Being hooked on fear, I would look forward to the next nightmare, hoping only that it would be more terrifying than the last. I was rarely disappointed. Eventually, my mind created a dream routine that would ease me out of the darkest reaches without the shock of being physically jolted into a sitting position in my real-world bed. The routine soon became my favorite part of every scary dreamscape escape. I offer up another recurring nightmare from early childhood to fill you in on the devilish details of the routine.

I find myself standing next to an antique potbelly woodstove that my mother is trying to light up – it’s a gloomy little room, cold and damp – foggy outside and foggy inside. Is it fog, smoke, or an army of ghosts filling this place? – mom is cursing – the fire won’t start – “Stay here Scott, I’m going to get some firewood.” – the room suddenly feels fragile, like a thin-skinned tent – I follow my mother to the screen door and latch it with an equally fragile hasp – as I’m backing away from the door, it dawns on me that I am no safer inside of this wicked crate than I would be outside of it – I know what’s coming – I’m powerless to stop it – my mom comes screeching back to the door with superhuman speed, crazy sharp claws, cruel looking fangs, and hair sticking straight out in all directions – it isn’t my mother, it’s an apocalyptic lunatic. Her tortured howl is maddening – I know the screen won’t hold for more than a second – I know that a second is all I need – my ritual of escape takes the lead and the relief is immediate – I curl into a ball and fly backwards through the air – spinning around, rolling forward and taking control – flying, rolling, out of the darkness and towards my house – bursting through the back door at full speed – up the narrow stair case and down the hall – in the instant that I land in my bed, I’m awake, and I know that I’m safe. Once again, I had left the shock of the night terror where I thought it belonged, deep down inside. What I failed to realize is that the depths would keep getting deeper to accommodate for the growing horde of monsters I was routinely breeding and feeding with my swiftly accumulating fears.

“Dream Wand”
acrylic on carved wood over cricket cage.

The fight was a mismatch from the very start. These demons were in an entirely different weight class than me. Anyone with a modicum of sense would surely have told me so. But I never told anyone about my plans to confront the blackness, except for the God within me, and I was fairly confident God would always have my back. If not, I thought, ‘How in the hell do I keep making it back to my bed in the morning?’

In the youngest years of my life, the daytime hours were filled with adventure, exploration and wonder. I would spend as many hours as I was allowed to, playing in the tattered woodland areas around town, wading through the rivers and runoffs, digging in the dirt for worms and antique bottles, and crawling through the rainwater drainage pipes beneath both Mill and Main Streets. When mom and dad decided I was old enough to sleep in a tent in our backyard, the adventures often continued well past the witching hour. Slinking through Hope in the darkness was a lot less scary when your friends were there with you, so usually the tent in our backyard was filled with as many friends as the tarpaulin floor could accommodate. As I recall, my older brother and I would argue over who’s turn it was to sleep out in the tent on any given night, but we soon realized that the overflow could always sleep on the ground underneath the stars. At one point we must have had upwards of fifteen wayward boys, and sometimes one wayward girl, marauding through the streets of Hope Village under the dark cloak of night.

Head Tales, Living in Presence

Self-Exploration Leads to Self-Discovery ~ Originally Posted 02/12/2020

Grand Providentia United

Many of my friends and family are probably scratching their heads, wondering why I took a 1,600 mile ride to New Hampshire just to display the Artists Against Trump Exhibit, especially when I’ve previously shown little, or no, interest in politics.

Carlos Cardona's Event On our first evening in New Hampshire, we set up the display at Carlos Cardona’s home, where he hosted an event for the Democratic Party in Laconia. In this photo, Mike is talking to Dan Feltes (Democrat running for Governor of NH) while the Reuters cameraman records the proceedings. 

In an effort to explain my decision to take the trip, and my choice to promote the message of this art exhibit, I’ll proceed by recounting some personal discoveries from a personal perspective.

Trump Truck

This truck drove by many times, sometimes with other trucks following behind. Attempts to intimidate us included slamming down the plows on the road while cruising past, and stopping in the right of way to take pictures of us and the exhibit.

I’ll start off my observations by making the firm statement:

I am still NOT interested in joining the world of competitive political ideologies, except for occasions where those ideologies interfere with, degrade, or threaten the existence of ideas that I perceive to be essential to the preservation of our earth environment and the humanity that depends upon that very same earth environment for its survival.

I do not consider myself a Democrat, a Republican, or an Independent. Nor do I identify with any political group or social movement. I believe in living a purposeful life and working to promote the ideals that bring hope for a brighter future for our human family.

Trump Bust Fans The artwork enjoyed a favorable welcome by most of the media and passersby at the Artists Against Trump Exhibit in Manchester, New Hampshire, on 2/8/2020. This was an ad-hoc showing of the exhibit, which could be best described as a guerilla-marketing inspired event. The temperature never rose above 20 degrees, with gusty winds delivering a wind chill in the single digits. The fact that we were politically unendorsed, left us open to the ridicule of those who didn’t share our enthusiasm for the message we were promoting. One of the most memorable encounters – A young man walked up to Mike and me and asked, “Are you two guys responsible for this?” Following our affirmative reply, he made the judgmental assertion that we were “Both f***ing losers!” As he walked off down the sidewalk without ever breaking his stride, I couldn’t help but notice that he was wearing worn out clothes with a considerable amount of what appeared to be chocolate stains on the seat of his pants. I thought to myself ‘If that is what winning looks like, I’d prefer to remain a f***ing loser.’ Instinctively, I nearly lost my cool and went after the man, but I decided that it would be a nonproductive strategy, as I was sure he wouldn’t change his attitude no matter what methods I used to convince him.

LDS Full Article

Some of you may be asking – “What have you learned from the whole experience?” Most importantly, I’ve learned that I greatly appreciate the freedom of self-expression; the right to give voice to my own preferences, ideas, and beliefs. I’ve learned, that along with the freedom of self-expression, comes the responsibility to practice daily, and with conscious awareness, the character traits which are harmonious with the belief systems being expressed. I’m eternally grateful to be living and growing, here, and now.

More on Sunday about the Artists Against Trump project, and the insights I gained from it, after which, I intend to get back to my apolitical journey. Thank you for reading the Grand Providentia United Online Journal! 🙂