This chapter is discussed in Notes On the Spectrum: Patience with God
Even as all reality is blurring at the moment: what is real, what is AI, what is hallucination, what is a deep fake. This is a deep fake of my own soul. I am trying to trick my own mind into revealing truths unfounded and unfathomed from the grey matter of my own awakening and enlivened mind. Mushrooms they say, are the key to skipping the Alzheimer’s decline late in life. I mean, the spores are the key, right? Elevation. Inspiration. Epiphanies. The face or voice of god in your life. The lives of your children, your cats, your dead mother and father.
The ghost of my dead sister is here beside me. Constantly, in much of what I do, she is a thin transparent guide, a cheerleader without a voice or body. Her spirit is in me. Formed me in the earliest years of my life. She is my mom. My mom, well, at that time, she was a wealthy socialite in a growing Texas city. Her passion was cooking, throwing Gatsby-level parties in her Gatsby-level house. Oh, I think he dies in the end, face down in his ornamental fountain. No one notices.
I am no ghost.
I am enhanced, however. Something different than you might imagine. My alteration happened earlier than my memories. In the nurture and child’s play of growing up with a hippie sister and her fine hippie girlfriends, running all over the lake house, playing The Beatles, swimming in bikinis while I watched from my bedroom. We lived in the Summer of Love. I was born in 1962, to a family on the rise with a side of danger and violence. I was looking down at the girls, getting into the ski boat, singing my heart out with a mic and a booming soundtrack coming from my sister’s back bedroom. I was the star. They were my audience. I was high as a kid kite can be, without any substances other than joy, drive, and a prepubescent masculine energy on the rise.
I was forged in those summers. I found my trajectory out. Even at 8 the world was askew. The fights at night, dad yelling, mom wailing. Us kids cowering in the back of the sprawling house, or escaping into the night in cars of boyfriends. I was too young to leave. I ran up into the hills above our house and built forts. I set up army men brigades in my bedroom. Lined up on the avocado shag carpet. Wooden blocks, tanks, green flame thrower guys, sharpshooters, and grenadiers. Was it any wonder that I spent untold hours blowing up piles of sand in the upper parking area of the big house?
Pause. Save draft. Reheat coffee. Turn off music. Listen.
