Is This Untitled?

What time is it?

It's night-time.
The air is clear, stillish, and cold as hell-fire.  The stars are crisp, colored by their ages, and Jupiter is smiling just off the outstretched arrow arc of Orion, as they rise.  Polaris sits and spins, truly blue-balled at celestial North.
We all know the stars and sky are on caffeine.  No other explanation.

On a wild hair, I - just now (one minute ago, anyways) - picked up a thumb-sized old river rock from one of the flower beds outside the back door, and (somewhat maliciously) wondered if I could hit something with it.  (Quick orientation for newbs. The largish backyard is north/south, raised beds at the north end, back door at the south, shed/gate, fence, grapes, fence, maple, diadora cedar along the western frontier.  (I decided on one of those silly 'solar-light' spikes that everyone buys at Wal-Mart [for white-elephant gifts at Xmas.]  Target was the size of a balled up fist, 12-14 square inches, and about a foot less in elevation - slightly uphill with the grade.  )
We cleared out the strawberries after 4 years, and I stuck one of those light spikes in there for shits-n-giggles, a few months back.  In the winter sun, it barely charges, and puts off a faint, orangey light for just a few hours, depending on its orientation.

I've been obsessed with trajectories for decades - rocks, arrows, rifle rounds, 105-120mm tank rounds - so this one was no different.
Just more primitive.  A tannish, speckled-with-many-hues prize of the glaciers.  My weapon.  So simple.  (Spoiler: I knew I was gonna hit it WAYYYY before I threw it.)

TL:DR  - We ALL know I hit it, dead-on, just a few minutes ago.  Plunk FTW!

So what am I getting at here?
Fuck, I have no idea.  Just happy that my hand-eye coordination hasn't faded.  Hell, it's improved as I've gotten older.  I do think about gravity, crosswind, spin-drift, Coriolis effects north/south, relative cant - weird shit like that.  Old training.
Move on, nothing to see here.  
Here's a song for symbolic reinforcement of my personal, empire-based ideals...  as a benevolent dictator.
(Mango!  Shhhhhh*^#@%^^, edit this out, later - before you hit 'Publish.'  Otherwise, people may assume you're in your head too much.
Am I?  Are we?
Maybe.  Sh'nt give it all up.
When we unveil the Uniform Mystical Anomaly Detangler, they'll all know, so as long as we don't reveal that, we're golden.  (Sinister laugh.)
So we'll delete this later in the column?
Yes, almost certainly.  Can't give up the UMAD yet, right?  Think about the long-term, man.
We try not to miss temporal details, don't we?  Still OCD as hell.
You are.
We are.)

"Like a steely blade in a silken sheath
We don't see what they're made of.
They shout about love, but when push comes to shove,
They live for things they're afraid of."

Rush "The Weapon" from 1982's 'Signals'



The security detachment was deployed, their toroid weapons had intersected coverage, they betrayed no breach, there were no alarums, so I exited the Tinglev.
Nothing at my first step.  So quiet.  The floor was shiny, a bit slippery - almost wet - so damn clean.  A CSI team couldn't find an errant skin-tag there.  No semen.  No hair.  Scoured.
"Pun lip smet pap a-ri'in."
"Blinx, Klargen."   They spread out further, and the drop hatch slid - muted - back into place.
"XO,  hold tight," I privated, "Be ready to get outta here, and glurg spin'to if you have to."
"Aye, Klargen."  He shot back, fearlessly.
He wouldn't go anywhere without me, and I knew it.  Plus, he knew I knew it.
Surveying the bottom of AMHRF, I was aware of the claustrophobic effect of rising walls that slope inward towards you, from my pseudo-climbing days.  Here, it was in all cardinal directions.  Everything above us closed to a small point, relatively, and very little ambient light reached that orifice.  It was a pucker of absolute dark above us.  The empty smoothness of the deck was as disconcerting, because this place used to be the shit, as far as I'd heard.  Unsettlingly boring.
I decided to use my real voice.
"Thank you for receiving us.  May we obtain repairs?"
My Greys kept a 360 perimeter, and feathered to outside the Tinglev's umbra, so that my engineer guys were perhaps 40 meters back, past the warp-bubble nacelles and then some - just inside the range of the only light sources - our landing markers.
Multiple echoes of my voice for a millisecond, soon deflected away, sadly muted.

A low-frequency rumble and several metallic 'clunks' belied a nauseous physical jolt, and the platform - the entire deck - began to descend, with all of us on it.  We could feel, and see, the relative motion downwards, hose lines snaking along the walls, soon merging into pumps, or obvious valves, or precise interior stairways cut into the rock, or fuel fixtures and provisioning cranes tucked in, tight against the walls.
Still no life-forms.  I could smell sweaty animals, or anxiety - adrenaline!  (Probably just me.  My Greys don't actually perspire.)

Level 5 was safe, as far as we knew.  But we weren't staying there, according to Them.
Fucking nerve-wracking few seconds.  I had to do something other than stand there, looking not-Klargen at all.
"2 X 2 cover, echelon right," I ordered privately, and we all jogged in a sweep toward the right, relative to the Tinglev.  (Order Blue suits shimmer a bit when you're running, reflecting ambient colors, which is great camouflage.)  I felt the XO ordering WEPS to cover us with ship's weapons, as well.
"XO, anything on passive sensors?"  I privated, puffing in the cool air as we reached the perimeter, halting, the wall just a few meters beyond.
Cool rock face, punctuated with curious infrastructure.  Nothing to betray what history had unfolded.
We seemed to be moving at office elevator slow-speed.  Kinda cool for a platform so large.
"Nil-paht, Klargen."
"Understood." (I could see him - mentally - on the edge of the Rotatey-Chair, straining for information on Visual Mode.)



In the immediate months after the kerfuffle of 'Beatrix and Her Minions of Misanthropy,' I was a bit self-destructive.  Not directly, but... took lots of risks, because I didn't exactly want to live with the foul offal of that situation.  (I had some fun friends.  We had some great times.)
I parked my car for nearly 9 months and rollerbladed just about everywhere - work, school, the supermarket, friend's houses.  (That lasted until I had E. coli, and my thigh muscles shrank considerably from 8 days of unconsciousness and relative exsanguination.  It really should've killed me, in retrospect.  I couldn't walk for a week after, and gaining the weight back took over a year.  Here's the Short Story of that night.  Before Near Death:  Part One.)

That last rollerblade adventure in Bellingham was a doozy.  I closed the cooling kitchen, now whisper-clean, and dropped a tab of good acid as I laced up my blades.  Had my 'shift-drink,' or two, and set out to the south, down 32nd St and then, Old Fairhaven Parkway.  (I wanted a good mile or two rolling by before it kicked in.  I purposely picked 'the long way' to get a good workout and to 'see' the night at a good clip.  I headed south to get northwest, eventually.)  The night was cold and clear, relatively quiet on a 'school night.'  Very little traffic.  I was moving very quickly on 8 axles.
Somewhere, in the last blocks before Fairhaven proper, my world expanded and I willingly joined it, as an extension of the planet itself, alive and conscious and serene.
Smell and taste and vision and memory converged into a loving warmth.  Fully aware, to the point of hyper-awareness.  Tiny buds on the trees seemed so bursting with future life, cats in windows watched intently as I rolled by, and a raccoon family hustled across the Parkway in the wee hours past midnight.  They knew I was no threat.  My balance and relative road-grip were delicious, and I strode out, cutting swaths of pavement with every stretch.  Reminded me of speed skating.
I had learned to spot bad asphalt and loose gravel from way off by then, so there were no surprises for me, even on a 'new' road.

Actually, I had learned this perceptive skill from Beatrix - in early April of 1991, when we were driving east on I-84 near Bridal Veil, Oregon - on our way to Carson Hot Springs.  The Columbia Gorge, in its vast grandness, lay ahead of us - a mighty, silvery river callous with wind-swept waves, dense mixed forests in clear taffetas of relief, chunky shadowed-brown cliffs leading to soaring mountains, and the road itself, full of movement, humanity, and color...  a rich scene.   I'd bet a few bucks that Peter Gabriel's "Big Time" was playing on the cassette player.  That album filled my days back then.
She noticed something ahead and spoke aloud, "There's a shoe hanging in that tree."  She pointed it out, a quarter mile away, at least - a white hi-top tennis shoe, hanging in the top of a tall fir a few hundred feet off the interstate.  It appeared to be laced to something, or maybe it'd fallen from an airplane and got stuck very high in that tree.
"What the fuck,"  I thought.  "All this and she sees 'that.'" 
It was, indeed, a shoe in a tree.  Infinite details in our windshield, and THAT one is what she locked onto, and mentioned.  In a natural wonder-scape, she found the synthetic.
Wow, I thought.
Took me a while to figure out how she did it, and it came down to this:  Some things break the natural pattern.  Some things don't belong where they are.  Some things are inherently obvious if you haven't learned to 'tune them out.'  Some things are obvious when you're tuned in.
This way of seeing was to become a mantra of mine for a long time.  I consciously tried to perfect that skill, to the point at which I could see a ball bearing in the middle of Samish Drive as I motored by at 35 mph.  (Yes, it was there, we stopped, I backtracked, and checked it out.)  Uncanny.  A fucking ball-bearing.



As I rolled up into Fairhaven from the south that long lost night ago, I was in this focused, heightened mode.  I noticed everything, patterned or not, because I had a become a cognizant part of it.  I was alive.  The mist seemed to be a friendly blanket, rolling off the bay just beyond the curl of the hill northwest.  A newer sidewalk provided a grid of rhythmic noise that allowed me to determine my relative speed, providing echoes that painted the road ahead and aside in auditory 3-D radar.  The arcs and planes of houses, the dampening of sounds by shrubbery and trees, the cave of space above, they all allowed me to see much more than my eyes alone could process.  Delicious.  I was truly Here/There.
Rounding the dog-leg bend near the street access to Boulevard Park, I noticed red and blue flashes reflecting off the trunks of trees and the telephone and power-wires ahead of me on Marine View Drive, and instead of heading up State Street, I decided to investigate.  Looked like fun.
Whee!
There were at least 6-7 BPD cars, and at least as many uniformed policemen fanned across the road, obviously intent on finding something.  I slowed down and approached the roadblock, tripping hard by now.  The intense beams of their flashlights were combing through the shrubbery and blackberries on either side of the road, like radioactive swords of lemony light.  They were searching for something lost, that much was obvious.  They had intent.  And I felt truly separate from it.

Skidding to a crisp stop at the first man-in-blue, I shielded my eyes from his Mag-lite.
"Evening Officer, what's up?"  I asked, panting just a bit, then stretching my legs to eke the calcium through...  I had a Strawberry-Kiwi Snapple in my bag and fetched it for a quick drink.
"We've got an escaped suspect spotted down here.  Did you see anyone south of here, along the road?"
"Not at all, Officer.  Not a soul.  I would've seen any movement, seriously."  (And I meant any movement, consciousness, or energy that didn't fit the pattern I was now intimate with.)  I'm sure I looked rather odd - a boomerang strapped to my hip, camouflage gym bag over both my shoulders, black beret, black rollerblades, tiny pupils.  I'm fairly sure he knew I was on something, but it wasn't his - or anyone else's - problem.  No harm, no foul.
"Where're you headed?" he inquired, obviously bored.
"My girlfriend's condo up on State," I said, gesturing up and right, "This way looked more interesting."
"If you see anyone, call 911."
"I will," I said, and skated though the discotheque gauntlet.   Said perp was gone - a ghost to the night.

"These aren't the droids you're looking for.  Move along."  Obi-Wan Kenobi.

The remainder of the night was filled with dreamy star-gazing - waiting for an auroral outburst that didn't come - feeling the crawling mist, the acrid aroma of saltwater, the gaze of conifers, occasional car exhaust.   And reliving troublesome memories.   One thing I was always sure of, on acid, was that 'consciousnesses are always connected.'  I knew when cats looked at me, and I knew when I'd been recognized by them.  (Some of my routines were interlaced, even though I changed my routes regularly.)  I knew when old consciousnesses could see me, or feel me.


What time is it?
It's about time.

I rolled the I Ching, regarding my seemingly obsessive relationship with Beatrix, in early 1993.  My question was "Why do I still think about her, what is the meaning?"
I got Hexagram 43, Kuai - 'The Breakthrough.'  There are many different interpretations of the hexagrams, but this one made sense.
Nonetheless, I didn't like it.  We rolled it up, yet again.  Got the same thing.  "Inconceivable."
Man, Oh man, that's some crazy odds.  Cray-2-the-Zed. What is 64 X 64 - 1?  Am I doing this right? 
So I rolled it again, same question. "Why Beatrix, what is it?"
Kuai.  The Breakthrough.
Those odds get unreasonable at 'three-in-a-row.'  With 64 possible combinations each time, do we even want to 'go there?'

Rolling that I Ching,
The Lake Over Heaven falls,
Three times in a row.  
from - Mango Dobbins' "A Haiku or Two."

The platform began to accelerate downwards, and we looked back and forth to acknowledge it.  We dropped and braced ourselves for a sudden stop.  We were way 'south' of level 6 at this point, moving like a freight elevator now; a confident, controlled dip.  I could hear the leather of my boots squeaking as my weight decreased, relative to the drop-rate.  The walls were vertical, and passed by in a smooth carpet of random earth-tones, or machinery parts, or a blend.  A faint lime-ish light came up from the rim, and I turned to my Security Team, and...

We dropped.  Faster.  My stomach began churning.  This didn't look good for us.

Watching the walls go by, in my periphery, I noticed my Greys fainting onto the slick silvery-grey surface.  Not in a violent way, more of a graduated loss of control.  Panic!  What the Xerox copier is going on?  Lemony flashes of partially-lit platforms, built-in to the walls went by, easily large enough to rest the Tinglev, do repairs.
"XO, spranx!"  ("Talk to me!")
"Klargen, herp speen toh-na spilt glurgen derp pah-neen, pamp do' rits..."
"Understood.  Very well."
So they were all unconscious, except the XO.  Maybe his mem-trans with me had something to do with that, I thought.  I'm so narcissiticalist!  (It means I'm lithely muscular and pathetically vain and aware of both those issues.  Gorgeous.)
The floor continued to fall.  It was getting almost unbearably fast.  The light became much brighter as we fell.  I could hear the awkward hum-drops of the air as it broke onto older, deadened cavities in the wall.  Some seemed to have weapons emplacements, I couldn't be sure - they really did go by quickly.  I laid down to protect my organs.  It took an effort.  The light-
"XO, set passive recording, full spectrum.  Filter limelight."  It was a tenuous push.
"Bonx, Klargen."  (I could hear the Rotatey Chair attempt to accommodate his skinny ass in near free-fall as he attempted SCIENCE controls from the interface on the armrest.)

And then we stopped, the Tinglev was behind us, about 60 feet to the bow, what a beautiful ship, and the creaks of hidden hydraulic systems betrayed themselves.  Rapid-ionic jets had fired to stabilize the Tinglev's relative fall, automatically.  Numerous seismic-level cogs in the vast platform did their thing, and we could feel it.  A very controlled stop.  Glassy, slimy grey walls.  And nothing else, except a doorway rimmed in intense light-green light.  About the size of a garage door.  For a big car.
"Klargen?"
"XO, what've you got?  Ni'l smeer pap' oh yetzt."  ("Don't sugar coat it.")
"Level 8, Klargen.  We're at Level 8."  The air was so thin I struggled to keep up with it.  Air pressure was dropping precariously.  The veins on my neck stood out, I could feel them.
"What time is it, XO?" I growled, for no reason whatsoever.   What the hell did that mean, Level 8?
"It's the time, Klargen.  Nothing is known from here on.  No humans allowed below Level 5," he reminded me.  He need'n't push it, but he did.
"Understood.  Very well."  Sphincters were puckering between the two of us.
And then the light dimmed, and the door smipped open, very mechanically, sucking what little air was left for a niptuk.  My eyes took a second to adjust...  blurry.

It was like a symphony.  Light being sounds, colors rendering shapes, new wondrous beings with old, familiar greetings, all erupted as they filed out.   (I can hardly describe it.)  Two distinguished Greys, a 4-foot lobster-looking thing - with a serious bearing - and three slinky shapes, moving like they were disguised by the rock, mere lines against the continuity of the walls.  They never stood still, and they seemed hepped up, on something, elsewhere.  Barely in the present.
I knew it all.  Seen it before, somehow.
"Call me Klargen," I chuckled, at first.  "Do not harm my crew.  There would be... repercussions."

They - probably the older Greys -  punished me for that, and pushed back, hard "There are no Klargens here."
My temples ached with that one.  The three line-beings kept up their intricate dances.
"But we will do your repairs.  Your crew is safe."
What?  Why?  Who are you? 
And they didn't offer shit.  Lobster-guy sputtered a bubble, nothing I could understand.
Nothing, then?  

"It's all fine.  Repairs will be underway."  The XO and I both heard, sub-audible.

I couldn't tell who sent me that message.  It sounded like an authority, and I was in their space, so to say.




"Though his mind is not for rent,
Don't put him down as arrogant.
His reserve - a quiet defense,
Riding out the day's events -
The river."

"Tom Sawyer," Rush at their best, 1981.

What time is it?

It's the time.  No time like the present.  Time waits for no one.  Time does its job.  Time is money.

It's night-time.  Sweet dreams, comrades.