In the span of just a few hours on the Ides of March, I was visited by both a messenger of God and one of Satan’s foot soldiers. We’ll save Satan for another day, so please won’t you join me for a little stroll through the slice of paradise known as the Chicago neighborhood of Lincoln Park?
- G.V
Dispatch: Ides of March 2023, a reminder that we're in a permanent state of pandemic.
I'd left my lighter someplace and needed to smoke a cigarette. I reckon "needed" is probably wrong and too strong a word, but the difference between my wants and needs at that moment was entirely negligible. The warm air hinted of spring, and the tree-lined street showed signs of life emerging from winter into a sunshine-filled day. Workers went in and out of these gorgeous old buildings, abandoned and in disrepair, soon to be homes to Chicago's well-to-do. I counted three such structures in this particular block alone.
My cigarette still needed lighting when two gentlemen in a paved yard across the way caught my eye. Flanking the entrance like guards at Buckingham Palace, they politely greeted this stranger entering their domain. One fellow had lost his left leg, a crutch tucked into his armpit standing in for the right leg that'd gone missing. I imagined a tour in Vietnam and a Purple Heart; the truth — diabetes. He offered me a light. From a wheelchair, the other man asked if I needed a lighter to take with me. I did, and it was the best dollar I've spent despite the half-full green plastic cheap-o only working half the time. Let me tell you about Brother Griffin and the wisdom he bestowed upon me, along with some homework to complete before our next meeting, which he referred to as "bible study".
He asked if I knew what the worst thing for a neighborhood was. I thought to myself, "Strollers?" But this obviously wasn't the answer, so I said I didn't know and let him tell me. "Abandoned buildings," he barked in dismay, pointing out the very three I had observed just moments earlier. He told a story about hearing a woman's screams and putting a call in to the police. For several days, she had been handcuffed in the basement by some thugs who'd been using the house across the street as a home office for their business dealings. He then asked if I was a believer, and I said yes — because I am. I reached into my shirt, showing him my sterling Jesus on a silver chain. I wear it for those moments when it feels like hopelessness starts to overtake my faith. Brother Griffin tells me, "That isn't God." I agreed that it certainly wasn’t.
He proceeded to walk me through highlights of the creation story in Genesis. Excited to share of my recent explorations into our beginning, I tell him about my learnings of Greek cosmogony and the creation myth involving the Orphic Egg and how I spent last summer going deep into the Pythagoreans and Gnostics. We talk about the importance of a name, which is something I think about quite a lot. Brother Griffin continued with his gospel, causing my brain's synapses to fire in acknowledgement that my innermost interests had been further illuminated by what appeared to be a messenger of God Himself.
Brother Griffin noted the three languages on Jesus’ cross — Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. He asked me if I knew what the original language spoken by Adam and Eve was. I'd wondered about the tree of knowledge and the tree of life, and the words God used to describe their fruits and the names given to the trees themselves. Bible scholars and historians have never actually aligned on what they really are. All I know is that the blueprint for world-building is inside, the seed or code for creating and sustaining life contained within. Brother Griffin suggested that I use the King James version of the Bible to light my path to greater understanding.
In parting, he casually asked that I come back to him with an answer to the question: What is the purpose of life? I struggle with knowing why I'm here — why we're all here — and knowing that I am. I have trouble being, so asking why sometimes feels like a question that's a million miles away, the answer infinitely farther.
A word on love, because I’m really feeling myself (and not myself) these days. Change is in the air. Something like spring is afoot, and my insides are in the process of getting unjumbled with a new psychoanalyst, though right now they’re more jumbled because it always gets worse before better. I’m taking the discomfort and unsettling realizations and wake-me-up-screaming nightmares as a sign of growth and the shedding of old skin. More than that, or more accurate rather, is to say how much it feels like I’m turning inside out. Experiences with a couple of recent new acquaintances have shown me how incredibly painful it is to be vulnerable but how very necessary it is to having new experiences in the first place. To say that I love these fellows is a stretch, but I love how pitiful and small and how big and beautiful I’ve felt coming away from our encounters. I know I’ll land someplace right-sized and perfectly where I need to be as a result of these connections, which thankfully occur with greater frequency in late-stage pandemic.
Boy, have Guthrie and I been through it. I wasn’t sure we’d make it out of 2005 alive, a year that saw a modern religious parable play out in real life and real time. How a Persian Jew and an Urban Pagan wound up ferrying the life’s belongings of a deported Chinese Canadian Born Again Christian from LA to Calgary, I’ll never know. And getting T-boned in the Mojave Desert on the first day of the drive really took the cake when all the cake wanted was to be left out in the rain. Maurice the 1989 Honda Accord was towed to a sidestreet in a dust-blown Grapes of Wrath scene where all of Guthrie’s things from his studies stateside plus a stint as an assistant at the illustrious and soul-crushing CAA likely were looted. None of us were in a position to do anything but walk away from it. We’d emerge all the wiser (once some time and distance stood between us and the calamitous collision).
The Sage (or Senex, in Latin) is a guide to the hero and a friend of fools. It makes sense that Mo, Guthrie, and I would be an inseparable unit for a period, coalescing around a shared seeking and hunger for wisdom and experience. Mo was a badass, becoming one of the world’s foremost champions of annotating the Internet — an idea with radical implications, as seen with his creating and launching genius.com and picking a highly visible fight online with Meta’s very own Zuck. Heroic indeed.
We were young Jedis to Guthrie’s wise elder. Just as much attuned to the past as transfixed by the future, he doled out visions and predictions and advice that seemed slightly suspect at the time, like a Werther’s excavated from grandpa’s cardigan sweater. He drew toilet doodles of people living in the not-so-distant future, his premonitions of a more vapid yet somehow advanced civilization proving to be spot on time and time again. I’d get them in the mail as postcards, some drawn during our hours-long calls that always left us wondering if the post-9/11 clicking sounds in our receivers were the NSA listening in. Guthrie dreamt up all kinds of products and cultural phenomena that eventually wound up being actual things. So many million-dollar ideas just some stoners’ passing fancies.
“What did you learn?” he’d inquire after a weekend at the sweat lodge (aka warehouse rave), already having had a multitude of these types of experiences being an ancient, or the OG of P.L.U.R. as I consider him now. His turn-of-the-millennium pre-party was technically my first rave, albeit in the Jonathan Edwards common room and done by midnight. I saw his all-knowing furrowed eyebrow, that of a concerned Roman, from across the dance floor. You could tell he knew how the future would unfold, and how he shouldered the world’s squandered potential. Ever the optimist though, he somehow lived in between reality and dreams, shepherding the seekers to understanding the true nature of things, just as the fates would have it.
Somewhere between the physical body and our virtual selves exists a space made of portals. This space is a computer desktop, the portals but digital versions of the paper file folder. Here’s what mine looked like mid-pandemic:
Every time Lana Del Rey releases an album, it seems like it coincides with some monumental moment in my life. Norman Fucking Rockwell came out right around my 39th birthday, my first full listen taking place on a day when the words “blind” and “rhythm” kept flashing in my mind, taking me to Lisbon’s waterfront only to discover the Casa dos Bicos, home to Blindness author Jose Saramago’s Foundation. Lana was the perfect soundtrack. And now, hearing “Kintsugi”, a track from her latest album, has unzipped me.
Think by the third of March, I was cracked open
Finally, the ground was cold, they wouldn't open
Brought by the sunlight of the spirit to pour into me
There's a name for it in Japanese, it's "Kintsugi"They sang folk songs from the '40s
Even the fourteen-year old knew "Froggie Came A-Courtin"
How do my blood relatives know all of these songs?
I don't know anyone left to know songs that I sing[Chorus]
That's how the light gets in
That's how the light gets in