Tabula Rasa

My Blank Pages

By guest author V. Montgomery Thorp

I was like a pilgrim wandering in the wilderness. Lost, disorientated and confused. There I was with D.J. and Thunderchicken, newly returned from Vietnam, coming down from an acid trip, at a Sierra Nevada rest stop with a sign that said, “the Donner Party was here.”

I was lurking in the bushes mistakenly thinking I was safely concealed when D.J. reached into his lunch bag and lasered a citrus fireball like Nolan Ryan that crunched right between my eyes. As the stars twinkled in my vision I saw something from my past and the stars formed a word: Tabula Rasa.

Where in my life journey had I heard that before? I had been brought up to have faith in a God through recitations, incantations and indoctrinations that had been shattered by the ungodly sights I had experienced from Saigon to San Diego to Peculiar, Missouri. A crusty plump old philosophy professor had said, “what would you do if you could go back in time before those unspeakable delusions had been programmed into you. What would you think? What would you do?”

What would you call that I wondered?

“Tabula Rasa,” he said after taking a long chug of Jack Daniels. “That’s what you need.”