The Trickster Diaries, part 3/Chapter 6
It was in that “open gate” spirit that I began taking down the art I’d hung only a few months earlier, methodically reassembling the boxes I’d flattened, loading them back up, stacking them in corners. We’d land safely somewhere, me and Hank and Linda. I knew we would.
And I knew something else, sometimes, free to wander in the garden the gate protected. I knew it so deeply and perfectly that the night it happened in the world outside the gate, it was as if it had already happened, or had always been happening, wormholing its way across realities.
Me: (Answering the phone) Hey, kid.
Melissa: What if I just bought you a house?
Emptiness, or an aspect of it, is witnessing and interacting with the world — with experience and perception — from a uniquely untangled realm.
Think LSD. Or even high quality marijuana, several buds of which Tom, sitting across the aisle from me on the bus, has just placed in an envelope and handed me.
I sniff it. “Whoa.”
“Happy New Year, man,” says Tom. “Figured you could use a little ‘escape.’”
“Most definitely. Thanks, man.”
So I escape to YouTube. To schlock, ’50’s and ’60’s drive-in sci fi and horror, specifically, then to Gothic horror, same era. Then, advancing along in escape mode, I began making GIFs from a few of the sexier clips I’d downloaded, captioning them with made up Zen koans, posting on Ello.
One day, gliding and giggling through YouTube algorithm land, I discovered Yanet Garcia, Mexican TV weathergirl.
Listen, unless it’s coming from a safe and protected distance, most of us are not cool with unwanted sexual attention. But there is a flipside. There is a strange and extreme wing of moral code that totally condones, supports, endorses, demands and rewards tease.
Yanet had tease down. Her weather report segment was, in fact, a master course in sociobiology, and in teaching it, a quick, quarter turn to her left revealed that all you believed previously was illusion.
That was my interpretation, anyhow, and I was eager to share. So I created GIFs of Ms Garcia doing her weathergirl routine and captioned them with dialogue between her (in Spanish) and her friend, Zen Master Noguchi (English).
As anticipated, I immediately lost a few female followers on Ello. But that, of course, was part of the game. The women who dropped me were offended, even outraged, pigeonholing the concept as sexist and anti #MeToo. It was neither. It was a series designed to do exactly what John did in El’s experimental art class, circa ’99…
