This one's longer than usual, and a little mushy. But it's still True™.

======================

This is a story I’ve told before. It’s worth telling again. It’s one of those stories that one looks back on, perhaps in an attempt to define one’s life.

Thanks to a series of events too involved to go into here, I applied for the position of resident advisor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign at the end of my sophomore year. Before heading back to my hometown of Romeoville, Illinois for the summer of 1990 -- the last summer I would ever spend there, although I didn’t know it at the time – I received news that I would indeed be working as an RA in Lundgren Hall, part of the so-called Triad complex, at the corner of Fourth and Gregory, at the start of the fall semester.

One of my responsibilities as an RA was to be the “on call” Housing Department official every 10 days or so: when on duty, I would be called in during emergencies, and would walk a set of rounds throughout “the Triad” several times during the night. These rounds, over time, acquainted me with the names, faces, and regular habits of the residents of the dormitory system under my watch. In time, I came to learn that the residents of Barton 2 really liked the BoDeans, and Lundgren Ground was dirty and noisy, and Clark 4 was sparse and quiet, like a tomb, or a church. I felt a little like a beat cop, even though I was really just a guy with a clipboard and a university badge and a smile who would cruise his territory and learn the idiosyncrasies of his particular path whether he wanted to or not. In short, I knew the place well.

One of the things I picked up on in that first semester was the fact that many of my residents had frequent guests. Encountering such ostensible anomalies as a woman in the all-male Lundgren or a man in the female-inhabited Clark or Barton was not at all uncommon, and I came to learn who the regular fixtures were in each building. I found myself mentally logging the faces and even the names of these regular visitors, rarely forgetting or confusing even a one.

One such archived face belonged to the boyfriend of Barb D., a woman who lived on Clark 3. Barb was a short, stocky landscape architecture major with copious freckles and a gorgeous mop of curly red hair. Her boyfriend was a resident of Lundgren 4, and every bit the archetypal U of I engineer – Coke-bottle glasses, white concert t-shirt, ever-present baseball cap. I saw this man many times, usually lounging on his girlfriend’s bed studying, as much a part of the room as the numerous R.E.M. posters covering the walls. Once in a while he would nod a silent greeting toward me, which I would return. Our roles were defined and cemented: I was the “straight” with the clipboard; he was the nerdball guest of my charge. No harm, no foul…and no further contact required.

A few months later, though, “further contact” was more or less thrust upon us. An utterly bizarre and somewhat melodramatic set of circumstances in the final week of December 1990 had surprisingly led me to become romantically involved with Kristin W., an RA at a neighboring dormitory. Thanks to an immediate personality conflict upon our first meeting months earlier, this was a woman I had come to consider something of an adversary, and as such, our burgeoning relationship surprised no one as much as I. We had gone from a state of unbridled animosity to one of equally intense passion in record time due to some remarkably coincidental scheduling: she and I, like many RA’s, had signed on to serve as hospitality staff for a massive conference being hosted by U of I over the Christmas break, and we wound up being assigned to work an overnight shift together in the same small office. We had each privately groaned about the inconvenience of getting “stuck” together for eight hours in a confined space, but as anyone who has seen a movie might expect, proximity led to discussion, which led to peace, which led each of us to take our newfound respect for each other a little further than it needed to go.

Thus, by the time students returned to campus in early January 1991, Kristin and I were an official item. One morning shortly thereafter, she informed me that her best friend had invited her to lunch that day in the dormitory’s cafeteria, and she asked that I accompany her, as said best friend’s boyfriend would be in attendance as well. I agreed, but figured it would be a fairly awkward “double date” of sorts, in which the two best friends would chat away, and the two tag-alongs – this boyfriend and myself – would sit in silence, unfamiliar with the nuances of the women’s discussion and strangers to each other.

Things were poised to become even more awkward once Kristin gave me a bit more information as to the identity of her best friend: it was Barb, the landscape architecture major from Clark 3. I recalled immediately that her boyfriend was the fellow I had seen numerous times and had virtually ignored, as he had me. I managed to keep from rolling my eyes, but I figured that I was in for a fairly dull lunch.

The noon hour arrived, and after being formally introduced to Barb and Jeramy, things proceeded exactly as I had expected them to: the women talked, and Jeramy and I did not.

And then came the moment.

I find it somewhat astonishing, given the fact that both Jeramy and I have excellent memories (especially when it comes to recalling seemingly insignificant bits of popular culture trivia), that neither of us to this day has been able to recall precisely what it was that I said during this moment. The closest we can get to pinpointing the momentous utterance is this: I muttered an obscure line from the 1980 Dino De Laurentiis production of FLASH GORDON as a sarcastic response to something one of the women said. This is the kind of thing I do all the time, and it is usually met with confused looks – or, at best, bemused expressions denoting a vague familiarity with what I’m saying -- from anyone in earshot, which is why I had taken to making such comments in a quieter-than-normal speaking voice. Since I generally made such comments for the sole purpose of amusing myself, keeping them fairly quiet seemed if nothing else the polite thing to do.

But this time, I was not only heard clearly…I was understood.

I looked up to see a face expressing neither confusion nor amusement. Through those impossibly thick glasses, wide blue eyes looked at me, conveying something akin to shock. Before I had time to process this expression fully, I felt my own eyes go wide as Jeramy spoke the next line of the movie, perfectly inflected, voiced to sound exactly like the actor who had originally spoken it in FLASH GORDON. And right then, I knew what that shocked look had been about. I could read it clearly on his face: I was just thinking the same thing. And no one ever thinks that stuff but me.

I knew that such was the thought in his head…because I was thinking it, too.

Barb and Kristin moaned “Oh, no” in unison, their tones suggesting the question: “What have we done?”

What, indeed.

Jeramy and I saw quite a bit of each other over the next few weeks, doing the “getting to know you” thing, comparing pop culture chops, and basically making each other laugh our asses off. Within a matter of months, we were using the “best friend” tag for each other, and still do to this day, over sixteen years later.

It’s fairly ironic that the person I have to thank for arranging the meeting that led to this remarkably significant relationship is no longer within my sphere of contact. In point of fact, she dramatically removed herself from my life after a rather unfriendly break-up no more than a week or two after Jeramy and I quite accidentally stumbled across our common ground. If I were the kind of man who insisted that everything “happens for a reason,” I would be forced to draw a bold causal line between the unlikely, inexplicable whirlwind romance with Kristin that seemed strange even as it was happening…and the strongest, truest friendship I have ever known or could ever have asked for.

I’m not that kind of man, so I won’t do that. But if you really press me on it, I’ll reluctantly admit that there have been times, in the last decade-and-change, when my friendship with Jeramy has seemed almost to be a palpable, radiant thing. The time his voice steadied me through the most emotionally chaotic day of my life. The day I stood with him at the altar of his marriage. The first time I held his newborn daughter, my goddaughter, in my arms while his hand rested proudly, confidently upon my shoulder. During each and all of these moments, I have thought about the long odds against our ever having become friends at all. And as I shake my head and smile at the fact that sometimes the universe sits up like an obedient dog and delivers exactly what you need, whether you know it or not…I say a little silent thank-you to Kristin, a woman I barely knew, who breezed in and out of my life so quickly that she would barely be a footnote today, were it not for the role she played in nudging my path in such a way that it would cross Jeramy’s.

Some would say that Kristin isn’t the one I should be thanking…but, as I said, I’m not the kind of man who could thank anyone or anything else, and my mother always taught me to say “thank you” when the situation called for it, so it has to get directed at somebody. That sounds a little silly, but it’s a hard thing to explain.

Jeramy would understand.

Nice story Frank. Did he by any chance marry Barb?

Jeramy did not marry Barb. It was not meant to be.

This is going to sound like a joke, but I honestly mean it. That's one of the best love stories I've ever read.

On a side note, there's a level of detail in your True Stories that I envy. Keep them coming.

Yeah, another winner, Frank!

The whole story was interesting and I enjoyed reading it. But for me the best part of the tale was "Barb was a short, stocky landscape architecture major". Short. Stocky. Landscape architecture. That is superb. A perfect little description. And just the kind of thing that tickles my funny bone.



Well done.

I don't take that as a joke. I do love my best friend very much. I'm not sure where I'd be right now if I hadn't met him.

Nowhere good, I'm thinking.

Trevor and Dave are so nice to me.

We try.

I probably shouldn't have posted this one. It's pretty personal. But Jeramy seems okay with it. He may join us here soon.

What a wonderful and touching story this was, one that triggered thoughts of my own life and how little things can become life-altering events of the very best kind. (The biggest for me is a car accident I had years before meeting Mrs. Taft. In a strange way, without that accident - which RUINED MY LIFE for a good several years - I'd not have encountered the most wonderful, painfully awesome thing in my entire life.) This is the stuff of life.

I have, in fact, joined you here. Be afraid, be very afraid.

Rest assured, I don't mind this story being posted at all. Frank tells it brilliantly in my humble opinion.

Great story, well told.

I love this story. Well done.

Much obliged.

(And thanks for giving me the opportunity to fix a couple of typos.)

This is the gayest thing I've ever written.

But I'm okay with that.

I'm glad you put these back up, Frank. The best friends are people who remember such things. Without our bards, we have no culture.

I still really enjoy reading this story. It is detailed and expected and unexpected.

The Thread of Heaven: in memory of the Domies

I was excited we've found each other via the Internet. This is to my friend, Heaven:

your generous gift is going to the service of generosity in the coming week. This is how we can be close: let me tell you about the Journey of the Thread of Heaven (which is TOTALLY what the name "Vado Bujinka"'s name means in her culture; see, the person who inspired Vado and her novella most directly & originally is going to receive the first purse made from this dormant thread you share with us. This bit about the name could not have occured without a person who helped create that character in the dormant recesses in my adolescent mind: smart, strong, rebellious, yet with a bohemian austerity and something undeniable as class. A very attractive package.

Now flash forward so many years later, when my unorthodox friends introduced me to their lives openly, in a way dignified, earthy, and enormously stimulative to the imagination. The Dome was a place romantic in character, secreted in the woods, the casual brain child of my friend C. J., who saw it for what it was: the perfect place to create a flesh and blood facebook for anyone cool enough simply not to squeal. It was a nexus to every hip idealized American scene: early 60s New York City, late 60s San Fransisco. Rock and roll---but indeed every kind of music, poem or film, interesting book or personal experience related in the unforgettable sense of his breath and body wash---never had a better friend than "C.J.", who passed on What It's All About, as likely to hit you with a question as a diabtribe there beside San Fransisco concert organizer Bill Graham's larger than life poster, there beside the workstation where he did his jobs and his labors of love with passions that seemed to dictate to him as much as he seriously pursued their scheduling. He was annoyed with the bullshitters who just didn't get how well this world could easily run, but he never believed the world had no place for we the dreamers of the dreams.


His amors throughout life carried on as friends, some living there, others knowing it as a place of safe haven. It was also home to the most earth friendly, spirit-balancing parties I ever found, a more manageable Woodstock of sorts on special days and a quiet place to cycle souls or take in a movie or everyone cook, draw, read, play instruments, whatever the several acres could do to accomodate. No one I often found myself out there, in a place that was the road map of Cool Itself, a place I wanted to live, many times, and my spirit will touch forever. I see why only a few could ever live there at a time: keeping everyone out there spread in homes and lives and opportunities kept an anarchic spirit alive, free from ego trips and cult seige mentality.



I never saw someone
so wounded explore the possibilities of love with greater abandon; I was privileged to have been befriend by so free a spirit.

Could two girls love one another and the same man? This was a theme; some would say, the recurrent, reconfiguring plot. He loved someone, and he loved and lived with someone else, while all three of them, save for a wife's disdain for scrutiny; could well have stayed together, but no, a baby was due someone, and love intervened with the machinations of other gods...

One summer the someone left to explore the language of native Arubans, and I took the occasion of her trip to begin creating for her the first draft of my fantasy, featuring Vado Bujinka, about whose name much could be related, involving Italian and Ninjitsu, and my gentle student experiences engrossing myself with a version of first hand knowledge of both.

I never DIDN't want them together---Brother Hawk's spirit watches ov er and communicates mind-to-mind with Vado, particularly as featured in the first five chapters, written as themed by the chakras. His role occurs more on the spiritual plane, encountering more nebulous, analogous types of malevolent beings, as she enters the crystal bearing cave beneath the earth in the sixth and seventh parts. I was inspired by Homer, Conan comic books, and the ecletic music handed to me by Brother Hawk himself for the sake of passing along its sacred power to set a background of joy in our existence.

Strangely, there was an instant of Vado's prayer for her grandmother, which was too painful for my muse; in fact, such a great many of our friends had the story at the disposal, she was at some point convinced her pain had been exploited. (My own maternal grandmother died the November before). We talked about it, and she encouraged me to keep the story alive anyway, and I believe we may have stayed friends yet another summer.

Then loves found, loves lost, and with true love yet intact and restless, parties parted company one depressing August in 2001, when the dark side of falling in love with someone who makes another choice haunted me one day with thoughts of joining Bush's military industrial complex, and yet, my friend's seeming success was becoming halved by love denied. But Vado's mother stayed close to Brother Hawk, even while he decided he would socially fence off the Dome in his grief and betrayal.

For seven months, my creativity went from a flurry to a slowly grinding, sporadically brilliant performance of less daily consistency. I was happy, but something was very out of tune after August, 2008: I thought we'd come out of Comic Con strong, still creating from completed issues and songs. For me, this gaze into the viscitudes of fortunes in the material world was something to be broken: I tried by putting my stalled interests on hold to become the assistant of Joe Phillips, whom I'd met at Comic Con. That experience, while yielding some shared meals but no pay and some discouragement, would've been different perhaps if I'd found facebook a week or two earlier; but eventually, that empowered me to great effect. But some ill mystery haunted me when I was alone and not feeling inspired (chalk it up to trying to do it straight all the time). Try as I might, I could not create a comic book, record an album, or write an actual story!


Seven months after the fact, the man who'd introduced me to the concept of building a World Access radio channel of brilliant Americana and world music and independent voices, who'd taught me about polyamory, Heinlein, commercial mediocrities and wicked centralization schemes circa 2000 had died without pain of a heart attack in the arms of Vado's mother, who shares Vado's keen insight and search for lost language (a lost language was the "maguffin' at stake in her solo journey) , someone who stuck out grad school and made time to help Brother Hawk grow organic gardens in their new little earthship made by their own endeavors, in the years after the geodesic domicile fell into other hands.

Angela cycled souls with her, loved her as did I, and thanks her for opening the world by her side in a beautiful time. She will make a new purse, after we heard in our reunion with the inspiration for the figure who roamed the Time of Timeless Time with the onomatapeia tongue of Dinkadoo present in the sounds as she climbed and explored the flesh of the Living Land. The purse is meant to carry whatever needs to be remembered.

to d'n'a:

I really hope we can collaborate on the Spanish chapters of my sequel (of sorts; it diverges from ch. 58 on, but incorporates themes that finished the 13 final chapters of Cervantes' original sequel.

I just found our girl S_______ again; that magnificent friend and quasi-adopted family member was wife, in custom, to the one man i considered my older brother (and, as cast by circumstance, as the rival for my affections Twice), the man that carried the spirit of the 1960s in his life till it ended on a magnificent date, 8-11-08, a beautiful palindrome that spoke volumes about a man who loved to observe dates,who had a heart attack in her arms and left this plane without pain, save for that in wake of his passing.

On 3-11-09 word finally arrives at the Apartment of Ideas, via a facebook "re-friending", to paraphrase my pal Grant. heaven's thread is not only part of a comforting gift, but inspiration to revisit the novella they inspired in 2000, and see the lead character's name, in her own culture, as "Journey of Heaven's Thread", perhaps a more fitting title, even, than the original "The Remote Chance," as in, perhaps, "The Remote Chance she'd end up our girlfriend if he didn't want her as his own.

Well, as I've never quite said before, intention, especially while intoxicated with muses and mysteries, plays a lot of tricks like the Coyote Spirit, yet I've never failed to live to see a day when it again all makes sense. you only need look at your daughter to see that proposition take flesh and blood, amen? Things result in our amazement, and life reveals itself to be a happy surprise. But that, is another lead character.

Chivalrously Yours, me, and through it will be weaved the Thread of heaven.


Finally, to Vado:

Thank you for letting me see into your world! Thank you for telling me to be bold and open up! Thank you for sharing with me the Dome Tribe.

Labels: brotherhood, elegies, freedom, hippies, love stories


Thursday, February 26, 2009
The Stars

The Stars
written by Lue Lyron copyright 2009 wingbat tunes/integr8d soul productions
Unrealised dreams
Hold on to the best of you
The midnight seems to sow
The heart of human art
For your grace and beauty
I draw for you a pivotal sign
Hope springs from nothing to illuminate


The stars we play the card
Hold it still then lay it on the table hard
The stars whatever your intentions are
The chain goes round...hold on to the handlebar.


Man as matter’s slave
The shadows on the cave
The light outside
reveals for you another world
Lift, uplift your gaze
There’s time before the setting sun
The clouds, the lake, ambitions wake
To find out that we really are

The stars we play the card
Hold it still then lay it on the table hard
The stars whatever your intentions are
The chain goes round...hold on to the handlebar.

Shouldn't this be in its own thread? Seems worth the effort to me. Nice work, luelyron.

Monk, you wanna moderate your forum, or what? I mean, what do we not pay you for?

Thank you, Frank. Okay. I felt very modest.