Thanks for all the birthday wishes guys!. I actually forgot until some of you reminded me. (Gee, thanks.) Oh, and I think my daughter, Kristina, fixed the email notification problem. See if you start getting the post feeds, and, if you don’t, she added an email subscribe widget on the homepage. Below is a photo I took at her big event Friday. They gave me a HUGE goody bag. Thanks for joining us! Check out Kristina’s blog, Pretty Shiny Sparkly. Thanks, Kristina!
I read, in the most recent Scientific American, that marijuana has done wonders for the treatment of recalcitrant epilepsy in children (and I’m sure in adults, too). Just like Erik said, cannabinoids without the THC that causes a high, works well and is very underappreciated and underutilized in many diseases and disorders. Sigh.
Hours went by, johnny went up & down stairs many times without any mishap. until about 9 oclock at night, my youngest girl and I where in the top hall beside the stairs playing with our cat Elvis, he was doing funny cat stuff making us laugh, when johnny appeared at the bottom of the stairs, he began walking up them and he too began laughing at our cat being funny, then next thing we saw johnny falling forward and his hands grabbing the stairs to stop himself. nothing serious, just like a slight misplacement of his footing,
Erik comes in with a LOT of noise! Kate, what is all this CRAP in here? (I’ve been eating chocolate chip oatmeal cookies, the sugar buzz is making it “sticky” for Erik.)
Erik shows a book – this is the last year of entries we’ve done together. (Wow, it’s been a year!) He closes the book, sets it on an empty shelf. This is the “We’re starting something new, now.”
Erik says, Gorgeous, I have been yelling at you the past two weeks, didn’t you hear me!?
Yeah, I did actually, and thank you for not pranking my family.
Yeah, I couldn’t actually. (Oh yeah, I had set up some no-nonsense rules around my visit.)
Tell them!
Oh yeah. The very minute I got back to my house, I started to smell rotting garbage. I was running around the house like a lunatic looking for the source of the smell until my partner told me she didn’t smell anything. That’s when I clued into Erik’s calling card. I’m just grateful it was garbage and not farts.
Yeah if it was farts, you girls would’ve been blaming it on each other! (Erik tips on to one butt cheek to let one rip – such a boy!)
So dude, what now? Year one is finito – Let’s go back to the Aliens stuff – I fucking love the aliens stuff! And stop asking why! (I asked why we needed to close a book on the old stuff if we were just going to go into Pinky again.)
See, this is what’s going on – we’re transforming the planet into a new alien world! Wooooooooah! (spreads his fingers in a “jazz hands” for effect. Okay, not “gay” jazz hands, fine. Magical, masculine woo-woo gestures. I give Erik an energy punch for using “gay” pejoratively. I won’t tell ya where I thumped him. I’m the medium, dude, quit criticising my choice of words!
Okay, here’s the thing: All these people, they’re asking “WHAT does it all MEAN!!??” Meaning, you know, Life, the Universe and Everything. (Great book, by the way.)
And then other folks just start to wrap their meat-minds around the cosmic craziness of it all, it’s like the Truth with a capital T negates their whole fucking existence as a human being in the here-and-now. (Shows me an eye, and the universe within the eyeball – it’s all very trippy, and truthy. Ha. Guess Erik’s a fan of the Colbert Report. I haven’t seen that show in years, but he’s talking about “truthiness”.)
Erik says, Yeah, it’s like The Truth, capital T, is this multi-faceted thing. The Truth doesn’t completely apply to you’re here and now, because you’re here and now isn’t all You are, the You with a capital Y. The incarnated you is like, you with a little y – it’s a small part of You. You get, gorgeous? (Erik wags a cigar at me in a Mad Men manner, teasing the feminist aspect of my personality.)
So the Truth with a capital T can make the you with a little y seem fucking insignificant… and the truthiness of it all is that the you with a little y IS insignificant if you shift the parameters of your judgement around – depending on how you look at time and space.
But here’s the thing: the little y you IS ABSOLUTELY-FUCKING VITAL. And it’s hard to explain that in Big T Truth terms, but here’s why I’m gonna try:
See, some peeps are seeing (the big universe, the capital T Truth) and they’re thinking, “Hey mofos, that big T Truth is what *I* want. What the fuck am I doing here?” And they’re thinking like maybe they want to check out. Not the way I did, necessairily, but they’re looking for an out. They just can’t fucking wait, and I get that. But here’s the thing I DIDN’T get while I was alive: how fucking important I really was.
Yeah, sure, I’ve gotten all internet famous. (breaths on his nails, polishes them in smug irony.) That’s not more important than who I was when I was little e Erik. And how “important” I am in whatever form depends on who you ask. There’s stuff I can do now, like make farts in your kitchen, and there’s stuff I can’t do now, and that fucking sucks for me, you know, when I’m not all zen and enlightened about all this shit.
Do you know that it’s a bit of a pain-in-the-ass ego thing to say that everything happens for a reason? Sometimes, shit happens. Sometimes, accidents happen. It tosses a new branch on to the branching-off realities, and to say that a thing that happened was Wrong is a bullshit judgement made by the little y you. Ya get me?
Yeah, I feel like you’re addressing the “everything is perfect” idea. What’s that book, the one Jesus wrote? (Erik laughs and asks if I mean The Bible.) NO, hang on… my friend was really into it but I couldn’t get past the first chapter. Oh right, A Course in Miracles.
Yeah, totally, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. Saying some shit like, “Everything is perfect” is EXACTLY the same as saying, “Shit Happens” or “Don’t worry, be happy!” And none of it really completely addresses the Truth, ‘cause that’s something you connect to, you download baby, you feel it.
A trasncendent moment.
Fucking enlightenment, baby!
The dark side of enlightenment: it can make your spirit itchy inside your body. Sometimes, your body can feel like an itchy wool sweater made from demon sheep yarn. When you get your transcendent moment, when you’ve felt up the Universe (oh erik) going to second base here on earth doesn’t quite cut it anymore. You are horny for the Universe. (oh erik!)
I’m going to pause a moment while Erik puts the universe back in his pants. Little u, dude.
So here it is: Every single thing exists for a reason. Every fruit fly, every energy parasite, every human being and every life and non-life form on every planet and in the big bad ocean of nothing inbetween. The Universe is a perfectly balanced equation – I think therefore I am. AAAAAAA! (He yells) DO YOU KNOW HOW FUCKING FRUSTRATING IT CAN BE TO TRY AND PUT THIS SHIT INTO ENGLISH????? (He shakes it off.)
There’s no brain here doing the thinking, but here I am. I exist for some people not for others. Their choice, whatever man.
So you gotta think, if you’re in an itchy body on earth, and you’re thinking that with your meat mind, you gotta know there is a reason you’re you, little y and big Y. The little y you on earth is just as important as the big Y you, and maybe you don’t know why that is, maybe you can’t know why that is, maybe it’s just something that’ll make sense later. Because IMPORTANCE is all about CONTEXT.
See, (Erik takes a diversion) that’s where the religious cults are gonna getcha – they ask you to trust. (He sings the verse from “The Book of Morman, the musical”) That’s kind of what God is going for… That was fucking funny by the way. Yeah, it was funny. A “rough” kind of humour, but I’m sure channeling erik fans can handle it.
And in a way, I kind of feel like a tool for saying the same thing. You’re fucking in a body, you’re on the fucking planet earth, you’re asking why. Maybe you’re thinking you’d rather just go back to being the big Y You. Maybe you want to cut a deal with God, and take yourself hostage “You tell me why I’m here or I’ll kill myself!”
Lemme tell ya, the Universe deals in irony.
If you think the big y You is more important than the little y you, you’re in for a fucking shock when you die, man. See, that’s the ironic thing about it, people can kill themselves for fucking philosophy, man!!! It’s nuts! (grabs his sack)
Check me out, I’m Michael Jackson! What! It’s still in my pants, man!
You know, for someone without an actual dick- Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m insatiable! Just keepin’ it real.
Philosophy, religion, blogs – it’s all the same, man. It’s all about a journey you go on with your mind – it’s different, but it’s not something you can judge as more or less important as making supper for your kids, or helping someone with their groceries, or even smiling at your neighbour. The living, you guys just like to glaze all over that.
See, and now I’m trying to talk in general terms, when each person really wants their own specific answer to their own existential crisis. (Erik takes a second to tease the 16 year old me on my gothed-out fasion choices, which is when I learned the term “existential crisis”.)
Sometimes, that’s just not a question with an answer for the little y you. (pulls up a talk I had with my mother a couple of weeks ago.)
A couple of weeks ago, my mother told me about a friend of hers who had recently visited (Fake name Mary.) Mary had become friends with my mother at the YMCA swim club, and had been going through a tough few years. She’d had a tough life actually, because she didn’t learn the same way that most people learn, and she doesn’t retain a lot of information.
After talking to Mary for a few weeks, my mother learned that Mary enjoyed playing the piano. She wasn’t very skilled, but she liked it, so my mother suggested she play the piano over at an assisted living facility for retired folks.
Mary did, but the residents were pretty critical of her imperfect performance. Then my mother suggested Mary play for the people living in the Alzheimer’s ward of a local nursing home. They wouldn’t notice Mary’s mistakes. This ward requires a thorough background check and references, and my mother made the connections for Mary and helped her through the process. My mother had volunteered in that home for years, and could vouch for Mary.
Mary has been playing for the people in that home ever since – a couple of years now. When Mary visited my mother last week, she had very exciting news: one of the long-term residents of the home, a lady my mother had known – a lady who had not connected with another human being in nearly a decade – had connected to Mary. She began to smile as Mary played the piano once a week. For months it was only that, just a quiet smile that wasn’t there before. Then, she spoke. She said, “Nice.” And smiled. It was the first time she’d spoken in over ten years.
So there it was for my mother, a tiny bit of her own universal importance, illuminated. For my mother, it was very little effort to do a nice thing and get Mary into a place where she could play the piano. She just did it to be nice to her swim buddy. Such a small thing for my mother, but a huge deal to Mary.
Then, there was Mary, playing the piano, imperfectly, for her own enjoyment – and it led to this one lady smiling and saying one word.
Such small things, yet they reflect the vastness of the personal experience, that person’s universe. How humbling is that to be able to do such a small thing that affects another so profoundly?
Erik says, If I was gonna come up with a catch-phrase, like something serious, it’d be this:
You are Important.
A’ight. Erik, out.
Thanks, E.
Here’s Kate’s site. Book a reading! PSYCHIC IN TRAINING
