THE GLASS DOORS
CHAPTER 33-40
CHAPTER 33
Relinquish
I was out of the commode, so to speak. It felt great. I was still floating, right side up from my perspective, but downward from where I had started. The journey was gentle and even-paced much like an Alpine funicular ride. Honestly, it didn’t matter where I landed, because anything was better than where I had just come from.
While I was floating gently downward, I considered some more ideas that could formulate new meditations. One notable concept was that of the Hero Sequence. Where I had just come from had too many political and social elements that reminded me of the human race, and the realization was fairly disheartening. I remembered that part of the reason I felt it was my cosmic duty to “fix” the world was because it was obvious that humans weren’t going to do it themselves. Humans had always had issues with the concept of masculinity and how it was expressed socially, but in Kerplunck masculinity was put under the microscope, so to speak, and it got me thinking about what ‘made the man’.
When I was a kid, it was the 1980s and the media culture was geared for positive male role models and displays of healthy masculinity. Good men used their aggression and emotion productively to bravely protect women and children. This was the message from He-Man in Masters of the Universe, and it was echoed by characters like Flint in G.I. Joe, as well as Lion-O in Thundercats. The male protection wasn’t about keeping women under their thumb evidenced through those same children’s shows which had realistic – and far from heavy-handed – portrayals of heroic women, including He-Man’s Teela and She-ra, G.I. Joe’s Lady Jaye and Scarlet, and Thundercat’s Cheetara and WilyKit, among many others.
I liked the media messages in those children’s cartoons. Men and women weren’t political and economic adversaries, but rather, synergistic partners. This felt natural and right to me. Slowly, media messages changed, and later it was easy for me to blame the Kerplunckians for it because in my perception an evil force had made the world a much worse place, culturally.
Growing up, Arnold Schwarzenegger was my hero, and not for knocking up his maid, or becoming ambitious politically, but for the work he had done in fitness and bodybuilding, combined with the heroic roles he took on in Hollywood movies. I loved all the big action heroes from Arnie to Sly, and Van Damme to Jackie Chan. What they did was inspire young men to step up to the plate and be brave when sacrificing themselves to protect innocent people and the vulnerable.
In previous generations it wasn’t the same, and arguably, it wasn’t an age of heroes prior to the 1980s. Clint Eastwood’s hard-nosed detectives and machismo cowboys were in it for pride or money, while prior to that era most heroes were military figures giving their lives for the state as glorified Stakhanovite would-be martyrs. Those earlier generations revered a man as heroic when he died out of pride, but in the 1980s a heroic man was the one who put down those prideful soldiers in order to protect the vulnerable. That was the mission of Arnie’s character, Matrix, in Commando, and at the end of the decade, Van Damme portrayed, Lyon, in Lionheart with similar gusto.
The 1980s was the “Hero” era in Western mass culture. In that era, I never would have uttered, “Johnny’s Inch”. The cosmic wager would have seemed invalid at that time. Culture was demonstrating that people were improving in worth from previous eras, especially with respect to masculinity. The macho, “Dirty” Harry Calahan, had been replaced by noble, Prince Adam of Eternia. I loved it.
In the 1990s, something started to happen in media, and I didn’t notice how insidious it was because I embraced a lot of it due to my teenage angst at the time. Culture began promoting the “Anti-hero” and its updated brand of masculinity. Where the hero was called upon and answered the call, the anti-hero was called upon and didn’t answer. The vulnerable required protection, but the anti-hero was too busy with his own bullshit.
The anti-hero existed long before the 1990s, and you can observe this fainthearted man in Rebel without a Cause, Cool Hand Luke, Easy Rider, The Conversation, Full Metal Jacket, or Rumble Fish, to name a few. However, the anti-hero was not revered in those films, and characters such as Luke or Joker were pitiable for their inability to step up and make the world a better place, and in turn, give themselves the purpose that would have made their lives meaningful. They were men who used wheelchairs when they had the ability to walk. These crippled men were well-endowed in faculty, but pissing into the wind spiritually, and we had to watch that unfold, most uncomfortably.
In the 1990s, the anti-hero was stock-in-trade for Hollywood, and Fight Club’s Tyler Durden, or Falling Down’s D-Fens protagonist characters became the new ‘he-men’ for the era. We were encouraged to admire these failures, and we were persuaded to reimagine their moral ineptitude and spiritual paralysis as ‘moxie’ – they were raging against the machine, and letting the world know that they were “bravely” in it for themselves. The comic-book-based movie character, Spawn, would get revenge to make himself feel better, as would resurrected Eric Draven in The Crow. The maligned attitude of those characters reverberated through mass culture to later influence the hilarious portrayal of South Park’s ineffectual Satan character then parodying The Crow and proclaiming petulantly before his legions of sycophants, “it’s all about me!”
What the hell happened? – from selfless heroes to selfish zeroes in less than a decade. It was veritable culture shock for me as I developed from an amazed child to a disillusioned teenager. But things got worse. The following decade, and into the new millennium, we were introduced to the “Unhero”. Was there an expectation that audiences would celebrate the Walter White character of Breaking Bad? I don’t know the writers or producers of the show personally, and cannot say for sure, but the worship of Walter happened all the same. Walter wasn’t only going to walk away from the call to be a hero and protect the vulnerable, much like an anti-hero would do, but Walter was also going to just straight up make the world a more awful place full of addiction, sickness, desperation, and death. People cheered for Mr. White. They donned Heisenberg t-shirts in his honor and bought meth lab caravan-shaped mousepads to keep him close to their hearts. Why?
It wasn’t the only show or movie in the 2000s that did this brand of masculinity, and it even continued into the next decade with lead characters such as, Rick Grimes, from The Walking Dead. Without batting an eyelash, Rick, would begin murdering other people if they got in the way of his plan to keep a little personal tribe safe during the worldwide zombie apocalypse. He was no hero – he was just a man of pride, that felt the easy goal of protecting someone that already trusted him was more important than the challenging goal of protecting someone who needed it but had no reason to trust others yet. The apocalyptic vision of that show mirrored the nihilistic mindset of those who found Rick’s masculinity, machismo, and philosophy on life admirable.
And now, I am waiting for the final segment in the Hero sequence which characterizes contemporary masculinity – the “Anhero”. The anhero is the man who wants to be heroic and is prepared to sacrifice himself to protect the vulnerable, but the rest of the world blocks the opportunity and denies him his rightful chance to help. They don’t want glory to go to just one man – it’s the collective pride now that comes into play. Thus, it is society that has become the villain within the drama. I would like to suggest that there are no anhero movies or TV shows to reference. There has been no collective support for the story of the anhero. The authors interested in that kind of lead character would have to rely on self-publishing and grassroots indie production.
I felt the weight of my role as an anhero. But you might ask about the timeline here and wonder how I can reference future events when it wasn’t yet 2010 as I was pushed into the black void in Weird Willard’s furnace room.
You are about to get an answer to those queries because time caught up to me fast.
Relinquish
I was out of the commode, so to speak. It felt great. I was still floating, right side up from my perspective, but downward from where I had started. The journey was gentle and even-paced much like an Alpine funicular ride. Honestly, it didn’t matter where I landed, because anything was better than where I had just come from.
While I was floating gently downward, I considered some more ideas that could formulate new meditations. One notable concept was that of the Hero Sequence. Where I had just come from had too many political and social elements that reminded me of the human race, and the realization was fairly disheartening. I remembered that part of the reason I felt it was my cosmic duty to “fix” the world was because it was obvious that humans weren’t going to do it themselves. Humans had always had issues with the concept of masculinity and how it was expressed socially, but in Kerplunck masculinity was put under the microscope, so to speak, and it got me thinking about what ‘made the man’.
When I was a kid, it was the 1980s and the media culture was geared for positive male role models and displays of healthy masculinity. Good men used their aggression and emotion productively to bravely protect women and children. This was the message from He-Man in Masters of the Universe, and it was echoed by characters like Flint in G.I. Joe, as well as Lion-O in Thundercats. The male protection wasn’t about keeping women under their thumb evidenced through those same children’s shows which had realistic – and far from heavy-handed – portrayals of heroic women, including He-Man’s Teela and She-ra, G.I. Joe’s Lady Jaye and Scarlet, and Thundercat’s Cheetara and WilyKit, among many others.
I liked the media messages in those children’s cartoons. Men and women weren’t political and economic adversaries, but rather, synergistic partners. This felt natural and right to me. Slowly, media messages changed, and later it was easy for me to blame the Kerplunckians for it because in my perception an evil force had made the world a much worse place, culturally.
Growing up, Arnold Schwarzenegger was my hero, and not for knocking up his maid, or becoming ambitious politically, but for the work he had done in fitness and bodybuilding, combined with the heroic roles he took on in Hollywood movies. I loved all the big action heroes from Arnie to Sly, and Van Damme to Jackie Chan. What they did was inspire young men to step up to the plate and be brave when sacrificing themselves to protect innocent people and the vulnerable.
In previous generations it wasn’t the same, and arguably, it wasn’t an age of heroes prior to the 1980s. Clint Eastwood’s hard-nosed detectives and machismo cowboys were in it for pride or money, while prior to that era most heroes were military figures giving their lives for the state as glorified Stakhanovite would-be martyrs. Those earlier generations revered a man as heroic when he died out of pride, but in the 1980s a heroic man was the one who put down those prideful soldiers in order to protect the vulnerable. That was the mission of Arnie’s character, Matrix, in Commando, and at the end of the decade, Van Damme portrayed, Lyon, in Lionheart with similar gusto.
The 1980s was the “Hero” era in Western mass culture. In that era, I never would have uttered, “Johnny’s Inch”. The cosmic wager would have seemed invalid at that time. Culture was demonstrating that people were improving in worth from previous eras, especially with respect to masculinity. The macho, “Dirty” Harry Calahan, had been replaced by noble, Prince Adam of Eternia. I loved it.
In the 1990s, something started to happen in media, and I didn’t notice how insidious it was because I embraced a lot of it due to my teenage angst at the time. Culture began promoting the “Anti-hero” and its updated brand of masculinity. Where the hero was called upon and answered the call, the anti-hero was called upon and didn’t answer. The vulnerable required protection, but the anti-hero was too busy with his own bullshit.
The anti-hero existed long before the 1990s, and you can observe this fainthearted man in Rebel without a Cause, Cool Hand Luke, Easy Rider, The Conversation, Full Metal Jacket, or Rumble Fish, to name a few. However, the anti-hero was not revered in those films, and characters such as Luke or Joker were pitiable for their inability to step up and make the world a better place, and in turn, give themselves the purpose that would have made their lives meaningful. They were men who used wheelchairs when they had the ability to walk. These crippled men were well-endowed in faculty, but pissing into the wind spiritually, and we had to watch that unfold, most uncomfortably.
In the 1990s, the anti-hero was stock-in-trade for Hollywood, and Fight Club’s Tyler Durden, or Falling Down’s D-Fens protagonist characters became the new ‘he-men’ for the era. We were encouraged to admire these failures, and we were persuaded to reimagine their moral ineptitude and spiritual paralysis as ‘moxie’ – they were raging against the machine, and letting the world know that they were “bravely” in it for themselves. The comic-book-based movie character, Spawn, would get revenge to make himself feel better, as would resurrected Eric Draven in The Crow. The maligned attitude of those characters reverberated through mass culture to later influence the hilarious portrayal of South Park’s ineffectual Satan character then parodying The Crow and proclaiming petulantly before his legions of sycophants, “it’s all about me!”
What the hell happened? – from selfless heroes to selfish zeroes in less than a decade. It was veritable culture shock for me as I developed from an amazed child to a disillusioned teenager. But things got worse. The following decade, and into the new millennium, we were introduced to the “Unhero”. Was there an expectation that audiences would celebrate the Walter White character of Breaking Bad? I don’t know the writers or producers of the show personally, and cannot say for sure, but the worship of Walter happened all the same. Walter wasn’t only going to walk away from the call to be a hero and protect the vulnerable, much like an anti-hero would do, but Walter was also going to just straight up make the world a more awful place full of addiction, sickness, desperation, and death. People cheered for Mr. White. They donned Heisenberg t-shirts in his honor and bought meth lab caravan-shaped mousepads to keep him close to their hearts. Why?
It wasn’t the only show or movie in the 2000s that did this brand of masculinity, and it even continued into the next decade with lead characters such as, Rick Grimes, from The Walking Dead. Without batting an eyelash, Rick, would begin murdering other people if they got in the way of his plan to keep a little personal tribe safe during the worldwide zombie apocalypse. He was no hero – he was just a man of pride, that felt the easy goal of protecting someone that already trusted him was more important than the challenging goal of protecting someone who needed it but had no reason to trust others yet. The apocalyptic vision of that show mirrored the nihilistic mindset of those who found Rick’s masculinity, machismo, and philosophy on life admirable.
And now, I am waiting for the final segment in the Hero sequence which characterizes contemporary masculinity – the “Anhero”. The anhero is the man who wants to be heroic and is prepared to sacrifice himself to protect the vulnerable, but the rest of the world blocks the opportunity and denies him his rightful chance to help. They don’t want glory to go to just one man – it’s the collective pride now that comes into play. Thus, it is society that has become the villain within the drama. I would like to suggest that there are no anhero movies or TV shows to reference. There has been no collective support for the story of the anhero. The authors interested in that kind of lead character would have to rely on self-publishing and grassroots indie production.
I felt the weight of my role as an anhero. But you might ask about the timeline here and wonder how I can reference future events when it wasn’t yet 2010 as I was pushed into the black void in Weird Willard’s furnace room.
You are about to get an answer to those queries because time caught up to me fast.
CHAPTER 34
Stability
My meditation on heroes and masculinity would soon be put to the test. I would be invited to evaluate my prejudices and consider how human culture had developed the way it did, and why. While I had been meditating and reflecting on childhood moments, my floating body had begun to slow down from its exodus in Kerplunck. The brown fog of the Kerplunkian interstitial space had transitioned to blackness all around me, and I wondered if I was finally being returned to the void at Willard’s house.
A bright light shone behind me. There was intense heat. The light cascaded beams into the darkness in front of me and I noted that the night sky had returned and was full of shining stars. My body was forced around suddenly and I was turned to face the light. At first, I closed my eyes but then the light faded and became gentle and reasonably bright.
I opened my eyes again and was faced by that lamentable, Bigot Star. If it had a face, I was sure that there would have been a proud sneer painted across its grease mug. There were no options. I was powerless. This was clear.
Looking down, I noticed the world had returned as a game piece for our head-to-head match. I assumed that it was more parables brought to life. Perhaps, this time I would have to watch Noah gather his animals onto the ark except the gay ones, or David slay Goliath because the behemoth was an atavistic half-breed. Then, my arrogant indignation turned to fear, as I recognized the possibility that I would have to repeat exactly what I had just gone through. Would this become my Sisyphus torture program? Was I stuck in some purgatory, like Phil Connors in Groundhog Day? What did I have to do to appease this bloated orb of light?
Once again, my head was pushed forward, but unlike the first time when I was full of wonderment, this time I resisted and was overcome with dread. Surprisingly, it wasn’t as bad as I had thought. It was no longer the new world that I entered. As my head submerged into the atmosphere of the planet, and my giant face was beyond the skies behind me, I noted that the continents were different from the new world I was shown before, and this time it was my home planet – it was Earth.
I felt a leap in my heart. I wanted to bang on my chest. Bring it on! If this was my Earth that I was being shown, then hopefully, I would be dropped back in the way I was dropped into the Tribe of Oor region before. I would have the correct languages available, or maybe I would just be allowed to resume my life as Will Strange. Effectively, I could be teleported from Willard’s basement to somewhere else on Earth and then find my way home. It could be the very next day as if nothing had happened. I’d only have to explain my disappearance to Heath, and it seemed he was capable of believing anything. This was doable.
Then again, I might be left in an invisible state and ghostly form. That too was a distinct possibility. It was unclear, but the force pushing at the back of my head gently nudged me as if it was listening to all my frantic conjecture and trying to shush me to ease my mind. I almost trusted that gesture. And so, I watched events unfold on Earth.
Stability
My meditation on heroes and masculinity would soon be put to the test. I would be invited to evaluate my prejudices and consider how human culture had developed the way it did, and why. While I had been meditating and reflecting on childhood moments, my floating body had begun to slow down from its exodus in Kerplunck. The brown fog of the Kerplunkian interstitial space had transitioned to blackness all around me, and I wondered if I was finally being returned to the void at Willard’s house.
A bright light shone behind me. There was intense heat. The light cascaded beams into the darkness in front of me and I noted that the night sky had returned and was full of shining stars. My body was forced around suddenly and I was turned to face the light. At first, I closed my eyes but then the light faded and became gentle and reasonably bright.
I opened my eyes again and was faced by that lamentable, Bigot Star. If it had a face, I was sure that there would have been a proud sneer painted across its grease mug. There were no options. I was powerless. This was clear.
Looking down, I noticed the world had returned as a game piece for our head-to-head match. I assumed that it was more parables brought to life. Perhaps, this time I would have to watch Noah gather his animals onto the ark except the gay ones, or David slay Goliath because the behemoth was an atavistic half-breed. Then, my arrogant indignation turned to fear, as I recognized the possibility that I would have to repeat exactly what I had just gone through. Would this become my Sisyphus torture program? Was I stuck in some purgatory, like Phil Connors in Groundhog Day? What did I have to do to appease this bloated orb of light?
Once again, my head was pushed forward, but unlike the first time when I was full of wonderment, this time I resisted and was overcome with dread. Surprisingly, it wasn’t as bad as I had thought. It was no longer the new world that I entered. As my head submerged into the atmosphere of the planet, and my giant face was beyond the skies behind me, I noted that the continents were different from the new world I was shown before, and this time it was my home planet – it was Earth.
I felt a leap in my heart. I wanted to bang on my chest. Bring it on! If this was my Earth that I was being shown, then hopefully, I would be dropped back in the way I was dropped into the Tribe of Oor region before. I would have the correct languages available, or maybe I would just be allowed to resume my life as Will Strange. Effectively, I could be teleported from Willard’s basement to somewhere else on Earth and then find my way home. It could be the very next day as if nothing had happened. I’d only have to explain my disappearance to Heath, and it seemed he was capable of believing anything. This was doable.
Then again, I might be left in an invisible state and ghostly form. That too was a distinct possibility. It was unclear, but the force pushing at the back of my head gently nudged me as if it was listening to all my frantic conjecture and trying to shush me to ease my mind. I almost trusted that gesture. And so, I watched events unfold on Earth.
CHAPTER 35
Dedication
This was Earth, and I had some important reference points available. I could follow the story and anticipate certain events. However, things kicked off way back. I had been a bit of a history buff when I was young but had forgotten much of the major developments of the human race. The Bigot Star brought me up to speed.
I watched the development of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Focus was put on the Semite tribes who had started in modern day Oman. They had traveled up to Mesopotamia and worn out their welcome after becoming rich and powerful as immigrants who resisted cultural integration. They made an exodus to the Levant region, which was inhabited by many different peoples, and much like, the new world of the Tribe of Oor, the Levant was a crossroads meso-region rife with political strife and cultural unrest.
The Semites had some notable figures but no one exceptional, and certainly not the heroes mentioned in the Old Testament of the Bible. Conflict was common in the Levant, and the Semite tribes had no real chance to establish dominance there prior to finding it hazardous to their health to stay. They moved south but were unwelcome by locals, and the Egyptian militia captured them and sought to make them slaves.
Slavery never happened for the Semites, but now a big-name character made an appearance. The Bigot Star wanted me to know the true story of Moses. Moses hadn’t been with the Semites, and it seemed that he wasn’t Jewish at all. He was an advocate for them in that southern region of the Levant where they had been treated as unwelcome and then reported to the Egyptian militia. Moses was an entrepreneur and merchant who traded gems and ore along the river Nile.
Moses negotiated with the local Egyptian governor for the release of the captive Semite tribes. These things were obvious to me as I watched events unfold, but again the language barrier made it impossible to discern any nuances in the interactions. An odd thing happened next. Moses and the most prominent leader of the displaced and roving Semite tribes ventured off in a western direction along the coast of North Africa. The pair staked-out a villa, around the area that would later be Carthage. One night, Moses and the Semite tribal leader murdered the family in the villa. The head of the household seemed undistinguished, but all the same he was stabbed several times by the two assassins at the front door of his estate. Pools of blood flowed down the front steps as Moses and the tribal leader stood on either side.
It all made sense to me later once Moses and the tribal leader returned to the Nile to collect their people. The Egyptian governor had demanded an assassination contract be completed in exchange for the freedom of the Semite tribes. As their caravans left Egyptian territory, Moses began writing on parchment and I suspected that his parting seas legend had originated from a proud reference to the bloody murder near Carthage.
It didn’t surprise me that our legends were apocryphal and that epic deeds were in fact deviant acts, and that great men were instead scheming charlatans who wrote themselves into history in ideal terms. Their true power was no different than L. Ron Hubbard, Jim Jones, or Charles Manson – they were cult leaders, and that is how the word of their greatness spread early on.
I thought to myself, “fuck Moses then”, but I also didn’t trust the coercive Bigot Star. The Bigot Star had stigmatized East Asians through the character of, Sum, being an arrogant man unable to respect individuality. Also, the Bigot Star had lambasted, Hum, a man characterized as a lazy African. And of course, all the sociopaths I was presented with were homosexuals. That wasn’t how my story had gone with the cosmic wager, Tricks of the Trade. The star was the bigot, and perhaps, antisemitic as well. This account of Moses might have been fictional.
I reserved judgment on what I was being shown, and I recognized that once it caught up to an era that I remembered clearly then I would be able to check for historical accuracy. In the meantime, I followed the story of Moses. He was a cult leader, and it was a long time after his death before the Semite tribes returned to the Levant. In fact, they returned during a moment when there was a mass exodus in Egypt and Mesopotamia at the same time. It was easier for the roving Semite tribes to justify returning to the Levant at that point because they blended in with other migrants.
Moses had led his cult and he had disciples who continued to work on his written texts. The rest of the congregation was illiterate; however, each generation of cult leaders was taught to read and write by the previous one. I couldn’t make out the words, and it was a foreign language, but it seemed to me that these texts were the basis for the Old Testament. I hadn’t read more than the book of Genesis in my life, and only knew the broad strokes of the Biblical legends, therefore, there was no way to confirm how much of the cultist text was boldface lying, or what inspired the legends, such as, the assassination at the Carthaginian villa. Based on the cult’s penchant for pederasty, and ritual rape, I was assuming that the entire text would have been best when served to the human race as toilet paper.
Time marched on. I was not shown developments in the Americas, nor China or the rest of East Asia. I had some purview on Africa and noted that it was African warlords who had been the first brutal slave masters on that continent, and that the Egyptian workforce was composed of sub-Saharan Africans who had odd traveling patterns along the Nile but were sold into slavery in the north by tribal African warlords of the south. It was intriguing, but perhaps a fib by the Bigot Star.
Northern Europe was out of visual range as my position shifted around, but the developments in Greece and Italy were brought into focus. I had watched as Egyptian culture was imported to the island of Crete and then perverted. From there, merchants traveled from Crete to the mainland and the indigenous people of Greece embraced some of the legends and iconography.
Greece was not the exciting place that I had expected, and most lives were quite dull. The greatness of the culture wasn’t appreciated by most, and citizens just found it to be a normal life. The force holding me in place and pushing at the back of my head continued to direct my attention within the atmosphere of the world. Eventually, I would watch the rise of Rome, but the age of the Roman Empire was not so different from the glory of Mycenean Greece. Yes, the battles and wars were interesting, but they appeared as urban gangland skirmishes when compared with modern warfare I had witnessed through video footage of World War II, the Vietnam War, or the Gulf War.
The growth of the Greek culture, Alexander’s conquests, and the rise of Rome happened across so many years that the people had no sense of what it meant in the grander scheme. They had no media, and their lives were perniciously unexceptional. Legends grew in the telling, and I noted that historians had been the Steven Spielbergs and Michael Bays of their time – they were entertainers spinning a yarn. Things just weren’t that exciting back then, and more happened in 1999 than what happened for an entire century in this ancient period. It made me ashamed that I had been so cavalier in trying to end my life after Tricks of the Trade. I now regretted that I had been so brazen in rejecting the status quo of my own era. The modern world had much happening – all at once – and to contribute to that in any significant way would have really mattered, historically.
Still, I watched and learned about the lies of history, such as, Alexander the Great being gay. He was not that, nor did he marry an Indian princess, nor did he kill his best friend in a drunken rage. However, I did see the little bastard who wrote it into history that way. His name was, Hoyos, but it was self-proclaimed and considered ‘cool’ by people at the time. It was the equivalent of when contemporary rappers are called, “Puff Daddy” or the “Doggfather”, except this moniker referenced him as a young buck – Hoyos, the son – much like other rappers, such as, Lil Wayne or Yung Thug.
I didn’t notice Hoyos at first because he was unexceptional in his youth, I suppose. However, he became a mover and shaker in his adult years. He hadn’t known Alexander personally, but he had been in the courts of both the Ptolemys and Seleucids who had inherited Alexander’s empire. Hoyos was similar to Moses in how he manipulated others, except Moses had been an affectionate extroverted sociopath, whereas Hoyos was guarded and in his private life I noted him as a creepy weirdo. Hard to explain.
Hoyos weaseled his way in deeper with important governors, and his influence seemed primarily based in his persuasive talking. It appeared to me that Hoyos was fluent in several languages, and he mediated negotiations on the battlefield and along major trade routes. Hoyos would have been an arms dealer if he had lived in the modern era. He was slippery and avoided two palace intrigues that ended in bloody massacres. I wish that I could speak the language so that I might have heard the cunning words he used to smooth talk his way out of those hairy situations.
I was disgruntled with these history lessons. With the human race, it was mainly murderers and liars who were the movers and shakers that brought about dramatic major changes. All the good and wholesome progress such as developments in science, invention, medicine, art, etc. were happening progressively and steadily without major leaps forward. There were no Da Vinci mavericks or Picasso renegades in the culture industry that I witnessed. Plus, I couldn’t read the texts, so if there were literary giants it wasn’t clear to me. I thought that I had identified Plato and Socrates, but it was ambiguous. There were half a dozen educators that might have been them. Some events were not within earshot for me, and all I could rely on was visuals that required squinting and straining my eyes. I knew that these moments of sensory disability were not haphazard, but rather, they were orchestrated by the Bigot Star who was directing my attention and only making available what it wanted me to know.
History was a sham. The books I had read, what I had learned in school, and everything else bandied about in casual conversation were about as accurate as the Hollywood movies. There was as much truth in the life of Pericles as it was written into history as there was for fictional characters such as, Hercules. Yet, there were some heroic guys like Hercules in the ancient world, and maybe that is where the legend came from, or at least where the legend grew in the telling.
I watched as one Thracian soldier was almost killed in a strange battle that broke out for no good reason during routine patrols along a border in peacetime. The Thracian soldier had escaped the grizzly fate of his small garrison and traveled back home to nurse his superficial wounds.
I could tell that he had survivors’ guilt, and this Thracian soldier became indomitable once he had healed up fully. He had to make up for feeling like a deserter, or at least, that is how I interpreted his behavior. I saw this burly man save a child from drowning, on another occasion he ran into a barn that was fully aflame and he ushered the animals free, and finally he caught a woman who had been pushed off an old turret tower by a jealous lover. This guy was a real hero, and the history books never mentioned him. His name was Habek, but I can’t confirm the spelling.
That was just an everyday guy with an extraordinary story, and it was worth twenty Pericles or Alexanders. Those big-name guys that we were familiar with in history were mainly just standing around most of the time, looking confidant, and having others speak for them. Others wrote for them as well. History was bogus and I was frustrated that the Bigot Star imposed control over my position and vantage, not allowing me to search out more inspiring heroes like Habek.
The next truly great person that I noted was Cato the Elder during the era of the Roman Republic.
Dedication
This was Earth, and I had some important reference points available. I could follow the story and anticipate certain events. However, things kicked off way back. I had been a bit of a history buff when I was young but had forgotten much of the major developments of the human race. The Bigot Star brought me up to speed.
I watched the development of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Focus was put on the Semite tribes who had started in modern day Oman. They had traveled up to Mesopotamia and worn out their welcome after becoming rich and powerful as immigrants who resisted cultural integration. They made an exodus to the Levant region, which was inhabited by many different peoples, and much like, the new world of the Tribe of Oor, the Levant was a crossroads meso-region rife with political strife and cultural unrest.
The Semites had some notable figures but no one exceptional, and certainly not the heroes mentioned in the Old Testament of the Bible. Conflict was common in the Levant, and the Semite tribes had no real chance to establish dominance there prior to finding it hazardous to their health to stay. They moved south but were unwelcome by locals, and the Egyptian militia captured them and sought to make them slaves.
Slavery never happened for the Semites, but now a big-name character made an appearance. The Bigot Star wanted me to know the true story of Moses. Moses hadn’t been with the Semites, and it seemed that he wasn’t Jewish at all. He was an advocate for them in that southern region of the Levant where they had been treated as unwelcome and then reported to the Egyptian militia. Moses was an entrepreneur and merchant who traded gems and ore along the river Nile.
Moses negotiated with the local Egyptian governor for the release of the captive Semite tribes. These things were obvious to me as I watched events unfold, but again the language barrier made it impossible to discern any nuances in the interactions. An odd thing happened next. Moses and the most prominent leader of the displaced and roving Semite tribes ventured off in a western direction along the coast of North Africa. The pair staked-out a villa, around the area that would later be Carthage. One night, Moses and the Semite tribal leader murdered the family in the villa. The head of the household seemed undistinguished, but all the same he was stabbed several times by the two assassins at the front door of his estate. Pools of blood flowed down the front steps as Moses and the tribal leader stood on either side.
It all made sense to me later once Moses and the tribal leader returned to the Nile to collect their people. The Egyptian governor had demanded an assassination contract be completed in exchange for the freedom of the Semite tribes. As their caravans left Egyptian territory, Moses began writing on parchment and I suspected that his parting seas legend had originated from a proud reference to the bloody murder near Carthage.
It didn’t surprise me that our legends were apocryphal and that epic deeds were in fact deviant acts, and that great men were instead scheming charlatans who wrote themselves into history in ideal terms. Their true power was no different than L. Ron Hubbard, Jim Jones, or Charles Manson – they were cult leaders, and that is how the word of their greatness spread early on.
I thought to myself, “fuck Moses then”, but I also didn’t trust the coercive Bigot Star. The Bigot Star had stigmatized East Asians through the character of, Sum, being an arrogant man unable to respect individuality. Also, the Bigot Star had lambasted, Hum, a man characterized as a lazy African. And of course, all the sociopaths I was presented with were homosexuals. That wasn’t how my story had gone with the cosmic wager, Tricks of the Trade. The star was the bigot, and perhaps, antisemitic as well. This account of Moses might have been fictional.
I reserved judgment on what I was being shown, and I recognized that once it caught up to an era that I remembered clearly then I would be able to check for historical accuracy. In the meantime, I followed the story of Moses. He was a cult leader, and it was a long time after his death before the Semite tribes returned to the Levant. In fact, they returned during a moment when there was a mass exodus in Egypt and Mesopotamia at the same time. It was easier for the roving Semite tribes to justify returning to the Levant at that point because they blended in with other migrants.
Moses had led his cult and he had disciples who continued to work on his written texts. The rest of the congregation was illiterate; however, each generation of cult leaders was taught to read and write by the previous one. I couldn’t make out the words, and it was a foreign language, but it seemed to me that these texts were the basis for the Old Testament. I hadn’t read more than the book of Genesis in my life, and only knew the broad strokes of the Biblical legends, therefore, there was no way to confirm how much of the cultist text was boldface lying, or what inspired the legends, such as, the assassination at the Carthaginian villa. Based on the cult’s penchant for pederasty, and ritual rape, I was assuming that the entire text would have been best when served to the human race as toilet paper.
Time marched on. I was not shown developments in the Americas, nor China or the rest of East Asia. I had some purview on Africa and noted that it was African warlords who had been the first brutal slave masters on that continent, and that the Egyptian workforce was composed of sub-Saharan Africans who had odd traveling patterns along the Nile but were sold into slavery in the north by tribal African warlords of the south. It was intriguing, but perhaps a fib by the Bigot Star.
Northern Europe was out of visual range as my position shifted around, but the developments in Greece and Italy were brought into focus. I had watched as Egyptian culture was imported to the island of Crete and then perverted. From there, merchants traveled from Crete to the mainland and the indigenous people of Greece embraced some of the legends and iconography.
Greece was not the exciting place that I had expected, and most lives were quite dull. The greatness of the culture wasn’t appreciated by most, and citizens just found it to be a normal life. The force holding me in place and pushing at the back of my head continued to direct my attention within the atmosphere of the world. Eventually, I would watch the rise of Rome, but the age of the Roman Empire was not so different from the glory of Mycenean Greece. Yes, the battles and wars were interesting, but they appeared as urban gangland skirmishes when compared with modern warfare I had witnessed through video footage of World War II, the Vietnam War, or the Gulf War.
The growth of the Greek culture, Alexander’s conquests, and the rise of Rome happened across so many years that the people had no sense of what it meant in the grander scheme. They had no media, and their lives were perniciously unexceptional. Legends grew in the telling, and I noted that historians had been the Steven Spielbergs and Michael Bays of their time – they were entertainers spinning a yarn. Things just weren’t that exciting back then, and more happened in 1999 than what happened for an entire century in this ancient period. It made me ashamed that I had been so cavalier in trying to end my life after Tricks of the Trade. I now regretted that I had been so brazen in rejecting the status quo of my own era. The modern world had much happening – all at once – and to contribute to that in any significant way would have really mattered, historically.
Still, I watched and learned about the lies of history, such as, Alexander the Great being gay. He was not that, nor did he marry an Indian princess, nor did he kill his best friend in a drunken rage. However, I did see the little bastard who wrote it into history that way. His name was, Hoyos, but it was self-proclaimed and considered ‘cool’ by people at the time. It was the equivalent of when contemporary rappers are called, “Puff Daddy” or the “Doggfather”, except this moniker referenced him as a young buck – Hoyos, the son – much like other rappers, such as, Lil Wayne or Yung Thug.
I didn’t notice Hoyos at first because he was unexceptional in his youth, I suppose. However, he became a mover and shaker in his adult years. He hadn’t known Alexander personally, but he had been in the courts of both the Ptolemys and Seleucids who had inherited Alexander’s empire. Hoyos was similar to Moses in how he manipulated others, except Moses had been an affectionate extroverted sociopath, whereas Hoyos was guarded and in his private life I noted him as a creepy weirdo. Hard to explain.
Hoyos weaseled his way in deeper with important governors, and his influence seemed primarily based in his persuasive talking. It appeared to me that Hoyos was fluent in several languages, and he mediated negotiations on the battlefield and along major trade routes. Hoyos would have been an arms dealer if he had lived in the modern era. He was slippery and avoided two palace intrigues that ended in bloody massacres. I wish that I could speak the language so that I might have heard the cunning words he used to smooth talk his way out of those hairy situations.
I was disgruntled with these history lessons. With the human race, it was mainly murderers and liars who were the movers and shakers that brought about dramatic major changes. All the good and wholesome progress such as developments in science, invention, medicine, art, etc. were happening progressively and steadily without major leaps forward. There were no Da Vinci mavericks or Picasso renegades in the culture industry that I witnessed. Plus, I couldn’t read the texts, so if there were literary giants it wasn’t clear to me. I thought that I had identified Plato and Socrates, but it was ambiguous. There were half a dozen educators that might have been them. Some events were not within earshot for me, and all I could rely on was visuals that required squinting and straining my eyes. I knew that these moments of sensory disability were not haphazard, but rather, they were orchestrated by the Bigot Star who was directing my attention and only making available what it wanted me to know.
History was a sham. The books I had read, what I had learned in school, and everything else bandied about in casual conversation were about as accurate as the Hollywood movies. There was as much truth in the life of Pericles as it was written into history as there was for fictional characters such as, Hercules. Yet, there were some heroic guys like Hercules in the ancient world, and maybe that is where the legend came from, or at least where the legend grew in the telling.
I watched as one Thracian soldier was almost killed in a strange battle that broke out for no good reason during routine patrols along a border in peacetime. The Thracian soldier had escaped the grizzly fate of his small garrison and traveled back home to nurse his superficial wounds.
I could tell that he had survivors’ guilt, and this Thracian soldier became indomitable once he had healed up fully. He had to make up for feeling like a deserter, or at least, that is how I interpreted his behavior. I saw this burly man save a child from drowning, on another occasion he ran into a barn that was fully aflame and he ushered the animals free, and finally he caught a woman who had been pushed off an old turret tower by a jealous lover. This guy was a real hero, and the history books never mentioned him. His name was Habek, but I can’t confirm the spelling.
That was just an everyday guy with an extraordinary story, and it was worth twenty Pericles or Alexanders. Those big-name guys that we were familiar with in history were mainly just standing around most of the time, looking confidant, and having others speak for them. Others wrote for them as well. History was bogus and I was frustrated that the Bigot Star imposed control over my position and vantage, not allowing me to search out more inspiring heroes like Habek.
The next truly great person that I noted was Cato the Elder during the era of the Roman Republic.
CHAPTER 36
Legitimacy
Cato the Elder was a reasonable man, and I found his brand of masculinity to be heroic. He excelled at conflict resolution and had grace when the spotlight was on him. Cato had aptly identified all the social ills of his era and then highlighted the factors which culturally plagued the state of Rome.
Cato recognized that in Rome’s greatness there was also opulence and bloat. Rome had been honoring itself too much through the recognition that the city was greater than any that had ever existed in the past. Rome had machismo and too much pride. Rome was unheroic.
Cato noted that influential Roman women had become hustlers, and that their political aspirations wrought destruction to the moral fabric of the city. These ambitious women traded in rumor and gossip, and they attempted to craft themselves as celebrity characters among the people. Cato spoke out against this class of woman. He found creative ways to illustrate that these women were talentless and not worthy of worship. One amusing method he employed was to hire servants to impersonate the ambitious women and expose their uncouth manner as the impersonators milled around popular hangouts.
Cato had been a farmer when he was young, and he was not raised as an urbanite. He had traditional values, although I didn’t think he was a conservative per se. His value system was fully-formed, and when he held a traditional value paramount others accused him of conservatism because they wanted faster progress at all costs. For his critics, rapid changes provided the opportunity to attain more political power. Rapid change meant new avenues to manipulate.
Hellenization had become stock-in-trade for the Roman cultural project. Hellenization referred to the process of cultural exchange between Rome and neighboring regions. If Syrian fashion became popular in Rome because of immigration from that region, then this was an example of Hellenization. Conversely, if Massali people (present day south of France) began building temples with Corinthian pilasters that had the nouveau Roman decorative touches, then this too was Hellenization. Importing foreign culture to Rome and exporting Roman culture abroad was how the most powerful senators understood Rome would maintain a stranglehold on its annexed foreign territory and future acquisitions. Foreign people had to buy into the Roman project and philosophy for Pax Romana to rise and prosper.
Cato the Elder could not disagree more with these powerful senators. Cato saw the moral decay that accompanied the import of foreign culture. For Cato, foreign culture was atavistic and a throwback to a previous era for Romans. Cato would often show Etruscan art pieces to fellow senators and then compare it directly with the foreign cultural artifacts that had flooded into the city and neighboring lands. He felt the juxtaposition was effective to demonstrate that Roman people centuries earlier were more advanced than people in the foreign lands were in that present moment.
Other senators were not sold on rejecting foreign cultures, and they found the variety of products flowing through Italy to be exciting and stimulating. The other issue with Hellenization which Cato attempted to expose was that the foreigners were perverting Roman culture. In Syria or France, there was indeed Roman influence despite these regions not yet being part of a Roman Empire. Foreign cultures were incorporating Roman style through bastardization. Cato sometimes traveled to the foreign regions and collected examples, such as Roman tunics embroidered with pagan Gods, or small sculpture trinkets which were replicas of well-known Roman pieces, but with foreign heads and visages as replacement to the distinctive Roman countenance.
Many of Cato’s critics scoffed at Cato’s moral outrage, and it seemed to me that they were arguing that such “profanity” was in fact a form of flattery. In one debate, Cato gave an impassioned speech and then fell silent after another senator’s retort. It was difficult to discern the content of the counterstrike, but I sensed that Cato was being made to see that the senators wanted Hellenization because it softened up foreigners for later Roman conquest. I suppose the idea was that in time, Rome could bring their laws to bear on the conquered people and replace the foreign heads with the correct Roman ones if trinkets sold on the street would even matter at that point.
Cato had an uphill battle throughout his political life, but he recognized when he was beat, and this is why the other senators accepted him as a worthy opponent and useful counter-balance to their overall project of maximizing wealth and power for Rome.
Cato was the first true Anhero. People didn’t really want him around, but his protestations provided for interesting conversation topics. His outrage was entertaining. The powerful elites in Rome had no intention of adhering to Cato’s morality, nor adopting it for their civil ethical code. In time, this laissez-faire liberal attitude of the Roman elites directly resulted in the formation of the mechanisms by which Rome transitioned from a republic to an oppressive empire.
The Roman Empire was not great at all. Pax Romana was a fascist conquest where war became normative, and mass murder was perceived in a casual manner. Genocidal tyrants were thrust into positions of power by the same types of personalities that Cato the Elder had been battling and warning against centuries earlier. During the republic era, Roman people had a sense of individualism, and they were politically enfranchised. However, during the Roman Empire all I witnessed was drone-like behavior with most Romans revealing themselves as numb to the endless wartime. The unceasing buzz around the major cities motivated nothing more than sordid political intrigues and self-righteous power grabs.
If the Bigot Star wanted me to despise human nature, it was doing a pretty good job. I was disillusioned by the history lesson. I was made to feel small despite watching over the world like a giant or God. I had worked through many of the stages of grief: pity for Ister had been my denial phase, watching Markis in the new world constituted my anger, and being stuck in Kerplunck mediated my negotiation. Now, I was just depressed.
Legitimacy
Cato the Elder was a reasonable man, and I found his brand of masculinity to be heroic. He excelled at conflict resolution and had grace when the spotlight was on him. Cato had aptly identified all the social ills of his era and then highlighted the factors which culturally plagued the state of Rome.
Cato recognized that in Rome’s greatness there was also opulence and bloat. Rome had been honoring itself too much through the recognition that the city was greater than any that had ever existed in the past. Rome had machismo and too much pride. Rome was unheroic.
Cato noted that influential Roman women had become hustlers, and that their political aspirations wrought destruction to the moral fabric of the city. These ambitious women traded in rumor and gossip, and they attempted to craft themselves as celebrity characters among the people. Cato spoke out against this class of woman. He found creative ways to illustrate that these women were talentless and not worthy of worship. One amusing method he employed was to hire servants to impersonate the ambitious women and expose their uncouth manner as the impersonators milled around popular hangouts.
Cato had been a farmer when he was young, and he was not raised as an urbanite. He had traditional values, although I didn’t think he was a conservative per se. His value system was fully-formed, and when he held a traditional value paramount others accused him of conservatism because they wanted faster progress at all costs. For his critics, rapid changes provided the opportunity to attain more political power. Rapid change meant new avenues to manipulate.
Hellenization had become stock-in-trade for the Roman cultural project. Hellenization referred to the process of cultural exchange between Rome and neighboring regions. If Syrian fashion became popular in Rome because of immigration from that region, then this was an example of Hellenization. Conversely, if Massali people (present day south of France) began building temples with Corinthian pilasters that had the nouveau Roman decorative touches, then this too was Hellenization. Importing foreign culture to Rome and exporting Roman culture abroad was how the most powerful senators understood Rome would maintain a stranglehold on its annexed foreign territory and future acquisitions. Foreign people had to buy into the Roman project and philosophy for Pax Romana to rise and prosper.
Cato the Elder could not disagree more with these powerful senators. Cato saw the moral decay that accompanied the import of foreign culture. For Cato, foreign culture was atavistic and a throwback to a previous era for Romans. Cato would often show Etruscan art pieces to fellow senators and then compare it directly with the foreign cultural artifacts that had flooded into the city and neighboring lands. He felt the juxtaposition was effective to demonstrate that Roman people centuries earlier were more advanced than people in the foreign lands were in that present moment.
Other senators were not sold on rejecting foreign cultures, and they found the variety of products flowing through Italy to be exciting and stimulating. The other issue with Hellenization which Cato attempted to expose was that the foreigners were perverting Roman culture. In Syria or France, there was indeed Roman influence despite these regions not yet being part of a Roman Empire. Foreign cultures were incorporating Roman style through bastardization. Cato sometimes traveled to the foreign regions and collected examples, such as Roman tunics embroidered with pagan Gods, or small sculpture trinkets which were replicas of well-known Roman pieces, but with foreign heads and visages as replacement to the distinctive Roman countenance.
Many of Cato’s critics scoffed at Cato’s moral outrage, and it seemed to me that they were arguing that such “profanity” was in fact a form of flattery. In one debate, Cato gave an impassioned speech and then fell silent after another senator’s retort. It was difficult to discern the content of the counterstrike, but I sensed that Cato was being made to see that the senators wanted Hellenization because it softened up foreigners for later Roman conquest. I suppose the idea was that in time, Rome could bring their laws to bear on the conquered people and replace the foreign heads with the correct Roman ones if trinkets sold on the street would even matter at that point.
Cato had an uphill battle throughout his political life, but he recognized when he was beat, and this is why the other senators accepted him as a worthy opponent and useful counter-balance to their overall project of maximizing wealth and power for Rome.
Cato was the first true Anhero. People didn’t really want him around, but his protestations provided for interesting conversation topics. His outrage was entertaining. The powerful elites in Rome had no intention of adhering to Cato’s morality, nor adopting it for their civil ethical code. In time, this laissez-faire liberal attitude of the Roman elites directly resulted in the formation of the mechanisms by which Rome transitioned from a republic to an oppressive empire.
The Roman Empire was not great at all. Pax Romana was a fascist conquest where war became normative, and mass murder was perceived in a casual manner. Genocidal tyrants were thrust into positions of power by the same types of personalities that Cato the Elder had been battling and warning against centuries earlier. During the republic era, Roman people had a sense of individualism, and they were politically enfranchised. However, during the Roman Empire all I witnessed was drone-like behavior with most Romans revealing themselves as numb to the endless wartime. The unceasing buzz around the major cities motivated nothing more than sordid political intrigues and self-righteous power grabs.
If the Bigot Star wanted me to despise human nature, it was doing a pretty good job. I was disillusioned by the history lesson. I was made to feel small despite watching over the world like a giant or God. I had worked through many of the stages of grief: pity for Ister had been my denial phase, watching Markis in the new world constituted my anger, and being stuck in Kerplunck mediated my negotiation. Now, I was just depressed.
CHAPTER 37
Sanguinary
In my depressed state, I decided to tune out what was happening to me. I felt like a catatonic Ister in the dank cave on the limestone hill. It scared me. The force pushing at the back of my head holding me in place within the atmosphere of the Earth cosmic game piece, never ceased. Time passed. I have no idea what happened. It was the Dark Ages.
I snapped out of it just in time for the Battle of Hastings, however, I realized that I had cheated myself through my intent to disconnect from the experience. This defining battle in England required greater historical contextualization. There had been much development in England from the Roman era to the rule of Alfred the Great, and his descendants.
I shook off the guilt of being a lazy student and regained my focus. The final sequence of events that would hopefully take me back to my own time concerned the crusader knights. The Crusades is thought of as a Holy War to take back the Holy Land in the Levant region of the Middle East. However, the Bigot Star showed me a different set of motivations for the major players involved in that set of historical events.
Close to the end of William the Conqueror’s life, he left England and traveled to France where he met in secret with Wibert of Ravenna who had become an antipope. It seemed that Wibert and Hildebrand of Sovana had a clandestine alliance which connected all the way back to the Moses cult. The pair had been initiated into a cabal of historians which had spawned from the Moses cult centuries earlier.
This cabal of historians was focused on manipulating history and thus determining the path of the human race. Saul of Tarsus had been the founder of the cabal and was the one who transitioned it from Moses’s heathen values about fantasy writing, such as, the Old Testament, to a more mature form of social control and mass propaganda. Saul had written the New Testament and fabricated the story of Jesus Christ virtually out of thin air.
I remembered having watched over the Levant around the time that was said to be that of the life of Jesus Christ, interested to catch a glimpse of the three wise men visiting Bethlehem that fateful night. Nothing had materialized and this made sense to me now that I was shown the origins of the cabal of historians.
In the time of Saul, he had traveled to the Levant and met an influential rabble rouser there. This rabble rouser had the ear of the people, but this enthusiastic rogue was also a homosexual who had a lover from sub-Saharan Africa living with him. This lover had wanted the rogue to use his influence with the people in order to proclaim that God approved of homosexuality. However, the rogue refused the request, fearing the people would turn their back on him. The African lover sold-out his intimate partner and alerted the Roman centurions stationed in Judea that the rogue was a dangerous character rallying the people against Roman occupation.
Once captured, this rogue was not crucified, but rather, he was made to dig a pit at the edge of the sea. The Roman soldiers forced him into the pit, and they buried him up to his neck. The tide came in at night and the rogue perished gruesomely, lungs full of sea water and no longer able to use his power of speech just before drowning.
Later, Saul returned to his true home in northern Greece, and he began writing the story of Jesus Christ and Judas which was based on this tragic couple that he had met in Judea. Saul had been the holder of the Moses cult ancient texts, but Saul was not interested in cult leadership. He was thinking bigger and wanted his writings to constitute a new religion. In time, Saul got his way. He was an ambitious entrepreneur who finessed local Roman governors on the idea that Christianity and its spread would be advantageous for business and their own political aspirations.
Previously, people of the Roman Empire were polytheists who held different gods and goddesses in high esteem. Sometimes, it was difficult for governors to control the people of the land when listless provocateurs manipulated the legends of a forum of deities to suit their needs. There was too much higher authority to contend with. Saul explained to the governors that monotheism would solve those kinds of problems, and many more, through situating the higher authority as a single God, who then translated their will to individual, patriarchal figures, such as a local governor, or the head of the church.
In the future, if the governor needed a marketplace cleared to make room for a cattle drive, a band of loiterers would not find it valid to claim that such-and-such a God was approving of them hanging around clogging up the agora. The governor, or even powerful businessmen, would make an appeal to the same god as that of the loiterers, and thus that one God would be perceived to be siding with whomever had the greater amount of economic and political power in society. Saul’s hypothesis was consistent with the anthropological origins of man based in alpha-male social structures and hierarchies.
Saul had an easy time getting the governors to promote gatherings of people to learn Saul’s story of the miraculous life of martyred Jesus Christ. The program was working, and the religion spread relatively quickly. Saul focused on how the Moses cult could be transformed into a historian’s cabal. Over the centuries, disciples of Saul continued his work, and the governors who bought into Christianity helped form the papacy which then fostered covert agents of Saul disciples from the Crusader Cabal.
Later in human history, during those secret meetings between Wibert and Hildebrand – two powerful players in the Crusader Cabal – it was discussed that William Conqueror was the appropriate person to back a holy war in the Levant. William was near death when the moment presented itself to the Crusader Cabal, and although William found the proposal fascinating, he declined to get involved. Hildebrand was already deceased, but Wibert continued to coax William. Finally, William agreed that he would do what he could to get the ball rolling on Wibert’s plans. Wibert was very pleased and instructed William to meet with Otho who would later become Pope Urban II.
William met with Otho and did not reveal his association with Wibert or the cabal of historians. William spoke persuasively, and Otho became convinced that a holy war was the mandate of the one true God. As pope, Otho announced the Crusades, and he gathered his council to ensure that the massive project was undertaken expeditiously and with due diligence. For two centuries, European elites were concerned with the quest to return the holy land to Christian people. However, that was just a cover story for the mission’s true purpose.
The Crusader Cabal had developed from Saul’s cabal of historians, in turn having been transformed from Moses’s cult of fantastic history. The Crusader Cabal were in charge of the crusades, and they had their own mandate independent of the official Holy Roman party line fed to the devout people of Europe. The Crusader Cabal intended to sack the holy land and selectively destroy all historical artifacts and texts that had been shipped to that region for safekeeping after the fall of Rome.
The Crusader Cabal knew that to control the future, it was essential to control the past through writing history. The Crusader Cabal relied on the social control built into monotheism, however, the ancient texts of polytheistic cultures if made available to the people would reveal the superiority of thinking, as well as inspired living that accompanies religions with relatable deities as opposed to a single, wrathful God. In polytheistic cultures, the deities were mentors who were fallible – that was human. In monotheistic cultures, a flawless God was inaccessible, and the relationship with God was mediated through ambitious charlatans and shameless scoundrels, and all with a sense of dread built-in when any worshipper faltered – that was inhuman. Most of all, it was unfair, and people deserved better.
They used to get better. Polytheistic religions in the Western world had humor and goodwill. Yet, the Crusader Cabal were set to task on selectively erasing the ancient artifacts and texts which revealed too much of how great culture and lifestyle had been in those times. The crusaders preserved only the artifacts – whether it be, statues, pottery, or written texts – that colored people’s views such that the ancient societies were then understood as frivolous and decadent. Ancient cultures were to be recognized as heathen, and farthest from the love of God.
The Crusader Cabal was entirely successful in the holy land, even if officially, many of the crusades were to be written into history as military disasters. The impression that the Crusader Cabal left for modern man was that ancient cultures were pederastic, deities were orgiastic and petulant, governments were tyrannical and unfair, and philosophers of the time were overly-concerned with formalism and minutiae, as opposed to developing primary concern for the beauty of the world as one of God’s creations. These ancient people were myopic pagans who would sooner watch Christians murdered in the Colosseum than embrace their ascetic duties of prayer and humility before God.
The Crusader Cabal was executing to perfection on Saul’s original plan. For Saul, monotheism was the key to social control. The Bible was the ultimate agitprop, and the tides of change could be controlled through manipulating its cryptic messages and false promises. Whereas polytheism would free people’s minds and in turn they would choose their own path. As a prideful sociopath par excellence, Saul could not abide the thought that people who were intellectually lesser than him would feel freedom in their own minds and experience it in their meek lives. The meek were not to inherit the earth.
The crusades continued for centuries with a hand-picked collection of ancient artifacts being preserved in order to produce contemporary impression regarding polytheistic culture and lifestyle. Meanwhile, the holy land had also been a place for storing much of the riches of the former Roman Empire. The crusaders developed three orders of knights which had separate mandates for the work to be done over the next thousand years.
Sanguinary
In my depressed state, I decided to tune out what was happening to me. I felt like a catatonic Ister in the dank cave on the limestone hill. It scared me. The force pushing at the back of my head holding me in place within the atmosphere of the Earth cosmic game piece, never ceased. Time passed. I have no idea what happened. It was the Dark Ages.
I snapped out of it just in time for the Battle of Hastings, however, I realized that I had cheated myself through my intent to disconnect from the experience. This defining battle in England required greater historical contextualization. There had been much development in England from the Roman era to the rule of Alfred the Great, and his descendants.
I shook off the guilt of being a lazy student and regained my focus. The final sequence of events that would hopefully take me back to my own time concerned the crusader knights. The Crusades is thought of as a Holy War to take back the Holy Land in the Levant region of the Middle East. However, the Bigot Star showed me a different set of motivations for the major players involved in that set of historical events.
Close to the end of William the Conqueror’s life, he left England and traveled to France where he met in secret with Wibert of Ravenna who had become an antipope. It seemed that Wibert and Hildebrand of Sovana had a clandestine alliance which connected all the way back to the Moses cult. The pair had been initiated into a cabal of historians which had spawned from the Moses cult centuries earlier.
This cabal of historians was focused on manipulating history and thus determining the path of the human race. Saul of Tarsus had been the founder of the cabal and was the one who transitioned it from Moses’s heathen values about fantasy writing, such as, the Old Testament, to a more mature form of social control and mass propaganda. Saul had written the New Testament and fabricated the story of Jesus Christ virtually out of thin air.
I remembered having watched over the Levant around the time that was said to be that of the life of Jesus Christ, interested to catch a glimpse of the three wise men visiting Bethlehem that fateful night. Nothing had materialized and this made sense to me now that I was shown the origins of the cabal of historians.
In the time of Saul, he had traveled to the Levant and met an influential rabble rouser there. This rabble rouser had the ear of the people, but this enthusiastic rogue was also a homosexual who had a lover from sub-Saharan Africa living with him. This lover had wanted the rogue to use his influence with the people in order to proclaim that God approved of homosexuality. However, the rogue refused the request, fearing the people would turn their back on him. The African lover sold-out his intimate partner and alerted the Roman centurions stationed in Judea that the rogue was a dangerous character rallying the people against Roman occupation.
Once captured, this rogue was not crucified, but rather, he was made to dig a pit at the edge of the sea. The Roman soldiers forced him into the pit, and they buried him up to his neck. The tide came in at night and the rogue perished gruesomely, lungs full of sea water and no longer able to use his power of speech just before drowning.
Later, Saul returned to his true home in northern Greece, and he began writing the story of Jesus Christ and Judas which was based on this tragic couple that he had met in Judea. Saul had been the holder of the Moses cult ancient texts, but Saul was not interested in cult leadership. He was thinking bigger and wanted his writings to constitute a new religion. In time, Saul got his way. He was an ambitious entrepreneur who finessed local Roman governors on the idea that Christianity and its spread would be advantageous for business and their own political aspirations.
Previously, people of the Roman Empire were polytheists who held different gods and goddesses in high esteem. Sometimes, it was difficult for governors to control the people of the land when listless provocateurs manipulated the legends of a forum of deities to suit their needs. There was too much higher authority to contend with. Saul explained to the governors that monotheism would solve those kinds of problems, and many more, through situating the higher authority as a single God, who then translated their will to individual, patriarchal figures, such as a local governor, or the head of the church.
In the future, if the governor needed a marketplace cleared to make room for a cattle drive, a band of loiterers would not find it valid to claim that such-and-such a God was approving of them hanging around clogging up the agora. The governor, or even powerful businessmen, would make an appeal to the same god as that of the loiterers, and thus that one God would be perceived to be siding with whomever had the greater amount of economic and political power in society. Saul’s hypothesis was consistent with the anthropological origins of man based in alpha-male social structures and hierarchies.
Saul had an easy time getting the governors to promote gatherings of people to learn Saul’s story of the miraculous life of martyred Jesus Christ. The program was working, and the religion spread relatively quickly. Saul focused on how the Moses cult could be transformed into a historian’s cabal. Over the centuries, disciples of Saul continued his work, and the governors who bought into Christianity helped form the papacy which then fostered covert agents of Saul disciples from the Crusader Cabal.
Later in human history, during those secret meetings between Wibert and Hildebrand – two powerful players in the Crusader Cabal – it was discussed that William Conqueror was the appropriate person to back a holy war in the Levant. William was near death when the moment presented itself to the Crusader Cabal, and although William found the proposal fascinating, he declined to get involved. Hildebrand was already deceased, but Wibert continued to coax William. Finally, William agreed that he would do what he could to get the ball rolling on Wibert’s plans. Wibert was very pleased and instructed William to meet with Otho who would later become Pope Urban II.
William met with Otho and did not reveal his association with Wibert or the cabal of historians. William spoke persuasively, and Otho became convinced that a holy war was the mandate of the one true God. As pope, Otho announced the Crusades, and he gathered his council to ensure that the massive project was undertaken expeditiously and with due diligence. For two centuries, European elites were concerned with the quest to return the holy land to Christian people. However, that was just a cover story for the mission’s true purpose.
The Crusader Cabal had developed from Saul’s cabal of historians, in turn having been transformed from Moses’s cult of fantastic history. The Crusader Cabal were in charge of the crusades, and they had their own mandate independent of the official Holy Roman party line fed to the devout people of Europe. The Crusader Cabal intended to sack the holy land and selectively destroy all historical artifacts and texts that had been shipped to that region for safekeeping after the fall of Rome.
The Crusader Cabal knew that to control the future, it was essential to control the past through writing history. The Crusader Cabal relied on the social control built into monotheism, however, the ancient texts of polytheistic cultures if made available to the people would reveal the superiority of thinking, as well as inspired living that accompanies religions with relatable deities as opposed to a single, wrathful God. In polytheistic cultures, the deities were mentors who were fallible – that was human. In monotheistic cultures, a flawless God was inaccessible, and the relationship with God was mediated through ambitious charlatans and shameless scoundrels, and all with a sense of dread built-in when any worshipper faltered – that was inhuman. Most of all, it was unfair, and people deserved better.
They used to get better. Polytheistic religions in the Western world had humor and goodwill. Yet, the Crusader Cabal were set to task on selectively erasing the ancient artifacts and texts which revealed too much of how great culture and lifestyle had been in those times. The crusaders preserved only the artifacts – whether it be, statues, pottery, or written texts – that colored people’s views such that the ancient societies were then understood as frivolous and decadent. Ancient cultures were to be recognized as heathen, and farthest from the love of God.
The Crusader Cabal was entirely successful in the holy land, even if officially, many of the crusades were to be written into history as military disasters. The impression that the Crusader Cabal left for modern man was that ancient cultures were pederastic, deities were orgiastic and petulant, governments were tyrannical and unfair, and philosophers of the time were overly-concerned with formalism and minutiae, as opposed to developing primary concern for the beauty of the world as one of God’s creations. These ancient people were myopic pagans who would sooner watch Christians murdered in the Colosseum than embrace their ascetic duties of prayer and humility before God.
The Crusader Cabal was executing to perfection on Saul’s original plan. For Saul, monotheism was the key to social control. The Bible was the ultimate agitprop, and the tides of change could be controlled through manipulating its cryptic messages and false promises. Whereas polytheism would free people’s minds and in turn they would choose their own path. As a prideful sociopath par excellence, Saul could not abide the thought that people who were intellectually lesser than him would feel freedom in their own minds and experience it in their meek lives. The meek were not to inherit the earth.
The crusades continued for centuries with a hand-picked collection of ancient artifacts being preserved in order to produce contemporary impression regarding polytheistic culture and lifestyle. Meanwhile, the holy land had also been a place for storing much of the riches of the former Roman Empire. The crusaders developed three orders of knights which had separate mandates for the work to be done over the next thousand years.
CHAPTER 38
Swindle
The Crusader Cabal brought the riches they plundered in the holy land to their new headquarters in the Alps. The Templar Knights used the booty to control all of Europe. Eventually, this region would become Switzerland and the ill-gotten wealth was the foundation for the untouchable Swiss banks. It all made sense to me now because I had never understood why Switzerland had simply been allowed neutrality while other nations fell to conquering armies, over and over.
A second order of crusader knights – the Knights of St John – situated themselves on the island of Cyprus. Eventually, no one noticed that they were there, and instead believed that they were stationed in Malta, innocuously. However, the task for this second order of knights was to keep a close eye on developments in the Levant, and then control that region by stimulating social unrest selectively as a geopolitical propaganda tool.
The third order of crusader knights – the Teutonic Knights – went into the region of Pomerania, in northeastern Europe. Their task was to ensure that the region was never properly developed, especially with respect to industrialization. The Crusader Cabal recognized the advancement of European people and knew that great global conquerors would emerge from that continent based on anthropological traits of the white ethnicity. A true conqueror of Europe would also have to control all the ethnically European people which meant invading Russia.
By keeping Pomerania underdeveloped (including the regions that constitute present-day Poland, Belarus, and Baltic states), grand armies of would-be European conquerors would perish on their long, desolate march to Moscow. The Teutonic Knights ensured there would be no robust supply lines for an invading grand army to rely on. Later, Napoleon found this out the hard way, and then Hitler repeated the ruinous endeavor. You might ask – how could the overwhelming early military success of Nazi Germany then completely collapse through doing something doomed to fail that had been tried not two centuries earlier under very similar conditions? The answer is: Napoleon and Hitler were merely allowed to rise to power through the machinations of the Crusader Cabal. They were glorified pawns for this cult of historians that was now controlling the human race.
As I watched the crusades unfold and I learned of the insidious plot of the Crusader Cabal, I considered whether those humans, such as Wibert or Hildebrand, were in league with the Kerplunckians, or instead, had the Kerplunckians been a mere fantasy concoction of my own devising whereas the true evil force that was destroying people’s lives on Earth was human in origin. The Bigot Star gave nothing away and I was left with nothing more than fevered conjecture. The Kerplunckians had certainly been real in a sense – I had been there in their crappy, crappy land.
I stuck with the idea that the Kerplunckians were real, and their land had developed consistent with my story about them. Therefore, I concluded that they likely had discovered Earth and the human race through Veggie Clint’s vivid dreamscape simulation. If this Crusader Cabal was also real, then were they in league with the Kerplunckians? Perhaps, they were being manipulated by those nefarious cosmic evil ones? The Kerplunckians surely would have noticed the Crusader Cabal, and if the evil ones were accustomed to masquerading on Earth in human form, then why not also use prestigious Crusader Cabal elites? There were many questions that I had, and there was a growing sense of anxiety as I realized that the two stories might not come together neatly, and I would have to conclude that everything in my life had been a depraved act of self-deception. The Bigot Star remained my anchor and I had to rely on it for greater knowledge, yet I also had to think back to other stories I had told during the Trick of the Trade for relevant clues.
Swindle
The Crusader Cabal brought the riches they plundered in the holy land to their new headquarters in the Alps. The Templar Knights used the booty to control all of Europe. Eventually, this region would become Switzerland and the ill-gotten wealth was the foundation for the untouchable Swiss banks. It all made sense to me now because I had never understood why Switzerland had simply been allowed neutrality while other nations fell to conquering armies, over and over.
A second order of crusader knights – the Knights of St John – situated themselves on the island of Cyprus. Eventually, no one noticed that they were there, and instead believed that they were stationed in Malta, innocuously. However, the task for this second order of knights was to keep a close eye on developments in the Levant, and then control that region by stimulating social unrest selectively as a geopolitical propaganda tool.
The third order of crusader knights – the Teutonic Knights – went into the region of Pomerania, in northeastern Europe. Their task was to ensure that the region was never properly developed, especially with respect to industrialization. The Crusader Cabal recognized the advancement of European people and knew that great global conquerors would emerge from that continent based on anthropological traits of the white ethnicity. A true conqueror of Europe would also have to control all the ethnically European people which meant invading Russia.
By keeping Pomerania underdeveloped (including the regions that constitute present-day Poland, Belarus, and Baltic states), grand armies of would-be European conquerors would perish on their long, desolate march to Moscow. The Teutonic Knights ensured there would be no robust supply lines for an invading grand army to rely on. Later, Napoleon found this out the hard way, and then Hitler repeated the ruinous endeavor. You might ask – how could the overwhelming early military success of Nazi Germany then completely collapse through doing something doomed to fail that had been tried not two centuries earlier under very similar conditions? The answer is: Napoleon and Hitler were merely allowed to rise to power through the machinations of the Crusader Cabal. They were glorified pawns for this cult of historians that was now controlling the human race.
As I watched the crusades unfold and I learned of the insidious plot of the Crusader Cabal, I considered whether those humans, such as Wibert or Hildebrand, were in league with the Kerplunckians, or instead, had the Kerplunckians been a mere fantasy concoction of my own devising whereas the true evil force that was destroying people’s lives on Earth was human in origin. The Bigot Star gave nothing away and I was left with nothing more than fevered conjecture. The Kerplunckians had certainly been real in a sense – I had been there in their crappy, crappy land.
I stuck with the idea that the Kerplunckians were real, and their land had developed consistent with my story about them. Therefore, I concluded that they likely had discovered Earth and the human race through Veggie Clint’s vivid dreamscape simulation. If this Crusader Cabal was also real, then were they in league with the Kerplunckians? Perhaps, they were being manipulated by those nefarious cosmic evil ones? The Kerplunckians surely would have noticed the Crusader Cabal, and if the evil ones were accustomed to masquerading on Earth in human form, then why not also use prestigious Crusader Cabal elites? There were many questions that I had, and there was a growing sense of anxiety as I realized that the two stories might not come together neatly, and I would have to conclude that everything in my life had been a depraved act of self-deception. The Bigot Star remained my anchor and I had to rely on it for greater knowledge, yet I also had to think back to other stories I had told during the Trick of the Trade for relevant clues.
CHAPTER 39
Beginnings
During the cosmic wager, Tricks of the Trade, I had eventually identified everyone in my life as having been a cosmic-based evil character. The notion was that they had surrounded me intent on convincing me that they were an ally, and all in hopes that I would believe it. If my judgment had been untrue then particular evil character would be free to continue ravaging humanity from their cosmic vantage. That was the nature of the cosmic game which I presided over as judge, jury, and executioner.
After the New Year’s nightmare, those who I had once held in high-esteem, such as, my family, or Gary as the guardian angel, and so on, were then identified as the second round of evil characters, and they too were condemned by me. All that remained was my skeleton crew that I recognized as not having interest in living on Earth as human because they found it unethical and unfair. I thought that their attitude was sensible, and this is why I began my attempts at suicide, eventually, finding myself in Algonquin Park with a box of rat poison.
When I had condemned this second round of evil characters they were not identified as Kerplunckians, but rather, were from a cosmic vantage named “Plunck”. They had been watching over the Kerplunckians much the way those little buggers watched over the human race. These characters of Plunck were led by Bill Fey and Phil Git. They were brothers who believed that they represented the “light side” of evil (jokes about sodomy, and such) and the “dark side” of evil (everything evil that wasn’t conceivable as light sided, I suppose). The details aren’t that important; however, the brothers had a population they led, and those wicked creatures of the cosmic were collectively known as “Feygits”.
I chose the word, “feygit”, because I felt it was an appropriate portmanteau combining the word, “fey” which means “doomed to fail”, and “git” which is defined as “contemptible fool”. Thus, the feygits were contemptible fools doomed to fail. It was a stigma which I hoped would brand them with bad luck for their quest to fool me and their goal to evade my judgment so that they could continue destroying humanity.
It was traumatic for me at the time to feel the need to reject the people closest to me who certainly didn’t deserve that poor treatment based on how they had contributed to my life. Essentially, the purge was a means to an end. My introspective consciousness was alien among humans, and I wanted to end the dissociated life I was forced to live with a world of people who would never understand me in a meaningful way. To justify suicide, I had to first explain why it didn’t matter that I end my life. The feygits being identified as my close family and friends who had been most trusted implied that there were no genuine characters left in my life, therefore, I wasn’t hurting anyone other than myself to end my life.
The trauma I experienced from identifying the feygits and thus divorcing from all my family and friends precipitated me turning away from the task of properly explaining who the feygits were. It was too traumatizing to address the feygit origin story or hierarchical structure in a concerted way. I knew that these evil characters were something like Kerplunckians, but they had been watching over that sordid lot, manipulating events in Kerplunck as well as thwarting Kerplunckian plans on Earth. I had stated during my cosmic judgment that the Tricks of the Trade event for Bill Fey and the Plunckian Feygits had been based in a wager they had with Kerplunckians. Yet, the deck was stacked in the favor of Bill Fey because his crew had presented themselves to Markis and Clint’s crew dishonestly. The Kerplunckians had remained unaware that the Feygits had vantage over their crappy, crappy land.
The essence of my mental work with respect to Bill Fey and his Feygits had been a Tricks of the Trade, Part II. The identification process in the cosmic judgment of the Kerplunckians had taken a full year of my life to complete, and then Bill Fey’s crew being condemned by me took an additional six months of my Will Strange life. After that came the pilgrimage to Algonquin Park.
There were important questions to address now that I was forced to consider all my cosmic wager work as a complete waste of time. Could the Feygits of Plunck have been Moses, Saul, Hildebrand, and the others? Were the Feygits, also performing as the Crusader Cabal? I felt a push at the back of my head. The Bigot Star had heard enough of my rambling speculation for now. I was being instructed to focus on the next history lesson.
Beginnings
During the cosmic wager, Tricks of the Trade, I had eventually identified everyone in my life as having been a cosmic-based evil character. The notion was that they had surrounded me intent on convincing me that they were an ally, and all in hopes that I would believe it. If my judgment had been untrue then particular evil character would be free to continue ravaging humanity from their cosmic vantage. That was the nature of the cosmic game which I presided over as judge, jury, and executioner.
After the New Year’s nightmare, those who I had once held in high-esteem, such as, my family, or Gary as the guardian angel, and so on, were then identified as the second round of evil characters, and they too were condemned by me. All that remained was my skeleton crew that I recognized as not having interest in living on Earth as human because they found it unethical and unfair. I thought that their attitude was sensible, and this is why I began my attempts at suicide, eventually, finding myself in Algonquin Park with a box of rat poison.
When I had condemned this second round of evil characters they were not identified as Kerplunckians, but rather, were from a cosmic vantage named “Plunck”. They had been watching over the Kerplunckians much the way those little buggers watched over the human race. These characters of Plunck were led by Bill Fey and Phil Git. They were brothers who believed that they represented the “light side” of evil (jokes about sodomy, and such) and the “dark side” of evil (everything evil that wasn’t conceivable as light sided, I suppose). The details aren’t that important; however, the brothers had a population they led, and those wicked creatures of the cosmic were collectively known as “Feygits”.
I chose the word, “feygit”, because I felt it was an appropriate portmanteau combining the word, “fey” which means “doomed to fail”, and “git” which is defined as “contemptible fool”. Thus, the feygits were contemptible fools doomed to fail. It was a stigma which I hoped would brand them with bad luck for their quest to fool me and their goal to evade my judgment so that they could continue destroying humanity.
It was traumatic for me at the time to feel the need to reject the people closest to me who certainly didn’t deserve that poor treatment based on how they had contributed to my life. Essentially, the purge was a means to an end. My introspective consciousness was alien among humans, and I wanted to end the dissociated life I was forced to live with a world of people who would never understand me in a meaningful way. To justify suicide, I had to first explain why it didn’t matter that I end my life. The feygits being identified as my close family and friends who had been most trusted implied that there were no genuine characters left in my life, therefore, I wasn’t hurting anyone other than myself to end my life.
The trauma I experienced from identifying the feygits and thus divorcing from all my family and friends precipitated me turning away from the task of properly explaining who the feygits were. It was too traumatizing to address the feygit origin story or hierarchical structure in a concerted way. I knew that these evil characters were something like Kerplunckians, but they had been watching over that sordid lot, manipulating events in Kerplunck as well as thwarting Kerplunckian plans on Earth. I had stated during my cosmic judgment that the Tricks of the Trade event for Bill Fey and the Plunckian Feygits had been based in a wager they had with Kerplunckians. Yet, the deck was stacked in the favor of Bill Fey because his crew had presented themselves to Markis and Clint’s crew dishonestly. The Kerplunckians had remained unaware that the Feygits had vantage over their crappy, crappy land.
The essence of my mental work with respect to Bill Fey and his Feygits had been a Tricks of the Trade, Part II. The identification process in the cosmic judgment of the Kerplunckians had taken a full year of my life to complete, and then Bill Fey’s crew being condemned by me took an additional six months of my Will Strange life. After that came the pilgrimage to Algonquin Park.
There were important questions to address now that I was forced to consider all my cosmic wager work as a complete waste of time. Could the Feygits of Plunck have been Moses, Saul, Hildebrand, and the others? Were the Feygits, also performing as the Crusader Cabal? I felt a push at the back of my head. The Bigot Star had heard enough of my rambling speculation for now. I was being instructed to focus on the next history lesson.
CHAPTER 40
Obedience
Time rolled forward quickly while my face was still pressed up close to the landscape of familiar Earth. English was being spoken in a dialect that was comprehensible and I knew enough French to pick up some of the dialogue in those regions as well. I felt less alienated, finally.
There were important historical events which I was shown, including aforementioned European conquests by Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler. However, there was so much activity on the planet in the 20th century, that it was near impossible to find a visual throughline for developments and events. Things were happening too quickly for me to track the progress. I’m not sure exactly what I saw, or whether I could trust what I had been shown.
The playthrough of human history gave me a fresh understanding for the American Civil War, the Holocaust, JFK’s assassination, and many other major historical events. Before I knew it, I had arrived at the year of my birth. However, the Bigot Star wouldn’t let me near Toronto, and I could not see my family’s lives or other familiar settings. The sense of torture returned, and I remembered all the time that I had spent stuck halfway into stone and dirt in the temple floor at the mouth of the river Sep.
The years passed and I was floating over the Atlantic Ocean in a holding pattern. There was nothing to look at, and I knew that the Bigot Star was doing this to me on purpose. I wanted to assert independence and I struggled to realign myself with the land. Each time that I made an attempt at lateral movement, I lost some of my altitude. The Bigot Star was dropping me into the ocean slowly and steadily based on my squirming. It seemed that the Bigot Star could hear my thoughts, and I wasn’t sure that it was possible to hide my motives from the powerful cosmic being. Nevertheless, I continued to struggle to see land, secretly hoping that I would continue to drop into the ocean and then be part of my own world again.
It finally happened, and I was floating in the Atlantic Ocean. But then I recognized the imminent problem. It had been so long in my ghostly form with its ideal physical nature that I had forgotten to consider what it meant to have a mortal body that was tangible in the physical world. I had begun to take for granted that my ghostly form’s body required no food, or sleep, and that it phased through objects and substances ethereally.
In those times when I had been dragged around by Ister, or when I was following Markis on his terrible hunts, if I became submerged in water it meant virtually nothing, and it was not possible for me to drown. Either I would sink to the bottom and that became my floor, or I would exist halfway in the liquid as if I were standing on solid ground. In my ghostly form, I wasn’t certain that I had working lungs. Breathing had been about air passing into my mouth more than it constituted a regulated process of inhaling and exhaling.
Now, I was drowning, and I knew for a fact that there was no island or boat in sight. I thrashed around at first and then resolved that I would die in the water. I submerged. My lungs filled with liquid and my eyes closed. My senses faded.
Moments later, my eyes opened, and I had a sense of emergency. Instead, of thrashing in the water, I quickly swam to the surface. I wiped at my eyes while treading water and looked around. I was in Algonquin Park again. Seemingly, I had drowned in the lake on that occasion where I remembered squatting in the rushes after swallowing the poison.
Obedience
Time rolled forward quickly while my face was still pressed up close to the landscape of familiar Earth. English was being spoken in a dialect that was comprehensible and I knew enough French to pick up some of the dialogue in those regions as well. I felt less alienated, finally.
There were important historical events which I was shown, including aforementioned European conquests by Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler. However, there was so much activity on the planet in the 20th century, that it was near impossible to find a visual throughline for developments and events. Things were happening too quickly for me to track the progress. I’m not sure exactly what I saw, or whether I could trust what I had been shown.
The playthrough of human history gave me a fresh understanding for the American Civil War, the Holocaust, JFK’s assassination, and many other major historical events. Before I knew it, I had arrived at the year of my birth. However, the Bigot Star wouldn’t let me near Toronto, and I could not see my family’s lives or other familiar settings. The sense of torture returned, and I remembered all the time that I had spent stuck halfway into stone and dirt in the temple floor at the mouth of the river Sep.
The years passed and I was floating over the Atlantic Ocean in a holding pattern. There was nothing to look at, and I knew that the Bigot Star was doing this to me on purpose. I wanted to assert independence and I struggled to realign myself with the land. Each time that I made an attempt at lateral movement, I lost some of my altitude. The Bigot Star was dropping me into the ocean slowly and steadily based on my squirming. It seemed that the Bigot Star could hear my thoughts, and I wasn’t sure that it was possible to hide my motives from the powerful cosmic being. Nevertheless, I continued to struggle to see land, secretly hoping that I would continue to drop into the ocean and then be part of my own world again.
It finally happened, and I was floating in the Atlantic Ocean. But then I recognized the imminent problem. It had been so long in my ghostly form with its ideal physical nature that I had forgotten to consider what it meant to have a mortal body that was tangible in the physical world. I had begun to take for granted that my ghostly form’s body required no food, or sleep, and that it phased through objects and substances ethereally.
In those times when I had been dragged around by Ister, or when I was following Markis on his terrible hunts, if I became submerged in water it meant virtually nothing, and it was not possible for me to drown. Either I would sink to the bottom and that became my floor, or I would exist halfway in the liquid as if I were standing on solid ground. In my ghostly form, I wasn’t certain that I had working lungs. Breathing had been about air passing into my mouth more than it constituted a regulated process of inhaling and exhaling.
Now, I was drowning, and I knew for a fact that there was no island or boat in sight. I thrashed around at first and then resolved that I would die in the water. I submerged. My lungs filled with liquid and my eyes closed. My senses faded.
Moments later, my eyes opened, and I had a sense of emergency. Instead, of thrashing in the water, I quickly swam to the surface. I wiped at my eyes while treading water and looked around. I was in Algonquin Park again. Seemingly, I had drowned in the lake on that occasion where I remembered squatting in the rushes after swallowing the poison.