The Plot Thickens. It Also Emulsifies.

In my focus on the missing shirts, I have drawn too narrow a focus. The mystery runs deeper.

For example, I never mentioned the red stuff sack that I kept in my soccer bag. I used to put my jerseys in it so that I wouldn't have to root around in my bag to find them. I know I had that stuff sack back at the end of the spring season. When the fall season rolled around, I couldn't find it.

I also had a pair-of-shoe-sized vinyl carrying bag that came with a pair of cleats I bought a few years back. I used to put my shin guards and sleeves and socks in it. It, too, disappeared between the spring and fall seasons.

As with the shirts, the obvious, materialist answer is that I simply lost these items--I left them on the field or something. And I would accede to that possibility, were I not so completely OCD about never leaving anything behind. I always check again and again and again before I walk away.

At a certain point, the question becomes not just, "What forces are acting so sneakily to steal my things?" but also, "What are they hoping to accomplish?" Could it be that occult forces are trying to disconnect me from my very sense of the solidity of reality?

Consider: a couple of nights ago, Debby went into the downstairs bathroom to get a little lotion from the huge bottle she keeps in there. She was in there for a long time, then came out, lotionless and puzzled.

"I couldn't find it," she said.

There are no hidden places in that bathroom. If you can't find something, it's not there.

"You see?" I said. "And you thought those pieces about house spirits and trickster gods was just me messing around."

Breezes, Waves, Winds

I am coming to suspect that the boundaries between the planes is becoming more porous. Was my stalker impelled to take the grey Montbell t-shirt by the breezes stirred up by Raven's wings or the echoes of Coyote's howls? Do I dare ignore the possibility?

One day, will I open up the drawer in which I keep my workout clothes, the one I've searched over and over again for the missing shirts, and find, balled and wrinkled in a back corner that I am certain I've checked fifty times before, that orange wool Ibex shirt or the long-lost Salsa jersey, the disappearance of which set into motion this whole madness?

A strong wind blows when two locations' air pressures differ. Think, then, of the strange currents of energy that must exist between two distinct realities, that of the physical plane that we (think we) know, and of another plane, more occult and wondrous and standing beyond our meager attempts to explain. What might those winds look like? As the boundary grows more permeable, mustn't the strength of the currents grow? From that perspective, I will view the unexpected return of my Ibex shirt as essentially the appearance of a wind sock between the dimensions. Here in this physical space I may see a crumpled ball of fabric, but with my eyes attuned to greater forces, I will see it inflated, as with portent, indicating the strongest of winds.

The Mysteries of Divine Agency

From the discussion over the last few days, it may seem that despite my initial mention of it, I have chosen to disregard the possibility that some sort of trickster deity had something to do with my shirts' disappearance. This isn't exactly so.

It is very hard to speak comfortably of an immortal's activities on our plane of existence, since in all but the rarest, most extraordinary cases, deities assert their agency via subtle influence rather than direct action. It wouldn't be inaccurate to say that a person (or other physical force) becomes the agent for the deity's whims. But how, then, do you differentiate divine influence from that agent's more prosaic activities? Given our rather impoverished perceptual abilities (by the standards of the vast panoply of beings whose planes ever intersect our own, anyway), it's rarely cut-and-dried.

Imagine, for example, that you are reading a book that you are really enjoying. You're moving towards the climax, and the book's momentum is really picking up. You realize you're thirsty, so you decide to take a little break to go get a beverage before moving boldly toward the book's exciting finish. You set the book on the side table next to the lamp, and go get your beverage. When you bring the glass back, you realize you need to use the restroom, so you put the glass down next to the book. When you return, you discover that the cat has jumped onto the side table and knocked your glass over. Now the book is soaked. "Damn it!" you cry. "Stupid cat!" To our haughtily incredulous, post-modern world-view, that's the end of the story: the cat was naughty. But can you really comfortably say that the cat wasn't in some way compelled into that action?

Indeed, it is perhaps worth asking: Don't the cat's weird, almost alien whims ever make you wonder just what the hell is going on in its furry, befanged little head? Can you really be sure it isn't some kind of antenna for the eldritch impulses of supernatural entities? And thus the follow up question: Why do you even have a cat in the first place? Why didn't you just get another dog?

On the Characteristics of House Spirits

House spirits, as you probably know, have a very different relationship with time from ours, and usually exist in a kind of floating dream-like observation. "Sleepy" might not be a bad word to describe it, though it does anthropomorphize something that is very much not anthro-. You almost don't want to say that the house spirit "saw" my stalker take the t-shirt, "saw" my subsequent befuddlement. It would almost be more accurate to say that because those events happened in the house, the house spirit couldn't not be aware of them: in a sense the resting house spirit is the observation ability of the house itself.

When did it fully "wake up?" Probably during the Boulder floods of 2013, in response to the insult the house experienced when the sewers backed up. That we took a long time to rebuild might explain its continued restlessness.

It remains active. I got home after midnight Monday night/Tuesday morning, and my wife sleepily told me that she'd awakened at some point to find all the covers thrown totally off the bed. Now, she's got a weird thermostat and sometimes gets hot for no reason at all and then kicks the covers off, but when that happens she always remembers doing so. Not this time. She was pretty puzzled.

But I know what's up. Definitely the house spirit. Hey, house spirit: I want my Ibex shirt back. I barely even got to wear it.

It Was Grey, Grey Like the Purgatory of Your Own Conflicted Emotions

To my stalker, taking the grey t-shirt had seemed like such a good--or at least, impossible-to-ignore--idea at the time. But every time she walked into her bedroom and saw my shirt on the pillow she'd dressed with it--a pillow to which she'd added a purple smiley-face-emblazoned balloon for a head, reasoning, "He's bald, after all"-- she felt a deep shame. Eventually it got to be too much. She moved to Peru, trying to escape her compulsions.

(How clean a break did she make? She took the t-shirt with her. She did, however, pop the balloon.)

But try as she might, she couldn't escape the feeling of something important missing from her life. After eight months, she had to move back.

Welcome back, my dear. I still want my t-shirt.

The Plot Thickens

After I published yesterday's piece, it occurred to me that it might be dangerously simplistic to assume that all three shirts were stolen by the same person/force. Why couldn't it have gone like this: the Salsa jersey, which disappeared several years before the other two, I simply lost. (No idea how, but still.) And then my stalker took the grey tech tee. And then the house spirit, which witnessed both the taking of the t-shirt and, later, the ensuing "Am I going insane?" confusion it engendered in me, found the whole thing delightful and made the Ibex shirt disappear.

Beware conclusions that are overly simplistic is the takeaway here.

Come Back to Me, O Lost Beloved Shirts

Over the past several years, all of the following have disappeared:

  • a red wool Salsa biking jersey, of which I was quite fond
  • a grey Montbell tech t-shirt, of which I was quite fond
  • an orange wool Ibex tech t-shirt, of which I was quite fond

As I see it, the two most likely explanations for their disappearances are either an unsettled, attention-seeking house spirit, or else the occult machinations of some sort of trickster deity. What else really makes sense? I mean, how otherwise does one lose t-shirts?

The only other possibility I can see--and this is a long-shot--is that I have a quiet and really quite subtle stalker. She (for it would have to be a she--no male could maintain this level of concentration over all these years) would have to sneak into my house when I'm leave. She would, of course, know exactly when I leave, and have a very good sense of how long I'd be gone. She would move quietly around the house. She would look at things but rarely touch. She would want to leave no trace of her passing. (She would have given up on perfume years ago, lest I catch the merest trace of it wafting through the air.)

She would long to be invisible. Oh, what a joy that would be! Then she could stay in the house when I came home. She'd have to be very, very quiet, but she could just stand there, ever so quietly, and watch me from a very close distance.

Every so often, it would get to be too much. She just wouldn't be able to stand letting me go. She would have to take something with her. But what would go unnoticed? The safest bet, as she would see it, would be a shirt that hadn't been worn in a long time. And, since she'd have been watching me, she would know exactly which shirt that would be.

And then, some indeterminate time later, I would say--and do say--"Wait a minute. Whatever happened to that shirt I used to have? I don't remember the last time I saw it." And I would and do look around everywhere I could and can imagine it might be, but I couldn't and can't find it. Eventually, with a puzzled look on my face, I would and do give up.

It's probably a disgruntled house spirit. That makes the most sense.

Surrender (Happy Joyful Piece for a Friday Afternoon)

I look at the world and wonder when we are going to decide to move beyond this cycle of destruction and begin to create again.

We will, I'm sure of it. Creation is our heart's blood.

And yet, this tiresome worship of destruction. Death cults sweep across the Middle East. Our rapacious hunger for resources consumes the planet like a cancer destroys its host. Even simple solutions appear to be beyond us: here at home, we're witnessing the inexorable and increasingly exponential meltdown of not just our government but our whole governmental system.

And we worship false gods. The gatepeople to our culture sell us stories of how we reward creativity. It's a golden age of innovation, they say. But what gets rewarded? Facebook paid $19 billion for WhatsApp. Meanwhile we have the most disparate concentration of wealth the world has ever seen.

My friend Anastacia has the ability to be an open channel for love-energy. But she's no star-eyed dreamer. She and I share a similar geopolitical awareness, and when we look outward at the world we both experience a deep fear as we're forced to ask, How bad will it get?

But Anastacia and I share, too, an optimism, born not of what we see (so much darkness out there right now) but of what each of us is increasingly able to feel: that the first seeds of a great awakening have been planted, are beginning to sprout. She texted me the other day of a download of energy that swept through her. "Whatever we want--LET IT BE SO--like it's up to us to surrender into receiving what the universe is conspiring to provide for us. WOW!"

And does this match my own lived experience? I can only say this: the only thing that I can do these days to stop myself from writing is to fight or try to control what comes to me and asks to be written. Should I surrender? I ask myself: the flow that I am trying to tap into: which is bigger, it or me?

Ideas

I sometimes get asked about ideas--where they come from, how I generate them--and I usually say they just come. Stay open, and they come. (Furthermore, I say, ideas aren't really the important part. They're a dime a dozen. The important part is what you do with them.)

Ironically, I've recently had a bear of a time coming up with ideas for these pieces. Pretty much every day I've been on the sheer cliff-edge of disaster, and it's getting a little old.

Something isn't working. What am I not seeing that I need to see?

Ima Radster’s Annoyingly Prophetic Discourse on My Road Trip-Related Decision Making

HEY MAN ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO GET THE LARGE COFFEE, I KNOW YOU HAVEN'T REALLY SLEPT AND ALL BUT IT'S A LONG DRIVE AND YOU HATE TO STOP. HEY REMEMBER THAT TIME YOU GOT THE COFFEE AND THEN INSISTED YOU COULD MAKE IT TO WHATEVER THAT TOWN WAS FOR GAS SO YOU BLEW BY THE REST STOP BUT THEN LIKE FIVE MINUTES LATER YOU HAD TO PEE SO BAD YOU PRACTICALLY SWERVED OFF THE HIGHWAY AND THEN AT THE GAS STATION THERE WAS SOMEONE IN THE MEN'S ROOM AND IN THE WOMEN'S ROOM TOO, REMEMBER HOW YOU WHIMPERED WHEN YOU TRIED THE DOOR, AND YOU RAN OUTSIDE TO PEE BEHIND THE BUILDING BUT YOU DIDN'T GET YOUR PANTS DOWN IN TIME SO YOU PISSED YOURSELF? THAT WAS PRETTY FUNNY, IT'S A GOOD THING YOU HAD THAT OTHER PAIR OF PANTS.