It was three different things, the ghost bugs. They weren't ghosts. It was hypersensitivity to mites, and all the other microscopic stuff, so I sit and sleep up on aluminum tables; second it was the parasites in the food. Had to cut out everything but raw vegetables, and a little chicken and fish, a bunch of enzymes and oil supplements, to heal the leaky gut syndrome. And third it was mania. I can't read the first page of the New York Times without getting ghost bugs, even on the clean diet and up on the aluminum table. I can read but I have to calm down, look away, look at the sky, then read a little more, and eventually I can do OK, get through an hour, even two, but then that's it for intense mental activity for the day. I can work, but at stuff I already know how to do, and I have to generally keep myself calm, walking around outside and things like that.
The psychiatrist from the last 72 hour psych hold, after I had spent the whole day reading and writing, and needed to be sedated, bugs crawling through and through, said he doesn't think I'm insane, but that I have an unusual connection to the unconscious, and that it could be a curse and a miracle, and that I'd have to figure out how to manage it.
Browsing websites about leaky gut syndrome led to the restrictive diet. Turns out the bugs are real, parasites infesting the processed food all through our food supply. I blur my eyes as I walk through the supermarket, past the boxes and cans with colorful packaging, all infested, not food for our bodies, not food for our minds, all just food for the parasites, keeping the infestation going, crowds like grand central station hugging when another meal comes down the pipe.
I eat my raw veggies and the 4 to 6 cloves of raw garlic a day, and when that raw garlic goes down there the mood of that grand central station hug fest changes dramatically, it's the look on satan's face when you've just come out of an exorcism, when they realize it's all onion and garlic from here on out, and the infestation is gonna have to go, it's the look of shock and awe, like grover and elmo, bulging eyes, flat mouth, drooping jaw.
It's like when the shaman's I'd meet would all say things like "the veil between the worlds is THIN for you!", it was the gut, leaky intestine lining with yeast roots opening holes like the yellow submarine into the bloodstream, blood and brain exposed to the demon world of parasites. As an infant, the infant's behavior is to touch and poke on the most interesting members of the new world before their eyes, digestive systems so thin you really shouldn't feed them regular food. I'm in the point oh three percentile of americans who didn't lose their food allergies after age three.
I sure don't regret it, schizotypality has been fascinating entertainment. I still turn on the drum tape from time to time, to watch endless adventure stories, with me as the central character, and always a psychotic vein of story to keep it interesting. This one was a recent little excursion one afternoon:
It's about me. I have a nice summertime date with my wife, special date, end with a special little hickey on my neck, then it's off to my formula one race at the racetrack, dangerous job. And dressed in my race outfit, standing at a podium under lights and cameras at the center of the stadium where I'll be racing, I make a speech, it's a declaration of a schism within Catholicism (happens all the time, Ukrainian church, church of england, now church of onderdonk), and I make this speech telling everybody to send the pope a telegram, tell him they are leaving with me, and the controversy goes out into the world, and then I get in to my car. The race begins, and I had told everybody to clock the engine, for with my new spiritual leadership of this new schism'd church I would be able to modify earthly physics, and go faster with the same engine if necessary. Well they watched, as the light began to glow from within my formula one, and the thing sure did go fast, but then complete whiteout, and I'm dead, crawling up through the ground, made it as far as the mall before I was given a wake and sent off, off to the moon, for burial. Not just me there, but a whole small collection of shamans and world leaders, that's where they really put osama bin laden, and that's not it, the adventure story is nowhere near over: there is something about the tides, and having shamans on the moon, that gets the earth to be damaged in some way that has the cows completely stop giving milk, anywhere in the world, all there is is canned milk, and it becomes quite the precious commodity, and then that's it, the milk is gone, we are all out of milk and it's all my fault.
And when I take the greyhound I still wake up in the middle of the night and take notes on the voices that are going wild all around me, as all the other passengers sleep and I sit at the center, on the aisle.
In a gan-shan-tropical town,
cow-licked and criss-crossed,
all the flurry instincts sharpen,
so what's real? forms? isolation huts?
the finger in my ear??
There's a nasty harmony
in the growth in a soldier's bones,
cranky as a fire-corn pit,
nasty in the spotlight,
and worldwide in its influence.
We dent the tides with a spoonful of sunshine,
in a zig-zag design that entrances the porcupine,
green streams flashing with kindness.
It's the relationship between good and universe, bad and kingdom.
With samizdat detail on the french veranda,
smiling and smoking as he goes,
the leather-bound saint leaves the time trail cold.
Work smart and see purple, resist the north, elevators for the racehorse.
Franken-cake slurpees and robot piss
like a thumb in the sky on the world's drive,
he's gone to see a man about a dog that wanders the highway
(get the dog to the kennel and the captain says hello!);
Bubble-bubble home, drippity-drip,
the coin-operated thunder horse trickles forward;
smart gators just gasp, and breathe in ghosts of the river -
(the ones who were looking for a hotel room) -
the year the rabbit went away,
there was no more forest,
and the chicken began singing a different tune.
It's hard to resist entertainment like that.
So in this epilogue, I declare the point where I stop trying to integrate the demon world, because I finally figured out what the hell it is. It's the world of parasites in our processed foods.
The ways of demons, that's what I've recorded here in this memoir. They have a sentient world. It isn't David versus goliath, me against some little defenseless mite. It's little me against a giant worldwide creature that acts as a monster, and I'm just trying to give it a haircut, off of me, appropriately.
I had been seduced by the gracious offering of honorary membership in their world, as they revealed it to me bit by torturous bit, but looking back it all makes sense. They run so quickly, those demons, well so do the ants on the ground in our world, they run that fast relative to their own bodies, much faster than we do. That's always how I know it was the demons. And the "portal" where they pulled me in. I thought maybe they were the "aliens" people were talking about, with magical philosophical knowledge about our race. But no, that portal was one into their own consciousness, into their collective world. The world of their ways.
When my religious brother in law asked me if there was anything in art that looked like the demon world, I said there was only one thing, the illustrations of Dr Suess books. And in "Horton hears a who", it was proposed by Dr Seuss exactly what I am proposing here. Horton the elephant was unusually sensitive, and heard the world of the whos in whoville inside a dustspec. He took some flak for it ("boil that dust spec boild that dustspec"), and got support from that world ("we're here, we're here"). Most whos in whoville were content to go about living their lives, but there was the occasional mad scientist who that would try to establish communication with the "other world", presumably ours in this case, and I think that's what happened to me, as well as horton the elephant, they drew me into their world.
And it wasn't just Horton who proposed this. I grew up watching the flintstones, and the jetsons, which I later realized were modelled on the honeymooners and maybe i love lucy. And scooby dooby doo had this motif as well: there would be a bizarre episode with supernatural stuff, tv series jumping the shark for a season premier or something, and the explanation at the end of the episode would be that moldy bologna sandwhich at midnight before they went to bed. Gotta lay off the late night cold cuts. They understood intuitively that the mites had contacted their mind, and presented a bizarre world. An alternate world rabbit hole many of our species have been pulled down, me worst of all.
Here's a schizotypal connection: we know the crazy people act up at full moon - the cops all know that, well documented. Well, we also know from bird mites dot org that the mites react to the full moon. And I know the pressure of mites acting up will make a person do all kinds of crazy things. I think those wolves howling at the moon have been eating some rotten meat and sitting in some unsavory sleeping holes, and are just bemoaning their own mite infestations as the mites themselves bay at the moon (imagine what kind of dreams those wolves are having!)
Yeah I listened to the demons for 25 years, cause the stuff they were tellin me was out of this world, no humans knew about it, and I thought somehow it would get me ahead, like john nash. But it's not getting me anywhere in the human world, just infested with parasites and insane and locked up in prisons and psychiatric hold all the time, itching all over like a maniac, with enough interesting stories to amaze the intakers and keepers.
Dude, misunderstanding. Shamans told me they were my ancestors, "dead people". The psychiatrists said it was my subconscious, "all in my mind". But I figured it out. The demon world is real. It's the mites and parasites, and they have a world much like ours, sentient beings in a collective, who can meld consciousness with the more empathic humans and teach us their world. I became a supreme court justice and a tele evangelist in the demon world, and the mites love me everywhere I go. I had a father in the demon world, and he was trying to kill me, and now that I realize he's a parasite, I don't have to listen to him. But once in a while I still do, you know that world knows stuff about the genome that our species doesn't understand, they modify our genome, "genome completing optimists" they say, "the grand central excitement that presides over the calm collapse of the night sky". But they are out to destroy us, species versus species, it's war, and I quit helping sabotage my original race for that of the parasites. I am eating 4 cloves of garlic a day, and the demons have the look on the face of satan on the day you come out of an exorcism, all shock and awe, like elmo with the bulging eyes, flat mouth, and drooping jaw.
So I stay away from processed food and they loose all power over me. They lurk in the cashews at my sister's house, and just about everywhere else in the human food supply. They crawl up my legs, I bet science dismisses it as "restless leg syndrome". I'm only insane when I eat from the human food supply. Fresh veggies, all rabbit food, and I am not itching, (just hungry), and not insane anymore.
Like a superhero, radically different.
Sinewy guitar player baying and swaying,
strong line in the fountain waiting,
orange summershine frosts the coast,
but the dark corners of tomorrow
block the truth, shed the sun and the sea.
In the lonely heat and the sun tanned ambulance,
the trail is certainly plasma-packed,
and the shine of the central garden is magic,
forming a syndicate of optimism on the relief plain,
eyeshot wandering through the noise,
listening to the harmony of ghosts,
parasites taking in a movie,
all about the swimming pool of forever,
rival pseudo-cakes the answer to fun and fantasy,
exploring heaven on a triple-beam sandwich the size of super-pie.
The tools of sunshine matter only indirectly in the swamp forest,
whole as messemer, messy as clouds.
Plying the by-ways of heaven with super-soap,
we eat our oranges and forget our dreams,
quiet before the dawn.
-nepomuk onderdonk
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