[WARNING Don't read this is you're sensitive to "Political Correctness" issues, or if you don't have much of a sense of humor. You won't like it. Believe me. I'm serious.]
Once upon a time, which happened to be in present time, there was an old woman, one of many; at least I thought she was human. She was in the same rehab as me, on another side of the other section not too close, but close enough for me to hear the animal sounds she made. Maybe Old Testament Jews would say Satan possessed her; who knows? I guess it takes one to know one.
Once upon a time, which happened to be in present time, there was an old woman, one of many; at least I thought she was human. She was in the same rehab as me, on another side of the other section not too close, but close enough for me to hear the animal sounds she made. Maybe Old Testament Jews would say Satan possessed her; who knows? I guess it takes one to know one.
I felt like I was in a Viet Cong urban prison, if I knew what one was like. This old troll, this old goat, this old bat, this old piece of shoe leather had been there long before that - and from the smell of things she'd be there long after I left. As deaf as he was, even Beethoven could have heard the noise she made! Every single night, this old Chinese thong, which I obviously had no compassion or consideration for, sat in bed, or in a wheelchair and made sounds like dying sheep, dying lambs caught in a trap, or goats being strangled or branded every five, six or seven seconds, repeatedly without stopping, without ever taking a break, not even for a sip of muddy water from the banks of the Chang Jiang. "Ba-a-a, aaaaaaaaaaa! Baa,a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a! G'o-o-o-o-o-odaaayyy,-a-a-a-a-a-a-a! G'odaayy-a-a-a-a-a-a! Gnaaaaaa-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a! Goo'baa-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a! Baa-a-a-a-a-a,a-a-a-gnoa-a-a-a-a-ayy!" She went on and on like this without stopping, hour after hour, one grimy night after another dirty night after more gloomy monotonous nights even more boring, sickening, sucking, horrifyingly mind-numbing, mentally insane, sadly sickening days and nights of non-therapeutic psychological torture without end! Water boarding would have been a vacation.
Now, this old crow -- who knew anything about her? She looked like she was once a person, maybe even a woman. She might have known a man, maybe they got married, had kids, maybe even grand kids. Maybe the old man died on his own for his escape, and maybe the kids dumped her in a well or in a dryer in a basement in a Chinatown laundry near the corner of Stockton and Clay under the tunnel bridge. If the kids were smart, they kissed the antique ways of the oldest country good riddence, moved out and shot up with hot new young sexy western-style Euro-pop-Asian-spiky-haired-party-crashers. Whatever happened, I'll never know; and the less I know the better.
In the meantime, in my rehab center on the third floor next to the window looking onto Pine Street, I shared a 3-bed dorm room with two tiresome and obsolete Asian men who spoke no English. Quickly, I got the rabbit-ears TV removed from the room, a TV which only transmitted loud Chinese sit-coms and stupid game shows. These guys were deaf anyway. After the TV was gone, one of men continued to sit in front of the table where the TV used to be and he'd just sit there and stare at it, stare at where it used to sit, staring at empty space on a shelf as if the TV was still there; there was nothing there but a shelf and a mirror. He'd sit there anyway and shovel his rice and seaweed into his mouth with his chopsticks and watch the no-TV that wasn't there just like some zen-master of the Vimalakirt Sutra, looking into the nature of his missing television and preparing a treatise on suffering without cable.
In case you haven't kept track, these remarks are connected to the Half-Goat/Half-Woman curse of evil story I started out with: both of these men belligerently and viciously hung onto their useless and fruitless excuses for lives as if under a curse. I'm not being cruel; I'm making an economically responsible observation in the new language of the "bailout". These dying men were waiting for their bailout like most people in this rehab center over 70yrs old struggling to stay alive like two divorced couples besieged with a summons to give up everything, like executives on the verge of bankruptcy wanting another bonus.
Like Wall Street crooks, the old Asians looked forward to one more death-defying day of bed-wetting, vomiting, coughing and shitting so often they could keep as many qualified doctors and nurses preoccupied with their cureless self-made tribulations just to be selfish, nasty and spread their prejudice to every corner of the building. And we wonder why health care is so expensive! It's not healthcare that's expensive; it's the care and feeding for a bloated ancient Chinese honor system that worships past generations of the Jade Emperor 玉皇, Yudi 玉帝 who had enough sense to die a long time ago. If you stick your head out the window you can smell the intenstinal garbage can of our financial district downtown San Francisco slowly sinking into its colorectal cancer landfill!
Did I mention that both men shit in their beds at least two or three times a week? Well, they did: one whimpered like a baby when he slept and moaned all night barely breathing; the other one gurgled and snored never clearing or swallowing his mucus-bound, throat-filled, sloppy phlegm-filled black lung (I'm assuming he had at least one) every five minutes or so before trying to climb out of his bed every so often. With his hands, like Larry Craig of Idaho infamy, he reached under the curtains separating our little bedroom cubicles and tried to get out of his bed and put his feet on the floor. He stretched out his ugly, deformed little bony death-like white skeleton finger-bones across the vast space from his unprotected infected bed to my antibiotic-protected bed just to get my attention; only Shennong 神農 the "Divine Farmer" of the dirt farmer, knew for what possible reason. Something creepy, for sure.
I had a theory that I thought because my hair was longer back then than it is now since I cut it short he must've thought I was a woman (it wouldn't be the first time I was mistaken for a woman and it wasn't always unpleasant, but that's another story for another time.) Back in the rehab institution, in his burned out feeble-headed empty-mindedness maybe he thought I was his faithful peasant village wife, maybe he thought he'd get lucky like in the past before he buried her in the back yard with the pigs and his WWI Chinese Armed Police officer camouflage uniform, maybe he had Chinese Necrophilia, the sexual attraction to non-English speaking corpses. Whatever it was, I called the nurses every night just in the nick of time. I'd turn over in my bed and look at his face, look into his bulging eyes and unshaven face and huge nose with the oxygen tubes sticking in his huge nostrils, laying there on his side fondling the tubes running down out of his bed onto the floor, into a half-filled bucket of discolored yellowish liquid that must've been toxic. The nurses came rushing in the dorm room, turn on the lights like they were working a rice paddy at sunrise, they'd say an honorable mention in ancient Chinese because nurses were gung-ho on honoring old Chinese men and women, calling them "pa-pa" and "ma-ma" whether they were related or not. I guess after Hiroshima and Nagasaki they were all related.
They'd tie him down to his bed like some kind of oriental S&M game, just before he took a shit in his bed; the smell was enough to kill me, but it never did. While this was going on, I had a pair of studio-quality, ear-gripping, volume-decapitating headphones wrapped around my eardrums as tightly as morphine would allow listening to Monk and Coltrane playing as loud as possible to drown out the ugliness that was in the space of my little cubicle. In case there's any question, let me be the first to declare that, zen-enlightenment or not - new-age self-awareness or not, I have zero tolerance for sick, old Asians who are among the world's most prejudiced, arrogant, belligerent, nasty, selfish and pushy people I've ever ran across, as in "run across" on a freeway, which by the way they should never be allowed to drive a car. However, I do think we need to give people the benefit of the doubt and accept them unconditionally, but there are exceptions when doubt becomes a malignant tumor invading and destroying healthy tissue spreading to other parts of the organism.
Let's get back to the story of the Half-Goat/Half-Woman. Beyond what I've just told you, as bad as that was – and it was worse than that - further down the hall, in the other section, was this Goat-Woman. In mythology, the devil often appeared as a goat to superstitious peasants carrying their supply of sorghum. I thought this old witch was brought here to float thru the halls of this refrigerated and decomposing mortuary to capture the futile fleeing souls of the dead, those who had sold themselves when they were young formations of animal alchemy symbols, extensions of the goat-tradition. Goats were viewed with as much reverence and high regard in alchemy as they were in other spiritual traditions such as Native Americans. They've held mystique for every culture. Great symbolism was placed upon beheaded goats. And, although true alchemical practices are highly guarded and facts are hard to come by, there are many dark areas still hiding in the anals of alchemy, some of which I photographed here on these pages and you can see it on their faces.
Near the end before I was discharged from the institution, the Half-Goat/Half-Woman waved good-bye to me in a threatening way, like she had a bomb under her blanket, like when she sat in her wheelchair and "saw" me - (I don't know if she could see anything except shadowy images) – it was clear I didn't belong there; her red puffy eyes and sagging skin would seem to shriek as she sat in her bed or in the wheelchair with her head bent over touching her knee caps, wearing her woolen blanket wrapped around her legs and shoulders like a tight cocoon, her eyes half closed, rolled up into the top of her forehead, scanning the room from the opening in her skull, like a submarine periscope. Her long twisted fingers slightly twitched from her fingernails to her knuckles as if she was counting the dead on her fingers. She sat there every night and day and made ghastly sounds of tortured dying sheep, fat deathly-scarred lamb chops and branded goats cornered by wild hungry dogs, wild starving blood-thirsty boars! Hour after hour, day after day and night, she would call them out of their dorm rooms one by one, or in groups of two, like Noah's ark of the handicapped, one mentally vacant skeleton after another, each of them carrying a "NO VACANCY" sign around their neck. I closed my door, closed my eyes, turned up my headphones but I still could hear her crying her half-goat/half-human sounds: "Ba-a-a,aaaaaaaaaaa! Baa,a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a! G'o-o-o-o-o-odaaa,-a-a-a-a-a-a-a! G'odaa-a-a-a-a-a-a! Gnaaaaaa-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a! Goo'baa-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a! Baa-a-a-a-a-a,a-a-a-gnoa-a-a-a-a-a! Ba-a-a,aaaaaaaaaaa!" It never stopped. She never quit. She went on and on every night, all night, all the time. Sleeping pills didn't make a difference. Her nervous system was possessed with evil. She was past the point of sleep. If she slept at all it was in the form of a trance; her sleep cycles were really cycles of trances.
As you can imagine, the noise almost made me go mad, but luckily I was spared: 200mls of morphine everyday kept my imagination from running away from me. I had a grip on reality. The old men snored with their nose-belching mucus-filled, wet breathing phlegm in their throat and lungs that should've killed them by now (and I wish it would have) went on and on as she continued her animal sounds "Ba-a-a,aaaaaaaaaaa! Baa,a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a! G'o-o-o-o-o-odaaa,-a-a-a-a-a-a-a! G'odaa-a-a-a-a-a-a! Gnaaaaaa-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a! Goo'baa-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a! Baa-a-a-a-a-a,a-a-a-gnoa-a-a-a-a-a! Ba-a-a,aaaaaaaaaaa!" But I for sure knew what was real and what was even more real!
The moral of the story: When the rest of us, the "normal" ones among us, talk about reality; when we talk about consciousness; when we talk about existence and life and beauty and intelligence; when we talk about matter, energy, space and time... where does this Half-Goat/Half-Woman fit in to the conversation? Where's her niche in life? What reality does she have that we're going to relate to? From magick wax, she carved out a two-headed Goat Candle and lit it up at both ends using her fingers as the fire starter, snapped them together to light the flame from the index finger. She lit the two-headed Goat-Candle, played with Chinese dolls and talked to them recalling the reckless, sleepless, death memories "Ba-a-a,aaaaaaaaaaa! Baa,a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a! G'o-o-o-o-o-odaaa,-a-a-a-a-a-a-a! G'odaa-a-a-a-a-a-a! Gnaaaaaa-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a! Goo'baa-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a! Baa-a-a-a-a-a,a-a-a-gnoa-a-a-a-a-a!" that kept us awake throughout the foggy creepy city night listening to her mystic dream in wet San Francisco nights blinded by a trance that cursed the winter.
