“Yes, I look like my grandmother…. And in those moments when a flicker of vanity hits me and I think, ‘Damn, I need a facelift,’ I remind myself that there’s a starving hound someone has abandoned and I must catch it, feed it and restore its confidence in the hound-human bond. So what if I look like hell? My heart is full, and I wish the same for you.”

—Rita Mae Brown

“I happen to believe that dogs have souls… because so many dogs, I find, are closer to the human than humans.”

—Norman Mailer, On God: An Uncommon Conversation

My brother, Crash, has a story about getting lost in a forest outside of Århus, in Denmark, during a hailstorm. He was in his early twenties at the time, on a no-budget, vagabond tour of Europe. Denmark is such a teensy little country that Crash thought he could just hike around anywhere, without knowing where he was going, and he’d eventually run into a town or the shoreline—but that didn’t turn out to be the case. The forest on the outskirts of Århus is vast, and in the middle of winter with an unanticipated hailstorm obscuring your vision and soaking through your shabby Norwegian thrift store overcoat, I guess it’s kind of easy to lose your way there.

At some point, after the hail had been pelting his blonde head for a good long while, Crash realized he was totally lost. He was also shivering uncontrollably. He thought he might die of exposure out there in the Scandinavian semi-wilderness—an ignominious death, to be sure. He could just see the Danish headlines (although not in actual Danish, since he wasn’t fluent in that language):

Asshole American Tourist Found Dead
Had Kierkegaard Book, But No Compass

He sat down on a low limb under a bushy tree to wait out the worst of the storm, but it only seemed to grow more fierce: hailstones the size of canned peas, mud puddles and coppery drifts of fallen pine needles rapidly turning white with ice. Crash was getting colder and wetter and more miserable with each passing second. He began to rue the day he’d met that dimpled Danish au pair girl in Santa Barbara who’d so sneakily seduced him into visiting her homeland.

Right about then, a big black dog appeared in the woods approximately ten yards ahead of Crash. He could just barely make out the dog’s shape through the curtain of plummeting hail. Crash stood up and walked toward the dog (or wolf, perhaps?) reasoning that, at the very least, being eaten by a wild dog would be more thrilling than freezing to death. It would also make for better Danish headlines:

A Werewolf in Århus?
American Savaged by
Danish Monster Dog

Crash had a job waiting for him as a journalist back in America. He couldn’t help but think in headlines.

The coal-black dog ambled up to Crash and sniffed his outstretched hand. It looked like a burly Bullmastiff—or maybe Cerberus, sans the two auxiliary heads. There was, however, a distinct friendliness about the dog that Crash sensed instantly. He scratched the dog behind its ears and the dog responded by leaning hard against Crash’s thigh and wagging its stumpy tail.

The dog had no collar, but even if it didn’t have a home or owners anywhere close by, Crash figured it knew the lay of the land better than he did at that moment. So when the dog turned and started walking deeper into the forest, indicating with an occasional backward glance at Crash that he should follow, he didn’t hesitate. He trotted after the dog as if it had him on a leash.

They slogged along a sodden deer path for at least a mile under a canopy of evergreens so dense and dark that it provided them with partial shelter as the storm cycled from hail to sleet. At last, through a gap in the trees, Crash saw a brighter light up ahead and he knew there had to be a clearing. It turned out to be a country road. And right across from that road sat an abandoned church.

Crash thought they might go inside the church and dry out for a while, but when the dog got to the church’s arched stone doorway it stopped, too frightened to go inside. Crash thought that was rather odd, but—peeking in through the heavy but unlocked double doors—there was definitely something creepy about the church’s dank, unlit interior (although maybe it was just the sight of all those skinny crucified Christs hanging everywhere). He decided to stay outside with the dog, under the church’s eaves, until the sleet finally slowed to a light drizzle.

The dog set out again and Crash followed. They walked another mile or so, this time along the country road, which led straight to a tidy little commuter train station. Crash thanked the dog after he bought a ticket back to his girlfriend’s house in Aalborg. He felt incredibly sad that he couldn’t take the dog with him. The dog seemed to feel the same way, whimpering plaintively as Crash got on the train. Crash had read a few stories about ghostly black devil dogs—and he would do much further research on the topic when he got back to America—but this dog had been his friend and protector. Perhaps even his savior.

Since that time, Crash, not surprisingly, has had an inordinate fondness for dogs of all sorts—especially black ones. He recently wrote in his own blog about an extreme, months-long case of insomnia that he experienced right around the time my book about him was published (see Crash on Crash), but what he neglected to tell his readers was that his insomnia ended just one day after his wife brought home a new black puppy to keep him company.

So does Crash think that his puppy has a Buddha-nature? Does he believe that God works in mysterious dogs?

You bet he does.

A Note From Derek: My older brother, “Crash” Gordon, has written in his blog at Nitt-Witt Ridge about how it feels to have his life turned into a book. I went over there thinking he’d be venting about how pissed off he was that I’d cannibalized his personal history to write Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg, but Crash’s post turned out to be something far stranger than that. I can’t say I was completely surprised. That’s the way things usually go when Crash gets involved. Check it out.

“Dear Mr. President, Internal Revenue regulations will turn us into a nation of bookkeepers. The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the meaning of human life history has ever seen. Man’s life is not a business.” —Saul Bellow, Herzog

“…if you take away just one thing from this evening, always remember this: The banks and insurance companies are only too happy to sell you an umbrella on a sunny day, but they’ll yank it away from you at the first sign of rain.” —Lloyd Marrsden, speaking to Gordon in Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg

Beet-cheeked, squinty-eyed, morbidly obese, Lloyd Marrsden is a man whose life has become a morally bankrupt (but highly profitable) business. Specifically, he’s an insurance broker to the rocket industry. He also happens to be a 33rd-degree Mason with deep and spooky ties to the medico- military-occult complex. Lloyd knows things. He profits from that knowledge at other people’s expense.

“Don’t you feel guilty, taking advantage of people like that?” Gordon asks him at a party, after he hears Lloyd gloating over one of his favorite insurance scams.

“Guilty? It’s the American way!” says Lloyd. “This country was founded on the principle of taking advantage of other people. Look at what we did to the Native Americans—not only did we steal their land; we subjected them to the most brutal campaign of genocide in human history. America is one big Indian burial ground, when you get right down to it. And then we kick-started our mighty economic engine by exploiting African slaves. If you think anyone ever gets rich without taking advantage of other people, you’re just being willfully naïve. ‘Behind every fortune lies a crime.’ I believe it was Balzac who said that—or Mario Puzo…. If it’s not written into our Constitution, it’s somewhere in The Godfather, I’m almost certain.”

Later, Lloyd goes on to explain: “Predatory lending—that’s the key. Goad your intended victim into taking on debt and then use that debt as a means of control. It works on governments as well as individuals. The Rothschilds understood this method and exploited it better than anyone. Using the National City Bank of Cleveland as a front, they financed John D. Rockefeller’s monopolistic acquisitions for Standard Oil. Now the Rockefellers control several key transnational corporations along with Chase Manhattan—arguably the most powerful bank in America—but who controls the Rockefellers? The answer is: the Rothschilds, of course.”

“Yeah, well… so how does that relate to any of us?” Gordon asks him, feeling surly.

“It relates in two ways,” Lloyd says. “On a microeconomic level, you have the pernicious influence of credit cards, the means by which bankers feed off the financial life-blood of the masses, much the same way as vampire bats feed off of cattle. It’s predatory lending on an unimaginably vast scale. You probably didn’t know this, but that little experiment in picking your pocket got its start right here in Fresno County. Back in 1958, Bank of America did the first credit card mass mailing to 66,000 unsuspecting Fresno County families. It was a huge success, obviously—for the bankers. By 1960, over two million cards were in circulation throughout California, at generally usurious rates.

“On the macroeconomic side of things, we handed over control of our economy—and thus our government—to a cartel of international bankers when Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. That ingenious piece of legislation was cobbled together in a secret meeting at J.P. Morgan’s private retreat out on Jekyll Island. Morgan was in on it, of course, as were the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. The American public has been whipsawed for gigantic profits from pre-engineered bouts of inflation and deflation ever since. Wars, recessions, even presidential elections—the Fed controls it all with monetary policy, our economy’s magic elixir.”

I had all of the above in mind as I watched the subprime mortgage market meltdown play out over the last few months, leading to our current “credit crisis.” [Of course, things are a bit more complicated than Lloyd’s necessarily brief cocktail party patter; see this link for a more nuanced picture of what’s currently going down.] I thought it was especially interesting that financial stocks like Wells Fargo Bank suddenly leaped 5% higher in the last hours of trade on the day before Ben Bernanke’s early morning “surprise” half-point cut to the Fed discount rate on August 17th, 2007. Conservative blue-chip stocks with huge market caps like Wells Fargo (Warren Buffet owns a chunk of it) don’t often make 5% moves in a few hours on no news. After Bernanke’s announcement, of course, Wells Fargo and the rest of the financials traded much higher—and those people in the know who bought the stock on the day before made a big, fat profit.

Lloyd, in my book, is the sort of guy who would have bought put options on airline stocks right before the attack on the World Trade Center, had he known what was coming down (and he would have known… along with others whom Congressman Dennis Kucinich is hoping to nail). Gordon sees him, at first, as a modern incarnation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi: a “fat, crazed, scatological king who keeps his conscience in a suitcase.” But Lloyd turns out to be a much more mercurial figure than that. He’s equal parts Ubu, Moses Herzog, John Perkins, and Aleister Crowley. Is he good? Is he bad? The answer isn’t always clear. As Gordon gets to know him better on their road trip to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Lloyd even shows some flashes of vulnerability, flipping open the locks on his brushed aluminum Zero Halliburton suitcase to let his conscience speak:

“It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that corporations are immortal soulless entities that take as much as they can and give nothing in return,” he admits. “Their primary goal is to keep increasing productivity and earnings in an all-devouring, endless cycle. Corporate egregores exploit their workers, pollute the environment, and turn vast quantities of the world’s irreplaceable natural resources into disposable junk products, all just to show a quarterly profit. They steal from the poor and give to the rich, creating enormous concentrations of wealth in the hands of just a few thousand elitist assholes. If Reagan and Bush get their way and all that money and power isn’t redistributed—via a system of fair taxes and the checks and balances built into our Constitution—then America’s liberal, democratic society will soon be looking a lot more like a corporate-sponsored fascist police state. And that will be because, quite simply, the egregores of unchecked capitalism tend to penalize those who would better the lot of humanity, while at the same time rewarding the relatively few unbridled sociopaths who take advantage of anyone and anything that they can.”

“Yeah, but where would we be without porno and Diet Coke?” Jimmy asks, pointing to just two of their recent purchases.

“Well, if you can’t beat ‘em…” Lloyd says cheerfully. “Seriously, why do you think I ended up in the insurance racket, anyway? My line of work probably has some of the most evil egregores out there—aside from Big Oil and the tobacco companies—yet most insurance brokers see that evil as something apart from themselves. They fail to recognize it as coming from their own hearts and souls.”

“But not you,” says Gordon.

“No… not me,” says Lloyd. “Not now, at least. That’s why I’m here doing my penance, trying to provide a little enlightened adult guidance to a carload of snarky but redeemable teenage jerk-offs.”

For more of Lloyd’s warped adult guidance, you can start here:

CHAPTER 14: CASUALTY BENEFITS

“The big attraction with Gordon—and the reason I’m tagging along with him on what is bound to be yet another crappy human adventure—is that he has a powerful daimon looking out for him. One of the very top guys. If you’ve never heard of them, daimons aren’t demons or devils—let’s get that straight right off. A daimon is sort of a spiritual mentor, a guide from the Other Side, who is there with you from birth onward to coax and shape your soul during your earthly life.”

—from Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg

Okay, so this is a little weird… I’ve written myself into my own novel as a space- and time-transcendent embryo who can observe (and comment on) my brother Crash’s life from my perch inside our fictional mother’s womb. To make a crappy pun, it’s a womb with a view.

I figured I could get away with this literary conceit because, for the past fifteen or twenty years now, I’ve had the unshaken conviction that we’re all spiritual beings who only temporarily inhabit these lame-ass human bodies for reasons of spiritual education. Life on earth, in other words, is like a boot camp for the soul. And a lot of the time, just like at any regular boot camp, being there kind of sucks.

This essentially gnostic take on the human condition has led me along some incredibly strange paths of inquiry over the years. I’ve explored hypnosis, lucid dreaming, Tibetan Buddhism, shamanism, remote viewing, Jungian analysis, and so on. But before you go writing me off as some sort of tripped-out New Age hippie-dippy bliss bunny, consider this from pages 200-201:

Suffering is the existential manifestation of evil in the world. And suffering exists. We know that. But what we sometimes forget is that the world is also full of good. Which is kind of amazing when you think about it. If we’re all just a collection of soulless atoms—random bundles of self-serving biology—then we should always be running around trying to fulfill our own greedy desires while we screw over everyone else in the process. But that isn’t always what happens, is it? How do you explain giving to charity, or extreme acts of self-sacrifice? Some people have given up their lives for the sake of others. It’s a mixed-up, fucked-up, crazy-making world, but at least there’s love in it, and a certain amount of the True God’s benevolent influence.

But then why did the True God let this half-assed god, the demiurge, get away with making such a flawed universe in the first place? I think Gordon himself provides part of the answer (with a little coaching from his daimon) in a book he’s going to write in his early twenties called The Sensuous Hermit. Since that book is already written from the perspective of eternity, and I’m still able to skip around in the past and future, I’ll just quote from the relevant passage here:

“There’s a Yiddish saying that God made man because He loves stories. The Sensuous Hermit has a more refined version of that same essential idea. It’s his contention that before the universe began there was only God—the One, the Absolute, the Unknown and Unknowable. But even God couldn’t comprehend Himself in that condition. To be conscious of his Oneness, He had to be less than One. Thus was born two-ness, or duality, with all the attendant distractions of that condition: light and dark, life and death, good and evil, love and fear, oil and vinegar, and so on. The truth is, we’re all still One with God, but at the moment we happen to be functioning as a kind of enchanted mirror that tells God stories about his true nature. Or better yet, the universe is one huge roman à clef in which the secret identity of every character is none other than the Absolute Author.”

Like I said, that’s part of it. But here’s a more radical spin on that same basic idea: What if mankind was once a single angelic being that fell from grace and was transformed, during the Big Bang, into the material universe as a means of salvation? What if shards of that fallen angelic personality could be found everywhere—in every rock, dinosaur, shark, tree, rainbow, bear, and person? And what if the ultimate purpose of all those fragmented personalities was to spiritually evolve into wholeness, back into that original angelic being—with increased knowledge of its own good and evil—which would in turn allow it to merge once more with the loving grace of the True God. If all of that were true, then we’d finally have a reasonable theological explanation for all the suffering in the world:

It’s self-inflicted.

Why does evil shit happen? Because we need to experience it. We need to know what evil is all about so we can strive to embody its opposite: spiritual good. But in a world like I’ve described, we could never be quite sure of our moral bearings. We’d be living under Kierkegaard’s dictum that when we’re feeling our most saintly, we could actually be working for the devil (Jerry Falwell and some of the more rabid popes come to mind…). Conversely, an act that seems evil might actually serve to nudge millions of souls toward salvation. Christ’s crucifixion would be the obvious example, but there are others. I’m not saying this is true, but what if I told you that every soul involved in the Holocaust actually volunteered for it?

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” That’s another of Kierkegaard’s dictums. It explains why we need to spend time on the Other Side between incarnations. We do it so we can kick back and take a long look at our lives and try to figure out what the hell has been going on.

There’s more, if you’re interested, starting here:

CHAPTER 5: A VIEW FROM THE WOMB

News Item, July 12th, 2007: New York Magazine’s Vulture blog scooped up quite the deal story yesterday afternoon involving PEN/Hemingway award winner Justin Cronin. In a major change of direction - also involving a pseudonym, Jordan Ainsley - Cronin is working on a postapocalyptic vampire trilogy set in 2016. He’s already completed the first 400 pages of volume one, which was sold by Trident Media’s Ellen Levine as a partial manuscript for what Vulture reports to be a whopping $3.75 million, 3-book deal… —mediabistro.com

What is it with vampires, anyway? Why are we so fascinated by them—and why do the big media companies dole out the big bucks for their stories? This particular news item made me think back to 1991, when I found out that my brother Crash’s old roommate, A.C. Nightshade, had somehow managed to sell the film rights to his unpublished first novel for $666,000. Disney ponied up. I guess they thought all that Mickey Mouse crap was getting stale….

The book was called Vampirism Made Easy. It’s a rollicking tale of vampires and genies and teenage nymphomaniacs and I don’t know what the hell Disney was thinking, frankly. They never made it into a movie. But A.C. Nightshade went on to become the Dave Barry (or Jimmy Buffet) of supernatural horror novels, which is not a bad thing to be in this day and age. Think of that guy who did the folksy voice-over narration for Disney’s “Charlie, the Lonesome Cougar”—only instead of chuckling over the rascally escapades of a boy and his mountain lion cub, he’s narrating a story about a vampire girl with perky tits who rips the throat out of a sleeping wino while the wino’s scabby hairless Chihuahua tries to hump her leg. That’s A.C. Nightshade for you…. Every time he comes out with a new book it hits the New York Times Best Sellers List. That Disney deal must be looking like chump change to him now.

A.C. Nightshade’s real name is Jimmy Marrsden, by the way. The A.C. stands for Anti-Christ or Aleister Crowley, according to Jimmy—depending on which day you ask him about it. He’s never been able to decide on one or the other, so he uses both.

You’ll meet a youthful version of Jimmy—and a youthful version of Crash, too, of course—if you read Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg. Just to give you some idea of what that reading experience might be like, I’ve included a link to Chapter 12 in its entirety. It’s about horny high school kids, lesbian vampire movies, and an encounter with a fat, friendly psychic lady at a rumored whorehouse. My theory on vampires, developed in this chapter, is that we’re fascinated by them because we’ve all had encounters with their real-world equivalents—psychic vampires, who prey on the spirit of others in everyday life.

It seems to me that some of those psychic vampires are extremely well-paid, such as (just speculating here…) Justin Cronin and my brother’s old friend and nemesis, A.C. Nightshade.

CHAPTER 12: GO VIKINGS!

“Yes, I do believe it is possible, and not only for novelists, to ‘plug in’ to an overmind, or Ur-mind, or unconscious, or what you will, and that this accounts for a great many improbabilities and ‘coincidences.’ ”

—Doris Lessing, winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature

WASHINGTON (CNN) 11:45 a.m. EDT, June 26, 2007 — The Supreme Court ruled against a former high school student Monday in the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner case—a split decision that limits students’ free speech rights. Joseph Frederick was 18 when he unveiled the 14-foot paper sign on a public sidewalk outside his Juneau, Alaska, high school in 2002. Principal Deborah Morse confiscated it and suspended Frederick. He sued, taking his case all the way to the nation’s highest court. The justices ruled that Frederick’s free speech rights were not violated by his suspension over what the majority’s written opinion called a “sophomoric” banner. (Watch the banner unfurl and launch a legal battle )

Here’s an example of how the collective unconscious works on us in mysterious ways…. I started writing Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg a few weeks after September 11th, 2001. We all know what went down that day and there’s no need to get into it here, except to say that I was living in Manhattan when it happened and I intuitively knew, right away, that there was more to the attacks on the World Trade Center than we were being told. Crash Gordon, in a way, has been my method of educating myself about the slithery history of false flag terrorist events and the manipulative lies our government tells us. “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” ended up as just one slender tentacle on that many-armed octopus.

The phrase occurs on page 48 of my book. I was writing that section during the winter of 2001-2002. I must have run across a news item about Joseph Frederick unfurling his banner during the Winter Olympics torch relay in Juneau, Alaska on January 24th, 2002—although I can’t remember doing so now. I do know that I liked the phrase, however I ran across it, and I decided to use it, for comic purposes, as a bit of graffiti painted on some pissed-off farmer’s barn. I had no way of knowing then that Frederick’s case would get all the way to the Supreme Court and result in a further Bush-sponsored curtailing of our constitutional rights. But believe it or not, that’s how it happened.

That in itself wouldn’t be of much note if I hadn’t written a scene in Crash Gordon, a few months later, that depicted Gordon defending a fellow student’s right to free speech in a series of editorials for his high school newspaper, The Viking Voice. Gordon ends up being harassed by his high school principal and an overzealous policeman for writing the editorials. But later, The Columbia Journalism Review singles out those same editorials for its Annual Scholastic Journalism Award.

So you can see where I’m going with this: Five years before it happened, the collective unconscious helped me key in on the exact phrase that would become the focus of an onerous Supreme Court decision regarding our rights to free speech. That particular issue happened to resonate with me, personally, because Crash Gordon’s fictional adventures in high school journalism were based on actual incidents from my brother Crash’s life. Crash really did write award-winning editorials on free speech in high school that got him sent to the principal’s office for an ugly police interrogation. And Crash grew up to become an independent journalist who got into still more trouble for publishing his anti-corporate screeds.

And now I’ve gone and written Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg—a book that five out of nine Supreme Court Justices might like to see banned and burned, if they could get away with it.

You can read the relevant excerpts here:

BONG HITS 4 JESUS — THE EXEGESIS