July 5, 2003
-
Meanwhile, back at the
Melody ranch….
Episode Seven
[Editor's note: Recently, The Adventures of Melody Andrewsdottir, Lady Shaman, have been in flashback format, due to an error by Professor Neil Dreary's benighted lab assistant in Hoopla, SD, who mistook Mel's lipstick-inked paper towels for the Kleenex of Turin. Before the lab lackey's lacuna, Melody had just completed a 17-year course of training in 23 minutes with the renowned Polynesian Poobah, Dr. Lint Kahuna Duke. After receiving the gift of a power object, Melody boarded a plane for Parma, on her quest for dharma, and the sacred wedding waffle iron.
{Editors footnote to editor's note: that episode can be found HERE}]
I was seated comfortably in the Fly By Night Airways jet, musing on the emergency instructions the flighty attendants had just finished imparting–”In case of emergency, passengers on the right side of the plane will please stick their right arms out the windows and flap like hell; non-sectarian prayer is also recommended.”–and thinking back to my session with Dr. Lint Kahuna Baron, also known, for reasons I could not yet fathom, as the shaman of many names. I had completed a lengthy and detailed course of mystic instructions, the details of which I had jotted down on the back of one of my business cards. In addition, he had presented me with a power object, the femur of an Abyssinian Lesser Aua, which I had reverently made up into the centerpiece of my coiffure. I wondered if perhaps he should have removed the meat and gristle adhering to it, but he had explained.
“To do so would have lessened the mana,” he explained messianically.
“But isn’t that the stuff that falls from heaven?” I protested weakly.
“Your protest is weak,” he countered, shifting his considerable bulk on the counter in his office.
“But what about the power?” I asked.
He unscrewed one end of the bone with a flourish and out popped two C-cells.
I was jerked back to reality, whatever that might be, by the presence of a flighty attendant hovering over me like a vulture that has spotted a moribund bunyip.
“Care for a cold drink?” the attendant asked.
“No thank you,” I replied coldly. “Alcohol dulls the senses, and opens one up to entity attachment.”
“How about some hot tea or coffee”?
“Certainly not,” I replied hotly. “Caffeine causes mood swings, palpitations, constipation, liver cancer, and also stains dentures.”
“Soft drink?” the attendant ventured softly.
“Sugar contributes to hypoglycemia, arthritis, tooth decay and the national debt; artificial sweeteners are worse.”
“How about some plain water?” she asked plaintively.
“Fish fuck in it.”
Defeated, the attendant retreated. I myself felt depleted, but at least the exchange was completed. Seeking new fields, I headed for the WC.
Returning to my seat, I wondered why the flighty ones pushed the booze. A high profit margin aside, perhaps they were just trying to be helpful. Naa, more likely they wanted to divert attention from minor lapses in service: the late arrivals and departures, the quasi-edible food, the occasional wing falling off the plane.
Finally the plane landed, wings intact, landing gear almost so. Stepping off the plane, I felt many eyes upon me, and brushed them off impatiently. Other onlookers were looking on at me and the bone in my hair, their noses wrinkling in the traditional, if cheesy, Parmesan gesture of greeting and approval.
It occurred to me that in my headlong quest for wisdom, enlightenment, and big bucks, I had neglected to determine just exactly where in the world Parma was, and what time zone it was in. Turning to the information counter, I asked, “Where are we? And what time is it?”
The counter clerk beamed my way. “We’re here! And it’s now!” he beamed.
Oh, great. I’m looking for some info, and I get a bloody Zen master. Irked, I trudged over to the newsstand to procure a local paper. I noticed the cover price of 25 cents was totally obscured by a sticker that said $2.98. Darned old profiteers, I thought, and was about to make a mental note to charge $50,000, not my planned $5,000, when I hit the lecture trail; but I had run out of mental Post-Its. I bought a paper anyway, and was about to read it when I became aware of an ominous figure lurking near the door to the men’s room.
It was a man, painfully thin but starkly muscular, clad in dusty cowboy boots, cut-off jeans, and a Boston Celtics t-shirt. His long greasy hair hung down to his long greasy shoulders. His brow was furrowed, and he had bags under his eyes. He bore an odd, striking, strange, uncanny resemblance to… someone…I…almost… remembered…. Marvin Dingleberry!! Worse, he bore an unmistakable sign of hostility. To be precise, he was carrying a large placard which read, “Death to Melody Andrewsdottir,” in five languages: English, French, Estonian, Pig Latin and Gaelic. It could only be Mad Dog!
My jaw dropped. My newspaper dropped. The London stockmarket dropped. Raindrops kept falling on my head. Noticing me noticing him, he folded up his sign, tucked it in one of the bags, and quickly sauntered off.
So, Mad Dog was in Parma! And so was I, and I knew that he knew that I knew. What I didn’t know, my power bone notwithstanding, was what to do next. I whirled around resolutely, to fetch my bags, and fetched up beneath the bosom of a rather large person who had been standing behind me. “Oof!”
Regaining my composure, I was pleased to see it was my mentor, Naomi Chortling Wolverine. Still clad in the familiar malodorous black high-topped Keds, she had her long flowing hair tied back in a bun, a Sara Lee cheese Danish, to be precise.
“Naomi!” I said.
“Welcome to Parma,” she beamed.
“Oh no, not again,” I wailed. “One more beam and I can make beam soup.”
“What’s wrong, my child?” she asked, beaming down.
“All this synchronicity is getting me down. I’m not as Jung as I used to be.”
She beamed up again. “Perhaps your blood sugar is low. Would you like to go for some Tennessee Freud Chicken?”
“No, thank you very much, it’s not that. You see, I have just seen Mad Dog.”
“Lord love a duck,” she ejaculated. “Last time I saw that rascal, he was in line to see a PG rated British flick at the Wodehouse Theater. And the time before that, he was in the Basque highlands herding sheep and singing ‘Embraceable Ewe.’ My goodness that rascal does get around.”
“But why is he here, and why now?”
“Everyone’s gotta be somewhere, Toots. But to be more specific, I suspect he is here because he realizes your power as a pledge to the Sorority of the Sow has not yet realized its full yin potential, and he wishes to force a confrontation before you are fully ready to claim back the power of the sacred wedding waffle iron he has purloined for his own nefarious porpoises.”
“Porpoises?” I protested powerfully.
She nodded grimly. “He has enlisted the aid of some renegade cetaceans, a group of militant mammals who are even now at work on a political polemic to be entitled ‘Flipper Died for your Sins.’ What’s more, he has a porpoise as one of his power animals, along with a tufted titmouse, a blue-footed booby and and rabid pit bull.”
“Yeow! That sounds like a pretty nasty crew.”
“Nasty, indeed. Nasty, mean and hungry. Let me put it this way: right now, in his current state of ACC (Alternating Current Consciousness), he makes Rambo look like Pee Wee Herman. So it behooves you to augment your yin power.”
“Let’s see, the yin is the guy, right?”
“Wrong, wrong, WRONG! Yin is the female polarity, yang is the male.”
“Okay, I think I got it now. How about port and starboard?”
“Never mind that now. You’re not at sea yet. At least, not completely at sea, anyway. Now, what do you have in the way of power animals?”
“The mink and the chinchilla,” I offered brightly.
“Not good enough, ” she sighed. “You need to take a journey to the underworld to retrieve power and knowledge.”
“Sounds scary,” I said. “How about I just buy a gun?”
“Nope. You wanna be a shaman, you gotta do shaman stuff,” she said stuffily.
That sounded reasonable enough, at least by shaman standards, so I proceeded to stiffen my upper lip, gird my loins, furrow my brow, and just generally psych myself up for what was next.
TO BE CONTINUED….
The foregoing episode first appeared in The Shaman Papers Volume 3, number 4 Winter, ’91-’92, along with some letters to the editor, an article about Theta State as Therapy, and a review of Native Healer: Initiation into an Ancient Art by Medicine Grizzlybear Lake. Lake was a reluctant shaman who, “…did not want medicine power, and consulted four shamans for the purposes of having it taken away. Of the four, two refused to have anything to do with him, one agreed to try to help and died within a year, and the fourth made him his apprentice.”
Also in that issue was the following by Greyfox:
The other night, Aurora sang to me.
High and clear like crystal ringing,
The other night Aurora sang to me.
The other night, Aurora danced for me.
High and clear with heaven for a stage,
The other night Aurora danced for me.
The other night, Aurora spoke to me.
High and clear like love made light,
The other night, Aurora spoke to me.
This was to have been a little filler essay, but got out of hand. What is described is true. I did really and for truly hear the Aurora Borealis. It sounded like a Tibetan bowl would sound if it could sing. Kathy tells me that to hear the aurora is not unknown, but quite uncommon. It seems small next to what I have heard tell of: an Inuit or Inupiat shaman, who could call the aurora down to him. Moi, I am content to gaze in wonder from down here.
Comments (1)
So prophetic… so synchronicitous… so laden with typos! Well, I can fix that last bit….