darkflavor

click for more images from day 1 in morro bay, ca

Jacque, my youngest sister, has grown out of her silly, teenage behavior. At 21, she is has a good head on her shoulders
Well, Anna (25yrs old) and I still don’t seem to get along.
My father Jeff and my oldest sister Lara did not get along for a very, very long time! Ever since I was a kid, all I would hear is “blah blah blah Lara fucks up our relationship” from Jeff.
Stuff about how she is difficult to communicate with.
It makes me wonder if I recreated that situation with Anna. You know, when
mothers smoke then the kids smoke — kids copying the behavior of their parents. There is something else that I did years ago that gives that weight to that idea. i’ll take about how i tried to recreate the situation i was born into another time.

Buffalo high was 9 and the high here was 73. And I want to move back there?

I used to think of all the billions of people in the world, and of all those people, how was I going to meet the right ones? The right ones to be my friends, the right one to be my husband. Now I just believe you meet the people you’re supposed to meet.
~ Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider, Northern Exposure, The Quest, 1995

What did I abandoned during my teenage and young adult years? All that was familiar.

During this abandonment period I experienced intense loneliness and isolation. That was the price to pay when I cast everything away in the quest to become myself. I choose not to say “find myself” because I am already there. I choose not to say “learn about myself” because before learning is creating – they follow suit. For example, a baby is created before one learns about it, one creates the possibility of an electron in the minds eye before learning that they indeed exist, one must create the choice that they will learn math before they can learn it.
I create mySelf.
There are others like me.
And so I met others, rebels, those who were waking up to the magic of reality. Those of family who did not share the same blood. One of these characters is named Angel. And like an Angel she became to me; guiding and lifting me away from the heavy world of tangibles to show me the power of the intangible.
At the time we first met she was 17 and I was 19. She frequented the local Scientology office in downtown Buffalo, where not only did she sleep (until she found an apartment) but we would meet as well. I did not realize until only a few weeks ago that Scientologists believe in pasts lives — and so did Angel. I thought only because she was part of an alternative lifestyle that she believed in past lives. you see, those two tend to go hand-in-hand.
We first met outside of Pano’s (a restaurant) on Elmwood. It was a warm autumn night so I went for a late night walk. Angel and five or so of her companions were wandering down the street as well in the opposite direction. Angel and I made eye contact and she stopped and said something strange like “I have been looking for you.”
Now that’s a unusual thing to say to a stranger!
However, it’s not too strange for me. It was only months earlier that I did something similar to someone else who worked at a local bookstore. I saw him smoking outside of the bookstore from my apartment window across the street, ran outside and said “I know who you are.” and proceeded to accurately tell him facts about himself. I suppose now those facts could have been picked up from physical appearance. Anyway, we still speak, and though from the outside Angel’s approach to me was similar to my approach to Brian, my first encounter with Angel would end up being more profound than I could have ever imagined.
And so Angel pulls away from the group and tells me she has to give me something. She takes her jacket off, places it on the sidewalk and proceeds to sit down on it while holding my hands down with her. While sitting across from each other she outstretches her right arm and exposes her palm at me. Once again she expressed that she has been waiting to give me something. Confused about all of this I reach out with my left palm placing it against hers with complete ignorance that this moment, sitting on dirty pavement in a warm autumn night, will begin a profound and transcendent relationship. The electrical shock we felt through our palms began a series of magical and unexplainable experiences with her that forever challenges my notion of reality.