Fall Dog Bombs The Moon

I had left the book lying flat down on the red carpet when I left the four to visit my Grandfather’s house in Hall Green. I had never done this before, and I hadn’t seen him for several years. I walked the distance which was around five miles.

 

My Grandfather had lived by himself since the passing of his wife and he longed to join her. The only thing preventing him from suicide was his strong Christian faith which I wasn’t even aware of until he himself had died. He was not a preacher. His initials were JC.

 

He was in his eighties and had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, although nobody in the family knew anything at all about his other illness, the illness without a name, the one we shared.

 

He wasn’t expecting a knock at the door and he seemed startled upon answering. He seemed to have needed reminding who I was, but that may have been a misinterpretation on my part. In hindsight it seems to me he may have been concerned  that I was going to confront him about the hand.

 

At this time however I believed that the disease was a random mutation and not something inherited from the family. I thought I hadn’t observed any noticeable signs. My Grandfather was always finely groomed, always had short hair, was attired in a suit and tie, he had no interest in the arts or poetry, had no criminal history, and always seemed of fine and moral character. One certainly wouldn’t describe him as an angry person. I only remember warmth and good humour, there seemed a high premium on jokes.

 

My Grandfather invited me inside, and I sat in the living room of his small council house at number 10 Copeworth Drive. He made me a cup of coffee in the kitchen and asked whether I took sugar, I said “no” and he said, “You’re sweet enough?”

 

We sat across the room from one another and he talked about the Second World War, and when I said somewhat impertinently, “But that was a long time ago,” he looked at me in a way that made it seem as though the war was still ongoing for him.

 

As a young man he had been a farmer working with herding animals in fields and he gave up his vocation to fight what he saw as the evils of Nazism, “We had to protect the Jews”, he said. He was posted in the Australian desert where he contracted Malaria which still affected him sixty years later. He said he hated his time in the country, not because of the sun, but the insects. He kept referring to the atom bomb. “This was before they dropped the atom bomb”. His regiment had been fighting the Japanese.

 

When there was a pause in the conversation he held up his right hand some time for me to see, and I thought, yeah, yeah, I know all about your accident Grandad! He had lost a part of his thumb and index finger with a chainsaw in the outhouse, he had told me when I was younger. The family however were told it had happened because of a “mining accident”; I seemed to be the only one with an alternate story. Due to semantic and ideological reasons I seemed to be prevented from seeing what he was trying to tell me.

 

I had first noticed around seven years of age the size differential. It seems to be more noticeable in the middle finger and thumb, and it was before going to sleep one night when I held my hands together in prayer that I realised. I told my mother the following morning and she said, “That hands your fathers, and that one’s mine”. I showed Anne Aughton who was a Geography teacher and who lived a few houses down the street from us, we lived at number seven, and her family lived at number one, I had hung out with her boys, and she stood staring at me with very large and wide eyes.

 

If I’d been born in an aboriginal tribe I would have been recognised by the elders at this time. I would have been brought up to be trained for a unique role and office.

 

My initials soon went up on the top of the chimney stack off Low Laithes. I would pass the structure on the way to my father’s house on a Sunday.  

 

It came out of the blue, and seemed somewhat irrelevant to me when my Grandfather said, “My birthday’s the 23^rd of July” and I thought to myself, I will make certain to remember and send him a card. My father had once been extremely annoyed with me when I was young boy because I could never remember his birthday, “You remember your other grandparent’s birthdays,” he had said, “why can’t you remember them on my side?”

 

I walked back into the city centre of Wakefield and sat down in my chair at the four. Unusual things had sometimes happened sitting in the chair at the four. Once I recall reading from a book and I paused for a moment and I saw that two books were on fire on my red carpet floor. One was Kenneth Meadows the Shamanic Experience and the other was called the Power of the Shaman, I actually stopped doing anything for a moment just so I could soak up the scene, before putting the fires out with my feet. It wasn’t everyday one saw books burning on a symbolical representation of hell. The book covers became charcoal, although the main body of the texts were thankfully unaffected.

 

The book I had been reading before setting off to Hall Green was called the Biggest Secret and I scooped it up off the floor and began to read. I turned over several pages and I stopped and read and re-read a paragraph on the left hand side, near the top of the page, which gave the information that the 23^rd of July was regarded as New Year’s Day in ancient Egypt, and was apparently linked with the Dog Star Sirius. I was amazed, it was only this very day I’d learnt the old man’s birthday! Then as though to contradict myself, memory came back and I recalled having said to the Smith back in December, “My Grandfather’s birthday will correlate with the most important day in Egypt’s calendar”. My brain seemed weird. I apparently wasn’t aware of his birthday or of the Egyptian New Year, but it also seemed I was also aware. I must have learned one piece of information, read the other, amalgamated, forgotten, spoken, forgotten, spoken . . .

 

The next book I bought from Ottaker’s was Rebels and Devils by Christopher Hyatt. This book introduced me to the author Robert Anton Wilson and I ordered his book Quantum Psychology to read shortly afterwards, it was written in 23 chapters, and I learned about E-prime, a system of general semantics that excluded the "is" of identity. Afterwards I discovered Illuminatus! Trilogy in the science fiction section. Robert Anton Wilson seemed interested in this date after receiving what he may have believed for a time were transmissions from the Dog Star Sirius on the 23^rd of July which had told him, in memory, “This day is very important”. He looked it up and discovered its meaning and associations. The banks of the Nile had flooded on this day it was written beginning what has been called the Dog Days.

 

Before leaving Wakefield I told Bob about the coincidence of my Grandfather’s birthday, its correlation with Sirius. I also seem to recall having mentioned the genetic inheritance of my hemi-hypertrophy from the old man. I recall Bob wincing as though we let one get away, I was angry with him. My Grandfather was loved and thought highly of by all of us, and I thought of all the people he would be upsetting by thinking in such an abhorrent way. People could be horrid to us if they knew, but pleasant if they didn’t. The response seems to be something hard-wired into the genes of species that seem to find mutations something to be antagonistic toward and repellent against. Ground squirrels don’t like tree squirrels.  

 

We were standing talking outside HMV and I said, "It seems an horrendous symbol, dogs listening masters, I'm not going to be just a dog". I remembered that years earlier he had once called Saddam Hussein “Madass Insane”, and I told him, “I will be able to call Saddam Hussein in. Then I can give the “Asians” a legitimate reason to hate me”.  Bob had seemed insistent the group he knew wanted to kill me, I wasn’t certain why? I said I could command the Iraqi dictator in around the end of the year, “the middle of December feels about right to me”.

 

As a young man I believed I could do almost anything. Limitations it seemed were only boundaries imposed by one’s own mind. It didn’t cross my mind for a single moment this act would be impossible at all. It seemed matter of fact to me. I felt entitled to be able to do this.

 

In August 2003 I took a job as a Trainee Graphic Designer at Bizspace, Shakespeare Road, Brixton, and I immediately encountered problems. During the induction on the very first morning one of the managers called Rapel had said, “In your own time, you can use the computers in whatever way you want,” and I responded “Great! I would like to design some mandalas”. Rapel abruptly leaned back against the wall and stared through me in a threatening and hostile manner. This was the second time in ten minutes he had done this, the first time because I had said, “I’d like to design a poster of a person with a butterfly in their chest, it’s a species wide analogy of the soul”, and he leaned back, and stared, he was not very happy with my ideas. I knew this was going to be a difficult assignment working here. A few weeks later I happened to notice however that in the bus shelter across the road from Olive Morris House there was a poster of a woman with a large butterfly inside her body. This was my idea, I thought to myself.

 

In September I took a lunch break and ordinarily I would turn left onto Coldharbour Lane and then into Brixton. This day I took a right turn, for the novelty of it, and to break the robotic routine, and I walked under the bridge, and I saw a huge poster of David Bowie which was advertising his new album Reality. I hadn’t seen the poster at any other location in London and I wondered at the coincidence of this, I also noticed that he was wearing a similar style of attire to myself at that time, although I didn’t wear a tie. I had seen this technique from him once before, the blue jumper he wore inside the Hours album was a more expensive version of a particular jumper I wore. I saw his tie was crooked, asymmetric, and I thought of the "crooked design" lyric and said to myself he’s still with me then.  

 

After work I bought some psilocybin truffles from the bookstore Broken Arrow on Streatham High Road and I bought the CD from the record store just off Kingscourt Road. The two black cashiers were shaking their heads from side-to-side and pulling strained faces when I put the CD on the table top counter. Before entering my room at the 72 I saw the first song title, New Killer Star, and I thought why does he have to use such awful and negative language? I went into the room, sat on the bed, munched mushrooms from a brown paper bag, and spun the CD three times over. I think I liked Try Some Buy Some the best, and I didn’t understand the fuller meaning of the CD at that time. The album was overshadowed by the electricity I found I could fire from my fingertips and the shapeshift into a reptilian.

 

 

 

In December I worked on the mandala. I’d had a theory for several years that one could activate an alternate state of consciousness through the style of these designs.

 

I had first encountered the ancient Indian art form whilst on MDMA in Bately and Bob had given me a book on Tantric Art to look through, Mohammad had shaken his head, he did not like the art it seemed. I had an experience where a small, but beautiful, coquettish, and lascivious Hindu deity had emerged from the page and performed an erotic dance on my lap for me. She was naked, but always managed to conceal her sexual parts with a thin veil which increased the eroticism.

 

Years later at the number four I had applied the Buddhist Wheel of Life to my bedroom wall. It was said the Buddha had asked for his teachings to be encoded in art form for preservation and longevity. The wheel was held in the hands of the demon Mara. I stared at this image without blinking for an hour, and when I attempted to go to sleep, I had an experience of a dark phantom in my room that was frightening, but much more so annoying, as I was seemingly and experientially pushed from off the bed, and I would climb from off the floor, and back into the bed, and this scenario repeated over and over again until I could see the sunlight emerging through the cracks in the velvet green curtains.

 

I became immensely frustrated, I was scheduled for a job interview at twelve midday and I wasn’t getting any sleep. I jumped off the bed, rushed over to the offending entity, and grabbed it by its throat; I dashed into the bathroom holding the phantom-critter out at arm’s length. I threw it into the toilet basin, slammed the lid, and flushed the chain, and went to sleep. I missed the job interview, and later in the week the toilet got blocked something awful.

 

I had read Phillip K Dick’s books Valis, Radio Free Albemuth and the Divine Invasion and I thought I understood something of what may have been happening to the author of strange and weird Sci-Fi.

 

I attempted to program the experience of the satellite into the mandala. Creating the design on a computer meant that one became more easily entranced which seems to be the natural human response to flickering screens; a pre-human adaptation perhaps to animals scurrying in bushes. I worked on the mandala for around eight hours and I cultivated a mood of playful expectance. The day before I had purchased red clothing in preparation, and I had shaved my long hair short, and coloured the grade-one remainder red. The satellite will be able to see me, I pretended to myself, walking home.

 

The night of the mandala experiment I laid down to sleep at the seventy-two and almost immediately I began to experience an invisible body-cuff coiling itself around me, like a serpent, starting at the feet, and working upward to the arms and chest. This prevented me from moving my arms at all which would have enabled me to perform a simple scientific test to ascertain whether the experience was internal or external? I could have put my fingers in my ears.

 

I experienced a thin beam of energy which seemed to come from my window at the far side of the room and connect to my left ear. The sound which seemed to crackle with the static energy of radio seemed to be contained only inside the beam, and not at any point outside or around it. “This is the satellite orbiting outside of the Earth’s atmosphere,” it began, “…You have been selected, one out of millions of people to represent us on account of your writing abilities…” 

 

Afterwards I thought this could be what Crowley meant when he wrote about invoking and remembering the knowledge and conversation of the holy guardian angel. I couldn’t write very well however. I had always wanted to be a writer.  

 

The following evening at Bizspace I worked through until half-past ten in the evening, and the situation became threatening to me, because Rapel’s Asian brother who sometimes worked on reception was dressed in a really expensive suit, which he had never done before in the office, and it didn’t seem right. He had also never loitered around the building so late into the evening. He had a half-past four clocking off time and I sensed there seemed to be something seriously wrong with this situation. I past him in the corridor around half-eight and he stopped in front of me and stared at his wristwatch. When I went out onto the stairwell to smoke a cigarette he immediately came out and joined me and smoked one in silence at my side.

 

The day before I had been standing in the corridor listening in on a conversation Rapel was having with a young white man, and Rapel had asked, “What’s your favourite video game?” and while the white man made “um” and “ah” noises, Rapel said, “Mine’s Road Rage”.  

 

It seemed a cold winter night and I turned off Coldharbour Lane and onto the road that takes one through into Brixton and I saw two well-built Pakistani’s wearing dark clothing and they were walking towards me. They were staring fixedly at me, looking fierce, and menacing, like they meant serious business.

I heard a call from behind me, “hold on Justin, I’ll walk down with you!” and I stopped still, and a colleague from work called David ran up behind me, and he joined me at my side.

 

The two Pakistanis glanced at David, and back to me, they continued walking towards me, and then seemed to bounce around and then past me when they got real close. They hadn’t planned for two people it seemed. David it seemed looked more perturbed than me. I pretended that nothing unusual or out of the ordinary had taken place. I kept my attention straight ahead, but David kept turning around, and looking over his shoulder, and he asked, “How are you getting home tonight?” and I said, “I’m just walking,” and he said, “I really don’t think you should do that!” and I said, “I think I’ll walk,” and he insisted, “Get the bus!”

 

We got down to the bottom of the road, and he took a right turn onto Brixton Road and I took a left. I was going to walk to Streatham.

 

As I past the church in Brixton I sensed that the two men were walking on the opposite side of the road to me, by the nightclub, I glanced over my shoulder, to the right, and they were looking back at me, and I continued onwards, and upwards, and as I approached the first bus shelter before Olive Morris House, I was thinking I really wish I’d taken David’s advice and got the bus! I was walking and a bus pulled in at the stop, and the doors opened, and the first few passengers hopped on board, and I followed them watching the men recede into the background out the window with a sigh of relief. My father had always said I was fluky.  

 

I sat up all night in my bed unable to sleep and I was thinking that I really need to change my life; I must be doing something wrong to generate this level of hostility.

 

The following day was a Thursday and first I made sure I received my monthly wage a day early, I hadn’t eaten since Monday, and then I walked into the office, and I stomped around jibber jabbering and pointing a finger at Rapel who sat all scrunched up and fat in his chair. He sat in silence looking guilty as captured and caught in front of the others, an Italian manager, and Australian admin worker, and I made it very clear to all what had happened the previous night.

 

At one point during my rant I spoke about my previous predictions that had come true appearing on the front pages of the tabloid press. This performed the function of a preamble introduction, I had an 100% success record, and I enacted out a little improvised drama as I spoke to the room and I said, “Saddam Hussein would be captured on the Saturday, it will feature on the front pages of the press on the Sunday, and to show you that it’s come from me and isn’t chance-coincidence, the day before, the Queen of England will feature on the front pages having had an eye operation for a benign tumour”. I was been metaphorical with regards the eye, but Rapel grinned maliciously, and annoyed with this I proceeded to blame Saddam’s future capture and arrest on Rapel. I knew that he was a supporter of the Iraqi dictator, “You have let your people down Rapel! It’s your fault Rapel! This would not be happening without your actions Rapel!” I played with the idea of been a mystic, a precog, a magickian, or/and an Illuminati Agent. I had no intention of going back into work.

 

On the Saturday I was walking out of Sainsbury’s Local on Streatham High Road when I saw the headline with a photograph of the Queen on the front page of the Daily Mail, she had an operation for a benign tumour above the eye, and I said to myself, “roll on Saddam tomorrow, we’re all set for Saddam”, and the following day I saw the first headline reports in the printed press of his capture.