A Shadow Without Eyes and Growing

SO LATELY I've had to wear the glasses everywhere because the hard lenses just gave out -- the edges get jagged when they get ragged. Time for new ones. I have to wear thick THICK ant-burning magnifiers, my eyes are so bad.

So it got me to remembering when I was a kid and had to wear them all the time. Beat up and made fun of for having them on back then. And now I go to work wearing them! Anyway, at night, as a kid, they had to come off when you went to bed. That's scary, because everything in the room instantly takes on a bigger, cloudier shape just when you don't want it to. And your wee sleepy mind stays awake, trying to make things out all night.

Worse than most kids, I saw all your same scary things, only much bigger and more horrifying because my canvas was a hell of a lot broader. If your mind plays tricks on you with a closet light in the dark, imagine the cardgames it throws when all that shit's blobby and moving.

You see things in the night.

So yeah, where was I? Oh yeah. Because of all this I would always have this recurring nightmare, well into my prepubescent days I might add, that was more like lucid nightmaring. It was no dream that's for sure. I would try to lay there, terrified, and fall asleep. Closing eyes never helped. The simplest of themes, even all shut up tight I would feel the presence of EYES. But when I looked (the fear response) all I would see was this SHADOW WITHOUT EYES AND GROWING persistent in the corner of the ceiling, way over there in the dark.

Not on the ceiling, nor on the walls either. But in the corner, hoisted or floating, and looking down and all over at once at the same time. Like one corner of a triangle filling in with swirls of oil, if you will. Man I was scared; but in a very personal way. How do you tell people about something you can't see? And this was every night! I saw the eyes with my whole being; felt the darkness like heavier air, always approaching the shoreline of my blanket but never getting close enough on land.

Now skip ahead into adulthood, with me working for the Rhode Island Tourism Division. I was with my colleagues on a "familiarity tour" (FAM) of historic houses, maybe mansions -- who's to say really -- but it surely was the Masons I remember. (an aside for later: Mom worked as a nurse at the OES nursing home in RI).

In that musty museum with heavy drapes and shiny floors you walk through velvet roped-off rooms into the family quarters of the rich, still bedecked in original 18th century opulence. Then the children's rooms. Man, they used to PAINT murals on the ceiling of their kids' rooms -- sky scenes with clouds and stuff, and then I saw it. The all-seeing Eye! Propped up in the sky! Along with symbols and stars and shit. Like, George Washington Mason stuff. Creepy! How many of these little brats looked up at night and saw things too? Only this was programming.

Mine was just a shadow of what theirs would always be. Open to the impressions of my fertile mind. So, my many builders of the Temple, look at how I've Turned Out.


The first imprinting. Not painted Vegas skies above my pillow, but right there in my head. Root consciousness. Basically, like the counted semicircle stars and symbolism gazed at by the spawn of important bloodlines, my fear track was my own and contained much more absolute power. Claymation from only my hands.

Skip back to present day, and it's the same thing, I am thinking, as I strip off the goggles and head to bed.

The blurry things bring me back. One day you finally realize all the fear under the bed on the ceiling and in the closet was only YOU looking back, and this makes for the simplest banning ritual in both worlds once you grow up and see that it was yourself, inner and outer unresolved, all along the Way. What better way to hide from the Eye than to realize there are none but yours?

Is that you? That you? (squint) Oh hi! How the Hell are ya?