"In making a choice, it is not so much a question of choosing the right as of the energy, the earnestness, the pathos with which one chooses. Thereby the personality announces its inner infinity, and thereby, in turn, the personality is consolidated"

For a while, I thought I could mortgage my future on extended, carefree Bart J. Simpson debt without ever paying an arduous cent at the stone altar of responsibility. . . . . the cold slab of sacrifice that would eventually catch up like the groan of "debtor's prison".

Decadence. Waste. Grape soda. Pizza. The soft, white-bosomed fleshy comfort over at my mother's air-conditioned home. But not all was paradise in this "womb for the shirking". She'd ask me to rake the leaves, and I'd sink deeper into my bean bag chair of an 11 year-old's slothful oblivion while playing Nintendo like a squashed turd that never really goes away, no matter how much it tries to disappear from nagging "but you promised!" reminders. One would sit there, and sit there, and sit there, until her exhortations grew fainter, fainter, and fainter and then died completely like an honorable, fading "call to service" that "The Silent Generation" would never understand. 

It was the most outrageous, in-your-face music around. It took what I saw as an angry, heroic stand against the dull, unimaginative adults who took the wind out of the sails of life each and every day. It was the triumph of the cockroaches over civilization, after everything that's meaningless has been wiped out by nuclear war!

Then there was my mother's vision of "the good life": a gathering of baggy-eyed baby-boomers bundled mildly around a wine & cheese gift basket sent to them in gratitude for the host's $365 contribution to their local PBS station's fund-raising drive. ("Think about it: ENLIGHTENMENT for a $1/day!").

Hugging themselves with ecstatic memories of the 1960's, the days of heady idealism and "changing the world" with peace and love, if not the lilting chords of "Puff the Magic Dragon" and a trio of hippies gently strumming guitars in their own dishrag version of rebellion that had long since petered out.

"IT WAS THE MUSIC" after-all, that united a generation as a balding man who looks like he belongs to the "Peter, Paul, & Mary" folk singer troupe uncorks the wine and savors the bouquet to that thought in a pine-tree sweater like a flute-snoot "wuss". . . . . A pick-up truck hurdles through the wall with an exploding starburst of crushed brick to their screams, and it's me banging my head to Metallica's "Damage Inc." with thrashing abandon.

. . . . .Or that's how it would have worked in my imagination at least, as I stalked around the gathering with petty, anti-social thoughts, helping myself to a cracker here and there in a grisly Metallica shirt, dicing off a piece of "cheese log" like a pirate and spreading it on thick like a marauder of the briny deep.

I figured that should make me PRETTY IMPRESSIVE to some beautiful older girl somewhere. . . . . sitting up in my room with my long hair and bopping my head around. What depth, WHAT PASSION she would see inside me. For deep within, he was a sensitive, wonderful soul-- that is, when he wasn't being a sociopath when his mother kept telling him to get a haircut.

My father, as a mild-mannered social worker, was really quite concerned with my morbid leanings. Didn't Metallica sing about the hand of doom, sanguinary slaughter, and the horned one? Surely this could not be healthy! So this is what counterculture had descended into. . . . . back from a time when my Dad remembered Elvis and finger-popping Doo-Wop and cars with giant chrome fins, if not "Born to be Wild" by Steppenwolf. To hear him stutter out his familiar catchphrase, his verbal faculties overwhelmed with the human venality of the record companies scampering around like fork-tailed goblins above the social toll they certainly weren't helping, it was "lower than whale shit".

And here was this band that was stealing away his children like the four pied pipers of rebellion, hate, vulgarity, and teen suicide.

"Oh, Ray", Mom would attempt to reason soft-headedly. "We had our music, they have theirs". But there was no parallel. Even I wasn't that flaky!

I wondered what Dad thought I should settle for, and he listed off a bunch of classic bands from his youth that left me with a nauseous feeling in my gut, like I was being offered a head of rotten cotton candy. Those clueless 1950's where it all began, frozen in photographs like blocks of ice-- a hidden history of dead babies, incest, and dark, repressed secrets like meat gone bad with freezer burn-- a sheen of syrup covering everything over all-too-white flesh and captured in clueless poses. No, I would stick to heavy metal instead and my own breed of consciousness.

Knowledge and self-awareness had expanded, breaking us out of the box and into new frontiers as the bounds of our world widened. You could say that I was one to believe in the transcendence of consciousness-expansion, of what a record or book could do for the human race-- taking them to higher and higher levels of rapture. I was a mystic, a Kabbalist, an esoteric, an ascetic, and perhaps believed in the dawn of a new era that was coming within my generation-- just as certainly as every batch of humans throughout all of history were convinced that they were living in "the end times", that "the circle would be completed", rooted in this need to have some kind of closure or answer in our lives as we waited around for "the day that never comes".

Or maybe I just had "a boner".

Yes, the libido and lightning-fast wrist reflexes of the video game player gripping a joystick and slamming buttons down at the local mall as a girl hangs on to his shoulder and half-smiles. And over there life could be mysterious. . . . . very mysterious.

In the haze of cigarette smoke, a storm of backward caps where peach fuzz sprouts like fish-hooks, kids slap the controls faster and faster in front of their favorite arcade machines. "Street Fighter 2". "Mortal Kombat". The digitized sound of fist meeting face and the blood flying. For a quarter, you become "the ultimate ninja"-- part of a shadowy fighting order of warriors shrouded with legend and mystery that if you ask around, even martial arts experts are a little bit vague about.

But it comes down to "the ultimate training", "the ultimate fist", "the ultimate infinity" that rises above the ultimate wretchedness of our lives that exists like a cosmic joke played on adolescents. In these games, there are sometimes hidden sub-basements of programming called "Easter eggs" that open up the gamer to hidden rooms or bosses. If you tap the controls at the right instant, at the right place, at the right time-- like an occult ritual, almost-- then "the universe will split open" and perform magic.

It is the stuff of hearsay and rumor among the nation's youth, seeking to break into "the higher reality" that underlies the rules like young magic adepts who probably need to "get outside" more often. Next thing you know, they'll be sipping goat's blood from chalices while listening to "Slayer". There's virtually no limit to what overly-intense young men can fall into.

Years later, when I found this florid piece of Winona Ryder "fan fiction" on the internet someplace, I realize it had the mingling of yearning, desperation, naivetè, and hope for "that ultimate moment" that somehow only existed up in our heads but at a certain point, we "shelve" like a bumbling adolescent memory.

Tisk, tisk, tisk.

I have made countless blunders in my search for "the ultimate reality" that would make The Great Maharishi cock his head and go, "shit, man!". Like Winona's character in "Mermaids" who licked a chalkboard because she read somewhere that a saint once kissed a wall and received a vision, I've been looked at askance. Like a self-appointed prophet coming down to chastise the wicked having a sex orgy around the golden calf, I've literally had stones pitched at me and had to hide out in a cave eating roasted bats. Wanting to be like "Daniel going into the Lion's Den", I did so-- but God had no comment on those who would yank on the lion's tale going "KITTY! KITTY!" and expecting protection.