The Mindstorm Chronicles: Chapter Nine

The Mindstorm Chronicles:

Chapter Nine

 

A work of fiction? A work of nonfiction? The work of insanity?

 

You decide.

 

 

Older now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there were all those hippie years when life was wonderful. It was all an adventure then. When did life turn sour? Oh yeah. 1987.  Always the same answer.

 

How did all of that start? Geeze, you know the memory isn't what it used to be after all that I've been through. Somehow all of this was meant to happen, I guess. Did it start with meeting JFK in my head? Did it start on that disturbing day when the military men were all upset? I don't know. Couldn't say. in a way, I always think that it started a few years before 1987.

 

Paintball is a stupid sport in a lot of ways. Oh, God. No, don't talk about paintball. Well, but that's where it began, in a way. There, where I began to meet new people. It was after that when things went sour at work, and for no real good reason. Nothing that I could ever put my finger on.

 

When we first started our team there was another team that was doing well at the field. No losses for six months straight, and I considered it our challenge to beat them. That was the only real measure of success, that was the only goal worth having at the time, was to rise through the ranking system at the field, You know, all of that stupid youthful macho exuberance. A young man with something to prove.

 

No easy challenge. These guys were a class act, unlike any other team there. They all owned their own guns, had their own T-shirts, and they had a newsletter. The captain of their team was brilliant. He did his own artwork and most of the writing for the newsletter, and was just freaking brilliant. I subscribed partly because I considered it like intelligence, I wanted to get to know our opponent. Partly I figured we could learn from their success. Partly, I was an enormous fan. I read the newsletter over, and over and over each month until the next one arrived. There was something about this guy. He was a genius of some sort. And his editorials were revealing in ways that I hadn't expected.

 

This guy knew how to be a team. Teamwork and communication were his specialties. And no wonder. He was former Green Beret, and had survived countless incursions behind enemy lines in Vietnam. Wouldn't have guessed it. He was the friendliest guy that you ever met. Great sense of humor. And had a certain humility to him that was completely disarming. He had become a cop when he got out of the service, and somehow ended up with paintball as a serious hobby.

 

There was something really familiar about him. But I could never place it. Even his name seemed familiar. And there was something magical about him. Probably why everyone called him the Wiz. Not to be outdone I started our own newsletter, which led to a whole lot of back and forth, all in good fun. Jabs, propaganda, and mutual back slapping. Great fun, but I found myself really admiring the man. He was somebody I began to see as a role model in my life. I doubt that he ever really new how much I had taken to him as a mentor.

 

And it really was very magical, as if we could read each other's minds. It's one thing to just feel that way, or to think such things. But every month when the newsletter arrived I saw proof of it. For some reason we knew each other. As far as I know, he saved my life. He must have. It must have been that he got wind of what was happening to me when my life began to implode in 1987. The cops weren't going to help me, but the sheriffs showed up, even though they were from the next town over. Did he put in a call to someone? I don't know to this day. But what was apparent was that, for reasons unknown to me, he knew more about my situation than anyone else. He told me all of these things in that metaphor sort of way that just had everything to do with what was happening in my life. I never even new how or why, but those little things that he said kept popping up in my mind over and over again as I would sit and recall every detail that I could trying to figure out how I ever got into the extreme mess that I was in, or how to get out of it. But by then it was as if a truck had run over my head. It was a wonder that I could still think at all.  

 

Somehow, I had just been struggling so hard with all of the deliberate illusions being forced upon me in some covert psychological war against me, that I seldom allowed my mind to wander to anything more extraordinary than was absolutely necessary to understand how or why they were pulling this war off. The last thing I needed to worry about, I thought, were the voices that I used to hear in my head when I was a kid. Especially alien voices, for Christ's sake. My number one goal at that point in my life was to remain sane. And alive.

 

Finally, after a year and a half, when my marriage was over, while I was losing the house that my father had built and that I had grown up in, sitting there without any utilities and no food, and being threatened by some CIA guy who I identified from previous encounters, George Herbert Walker Bush, who had just become president, I think, I started looking for a way out. And I was no longer in a position to be picky. I prayed to God, I even talked to aliens.

 

That's when they began to remind me of all that had happened before the mind control tank ran over my head. And that's when I remembered this Wiz guy. The first time that I met him. He was the soldier in Vietnam who I had told to expect help from the "Martians". That was part of the plan at some point. That I would meet this guy and get to know him. And he would be there in my life when I most needed someone to be there, at a time when it was already getting hard for me just to sign in at the paintball games because I couldn't remember the year and had trouble even remembering my name anymore.

 

I thought about all of those years ago when I was seven or eight laying down in the back seat of the family car on the long drive to Lil' Miss, about how he had told me that he had problems with the CIA, and how for some strange reason I said that the "Martians" would help him. And how the songs on the radio would talk to me, in a way. Tell me when things would be alright. "Near the village, the peaceful village, the lion sleeps tonight." My problem had been all along that I couldn't believe how serious things were getting. And every time I thought about that, they were even more serious than I dared believe. Somehow though, eventually something would come along to fix by broken believer. But full well I knew that every time that happened I was being drawn into a world of other "nut jobs" who had no way at all of proving what they believed. Rather than become so marginalized, I justcontinued to compartmentalize my thoughts, and live a double life. As lonely as that was, it was still a life that would allow me to carry on.

 

There were other songs. One meant that things were getting heavy. "C, CC Rider, now see what you have done". Where would I be without the music?

 

 

End Chapter Nine