The Mindstorm Chronicles: Chapter Seven

The Mindstorm

Chronicles:

Chapter Seven

 

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

 

You decide.

 

The world always seems like such a vast and confusing place to a child. You start out learning the basic differences between right and wrong, and end up wondering just how adults seem to have forgotten such lessons. At some point you wake up and realize that there is so much hypocrisy going on about everything that you increasingly begin to take on a sort of cynicism, the world is in the hands of so many fakers and snake oil salesmen that it makes you stop listening, you begin as a preteen to form a sort of existentialist view. The world is quite insane. Though you figured that at a much younger age, by the time that you have some knowledge of the world the proof is everywhere. Everything seems absurd. And it really is.

 

Somewhere along the line I had become socially conscious, slowly, too slowly to have recognized that this was happening to me. It was partly, I suppose, the sort of times that we lived in that made me so. I was always a curious kid, and I'd run across some of my sister's more liberal books about the civil rights movement, was forming my own opinion about Vietnam from various papers that I'd read, watched as charges of injustices such as police brutality dominated at least some headlines. Every once in awhile I'd stop and say something to the voices I always felt were still listening somewhere, and on rare occasions I would talk to someone, a politician of some sort or another. After which I would embrace my custom of talking to some entertainment types so that it made me feel better somehow. Like we were doing something, if not very much at all. Though quite often the results of those dialogs produced results which exceeded all expectations.

 

Not that I'm at all comfortable talking about those things. You know, when you're just sitting alone in your darkened living room talking to the voices in your head, and not really knowing how they feel about any of this, and not even being sure that you're not just crazy or something, it doesn't seem like much at all. But later it seems like too much if the thing we talked about really took on wings. Then it would look as though you were trying to gain something by being associated with something famous and all, even if the fact was that you were just a kid whiling away a few hours now and then. And had just hoped that you weren't dooming them by asking for something so different.

 

We talked about all kinds of things and would sort of think them through together. Those voices were still so helpful in answering my questions, you know, why the world was this way or that way, what did they see happening from where they sat and so on. One time I asked someone why, if rock and roll music was so powerful, didn't anyone try to use it to do something useful in the world? And the voice said "Like what?" And I had to think about that for awhile. And I thought, well, you know, find some things that we all know are true, things that all people should believe in, and sing about those things sometimes.

 

I remembered President John Kennedy saying something which I later learned was quoted from another president, that we had nothing to fear but fear itself. During the course of the evening I began to wonder just what he'd meant, and how many ways that was true. Someone had said that some people hated some other people because they were afraid of them, and really, they didn't even know those people. They were too afraid to even get to know those people in the first place. Some rich people liked it that way, but most normal people suffered because of it. So, I thought that, well, maybe someone should try out some songs about all of that and see if people would like them enough that they still bought the music.

 

I tried to just stay with what I thought I knew for sure, things that made us all better people, things like I'd been learning from those other voices in my head. We shouldn't be fearful and hateful. We shouldn't be ignorant. We shouldn't be silent. We could do anything if we just put our minds to it. Those sorts of things.

And right then the voice in my head, who I'd all but forgotten about said, "How should it go?" 

 

So I made up a little song about it, and I could see the man, who I had always thought to look much different than he did right then, writing down the words. He was from England and I thought about the man from Tavistock who I spoke to many years earlier, and I wanted an English approach to the song. Then, as happened sometimes, I began to get pictures coming into my mind's eye that there would be a whole lot of satellites connected for the very first time for TV, and I thought that if the song turned out to be good enough, well, that maybe it would inspire musicians everywhere to use the power of their music to once in awhile say something that made people think instead of just going along with whatever the rich people had to say, or just so many songs that were far less meaningful. Then we just started talking and talking, but I've probably said more than enough about all of that already.

 

With some other person I talked about alien contact quite a bit, because that had always been an area of interest to me. I seldom spoke to the aliens anymore, or if I did they didn't feel it necessary to tell me that they were aliens. After my president was shot I was never as accessible to voices. Not for a long time anyway, though sometimes we'd still talk about one thing or another. But I hated the feeling that maybe I might have gotten him into a lot of trouble, and that I could get someone else into trouble. All the same, you know, I had to leave it to God and to adults to figure these things out. Well, and the aliens, who were adult aliens even if they were only five years old. The world was just a very serious place. Could be, anyways. But it always made me feel good when something popped up in the media about which I'd been some small part.

And it seemed sometimes, well, as though the whole universe wanted me to be happy, and that I was just the luckiest kid in the world, even if these other things were so difficult to go through.

 

Lil' Miss was a wonderful place, our nursery and our landscaping made it seem like a tropical island somewhere, and we were always playing at such things. There was a public swimming pool just down the street and we'd spend a lot of time there in the summer, which always put me in mind of Tarzan movies and the like, going from the jungle to the water that way to swim, being an imaginative kid and all. In Lil' Miss, us kids, tadpoles the old folks called us, spent our summers in no more than a pair of cutoff jeans and underwear. We didn't wear shoes or shirts, we were just like Tarzans and Bomba the Jungle Boys and what not, climbing trees, throwing spears made from tree stakes, climbing trees and all. We hadn't had a monkey for a long, long time, but my dog was still my best sidekick, and after a long day of swimming I'd come home to that same old familiar scolding, "Ahrooo, rooo, rooo! Ahrooo, rooo, rooo!" And all that went with it. It was sort of like my Tarzan call.

 

I used to love that summer afternoon time of day in Lil' Miss. The way the light danced upon the water at the pool, the way it filtered down through all of the trees as the day began to cool off. I'd come down the path past Granny's shed, where we stored materials, share whatever was left of my treats which were purchased with whatever change was left with my dog Laddy and than go straight to my room to rest and to watch television with my bloodshot and blurry eyes. Laying there exhausted from the days swim, smelling of sunburned skin, I would usually hear some little remaining pool water drain out of my ear just before I went off to sleep for a little while. For all the world, at that age, I couldn't have imagined a better life for a kid.   

 

 

End Chapter Seven