Messages from Beyond {a letter to a friend}

Some hindsight for you...

1} 320lbs & suicidal

2} 250sqft of squalor, reality TV type filth

3} An encounter with Kat's titties

3.1} Faith that I was worth saving

4} Cogitation

5} Dissociation

6} Revelation

7} What would Karma do? {duh, help people of course}

8} Abandon direction

This brings us to last September and the first incident that confirmed the existence of spirits from the other side who were able to show me signs that were for my eyes only. The Prime Directive of my Odyssey has been that whatever I need, I must help someone in order to get it, part of the Taoist influence coming through I tink. {sic}

I was talking to Wayne on the phone, he was telling me that he had to go to Collingwood to take apart a wheelchair ramp for one of his mother's friends, the sadness in his voice was unmistakable. He's a passionate stoic like most of the men on both sides of his family so he was reticent to admit that he really didn't want to go.

I pushed him to tell me what was bothering him, it took some pressure before he finally admitted that he had plans to go to a pre-release draft for the upcoming Magic the Gathering set. He'd been sharing the details of every spoiler drop for weeks, this was going to be a monumental moment in the canon narrative and he had front row seats for the opening act.

You have to understand that, for Wayne, at that time, Magic and anime were all consuming passions and formed the basis of our relationship. Whenever he was at my place for the weekend he'd bring a pair of decks and we'd netflix Durarara or Ghibli, at least that was up until point where the bustle of his life made visiting a rare occasion. Not that I was complaining, by the spring of last year the only reason I got out of bed on weekends was because the fibromyalgia had become so bad that lying in bed was too painful. In order to take the pressure off my legs I'd sit in front of the computer playing solitaire for hours on end.

{tim's xl 2c1s@4:30am & 6am, 3 mini BB danish, F=95%, 2 hits #dali @ 5am}

[Jet Blue Ice Fighter, Attack snow and Ice with Military precision! I swear, that's what is says on the bucket the dude at Tim's is using.[SQUIRELL]

Anyhoo, after a great deal of convincing he finally allowed me to take this responsibility off his shoulders; a good thing too, his mother was sending him up there, I assume by bus, without tools to remove this poor woman's only means of egress. Their plan was to have Wayne remove it and some nephew or other was going to rebuild it but, as you know better than most, sketchy plans of sketchy people tend to produce sketchy results. Go ahead, ask me how I know this...

I loaded up my bag of tools and my chopsaw {just in case} as well as my camera gear and headed up to Collingwood on a bright Saturday morning. As had become my custom by then, I was in no hurry, I stopped for a puff at a video/game shop in Aurora which I found along the path less traveled, {I guess that would be a ZAMM influence} then took the back roads along my route.

Remember, at that time I was 320lbs, I couldn't work on my feet for more than 20 minutes which led my boss to say that I was the slowest employee he'd ever had but he's another story altogether. The ramp had been built by the woman's late husband 20 years ago and March of Dimes won't consider paying for repairs to a ramp when they have hundreds of people with no ramp at all. I tore off the rotten boards only to discover that the support structure underneath was hanging loose at half of the cross members, it's a wonder her chair hadn't pushed through already. I got some money from her and set off to Home Hardware to fetch some joist hangers with which to shore up the structural integrity before putting on the new decking.

Between my late arrival and the amount of effort required to drag my fat ass around the job, Home Hardware was closed when I got there so I made arrangements to spend the night at a motel on the lake shore. At that point I still believed in my heart that I'd be able to get funding for my Odyssey from Kickstarter so I was tapping my Visa for anything I felt I needed to make things happen. I kept all the receipts as a paper trail of what went into making this dream of mine come true thinking it would make for interesting reading like a trail of breadcrumbs that reflected my travels.

Have you ever smoked a Charmin? Been doing it all weekend, it's something I learned from a Rasta in Montego Bay back in '87.

Anyhoo, I had some #SillyRasta that weekend and I decided that I'd take a drive up the hills to see what there was to see before finding a place to cogitate with a couple of beers. I ended up at a little motel close to the water and was pleased to find that there was an amazing little beach close enough that even I could walk. I'm thinking now that I'd like to look that spot up to see how far it actually was, it would have to be less than a Km each way, more like half I bet.

I'd stopped at the Mac's along the way for beer, an experience in and of itself for a 21st Century Bohemian, finally deciding that I should sit under the stars and drink a toast to my late father-in-law who I'd shared many an animated discussion with over numerous Blues. I'm not sure if I told you or not {hell, I have no idea any more what I've told anyone these days} but Wayne's named after his grandfathers, my dad's Robert and, while it may be customary to use the sire's sire as the prior, Wayne was in the final stages of cancer when my son was born and died a few months after, Mother's Day if I remember correctly. I knew my son would know my father but never hers so it just seemed like the right thing to do.

So there I was, 2 spliffs and 3 beers in, starry night, driftwood and waves gently lapping at the sand, lights dotting a distant shore that was hidden in the inky darkness of 2 am. At this point I should pause the narrative to explain my father-in-law to you, he wasn't a tall man but he was built like a granite shit house, his fingers were all as thick as thumbs and accustomed to doing manual labor. He ran a works yard for the City of Mississauga which, in another small world story, was just around the corner from the first sign shop I worked at. {That was the first time I worked on the signage down at the Skydome, I also worked on the retrofit when Rogers stole the place but I digress.}

Yellow Ledbetter, need I say more?

I have a friend I call The Maestro, he's told me at least a dozen times that he got an MBA by working for his father, he may have learned the real estate game but if you want to know what goes into a real world MBA you would have to study the underground economy from someone like Wayne. He was biker, not a 1% but I know they'd have given him the respect he deserved even though he rode a Gordwing. One of my favourite stories is about the time Wayne and I were in his garage workshop, he was quite an accomplished woodworker and furniture maker.

We were having a few beers when I noticed the owner's manual for his bike on the workbench and the cover photo caught my eye, you see, when I was in high school I used to run errands and do a bit of part time sales work for the local furniture store. My boss was a 6'4” Newfie who'd gone horizonal over a 30' cliff on a Goldwing with no ferring, my father-in-law always maintained that it was a Silverwing because Honda never produced a Goldwing without the ferring but there it was, on HIS owner's manual, lol.

When I was a kid we used to be up North for the Perseid meteor showers almost every year, I've seen a lot of shooting stars in my life. Here I was on the shores of Lake Huron thinking about the man under a perfectly clear night, the temperature was cool, the waves were gentle and I remember thinking to him, “All I ever wanted was your respect”, as soon as the thought appeared in my internal dialogue a shooting star darted across my field of view.

I'm telling you, this one was not off to the side, not in the peripheral at all, it was directly in the middle of my field of view. I broke at that moment, it was not the first time I'd had such a cathartic vision but it was this incident that made me understand the meaning of confluence and the importance of having faith in it.

Thanks again for all your help this weekend, I made it to the service where the medium told me that someone was patting me on the head and telling me to stop being so stubborn. Any idea who she might have been referring to? She also said that he was looking after someone who'd recently died, I'm sure my niece and nephews will be glad to hear that.

Live, Love and stay Wild my Friend

Tom

P.S. can you tell where I switched text editors?