A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven (21 page)

Beyond the Fringe

R
EMEMBER
THE
DREAM
I told you about in chapter 2? The one in which I am flying around the cavern like Indiana Jones, killing zombies like a boss? And the guy yells at me to take my shoes off? Well, friends and enemies, this one is even stranger. It only happened once, but fuck Moses, it left an impression. Before you ask, no, I am not currently taking any prescription drugs or sniffing Scotchgard. I apparently just have a penchant for fucked up dreams lately. It is times like these when I truly wish there was some kind of headgear or helmet that could capture and record all this weirdness. I think I should have a word with Professor Brian Cox about that, if he ever returns my fan mail. Hopefully he signs my eight-by-ten picture of him too—he is just dreamy . . . sigh . . .

Ahem—sorry.

I came to in my dream doing yard work in my grandmother’s yard at her house on the south side of Des Moines. Just popped awake, rake in my hand—no reason for it really. I have not done yard work at my Gram’s house in years. So it was a novel sensation, albeit in dream mode. It kind of felt cool to have that old rake in my hand again, plunging it into the leaves furiously. Never mind the fact that there are no trees in my Gram’s front yard anymore—we had those cleared years ago. So where the bloody shitter did all these leaves come from? I suppose it is not for me to figure out, just to push into piles so I can jump in.

In my dream it was a typically gray autumn day on the south side. It had that look like it would rain, but there was no moisture in the air. But that was okay because it was a jacket day, and I swear that Des Moines, Iowa, has the best jacket days on the planet. You can wear whatever jacket you want and you will be fine. If you go outside in just a T-shirt, your nipples will cut through corduroy. Put one jacket on, and you are immediately immersed in the Goldilocks Effect: everything is just right.

So there I was, on a perfect jacket day, inexplicably raking leaves that should not have been on my Gram’s lawn, when I happened to look up the street.

I saw a lion.

My first reaction was complete nonchalance: “Oh, look at that—another lion.” Like it was completely and utterly expected—it is an everyday occurrence to run into the King of the Fucking Jungle on the wild streets of south side Des Moines. Why not? Made sense to me, just as it made sense for the lawn to be loaded with leaves with no trees around. But then again, it must have smacked of fantasy, because I turned my attention fully to this beast wandering around the suburbs.

It looked a bit like something you would discover at a Chinese New Year parade, some sort of pantomime lion with short surly gents meandering about, trying their best not to think about the fact that no matter how gruff you pretend to be, you cannot look cool dressed as a lion made of yarn. But as I was contemplating it, something even more fantastic happened. The lion became a horse—not a pantomime horse, but a proper horse. What the hell was going on? It still appeared to have yarn for hair, like a bastard acid trip from a Kroft cartoon—H. R. What-the-fuck. Just as I was getting used to the fact that it had changed from lion to horse, the fucking horse’s head opened like a Venus flytrap. Two lidless eyes peered at me down the street. The whole thing had the effect of deleted scenes from Beetlejuice. I was horrified, mesmerized, and laughing uncontrollably all at once. I can only compare it to kissing, biting, and shitting your pants simultaneously.

Some time must have passed, because the next thing I know, a Russian woman, who lived across the street from my grandmother the whole time and I did not know about it, was explaining to me how she did not wash her vagina. I bottled off across the street to my house (in real life, I live nowhere near my grandmother) and told my wife about the encounter and about how the Russian woman did not wash her vagina. Her response? “When does she?”

That is a true story . . . as far as an imagined nocturnal scenario can be considered true. I might just be using this book as some strange dream journal, now that I think about it. But I guess my point is that nothing is ever what it seems. Just when you think you have everything figured out, the truth will deliver a vicious wallop to your gooch that could tear it open like a trash bag full of prison-house wine, spilling your nut blood for everyone to see. A dose of reality is as healthy as a vitamin every morning but can also be as jarring as a punch in the mouth. No matter how much you shun the inevitable, sometimes you just need to shake your head like a magic eight ball and wait for a different conclusion.

So on that note, let me talk a bit about cryptozoology.

From Bigfoot to Nessie, from the New Jersey Devil to the Wendigo, there has been a place in my heart for this pseudo-science since I saw my first episode of Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of . . . . I have learned so much about places like the Bermuda Triangle and the supposed lost civilization of Atlantis from programs that go on little proof but a lot of chutzpah. The show Ancient Aliens alone has a special little place in my heart and soul because, according to “ancient astronaut theorists” (the greatest three-word combination ever to be uttered in my presence), almost everything can be traced back to aliens throughout history. You name it, they have a program about how the aliens had a hand in it: Nazis and their various advancements in technology, Aztecs and their advancements in technology, the Bible, angels, Bigfoot, structures that predate man’s abilities—I mean, seriously, the lists have become so ridiculous that I watch now just to get a fucking laugh. Now the wonderful thing about these programs is that they start so promising. Some of their findings at first do make you stop and go, “Huh, you know, that is quite interesting. Maybe . . .” But then they chime in with the crop circles and the like, and I resign myself to sitting back and enjoying it for what it is—entertainment, with a Hershey bar and some peanut butter. Sherlock Holmes said that one must be careful with assumptions—you run the risk of finding facts to suit theories instead of devising theories to suit facts. That, and you make an “ass” out of “u” and “me,” but that in itself is asinine. The world is full of wonderful things without giving all the credit to Ye Olde E.T.

While doing research I uncovered some lovely examples of cryptozoology. Apparently, years ago, people could believe that cotton—patently a plant—was the fruit of something other than vegetation. So a legend grew up around “The Vegetable Lamb of Tartarry.” It was believed to be half-plant, half-animal and looked much like a cross between a sheep and a fucking cauliflower. Well, that is at least what the drawings of this being looked like—a sort of artist’s representation of a thing that did not exist. But people believed in this strongly because it was during an age when new plants and animals were being discovered all the time. It had been shown that fungi-like mushrooms were a sort of amalgam of flora and fauna, with the visual traits of a plant yet leaning closer to an animal, so at the time it was not that far off the beaten path. Of course, today we know this is nonsense. But think about back then: farmers trying desperately to get their hands on Vegetable Lamb seed and scratching their brains in an effort to figure out what to feed the fuckers when they had flowered. It is very much a bit of Piers Anthony: the land of Xanth would have been loaded with Vegetable Lambs.

I can almost hear your heads shaking, as you say, “Fuck my butter, what does this have to do with anything?” You should know by now that I always have a bit of deviance just around the corner. Give us a second, yeah?

Look, I am not saying there are not some pointless bits of interest out there. It has been going on since before we began letting people like Nicole Richie contribute to the verbal gene pool, coining phrases like “frenemies.” I mean, what in the purple fuck is a “biz-cation”? I know it is an amalgam of the words business and vacation, but it is fucking stupid. Also, why would you ever have any reason whatsoever for following Wal-Mart or Miracle Whip or fucking Starbucks on Twitter? Why would we follow businesses on a social network? It is the most frivolous and ridiculous bit of nonsense I have ever experienced. Sometimes desperation can be the most nurturing mother of invention, but in this case it smacks of the old guy in the bar trying to pick up the younger girls with liquor and a hot car—it is creepy and it makes me uncomfortable as I look toward the future.

Where the fuck was I?

The reason I bring up cryptozoology is because I want to talk about something that is referred to as “fringe science.” In an earlier chapter I discussed reasons why the existence of ghosts could be plausible from a scientific standpoint by explaining how their makeup could be validated using the laws of thermodynamics. This gave me the courage (and terror, to be frank) to put together a bit of calculus based on an idea I call “intelligent energy,” which you might remember was S (W + E) × ∞ = ghosts. I am not trying to recreate Maxwell’s Equation or anything, but it looks the shit on paper. Well, I am afraid I am about to bombast you with even more science content. So once again, spoiler alert: you may actually learn something in the next few pages.

I can only apologize.

The following bits of fairly relevant data have been pieced together using a few websites and the more credible ends of Wikipedia. I am most annoyingly standing on the shoulders of giants to put these strings of theory together, but give credit where credit is due—I have used pregathered intelligence to reinforce the ideas I am surmising at the moment. Thankfully, this has made my job a little easier. But just so you know: I did my research using preexisting research. It is “all good in the hood,” as the kids are prone to say. Then again, the kids also use the acronym YOLO, which means “you only live once,” as an excuse to do some of the dumbest shit I have ever had to witness. So maybe I should just stick to the shit I would use, like “fucking get over it.” Yeah—that feels more like my style.

Anyway, there is a phenomenon known as an “out-of-body experience.” To put it moderately, this is apparently when the spirit leaves the body during death and explores the world around it, even traveling hundreds of miles, but returning to its body upon resuscitation. Doctors refer to this as an NDE, a “near-death experience.” It has also been referred to as “astral projection,” a popular term coined by the incense addicts. As you might imagine, there is a great deal of research that has arisen that is, to quote the great Stephen Fry, quite interesting.

People have described these extraordinary instances for years. Carl Jung, one of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, had one himself after a heart attack. As late as 2003 Dr. Peter Lenwick of London University had found convincing instances of paranormal feats, such as premonitions, telepathy, and, indeed, NDEs. Sharon Cooper and Dr. Kenneth Ring did a similar study in which blind people could see and feel things during an NDE, even if those same people were blind from birth. They were able to describe their surroundings and the goings-on with total accuracy. This coincided with a study done in 2000 by Dr. Bruce Greyson in which “events observed while outside the body were later verified by others.” Dr. Karl Jansen, during his research on ketamine, described its effect on a part of the brain known as “the God spot,” a version of the archetypal “higher self” or “God Image,” which Carl Jung was able to describe after his personal NDE.

The phenomenon has also been called “soul flight.” This has to be a phrase created by peyote eaters. I have nothing against imbibers of the Almighty Cactus, but it is stuff like this that leads to strange conversations about who would win in a fight between Bruce Lee and Spiderman. I include it here for one simple reason: I believe there is a correlation between NDEs and the existence of ghosts and spirits. There are some intriguing things that could back up my hypothesis, much like the reasoning I gave on the laws of thermodynamics. Interestingly, some surmise that NDEs correspond to the fringe principles found in quantum physics, such as, and I quote, “properties of light,” “multidimensional realities,” “the zero-point field,” “quantum interconnectivity, consciousness, and synchronicity,” “space/time interconnectivity” “time travel” (stick with me, people), “teleportation” (I said stick with me, people!), “nonlocality,” “singularities” (i.e., the existence of black holes—any Star Trek fan can explain that to you), and “subjectivity.”

That is indeed quite a list. I may be fairly confident in my supposition that most of you have a raging fucking brain-ache at the moment. But I refuse to let up on you right now. The gist of this, if it is in fact plausible, is that if these various laws and theorems can establish reasonable evidence to support NDEs, the same can be done for ghosts and spirits. You might think, “surely, this cannot be the case,” and you may be right—most scientists regard this “evidence” as fairly pompous work, or garbage science. In a lot of ways this casts a fairly puritanical shadow on that specific side of the researching society in general, for supposedly a scientist’s first response should always be “we do not know yet” and not “that is not plausible” until it has been exhaustively scrutinized. The latter is the outburst of the religious, who believe all their answers can be found in ancient texts instead of in the world around them. I would like to think that the many communities of studious peoples might some day regard this with more query than scoffing.

If we could get back to the list of examples that caused everyone to run screaming for the aspirin, I will continue.

Let’s look at the properties of light—more importantly, electromagnetic radiation, or EMR. This is a form of energy that is emitted and absorbed by charged particles. Electromagnetic radiation carries radiant energy through space, continuously away from its source. To me, that means that energy can exist autonomously from the body’s source. So in NDEs many scientists conjecture that the will and soul may be able to exist away from the physical body during temporary death. Why might this not support my “intelligent energy” idea? If we can accept that a soul can live away from the body when it is temporarily dead, what about during a more permanent state of death? There seems to be evidence that energy can coalesce spontaneously. What is to say that a soul, broken from its physical self, may not establish itself when the source is gone? It may be a stretch, but to me it makes perfect sense. Then again, I have been known to talk out of various stinky orifices.