The Televisionary Oracle

H
i, beauty and truth fans, and welcome to The Most Secret Spectacle on Earth, brought to you by the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail, Beauty and Truth, Inc., and Twenty-Two Minutes of World Orgasm.

We’re your hosts with the Holy Ghost grins, and we’re proud to announce that this is a perfect moment. This is a perfect moment because you, my beloved friends and teachers, have taken the first step in a ritual which could lead to the end of your amnesia.

At this perfect moment you have somehow managed, by fabulous accident or blind luck or ingenious tricks, to tune in to the Televisionary Oracle—proving that you’re ready to recover your repressed memories of your sublime origins, and know again the Thirteen Perfect Secrets from Before the Beginning of Time.

Welcome to the end of your nightmares! The world is young, your soul is free, and a naked celebrity is dying to talk to you about your most intimate secrets right now!

Just kidding. In actuality, the world is young, your soul is free, and at any moment you’ll begin to feel horny for salamanders, clouds, toasters, oak trees—and even the ocean itself!

Whoever you think you are, whatever friendly monsters you’ve tried to make into your gods and goddesses, whatever media viruses you might have invited into your most private sanctuaries—you can decide right now that your turning point has arrived. You can decide that you’re ready to change your lives … and change your signs … and change your changing. Because when you tuned in the Televisionary Oracle, you tuned into your own purified, glorified, unified, and mystifying self.

We’re your hosts for it all, beauty and truth fans. Your MCs for the Televisionary Oracle. Your listeners and your protectors and the sacred janitors we hope you’ve always wanted.

Does it matter what we call ourselves? You can refer to us any way you want. Your Sweet Fairy Godparents. Your Spirit Guides or Extraterrestrial Midwives or Personal Diplomatic Representatives to the Queen of Heaven.

Do you remember your dream of the saintly anarchists burning heaven to the ground? That was real. That was us. We can’t in good conscience tolerate institutions that kill people with love.

Do you remember your dream, from the night before your seventh birthday, of the janitors with the pet vultures taking the garbage out from under your bed? That was real. That was us. We own all trash everywhere, after all. We were just ministering to what’s ours.

We’re inside your shadow, beauty and truth fans, helping you use your terror to become rich and famous—if that’s what you want.

We’re percolating up from the ground beneath you, bringing you the Gnostic African Buddhist music of the ever-growing roots—if that’s what you want.

Like a tick in the navel of the seven-headed, ten-horned beast of the apocalypse, we’re even riding on the underbelly of tonight’s satellite transmission from CNN, MTV, UFO, and CIA, broadcasting to
you on location from wherever we happen to be at the moment—if that’s what you want.

We’re all around you—if that’s what you want—or nowhere to be seen—a secret keeping itself, like nature—if that’s what you want.

So. What
do
you want, anyway?

I
’m at the Catalyst, the biggest nightclub in Santa Cruz, California, looking for trouble on a Friday afternoon in April. Later tonight, my band World Entertainment War will be playing here, and I’m working myself into a righteous frenzy so I’ll hit the stage in just the right mood.

For twenty minutes I sit alone at the bar swigging a lemonade under a sunny skylight. Meanwhile, I monitor the traffic in and out of the women’s bathroom, glad to see only one visitor in all that time. Finally I’m ready to move. Acting as if I’m headed for the men’s room, I instead slip into enemy territory, primed to perform my benevolent terrorism.

The yellowish white walls are an unruly pastiche of smooth and rough surfaces. The mirror over the sink is blistered with cracked orange stains, and the faint stench of bleach adds just the right touch to the ambiance. Pulling out my fine-point felt-tip marker, I print neatly on the wall:

As I’m writing my phone number, the lavatory door slams open. In strides a tall, athletic voluptuary with a waist-length auburn mane and a bemused expression. I’m in love instantly. Her emerald eyes are kind but skeptical. Her crooked grin is a work of art that announces that she’s uttered a lot of smart-ass benedictions in her time. My fantasies are already going full bore. I’m inventing her from scratch. She’s a Qabalistic witch with dancer’s instincts, steeped in the magical lore of herbs and the art of turning men into salamanders. She’s a beauty queen who renounced her crown in solidarity with her ugly sisters everywhere. She’s a stand-up comedienne with a slapstick streak, and she cackles when she comes.

Probably none of this is true, but I can’t help myself. Her thick auburn eyebrows and flared nostrils and top-front-teeth-gap and freckled cleavage are the exact features my dreamwoman would have. Her high forehead and total lack of make-up are clear evidence that she’s an earthy idealist with a massive IQ. Gorgeous sphinx with a prankster heart; part-Italian, part-Ethiopian, part-Irish, part-Czech, and part-extraterrestrial. Definitely not raised as a Catholic. Her loose-limbed body language says she loves sex and treats herself with joyous respect.

True, the purple baseball hat and purple windbreaker are a little strange—they’re accessories favored by redneck babes—but on the other hand the logo on the front of the hat is a double-headed ax,
which is a notorious code, at least in bohemian Santa Cruz, for feisty feminism (having been an important symbol in ancient Crete, among the world’s last-known matriarchal cultures). Maybe she’s the star shortstop of an all-woman team sponsored by a pagan coven. Hell, maybe she’s the high priestess of the coven herself. I picture her sky-clad in an oak grove, holding a carved willow-wood thyrsus as she leads a circle of worshipers in a bacchanalian dance under a full moon.