Drinking from the Faucet

"Here I am again
Back on the corner again
Back where I belong
Where I've always been
Everything the same
It don't ever change"
                                Van Morrison-The Healing Game

   After forty days of non stop rain, Noah had had enough. The Biblical story said he sent out birds, first two crows and then a dove. The dove returned with a branch signifying dry land and the rest is history.

   I find it hard to believe that Noah, who according to legend, could communicate directly with God would resort to using birds to gather this important information. I mean, unless he was like trying to test God's knowledge of archaic languages or something like that.

    I mean a guy who had God on speed dial would at least have something as powerful as a smart phone you would think. I mean, hell, even we got Google!  I guess we should at least be thankful that he didn't have Quora (Shit, we'd all have gills by now). 

       I think it probably went more like this after you throw out the allegorical bird stuff.

         Cell phone rings. ( Its a riff from a CD you can only get in heaven where Gabriel is jamming with Miles Davis.) God thinks about answering it.
    
            "God speaking and who is this?"

            "It's Noah."

            "I know. Just messing with you, dude." Noah can't see it but God winks at Jesus who is sitting in a chaise lounge chatting with Sammy Davis Jr. and Martin Luther King Jr. "What you got?"

           "It's the rain thing, God. It's been like forty days. Things down here are awful wet. I have put my underwear on back of elephant to dry. You know what that's like?"

         "Yes I do. You do; I do. Don't forget who you are talking to," God is starting to get a little annoyed. " What do you want me to do?"

       "Can't you at least turn the faucet back a little? So we can least have small piece of ground where we can park the Ark grow a few vegetables. You know like that place in the Mel Gibson movie."

         "Awwright. Awwright. I'll turn the faucet down, or have St. Peter do it. I must have left it on when I fell asleep watching the Dodger game."

          '' They got swept!" an excited voice in the background piped in.

         "Go to Hell."

         Things got very quiet. The CD player screeched to a sudden halt. When God said things like that, you never knew if he was joking or not.

         " At least it wasn't the Giants," God laughed at the burn, and the CD music returned even louder as Fred Astaire pulled Ginger Rogers to her feet. "Consider it done. Is that all?"

           " One more thing," Noah fidgeted as he spoke, "You know its all soaking wet down here; what am I supposed to do now?"

            "I don't know. You're the Chosen One. Go do Chosen One type of stuff."

      Anybody who has been reading what I write lately, knows that I love myself some floodwaters of the subconscious. I've written about my propensity for taking a dip in its depths from time to time.

        I've often recounted the story of how I was driving North on 99 headed to Fresno, when all of sudden, water started filling up inside my car ( Head? Car? What's the difference they both have radios and move  fast). It got up to my eyeballs, and I was tryna hold my breath when I realized that I should just roll down the windows.

   News Flash- automatic windows don't work well under water! So, I had to pull over and open the doors which worked fine because the pressure was coming from inside the car.

         I sat for a moment, gasping for air and then surveyed the inside of my car. Everything was good, just a little wet. But when I took of a sip of my coffee which had been completely submerged (it's okay as I have a sippy cup type of thing like when I was a child. Okay, it's the same fucking cup. What difference does that make!), I noticed a change in the taste.

        I love hazelnut coffee. I regard Don Francisco Hazelnut coffee as a necessity of life. I would seriously think about booking my accommodations in the afterlife based on whether they serve Hazelnut coffee (OK, maybe not seriously). 

       I usually put two-three hazelnut creamers in my coffee, but this time it didn't taste so much as heavenly as it did earthy, and I mean Mississippi mud kind of earthy. And it tasted like fertility of all things, it tasted so fertile that if I was a woman you'd all be saying rude things about me instead of the Octomom. The thing is I later developed something of a taste for that flavor that was added by the flood water.

        In his classic exploration of altered states The Doors of Perception, the brilliant Aldous Huxley wrote about this very thing. Huxley regarded human existence as being reductionist in nature. He felt that true reality is a gigantic ocean of pure being that we are all a part of, and that life in the material world can only be brought about by reducing the size and influence of the subconscious.

      Life is a like a faucet in other words, a device to reduce the infinite universe down to a manageable flow, waters that can irrigate the seeds we plant but not  inundate to the point that we all become gelatinous blobs on floating on infinite seas propelled by flagellating nose hairs and flatulent winds produced by unseen gods.

     Huxley also writes about the fact that the human body is itself a leaky faucet as he recognized that mescalin intoxication shared similarities with adrenochrome a substance produced by the decomposition of adrenalin. "In other words, each one of us may be capable of manufacturing a chemical, minute doses of which, are known to cause profound changes in consciousness."

          The reason why this knowledge grabbed hold of me, and demanded I write something about it even it if I had to start off with an nonsensical conversation between God and Noah, is the logical extension of Huxley's thinking. If you follow it down, Huxley would say that the reason that we humans are always isolated from one another is that we have learned so much about controlling the flow of the waters of being that we are depriving ourselves of the nutrients once brought down in the topsoil and carried along by the flood.

            In our desire to keep our fields fertile and green we  resorted more and more to using artificial chemicals, and the chemicals are so unnatural and overly saline that they now deprive us of the means to see ourself as part of God.

            We now sit on the side of the river bank with a pole trying to latch on to things floating by instead of understanding that we are the bank of the river, the tree, the shade, the water, the fish, the pole, and the six crushed cans of Michelob Ultra. We are the whole shebang including the words the whole shebang.

    (This also shows why we don't invite Buddhist to our dinner parties.
      Me: How's your wife?
      Buddhist: I am my wife. I am also this martini.
      Me: How cute. Can you enlighten me as to what that means?
      Buddhist: I am the meaning. You are the meaning also.
      Me:  O-k-a-y.)

     The point that Huxley makes is that humans are always searching for our way back to the garden. And that there needs to be a way to create a better faucet, one that leaks a perfect amount of that nutrient laden water. Enough to let us know that we are the garden, the trees, and even the serpent, but still lets us use our own driver's license to cash personal checks.

      God: Now you are just trying to be funny.

      Me: I know, but......

      God:  But nuthin..Knock it off.

      Me:  Can't I at least explain to you about this stuff called
              Hydroponic Farming?

      God: Later. We'll talk about it over coffee some day this week.

      Me: Okay, I'll bring the hazel nut creamer, you bring some of
             that Mesopotamian Mud.