The elegance of a formula that explains what can never be said but only felt is intuition. Intuition is never written. Once written, it is something else.

Intuition is not something you can reach out and touch. There is something about water and dolphins and whale singing that people try to express, only it always ends up sounding trite and cheerful like a sunny toothpaste commercial, but in reality can never be said or written.

Do we talk about zen and God and wish to communicate and exchange language between brains without ever speaking? As crazy as that sounds, military and security agencies of various governments are seriously looking into that subject.

What possible thing could I or anyone else ever uncover that would equal the riotous green moss screaming on a rotting and toppled tree limb in an awed and hushed forest or the unappreciated geode that I found accidentally when my lawnmower hit what looked like a plain and uninteresting old rock.

The mower hit it, and suddenly there it was, cracked open like a coconut. Yes, there it was, like a fossilized sparkling rock fetus created a billion years ago on a distant planet that exploded and rode on a comet that crashed into a dinosaur lair and waited. Just waited without words, or except maybe rock words, however hidden they might be, for someone to find it. I sensed somewhere in the prehistoric section of my brain that it was calling to me while I was methodically making clean and orderly swaths on my unruly yard grass. It kept calling my star name which has no sound but, nevertheless, is a real name like a frequency that is tuned to me, like a come hither call until I just did it, opened it up like a ripe melon, and there it was, not considered valuable at all.

The sparkling inside of a geode is crystallized, and, of course, there are crystal radios, so there might be a grain of truth somewhere in there.

Can you imagine, after eons of patient sitting until I could be born and acquire a yard and an instrument of destruction, in this case my lawnmower, that the geode was waiting for me to crack that case. I was intoxicated with its luscious bountiful self and all it had done for me simply by imagining that this was destiny. It was the same sense-crazed but silent love-furor I felt when I found a purple morning glory one morning and nearly swooned at the velvet-ness of its open workings.

Of course, I've overstated the experience. A geode is probably not from a distant planet. Dare we carry our poetic license in our wallet?

Pickle and ketchup sandwiches, mayonnaise on white bread sandwiches, these were a few of my favorite things. Back in the day it was common for children to ask for unusual sandwiches. Conformity wasn't even in my vocabulary yet, although I would learn. I probably got a D-minus in Conformity 101, whatever. I was a weird kid, but I was fed on monster movies.


Those were two of my snacks in my childhood days when I had a cast iron stomach. That ended in the sixth grade. The event, the gastronomic catalyst was buttered popcorn at the movie theater while I watched The Day The Earth Caught Fire. Suddenly grease became indigestible and made me queasy, and I have never really loved anything greasy after that. Well,yes, I loved it but was unable to digest it.

I used to watch Shock Theater on Friday Nights and listen to ghost stories like Whispering Pines and Thump Thump Drag as other weekend fare.. Why do kids scare themselves silly with these things?

Imagine watching Shock Theater featuring I Was A Teenage Werewolf (I wasn't.) and eating a pickle and ketchup sandwich. I did that once when I was in second grade. My parents were both asleep.

Sometimes, Little Bird would watch the horror films with me, although I think she may have passed on the P&K sandwich option. Up alone at night while my parents slept, the adult world of monsters became all too obvious. This is what we had to look forward to as we someday took our place in the "real world".

Even today, I can't pass up a really good paranormal article, although I have to say my main motive is to see how quickly I can debunk the myth. I could de-bunk in a single bound as a child, out of my bunk bed, but that is a different story.

It takes a little longer to find the flaw in a haunting.

My father habitually wanted (past was imperfect) to build separate quarters in our house for Little Bird and myself, as if we were too dangerous in some unspecified way to live close to the rest of the family. Or maybe they were slave quarters to go with our permanent waves, or it might just have been to satisfy some craving of his to hew out spaces and hammer nails in lumber-wilderness within the too civilized confines of a suburban home.

My father liked working with his hands. He would go down into his laboratory in the basement and make a frankenphone or some other gadget by rigging up cast-off parts of once useful appliances to make a new and jagged version of the real deal.

I ran across an article about a haunted town in Connecticut. There were a lot of related sites on the Internet, some featuring photos. There were smudgy and blotchy marks on the photographs. Sketchy shapes on your film cannot convince me that the paranormal is real.

I have a lot of haunted photographs too, with funny discoloring and bubbly, moon shaped orbs. I blame the haunted demonic photo lab technician for all of it, except for the Polaroids.

Why do people want to sleep in haunted rooms with wall banging and moving furniture and whatnot's? My father died in his room less than six months ago. It was not a surprise. He was a patched up and glued together, a nearly bionic version of the human he once was. There was even some metal left after he was cremated.

I was not there when he died. He had already given me a farewell present a few weeks before: a leather suitcase. My mother had given him a luggage set of three a long time ago as a gift. Two were stolen in a hotel in Chicago when he was on a business trip. I got what was left and have since put most of my writing notebooks in it. When he presented the suitcase to me, I opened it. Inside was a wad of hideous and outdated ties, which he was going to toss into the trash. I told him not to throw them away, that people made quilts from them, that I would drop them off at a thrift shop. I now have them tied up in a little plastic bag in one of my storage boxes. I will burn them one day.

I don't think of him as dead so much as on a lengthy business trip.

Since he died, three people have moved in and out of that room, all related to him. Furniture moving all over the place. What infernal urge is causing this? I was one of those who slept in the haunted room for a few days. He would have been irked about it if he had known. He was a territorial animal. Never that close to us in life, weirdly bonkers after death.

There are a lot of funny and unaccounted for noises in the night when you sleep in that room, but I think they are coming from the neighbors and Little Bird.

Waxing eloquent..I suddenly realized I should take my own advice. "If your life seems like a prison, then let yourself out."

So I did. And I got another haircut. And a pedicure. And some foot reflexology. And new boots. And I had some seriously lascivious thoughts about inappropriate men, which I intend to act upon if given the chance.

I had been planning this for some time now. It feels entirely natural.

I am goofing off.