What did you do during the Pandemic?

I have been gone for so long, that there are probably few people left that even remember me.

Most of my former followers have quit. Few blogs last longer than five years, although I recently celebrated my Eighth Anniversary with WordPress, which for me, is like an electronic writers’ colony.

Also, I am not much of a blogger; I am a writer, and much too selfish to participate in the “blah-blah-blahs of blogging” that Suki, my long-suffering spouse was especially good at doing.

Also, she is a great deal more likable and outgoing, so when she gave up the sport, many of the people who followed me by way of her dropped from the ranks of regular readers.

My pursuits involving “research” for my third novel, “Once in a Blue Agave Moon” and a long-standing bout with depression and mental illness resulted in a most protracted hiatus…

BUT recently, a long-lost associate from the EMS community inquired about my first novel, the eponymous “Dancing in Dreamland,” but when I went to the page that I thought had been loaded there, I discovered that it was nearly unreadable for a long list of reasons…

So I edited it extensively and prepared it for e-publication, which I had procrastinated for far too long.

I was on a roll, so I also edited and prepared “The Home for Wayward Souls and the Talking Monkeys” which is possibly a far superior work.

Both will have a new page of their own, possibly before the end of the evening.

Once I e-publish them, they will no longer be free for the reading, but I have almost no idea how to accomplish this without Suki’s assistance…

Namasté

नमस्ते

Chazz Vincent

12/08/2020

I Stare into the Fire

Late January

In a place where

Winter is Perpetual spring

a tender shoulder

 makes my

mouth

wet

As I stare into the fire.

It is enough to be here now.

Apologia Revisited

Even if you aren’t reading this,

…this moment,…these words…this testament

is for all of you, as well as for each of you…

the heroines of all my never-ending torch songs.

My heroines, my heroin…

Perhaps I wasn’t your best friend after all,

but not for nothing…you can’t say I didn’t try.

I’m a weaver of dreams, a conjuror of spells,

but I fear the realities I brought you 

did not live up to the Great Expectations I inspired

until I disappointed the Dickens out of you.

“I’m sorry” I say

“Is there nothing I can do?” I ask

as you sadly shake your head (“no”).

as a small part of me dies inside.

This is what I do time and again.

‘til you’d think I’d grow weary of it,

but no, I just grow so very,…very weary

of letting you down again.

I didn’t want to be that guy…after all…

I was the guy who taught you Grand Theft Auto

(not the video game…)

The guy who took you

camping, or fishing, or diving or hunting

smuggling guns or contraband and stolen

works of art over state lines,

screwing like cats in heat at turnpike rest stops,

driving too many hours with too little sleep

were it not for ‘better living through chemistry’

You were the first to jump right in with me, wherever

whatever magic helped raise the ante

back when it was still fun

to live dangerously and without fear…

walking past chalk lines to do the Devil’s bidding

like it was a game of (hip-) hop-scotch.

Whether copping a feel or a few stolen kisses

still took our breath away.

I was the guy your parents warned you about

even after they found me charming, witty and bright,

because they didn’t know I was also that other guy…

 wasn’t that a part of the appeal….?

I was the Serpent in the Garden and you were my Primordial Eve.

You became my co-conspirator.

You followed me into

sleazy clubs in basements underground;

in practice houses, and lived in industrial neighborhoods,

a haunted house way out in the country

next to a cemetery where no one else would live

or warehouse districts, or wherever I found a place,

playing guitar so loud you thought your eyeballs would bleed

and your ears would ring for weeks on end,

where we would hold out like outlaws day and night.

You went with me to rifle and pistol ranges, and dojos,

living in houses filled with guns and ammo

(not the magazine….),

the walls of entire rooms lined with amplifiers to the ceiling,

guarded by dangerous dogs who loved you

almost as much as me

and would have killed for you as you would for me

or I for you,

when it seemed like that moment

was just around the next turn in the story.

There was a knife and a gun in every drawer

and under each pillow each night.

We slept in tents, on floors, in cars and trucks,

or high-rise apartments overlooking the bay

that we could never afford,

if not for the generous benefactors

we chose to entertain.

We watched porn together. We made porn together,

Hell, we were porn together

and everything we ever did was either Art or Music.

We painted everything in sight.

We sketched and photographed each other

while we played and sang with such conviction

I don’t know how our hearts didn’t burst.

We learned to dance the Apocalypso

on the razor’s edge ‘til dawn

and got up and did it all over again.

We drove way too fast through downtown traffic

any time of day, whichever way we were going,

or late at night along the beach with the lights out

or up on the Interstate, illuminated by

flamingo-pink sodium vapor lights;

stopping on the causeways over Biscayne Bay

just long enough to remind each other of who we were

and just where we were just then.

When every moment alive together was a miracle.

We fucked on the perimeter road around MIA,

(Em-Eye-Eh)

with the planes maybe a hundred feet

over our heads, engines screaming

and one eye looking out for cops

with nothing better to do

than to wish they could have been us.

No matter where we went or what we did

it seemed like I could talk my way

into or out of anything or anywhere

and charm the birds from right out of the trees,

particularly if it meant staying out of jail…or worse

(but most especially if I thought it might impress you.)

But most of all, I let every one of you down

one way or another.

…so many memories of that defining moment

when you knew it was over,

leaving me to figure it out later….

I played grasshopper to your ant

well into our winter of discontent.

It didn’t turn out happily ever after…

it never has and probably never will,

for me or for you….

Maybe it never does.

Maybe it’s not supposed to…

I just hope you can look back and remember

those few golden moments we shared, the same fondness,

with the same lack of reservations we shared back then

before we gave a thought to how it all might end,

because it was the beginnings and everything in between

that made it all worthwhile for me…

and each ending too beautifully, poignantly sad to just be forgotten

back when I was just me and you were just you

before we ever thought about tomorrow….

If I had the chance to do it all over again

I’d do it all over you.

It just took me too long to realize

that not being a bad person

didn’t make me a good person.

(…but not for nothing)

You can’t say I didn’t try.

Who can say they did all of it,

and gave their all with all of me?

(You know who you are, n’est-ce pas?)

Just you…

Because before there was you and me, Darlin’

each one of the others saw something special

to show me about myself that took me higher,

‘tho some cut me low before they were thru.

But I cannot deny

each one of them didn’t teach me a thing or two

I hadn’t yet learned

so that maybe it wouldn’t happen

the same way to me and you.

So here we are now just you and just me

and those wantonly willing hostages

whomever we take as we continue together

until

The End.

Namasté

नमस्ते

Chazz Vincent

copyright  ©  a March 9th, 2021  

Fish swim with the tides, into and out of the lagoon as it empties itself, receives from, and flows back into the sea.

*ALL REFERENCES TO ANY PERSONS CONFIRMED STILL LIVING IS PURELY CO-INCIDENTAL…AND THE DEAD ARE TOO BUSY LAUGHING AT US TO CARE.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Merely a Series of Unfortunate Coincidences? The Illusion of Synchronicity…Sorry for the Inconvenience…and now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

At approximately ten PM on July the 16^th, my brother was pronounced dead in an Emergency Room approximately one thousand miles from my current home. He was two years younger than I.

In less than six years he managed to turn a five-bedroom French Colonial mansion into a landfill, starting with the second floor, which he occupied while my parents were still alive.

Alcoholism and poor judgment based on bad legal advice has rendered the entire estate uninhabitable and facing a sea of legal encumbrances that would prevent me from even taking my parents’ wedding album or my own high school yearbooks from the premises.

In less than seven months’ time since my mother passed away, the kitchen, dining room and front parlor will now require a hazmat team to clean up the mess he left, which in some places was knee-deep.

Power and water services have been disconnected. There is two feet of standing water in the basement.

We were forced to stay at a local motel.

After waiting nearly a week, I was still unable to make arrangements to have his ashes scattered over the graves of my parents, and was forced to leave to return to work.

My parents’ Lutheran minister seems to (correctly) suspect that my wife and I are Pagans, and insisted on being present to say a few words and prayers over my brother’s remains, although he was busy at a conference in St. Louis at the time.

It is my understanding that he still is in possession of his ashes.

My father died two years ago, and my mother passed away on December 30^th of 2013. While we were there, I installed two solar powered carriage lamps to light their gravesite at night.

On the way home, I was struck by the question “Who will see the lights?”

It takes somewhere between twenty-four and twenty-nine hours to drive to my parents’ home…and the same amount of time to return.

The only resting or sleeping done in either direction consisted of short naps at designated rest areas or while Suki was driving and one meal not eaten in the vehicle enroute.

Several hours after my first day back at work, I was diagnosed at a local ER with a DVT, or Deep Vein Thrombosis in my left leg. It is potentially life-threatening.

A new miracle oral drug called Xarelto has allowed me to convalesce at home without the customary four-day hospital admittance with intravenous drug therapy and frequent blood tests.

My healthcare insurance provider does not cover this medication, which can cost as much as four hundred dollars per month on average. My employer is a prescription drug plan administrator.

The irony of the fact that many of the plans my employer administers for other providers are much more generous in terms of the coverage, or cost of co-payments and premiums than the policy provided to company employees is not lost in moments like these.

Fortunately, the manufacturer is providing it for free for the first month, and only five dollars per month for the next two months I will need to take it. It would also appear that my annual salary is low enough to qualify me for hardship benefits…really? Really?!?! …Yeah, really.

After a week of bed rest under the skillful care of both my wife Suki and the lovely and talented Anastasia, I am slowly returning to full health.

If you absolutely have to get sick, plan on doing it under the care of a nurse, or better still, two of them…(especially if they are close friends with each other)…the right nurses can make almost anything better, and these two could turn a disaster into a block party.

“Sic hoc ergo propter hoc” means literally “after this, therefore because of this”. It represents what is regarded in the scientific community as one of the commonest flaws of logic, which is to assume that mere juxtaposition somehow implies a relationship between two or more possibly unrelated events.

Synchronicity is a term coined by Carl Jung, who initially identified an “acausal relationship” between the simultaneous occurrence of two or more unrelated psycho-physic phenomena.

Jung and his associates later noted, however that our ability to perceive meaning, portent or omen in the simultaneity of the events allows us to “assimilate unconscious materials”, thereby encouraging us to experience a renewal and vitalization of our unilateral personality. In this way, our sentience enables us to construct order out of chaos.

This is a process well-known to both the Chinese (I Ching, Consulting the Oracle of Changes) and the aboriginal peoples of what is now called North America, whose shamanistic traditions divined meaning and direction from occurrences within the natural world.

As unfortunate and sad as the recent series of events are, they are hopefully merely a series of unfortunate coincidences. They were replete with enough foreshadowing and ominous portents to fill up any novel by Nathanial Hawthorne or Theodore Dreiser.

Were I so inclined, I could spend the rest of my life waiting for “the other shoe to drop” and in the process miss whatever joyous opportunities await, barring superstition and fear.

On the other hand, those of us who are inclined to believe in the in the interconnection between the finite physical world and the more elusive and occult ethereal worlds do have the opportunity to reflect, if you will, on the interconnection of all things, even in the midst of random chaos.

I have missed you all these past four weeks…although it would appear that nobody noticed I was gone….

As my heath returns, I will be doing my best to make up for lost time, despite the fact that the expression is in itself an oxymoron.

I have been told that some of my more charming attributes are my irreverence, glib facetiousness, and affectionate preoccupation with anarchy and the self-determinism of lawless disregard for other people’s rules, and this trip was no exception. It was in part a journey into the heartland of America (or the Heart of Darkness), as well as an opportunity to skylark in the midst of loss and sorrow.

Somewhere between the extremes, illumination awaits us.

You be the judge.

As soon as I consult my advisors as to how to tell the story without subjecting myself to incarceration for any number of possible felonies that might be construed as to having been committed, I will be sure to share it with you.

…and now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

 

 

 

 

What have You Done with My Goddess?

*****

Dull eyes staring back at me
Misplaced anger
and my own misdirected self-pity…
Who was hiding
in this shell,
this empty house?
…this tired, bitter imposter?
I pray she can forgive me
for not recognizing
the face of my own widow.
A Goddess mourning
the passing of her own Hero,
forever plagued by the ghost of
Yesterday’s Greatest Love.

A minion of years….

Yesterday’s Bitter Ashes,

The sweet honey of Love and Passion

and the mixed emotions

of realized dreams,

great hopes

and

Devastating Regrets.
*****

Come with me.

Take my hand again in Love and Faith.

Remember what was…

never forget….

Let yourself feel the anguish

and acknowledge what we have lost.

Let it inspire us again.

To live each day

as the resurrected idols

of each other’s Idols.

Rekindle the fires…

Breathe life back into each other.

Reanimate The Dream.

*****

Yesterday we found and lost each other,

as well as ourselves….

I remember the joy we felt

the first time I gazed into your eyes

and chose to ignore the foreboding…

knowing my life

would never be the same.

Knowing that our destiny could not be ignored,

Hoping it was all a dream

from which we never would awake.

*****
We are old souls that have lost our way,

our selves,

and each other.

Rediscover today, My Goddess.

Your Hero awaits his Idol.

Take my hand and walk with me

together into tomorrow

and…

Never Forget

Yesterday.

*****

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

You are my goddess yesterday,

today and tomorrow.

Alone, I hear my own heartbeat.

Can you?

It is the knocking

that I pray that you hear

at the door to your soul,

begging to come back inside…

forever wanting to come inside….

Miami’s yesterdays

wash away

my daily preoccupations

like a summer monsoon,

laying bare

the memories

of years gone by.

Sweet memories of what was

and bitter tears of regret

for a million missed opportunities

to have lived better todays back then.

A hurricane of emotions

blowing away the doldrums of horse latitudes of inertia.

Too many todays taken for granted…

Too many yesterdays

of apathy,

complacency

and boredom,

borne of mind-numbing fatigue

spawned from forgotten exhilaration…

that each of the first days

that seemed like they would never end.

Anticipating every day,

just to wake up next to my Goddess

with the realization that our love

was not a dream;

that my Goddess was real,

and she was mine and I was hers.

God and Goddess were alive

and magic was afoot.

T
o
o

M
a
n
y

L
o
s
t

Y
e
a
r
s
.
.
.
.
¿?

This poem was written long ago, before Suki and I rediscovered each
other.
I found this poem after believing it to be forever lost. I should have known better…it was written almost a decade ago in the midst of a reawakening I was experiencing while quartered with my flight crew in Miami Shores at the Marriot Courtyards.
We had been grounded for the last five days first for maintenance, then for weather, when I had this epiphany and it wrecked me completely.
IT was written for Suki. It took a long time for her to take it to heart, but she kept it just the same. There came a time when she experienced a sort of spiritual death and this made her gasp her first new breaths.
Shortly afterward I started writing what was to become Dancing in Dreamland. It took me eight years to write it and another year before she would read the first words of the completed manuscript, and about five days to stop crying after she did.
We have both been breathing a lot better ever since.
It is a call to arms to resuscitate a lost lover in order to resuscitate a lost love.
XO,
Chazz

A Cabin in the Woods

A Cabin in the Woods

Perhaps some of you may have noticed that I have not posted any new material in almost three weeks…then again, maybe not, but to me it has been an eternity.

December 29^th, the day before my mother died, I was served an eviction notice giving me fifteen days to vacate. The eviction was not much of a surprise.

For the last seven years the owner has refused to pay for any upkeep on the premises (which were greatly overpriced) and my payments for rent have admittedly been sporadic and short. I am not good with money.

Any normal person would not have stayed so long, but then again, I did not consider my current occupation to be anything more than the likes of a summer job, and I have been at it for almost nine years. It’s as if I fell down the rabbit hole and can’t find my way back out. If you can’t find something at least as good as what you were doing, what’s the difference?

At least I’m still in Florida. I came here in 1972, and left it for three long, cold, terrible years and couldn’t return fast enough once I had the chance.

Although the housing market tanked here just like everywhere else, and empty, foreclosed homes are on every block, none of them are for rent because the banks who now own them would rather keep them empty to artificially elevate the prices of rental property (presumably in collusion with realtors’ associations) leaving us with neighborhood after neighborhood of blocks filled with empty houses, which should have resulted in a renter’s paradise, if in fact supply and demand had anything to do with market prices.

Two months ago, my Nissan 300ZX had to be parked due to having two injectors fail and I have been unable to repair it immediately, leaving me to rely on my 1987 Toyota 4WD pickup truck exclusively, including my anticipated move.

Last Friday night, my truck spun a cam bearing, leaving me stranded until I could borrow a car to get home long enough to hire two men with a truck and a trailer to help me complete my move, including putting many items into a 10X10 storage room.

This includes my automotive tools, enough power tools to run a machine shop, a compressor and air tools, including paint sprayers, a ten kilowatt electric generator, a TIG welder, an eight-foot work bench, a world-class amateur radio station, a forty-foot antenna tower, a six-element tri-band horizontal antenna, and a half-wave vertical antenna.

My books, the stereos, a television, my last electric guitar, two amplifiers, and more firearms than I can fit into the safe that houses most of them are already safely tucked away in my new home, which is so small that I had to leave or give away most of the furniture.

I do not plan on keeping anything in storage for more than two months if I cannot find a way to make space for it in my new abode, a double-wide trailer. There is no garage or car port.

My first thought was “I sure hope this is bottom….”

But wait! There’s more….

I had my telephone service scheduled to be transferred last Monday. The telephone company installer could not find the address, which is not even listed on Google Earth.

Although they claimed to have the service turned on, the inside outlets had no signal, leaving me to trace the wiring from the pedestal myself, or wait until January 29^th for repair service to locate the problem.  Today, Friday, I finally connected my telephone.

Everywhere I have ever lived seems to have a north county line full of radio and television antenna towers and desolate residences such as mine…I just never bothered to consider living there.

There seem to be two paradigms for trailer parks. One is for fifty-something plus only residents. Many of them are very respectable, upscale retirement-age communities that want nothing to do with the likes of either my pit-bull dog or me.

The other ones are teeming with life, no matter how sordid, where a single stray gunshot may pass through four residences in nanoseconds unless it lodges itself in something more substantial, presumably including a body or two. They are hotbeds of adultery, alcoholism, violence, drugs, perversion, and tall tales of dangerous lives lived without regard to consequences.

Legend has it that Original Sin was spawned in such a place many eons ago in Azerbaijan on the outskirts of Tabriz, long before aluminum was discovered.

But there is a downside…although I love intrigue and liaisons of mind and body far outside the norms of nominally civilized, domesticated minds, I need solace to write, and the sort of trailer parks that would welcome me are not likely to provide it.

I don’t need any more ideas for stories of craziness and depravity…living them in real time has already been responsible for too many years’ delay in writing what I already know.

This tiny grotto is unlike either of these types of places. It was formerly as lawless and dangerous as any Wild West gold rush town, but while the new owners ran out the really dangerous degenerates there is no danger of it ever becoming too respectable for the likes of me. It is run-down and squalid, but quiet.

And as it turns out, I really already love the place. For the first time in more years than I can recall, there is almost no ambient noise…at least nothing chronic or continuous. I rarely hear the noise of the closest highway, even though it is a major thoroughfare.

Ever since my arrival, I have felt more as if I was in a campground, rather than a trailer park, and this is my cabin in the woods.

For the last three weeks, every day started early with endless lists of required activities that demanded my attention until later than I cared to be awake leaving me even less time to sleep to prepare for my next ten-hour day at work from Monday through Thursday as a telemarketer.

Despite loss, distraction and dislocation, my sales figures continue to exceed not only my quotas, but also my own expectations. I dread and despise the prospect of going in, but once I am there, within the hour I find myself fully engaged, consumed and challenged.

Somehow it all just happens, almost as if it is something beyond my control once I set it in motion. I have learned to repeat entire paragraphs of dialogue without conscious effort, inputting data into several semi-independent programs on separate screens as I type notes related to the call that have no direct bearing to the words I am speaking as I type.

When I am in my zone, I am part radio talk show host, part snake oil salesman, and part chameleon, ingratiating myself to them with charm and witty repartee so as to practice home invasion by way of the telephone.

Although drugs are involved, I do not sell drugs; I simply sell home delivery of the drugs they already take. As such, I am an agent of the Evil Empire that is ruining prescription drug insurance in America, but at least it beats a gun and a ski mask, although sometimes not by much, and it is a far cry from raising the dead and transporting the sick and injured.

For the time being, it is my deep cover for the inside research necessary to write The Home for Wayward Souls and The Talking Monkeys.

Tonight I resume a love affair with my word processor, the internet, and this brain that is wired to my soul in a ménage a trois of abduction, seduction, and provocation.

I started blogging in an attempt to promote my books and other writings, only to discover the delicious nakedness of exposing my true nature and intellectual flights of fantasy to other writers who have become my muses and co-conspirators full of enthusiasm and encouragement.

I have missed you more than you probably know, although I hope you already know who you are.

This forced hiatus has taught me how much I need the push and pull and ebb and flow of ideas, energies and images we share like sex between lovers.

We are lovers of words using our craft to become lovers through words, even when there is no specific reference to sex at all…although those times are probably fewer than I might be inclined to acknowledge.

This is what separates blogging from writing. Posts like this are part of the running dialogue I maintain with my fellow writers, and the posts that are becoming the body of my current novel make up the rest of what I send out, but in either case, it is you, my fellow writers who provide the feedback that is immediate and conversational in a way that solitary writing lacks.

Just as the moon draws the tides as we draw down the moon, this life that flows between us connects us as we connect with the One.

If all things return to the One, to where does the One return?

 

THFWS All Together Now

THFWS All Together Now

Merle began to speak in soft, low tones. The sheer size of his chest resonated the bass in his voice in a way no smaller man could. The Apache tend to speak in a voice that reverberates further back in the mouth and throat, which further accentuated the deep sound of his voice.

“One of the other effects of The Knowledge is that for the twelve hours or so that you are under its effects your brain restores and renews all the conduction pathways to every experience you’ve ever known. It has to do with a center in the brain that functions like the table of contents in any computer database.”

“Every experience, and every thought you’ve ever had stays in your brain intact. The reason people forget most of these experiences is because they do not get reinforced by repetition…not the actual data, but the access to it, If you corrupt the table of contents of a computer’s data, it becomes inaccessible unless you can restore the table of contents.”

“People say Art imitates Life; but your brain is not like a computer…that is just backwards. The reason computers imitate the brain is due to the way our brains work, so we just naturally reflect the same structure in our machines.”

“One of the results of this is that you will learn to develop recall of all your present life experiences, and possibly eventually even previous life experiences. The goal is to recognize what it is that represents the essential enigma of your nature. Once you become aware of whatever built-in sabotage is present in your program, you can learn to balance the contradictory influences in a way that unifies and focuses your efforts and connects you to all life itself.”

“To accomplish this, I spliced in a molecule of a drug that is supposed to reduce the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. It hasn’t even made it to the level of investigational study. So far, it turns out to surpass any expectations that were anticipated. If the Department of Defense gets wind of it, no one but military personnel will ever get access to it. I have already produced enough of the hybrid drug for our use for about three hundred years. What the DOD does with it will not have to be our concern, at least for now.”

“In the meantime, our drug will connect you with the ability to perceive energy, ideas, and focused data that was not visible to you before. It has something to do with scan rates of perception, for lack of a better analogy. Velocity influences mass sufficiently to allow two real, solid objects to occupy the same space at the same time, like pouring sugar into a beaker filled with rocks, and then pouring water into the glass to occupy the remaining space, and then dissolving oxygen into the water. Different densities…you can anticipate that you’re going to see a lot of startling or unusual images and visionary revelations. If you are already familiar with LSD, Mescaline, Peyote, Psilocybin, MDMA, Yopo, Ayahuasca, El Changa, or similar psychoactive drugs, the whole experience will be much easier to process.”

“My own previous experiences had led me to believe that those visions were more like analogies…an insight, but not a true reality…The Knowledge has caused me to rethink those assumptions.”

“I believe that The Knowledge will allow us to actually develop a new level of sentience…to Cross Over. I’ve had the experience Betty referred to as ‘hitchhiking’…having a disembodied spirit jump into my physical body. Until I understood the process, I was as terrified as I was fascinated by the experience, and the traces they leave behind are strangely beautiful in a way I cannot find words to describe. The understanding they impart is priceless. You will know what I mean soon.”

Ash was the next to speak. The presence of the spirits was becoming more apparent and tangible by the minute. Images of familiar and unfamiliar entities drifted into each of their fields of view, and somehow they all believed they were seeing the same images in unison, a phenomenon that almost never has been reported in experimental drug use, but has been documented in certain religious experiences. Later conversations between the members affirmed their beliefs of the congruencies of their simultaneous group perceptions.

The group stood naked in their original positions, one mirror behind, one in front with Merle and Charles facing East and South respectively and Suki was also facing East just in front of Charles, so close she can feel his erect cock pressing between the mounds of her buttocks. Darcy stood in front of Merle, also facing South. She felt Merle’s firm member dangling from just above the small of her back to at least the bottom of her buttocks. She wondered to herself if his cock ever stood up, or even out at all. Most of the ‘big guys’ she knew in the past could get quite hard without ever achieving those two o’clock, almost straight up to their own belly erections. In this case, she hoped not, since range of motion would allow for more imaginative positionings, and he had such a distinctive upwards curve that she already knew that it would hit all the right spots,

“Try to connect with your polar opposite on the physical plane in whatever fashion appeals to you. Fix your stare onto the pupils of your partner via their reflection in the mirror facing you. Trust your instincts that your partner will accept the connection as you feel the energy welling up and flowing back and forth between you in an exchange like waves rolling between you.”

With that, Darcy leaned slowly forward until she was bent over far enough to touch the floor in front of her, never shifting her gaze as she continued to stare into the reflection of Merle’s pupils in the mirror. She slowly smiled enigmatically as Merle moved just enough to place his hands on both her hips.

After a few minutes, she was aware they were now touching in three places…as his member continued to engorge and stiffen, she could feel it raise enough to press against her mons, and she could feel its pulsations. Their heights matched very well for this kind of contact, and it turned her on incredibly because it was so rare that she found men that could reach her without standing on something. She was almost a half foot taller than Mark, and several inches taller than Hank, as well as most of the men she had dated.

She had been anticipating this moment with Merle since the first time they had met on the grounds outside the Sanctuary. She was so wet that the tip of Merle’s penis easily parted her labia as the foreskin began to slide backwards on the shaft as it welled up before turning back onto itself.

Just the girth of the head of it was starting to stretch her open so far that she felt more vulnerable than she could ever remember, Just as she was beginning to wonder if she could even fit him inside without suffering serious pain and possibly permanent trauma suddenly Merle just held himself there, not pushing any farther, just hovering. Darcy began to shift her weight just enough to produce an almost imperceptible undulation of her hips, just slightly grinding herself against the end of his shaft. As much as she wanted to feel herself skewered upon his flesh, there was a delicious pleasure just hanging in midair, aware of each other in the most intimate way, connected both by flesh and each other’s gaze.

Charles and Suki had followed their lead, but being much more accustomed to each other sexually they were already fully engaged and practicing a Tantric technique to maintain arousal without visible motion or perceptible thrusting. They had been swingers long before they came to embrace the Home for Wayward Souls, and they brought their own blend of sexuality to their encounters with other members of the group.

The sound system in Ash and Kali’s home was almost beyond imagination. Charles had installed it with Lothar’s help utilizing over ten thousand watts of power that allowed you to listen to music anywhere in the house, Free standing enclosures and built-in speakers filled the house with a mix of ambiences and resonant frequencies and harmonies that floated and flowed together in the most natural and uplifting way.

Also Charles and Mark had worked on a mix of sounds designed to not call attention to themself and still provide a mood and focus for their experience together. It was designed to not drown out or interfere with whatever else there was to be heard.

The visible presence of the spirits did not seem especially disarming in the setting they had provided, and occasionally they felt a touch, a caress, or a fondling as the strangely illuminated images floated and zipped around them. The sensation was electrifying.

As preoccupied as Mark was with Darcy and Merle’s coupling, Kali managed to arouse and distract Mark in a way few other women ever could. Ash and Kali had anticipated this, and mutually agreed it would allow Ash to focus on directing and channeling everyone.

As Mark and Kali stood facing each other, caressing and staring into each other’s eyes, a luminous form began to materialize in the center of the circle. It swirled and pulsated before them, but remained enigmatic and slightly unfocused, just teasingly familiar enough to be vaguely recognizable, but not quite identifiable.

The spirits were gathering around the group as they watched for the arrival of the mysterious image.

Coming Late Tonight: The Things I’ve Learned About Women from Lesbians

I promise it will be worth the wait…See you tonight in Dreamland.