Personal Reminiscences of Father Seraphim Rose

Personal Reminiscences of Father Seraphim Rose

Christmas Letter To Home 2011

Hole 3, The Big Par 5

Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m Bob Dobalina. We are proud to announce a new, major sponsor to our Wonderful World of Golf Family, the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company. Now, with their help, instead of having to rely on the player’s telling us what thought processes, strategies, emotional interplay (with regards to performance as influenced by their physical prowess, psychological brio, and/or intellectual zest), we will actually be able to “ride along” with the player, from deep inside his mind.
Each player, prior to his round of golf, will ingest a small pill which will allow everything that He experiences to be transmitted (in real time) to the Sandoz Telecommunications Nerve Center, where it will be filtered for appropriate content and then broadcast on our fabulous 16,000 square meter Mega-Tron monitor.
Now, let’s send it over to Tom Stanklewitz for more about this fascinating new twist on the world’s greatest sport, golf. Tom? Thank you Bob! Yes indeed folks, well I am out here on the course, at the magnificent tee area for hole number 3, the big par 5, where I see the young Jimbeau Eseely preparing to tee-off. Let’s now go live, inside his head, for our first glimpse into this latest interpretive system from The Sandoz Family of Pharmaceuticals. Without further adieu, we now send you directly into Jimbeau’s head… mind… brain? I don’t know, this is all so new for all of us!
Over the massive P.A. system, electronic static crackles and hums and on the Mega-Tron, faint images begin to appear. The impression of a golf ball tee’d high up off the immaculately prepared tee surface comes into focus. We see the ball from above, looking straight down upon it, my God; we are experiencing it directly through Jimbeau’s very eyes! Suddenly, without warning, a voice is heard upon the P.A. system. A familiar voice, not that of one of golf’s most beloved players, not that of young Jimbeau, but that of the sinister Vincent Price, long dead but robust and rife with words of some as yet discernable agenda. It begins to gather momentum, building into a mighty soliloquy. “…on the trumpets of ambush they shall write, The Mysteries of God for the Destruction of Wickedness; on the trumpets of pursuit they shall write, God’s Smiting All the Sons of Darkness—His Anger Will Not Turn Back until They are Destroyed.”
Meanwhile, back at the tee, much to the horror of the crowd, when the cameras pan over to Tee Box 3, we see Jimbeau locked into a sort of trance, perfectly mouthing the words of the megalomaniac Vincent Price. Jimbeau stares off upon some unseen distant vision. He has raised the metal head of his driver to his mouth and is screaming into it as though it was a microphone--
Tom? Tom, this is Bob up in the booth! Can you tell us what is happening down there?
Now, from the tee, we see images on the Mega-Tron of Jimbeau rolling around on the ground, clutching his golf club as if the shaft of the driver was the neck of some kind of attacking animal, the head of the club hitting Jimbeau in the neck and throat repeatedly.
Alrighty then, let’s now go live to the phones where we have one of the Sandoz Labs psycho-biologists standing by to try to help us all understand what is going on here. Doctor Werneroff? Are you there Doctor?
Ya ya, I can hear you.
Doctor, what exactly is going on here? Is Jimbeau in any danger? Who is in control here? Is that voice really Vincent Price? I thought he died!
Vell Bob, vee haff several tearies as to da nature of deez seetuation, rangink from computor hawkers to some zort of previously undeezcovered universal subconscious mind control, to zee elaborate Hollyvood propaganda champagne uzzink old Veencint Prize zound bytes ya.
Suddenly, over the P.A. system, a voice rings out aggressively, I AM NOT FRIGGIN’ VINCENT PRICE YOU IMBECILES! I AM NOMAR! SPIRIT OF ACIENT EGYPT! I am here to take possession of my cat’s mummified remains, which the man you call Jimbeau bought while on tour to Saudi Arabia last Fall! Meanwhile, back at the tee, young Jimbeau snaps abruptly to his feet. This time he has a 7 iron in his right hand and some sort of little five-woody looking affair in his left. He begins alternately holding one or both out at arms length. Apparently he is trying to send a message semaphore-style to some distant, unseen ship.
Luckily, I happen to know the semaphore alphabet, so I can tell you what he is saying. But first, who exactly am “I” you may ask. I am Jay Fawkes, son of the infamous Guy Fawkes. I was born a Queer* White Boy* of Irish* Catholic* descent.
*It is critical to note here that in the twenty first century in American society, the use of these sorts of terms must be restricted exclusively to those who might fit the category, i.e. I, the author, a white male, possibly of Irish descent, definitely white, probably not queer but often mistaken as such, I am an aspiring Catholic; so all of these terms, when used by me, to describe me, are all perfectly acceptable. HOWEVER, it is vital that one never uses terms that have nothing to do with his race, color, creed or sexual orientation even in reference to oneself. I am someone, a bit like Jay Fawkes I suppose, but where were we, oh yes, now, let’s send it back to Jay Fawkes, to learn more about the fascinating world of communicating through means of the semaphore language. Jay?!
Thank you Vincent, I mean Jimbeau, I mean, who the hell was that? You know folks; really, it’s this sort of insensitivity, bred through generations of depravity that just frosts my cake. I mean really, where is the love, the compassion, and the gratitude? So here he goes again, trying to pawn off another hackneyed, Vonnegut-esque, Gonzo-style (or so he imagines) Christmas story. Is he really going to try, yet again, to just fill up page after page with insensitive, impertinent scribblings that might, if we are lucky, assay out to one, perhaps two semi-clever, possibly plagiarized sentences? Again I ask, where is the heartfelt, vulnerability that typically characterizes an annual, Letter-to-home sort of correspondence? Yes folks that’s right! I am calling out the man at the keyboard for a sort of character reference, background check, track-record evaluation, to determine if indeed anyone really is there in the first place.
O.K. so he was born in the summer of 1956, we’ll give him 5 years to become semi-human. 1961, he enters public school where he begins learning the tricks of the trade to just floating along, barely doing anything but eating and watching Captain Kangaroo.
1971, he smokes pot for the first time and discovers a world of unimagined magic that dovetails perfectly with the kind of lackadaisical existence he already knows so well, but this time with the added benefit of food tasting better than it ever has before. 1981, he has smoked himself into a hole of fear and paranoia; alcohol becomes his bulletproof vest. He fancies himself to be a kind of Alan Alda as Hawkeye Pierce from MASH, sort of character. His motto becomes, If You Had the Kind Of Insight into Humanity That I Have, You’d Drink Too! 1991, alcohol has taken him from celebration to desperation. Coffee becomes his new drug-of-choice. And so it was, with that cup o’ Joe the size of a barrel o’ pickles, he began down a road of…
Warning! Warning! We have an oil light! I need you to pull this rig safely over to the shoulder of the road and shut down that engine, NOW! Let’s get a look at what’s going on here. Right then, I can have that engine out of the vehicle and on the bench in less than an hour if needed, but I’ll be damned if I haven’t neglected to bring even a pint of oil. What was I thinking? Let’s send it up to Central Control while we wait for further instructions.
Mysteriously, our story now resumes several trillion years later, after one complete Universal Cycle. We now rejoin Dr. Jeff Cieleague mid-sentence in a large lecture hall. …actually, I don’t know, but I presume that somehow, they’ve manager to put a time signature in the electricity grid so that when you plug a device in the wall, there you go, perfect clocks everywhere! That’s a very good question! Well yes, of course I understand the implications; it’s just that I… Oh. Hello! And welcome to our Christmas Letter for the year of our Governor 2011. Well here I am, home for the holidays, 6 years after the ”Event” and for those of you who still don’t know what I’m referring to, well, just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip, that started from my old back porch, upon this tiny so-on-and-so-forth… My intention this year is to finally lay to rest all the rumors, half-truths and outright lies about the semi-miraculous circumstances that all came together in a “perfect storm” if you will, to produce what I call the…
Suddenly, a voice rings out like that of a disembodied spirit on a non-existent P.A. system, a voice from my childhood… Wait a minute… are you getting this?!
Hey Kid! Why don’t ya’s make with the disappearing act and drop this whole “Event” gobbledygook? I’VE GOT IT! That voice! So theatrical, so vaudevillian, so slapstick… so, JEWISH!? By gaw ladies and gentleman, won’t you all give a warm welcome to Mr. Groucho Marx!
Vut are ya, some kinda vise guy? I am certainly not Groucho Marx, but thanks for the compliment! I am Ono Marx; I haunt the graveyards out to the west of your fair city. I am here to tell you to immediately drop this whole “Event” thing. What did you expect to happen when you went out into the wilderness, alone, fasting, praying for a vision? Chopped Livah from heaven maybe?
No! Wait! It was more! I am special! Stop! Listen! I was the chief bean-counter and bottle-washer of one of this country’s Biggest Barbequed/Baked Bean producers. Oh, we had it all! We had a company that employed some of the greatest folks you could ever meet. My own Great-Grandmother, bless her heart, was the founding matriarch of that fabulous company. She and her seven sisters, all of that lovely McCarthy lineage, all orphaned by a war that was to end all wars, all immigrants to a strange new land, not to that of some east coast anchorage, but around “The Horn” and into that lovely west coast bay to finish out their collective fledgling-ships in a convent in the Mendocino area of this fine state of Californey! All of them stayed close to their Irish Catholic roots for the rest of their lives. The last of the sisters passed away in 1969 when I was but a lad of 13 years age. I never really understood women all that much, although I did marry. Eventually, I realized that somehow, I had really hit the Bonanza Jackpot with my dearly beloved especially considering that it was virtually an arranged marriage, replete with dowry paid to my father, the famous Sci-Fi writer, that entertainer to countless teenage nerds throughout the High-Tech world, Dr. E. Leese Eli. But I digress.
Anyway! In 1972, I adopted a kitten. I named him Twigs. That cat went everywhere with me, including my years at college dormitories, my trips by car (1974 Datsun B210) to the Southwest for springtime peyote ceremonies and even to a small town jail in Nevada for a vagrancy charge that was cleared up by my Grandpa and Western Union. Twigs was a wonderful cat of whom many people to this day still inquire about and who’s grave-site has become a sort of right of passage/destination for homeless teenagers searching for some kind of meaning for their lives. Why ME? Why Me? they always ask. Why not you, I reply. Twigs finally bought the proverbial farm in 1996 at the ripe old age of 24 as the result of a fight he got into with a skunk while we lived over on South Street. My son, Donald B. Seely, 1974-2001 (probably gay but never fully “out-ed”) had Twigs stuffed and mounted by a taxidermist who disclosed to me later that Twigs was actually mummified, but that, as the guy told me, was strictly between he and I. It is ironic that my son would also end up mummified, as the result of a climbing accident in Nepal while on holiday with his long time roommate Raul. My son’s body is still up there, high upon an 8,000-meter peak known as Annapurna and he will probably remain there until the proverbial sacred cows come home, aka FOREVER. But again I’ve gone adrift into some trivial, jumble-jungle of nonessential info, straying away from the real story we are trying to convey here, namely, that of the semi-miraculous event, I like to call “The Event” and the circumstances that lead up to it and of course, the repercussions from it that I’m/We’re still dealing with today.
Finally after the better part of a decade, after countless tears shed by my friends and loved ones, after lock-ups, evaluations, misdiagnosis, disappearances, emergence's, and divergences, I am back and ready to tell all! But wait! What’s that? What’s that? The lecture hall is empty? Everyone has left the building? There, far across the room, a piece of paper, pinned to a blue door, there is writing on it. I start to walk toward it, to read what is written upon it, but in the dimly lit hall my progress is slow. I know that if I am not careful I risk falling or smashing through the floor, which has become oddly uneven. I reach down with my hand to try to determine what I am walking upon. It’s muddy clay; a fine dusting of snow has fallen. I trudge on, determined to read the note, which seems to grow further away with each step I take. At times I think I can almost make out the writing. It seems to be written in Japanese calligraphy, but then I think it may be written in ancient Sumerian Cuneiform. Out of nowhere, I see a man behind a previously unnoticed counter, selling ice cream. He yells at me, hoping to entice me to sample is wares, but now, it is so cold that the thought of ice cream seems ludicrous. No, what I need is information and strong hot tea. He yells at me, Well I can tell you this! You’re late! There must be at least 10,000 people ahead of you, all trying to catch a glimpse of that silly note pinned to that blue door. Funny thing is though, when they do get close enough to read it, then they realize they simply must see what’s behind the door. Let me save you a lot of time and struggle my son by telling you a little secret, behind that door, is another door and behind it, another door, and behind it, well, the last I heard, someone is in there 64,000 doors deep and still going! Wait a minute! How big is this place? Well the latest estimates put it at something like two hundred and ten thousand light years across. O.K. I said, but what does the note say. Oh that’s the real kicker Son, it says, For Madmen Only—Price Of Admission—Your Mind. I mulled it over for a moment and then said, I reckon I’ll have one o’ them Ice Cream Sandwiches. Say, aren’t you George Burns?