FEBRUARY 22nd, 2022 (02-22-2022)
PART I
I’m inside the Lynchian cube found on film behind the dumpster where the dirt-smeared homeless figure startles the viewer. The dream the man was afraid of was no dream at all. What did the poet say? The center cannot hold. The viewer who was me but is me no longer is finally beginning to understand: what was one thing percolating within the celluloid hopes of the wannabe actress suddenly becomes something else, something darker and much closer to the truth.
Two miles east of Hellgate Canyon David Lynch entered the world on January 20th, 1946. Two miles east of Hellgate, Sean Stevenson left this world on January 5th, 2020. Between two swells of mountain marked with a “M” to the south and a “L” to the north, the boy shows himself to Clark and the shot that dissolves the boy’s head is the shot that begins the story.
The story of Zula.
Hyper-Localism is firing up my synapses, but remains elusive. It’s an idea I’m working on emerging from my study and practice of synchro-mysticism and entangled in a project I’m calling the CC Rider Alliance. Here’s the short of it: Conspiracists and Christians, UNITE!
In the story of Zula a homeless man is violently bludgeoned to death by another homeless man. On November 20th, 2020, a homeless man I knew well—Lee Nelson—was violently bludgeoned to death by another homeless man. This violent murder occurred where the Fox Theater once stood and where Nick Checota hoped to build a conference center with the help of Tax Increment Financing.
On January 5th, 2022, the documentary about the controversy that erupted from that proposed conference center was made public online. The documentary is called Engen’s Missoula.
John Engen first assumed office, as Mayor, on January 3rd, 2006. Sean Stevenson was assaulted at the homeless shelter where I used to work on January 3rd, 2020. I put in my notice to leave my job at Missoula Aging Services on January 3rd, 2020. Before making the documentary public, it was uploaded to Vimeo on a date you can probably anticipate at this point.
I don’t expect this to have any relevance outside my personal sphere. As I string together words that reflect thoughts I’ve been trying to form for how long I don’t know, there will be no plan offered to trust or white hat character coming to keep you comfortable on your couch.
If you want to wake the fuck up, read on. If you prefer the robotic patterns of the first four circuits, stop now. You’ve been warned.
David Lynch doesn’t remember Missoula, but seems to be rather amused at the idea of entering this realm near the gates of hell. Here is an exchange with an interviewer from Missoula’s shuttered weekly publication ended by Lee Enterprises on September 11th, 2018 (but that’s another story for another time):
Indy: How long did you actually live in Missoula?
Lynch: Two months.
Indy: That’s it?
Lynch: I was born there, and right after I was born my parents moved to Sand Point, Idaho. I lived in the Northwest until I was 14, but always in different cities.
Indy: During those years did you ever make your way back through Missoula?
Lynch: No. My relatives in Montana were in Hungry Horse, Montana; my aunt and uncle lived there. My parents have a log cabin up near Kalispell—what’s the name of the ski resort? Whitefish? My Dad was raised near Highwood, Montana, on a wheat ranch, and my grandfather was a state senator in Montana. They retired from the ranch and lived in Hamilton for a while. I’ve been to Montana a lot, but never really back to Missoula.
Indy: So, when you came back, you were mostly heading back to the Kalispell area?
Lynch: Exactly. It’s beautiful up there.
Indy: Do you have any memories of Missoula at all?
Lynch: Um, no. Not really. But I’ve heard people say it’s a great town and I should go visit it because it’s got a real mood. And I want to go find the hospital I was born in and see if it brings back memories. I remember it was two miles from Hell’s Canyon…St. Patrick Hospital. That’s it. I’d like to get back there.
David Lynch bounced around America because his dad was a research scientist working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). His artistic vision found a catalyst in the violence surrounding his early career in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Sean Stevenson was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to loving parents with a strong faith in God. Sean’s father, Dr. Kenneth Stevenson, was delivered from certain death by miraculous circumstances in the sky over Vietnam. He dedicated his life to serving the Lord from that moment on, spending time as the pastor at the church in Pittsburgh where the movie Dogma was filmed. In that movie God is played by Alanis Morissette.
I’m inside the Lynchian cube. So is Philip K. Dick.
During the fall of 1978, Philip K. Dick wrote VALIS. I was born on September 19th, 1978, in Spokane Washington, just a few mountain passes west of Missoula. All of this area is thought to have been formed, geologically, by the great flood waters unleashed when glacial lake Missoula broke and dumped its deluge.
Philip K. Dick wrote VALIS and a few other books in an attempt to understand miraculous things happening to him around 1973. One of those books, Radio Free Albemuth, was turned into a movie. The main character, Nick, is based on an aspect of Dick’s life that really happened. In the film he meets Sylvia, a fellow traveler awakened by the sky device Dick posited might be responsible for his own real life experiences.
In the movie Sylvia is played by Alanis Morissette. Writing this just now, the name “Alanis”—because I’m referencing flood waters—makes me think ATLANTIS. And that makes me think about Tartaria, which leads me to the conversation I had with Adam and Chud X about synchronicities I experienced listening to an episode they did about the Northwest.
The synchronicities I experienced are culturally encoded in the series Carnivale, which first aired from 2003-2005, right before Mayor Engen’s reign began. The show takes place in the dustbowl era of 1934 and carries the esoteric baggage of old-world Templar intrigues and an avatar showdown between the fleshy incarnations of good and evil.
Templar intrigue was prominent in my brain, having received and read a book by Tracy Twyman. And when “management” dies, and the cloth is draped over his body, and the body later disappears, and the little man (played by Michael J. Anderson, who also acted in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks) is given an experience with a shroud showing his friend’s image, of course it correlated again to a book recently arrived.
Because Sean’s father, Ken, worked with and wrote multiple books about the SHROUD of TURIN.
One and three and 2020 to begin to see future threads like tentacles reaching back from Zula fiction into hyper-local little me resonating in the valley of arrival.
I had intended these notes to provide more tangible applications of my theory on hyper-localism as antidote to the co-opting parasites of the mind from stealing your eyes and attention.
Stop the hope an easy vote will be enough to stop this.
Pay attention to your immediate surroundings and meaningful coincidences will emerge and multiply.
Speak out loud to your ancestors and guardian angel. Ask for help if you need it. Suicide energy like little black holes desire to be absolved and true kings and queens with burning hearts may enter the cavernous mountain to offer the dead a chance to be forgiven.
Hyper-localism is setting up a THC meet-up (The Higherside Chat) and meeting a mom with three kids similar to your three kids in gender and age range and her name of course makes you think of Alanis because it’s Alexis and you have another ally in the local fight to un-mask the children and keep them safe from needle Nazis.
No vote required. Just a little planning, intention, and action of feet on the ground taking steps toward easily achievable objectives.
We are well met, brothers and sisters. Welcome to a new waking made possible by the spirit. The cube is an old technology breaking down, which makes the operators even more dangerous as they cling and claw for purchase on our shuddering shoulders.
We send the comets back and close the circuits. We pray. The rockets are tired performances for an audience crushing boner pills for a quick snort to stiffen what love has long since left.
My hyper-local is allowing a third-party to make safe the space for admitting, yes, I gaslit her worry to cast her in the limiting form of a nag so I could lighten the Bota Box every night in embarrassing, tortured artist cliché misery I assumed the poetic resume required.
One/three is me, John, and Sean making maladaptive problems for others with how we tried doing it wrong for so long. If you can’t quiet the shit-storm in your own backyard, you’ll be of no use to others when the time comes.
And, if you haven’t noticed, the time has long since come when the two week flat-out lie brought the fear rain raining down and hasn’t stopped and they won’t because their grip is loose and their black magic not working like it used to.
Part II
I am delineating parts of this missive because the speed of reference/synchronicity means I write about suicide energy on a Friday because of a conversation I had with someone about suicide spirits taking over the physical hierarchy of our Zoom Town municipality (a Mayor of Missoula off’d himself while in office, and our current leader was on his way with alcohol abuse) on a Thursday, and then, on Saturday, on a Patrons-only Prop Report Zoom meeting, a counselor in Seattle talked about her recent exploration of indigenous concepts of suicide.
Well, ok then.
I concluded that Saturday watching the conclusion of Archive 81 where the protagonist finds himself time-traveled to 1994, which is confirmed when Kurt Loder is seen on the television announcing the suicide (alleged) of Kurt Cobain.
Because of course.
Archive 81 began with so many name-synchs I had to keep pausing to scribble them down. Female protagonist, Melody Pendras (I live on Melody Lane). Male protagonist, Daniel Turner (my oldest kid’s middle name is Daniel, and the first street we lived on in Missoula was Turner St.). Emily Turner played by Jaxon Rose Moore + the female human sacrifice offered to the demon who is known by the first name, Rose (my youngest kid’s middle name is Rose). Podcaster Mark Higgins (Higgins the critical thoroughfare running north/south though downtown Missoula).
The synchs continue with William Crest, the patriarch of the Crest family who became obsessed with the occult rituals carried out by the Voss family in 1924, making a series called “The Circle” that never aired. My middle name is William, my pen name is William Skink, and I have a little moleskin journal I call the book of Williams because there are so many goddamn Williams across the spectrum of WILLful influence, I tried to document them and finally gave up after around 170 of them.
When I finished the series I erroneously concluded I was finished with the synchs, but then my mother told me of a Spokane connection. Because of course. So I looked it up to confirm, and yep.
Shadle Park High School alumna and Hollywood producer Amanda Kay Price knew her latest production, “Archive 81,” came with a built-in audience as an adaptation of a popular horror podcast.
But Price, who goes by Mandi, said from her home in Los Angeles on Tuesday she had no clue how big that audience would be.
“We really went into this weekend not knowing if anyone would even watch the show,” Price said.
As of Tuesday, the thriller series that follows a video archivist who stumbles upon an occult mystery tied to an old apartment complex is Netflix’s No. 1 show by viewers. Beating, as Price gleefully pointed out, established series that include the popular “Cobra Kai” continuation of “The Karate Kid” story (No. 5).
Well how about that? And I can just keep going. The dude at Alpha Graphics, where I got my latest book of poems self-published, is KEN PRICE. Fucking priceless.
Synchronicities that locate hyper-localism within an introspective space is usually about as compelling as dreams when trying to convey the meaning one can find in meaningful coincidences. That is why it is so wonderful to have people like Christopher Knowles attempting to bring a framework that include conscious methodology and self-reflective/skeptically-applied rigor to the synchs.
Because tricksters are afoot and synchronicity storms can bring clouds of paranoia to bear on untrained psyches.
While my hyper-localism is backyard oriented, Knowles’ reminder of a crazy church shooting in Coeur d'Alene (where my grandma once had a lake cabin) pushed me into the synchronicities of the region known as the Pacific Northwest and, going backwards through my Lynchian cube, a future place called New Cascadia.
Part III
A homeless man by the name of Buck blessed me on the California bridge when I told him I was trying to understand the death of Sean Stevenson. He said the synchronicities of 1’s (11:11, 111, 1:11, etc.) is the language of angels.
Today is the Tuesday of two’s and the day I will put this Lynchian cube out on the substack intertubes. Next month, March, the disaster/fiction simulation goes hot with my slow-burn realization (pandemic journal) the simulated Zoom Town I created in Zula won’t stay contained in fiction.
And the bleed-over feels like it’s accelerating.
I oscillate between artist/creator and synchromystic detective, going to the doc-shop in the spanking-new library to let Sara Terry know her mobile home documentary ironically played in a space (the Wilma) where a local oligarch helps control local narratives for subsidy loot and has no qualms about killing music at one of his venues, the Top Hat, while going ka-ching over Cannabis.
Another Terry, this one a private investigator in Florida, James Terry, is trying to help Rebekah’s mother find out what happened to her daughter in July, two days with twos involved; what happened at Council Groves on July 2nd? And what happened at Alberton 18 days later, on July 20th? Did she go into the water and drown? Was her allegedly abusive husband there against court orders?
So many questions.
And a few months ago I woke up from a nap to a crash because I knocked over (did I?) the old Odd Fellows poster (very old) given to me as a gift by my wife. Odd Fellows, a society involved in processing the bodies of the dead. And it gets even more ridiculous because on this old poster there’s a woman’s name, and it’s spelled REBEKAH.
Behind the image in the glass-shattered frame I found another old image, with the words at the bottom THE LAST CHANGE. Did I feel like I was in the Goonies? Of course, because in Carnivale Ben enters Hotel ASTORIA, which is a real place (I looked it up) in St. Petersburg, Russia. Which makes me think of Tartaria and Adam and Chud from Debra Gets Red Pilled (she almost did, but snaps back like a rubber band toward the safety of the lies) and
And
And the damn Lynchian cube with today’s 2sday of 2’s and a call from Synchro-Ben telling me go outside, look at the dissipating sky trail, and I did and DAMN I have to leave this cube for today as the work on the meta-timeline begins and we, the resonators of the GOOD hum, fight back against the upside down bat eyes echo-locating empaths like sharks scenting chum in the water.
Amen.
Hyperlocal can be antidote to all that larger parasitical energy sucking away at our withering edges because when you keep it close our exosomes can dance in the dust of what makes us.
Or something like that.
And what’s coming next, in the month Melody Pendras begins filming (March 11th, 1994), is like a crisis actor disaster emergency drill going live. One day you’re keeping at fiction-arms-length, the next day world institutions move to lockdown humanity across the globe.
What’s coming next is the fear, and how I said fuck it, I’m here for a reason and it’s to be awake during this time.
!