Art’s Theory 8

chapter eight

Beware of Doug

          Mile after miserable mile, the seconds are counted by the yellow dashes down the middle of this blacktop country road.  It’s been over an hour since Sam picked up the ringing phone back in his studio.  A ghost from his past had returned to the civilized world and harangued Sam into driving up the mountain side.  Once again, he had borrowed Zia’s car without permission and would surely return it with an empty gas tank.  The rusted bucket of bolts was barely road worthy and each incline challenged the misfiring engine to a death match.

          Sam was irrationally trying to control the engine’s mechanical functions with his mind, attempting to stop the misfiring piston from seizing up.  This was uncharacteristic behavior from a guy who swore by scientific explanations of things.  Sam superstitiously acted as if a malevolent ghost existed inside this modern machine, just itching to fuck up his life.

          The car’s headlights pushed through the darkness as Sam became mesmerized by the patchwork ribbon of concrete, tar and gravel moving beneath him.  The hypnotic flickering of black and gray transported him back to memories of getting stoned with Doug and laughing until their sides hurt.  Playing chess for hours and arguing brainy college nonsense, they had bonded for life – soul mates.  Sam could still envision Doug’s Halloween costumes.  One year his scientist friend dressed up as General Electric with battery powered lights among the medals and ribbons adorning the military uniform.  But for Sam the best costume had to be the year Doug used a giant trench coat and a backpack frame to transform into a headless man holding his own skull.  That illusion was almost too real for most people’s taste.

          Trees fluttered past Sam’s peripheral vision as his sleepy foot got heavy on the gas pedal.  Bridge supports replaced trees while Sam’s eyes lost focus.  Dashes of yellow turned solid and ribbed asphalt vibrated his ass deep into the tattered driver’s seat.  Oh, how the rumbling caressed his brain stem. 

Yellow …. Red …. STOP!

          A wall of solid granite flies towards a bug splattered grille and the squeal of bald tires jerks Sam’s mind back to semi-consciousness.  Zia’s old car starts to slide sideways and Sam contemplates his chances of surviving a roll over.  He visualizes the rusted out roof collapsing and crushing his skull, causing both his eyeballs to squirt out onto the cracked dashboard.  And then, as if touched by an angel, the car comes to a stop and stalls just inches from the rock wall.          Praise the Lord.

          How quickly God shows up in a crisis.  Sam often joked that he believed in the trinity whenever he was caught referring to himself in the plural: we.  “Me, myself and I” being the punch line to the trinity set up.  “And besides, you are never alone with a schizophrenic,” although meant to be funny, was the part of this humorous bit people found most concerning.

          Sam was now on the other side of the serpentine river the old county road had been faithfully mirroring.  Widow’s Peak topped the geologically up-lifted granite mountain blocking the road’s path.  There was no more straight ahead, Sam had come to a fork in the road and must now choose – left or right.  This must be the three-way intersection Doug mentioned while giving him directions to their meeting spot. 

          “Three ways are always dangerous,” Sam joked out loud. 

          With his heartbeat returning to normal, he restarted Zia’s over heating car and continued further up the mountainside.  “There is a bend in the road up ahead” - if said by a fortune teller or read in a fortune cookie might suggest that you will soon experience a fateful event.  But indeed, there was a bend in the road ahead as it narrowed and changed from blacktop to loose gravel.  Now in the middle of unfamiliar terrain, irrational fear and paranoia were setting in.  Thoughts raced around inside Sam’s brain: did he miss a turn?  Sam had nearly convinced himself he was on the wrong road when something appeared up the hill in a forest clearing. 

          “That’s it!”  Sam tried to convince himself while spinning a donut on the gravel road to turn the car around.  Set back off the road, a flickering neon sign blinked AND US AVE.  Sam’s confusion was growing as he turned into the poorly maintained driveway entrance.  He could now read the burnt out letters on the bar’s sign: GRANDMA’S RUSTIC TAVERN.

          Pulling into the noisy gravel parking lot, he spied Doug’s old green Chevy Impala near the front entrance.  After finding a spot away from the decaying tar paper building, Sam killed the engine and extracted himself from the vehicle.  After much moaning and stretching, he shut Zia’s car door and limped towards the classic rock music emanating from the rural tavern’s entrance door.  A mangy dog bounced across in front of him and blocked the doorway.  Sam stopped to study the dog – he seemed friendly enough, so Sam slowly offered his right hand for the mutt to smell before petting the canine’s head.  Man’s best friend inched closer and stared into Sam’s eyes with eternal gratitude for the scratches behind each floppy ear.  After calmly maneuvering the animal away from the front entrance, Sam opened the rotting door and ventured into a smoke filled cavern. 

          Sam has developed a terrible case of dry mouth from the joint he smoked on the drive up to meet his friend.  Reaching the beer soaked wooden bar he struggled to rasp out his request: sparkling water.  His order was so unusual it took the barmaid a couple seconds to mentally process.  Several grungy locals turned to eyeball the stranger with the gay drink order.  Sam paid and quickly poured the bubble water into a short cocktail glass, marveling at the complexity of the aerated fluid.  Chaotic explosions erupted all over the water’s surface as carbon dioxide molecules struggled to escape.  Sam could relate to their plight.

          Deeper inside the decrepit roadhouse he found Doug playing pool with some inbred local working class hero.  Sam slyly approached the billiard table, slapped some quarters down and proclaimed, “I’ve got the winner.”

          “Sam!  How the hell are you?”  Doug beamed as he reached out to hug his soul mate.

          “You can hug me, but please don’t kiss me,” Sam joked as some of the local patrons began to look concerned.  The two of them spent so much energy bantering back and forth that Doug lost the game of eight ball.  Sam reached over to take his money off the table.

          “Rack‘um up,” Doug’s opponent with the eyes too close together demanded.

          “Listen Dude, I just wanted to play pool with my long lost friend,” Sam explained while pointing at Doug.  “But now that you have won, I’d much rather sit down and visit with my buddy, catch up on things.  Know what I mean?”

          “Well, why don’t you consider me your brand new buddy?  Everyone here calls me Lucky.  Now rack up those balls and let me show you why.”

          Sam turned, winked at Doug and slyly asked, “Do you like to play for money, Lucky? “

          “Um sure,” Lucky slowly replied.

          “How about five bucks just to make it interesting,” Sam added while searching for a straight cue stick.

          Lucky knitted his brow to stare at Sam and then slowly agreed to the small wager.  Having grown up in a pool hall, Sam corralled the fifteen balls into a “house rack” – a loose triangle formation of balls not quite touching.  This technique was Sam’s insurance against Lucky breaking and running the table.  Sure enough, the cue ball will slam violently into the rack of balls, but nothing will fall into any of the six pockets.                                                                                                                    Sam examined the colored balls arranged on the short barroom table and baits his adversary.  “Five dollars says I can run this table.”

          “We play last pocket for the eight ball around here, and no slop”

          “Okay, last pocket and call your shots.  Is it a bet?”

          Lucky paused to calculate and then added, “Let me get this straight.  If you run the table I owe you a total of ten dollars, but once you miss the worst I can do is break even.”

          “Sounds like a sweetheart deal.  Are we on?” Sam inquired as he chalked the end of his cue stick and circled the table.

          Lucky sounded much less cocky as he clarified, “Solids or stripes?”

          Without looking up from studying the balls on the small rectangle of green felt, Sam replied, “You pick.”

          Poor Lucky didn’t know what to make of this out of town pool hustler.  He surveyed the crowded collection of balls and chose the striped ones because of where the cue ball had stopped. 

          Sam continued to walk around the pool table while considering the possibilities.  Finally, he called the nine-ball in the side pocket and Lucky began to smile.  That razor thin cut certainly wasn’t the easiest shot on the table.  But the longer you play this game the more you realize that the most important shot is the next one.  Sam bent over and stroked the cue ball with violent force.  The white orb sliced the nine into the side pocket and then slammed full blast into the central pile of balls.  With the newly added space between the balls, Sam’s job got easier with each shot.  There was never a long shot on one of these six-foot-long barroom pool tables.  Sam was cleaning up as he sank the last striped-ball, but the errant cue ball had rolled a little too far, stopping behind a solid-colored ball.

          “You can’t use my ball,” Lucky blurts out with a sigh of relief.  Sam had managed to nudge the eight ball close to the hole his last striped ball fell into.  If the path wasn’t blocked by the blue number two ball, this would be an easy shot for Sam.  He bends over, lifts the butt of his cue stick higher than normal and takes aim at the very bottom of the cue ball.

          “No jump shots,” Lucky warns, while pointing to the faded list of rules written on the dirty wall behind the bar.

          Sam walked over and read the list of actions that could get you kicked out of this fine establishment.  With a devilish grin, he returned to the pool table and raised the butt of his cue stick straight up into the air.  Before Lucky figured out what to protest, Sam stroked the white ball on the top right side.  The angle of attack caused the cue ball to squirt to the left and then spin back towards the eight ball.  The whole bar watched as it curved like a bowling ball down the lane and bumped the ebony black eight ball into the corner pocket. 

          Momentarily stunned, Sam’s opponent begrudgingly reached in his back pocket and extracted the wallet still chained to his belt.  With greasy biker fingernails this unlucky local loser handed over the prize money.

          Sam used the ten dollar bill to buy a couple beers and then joined Doug at the back of the bar. 

          “Sit down,” Doug gestured to the beat up wooden chair across the table from himself.  “I’ve got something to show you,” he added while reaching into his backpack.  Out came a dog-eared notebook filled with copious notes.

          “A book?” Sam guesses, while counting his change.

          “Notes for my thesis,” Doug corrects while opening the spiral notebook and pointing to a contour line drawing over the light blue horizontal lines defining the page.  But Sam is more focused on the jagged shape missing from Doug’s pointing finger nail.  Once again, a feeling of déjà vu distracts Sam’s mind for a moment. 

          Refocusing Sam muses, “I’ve always wanted to write a book,” as he hands a cold beer to his best buddy.

          “About what?” Doug honestly wonders out loud.

          “I don’t know…drugs?”

          “Yeah, you could write a book about all your drug experiences.  That would be a huge book!”  Doug adds with a twinkle in his eye, “In size, not in sales.  Ha ha.”

          “No, no that sounds awful, I wouldn’t even read that.  But you know what would be cool is to write a story that feels like a drug experience when you read it.”

          “Okay you might have something there, Sam,” Doug concedes as he turns his friend’s attention back to the notebook on the table. 

          Some of the pages had photographs of coarsely textured rocks glued to them.  Looking closely, Sam could make out faint linear designs carved into the pumice stones.  Doug’s crude line drawings next to the photos made it easier for Sam to find the shapes etched into the lava rocks.

          “Where did you find these?” Sam asked while turning to the next page.

          “The natives call the island Te-Pito-O-Te-Henua - meaning navel of the world, or Mata-Ki-Te-Rani - meaning eyes looking at heaven.  But you would know that remote treeless triangle of lava as Easter Island.

          “The place with the cool heads,” Sam added.  “Did you ever notice they seem to have dog ears?”

          “Let me get right to the point,” Doug ignored Sam’s question while leaning forward and lowering his voice.  “I’m convinced a prehistoric culture made those carvings.  They may just be the most advanced people to ever live on that remote island.  But what’s really odd is the total lack of a genetic link to the island’s native population.”

          “How does that work?  Did they all die off in a natural disaster?”

          “They vanished into thin air according to ancient island folklore,” Doug explained.  “The ancestors of present day Easter Islanders, the same ones who carved the famous giant heads, believed those ancient inhabitants were actually gods from a higher realm.  Easter Island’s ancient symbolic language, called RongoRongo, originated long before those heads were carved.  Although no one can translate the exact meaning of the symbols, it appears to be a rather straight forward picture language.  The drawing that looks like a lizard probably means lizard, the one that looks like a fish stood for fish and so on.  After six thousand years of erosion, most of the petro-glyphs I found are now invisible to an untrained eye.”

          “I’m no mathematician, but doesn’t that put your advanced ancient culture at about four thousand B.C.?”

          “Quick ciphering, Sam.”

          “Don’t your fellow archeologists claim the island was uninhabited until long after the fall of Rome?”

          “They’ve been wrong before,” Doug argued.  “Look at these photographs.  What would you call that image scratched into the lava rock?”  His friend pushed the notebook toward him for closer inspection.  The coarse surface of the pumice stone contained a nearly subliminal contour line drawing of a hooded stem.

          “Well you’re right about the carvings being hard to see.  But as I look at this snapshot with the light raking across the stone, I’d say it looks just like a psychedelic mushroom.”

          “Exactly,” Doug replied while rewarding Sam with a smirk.

          “I was kidding!  Please don’t tell me you’ve been hunting for ancient mushrooms for the last eight months.”

          Doug leaned back in the chair and flashed a Cheshire cat grin.  This was the face Sam always envisioned when thinking about his best friend – smiling lips and squinting eyes with expressive crow’s feet. 

          “There are no mushroom spores on the entire island,” Doug states.  “The native language contains no word for mushroom.  But their oral folklore tells about a time before time when the ancient gods visited the island.  The way the story is told by Easter Islanders today often implies that the ancient inhabitants were extraterrestrials.”

          “You’re starting to worry me now, Doug.  Did you stay out in the hot sun too long?”

          Doug, normally a jovial person, got that serious look on his face and started flipping through the pages of his notebook.

          “Look at those two shapes,” Doug commands while pointing with his crooked index finger, the result of an old football injury.

          “A trapezoid and a triangle?” Sam searches for a deeper relationship between the shapes.

          “Notice the points of light, Sam.  That’s Orion,” Doug reveals.

          “So it is.  But it is pointing in the wrong direction.  What does that mean?”

          “Southern hemisphere, dumbass,” Doug scolds.  “Besides being one of the most recognized constellations in the night sky, it is also an extremely active region of space.  The Trapezium star cluster is a star and planet factory on steroids.  And maybe more relevant to my research, the nearest black hole to earth is located there.”

          Sam looks puzzled and asks, “How is that important, exactly?”

          “Well it seems as though the physics of time and space are very different inside and around both that black hole and the Orion nebula,” Doug explains.

          “Oh, no, not your ancient aliens again, Doug.  Did they zip through some wormhole short cut to get here?”

          “I’m convinced those giant heads do not represent dead kings or function to scare away enemies.  First of all, most of them face inland and, secondly, who invades the middle of nowhere?  The myth clearly states that the heads are looking out into the other, not looking out for others.”

          “So you think the heads were made to look into deep space for where those ancient visitors came from”

          “You’ve been paying attention again, Sam.”

          “Hey, what if those ancient aliens actually looked like that, with the dog ears and sharp jaw line?”  Sam speculates.

          “Would you stop with the dog ear shit, please?” Doug begs.

          Sam was disappointed in his friend’s refusal to play and tried changing topics, “I thought we were talking about mushrooms; the ones that don’t grow there anymore.”

          Doug let out a tiny grunt as he bent over and stuck his dry cracked hand into the backpack again.  He pulled out a small glass vial and placed it on the table directly in front of Sam.  The translucent cylinder seemed to have a hazy matte surface.  Sam bent forward to get a closer look and Doug handed him a pocket sized magnifying glass.  On closer inspection, the frosted glass effect was actually microscopic symbols etched all over the tubular talisman.

           “I found that vial in a small hidden chamber within the altar of an ancient temple.  All my colleagues consider the site to just be a stone quarry used to harvest rocks for the giant sculptures.  In fact, most of the ancient sacred site was probably destroyed during the statue building era.”

          “Are you telling me that gray dust in the vial is a prehistoric mushroom?”

          “More like a hundred, actually.  If those petro-glyphs represent a crude symbolic language, then that dust could have been used in some sort of mystery cult ritual.”  Doug grasped for some standard archeological reasoning.

          “You could have told me all this over the phone,” Sam protested.  “Why the hell did I have to drive all the way up here in the middle of the night?  Not that I don’t love seeing you, of course.”

          “Patience Sam, I’m getting to the best part,” Doug reprimanded.  “I’ll admit that most of what I’m going to add is just wild conjecture, but hear me out.  According to oral folklore, those prehistoric inhabitants of the island believed our concept of reality is just an illusion caused by linear space/time.  In other words, the very act of living our lives from beginning to end limits our perception of reality.”

          Sam was getting totally lost trying to imagine nonlinear space/time, so he changed the subject.  “Wait a minute.  How could those mushrooms still exist after six thousand years?”

          Doug flipped to the back of his notebook and pointed to a photo of a translucent rock shaped into a perfect sphere.  “That ball of quartz is about the size of a large grapefruit, made from a stone only found in meteorites, and geometrically flawless.  It was the most significant artifact I found during my dig.”

          “Was, as in no more?”

          “My Ph.D. thesis now feels like what you said about your paintings at that last opening exhibition I went to.”

          “Three years ago?  Help me out.  What did I say, Doug?” Sam often found invented suspense to be tedious.

          “You confessed that your paintings are never what they start out to be, but are much better than they were!  Almost a Zen koan when you think about it.  Now I know what you meant about the act of discovery.  When I presented my findings at the Chilean conference last weekend, my archeological colleagues were interested until that stone sphere came out.  They literally laughed me off the stage, Sam.  The humiliation gave me temporary insanity and, in a fit of irrational anger, I took my stupid rock into the university lab and cut it open.”

          “You destroyed the artifact?!” Sam asked in disbelief.

          “Again, acts of desperation!  Isn’t that your definition of painting?”

          “I was quoting my favorite painting professor.”

          “That doesn’t really matter; just let me get to the best part.  The diamond blade stopped when it got to the middle of that spherical relic.  There was something inside that was too hard for the wet saw to cut through.  So I rotated the crystal ball and cut all around that hard center.  When I separated the two hemispheres, I found that.”  Doug pointed to the glass vial on the table.

          “Bullshit.  A wet saw could cut through that glass like it was butter.”

          “Go ahead and bounce it off the floor, it seems to be unbreakable.  Ten times harder than diamond, this pure carbon is like lonsdaleite which is only created by meteorite impacts here on earth.  That material is beyond our understanding of molecular chemistry.”  Doug opened the vial and held it so Sam could see inside.

          Sam studied the dusty crumbs inside the mystery glass.  The substance appeared completely devoid of color.  His eyes strained to bring the gray powder into focus.  “And you think that is mushroom dust?”

          “I think those ancient people used the hallucinogenic mushrooms to experience another dimension or parallel universe.  What if contemporary physics is right and we all live in the ten-dimensional world of string theory, but more than half of reality is invisible to us?  If nothing else, the psychotropic effect might create that illusion of nonlocal space/time the island natives talked about.”

          “Maybe that’s why I can’t seem to get a clear view of that crap.  It would also explain how such organic material could still exist.  What if that mushroom dust is still in some sort of nonlocal space/time?”

          Doug sat back in his chair and smiled, once again enjoying Sam’s child-like creative thought process.  “Of course; why not, it’s the logical next step within an insane theory.  Sam, you’re a genius!”

          “I know that!  But tell me, do you actually think the mushroom dust is still potent?  Will it take us to that nonlocal space/time extra dimension parallel universe deal?

          “We could get seriously ill; maybe even die of alkali poisoning!” Doug warned.

          “What are you- some high school drug counselor?  We both know you arranged this whole get together in the middle of nowhere so we could try that shit out.”

          “Well yeah, that was my plan at first, but now I’m starting to have second thoughts.  There are some serious issues to consider before we swallow that mystery powder.  We should get out of this bar,” Doug insisted.  “Let’s hike up to the top of the ridge.  Since we’re looking for a new perspective, we might as well have a good view.”

          Sam stopped at the bar to purchase two cans of beer for the hike while Doug searched through the trunk of his car, for a flashlight.  They met up at the far edge of the gravel parking lot and Doug attempted to light the way up a steep mountain path.  The beam of light was flitting everywhere, creating a jerky world of visual fragments.  While trying his best to keep up with Doug, Sam focused all his attention on not falling down.  After ten minutes of heavy breathing, they stopped to rest near a large granite boulder.  The churning roar of a whitewater stream urged them to press on.  Finally, they found a reflective liquid ribbon of snowmelt cascading down the mountain side and located a large flat slab of polished stone jutting out into the rushing water.  As they sat down into the negative ion cloud created by the roiling water, Sam pulled two pale ales from his jacket and hands one to Doug.

          “This calls for a celebration,” Sam exults as he shoves a beer at his buddy and says, “You’ll need this to wash that alkali poison down.”

          “This might be a bad idea,” Doug admits.

          “Ya think?  It’s your call Doug; but personally, my life couldn’t get any more fucked up.  Another dimension is just what I need.  Who knows?  I might actually be famous in a parallel universe.” 

          Doug reluctantly retrieved the vial from his front pocket and held it dramatically in the palm of his left hand.  “There’s something else I should tell you about this etched cylinder,” Doug begins to explain.  “All those character designs you could see through the magnifying glass, literally never end.  When I examined it in the lab, increasing the amount of magnification exponentially – the graphics just kept evolving.  So I put it in the electron microscope and found the patterns continued into the sub-atomic structure.” 

          Sam snatches the glass vial with a Bruce Lee-like move and quickly opens the mysterious translucent tube.  Before Doug could object, Sam pokes his pinky finger into the vial and pulls it out all covered in gray ancient mushroom dust.

          “Okay, you’re absolutely right - this is exactly why I asked you to drive all the way up here tonight.”  In one fluid motion, Doug jammed his finger into the stubby vial and, then, poked it into his mouth.  Sam followed blindly, as if jumping off a cliff.  The substance tasted like dirt without the grit.  He took a big gulp of beer as Doug clanked his suddenly empty can down on the smooth rock surface.  Time seemed to decelerate to a crawl.  The calming white noise of the mountain stream provided the only evidence of movement.  This void of action left Sam with only one thought – he really had to pee.  So he stood up and looked for a proper spot away from the water.  Doug got up to join him over by the cypress tree. 

          As they stared into the night sky and emptied their bladders, Doug began to talk, “I know you’re not into sports.”

          As usual, Sam interrupts mid-sentence, “I like basketball.”

          “Fine, using the basketball analogy – who would be your starting five artists?”

          “The best of all time or the ones who have influenced me the most,” Sam asks.

          “The artists who represent the historical styles your own paintings are built upon,” Doug clarifies.

          “First would have to be Leonardo da Vinci because of the iconic images and his scientific mind,” Sam begins.

          “You are definitely analytical for an artist,” Doug agrees.

          “Second would be Vermeer and his use of the camera obscura.  He is really the first photorealist when you think about it.  And I just loved such illusionism when I was a teenager. Then I learned about surrealism and my third pick – Salvador Dali.”

          “That influence was more obvious in your high school artworks,” Doug adds.

          “I didn’t say it was a sophisticated choice,” Sam responds in a rather defensive way.

          “No, I like that about your paintings,” Doug assures.

          “I still see surrealism everywhere, all the way back to the Renaissance,” Sam elaborates.  And not just the obvious Bosch weirdness, but also Leonardo’s “Leda and the Swan” or that elongated “Lady with the Ermine.  Not to mention Giuseppe Arcimboldo the Mannerist Dali.”

          “Who?”

          “The head made out of fruits and vegetables,” Sam describes Arcimboldo’s most famous painting.

          “Oh yeah, I know that one,” Doug realizes as he returns to the conversations quest.   “And who would be number four on your team, Sam?”

          “Picasso!  Did I mention Picasso, yet?  He has been huge for me.  Long before I understood any of that Cubism abstraction, I would stand in front of his paintings and try to convince myself that they were crap.  Like all humans, I was threatened by what I didn’t understand,” Sam confesses.

          “Well I still struggle with Cubism, but even I can see how it shows up in the structure of your compositions,” Doug interjects.

          “Picasso re-invented the formal structure of painting and taught us that all children are artists.  But the reverse is also true.  Artists are people who never grow up, allowing them to see creative possibilities hidden from the adults in the world.”

          “Beginner’s mind,” Doug adds a related concept.

          “Improvisation is the vehicle to discovery.  Something every child and jazz musician knows,” Sam proclaims.

          “You have one more pick left,” Doug refocuses Sam on the list.

          “This is hard; so much gets left out with just five. My last choice must include David Bomberg’s concept of the spirit in the mass and how it influenced his student, Frank Auerbach to make such thick paintings.  The magical way the material qualities of the paint fold into an illusion of physical mass was a discovery of modern expressionism.  Beginning with Van Gogh, the viewer starts to feel the reality within the painting.

          “So, which one would it be,” Doug tries to complete the team’s roster.

          “Giacometti could represent that part of my work even though he didn’t paint thickly.  I pick him because of what he said about the impossible struggle of seeing the physical world and his unique solution as to how one might go about painting our experience of reality.”

          “I’m not sure his name will fit on your team’s jersey,” Doug jokes.

          “How about a sixth man?” Sam begs for more teammates.

          “Sure.”

          “Marcel Duchamp!” Sam enjoys the drama of his own over acting.

          “I don’t get him,” Doug has to admit.  “He just chose shit and called it art.”

          “They are called Readymades, like the urinal.”

          “How is a urinal a work of art?”

          “Duchamp declared a choice of mind to be equal to a choice of hand.  It was art because he repurposed it to be so, not unlike what an artist does with oil paint and marble.  Duchamp was observing that things become art when we decide they are no longer mere things, as Heidegger would say.”

          “I’m still lost Sam,” Doug has to admit.

          “Think of it this way, Doug.  The Mona Lisa is the world’s most famous painting because western culture decided it was – a collective conceptual choice!”

           Doug struggled to think like an artist as Sam sat back down on the flat rock and finally relaxed, just enjoying the clean mountain air.  The crescent moonlight sparkled off the chaotic water flowing in front of them.  The inky blackness of the clear night sky revealed the dense star field of our Milky Way galaxy.  They could see so many stars from up on the mountain that finding the constellations became a challenge. 

          Sam was surprised to find a purple glow around the Pleiades cluster and the “W” formation of Cassiopeia drenched in a magenta haze.  Looking out the corner of his eye for better night vision, Sam could just barely see the fuzzy dot of the Andromeda galaxy, the nearest companion to our own spiral formation.  Amazingly, that light left Andromeda hundreds of millions of years ago.

          Sam spots Orion’s belt of stars and asks Doug, “Where is that black hole you were talking about?”

          “Near the bottom of Orion’s sword is a red fuzzy glow that also becomes the top of the triangle in the petroglyphs.”  Doug points into the night sky and adds, “It is called the Orion Nebula, or M42, and in the center of that fuzzy red dot is the trapezium star cluster, which is the location of the nearest black hole to earth.”

          “Wow, that’s pretty cool, Doug,” Sam has to admit.

          “Not only are stars being created at a frenzied pace, they are also exploding out of there at ridiculous speeds.  It is hard to even form a concept of how much energy exists inside that star cluster.”

          “Do you know what that star is called?”  Sam asks while pointing at the brightest star in the night sky.  “The Doug star.”

          “The dog star, otherwise known as Sirius,” Doug clarifies.

          Suddenly, a neon blue shooting star streaks across the sky, Sam pokes his friend and yells, “Wow!  Did you see that?”

          “How could I miss it,” Doug yells back!

          “Gee Doug, I don’t think your stale juju is going to work.  Do you feel anything?”

          “No, just the four beers,” Doug smiled back at Sam.

          “Four?  Oh, that’s right, you beat me here.  So tell me Doug, what else is going on in your life?”

          “Well, I still feel bad about the lizard.”  Doug, once again, smiles that unique Doug smile.

          Sam responds with his own expressive face and asks, “Lizard?”

          “I found some rat sized poop in my hut, so I concocted a glue mixture and set a trap on the floor.  Upon closer examination the poop seemed structured like a dolma which I thought was odd at the time, but forgot about in the rush to pack for my return to the dig site.  When I got back to my hut days later, there he was – stuck down, twisted body, mouth open and eyes glazed over.”

          “That’s so sad,” Sam has to admit. “I hope your love life is less depressing.

          “Let’s see, my last girlfriend spoke no English and lived on a small island in the middle of nowhere.  But if you are asking about my ex-wife, I’d rather not go there.  How are things with Zia?”

          “Same same, as my Thai friend says.  I used Zia’s car to drive up here.  It almost didn’t make it and I’m not looking forward to testing her brakes on the drive back down the mountain,” Sam added, while frantically searching all his pockets.

          “What are you looking for?”

          “I’ve lost a roach.”

          “You don’t realize how great your life is.”

          “Are you talking to me?!”

          “Zia is a one in a million find, Sam.”

          “Duh, that’s why I’m faithful to her.”

          “Yeah right, how about that naked dancer friend of yours?”

          “Why does everyone just assume I’m fucking Viper?”

          “Maybe it’s because no mortal man with a functioning penis would pass   up a chance to do her.”

          “I’d be glad to introduce you,” Sam angrily offered. 

          The two of them sat in silence for awhile, their minds running off in various directions.  Did Doug just go out of focus like a television channel tuned to a weak broadcasting signal?  A world of snowy particles in vertical waves makes Sam rub his eyes, using his shirt to clean the sleep out of the corners.  He contemplates the source of his unhappiness and blurts out, “Just once, I’d like to know that my life isn’t a total waste of time for everyone I touch.”

          “Quite the contrary, Sam,” Doug assured.  “I’m a more creative person because of you.  Life is more entertaining because of you.  What do you want?”

          “A sign of some purposeful direction to my life that would explain what it all means.”

          Sam sat up and peeked into Doug’s eyes before turning to contemplate the unfathomable abyss of the crystal clear night sky.  From above the slender crescent moon, another point of light seemed to shoot from the moon’s surface.  The dot instantly jumped from distant past to present orb, causing Sam to experience the most compelling 3-D movie illusion of his life. 

          A blinding flash erases the world and Sam ducks in reflexive fear.  In the voice of a terrified child, he involuntarily screams, “Motherfucker.”  Sam feels incredibly dizzy – his adrenaline accelerated heart pounding in his ears.  Ever so slowly, he straightens up and turns to look at Doug.

          Sam will not be able to believe his own eyes.  Right in the middle of his best friend’s forehead, a golf ball-sized opening, with starlight shining through, will stare back at Sam.  Fixated on the hole, he will hear Doug’s voice but the sounds will be unintelligible.  Sam will find it impossible to look away from the perfectly round hole.  In a flash, Sam may forever travel through the spiraling worm hole embedded in his friend’s forehead.

          I’m lost, still searching for a glimpse of your all-knowing light.

          Delirium tempts me to act impulsively, to enter the darkness.

          Twisting and fluid, my thoughts are colliding with ancient myths.

          All of time has melted into a mirror world of unspoken dreams.