Reading is a good thing to get good at. I’m not particularly well educated, and I don’t pretend that I am. But I did eventually find reading material that resonated with my own personal interests. I had something to turn to in my down time. You can’t brain rot every day. You can’t get shit faced, every day. You have to try to make things somewhat better, sometimes. And for me, that was found through reading.
My mom gave me some of her interests. She was very much into horror movies and true crime. I never felt like reading any of her paperback novels, but I did find her copy of Nightmares and Dreamscapes. Because of her, reading was something that I knew I should work towards.
She wasn’t the only one.
My grandpa was a reader too. He had a stroke around when I was born. I don’t know who he was before the injury. I knew him as the quiet mechanic, who was always exercising his left hand and arm. Always stretching and working on his mobility.
He also read scripture every night.
His voice barely audible, going over highlighted sections in his bible.
My grandparents on my mom’s side were a big part of my life, as they only lived a few houses up the street from us. And ma dropped us off up there whenever her and pops needed a sitter/wanted to get sloshed, which happened a lot.
Grandma was very theatric in her fear of God and the end of the world. I believe she lost her firstborn to a tornado, way back in the day. I’m not too interested in reaching out to anyone to fact check that, so we’ll let my dusty memory exist on this page with an asterisk. That meant every storm was a tornado, that every big world event was a sign of the end. It was very exhausting.
I don’t think I was able to appreciate the beauty of South Dakotan rainstorm until I was older than most.
Grandpa’s presence was complimentary but silent.
Grandma drank a handful of times. She’d get drunk with my uncles and aunts. Those binges usually lasted a good four days.
I can’t remember Grandpa ever getting shit faced or acting up. I think the injury had a lot to do with that. Both of my grandpas were cut of a similar clothe. And both were a big part of my life. My dad made sure we visited his dad the summer before gramps passed away. I guess he had a feeling that things were winding down.
Both of my grandpas were the church types. Not nearly as devoted as Grandma though.
My mom’s pops – he was known to have had visions. I think it was partially due to the injury. Grandpa saw a mass exodus of people walking towards the west. Whatever else he may have seen, has been lost.
I haven’t seen him in a long, long time.
I started to dream at eighteen, and the bulk of these dreams would run until around twenty-five. They started slow. Dreams of floods, brief flashes of animals, seen the eye of God eventually.
Joseph Campbell said that if a culture lacks the resources to initiate someone into the next phase of their life, then their psyche or unconscious will attempt to compensate via the spontaneous production of mythological imagery.
It was my cursory knowledge of Jungian psychology, at that time, that made me be mindful of dreams. I wasn’t familiar with the ins-and-outs of this particular branch of psychoanalysis or their specific beliefs, but I knew from Campbell, that I should pay attention.
They said that the unconscious delights in being recognized. This is something that we hear from the lucid dreamers, too. They don’t mythologize it as much, but they say that if you want to lucid dream, you need to start a dream journal. You have to strengthen your ability to recall dreams.
The Jungians believed the same, but it was a bit more superstitious. There was a higher but silent and unseen observer walking alongside us in this life. And if we gave it the attention that it asks, then it’d allow you to see more than you were previously able to see.
Further than that, people and opportunities would show up, unseen helpers, wandering onto your path.
I don’t remember exactly when this dream happened, but it happened early on. Easily in that first year.
I think this is one of the more straightforward dreams that I have illustrated, and the commentary isn’t particularly insightful. But for who I was back then, it meant something.
The dream tells me to pray to the center of these two posts. I believe it was asking me to live in moderation. That was simply something that I wouldn’t be able to do. The years that followed were very much sloppy, drunk, and miserable. And because I couldn’t live in moderation, I was shown a demonic tree.
The imagery, yet again, is not particularly occult or hidden. It’s just the facts. And those facts are simple; a lot of my relatives on both sides of the family died young, died miserable, and died from not living in moderation. There are more sad stories in our family’s history than there is success.
The dream throws an at-the-time curveball at me, by showing gramps, who embodied characteristics that weren’t a part of my life. Gramps was a reader, a mechanic, he was disciplined, he was sober, he was a roofer before the stroke, he had visions, he was aligned with God, he was a fisherman.
Him carrying an eagle staff did and still seems strange, as he wasn’t a traditional type. I guess the importance of the staff still has some weight in our dumb ancient DNA.
It’s with this ceremonial or ritual item, and the qualities that he carried, the ones that I lacked, that he’s able to put a dent into this evil tree.
And the question is always, was what he did enough to change what this tree was – or was what he did futile.
I don’t know, probably never will. We do not live on the same timescales as trees.
Where the next generations go will not be seen by us.
There are wayward elements that have collected in my work over the last decade or so. None of them were planned out. They come and go based entirely on what feels right, and what I think the piece needs. For the longest time, having a crucifix in my work felt right. These days it’s the crucifix, four horns on my rotted humanoids, animals with exposed ribs, moths, and some form of the moon.
I think it’d be safe to say that Zdzislaw played a big part in my incorporating the crosses, but I wouldn’t put all of it on simple artist worship. My connection to Christianity has been a lifelong burden of sorts and I’d like to share that strange journey here, semi-officially.
I was raised by my shithead relatives, and they weren’t good for identifying positive traits. They weren’t great at leading by example. They weren’t particularly interested in supporting anyone from a genuine place. They talked poorly of one another. Lies of omission were common. These were toxic people and I wouldn’t be able to untangle myself from them for quite some time.
We were bad people and we had nothing to bind us together. Race was the easy one. Native America was the easy one. Wearing your hair in braids and becoming a Big Lakota was easy. Easier still, was to pick out people who carried themselves well, and label them as “acting White.”
One relative was singled out in particular. None of the qualities that he fostered were shameful or destructive. The person he became would make anyone proud to have known him. My relatives who gave him shit are likely still begging on the streets.
Grandma gave us the gift of the end of the world. She gave us religious paranoia and fear. She spoke of eternal damnation and a final Armageddon. I love and miss Grandma and see where she was coming from. She was a former alcoholic, one who replaced her social circle with members of the congregation. To paint the world in black and white was to put in place a simple path for us.
The world was frightening and it would all end soon.
Our grandparents were from a different world. Their generation got put into boarding schools, they were taught to be Christians. All but one, I believe either my mom’s dad, or my dad’s dad, one of my grandpas lived so far out in the sticks that they couldn’t throw him into one of their schools.
As such, traditional Lakota spiritual practices were simply left to rot. To this day, many of our traditions mean little to our generation. I welcome anyone who wants to keep their meanings alive, as most of us were not sent to this life to enshrine the past. If you’re White and you can learn what these things mean, then go for it. If you’re Native and you practice this stuff, go for it.
I did not choose this path.
Ceremonies were talked with fear and reverence. Yuwipi wasn’t something that most of us knew about, and the mere mention of it was enough to scare some of my uncles. Tobacco ties were seen as pagan and therefore of-the-devil. The Christian mark was stamped in their minds with prejudice, and as such, our connection to a living spiritual life was effectively cut off, as seems to be the standard for all Christians, save for the strange snake dancers.
I will always remember Grandma, off the wagon for the first time in a decade, sitting in a cigarette smoke filled dining room, crying and singing a traditional Lakota song. Not telling us the meaning, only reciting from memory. Pow Wow music has never had the same impact as that one verse.
My cousin became a preacher. Our cousin that we called “White” went off to become a preacher. Went off and joined the marines, and then went to seminary, and then opened his own church while also working with the elderly. He became a good man.
And who were we? Who did we become?
Grandma raised a preacher. She also raised a strange, strange artist who claimed to see spirits, who had visions and dreams, who saw the Lamb of God with his own eyes.
I worked with my grandma for a summer back in 2016. We cleaned motel rooms. I was on the final leg of my alcoholic years. I shared my dreams and visions with her, assuming she’d see the devil in there, but instead, she wanted to hear more.
She was interested in Christian faith healing. When I was growing up, my lungs didn’t work well. We weren’t aware of just how damaging cigarette smoke was. I had scabs and sores growing on my arms and legs. Perpetually inflamed eczema that hurt when the skin stretched. Cracked with ridges and pus constantly flowing.
My long sleeve shirts would dry and stick to my infected skin.
Grandma saw how bad this body was, saw me tied to oxygen masks, saw me being taken to the hospital.
We were backwoods people. We were poor people. We didn’t travel; we didn’t have the money to travel. Once a year, when those income tax checks came through, mom and pops would round us up and take us to the city, and the city was never too far away. Pierre, Rapid City, Sioux Falls. We were poor and vacation meant staying at a hotel that had a pool.
Very few of us have seen the ocean. Not many of us have flown or vacationed. We’re “ooohn-shii-kuh” – we’re pitiful.
(Ushika)
Grandma took us to a faith healer a town over and sent me up to receive a prayer and a clean bill of health.
If only it were that easy.
When that didn’t work, she took us out to Denver to see a very famous con man, the type that would invite people on stage, who would tap them on the head and they’d fall to the ground and stand back up, healed.
That didn’t work either.
They always asked, all of my relatives asked, they were all curious about Christianity and Christ. They wondered about basic mythological ideas and motifs and were never given an adequate answer.
The preachers said that the devil put corrupt bibles out in the world to cause strife. The true bible, the true story, the true teachings were always what those preachers were selling.
I prefer to have an ativan nearby if I’m gonna do some heavy drinking, these days. The anxiety is something that I was never warned about. If I drink, this old body’s gonna feel like it has pins and needles in its hands, there’s gonna be a heavy weight in my shoulders and chest, and I’m going to want to pray. I’m going to want to be prayed for. I’m going to want the comfort of a church or mosque.
Dad drank Everclear. Drank a pint of Everclear every day. One of my first memories of him was when they tied him to a machine at the ER in the city. Pops drank a lot. 9 months out of the year. Pops was difficult to get along with. He could be insecure, angry, stubborn, accusatory, embarrassing – and after his yearly ICU stay and likely coma, he’d sober up and return to being a mostly quiet fella who preoccupied himself with yard work and maintenance upkeep.
There was always a window somewhere in there, leading up to his eventual return to sobriety, where he’d pass out with the tv on some Christian channel, listening to preachers talk about the end of the world.
One of our relatives burned himself up after huffing gas. He disappeared for a long time after that. I wouldn’t see him for a few years. When he came back, he was different in a strange way. He talked quieter and was preoccupied with the end of the world. He was mapping current events onto the Book of Revelation. He said the Gulf oil spill was a sign of the end.
The Christians preached strange stories and never gave us a good-enough answer for a lot of it.
In the Seven Sermons to the Dead, Jung says he was awakened by the sounds of spirits. They went to Jung because they couldn’t find what they were looking for in Jerusalem.
At eighteen I found the monomyth and the work of Joseph Campbell, and that brought me to Jung and Terence Mckenna. I found psychoanalytic interpretations of Christian dogma and finally felt that we had some answers that made sense. The Book of Revelation, The Book of Job – the totality of the Old Testament, they were all cut apart by thinkers like Edward Edinger. Campbell brought myths from across the world under one umbrella.
We were not as distant as we thought.
One of these writers once said that the strength of the unconscious, its ability to create ritual and myth was so strong, so standard to various tribes in both North and South America, that the early Jesuit priests were convinced that the devil made it to the Americas first and taught the Natives a blasphemous version of Christianity to mock the Christians.
The Christians partook in the Eucharist, divorced from its original cannibalism, and were shocked to see indigenous cultures around the world living their myth literally.
The Jungians so succinctly mapped the psyche onto Christianity, that doomsday preachers no longer have any teeth. Conspiracy theorists can’t peddle these stories about literal giants, and we can’t so blindly believe, as many would like us to, that every miracle in the bible can be traced back to alien craft and beings.
If only we had active Jungians out in pulpits today to defang Christian Nationalism.
The Jungians and the alchemists have a way of looking at the world, one that makes sense. Jesus, as the son of God, was too pure to be identified with, by common people. So, they began to venerate Mary, as she was closer to humans. And in the Middle Ages, that was brought down a step farther. It was easier to identify with the Arthurian knights than the mother of God, or God himself.
The alchemists and the Jungians inverted the entire relationship by returning to the (blasphemed) early beliefs of Gnosticism. A divorced piece of God (the totality of God) became trapped in all matter. The process then, was to embark on the reunification of Sol and Luna within our own life. The Holy Trinity was incomplete because it was not balanced by both the feminine and the shadow. The early mentioning of a feminine presence in Proverbs, one who says that she was with God before the creation of earth, and our continued insistence on an Antichrist, points to a stubborn problem relating to what-it-means-to-be-fully-human in modern times.
Jesus, God, they don’t descend unto earth from on-high, only to run away afterwards. The alchemists and Jungians say that the Philosopher’s Stone is created in the dunghill. The Philosopher’s Stone is created through base matter. We become like lead in our psychological struggles, and we seek out the advice of modern medicine men, we become the initiate, asking for help from ritual elders (the therapists, if we’re lucky enough to find one), who encourage our examinations of our own psychological and mythological symbolic processes.
Von Franz said that “I am the friend of whoever is lonely” in relation to Hermes Trismegistus. The unconscious is the friend of whoever is lonely. That if we retreat from the world, we load up the psyche with power, and that power becomes a mirror, one that can show us a still-living spiritual process in our time. Not one that can only be viewed after death.
If ever there was a place capable of creating The Philosopher’s Stone, a place where the dunghill is smashed and pushed into wounds, a place where one can be allowed to be truly lonely, then it was this life.
I like to think that I’m agnostic or an atheist. I like to look down on tarot users and Christians alike. I think I’m being dishonest with myself. I think there’s an active discipline that I return to on occasion. These methods are not good for my mental health. I don’t think I ever really left the world of magical thinking.
In dreams, staring at the sky has been met with scorn from figures I can’t see. To look up when dreaming is to defy explicit orders from something ancient. The few times I have looked up, have been at the direct command of dream figures.
There was a curse placed on the wall, and I was shown it over the course of a week or so, and I had little to no way of defending against it. The methods for getting out of it were spoken of directly, when I had no one else to turn to. There’s a metaphysical shop downtown, by the university. It’s out of the way. They pride themselves on carrying esoteric items.
I asked if they had sage or sweet grass. They told me they specifically do not carry any of the Four Medicines to discourage “wrong use.” This was a problem, because I am from the Plains. We use sweet grass, sage, and ceder to pray. Even as modern people, who left superstition in the past, we still go to smudging if we have no other options, and at that point I felt absolutely hopeless.
I can say with complete honesty, that I unknowingly invited this into my life. It was a mistake on my part, and it had long lasting effects. I was unable to sleep in the dark, unable to sleep without Lakota prayer songs in my headphones, something visited me and refused to leave.
When I was young, I’d listen to recorded shaman singing from some Ayahuasca drinkers. It never really worked, is the problem. I mean, technologically, it wouldn’t work. If I was listening from a phone or an MP3 player, the stream would drop or the files would get corrupted. It seems as though there was medicine in there somewhere, some level of sanctity managed to stand up to ignorance of a spiritual tourist.
I often wonder why it is that we listen to human interpretations of biblical stories, instead of listening to the tales of those who have had Near Death Experiences. I listen to new Near-Death Experiences. I listen to old ones. I read them. The trail of something real and outside of this reality lies in their stories.
There’s a book about the Lakota called Lakota America. In it they talk about how our ancestors first approached government officials, whether that be French or American, I can’t remember. The main point is that they would go up to these officials and cry. They’d weep and ask for help. They did this ritualistically.
We are a people who hurt ourselves.
Those old wounds and that wiring still exists, at least in me, and in our sad relatives.
I get desperate, I get plenty desperate. I get scared, all the time. I get worried, and I don’t know how to solve my problems. The only path that I know is the creation of art. It’s devotion to the unconscious. I have reverence for dreams and visions. This outside world has never really been a place that gives comfort.
I look down on tarot readers and Christian prayers. But I have no qualms about using the I Ching as a means of divination. I have used this book for nearly 20 years, and it has been poignant damn near every time. It will reprimand me for asking the same question, while looking for a new answer. “It is not I who seeks the fool; the fool seeks me.” I have no problems with dream-incubation. If things are bad enough, I will turn to dreams for instructions or insights.
These are living paths to me. I unironically do not see the disconnect between what I do and believe, and what others do or believe.
In late 2024/early 2025, multiple streams met one another, and it was very hard to pull myself out of it. I can say, with hindsight, that something went wrong with me on a mental level. There was no guidance. There were no doctors. I had to weather it, and hope that things got better.
I have known about the Tibetan Book of the Dead for a number of years. Carl Jung and Timothy Leary spoke about it. Jung saw it as a metaphor for the individuation process and Leary saw it as a guide for the psychedelic experience. I saw it as a way of getting payback towards God and the hand He dealt.
You’re supposed to read it and familiarize yourself with it while you’re still alive, while you’re in the process of dying – someone is supposed to read it to you, and when you do die, someone is supposed to either read it to your body or to where you usually sleep.
I listened to it while trying to sleep.
I think that was a mistake. My dreams weren’t given a ritualistic or inward quality. Instead, I found a roadblock. I would see a decapitated head, rotten, skin dried and pulled back tight, a portion of the neck still attached, and this head would be next to me. It’d be next to where I sat and slept. It would vibrate and thrash around at speeds so fast that the damn thing became a blur.
Over and over again. Never seeing the Bardo Thodol. Never practicing for my dying experience. Instead, I saw a thrashing head.
Something got through.
I’m supposed to be agnostic. I’m supposed to be an atheist. These are just dreams. There are no ghosts. There are no spirits.
And here we were.
I would paint with my back against the room, with my desk facing the wall.
I could feel the presence of many-beings in the room. I don’t know about you, but I can hear when someone walks around a room, there’s weight blocking ambient noise. I know when there are people around me, and for a stretch there, I felt something. Somethings. They didn’t present themselves as human. They instead felt like disembodied orbs, invisible to the eye, but audible. They looked over my should while I tried to paint.
It got so overwhelming that, often times, I’d simply stop making art.
I lost out on cash because I wasn’t able to make new art for at least three weeks.
Something got through and it was everywhere.
I couldn’t sleep in the dark after that. I couldn’t sleep without sound blaring in my ears around the clock. I started hearing metallic voices exploding between my ears just before falling to sleep.
We use sage to cast out bad spirits; we burn sweet grass to invite in good spirits. We burn ceder for protection. I had to get what I could, which was honestly the silliest part of this dark period in my life. Spiritual protection was delivered to my doorstep after putting in my card info.
I started asking the dreams for help, because this was something that the Christians probably weren’t equipped to deal with.
The dreams were explicit in their diagnosis and advice.
First, I was shown what happened. There was a curse placed on the house, or maybe on, specifically, me. The curse was drawn on the wall. In the corner of the room, where the two walls meet, there was half of an owl drawn on both walls, meeting in the center.
Next, I was shown how to see what found its way into my life.
There’s a curtain on the window. The dream said that I should smudge with sage and push the smoke outwards to the window curtain. The spirit that was fucking with me would temporarily show itself, coming towards me, made visible by the curtain.
I found myself on a boat, floating in a massive body of water. I saw a Thunderbird, with my own eyes but it wasn’t like what I’ve read about, at all. It was a massive, slow-moving cloud. A section of the cloud seemed to be pulling the rest of the cloud behind it. That forward section took the shape of its head, and the entire cloud became its massive wings, while a storm followed closely.
A star fell to the earth.
I walked up to it and found a monk. He exuded peace and love. He was only peace, and only love.
No amount of prayer or sage burning could stop what was happening in that room or that house.
Symptoms didn’t lessen.
It took me leaving for it to stop.
Elders and medicine men exist for a reason, and I wasn’t either.
I wonder, a lot of the time, if I’ll ever get tired of licking my own wounds. The old world’s been gone a long time, and I still circle around it like everything just happened. Thinking this way ends up freezing the calendar. A decade’s passed at blinding speeds and my body’s all beaten down and broken. The concrete flowers done grew up, wilted, and got replaced with people from my generation! The bums from my youth have been gone a long while now, and familiar faces from my time have taken their place, have grown up to become tweakers, and a lot of them are just flat out dead.
They saw my friend back in our hometown, he was trying to get a ride to the city. Apparently, his eyes were all swollen and black. I’m not sure who did it but given how much he drinks, it wasn’t really a surprise. That’s not to say I’ve seen him be particularly shitty towards anyone, but those are the risks that come with the lifestyle.
I’d describe our decades long friendship as being based around convenience. We were both losers and losers need friends too.
I was always self-paced with new ideas. I tried to read or listen to anything new or novel. When I wasn’t a complete degen, I was following my own path towards what I thought were important ideas. My buddy wasn’t really like that.
We didn’t approach alcoholism the same way. I went inward; I quietly tried to drink more than I did before. I tried to ride that line between buzzed and fucked up. I tried to push my tolerance while keeping everything on track, as much as possible.
I never wanted to come across as sloppy. Problem with being a fuck up, is that when you do slip up, no one will remember you redlining it for years before. They’ll only remember you being a sloppy mess, so the overall project really didn’t help in the long run.
My friend was what we call a “soak.” He hung out all the time, but he never contributed shit to anything or anyone. Never as a courtesy, never “just cause”. It was the strangest thing, dude soaked up booze and smoke from everyone.
I guess we liked him enough when he wasn’t sloshed.
What I’m getting as this: we talk in circles when we’re drunk and that tendency doesn’t go away simply because you sober up. You learn to live with it as best as you can, and that’s about all you can do without venturing into mindfulness or meditation. I would never claim to have a real ailment that fucks with people, but goddamn is my brain a bit fucked. It’s like a minefield of hangnails.
Old memories live on. Old events live on. Regrets about the past live on. Never healing, never peeling completely off. Always present. And each time I stumble over a hangnail, I want to scream, I want to yell, I want to fire off all of my muscles to pull away from my own brain.
My buddy would talk in circles. Always about what we drank the last time we hung out, what he drank the last time he was drunk, we were in our mid-to-late 20’s, and he was still bringing up shit that happened ten years before. It was a challenge to hang out with him because he wasn’t really interested in anything. He lost a few people in his life and if he wasn’t talking about what he drank, he’d talk about them and other sad stuff.
I knew there was a person in there, I knew that he was interested in life at one point, and I had to pry it out of him. Had to fish for threads so he could talk about stuff that he used to care about. And that’s what we all are to a certain degree. And by “we” I mean my own specific strata of aging degen loser.
I was twenty-four when I realized that I could simply remove myself from miserable people. My other buddy sold a brick of government cheese for a liter of vodka and he wanted to share it with me, which, to be fair, was pretty sick. What wasn’t sick was the woe-is-me. It was a repeated cycle of stories, and he circled around them for at least an hour and a half. It got to the point where I could guess where each thread would lead to.
I appreciate the free buzz but if it means I have to listen to a drunk talk in circles and try to make me feel bad for their bad decisions?
Yeah, fuck that.
And that’s how I approached the situation. He started on another retelling of the same stories, and I stood up. Finished my next shot. Turned around and just walked away.
You’re allowed to do that, turns out.
He was a friend. Someone who had been in my life for a long time. But the lives we were living, the mental decline that we were inflicting on ourselves with hundred proof, that shit was making us slow.
I say all of that, to say this: I didn’t change much internally. I’m still licking my wounds. I’m still thinking about the past. I still relive all of it. I still get preoccupied by it. I don’t really know any other way to live. And the more I hold on to the past, the more time I lose out on. It’s a real problem, and a problem I wish could heal, or at least, lessen.
My parents used to terrify us with their old stories, and I don’t think it was intentional. I don’t think they were trying to one up each loss with more hurt. I don’t think they really knew what kind of effect it’d have on us. It was just who they were and these were the lives they lived.
I don’t have a family to trauma-dump on, so I do it through my art and my writing. Let it go somewhere where it can die permanently, like the final leaves falling off of a fucked epigenetic tree.
I don’t want to mention anyone by name, and there are stories I don’t think I should share, because they belong to someone else. They belong to different families and different friend groups. I’m not in the business of writing fiction or fictionalizing things that happened.
All of that to say, that I still think about the past. I still think about people who died. I still think about old friends. But I’m old now and I don’t really have as much of a connection to the past or those past feelings like I used to. It’s lot like getting a toenail removed. It hurts, but the skin hardens eventually. And sometimes a direct hit can still feel strange, but it ain’t like it used to be.
Death Premonition – my buddy’s been dead a long time now. Him leaving hit hard because we were similar. He was the type of person to get curious about stuff, and he’d search for some kind of answer, might not always be the right answer, but he was open to learning and thinking. Being open to new ideas, to new experiences, that’s a lot rarer than you’d think. Especially in a no-name, isolated ass town.
He died at the beginning of 2014. I would then proceed to drink more than I ever did before. That would go on for two years. And then I would eventually sober up. Sobering up meant that all of the people I used to associate with were left in the past. And the good people I knew before life got bad were long gone.
Life got quiet. Life would be quiet until 2021.
My family opens gifts at midnight on Christmas. They gave me two jugs of cheap wine. A bottle of cheap wine has as much of a kick as a single forty ounce of malt liquor. I got a hold of my buddy, who was usually up pretty late, and asked if he wanted to catch a quick buzz. He said he was down and that we should meet in the woods, which was a little over halfway between my community and town. “The woods” was a large creek area, with a decent fishing spot, that used to have a main road going through it about eighty years prior.
The state eventually made a proper highway and a lot of those old roads and bridges started to crumble into nothing. All that was left was a degraded dirt road, one that would get overgrown and washed out, more and more through the years.
The old bums called that creek area Ho-Chi-Man Trail, as a good number of them were vets.
Pops said he once found police negatives down there with pictures of a frozen dude, half submerged in the water.
I don’t know how true that is, but I do know that a pair of brothers died near that lake, one on one side of the road, the other on the other side, that was a long, long time before I was born.
Our bored imaginations used to search around for something interesting. We’d walk up that road to the church in the summer, about eight of us. Our grandparents were lifelong church goers, and the church would feed the community. Someone burned it down eventually.
Our older cousins would tell us about “tiny men made of sticks” that were hiding down there in the woods.
Time would paint that area as harmless. As I got older, I’d walk the actual creek line with pellet guns and .22s. When I got even older, I’d wander through in the middle of the night, with pupils the size of saucers, mind overrun by a mushroom, with stars hanging low overhead.
One day a relative would get beat to near-death just passed the creek.
On Christmas morning, 2013, at approximately 1am, the sky was clear. The moon was in its last quarter but still bright enough to light up the woods when reflected off the snow. My buddy came down from above, and we went for a walk. We followed the gravel road, passed the creek, up the hill, and down again, all the way to a hidden pond, about a mile away from town. We caught a buzz and caught up.
He was excited about a party happening on New Years Eve. I told him I could get someone to work for me, and that we could get a few people down near our little campsite/bonfire area. He wasn’t interested in that because the party was supposed to be a big one.
I don’t think I could’ve gotten anyone to work for me anyway.
It’s been so long that I can’t even fake a conversation between us for anyone reading this.
We drank two bottles of wine and started walking towards town. I went with him back to his street, said goodbye and made plans to drink soon.
I used to wash dishes at an old folks home. It was on the edge of town. It was a solid walk, you could take the highway or cut through the woods. I’d walk to and from even if the weather was shit, and the weather was shit. It was cold as fuck. But, when you get moving, it’s like an inner furnace starts goin’ and the cold doesn’t really fuck with you so much. Not as much as the frozen patches on the roads and sidewalks.
A section of the old-old road started to erode by then. In the real world, that thing was up to my chest. I got daily updates on a neighbor’s SUV. It got stuck in that eroded ditch earlier in the week. And each morning it got more and more fucked up. By the end, every piece of glass, every light, every window, all smashed and broken.
Between Christmas Day and New Years Eve – there came a dream. A vivid fucking dream.
In the dream, I’m walking that stretch of road and fall into that washed out section. It’s a lot fucking deeper than I remember. It becomes a cave system. There’s something calling out to me, telling me to get closer, so I follow.
At the back of the cave is a snake made of neon colored glass. It shakes its rattle before chasing after me.
I am not athletic.
I am not able to escape in time.
I try to climb up and out but I’m too slow.
It bites me.
I open my eyes and I’m in this massive space, inside of a dusty warehouse, but it felt like the inside of a teepee.
There are these massive, massive robed or cloaked figures, all standing silently.
I find myself falling to my knees in front of one and I start to cry and beg and cry.
“Are they going to kill me? Are they going to kill me? Are they going to…”
This cloaked figure presents a dead infant in front of me. I instinctively start smashing it with my foot. I’m scared as shit and WOOOOF.
I’m awake.
Fuckin’ shook.
Freaking out as the dream residue slides back like cooking oil in a bottle.
I had to work on New Years Eve and Day. I was kind of pissed, but only on a “I wish I could be getting sloshed” level.
New Years Eve – pops got me a bottle of wine, nothing strong, but it was alcohol.
Instead of getting shit faced off of some cheap booze, I painted. I painted and listened to a lecture by Manly P Hall. You can still listen to it as it’s freely available – Secret Powers and Why We Should Not Use Them.
He says something like, “prayer works, and because prayer works, we should pray for good things if we have to pray.”
I didn’t think much of it. I was never a theosophist, or a particularly avid Hall listener, but his lectures were interesting and strange enough as background noise.
I remember saying “I hope you end up in jail or a ditch.”
Not aimed at anyone in particular.
I was annoyed about not being able to drink, so I put some of that negativity out in the world.
Do I think I caused any of this nonsense with my attitude alone? Fuck no. Not one bit. But it is interesting, the way that things worked out.
Out of respect for my friend and his family I will end things here.
My buddy went missing that night. His family would go looking for him the next day, and the day after. I thought he got got for a night in the drunk tank, worst case scenario.
My ma would tell me that they found him about three days later. The weather cleared up and a good number of people were able to walk in a massive line out in a field. The big party he talked about was out in the country a good way. I’m not sure what he was thinking. We used to hunt out there; it’s a decent drive, and a walk that I never heard of anyone taking before.
I guess he figured someone would be driving and he could hitch a ride in.
Sometime later, after a lot of drinking and crying, and moving on, I had another dream. A dream that I think deserves a retelling here.
In the dream, I’m hovering over where he went missing. I’m a good way back and up, but I can see whereabouts they found him. And the dream says, quite explicitly, that I should go back out there with some sage. I should go out there, light the sage, and make sure there’s a trail of smoke from where they found him, all the way back to his grave.
I never did do that.
And I don’t think he’s trapped out there.
I’m too much of an atheist to think that way. I listened to too many near-death experiences to think that someone’s soul could get lost in the wilderness. I’m sure we’re all going somewhere strange, outside of space and time, or at the very least, we’ll return to nothingness again, and before you know it, we’ll cry and breathe again, in another life.
I do think, though, that these types of dreams are what informed the actions of old school medicine men and mystics, and potentially were why certain traditions or rituals started.
This short comic is something that I’ll post from time to time if I want to get some traffic going to my profile. It’s gotten nearly a million views at one point, a few hundred thousand another time. The thing about my comics is that they’re rarely altered from a storytelling standpoint. Some, I mean, a small fraction, are biographical or willed fiction. Most are translated as best as I can, with my skill level as an illustrator, from dreams. And this one is no different.
In 2024, I moved to Texas with a fella I met on the internet nearly a decade prior. We had good drunk conversations throughout the years. October of 2022, he says I should move in because he needed a roommate. In summer of 2023, he offers again, as we were talking about how ghetto my spot-at-the-time was. And goddamn was it ghetto.
My “hometown”, Rapid City, was and currently is, in an active gentrification process. New apartment builds continue to get approved and constructed, but none of them seem to pay attention to a certain income bracket. Instead, they set their sights on the Airforce base, they set their sights on the medical professionals working at Monument health, or the graduates from our tech schools.
Prices go up, two-bedroom apartments go for 2k plus – to live in a town that’s not worth 2k rent. The pool of affordable or low-income housing stays stagnant or shrinks, as the poor-population slowly expands. It’s not a great setup, and the city shows its policies with its homeless population, a sizeable chunk of baked dark brown Natives, spread out in the parks, in full view of tourist eyes.
It’s hard getting started in a world that rewards being extremely poor or properly educated. At least that’s the way it feels to me. If I were broke enough, I’d get help from social programs, and if I made enough, I would be good on my own. Instead, I’m stuck in this middle world where just being seen at an urgent care, with no medical treatment, will put me in the red for weeks.
So, my buddy asks me to move in with him. He says he got into a fight. Got his ribs broken by one of his roommate’s ex-boyfriends. Apparently, the guy broke into the house and started throwing fists. His roommates weren’t great people and refused to pay rent for the last three months.
A part of what I was invited to do, was to be a human pitbull.
He was offering a place without a credit check. Flat rent. He had an available garage, converted some ten years before. He played bass in a few bands back in the day and wanted a spot to rehearse, so that was what the garage became. Sound dampened, carpeted, with my own entrance.
From 29 to 32, I lived a transient life, and for the first time in forever, I knew where I’d be staying, I knew I’d have a spot next month, and the next, and the next.
Down in Texas, at least for the first month, I was able to rest, and resting meant a lot of boozing.
I don’t drink like I used to because my hangovers got bad. The old days where I could ride out the shivers, shits, and dehydration are gone. Hangovers aren’t a body problem anymore; it’s a psychological problem. It’s a spiritual problem.
When that hangxiety comes, something in me asks to go to church. It asks to go to mosque. It asks to be comforted by a preacher. It asks to pray and be prayed for. It’s terrified and the dreams reflect it.
I remember when this dream came, when these images came, it was after my first month in Texas. Early March. I sat outside, in the backyard, wearing a hoodie in the Texas sun. I wanted to sweat, wanted to purge, because I poisoned my body with liquor for at least three weeks and I couldn’t do it anymore.
“I see a cross, massive cross, flying over this blood red dusty demolished city. It looks like a cross, but it feels like a bird of prey. I’m in a dark room. I see these fucked up ghosts or demons. They tell me to be quiet, because if it hears me talk or think, it’ll find and kill me. Just processing what they said to me was enough to alert the cross. It let out a beam that leveled the buildings.”
I think there’s a such thing as a good hangover. And a good hangover is not no-hangover. A good hangover is a challenging hangover. A good hangover will have you questioning your life and your path forward. A good hangover will remind you that we’re also, to some degree, spiritual beings.
A good hangover will make you pray.
(Instead of going to church, I went to an AA meeting.)
Behold A Red Horse 