The 4th River - A Multi-Reality Medium

Today is January 4^th 007—the right time in space to open the gates of ‘The 4^th River’ and let it finally take its course. It is my destiny after all. I have been alchemizing this story for quite some time, churning it in my psyche, and though I’ve chastised myself on procrastination, I can see now that I wasn’t procrastinating, but alchemizing. Brewing and stewing my whole life long, sometimes a wee vaporous puff escapes from the corner of my eye, and then I know it’s time to start writing again. Of course, I could be delusional, but it has been my good fortune to have been born with a supernatural fear of the medical model and to never have been diagnosed. The Dark Mother says it was a gift from her. I also had a talent for lying and being a trickster for the first part of my life, but have devoted the second part to being a truth seeker. Life is after all, quite short, and it is the truth that sets us free.

If what I am now writing is prophetic, than this is the year that cannabis/hemp will be set free, and I will go to Africa and start an underground organization called ‘13 Orphans’ to begin a hemp revolution from Tanzania all the way up to Afghanistan. My name is Lucy and the Almighty Dark Mother has pushed me around since I was young, probably in the womb, and now she says it’s time to write this down and make it happen. It is all based on dreams, fantasies, sexual desires, social justice, and even a martyr complex because of my damned Catholic upbringing, which has always been a curse and a gift, but mostly has felt like a sexual curse, especially lately. My undiagnosed realities include the Dark Mother sometimes being mean to me with her whispering voice, ‘you will always look for love, even crave it, but you might never find it, ya, ya’. One of my addictions she gave me from this voice is being addicted to feeling insecure and although I am still an excellent hider—though she’s breaking down these barriers too in order for the world and me to apparently feel better one day, I am so often chasing women in a hundred different interior ways, and of course, I fall for the ones who don’t want me. I cannot think of a word for my sensitivity.

So, I might be torn asunder by lions on a range or bitten by a poisonous snake while I am in Africa because I have had dreams such as these, but it will be for a good cause. Africa—I have fantasized going there since before the age of 10 and I cringe admitting this, but it all started with stories from missionaries at church. I escaped my outsider suburban life by dreaming of toiling her land and planting seeds, feeling her with my bare feet. As I grew into an aware Feminist, I shunted this dream to the recesses of my mind, embarrassed that I once thought like a Colonialist Christ, like so many white people, that I would go there and give them what they needed. Many years have passed and my life has been rich in goodwill, grief, sorrow and joy and I have been saved by my imagination on many occasions. But the Dark Mother recently made it very clear to me that it was time to get over my white ass and go. Africa is after all the Mother of all of us and she is owed. I am relinquishing my part of the monumental debt to her into the 4^th River so that I may rest finally on her milky shores.

If I have lived for any pedestrian reason at all, it is to participate in a good cause. The Almighty Mother is dark and mean but she has to be—look at the mess we’re in? The polar bears are starving to death, Katrina, Tsunami, possibly caused from the oil we’re sucking out of the ocean floor, even though this is never mentioned as a possible cause. War, sexual trauma, a daily television staple that is hard to resist because of its forensic and technological creativity, but is always about women being raped and murdered because we certainly have been given the message early on that this easily can and does happen to us, day in day out.

Yes, the Dark Mother is mighty MAD MAD MAD and she is summoning many of us to crack the whip or we’ll all be whipped for good. I may be a humanitarian, but I am not doing it for any of you, you ugly masses; you make me angry with your greed and violent impulses. No, I am doing it for her love and her love only. If she has recruited me for higher reasons, they would include depression, substance use, a weakness for wanting sex and a desire for danger. It’s what makes me special.

I am no saint, that is for sure, but she did make herself known to me in my childhood reveries climbing the Scarborough Bluffs. It was by the water that I first felt her presence, and it did feel holy. She reminds me of this sometimes and makes me see her in many of the women I desire, which has been more torment than pleasure, but being masochistically bent, I, of course, blend the two feelings together, and do enjoy. But now it is pay back time and I could never say no to her because she has hinted, taunted, teased, that she will be my ultimate prize, so I am going soon, sweet Motherfucker that I strive to be.

Currently, I am doing a short term project at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). It’s such a good fit for me as the other two in my pod are Scorpios and we have transformed our space into a bit of a pervert pod, forming a bond between us—it’s the kind of ‘pervert’ that is de-toxifying and humorous and NOT toxifying—there is a huge difference and sexual healing is big on the Mother’s agenda—I’m just a sexual healing slut trying to soldier on for HER. They have massages here, one day maybe they will offer what I call Catholic massages, a little flogging, a little whipping—it’s far more meaningful when someone else does it for you!

When they gave me the keys to the office, my eyes alit with glee, something inside stirred, and I thought, finally, the keys to the asylum! Ha, ha, finally, they have no idea what they have done, but at least they won’t need to be forgiven this time, right Mother?

They say, ‘former patients’ I say former unpaid labourers, i.e. slaves.

I do have crazy thoughts at times, and, at least I am in the right place to have them, because I sense that some of the people working here, like me, were former prisoners in a previous life. They say ‘patients’ I say ‘prisoners’. How can I storm this Bastille while I am there? My heart is brimming with love and revolution. It will unfold as it is meant to, is what I must believe. It is.

I can see that one of the benefits of being at CAMH is access to the abundant pamphlets on the tendencies I have been beleaguered with, such as depression, suicidal thoughts, anxiety. My thoughts re: suicide, if you have not thought about it 40 times by the age of 40, you’re probably not someone I would ever get close to, as you would lack a certain depth of feeling, a certain finessed compassion, understanding. I could be wrong, I like being wrong about such things, because there are always exceptions.

The people I love have been laid with grief.

My close friend ended his life and the devastation left in this wake is something we must strive to prevent. I don’t believe he wanted to as much as he was temporarily seized/paralyzed by sadness, and couldn’t see a way out, and had easy access to pills because of his profession. The night I learned of his death I dreamt about him sitting in a chair looking sickly and he gazed up to my sorrow and said, ‘have you come here to lecture me?’ My response in the dream was, ‘who could lecture on this?’

I see good evidence in this world that we are learning to liberate ourselves allowing children to grow without freezing their feelings out, but we have all inherited some pretty awful legacies.

My friend’s parents are good people. They came to Ottawa with a group of us to lobby gay-bashing in law as a hate crime. My friend and his lover had been gay-bashed. I believe this contributed to his suicide since he killed himself within a few weeks of Matthew Shepard’s murder and his accusers (soccer stars) never went to prison. I was hardly an amateur attending the funerals of young gay men in the 90’s, but his was the hardest to bear.

What is still upsetting to me is that because of his religion, his casket was not allowed in the chapel, and his burial had to be on the periphery of the cemetery, stigmatizing and punishing him, one more indignity, even in death. In death I believed he transcended this stigma, but we should all reach higher for harm reduction in life—nothing should be sacred from this principle.

If I had been born a decade earlier in the same repressive milieu, I likely would have become a nun. I know this because my first ‘unnatural’ obsessions were with nuns. I like putting quotation marks to emphasize words, including words I want to point out as being stupid, like ‘unnatural’ or ‘illegitimate’. I know we’re currently living in a world that is lamenting the loss of the empire’s superiority complex in language, but if it’s going down, could we not toss out some of the Fatherfucker words and make up new ones like Fatherfucker and transform other ones like Motherfucker, as I am hoping this question might do.

Because I hang around gay men as much as I do, my ability to cruise discreetly has been diminished and not discreetly. There must be a course I can take, a program I can enroll in? Fortunately, the good women at CAMH have been mildly amused by my flirting. The woman who hired me told someone in front of me that I was brilliant and I fell for her ruse as she knew with my narcissistic bent, that I would—still, she fantastically gave this opportunity to me so I know she must be part of the revolutionary plan.

The real reason she hired me was because I could immediately avail myself and because when trying to get things done with an unreasonable deadline, I transform into a pathetic waif, with as much charm as one can muster in middle age, but luckily, it is like good energy, and if you use it, you never lose it, and it comes in handy with flirting ferociously to move the myriad of tasks along.

Emotional tugs make me want skin to skin contact like a newborn. I’ve been touched—no not touched, smacked, slapped, hacked by the need for redemption of the Romantics; such hubristic folly turns me into a revolutionary over and over where I cannot and do not want to escape, as much as I want to understand. This crawl forward is never easy. Its success depends on me never knowing truly if what has happened to me is a sign from Pierre. Sometimes the signs are so obvious I feel him saying to me, ‘how many times do I have to prove it over and over for you to believe?’

I must throw it all with love into The 4^th River where turbulent, centrifugal forces swish and swirl the white water alchemy of innocence, of awareness, and in the centre of post coital tenderness, the accumulation of all desire, all unmet infant and childhood needs released at last. When your ego plummets your confidence rises from this watershed moment in the rushing sounds of joy, purity; at last not inspired or motivated by patriarchy and poisonous perversion—this orgasm reaches the summit of its true destiny. Or, is this death? The Scorpio delights with a sex and death appetite.

No domestic ease for this Scarborough soul, there is some kind of magic in those Bluffs and I submitted to the journey, knew it would be burdensome, lonely, but wounded I could see .

To ease the pain I am a flaneur and walk and observe everything—sometimes it is everything inside and other times it is outside. The two can become one and more. Sometimes I can even truly fall in love with my own city Toronto. Walking up Jones Ave. and peering down Gerrard St., I am suddenly awed on a climate change January eve. The sky shrieks pink with fluffy haloed lavender frays as a backdrop to street car lines that always remind me of our city being stitched together loosely, somewhat recklessly, but still, it holds itself together well, a metaphor that aptly suits me. Dark stitching and a sissy sailor’s sky provoke a lost context and the want for more nuanced feelings envelopes me.

I love my city, which is why I want her to be better at diversity, to make an everlasting, deep commitment to diversity, and to reward those who continue to challenge diversity’s meaning at its most heartfelt level.

The people who will lead the way will have known, met, fought, acquiesced deeply with grief and will still lay with love. Revolutionary love is the Mother of all of us. Rise up Orphan Spirits.