The CUT

December 2019:

It was one score years ago…

(Posted to Facebook 9/12/2019 at 12 noon AEDT, 11 minutes before the NZ White Island Volcanic Eruption (01:11 UTC), at the conclusion of the “Flame Zone Dream Build” Winter/Spring 2019 mission.)

Is she out there? Dead or alive? Don’t worry. I only want her head on a spike. Figuratively, you understand. Although…how is the weather in Tripoli this time of year? I wonder, probably quite pleasantly cool. Those Arabian latitudes. They say shepherds certainly might have been tending their flocks at night on the solstice two millennia ago.

My head’s still on a spike, for her doing. It’ll always be hers to claim. I pray to the goddess of my flesh’s burning desire that I’ll always be able to keep it hard to take. Certainly the spirit will always be willing. Like her Muslim Arab father Ali used to say about her spiritually repressed, faithless, pale skinned, red headed mother from a Catholic family named Scully (the truth is out there in these x-files), and it must be said in an Arab accent, “If there’s one thing I’ll say about you…you’re a good cook.” And she was.

If there’re two things I’ll say about you Yasmine…you sure had a great arse and a perfect pair of perky titties. Oh yes, how can I ever forget? That night we walked home from the city via the botanical gardens, in the moonlight, and you rode me, reverse cowgirl, as I sat on the bench in the herb garden, by the pond where the water flows from Leo’s mouth. Perfection. We were the dream team. You were my queen.

I would tell her so. In those intimate moments of intense unashamed passion (mine, not hers). “I love you so much. You complete me. You are my queen. Without you I’m nothing. I’d die without you.”

As she was shafting me she used it for an accusation of emotional entrapment. She knew better. The hand she was holding was too big to completely conceal. “Oh come on!” I’d cry. Four years of a relationship built on a solid, pragmatic, supposedly honest transparent friendship of mutual understanding. My passionate lyrically waxing creativity tempered with her cooler analytical style, but we both had a full range. We knew the score. But what game were we playing? I can’t see through walls to see the cards she was hiding under the table. Deception. Manipulation.

“I’m sorry,” I said through tears, “if I was just being totally open and honest with you.”

“Yeah well,” she replied with a tone of staggeringly vicious hard brutality, “maybe you shouldn’t have been so honest.”

Self-doubt. Self-accusation. Self-blame. Shouldering responsibility. Burdens for men. Especially those highly aware of how they create their own realities. But we are all characters of a story that is a production of the universal reality in which we exist. Our emotional weaknesses, so easily weaponised against us like a blow torch. You suck it up and move on. What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger. Why talk about it? You were the sick one. He was off his head, psychotic, haven’t you heard?

It nearly killed me. In the year 2000. Standing on the edge of the carpark building above Opera House Lane. Would that do it? Probably. How old was I? Still 27? Yeah, cool, whatever. Lucky me. I was in the club anyway. I died in the psych ward of that hospital. The same shithole where I was born. Not even my hometown.

I was in hell. Absolute bottom. What did it matter? There was only one way out. Dying would only let that pattern of the flow of energy pump out into the soul of the universe for some other poor schmuck to suck. Would it be me again? Probably.

I clawed my way back. And then some. 2001 saw me back in that herb garden, on the edge of the pond, in front of the water flowing from Leo’s mouth, in full lotus, doing sitting push-ups combined with leg lifts. I’ll fucking well show you what I am.

I talked about it. A bit. Later in 2001 I hitched to Dunedin for the first visit riding a heavy wave of hunches and synchronicities. Scored a ride from Christchurch with a young surfer dude, Matt Yamashita, from Molokai, Hawaii. Told him what I was up to. Exploring my ability to create substantial synchronicity for a story in the context of who and when I am in Aotearoa, while taking time to recover from the trauma of months of hardship and losing my life from having been put through the mental health system with heavy medication after a difficult break-up.

He was on a gap year after graduating from film school in LA. A wealthy NZ family who had managed the main ranch on Molokai had shouted him a free trip to NZ as a graduation gift. Later we called in to see them near Oamaru or somewhere. Beforehand Matt had decided to carry on down to Dunners that day to visit their kids who were at uni and so we could talk more. He was for real.

He said he knew how traumatic break-ups could be. His parents were psychologists or psychiatrists who had concerns about the over-prescription of medication. We discussed relationships.

“Above all, the most important thing,” he said, “is to just always be totally honest.”

“My partner told me I shouldn’t be so honest.” I replied.

He frowned. “You must have been in the wrong relationship.”

“Yeah.” I didn’t go into it. We had better things to talk about.

Down at Tomahawk Beach I told Tim about what went down. I wasn’t psychotic, just very, very high. I remembered everything. Completely uninhibited. Free to fully explore what I represented on the millennium. The phone calls to the El Orfi’s to tell them I could see the role they were playing forcing me to confront my embodiment of Christ and Anti-Christ and I held no animosity towards them for the emotional manipulation they had wrought which had led me to call them up very late one night to cheekily inform them that they were acting like witches and it would make men want to burn their house down. That little shit Omar. And what did Ali used to call Yasmine? Ghoula?

Tim became seriously concerned. I could see that flicker of anger that used to burn in him a few years earlier when he was younger and on the hunt.

“I saw Yasmine in Wellington when you were locked up,” he said, “I asked what was going on and her exact words were, “It’s alright, Darryl just thinks he’s Jesus, that’s all.”” He imitated her confidently clever voice perfectly.

“Was that it?”

“Yeah, I didn’t know what to think or say.”

Was she high or drunk? She seemed pretty in control to him.

“Bro,” I replied, “I might have been going off, high as a kite, but I went into it in detail like I said, and Yasmine and Katherine are both very intelligent, confident women. And I most certainly never said I thought I was Jesus.”

I guess that’s what she told all our friends. I heard some other things elsewhere.

I explained my realization of the millennium and the full force of accepting being in a position to represent as a second-coming figure, which was something I had consciously been working around since I became fully aware of it when I was about 21.

It was blowing my mind on one of those millennium mornings, still so high from the Christmas Eve acid trip, just like I’d been planning and training for many weeks. I walked down to the local café in perfect sunny calm weather. The smell of the blooming cottage gardens mingling with the scent of the ocean was intoxicating. Something appeared in the middle of the footpath in front of me. What’s this? It was a small booklet lying face down. I picked it up. It was Christian junk mail. The title was “The Second Coming”. I kept it. It was real. Yeah baby, it was on.

I showed it to my mother when I was released from hospital, still under section, and we were having to pack up my stuff for storage because I was being forced to move to Nelson to live with them. I tried to tell the story, but speech was difficult under the medication. But I got the result I was expecting. Her pitiful ignorant scared expression.

“What happened to my cards?” I had asked them, as I stood trembling, looking at the bare polished timber floorboards of the living room.

“We packed it up,” she said. “It looked like some kind of shrine.” There was terror in her voice. It was so pathetic. I couldn’t feel pity, or disgust, or annoyance, or frustration. I couldn’t feel anything. Except death. Black emptiness.

A shrine was exactly what it was. A shrine for the spirit of the Goddess. It was a meditation rug surrounded by Klimt postcards. His golden women and his flora impressions. I’d sat there grounding myself, feeling an immense energy flowing through me, my heart expanding until it became one with the world. I wept with joy before going to my bed to sleep peacefully.

Next morning the mental health crisis people showed up. Here we go. Bring it on. I went blah blah blah blah blah. They went “We think you’re very sick and need to come with us.” I went “Good for you. I’ve had coffee and no breakfast, the gardener’s turning up shortly, and I really need to go for a run to burn off some charge, it was nice meeting you, there’s the door.” Exit the mental health crisis people. He was a dick who wasn’t nearly as smart as he thought he was, but she was hot, like fuck yeah. Mind you, I was tanned, extremely fit, and the hottest guy on the planet, so maybe it was just me.

Then the gardener shows up. The owner of the cottage had arranged it. The gardener’s name was Xena, like the warrior princess. She was a boss, with a big crew of young people under her strict control. They ripped into it with steel blades flying.

I stretched out for my run. I was planning a big one. It was overdue. Two full end to end circuits of Queen Elizabeth Park. I told Xena I was going out and made it nearly as far as the driveway before I got stopped by the police.

I can’t remember how much I told Tim about all that. And I can’t remember how much I told him about the months of apparently orchestrated gaslighting Yasmine had subjected me to. Gaslighting. We didn’t have that term then. And now we do. Yasmine’s was textbook, to the extent of being, at the end, very blatant. I never gave the full account of that. It hurts. It still does. So I’ve sat on it. Pain is a fire in which one can harden resolve. One day I’d tell the full story. I would never forget…

To be continued.

(This is a section to be included in the existing memoir “Dreams Love Fucking Life Near Death and Some Other Shit” and it comes before “Prophecy 2001”.)

We Need To Talk About Yasmine El Orfi (Part Two)