AUTHOR’S NOTE: Much of what goes on in the following won’t make perfect sense because references are being made to earlier events in the book’s text. That’s one reason why you might want to consider buying Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg, instead of just flitting around from excerpt to excerpt on this website. But for those of you who are merely curious—or too broke to spend money on books and too shy to demand that your local library buy it for you—here are a few more embryonic observations for your consideration….

• • • • • • • • •

From Pages 117-118: What I love about Dr. Smiley is that the fat flake actually thinks he knows what he’s doing, when in reality he’s just being used by a higher force. In other words, he’s a quack, but a quack with a purpose. Gordon could have told him as much, if he’d looked for clues in the poetry he’s been reading lately. W. H. Auden said it best:

“We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.”

Here’s the deal: Gordon’s daimon needed a way to stay in touch with him on a regular basis—an open channel between this world and the Other Side. It didn’t look like Gordon would be going the monk route and learning to meditate anytime soon (masturbation doesn’t qualify, unfortunately—it’s actually the flip side of meditation), so it was decided that making Gordon chronically ill would be the next best choice. But there was a problem: Any halfway decent pediatrician would have had Gordon up and running around like a healthy little maniac in no time. There were drugs, even then, that would’ve gotten Gordon’s asthma and his other symptoms under control. So, working with the materials at hand, Gordon’s daimon threw Dr. Smiley into the mix. And that dorkwad of a doctor did exactly what he was supposed to do: He screwed up Gordon’s health to the point where he’d be sick for most of his life.

I know that sounds harsh…. From any way of looking at it but a daimon’s, it basically sucks. While Gordon’s little buddies were tearing around on football fields and jumping their bikes over ditch banks, Gordon sat around on his butt all day wheezing and reading books. But look at it this way: Those little jocks and future farmers of America never had a shot at transcending their origins. They grew up thinking they’d have lives pretty much like the lives of their parents—a regular job, a regular wife, and regular kids. If it all went A-okay, a new Cadillac might be in their future. For Gordon, however, the future was wide open, because he was becoming much more imaginative.

In fact, Gordon has been tapped for far greater (and stranger) things. That’s why he has a daimon in the first place. In this life, like the last, he’s destined to become an artist. Only this time, words will be as important to him as images. A good chunk of his life will be spent trying to grab the dragon tail of consciousness and shake off its scales into neat little rows of black on white. Letters onto paper. Spirit into matter. He’s going to become a writer. Or a Scribe, as they call the position on the Other Side.

Becoming a Scribe is no easy thing. Not everyone’s cut out for it. Being sick a lot of the time is only half of it—and in that respect, Gordon is actually getting off kind of easy. There are worse diseases that have kept daimons in close contact with their charges throughout history. I mean, think about it…. It could have been syphilis (a route Dr. Smiley warned Gordon off). Syphilis works great, as a matter of fact. Some pretty famous writers did their best work while suffering from it. Isak Dinesen got a royal case of it coming out of Africa. Its evil flowers bloomed in Baudelaire. (How are you liking these cornball allusions to the author’s work so far?) Syphilis was at the birth of Nietzsche’s tragedy, it caused Rimbaud to pass a season in hell, and it provided an unsentimental education for Flaubert. (Okay, I’m done now. Sorry about that.)

Tuberculosis has also done wonders for an amazing number of writers. Just for starters, there’s Kafka, Chekov, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Thoreau, Emerson, Jane Austen, Eugene O’Neill, George Orwell, Robert Louis Stevenson, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, and all five of the Bronte sisters. And that’s not all…. Byron had tuberculosis and Shelly would have died of it if he hadn’t drowned first. It gave Albert Camus that existential feeling and Edgar Allen Poe his morbid twist. As a way of weakening the human vessel so the Other Side comes through loud and clear, tuberculosis used to be the disease of choice.

But then modern medicine took it out, along with syphilis. So Gordon’s daimon decided to go with the next best thing: Asthma. Which is kind of a wimpy disease, a disease for people who blow-dry their hair, maybe. But hey, it definitely gets the job done. If it was good enough for John Updike, Che Guevara, Marcel Proust, and Philip K. Dick, it’s good enough for anyone.

There’s something else Auden said: “Art is born of humiliation”—and that’s the other half of the equation. Writers need to have something to write about, and for some reason humiliation spurs them on better than anything else. Gordon has already had plenty of humiliation, and there’s more coming, of course. It’s just the price you pay for walking around as a human. When spirit is made flesh, and you can remember what it was like when you were only spirit, flesh can seem kind of gross.

To tell the truth, sometimes flesh can get so downright disgusting it can make you ashamed to be alive. Human bodies always seem to come to a bad end. But maybe that’s just nature’s way of making you look past biology toward the soul.

Or God’s way of saying, “Stay humble.”

• • • • • • • • •

From Pages 153-156: Gordon didn’t just pass out. His brain suddenly clicked over into full-blown REM sleep. He’d turned narcoleptic, like his dumb basset hound. Blame it on post-traumatic stress or whatever—there was no real cure for it. From that point on, whenever he got too excited or scared or horny, there was a chance he’d fall over and dream. The attacks would keep him off-balance all through high school and earn him the nickname that would later make him famous: Crash Gordon.

Gordon’s first narcoleptic dream was kind of interesting—right there in the den beside his dead father. He dreamed Mal was teaching him to fly, but not in an airplane. Not even with wings. All Gordon had to do was stretch his arms at his sides and catch the wind in his fingertips a certain way. Mal showed him how it was done. At first Gordon had to get a running start and jump into the air. He noticed that each jump seemed to last longer and travel further than the last, until he was spending more time above ground than gravity should have allowed him. While he was up there, he experienced a delicate floating sensation. Sometimes, like a spastic Icarus, he panicked or squirmed in the wrong way and he fell back to earth. But then all he had to do was push off the ground with one foot and he bounced back up into the sky again, floating like a balloon. It felt great. Gordon learned to remain calm and feel the breeze in his fingertips, as Mal had shown him. Soon he was actually flying, like a bird riding the wind currents. Mal was up there with him, a Daddy Dadaelus, doing loop-de-loops and heading too close to the sun. Then something happened and Mal melted. Gordon woke up bereft.

It’s tough when you wake up and see your splattered dad sitting next to you. By then the sirens from the police cars and fire trucks could be heard approaching. Gordon and his father didn’t have much time left to be alone together. Gordon said a little prayer for him, a sort of thank you and farewell. He reminded Mal to head toward the Light. His father was an atheist, so far as Gordon knew. Maybe he could use a little reminding.

But Mal was just fine. He’d planned the whole thing out that way long ago, before he was even born. His death would become the central mystery of Gordon’s existence, but for Mal there was no mystery at all. For Mal it was just, “Mission accomplished. And now, thank God, I can go home.”

See, here’s the thing about death: We’re all suicides, in a sense. We all plot the course of our lives before we incarnate, and along that course we always designate the exit points. Most lives have more than one.

So say you’re driving along Highway 1 through Big Sur in a neat little sports car and some cutesy-pie woodland creature darts out in front of you, maybe a self-absorbed raccoon. You swerve to avoid hitting it. The car skids, the front bumper clips a guardrail, the steering wheel wrenches hard to one side. Then something goes horribly wrong. You find yourself airborne, somersaulting through clear blue sky, tumbling down an iceplant-covered embankment. A rocky shore at low tide fills the windshield. It shatters in your face. You’ve arrived at your self-designated exit point. Every task you’ve set for yourself has been accomplished—or attempted and botched.

Or maybe not. Maybe there’s still more for you to do. So you run right over that raccoon and keep going: Heading to New York, getting married, writing books, adopting a beautiful, laughing baby girl from China…. It could be anything. The main thing is, you don’t look back. If you pass one exit point, there’s always another one further up the road. Every human body is like an unlaunched rocket, waiting to hurtle you through death to the Other Side.

Be grateful for that. We all need an escape plan. Because incarnating in this world is like a descent into hell. Those of us from the Other Side only do it because we love you. It’s almost embarrassing to admit, but that’s the big, sappy secret: The dead love you.

Take Mal, for instance. Sure, he was just a half-assed dad while he was still alive. He barely would’ve known Gordon existed, if it hadn’t been for the doctor’s bills. He had his own problems. And that’s just the point: Life on Earth is so full of cruel pressures that almost everyone ends up a little damaged. No one escapes, really. Some totally cave in and howl and strut, committing acts of depravity wherever they go, so the world can see them for the demented souls they’ve truly become. Others, more cunning, might command acts far more heinous in the name of God or democracy. But absolutely everyone is in the same trap—the high school janitor and the secretary of state, presidents of great nations and run-of-the-mill schizophrenics, stay-at-home moms and Islamic terrorists. Only when they die do they figure out, as Mal realized, that we’re all one. Every single thing in the whole universe—and beyond—is interconnected. No one can be at peace until we’re all at peace. And that realization creates an enormous sense of compassion in the newly departed for those still left behind on Earth. Or let’s just call it what it really is: Love. The dead love you. God loves you (whatever your conception of God might be). You are loved, in spite of everything. Get that through your head. It’s important.

Often, it’s the newly dead who end up taking the biggest risks for those they’ve left behind. Any spirit or guardian angel can intervene on behalf of the living to make their lives a little better, but for the most part, the longer the dead stay on the Other Side, the more conservative they tend to get. Like I’ve said, it’s nice there. The (non-)living is easy. They start to think like slaves under a kind new master, worried they’ll be sold back to humanity. So they end up doing nothing—trying to shove the turmoil of man’s world out of their thoughts, deliberately forgetting how bad things are down there. Which is why most guardian angels are kind of crappy. And why you’ll find, in the lives of the famous or exceedingly fortunate, that they also saw a lot of tragedy—a lot of people died around them. Fame or good fortune usually requires a blood sacrifice. It’s not witchcraft. It’s just life—and the brand-new opposite of life, doing what it can to provide.

The biggest risk, of course—the greatest act of love—is to incarnate again to help others. Some souls get lost on Earth. They forget they’re eternal and sometimes they can’t find their way home again. Sometimes, they forget the love of God—who is, admittedly, not without His terrors. Although fear and suffering are necessary for spiritual growth (I’ll explain that one later), sometimes enough is enough. At a certain point, there’s only one thing left to do. It’s what I’m about to do, on July 13th, 1979 (A Friday, of course. Friday the 13th. I can’t seem to catch a break): You put on one of those ridiculous human suits and you get down to business.

Just before I’m born, an angel will put a finger to my lips and make me forget everything I’ve told you. I know why they do that now. It’s for my own good. If I could remember all I know about the Other Side while I was stuck in a puny human body, it would drive me absolutely fucking nuts. But hopefully I’ll remember a little something, like Gordon, so I won’t be totally clueless, either.

Gordon’s daimon is watching out for us both, which makes me feel better. It’s always a little nerve-wracking when you’re as close to incarnating again as I am. But don’t worry about me. I can still see the past and the future from right here, remember? I know things will turn out pretty much the way they’ve been planned (that doesn’t mean it’ll be easy). I’ll still be able to comment on the action from my little newswomb even after I’m hauled out of Cynthia’s stretch-marked old belly (she’s having a Cesarean, did I tell you?). A few things have to happen before I arrive—John Wayne has to die and Skylab has to scatter itself across parts of Australia and the Indian Ocean—but then some overworked doctor will be yanking me upside-down by my bloody ankles.

Wish me luck. Like everyone else on Earth, I’ll be needing it.

• • • • • • • • •

From Pages 173-178: So that was my debut. I wanted to make my appearance at Mal’s funeral for the sake of symmetry. You know… rub everyone’s noses in the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. It’s too bad my head was too big to fit through Cynthia’s cervix, otherwise I would’ve had her splork me out right there on the lawn next to Mal’s grave, which to my way of thinking would’ve been really spectacular—especially with Gordon passed out right next to me. Instead, I was hustled away inside Cynthia’s contracting belly. I felt like a fat man spending a really humid day in an economy car with the air bags deploying every few seconds. Being born is always a hassle.

(Later, in the hospital, when Cynthia found out she’d be having a Caesarian, she insisted that a plastic surgeon sit in on the operation and give her a tummy tuck after they fished me out of her. Her thinking was: “Now that I’m without a husband, it’s time to make myself beautiful again.” Ecclesiastes had it right about that vanity business.)

Timing is everything when it comes to being born—and not just for reasons any astrologer might give you, although those guys are definitely onto something. I could explain it all with chaos theory, but then I’d have to give you a big-ass lecture about Edward Lorenz, Benoit Mandelbrot, Hopf bifurcations, strange attractors, and nonlinear iterative equations. For now, I’ll just let it go by saying that each birth is an example of sensitive dependence on initial conditions and is subject to its own “butterfly effect.” You’ve probably heard about that one. It’s the theory that a butterfly flapping its wings over Beijing can cause a ripple in the wind that ends up as a hurricane ripping the shit out of trailer parks along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. When it comes to chaotic systems—like the weather or a human life—tiny variations at the beginning can have huge consequences over time.

Chaos theory works as an explanation for just about everything, if you really want to know. The entire universe was created from a void—or Chaos—whether you believe in Genesis or the Big Bang. Matter came into existence then, and with it, the force of attraction (Eros, or Love, if you have a mythic or spiritual view of things; Gravity for those of you inclined toward the scientific or mundane). So there’s another cosmic trinity for your consideration: The whole universe boils down to Chaos, Matter, and Attraction—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And like fractals and holograms, the entire cosmos can be recreated from even the tiniest little part of it. It’s like William Blake seeing the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower. Or as Friedrich W.J. Schelling put it, less succinctly, perhaps (but, hey, this was forty years before Darwin): “The universe is made on the model of the human soul… the analogy of each part of the universe to the whole is such that the same idea is reflected constantly from whole to part and part to whole.”

Does that make sense, or have I lost you?

Okay, let me try to come at this from a different angle. There are two kinds of chaos in God’s universe. There’s entropic chaos, where everything spins off into sheer randomness and dissipation (“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold…”), and then there’s deterministic chaos, which always contains the latent seeds of self-organization. Deterministic chaos eventually settles into—or is attracted into—complex patterns that are recognizable, but never retrace the same path. These patterns are self-similar and scale-invariant, meaning that they repeat themselves at different scales of observation (“…from whole to part and part to whole.”). They’re called strange attractors. Benoit Mandelbrot over at Bell Labs was figuring this out right around the time I was being born. He would eventually conclude that all strange attractors are fractal, which is the term he coined to denote configurations that transcend traditional numerical categories. Fractal geometry is the geometry of nature. It can mathematically describe a snowflake, a tree, or a cloud stealing past the Moon in the night.

Stay with me here…. Physicists working on chaos theory some years later hit on the discovery that when chaotic dynamics generate more than one strange attractor, the attractors can merge, resulting in greater capacities of self-organization, or “symmetry building.” In other words, a little chaos can be good for you. It can dissolve crusty old structures and evolve into bright, shiny new ones, better adapted to survival. But it’s not always easy getting there. First the original attractor is disrupted and the whole system experiences a loss of structure—a period of “transient chaos”—before the new attractor is generated. Think mid-life crisis or a forest on fire. Then there’s the chance that the transient chaos will tip over into entropic chaos, resulting in, well… death. End of story. But even entropic chaos leads to increased self-organization when you take the Other Side into consideration. You don’t think life and death and reincarnation are all utterly devoid of meaning, do you? We’re supposed to be learning things, evolving, striving toward enlightenment so we can become good pals with God, or whatever. And we can’t do that without learning to love chaos. To quote Nietzsche:

“Yea verily, I say unto you: A man must have chaos yet within him to birth a dancing star.”

In our own lives, each major transition to a new strange attractor is accompanied by changes in the quantum field (and believe me, you don’t wanna get me started on quantum field theory…). Those periods of transient chaos can stretch and fold reality so that events usually perceived as being separated in time and place become linked in a non-linear way, which—I know this sounds wacky—sometimes results in our psychic reality being mirrored by external reality through synchronicity and prophetic dreams.

If you’re looking for an example, try Gordon. Remember him, flopped down in the dirt next to his dad’s grave? There’s more than enough crap going on in Gordon’s life to knock him out of his stale old patterns: The death of a parent, his new adventures in narcolepsy, revelations about the sex life of his grandma, a little brother (yours truly) about to join the family. But with Gordon, frankly, it doesn’t take anywhere near that much to mess with his strange attractors. That asthma juice he’s always sucking on elevates his brain’s levels of noradrenaline, which increases his sensitivity to sensory input. In fact, he’s so damn sensitive that half the time he’s living right on the edge of chaos (the “homoclinic point” as chaos theorists call it—where stable dynamics become chaotic and chaotic dynamics become orderly). All it takes, potentially, is a new taste sensation or a foxy glance from a redheaded lady to trigger a massive state change—a Hopf bifurcation—in Gordon’s psyche, sending him careening off on his own butterfly effect (think about what madeleine crumbs did for Proust, or what Salome did for John the Baptist). Much as he dislikes it, chaos will be a near-constant companion throughout Gordon’s life. And when that chaos starts to settle down into new strange attractors, the first place the seeds of self-organization will usually show up are in his dreams—the dream he had at his father’s funeral being a perfect case in point.

Here’s what happened: Gordon dreamed he was playing tennis on an old clay court surrounded by a forest of pine and maples. His opponent happened to be invisible but cast a dark shadow and returned his serves and volleys perfectly. Soon the balls in play started multiplying—three, then five, then seven and nine—and Gordon broke into a sweat running after them. He stopped long enough to take off his black T-shirt and hang it on a chain-link fence. Just then a lemon-yellow biplane roared overhead and crashed into the woods on a slope below the court. Gordon grabbed his shirt and ran into the forest to see if there were any survivors. As he was jogging along a wide dirt path, a sky blue Bentley Corniche convertible appeared behind him. At the wheel was a serpentman with glistening green-black skin who intended Gordon harm. As the Bentley picked up speed to pass him, the serpentman threw a poisoned dart at Gordon’s eyes. Gordon stretched his T-shirt tight between his hands and caught the dart with it, but its tip poked through the cloth and grazed his chest. It didn’t deliver enough poison to harm him—in fact, Gordon thought it might even work as an inoculation. The Bentley tried to turn around and come after him again, but one of its wheels got stuck in a ditch and Gordon was able to run right past it. As the path narrowed, a man wearing a fancy white linen shirt stepped out from behind a tree ahead of him. It was his father, looking happier than Gordon had ever seen him. Gold Grecian chains dangled from around Mal’s neck and his hair was full and modishly styled. He looked like a jet-setting playboy, the epitome of mid-sixties cool—or at least as cool as Mal ever could be. He was carrying a bundle that turned out to be a baby. He handed it to Gordon, saying telepathically, “Here, have a look at your new little brother.” The first telepathic thought that Gordon communicated back was “What a cute baby!” even though it wasn’t. The entire right side of the baby’s face was covered with reddish-brown fur. Two gnarled horns protruded from the top of its reddened forehead. The poor little baby looked demonic, although Gordon sensed no evil in it. Then it started to cry. Gordon took his little dreambrother in his arms and the crying stopped immediately. They both felt comforted. And that’s where the dream ended.

Now here’s the kicker: Gordon’s dream had me nailed. I really was born with reddish-brown fur covering half of my face (no horns, though). Synchronicity, a lucky guess, or did Gordon remember a glimpse of our future? You tell me. Cynthia thought she’d given birth to a baby werewolf. She was so fucking freaked that I pretty much scared her straight. She blamed the fur on all those pills she’d been popping. She worried that they’d messed with my DNA—and hers, too, for that matter. So she went cold turkey on the painkillers and ditched her role as a suburban junky housewife to become an ardent nudist (but that’s a story for later…).

It took a few months, but eventually all the fur rubbed off me. I ended up looking fairly normal. I heard stories, though—and even saw a few pictures—so I grew up with a special fondness for that Warren Zevon song, “Werewolves of London,” which was a big radio hit right around the time I was being conceived. Gordon taught me the lyrics when I was three. He and I would sing it together (“I saw a werewolf drinking a piña colada at Trader Vics—and his hair was perfect…”) whenever we wanted to drive Cynthia crazy.

Gordon was right about me: I’m not demonic (or even daimonic). But I sure as hell brought along enough chaos with me to birth one of Nietzsche’s dancing stars. I’ve turned up at this point to remind Gordon that chaos leads to creativity. If he wants to be an artist—or a Scribe, or even just a whole and healthy human being—he really needs to start embracing chaos. He has to stop running from it and learn how to stay within the seeming madness, so he can confront and then slay the Dragons of Disorder (which so often turn out to be only the Chihuahuas of Petulance). Chaos can be both creator and destroyer, like the goddess Kali. Chaos can be Satan, the Prince of Darkness, or Lucifer, the Light-Bringer. Chaos may be at the root of all evil, but without it there could be no flowering of good. Chaos can be your worst enemy and sometimes chaos can be your best friend. I mean that both as a metaphor and in its literal sense:

Chaos can be your best friend.

• • • • • • • • •

From Pages 199-201: I guess it’s only natural that Gordon would be thinking about religion after the death of our biological father. I mean, I never really knew the guy (at least not in this incarnation), so growing up without him doesn’t seem like that big a deal to me. But for Gordon the concept of not having a dad must be kind of freaky, because he was so used to having Mal around. So what do you do when you’re experiencing a sense of loss and feeling like you’re living in an absurd, malicious universe? You turn to religion for the answers.

Basically, what Gordon wants to know is: “Why does evil shit happen?”

Almost all anger boils down to us being pissed off at God for not running the show better. Yeah I know, “God is great, God is good,” “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” and blah, blah, fucking blah… but look—if the God of this world is all-powerful and all-good, then how do you account for all the heinous crap that’s been going on throughout history? Original Sin? I don’t think so. I mean, animals have been eating other animals since way before man showed up. Do you think a merciful God would deliberately create a planet that’s one big predatory snack bar? Being eaten hurts. I should know. Around 1838, I fell out of a whaling schooner off the coast of Nantucket (crow’s nest, sudden gale) and a shark came along and ate me raw. It hurt like hell, believe me—especially that first bite taken out of my ass while I was still dogpaddling.

And that’s just dumb animal suffering, which is bad enough, but what about the ravages of premeditated evil? I’m talking about war atrocities, mob lynchings, burning witches at the stake. I’m talking about poisoning a town’s drinking water for the sake of corporate profits, causing children to grow up with brain tumors and liver disease. I’m talking about rape and murder and arson—acts that are consciously intended to cause suffering to other innocent human beings. Why would an almighty, loving God put up with any of that? I mean, really: What the hell is up?

I’ll tell you what’s up: The gnostics have it right—or as nearly right as anyone. This world was created by a bad god. A demiurge. Only a flawed creator would create a flawed world. Original Sin exists, but not as most people understand it. The Original Sin was the creation of this world by a half-assed god who’d wandered too far from the True God’s influence. Pumped up on the sins of pride and hubris, like Lucifer (way too much like Lucifer, actually), this half-assed god created a world that was a mixture of good and evil. A world in which every creature born to it is bound to suffer.

Suffering is the existential manifestation of evil in the world. And suffering exists. We know that. But what we sometimes forget is that the world is also full of good. Which is kind of amazing when you think about it. If we’re all just a collection of soulless atoms—random bundles of self-serving biology—then we should always be running around trying to fulfil our own greedy desires while we screw over everyone else in the process. But that isn’t always what happens, is it? How do you explain giving to charity, or extreme acts of self-sacrifice? Some people have given up their lives for the sake of others. It’s a mixed-up, fucked-up, crazy-making world, but at least there’s love in it, and a certain amount of the True God’s benevolent influence.

But then why did the True God let this half-assed god, the demiurge, get away with making such a flawed universe in the first place? I think Gordon himself provides part of the answer (with a little coaching from his daimon) in a book he’s going to write in his early twenties called The Sensuous Hermit. Since that book is already written from the perspective of eternity, and I’m still able to skip around in the past and future, I’ll just quote from the relevant passage here:

“There’s a Yiddish saying that God made man because He loves stories. The Sensuous Hermit has a more refined version of that same essential idea. It’s his contention that before the universe began there was only God—the One, the Absolute, the Unknown and Unknowable. But even God couldn’t comprehend Himself in that condition. To be conscious of his Oneness, He had to be less than One. Thus was born two-ness, or duality, with all the attendant distractions of that condition: light and dark, life and death, good and evil, love and fear, oil and vinegar, and so on. The truth is, we’re all still One with God, but at the moment we happen to be functioning as a kind of enchanted mirror that tells God stories about his true nature. Or better yet, the universe is one huge roman à clef in which the secret identity of every character is none other than the Absolute Author.”

Like I said, that’s part of it. But here’s a more radical spin on that same basic idea: What if mankind was once a single angelic being that fell from grace and was transformed, during the Big Bang, into the material universe as a means of salvation? What if shards of that fallen angelic personality could be found everywhere, in every rock, dinosaur, shark, tree, rainbow, bear, and person? And what if the ultimate purpose of all those fragmented personalities was to spiritually evolve into wholeness, back into that original angelic being—with increased knowledge of its own good and evil—which would in turn allow it to merge once more with the loving grace of the True God. If all of that were true, then we’d finally have a reasonable theological explanation for all the suffering in the world:

It’s self-inflicted.

Why does evil shit happen? Because we need to experience it. We need to know what evil is all about so we can strive to embody its opposite—spiritual good. But in a world like I’ve described, we could never be quite sure of our moral bearings. We’d be living under Kierkegaard’s dictum that when we’re feeling our most saintly, we could actually be working for the devil (Jerry Falwell and some of the more rabid popes come to mind). Conversely, an act that seems evil might actually serve to nudge millions of souls toward salvation. Christ’s crucifixion would be the obvious example, but there are others. I’m not saying this is true, but what if I told you that every soul involved in the Holocaust actually volunteered for it?

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” That’s another of Kierkegaard’s dictums. It explains why we need to spend time on the Other Side between incarnations. We do it so we can kick back and take a long look at our lives and try to figure out what the hell has been going on.

• • • • • • • • •

From Pages 232-234: There are some things you just can’t do on the Other Side. Getting stoned on opiated Thai stick and having a premature ejaculation during the ensuing headrush is one of them. Like I’ve said before, there’s nothing like an earthly orgasm over there. Which is too bad, because if there was, maybe I could stop reincarnating. Sometimes I think the material universe is like some monstrously addictive drug. You know it’s bad for you, but you keep going back for more, anyway. Maybe that’s why life on Earth has to be so harsh—so our souls don’t end up loving it too much.

“Life’ll kill ya,” as the great Warren Zevon once sang. There’s an infinite number of ways in which life can screw you over: Asthma or alcoholism, bankruptcy or bulimia, cancer or car crashes, drug addiction or divorce…. Just go through the alphabet—you’ll never run out of possibilities. Even someone as blameless as a little old church lady will wind up getting the shaft in this world. It doesn’t matter if she was too timid to sin. She’ll still have to deal with psoriasis, bad dentures, failing eyesight, her daughter’s lupus, her favorite nephew’s schizophrenia, and a thousand other bullshit problems until her lungs gradually fill up with fluid and she suffocates because her heart is too tired to pump. And who wants to grow up to be a little old church lady, anyway? Where’s the fun in that?

Look, we all know that partying with the Hell’s Angels and jumping off a 90-foot cliff will lead to a skull-crushing hangover the next morning, if not something worse—but some of us are dumb enough (or ballsy enough) to try it, anyway. Maybe that’s an okay thing. I’m not saying you should start shooting smack and robbing banks with a posse of depraved French circus clowns (you can watch the movie to see how that one plays out). I’m just saying that a little worldly experience isn’t always such a bad thing. It can be good for the soul. For starters, it can make you more compassionate, less willing to judge.

Think about it: If someone had the authority to send your soul to hell, who would you want judging you—the blameless little old church lady, or someone like Mal’s hero, James Bond? Let’s get even more specific: Let’s say Gordon’s soul is on the line and while he was in the tent with Francesca, 007 and the church lady were watching him from on high.

Of course, the church lady is going to be seeing sin all over the place (especially clinging to Francesca’s hand). She sourly notes profanity, drug use, and premarital sex. Following the handy guide to eternal damnation in the back of her Bible, she decides she has no choice but to consign Gordon’s soul to the fiery pit. Thanks to the church lady, Gordon now gets to spend eternity bending over for Tabasco sauce enemas and being force-fed chocolate napalm pudding—all just because he fell in love with a girl and wanted to do the horizontal hula with her.

But then James Bond weighs in…. Here’s a true man of the world, a martini-swilling, Walther PPK-packing sybarite, a debonair badass who knows his way around bikini-clad women and the baccarat tables of Monaco. What he sees isn’t sin—it’s just angsty, adolescent error. “We can fix that, old chap,” Bond says, clapping Gordon on the back. Rather than damn him to hell, Bond persuades M to supply Gordon with a box of bulletproof condoms and then sends him off to practice his mattress mambo technique with the Goldfinger Girls and Pussy Galore.

If James Bond can forgive you, then God should be able to forgive you, too. At least that’s my theory. There’s no hell once you die, anyway, so it’s not like it matters much. There’s some pretty heavy mind-fucking that goes on in that Bardo place Gordon’s always talking about, but no hell. Hell is right here on Earth, if it’s anywhere. I’ll bet you’re glad to hear that.

Fear and pain don’t exist on the Other Side, either, just so you know. You won’t find orgies, bullets, narcotics, flesh-eating zombies, or Carlsberg Elephant Malt Liquor on the Other Side—which probably explains why teenage boys find all those things so fascinating. One of the reasons we reincarnate is so we can experience all the stuff that doesn’t exist in heaven. The people who enjoy that junk the most are the ones who have most thoroughly forgotten that they’re spiritual beings who don’t really belong here in the first place. And teenage boys, as everyone knows, are about as oblivious as you can get. For them, the world can look a lot like Valhalla, that mythical hall the Vikings went to when they died in battle, a place of eternal drinking, fighting, and Valkyrie-fucking.

Everyone makes a plan, before they reincarnate, that lays out all the experiences they need to have in their upcoming lifetime. Not all of those experiences are necessarily fun. The more difficulties you put in front of yourself, the more chances you’ll have for spiritual growth. There are opportunities for spiritual growth on the Other Side as well, but they’re nowhere near as intense as the crap that happens on Earth. The cruel pressures you feel while you’re stuck in a human body are the spiritual equivalent of those chthonic geological forces that can turn a pile of dinosaur bones into a diamond. I’m guessing a similar result is intended for our souls. It must be God’s way of squeezing out our Divine Sparks.

A daimon, or some more run-of-the-mill spirit guide, will help you with all the details in the blueprint for your new life. Then they’ll watch out for you from the Other Side while you’re incarnated, trying to make sure that all the stuff you laid out for yourself actually happens. Before you go, you’ll make deals with other spirits—like Gordon and I did—about who will join you as a brother or a sister, who will be your mom and dad, and so on. You’ll even pick out some of your more important friends and enemies—usually spirits you’ve known from one or more past lives. Your worst enemy in this world could be one of your closest friends on the Other Side. Like, I know for a fact that Jesus and Judas are good buddies. You can’t blame Judas for the crucifixion. The whole thing was set up in advance.

As you’ve probably guessed by now, Gordon and Jimmy have a relationship like that.

This page has the following sub pages.

• STILL MORE EMBRYONIC OBSERVATIONS