Todd's People - God in Kentucky

I am available and ready. I have crawled out of my cocoon and embraced the metamorphosis. I have built a tree house in Kentucky with nobody to see, for no body but mine. I have accepted rides on lonely stretches of back highways with America. I’ve met truckers and their guns, strippers and their kids. I have dodged punches thrown at me by gangsters in lonely late night walks in poor neighborhoods and have avoided damage while concussion grenades and billy clubs took their turns on my body. It is true, World, I tried to lose you, but I didn’t know that I would find more instead.

The cocoon I made for myself was decorated with dropping out of college, highlighted with hitchhiking and the scent of saturated freedom. Prior to this, I had been feeling the enormous disappointment of traveling a path already paved by millions of other people and I needed to adventure while youth was on my side. And especially needed to avoid the scam that is known as student loans in a system that sells knowledge that was harvested by the human collective for the human collective.

From here, life exploded. I broke a tooth, Bush got re-elected, and I headed south.

In Kentucky I met God, or so that is what a friend down the street told me after I explained to her a story of a stranger, a neighbor, who’d just got out of prison and had slowly become a friend, contrary to advice given all around town that if “you get between his drugs and his guns, he’ll kill you.” I said to my friend down the street, “It is rumored he got someone shot. Would God do that?”

She replied, “God kills people all day!”

The nearest road from my house was a mile away, and you had to travel down gravel paths till you reached it. Nobody visited. But we knew of our neighbor through rumors and gossip, and then for the first time a knock at the door showed him, the neighbor, with an AK-47 and no shirt. He had a Confederate flag tattoo and a big joint in his mouth. He was upset about a hunter killing a deer on his land. He was pissed and gave us his card and said, “Call me if you see that son of a bitch again.” In fact, we understood his sentiment because the hunter would leave empty cans of his cheap beer everywhere and shoot guns by our house.

A week or so later the deer hunter arrived. Our neighbor arrived soon afterward and chased the guy off. To our surprise, the neighbor brought an axe and destroyed the deer stand. Then the neighbor came back to hang out for a minute and also to advise us to pee outside to scare away the deer—although we'd already done that anyway because we had no running water. Eventually, the visits became more frequent and longer. Our new friend would leave us collections of bones along our fence line, which was a little startling but seemed more like an offering and a memory of his visit.

One afternoon with a yellow sun dancing down the hills in Kentucky, our neighbor revealed his godlike character to a roommate and me. Standing on top of a hill with his shirt off, the God in question took in a gigantic inhale and said, “I know what you are up to.” Then with his nose up he stated, “Do you smell that?” By this point, God’s beard was wrapped in on itself, gesticulating every word he said. I smelled… nothing.

“Once more,” God said.

As I inhaled deeply, God clenched his fist and punched into the ground…. Pulled out a handful of dirt and smelled it, then offered it for my nose. I smelled it. Then my roommate. Then all of us. The earth never smelled so good to me. It smelled like miles. Like time. Like blood mixed with honeysuckle. In my hands it felt like I could squeeze into it forever.

Kentucky is full of magic. On my birthday, a snake crossed my path and dropped off my conscience in the form of a patch of mushrooms. It’s a complicated story that didn’t make sense until hindsight revealed itself, largely in the form of the DMT I just smoked before writing this. The first hit I took, my brain rattled. The second hit, my face expanded. The third hit was loud, it rang my ears and I left my hand on the floor with my pipe as I lay in bed.

I had visited God back in Kentucky, and with this experience I visited God again. This second time I felt like I died instantly and apologized to this energy for the problems I have caused on earth. As I cried, my tears caressed my third eye and flowed upward. My breath was cold, my body colder, and all I felt was the weight of skin and bones. I have no fear of death now; in fact, what you enter when you die is much more fun than it is here. But that’s the double side, we can make it like that now. We can rip it open in this life and release all of those things.

Previously - House of Escada Ball