Drunken Owls and Other Delights

Q: Tell a story you haven't told yet. Give it a different ending than the one that really happened. Don't tell us where you start changing things. Just go.

[NOTE: I sort of cheated here. Most all of my LJ friends know this story already and know what's true and what might not be (so don't give it away for the others!). I'm telling it here for the benefit of the Scintilla readers.]

I met one of my childhood heroes on April 12, 2000, when I was working at HMV Records. It wasn't the first time I met a famous rock musisian, as in the four years I'd worked there, I'd seen (or heard about) big name rockers popping into the store every now and again. I'd gone to various shows and stayed for meet-and-greets, or gone to signings.

The store was at the Solomon Pond Mall in Marlborough--kind of an odd place but a well-placed one. It's about 10 miles east of Worcester and 40 miles east of Boston, so it's kind of in the middle of nowhere. On the other hand, it's at the intersection where I-290 and I-495 meet up, so it's really easy to get to. For this reason, a lot of musicians who were playing in either town would stop by because it was out of town but close enough for them to retain a bit of anonymity.

My job was in the back room--I was the sole shipping/receiving clerk for most of the four years I was there. When I wasn't out on the sales floor helping various customers or ringing up at the register, or what have you, I was out in the spacious back room where I'd be pricing, sale-stickering, ordering, whatever needed to be done. It might have been a somewhat monotonous job for some people, but I absolutely adored it because I saw EVERYTHING that came in, which means that I got to hear albums before the drop date and listened to pretty much anything on the cd player up back.

On that day, however, it was a pretty quiet day. Not too much happening. I'd just gotten a visit from our UPS deliveryman, who would usually share some sordid or funny stories of things going on elsewhere in the building. He'd told me someone famous was in the building, but I didn't take him too seriously...it just sounded too farfetched. Not impossible--the person was apparently in the area, visiting a new-agey health clinic a few towns over--but I highly doubted he'd be here. I let it pass and went on with my work.

That afternoon, I was doing my usual work of checking in new product and listening to music, when I got a page from my boss who was up front.

"Jon, could you please come to the floor? Someone needs help in the world music section...they're over in the back corner."

I sat there for a second...first of all, our world music section is terribly tiny, and second of all, it's the one section I know the least in our store. Third of all, the world section was near the registers, not in the back forty where it used to be. But I figured they were busy up front, so I shrugged and made my way out. I stepped through the back door and looked for a lost client.

And found myself looking at George Harrison.

Now, mind you, I'm a HUGE Beatles fan, and had been so since I was a kid. He was a hero to me, more than the other three in the band. He was the most spiritual, the most centered, and the most down to earth. And he was a damn fine guitarist to boot! For about .03 seconds, my heart flipped and I had a look of "Oh. My. GOD." on my face. But! I couldn't pass this up. I had to be cool, calm and collected. After all, I had to give him good customer service. I walked over to him and the young woman who had been his assistant.

"Hi, welcome to HMV, how can I help you?" I said as evenly as I could.

"Hi," he said in a very quiet, unassuming manner. "Could you please show me where your world section is?"

"Certainly!" I said, and started walking towards the section. "Is there anything you're looking for in particular?"

"There are a few new Ravi Shankar reissues out that I'd like to buy."

As luck would have it, I had JUST checked them into the system that morning. I found them and pulled them out, and handed them to him. "Here you go," I said. "Is there anything else you'd like to look for?"

He smiled and looked around. "I'll just take a look through here," he said, and nodded. "You know, I'm a bit frustrated by the price of these discs nowadays," he continued. "It's not your fault of course, but it's the fact that most of the money isn't going to the performers, it's all to the label."

I nodded and completely understood. "I totally agree with you," I said.

We chatted a little further--I also handed him a copy of the Buena Vista Social Club cd that had been such a big hit a few years previous, as I thought he'd enjoy it. From there, I left him alone and headed to the register. My boss happened to walk by and had the biggest shit-eating grin on his face, and I gave him a you did that on purpose, you bastard! smirk.

When George was finished, he came to the register and I rung him up. I gave him our employee discount (and let him know it) so he had a good 40% off his purchase. He paid in cash, of course. I handed him the change and smiled, and finally let my guard down. "It was a pleasure to meet you," I said. "And thank you." He stood there for a second and gave me his trademark lopsided smile. He understood, and I didn't have to explain. "Thank you for your help," he said, and waved to his assistant. They walked out of the store.

Two minutes later I was out back, calling my Mom, hands shaking, completely freaked out. I had just met a Beatle, and my childhood hero.

Q: Talk about an experience with faith, your own or someone else's.

If people ask me, I say I'm more spiritual than religious. It's not that I disavow any churches or their doctrines (outdated or conflicting though some of them may be)...I'm actually kind of fascinated by the multitude of religions and faiths out there in this crazy world. I love the idea of community in a parish, the peace of meditation, the love of earth and spirit. I was brought up Roman Catholic in a small town and enjoyed the sense of community and friendship it gave, but I walked away in college because I wanted to explore. (That's not to say I denounced my faith or my membership, I just moved away from it is all.)

In the mid-90s I had a few revelations (as it were). The first was an invitation to a circle ritual for a few Wiccans I knew. I found myself fascinated by the idea of--well, not so much a religion or an organized faith, but a mindset of peace and balance, which I desperately needed at the time. Skeptic that I sometimes am, I didn't completely and blindly give in to Wicca, but I studied it quite a bit over the course of a few years. I didn't really focus on the rituals, because they were the main reason I left the Catholic church in the first place--I found that religious ritual, over time, kind of loses its meaning for me unless I change it up now and again. I liked the idea in Wicca of not so much having a set ritual that everyone followed, but to have your own, as long as the outcome was to thank nature for what it's given you, and to follow the tenet of 'an it harm none, do as thou wilt'.

This seeped into my writing about this time. My aborted novel with Diana, True Faith, contained a number of scenes with magic of a spiritual bent. The one problem with the plot, however, was that I was trying to shoehorn a non-diametric belief system into a good-versus-evil story. I was going to hit a lot of roadblocks (not to mention step on some toes) if I kept heading down that road.

By late 1996, I'd moved on from Wicca as well as from that relationship. Not that I'd immersed myself wholly into it to begin with, but I had come to a stagnation point--I was still intrigued by its belief system, but I just couldn't quite bring myself to ever completely give into it.

Then the oddest thing popped into my life--a book about aliens. Hear me out on this one, it's kind of fun. :)

Now, this was one of your typical throwaway paperbacks you'd find in a supermarket about whether or not aliens and alien encounters were real. I picked it up partly as a lark, and partly because I was interested in why someone would believe such--I considered it research for my writing, as I kind of liked the "aliens among us" idea. What got me, though, was an intriguing spiritual theory I'd never heard before: what if the human soul wasn't just bound to Earth? What if the soul reincarnated several lifetimes, not just to learn or to 'spread the message', but just to experience life? And most of all, where would these souls come from?

My first thought was Hot Damn, that's a story line right there! And that's how the Eden Cycle was born, first as a single novel (The Phoenix Effect), then as a trilogy (A Division of Souls, The Persistence of Memories and The Process of Belief) written over the course of nearly ten years. I'm currently revising them now (I have early versions posted at edencycle in extremely friends-locked posts, if anyone's interested).

I was so intrigued by that idea that I followed it for a good few years more, reading quite a number of different books. I read Barbara Hand Clow's The Pleiadian Agenda, parts of The Urantia Book, books about Billy Meier and FIGU, visited a number of online bulletin boards, and even tried a bit of automatic writing. I took it all with a good heaping grain of salt, of course, as I wasn't expecting a spaceship to pick me up and "take me home" any time soon. What I got out of it was another sense of community and insight--it was less about blindly following what others claimed to be true, but more about focusing and parsing what I'd learned. It was sort of like a roundabout meditation, in a way.

(ETA: I should probably add that this was why I was so angry when Marshall Applewhite led the Heaven's Gate cult to a mass suicide--this was both blind following and abusive leadership, both of which I find abhorrent in spirituality.)

I let that go probably in 2000 or so, as my focus veered away from the alien spirit idea and more towards my Eden Cycle novels. I haven't really thought about spirituality or religion since then. The current political weather has made me irritable, of course, but that's really due to the blatant misinterpretation and abuse of what religion and spirituality should be about. I'm not angry at believers in general, just the ones who are exploiting their beliefs for selfish and sometimes violent ends.

If anything, I still think of myself as spiritual in a universal sort of way. I still don't expect P'Taah to come picking me up anytime soon...but when I look out into a night sky and see the countless stars out there, I'm glad I'm part of this universe too, in my own way.