SURRENDER AURORA
by
W. Strawn Douglas
Surrender Aurora
by W. Strawn Douglas
Copyright 2016 by W. Strawn Douglas. All Rights Reserved.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016901130
This is a work of fiction. Any views expressed in this work are solely those of the author. Any resemblance of characters in this work to persons living or dead are coincidental.
CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Afterword
From the Vault: Four Short Stories
Immortality Class
Ghost Story
The Piñata
All Jacked Up in 2070
About the Author
A Short Biography
Other Titles by the Author
CHAPTER ONE
Back in the old days, the early ’80s, you could sit on a park bench and smoke some pot in complete peace. Now the crackheads had moved in, and the police with them. Much had been lost.
This was not the West Bank of Paris, or Jerusalem. This was the West Bank of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Time had been hard on this unique little neighborhood. Other shops had opened and closed, their owners moved on. The one constant had been the old hippie vegetarian restaurant, the New Riverside Café. The Riv had in many ways been the community’s hub; its informal meeting place was where revolutionaries could foment overthrow in the non-exploitive company of the feminist brigade, a few day-glow mohawks, and fine dining in the form of brown rice with steamed or wokked veggies. It was a place of great comfort to its people. And now the Riv had closed too.
Nestled between the Mississippi River and two huge six-lane highways, the people had developed a unique culture, some residents never leaving the comfort of its confines for years. Comfort brought those seeking refuge from the cold winds of distrust and foreignness. Eritrean and Somali Africans migrated in as old-guard hippies moved out. They settled in and took over the HUD-operated apartment towers and did not cower away from the concrete as had their hippie predecessors.
Five concrete towers made up Cedar Square West. The housing project had been the brainchild of Keith Heller. In the late ’60s and into the ’70s, the hippies had stopped this corpulent, rich businessman dead in his tracks as he tried to take over the neighborhood, pave its charm, and move on to the next project. The hippies organized, rallied, and conquered Heller. The property was taken over by the federal government entity, the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Forty floors of the McKnight Tower were now available for college students, immigrants, and low- and middle-income tenants. Soon these people began to change the face of the streets below. When once there had been young women in psychedelic tie-dye, there were now African Muslim women clothed from hood to ankle in intricate, colorful wraps and dresses. James called them the Psychedelic Nuns.
James Scott McGregor was five foot eight, slim build, and 160 pounds of weight. An aquiline, narrow face with sharp gestures and curly brown hair, blue eyes. Living on an SSI Social Security check in Section 8 low-income housing in the tower, he was one of the many welfare cases that made Cedar Square West the “ghetto in the sky.”
It was a Tuesday, the 10th of November, noonish. He awoke, arose from his futon mattress, and scanned the panorama of his one-bedroom apartment. His computer sat waiting for him on his desk, a former door. He dressed in jeans, T-shirt, running shoes, and vest. He strode to the desk and took a seat in the old gray-green swivel chair. He picked up the inverted Frisbee that served as his marijuana-cleaning tray. He selected a small bud from the bigger stem of buds and began to remove the stems and seeds. He packed the leaves into the brass ‘one-hitter’ pipe. Clenching it in his teeth, he scanned the tabletop for matches or a lighter. He found a pack of matches with nine matches left. He tore one loose and hit its red head on the striker. The flame exploded with a hiss. After the sulfur fuel of the matchhead was done burning, he touched the flaming stick of paper up to the port end of the one-hitter. He inhaled deeply and brought the thick, pungent smoke down into his lungs. He held this for seven seconds and exhaled. Immediately he began to feel the effect: warmth passed into his brain. A gentle euphoria came over him. A buttery silliness tinged with paranoia.
He lit another match and burned out the last of the green leaf in the pipe, pulling the smoke into his lungs. The effect on his body was minimal. He was already stoned. He found the wonderful euphoria, with its confusion and loss of short-term memory, comforting to him, as always.
James pulled a leather Navy pilot’s jacket from the closet. He slid into its cool nylon lining and zipped it up halfway. It was cool out, but not bitterly cold. The flight jacket would be enough. He stepped out into the hallway, locking the door behind him, and headed down the red-carpeted hall. He waited for an elevator; he looked out the window at the street scene below. To the right was the burned-out hulk of Dania Hall, an old turn-of-the-century theater. Left of that was the Holtzerman Building, with its cheap single rooms and extensive fire escape network just out of sight on its east side. The Holtzerman’s street-level tenant spaces below were occupied by an art supply store and a furniture and futon mattress store.
James considered stopping in to the Artery. I do need some more radiograph ink, he thought, but then disregarded the notion. I’ll get it on the return trip, he decided.
He dug in his pants pocket for a cigarette pack: Rothman Blues.
The bell rang for the elevator. He rode it down, got out, and walked outside in the sun and fresh air. He followed the walkway to the street, noting the security camera and the place where the old walk bridge had once stood. He crossed the street and walked past the Artery, Come to Your Senses, and the bank. Rounding the corner, he soon came upon the Hard Times Café.
“A large cup of coffee, please,” he said to the counter worker in tank top and Army dungarees. The worker handed him the paper cup, plastic-covered, and moved on to the next customer. Just as he was about to go back out the way he came, he heard a familiar voice.
“Hey, James, check this out,” came the voice of Kermit Suns. “I think you’d like to see this.”
“Hey, Frog, what’s new?” James joined Kermit, who was sitting at a table. The little man was dressed in a Carhartt tan jacket and faded jeans, his knees showing pale skin through ample holes. Kermit’s dark hair was cut short; he had a thick moustache. A mousy man, he was known for his talents at electronic circuitry. Nicknamed “Frog” for the similarity of his name to The Muppet Show’s Kermit the Frog, he wore his name with pride. Piercings on his eyebrows marked him as one of the West Bank’s newer residents.
“I posted it, Frog,” said James.
“What did you post?” inquired Frog.
“I linked four old posts and put them together for a conversation we are having on the interweb,” said James. “It’s all about the ‘higher power’ god in Alcoholics Anonymous. It is, of course, a religion unto itself, but its addicts call it ‘spirituality’ and not rel
igion. I have a friend into that sort of stuff. Every time I get close to government in my life, the State comes at us with that ‘higher power’ shit. I hope Sean gets a kick out of it.”
* * *
Across town, at the Linden Hills “Lunds” upscale grocery store, Sean was reading the post James had put up onto his blog site while using the store’s free Wi-Fi. He was a slender, athletic man just under six feet tall. His dark-Irish blackish-brown hair and deep-brown eyes matched his brooding mood.
James had linked the posts as if they were a private note to Sean, which was essentially the reality at hand. Sean skimmed through the introduction and got into the first section, called “Eric the Fish.”
Blog Post One
Eric Clapton was once called Eric the Fish
Years ago in a faraway land called London, there lived a guitar player named Eric the Fish. Eric was a bit of a drunk. He shot heroin, tripped on acid, snorted cocaine, and was generally a rake. Whenever dour Christians told him to correct his ways, he pointed to the ritual of the wine. It seemed that the besotted Eric was just as good a Christian as the dour followers of strict god-fearing people were. Perhaps even more so as Eric clung to that god of the wine by consuming that wine and playing guitar and drinking more and more of that wine.
It seems that the Jewish testaments had many references to holy waters and anointing oils. We all in our modern era call these by the name of toxicology and topically applied drugs. The Bible is filled with drug use and many unplanned pregnancies. The glass of wine and other noxious chemicals has had a shared quality to it. Take a sip of my glass means share all of my merriment, drugs, and diseases. Be part of the communion as we share all of our body chemistry from hallucinogens to Eric’s heroin and everybody’s bodily fluids.
This is what is meant by the ritual of the wine. From AA and NA to the seller’s door, it all comes together as communion. We share and take as a community, and there are many ways to enjoy it all. In college we used to joke about it all being Wine, Women, and Bong. In our morning-afters, women take pregnancy tests and men take aspirin and a beer and worry that they may have to call the lawyer just as quickly as a woman calls the obstetrician.
Christianity was created by a group of smart and creative do-gooder men who drank wine and hung out with prostitutes and had many long talks about god and the future. They were just as concerned with the future as Heinlein and Asimov were when they called their sci-fi writers group the “Futurians”… Christ and Luke were talking about the chemistry of shared wine and shared prostitutes and diseases and drugs and pregnancies. They created a few rituals and those rituals got us to Eric the Fish.
Holy waters and wine and anointing oils are all drugs and so is our modern application of Christianity. The only real question is do you have faith that the hangover society is a good thing to endorse. If you say yes to kids taking communion at age thirteen, then give them a sip of wine and stand back as we light the fuse of the cherry bomb, then stand back as the enlightened crowd says it’s all the fault of the wine and that fiend in Jerusalem who so thoroughly endorsed all of this merriment. Do you endorse it all as the kids go trotting off to the disco like heifers to the slaughter?
All these things come together in the blood-and-wine ritual of the Christ, and we look at the creative ways of that man and we ask ourselves whether we believe the ritual is sound. If we say the creation of the ritual was a good idea, then we call ourselves Christians. Then that creativity is the will of god and we are exposed to the will of god. If it happened and it was part of the genius of human intellect, then it is god. There is a god for eight-year-olds and a god for teens and a god for adults, parents, and the rest of us too.
Then there is forgiveness and everlasting life. Forgiveness is grand and key to the Christian experience. The world is better for it. There is everlasting life in works and legacies. I cannot agree with the monk spending years in prayer. But that’s just my spin on it
On the subject of herbal remedies:
My father once researched colchicine to treat pulmonary fibrosis. This was groundbreaking research as colchicine had been around since 1500. Dad tracked the colchicine in a side-by-side trial of the steroid called prednisone. After three months the patients on the colchicine were doing so much better that the trial was halted, and all the patients in the trial were put onto the colchicine. The colchicine was a 500-year-old gout medication.
The real punchline to this story is that for all of the drama regarding the original discovery of the superiority of the herbal preparation called colchicine, the end result was that newer medications proved both the colchicine and the prednisone to be dysfunctional and somewhat antique. Newer drugs outpaced both of the drugs my father tested.
The original drug trial was done five years prior to the new standard of recovery from pulmonary fibrosis. Five years in the past the test made sense, but now it is obsolete. Other cures got us farther and more healthy than older five-year-old agendas. My father treated it as a commonplace occurrence that all of his work and research was obsolete in a small span of half a decade.
Let’s all build something new that’s not obsolete. Whether it’s thirty years or just five, we all have to come together and create something that works and get us all paid. Have a nice day.
Blog Post Two
Twelve liars and a suicide
There is a thing called Rationalism. From a rationalist’s point of view, the great Christian event that led to what is called the “Week of Passion” means that Jesus was a narcissistic suicidal megalomaniac. A social engineer who had no idea that his stunt would take traction and create anything beyond making some friends and getting his favorite prostitute to wash his feet with her long hair. Twelve liars and a suicide.
He knew there were legends of a messiah in Jewish folklore, and he said to himself, “I will dare to see all these legends be claimed and activated by me even if it kills me.” The rationalist points to human intellect and infinite chance and calls these factors GOD. If god is everything and nothing at the same time, then these acts are the presence of god with a rationalist’s explanation of twelve crafty liars and one host. A host like the host of a party or the host animal to a feeding parasite. A host who offered up his life to be gorged upon and completely consumed by Pharisees and common sinners who were being taught a new way to pray.
From a rationalist’s point of view there is no difference from a man intent on pushing all of society’s buttons and being a messiah. He wanted people to have hope and the comfort of something to pray to.
The ritual of wine and communion and bread was crafted and devised to remind new followers to think of god every time you ate bread or drank wine. Every sip of wine from all of the unplanned pregnancies to hangovers to petty theft and fights was tied to the wine that created it all. Nobody can understand communion until they have tripped on a drop of LSD served on a sugar cube. There is no better way you can have the consciousness of shared bodily fluids and sweat and blood and shared diseases than to consume that one drop of communion wine that now is more potent than a case of wine.
These rituals were invented by chance and human intellect, which is a rationalist’s definition of god. We simply evolved to a point where one day a man like the Nazarene carpenter did his thing and said to the Pharisees, “I will dare”…and they killed him in response, as was their only option.
Kurtz in Apocalypse Now says, “The love that it took to do that. If I had ten regiments of such men, our troubles here would soon be over.” Yes, your god is kind and loving. I am not challenging that. I just say it was twelve liars and a suicidal man who created your faith with great calculation and a deliberate mindset that created something that would settle the unpredictable and unfair ways of a selfish, angry world. A suicide that created hope and even that fleeting thing we call love.
As for forgiveness, we assume you are going to screw up and we assume you will come back to us as a prodigal son looking to speak the words “forgive me”… It i
s assumed you will screw up. We almost take it for granted.
But ultimately it was the love of twelve liars and a suicide that created your superstar of Christian love. And it’s a snap to turn water into wine with just the right mushroom juice. From a rationalist’s point of view, there is no difference between twelve liars and a suicide and the other explanation of Holy Sacrament and divine miracle. The end result is hope, and in some rare cases, love.
Though I live with the flower of human intellect and a lottery of chance, I serve the same god as you do. I get less trappings and more wine but perhaps we can get along. It’s not every day you walk out and say, “I am going out into the neighborhood today to save the world with my friends.” That is rare.
The Old Testament is filled with Holy Waters and every crafty herb and anointing oil. Thus religion and Narcotics Anonymous come together.
Blog Post Three
Practical Applications
The whole Christianity obsession thing is still going strong. The human mind is hard-wired to work better when there is some kind of spiritual belief system in place. Alcoholics and narcotics addicts swear by AA and NA and the god component in those programs. Even today when new groups search the soul, they almost always use a god component.
Jesus and his friends created a very significant form of performance art. It was like a designer drug specifically created to feed a hunger that they intuitively saw as a force in the world 2,000 years ago. People feared death as the end of life. They feared being alone in the world. They feared oppressive governments. They feared poverty and disease. They wanted miracles, and Jesus and his twelve friends gave them a faith tailor-made and crafted to fit their needs as carefully and responsively as a scientist would create a new designer drug to fit exactly the receptors in the mind that needed to be fed. The Christian event was one of spiritual feeding, and it really doesn’t matter that reason tells us there were frauds; the end result is the same. Mr. Jesus wanted you to pray to god. That is the end result. They want you to pray to god because they know your mind is several gears ahead if you have a spiritual relationship with somebody you can trust.