Beyond the Veil of this Mortal Coil, Childhood's Imaginative Proclamation

The Tower of Brahma. Chapter 42. it healed me father. (edit)

01/31/06

THIS, is my favorite chapter. I was so busy writing and living out the chapters from here on out that this one didn't jump out at me at the time, but now editing it, I see it's probably the most important.

With this book, I wasn't just writing a fictional account of my life, blending the mundane and the fantastic as always did in my head when I was a kid, but I was mythologizing my entire life. I was taking moments and obstacles and people I knew and re-creating this past so that I could make sense of my life. I was raised by television shows and movies. It's how I saw life up until I started this book, a fact that made my ordinary life pale in comparison, sending me spiraling into a depression and acceptance of suburban ordinariness.

But then this book, loosely based on a screenplay I wrote in college, redefined as a cry for help disguised as a wish fulfillment fantasy that embraced all of the influences, interests, and defining moments of my life and rolled it all into an adventure pulp, part-Beat Generation in Tarantino black suits, part-70's sci-fi paperback, bohemian nihilistic secret agency shootouts and Eastern enlightenment enmeshed in the poetic.

This chapter deals with something I truly feel did change my entire life, when I choked to death on a hot dog, about four years old. I was told the story, and ultimately why I couldn't have hot dogs for most of my life (a reason I savor them now), and I always tried to imagine the scene, seeing my father in action. I also talk about CODENAME: HOTSHOT, a kid superspy persona that made me carry all sorts of broken 80's clunky gadgets around with me, and brushes upon my obsession with superspeed, which is obviously the greatest superpower of all time. These were the characters I would imagine myself to be while out in public, flipping and crashing into the scenery around me, looking over my shoulder for a double-cross ambush of mystical ninjas.

My ultimate fear is that I'm dead. That the hotdog I choked on has actually killed me, and if you haven't seen Jacob's Ladder, or Waking Life, well, my fear is that this is all a delusional on my dying brain, things getting more and more fantastic as I grow closer to brain death.