Front PagePage TwoRecent OfferingsWeekly MagazineHoroscopesSubscribe!Feedback
Feb. 21 | More Fishy Times

I HAVE a feeling that this is going to be an impressive Mercury retrograde in Pisces, as far as the whole 'transparency of reality' issue is concerned. Yet the utter strangeness of this moment in history is how see-through it's all become -- and how little this seems to move anything or anyone.

I am aware that there are a LOT of concerned and attentive people; most of them don't know what to do. Many others are just stunned and at times this seems like a deer in the headlights kind of thing. And I've noticed this before. I was working earlier today (miraculously) on a chapter in my Planet Waves book, which project I last worked on the day the levee broke in New Orleans: today's chapter is called "When Nobody Believes the Truth (or Why I Became an Astrologer)."

The theme is, when you violate the T.S. Eliot idea that "human kind cannot stand very much reality," you start to go nowhere fast. Astrology makes the shift toward fiction; toward suspension of disbelief; the mythological world is invoked; there is a story being told that is longer than the news cycle; longer than a presidential term; longer than a generation; longer than the history of a nation. And people show up looking for something, looking to be helped or help themselves, ready to grow, wanting to have a real conversation -- much more often than in the field of (for example) toxins fraud.

When it comes to toxins, all people want is to be told it's safe -- by somebody or anybody.

What's happening in our world is shocking, and yet my spiritual training warns me off of getting too emotionally involved or lending it too much credence. At the same time, I follow the basic idea of "notice what I am aware of."

And somewhere in there is this process, sometimes subtle, sometimes not, is the art of choosing one's reality.

I have seen a lot of weird stuff go by my desk, or happen in the world, since the age of 18, when I started taking reporting seriously. The weirdest of it has been people in suits, smiling, willing to kill people because it's their job: state officials whose job it was to move people back into a contaminated neighborhood called Love Canal, for example.

I've also seen a lot of pretty mundane things that most "normal" people around me felt were absurd and then which in actual fact were true, or came true; covering education in New York State, for example, I was aware of a legislative plan for public college tuition to go to go up five-fold in a very short time, after a long tuition freeze. Most rational people thought my friends and I were morons and conspiracy theorists. And yet...tuition was soon five times what it was, in direct violation of the university's mission, keeping a lot of the poorer students out.

Over and over, I've watched people tell me the most outrageous lies, right to my face, sure I would believe them. And people get pissed off when you don't believe their lies. And at the same time, it's necessary to entertain possibilities that other people think are just absurd. In a sense, one must have boundaries, but they need to be moving boundaries. Walls need doors; doors need locks that open and shut.

Shortly after I set aside full time work covering environmental fraud, where I discovered things that really would defy the imagination of even of somebody like Aldus Huxley, I wound up working for these lawyers who needed me to get their story into The New York Times. I was hired to write and design one of those ads that appears on the Op-Ed page, usually for Exxon or somebody like that, making their case to the public, and to the state and national political communities. I'll see if I can find a link to the text, it must be out there somewhere.

The advertorial explained what some would say was a really over-the-top conspiracy -- but a well-documented one -- for several political bosses to control the judicial system in New York State, essentially robbing voters of their choice of candidates. In other words, my job was to explain in The Times how judicial elections were rigged.

Well, I did the piece, and we got into the Times, right onto the Op-Ed page, widely read on all levels of government. Then the phone at this mansion I was working out of rang a lot. I answered one time, and this guy said, listen, I've got a really big story.

I said, well, okay. If you want to tell me about it, I'll listen -- but now is not the time. Meet me in New Paltz this weekend at the Main Street Bistro for lunch. He agreed. I picked a big, crowded restaurant where at any given time I might know 10 people in the room, including the wait staff and often the kitchen.

So, I showed up and the guy showed up, and we got a table. It was a fairly large round table, and the restaurant was pretty full on a Saturday afternoon. He produced an envelope and emptied the contents, and spread these documents out, covering the whole tabletop like a kind of collage. Newspaper editorials, clippings, other stuff...what turned out to be his evidence of a Grand Conspiracy Theory of It All, with bits and pieces supposedly supported by things like The Wall Street Journal. I recognized some elements; others were new; others were really scary, including bits from something called HAARP, the 'nonlethal' weapons program that actually does exist and has started come to the surface in recent years. To him, it all fit together into something else.

He seemed authentic, if a bit strange. But as a journalist, including one who specialized in putting together thousands of pieces of very large puzzles, and having at times to trust people I didn't necessarily know so well, I did not like the energy. It was all feeling very slippery and astral.

Meanwhile, we ordered lunch, or rather I did.

He didn't know what to get, so I ordered him another of what I was getting, this kind of rice plate with tofu and vegetables. When the meal came, he wouldn't eat his because he was sure it was poisoned. This pretty well stunned me, mostly because I knew the staff of the restaurant and ate there all the time and the notion of...well, you get it.

Then I noticed that he had about 20 tiny acupuncture needles in his right ear, neatly placed in a little spiral, going around and into his ear canal. It looked pretty cool...very scifi, like these cosmic radio antennae, but it was genuinely strange. I don't think that's what tipped the scales for me: it might have been his fear of getting poisoned. It might have been something he said. Something was not adding up. Something made me doubt who he was, and what his intentions were. In retrospect, he was just a nut case with a theory and a few documents (kind of like some people said about me!).

I got on-the-spot guidance for what to do. Without even thinking, I left money on the table, stood up, and said in a clear voice something akin to, "I don't want any part of this" -- and walked out. Come to think of it, I probably went home and did something really sensible -- study how planets and bits of space dust shape consciousness and history.


--------

Here is the ad from The New York Times, describing what is called judicial cross endorsement. It's just the cached copy of the text from Google -- not my rather nice presentation. http://snipurl.com/mrs7