God Is an Anarchist, Part 8: Laughing Mormon Jazz

I was almost gonna end the book on that last chapter.

I probably shouldn't indulge myself, but I had this dream on Mikey’s last night, and to leave it out would be too fucking sad.

Anyway, I'll make it quick.

When I faded off to sleep that night, I guess it was Mikey's slow, steady breathing that created the whole atmosphere of this dream.

I was floating into a massive gray sky — somehow more endless than a clear, blue sky — and was out by the sea and the waves were coming in and out.

I floated over a massive sand dune that kind of reminded me of Mt. Baldy in Michigan City, and there was a tower to my right, like something out of a Salvador Dali painting. And in the background a bunch of smokestacks. I was floating out to the sea between Sekiya Beach and Higashi Ward. Just southwest of Minato Tunnel. Niigata City.

I had ridden my bike out there alone when I first arrived, and the sites of the tetrapods neatly stacked on the shore, and the abandoned, washed out parks and beat up paths and moss-covered pedestrian underpasses really tripped me out in the best kind of way. I was still trying to shake my mental torment, too, and all the guilt at the time. And there was no more fucked up anarchist Mikey to help me. 

Well, in this dream I fell down and started rolling through the sand, and a girl named Rebecca I knew from college was waiting for me at the bottom.

When I finally got to her I gave her a big hug. There was such a feeling of warmth coming from her in this dream that I just started crying. Her hair was stuck to my face in the tears and she just said: “Don’t be embarrassed.”

Well, she vanished, and then I was looking out across the sea, knowing it ended at Korea, Russia, China — but that just made it seem all the more infinite, in a way.

Once, when he had been preaching at me in Indiana, Mikey said that a drop of the ocean is in a way the same thing as the whole ocean, and in a way also infinitely smaller and that the moron fucks would never be able to understand this. At the time I had felt like a moron fuck but I finally think I get it now.

We're all kinda god — and there's no robbery in saying that — but at the same time to underestimate our idiocy would also be a mistake. Best you can do is follow logic and if you fuck up, fix it, he had said. Otherwise all you can do is listen to other people and get derailed.

Anyway, after Rebecca was gone, the whole gray sky dissolved and exploded into this big brilliant blue, with a fat, warm sun glowing hot above our heads.

Mikey said he understood why people worshipped it.

I did, too.

The sun washed over the satsuki azaleas and pine needles and sand, and made this intoxicating aroma — it made me want to find the nearest respectable female and start a tribal beach family.

At the exact moment I was having this stupid fantasy about primal, mind-blowing sex with a dark-skinned tribal girl on the beach, two Mormons passed by. 

They spotted me immediately in the dream the way monsters do right when you think about them. They still had on their goofy bicycle helmets and sweaty white shirts — with name tags calling the super young, awkward kids “elders” — and black ties, even in this hot weather.

I was sitting at a beach house in the dream with an icy-cold beer — there's nothing colder than a draft beer in Japan — in front of me. The guy who owned the place in the dream was named Hiroto, and he was playing some weird classic jazz version of the Blue Hearts’ “Aozora” on an old radio.

I could tell the Mormons thought I’d be an easy target. A fellow Westerner, alone, looking insecure. I just wanted them to go away.

And I was an easy target, too. I always had been. Mikey told me that, too. He said I shoved down my skepticism and gut feelings too much for the sake of pleasing others. 

It's not bad that you like other people so much. But it's bad that you let them take your time and fuck you over so easily. It’s okay to hurt people’s feelings sometimes. Sometimes, they need it.

I smiled at the Mormons, remembering his advice, and when they asked if they could talk to me about God, I said only if you have a beer with me. The boys gave nervous excuses as to why they couldn’t — because of course they couldn’t or they’d be kicked out of their whole travel, missionary thing — and moved along. I wanted to hug them, too.

Mikey appeared beside me giggling.

They can't even have one tiny beer with you to save your ENTIRE SOUL FROM THE ETERNAL FIRES OF HELL!

Ahahahahahahah! I guess you really are a piece of shit, bro!

Mikey burst into a huge fit of laughter here, shaking and convulsing with his arm around me. And I suddenly felt this wonderful recognition. A tidal wave of euphoria and pure understanding, as if the whole thing was like a big, beautiful, and hilarious game! And now I wanted to share the savagely ingenious, tender-loving punchline with everyone.

But as soon as I got it, it was gone, and I still couldn’t grasp it. Not even in the dream. That “G spot of the universe.”

Well, I knew there was love. Even if it’s not a lot, or any at all, at times. But it does happen in life. Even saving a cat from the road is proof.

And if love is possible at all, like Mikey said, there’s gotta be complete freedom — or else it would just be robotics. Complete freedom, even if that means the possibility of unspeakably horrible things. It’s people doing this stuff to each other as far as I can tell, anyway, Mikey had said. Never saw god come down and launch a drone strike. Never saw god molest a kid. It’s people that do that shit.

It’s the politicians Mikey wants to string up. The unrepentant cops that get away with murder he wants to see lying in the street bloody, stiff, and rotting in the sun — no longer a threat. It’s the priests playing god and destroying a child’s innocence. 

I do understand the objections. Why would god — if there is a “God” as such — let such evil things like kids getting cancer or getting raped, happen at all? I don’t fuckin’ know.

Any answer would be wrong. Any answer would just be stupid. I guess that’s why the Zen monks say it’s better not to talk sometimes.

I took off all my clothes and ran down to the sea, jumping in, and feeling amazing as the water washed over my naked body, dissolving all thinking into nothingness.

The fish swimming around the sunken tetrapods looked up from below, eyeing me skittishly. We observed each other for a weird instant, and then they darted away.