boobaroosaurusscan

Yes.  As the man said, driving the Interstate thru’ Pendleton, Oregon over 30 years ago, the Suruasooraboob was seen crossing the road.  I’ve been on a mission ever since.

Basically — don’t look for what is there.  Keep searching for what isn’t there.  Not long after, I formulated and internalized a kind of dictum-operandi:  it’s THE GLUE BETWEEN THINGS.

You don’t have to live in an area with big rivers to contend with the bridges …

We cross the bridge between day and night.  Between sleep and waking up to begin the day.  The job and what you do after the job.  What may seem ridiculous; what is actually sublime.  Dreams, wallowing in the mud.  Recently, many of my dreams seem to involve mud-wallowing.  Could it be I might find a diamond or gold while mucking about in the mire?

one of the WEIRDest

discoveries was, after    working for a fellow  named BEN BULBOUS  for a few years (and not knowing we worked for him)  was the chance stumbling upon a picture of W B Yeats’ gravestone.

“Cast a cold eye

on life, on death.

Horseman, pass by!”

From Under Ben Bulben (“Last Poems and 2 Plays” 1939).  And yes, it seems most of my friends are, in more ways than the merely corporeal-dispatched, expired in other aspects of “gone.”

Oh, poor lonely dino …  wandering the landscape seemingly alone.  But few things are as they seem.  You are never, really, very, alone.

I was part of a close-knit group of compahdres for most the teen-aged and early twenties years.  As we didn’t exactly have a mentor, considering ourselves more-or-less equals, we invented an entity whom we named BEN BULBOUS.  Little did we know, that perhaps Ben Bulbous, in a sense, invented us.  Below, Ben and his muse frolic at ocean’s edge …

Professor Bulbous re-entered our collective lives a few years later.  Aspiring psychology students, all (well, most) of us, we acquired research positions based in the Univ. of Colo. Muenzinger Psychology Center studying a fledgling and cutting-edge project tentatively called “Amphetamine Psychosis.”  The lead researcher was, to our surprise — Benjamin.  (At first we all were mind-blown.  Later some of us claimed that this wasn’t a ‘surprise’ — that Prof. B had, behind the scenes, arranged for this juxtaposition of serendipity and continued joint exploration all along).  Well, I was surprised.

Below, some of our research subjects on a rare supervised trip away from the facility.  They had to be chained together, as if not, they would wander off and cause trouble in three different places.  This way, if they shambled off, the trouble was usually confined to just one location, and we usually could find them fairly easily.  Before they got into more trouble.

We can’t verify this with a high degree of certainty, but we are darned sure a couple movie-writer/producers were aware of our work with Delmar, Everett, and Pete and based the main characters in a big budget movie they made many years later on them.  Everett had an obsession with hair gel, it was either Pete or Delmar who considered gophers and other ground-dwelling rodents a delicacy when roasted on a stick, and the other guy frequently thought he was in danger of transmogrifying into some sort of reptile.

Our work with Delmar, Pete, and Elliot was mild compared to the ever-elusive and seldom-seen Dopey.

And I thought we had endured enough dumpster-diving while previously unemployed as starving under-grad students.

After a few months of amphetamine-psychosis research, we were prepared for what Professor Bulbous called “the next steps.”

“Look for the energy vortexes.  You might actually see the lines connecting many different life forms.”

Watch the river.  But, remember, that is but a small part of what is going on .

The river is watching you.  And there’s no way you can even begin to think you know what it’s thinking.

It might be safe to say that “Pete” (or whoever this is, below) is not only fascinated by the river, hypnotized by it, but

about to surrender part, or all, of his life-force to it.

Under Ben Bulben?

Or is Ben Bulben under everything?  W B Yeats was no light-weight …

Okay, this doesn’t have much to do with anything, but Everett, having briefly come home for a visit,

presents an ichthylogical present to his not-too-obviously-excited mom.

Delmar, temporarily free from the toadal and/or froggy influences, has a message which hopefully will deter Gort from destroying the whirled:

GORT!  KLAATU BARADA NIK-TOE !