My Date With Fractal Time

Anyone who's ever looked into novelty theory - you know, Terrence McKenna's theoretical exposition underlying and centered around the (in)famous Timewave Zero program that first and most famously highlighted the possible importance of the date 2012/02/21, at least for those of us in the West - has doubtlessly come across the concept that time is fractal, that is, that rather than being simply a featureless metric against which the accumulation of history is measured, it has a certain structure to it, one in which similar archetypal patterns of events repeat in a self-similar (though not identical) pattern at all scales of time. Thus, for example, the rise and fall of an empire might be reflected in the story of a business mogul's life or the events of a single day. Of course, it's possible that you've never heard of McKenna or the Timewave but have noticed this very same dynamic on your own, simply through observing history, and if that's the case then my hat goes off to you as being a profoundly observant and original thinker.

At any rate, this past Sunday I was given a vivid demonstration of this dynamic, in the context of what I believe to be a very important life lesson. It was nothing so grand as the rise and fall of a great empire, mind; but it was for me something just as significant. You see, I experienced a recapitulation of my entire romantic life in the space of a single day, and if you follow along with this piece you'll learn more than you've ever known about me. Quite possibly far more than you wanted to know for things may come out here that may well change how you view me, aspects of my shadow self that I myself prefer not to dwell on though I am, of course, quite aware of and ... in the final analysis, it is perhaps best to be fully open about. For concealment, after all, is the very definition of lying and lies are not what this blog is about although they are of great relevence to this particular post.

Let me define terms, here. By 'romantic life' I really mean, the ways in which I've interacted and can interact with the female energy of the cosmos.

Backing up a bit ... for some time now I've had a profile up at a certain large dating site. A month or two ago I updated it, for the first time in a long time, in order to let the ladies know I no longer lived in Tokyo and of course to change my profile information to more accurately describe the person I'd come to be at that point. I searched a couple of time, finding two lovely young women who seemed in many ways exactly what I was looking for, but neither of them replied to my overtures and for the most part I simply kept an eye on anyone who viewed my profile or whoever the algorithms determined I was a good match with (and which determinations were, as a rule and not at all unsurprisingly, utterly worthless.)

Now, I know what you're thinking. Come on, man, a dating website? Really? Don't you know how dodgy those things are?

Well, yes I do know as a matter of fact, and of course also knew, and realizing the deeper reasons for why that's the case is a large part of what the lesson was but I'll be getting to that.

Of course, using an online dating service is mark of desperation, isn't it? Well, it has been a long time, and especially so since I had a real relationship with emotional and spiritual levels of committment and so admittedly I had reached a certain point of, not despair so much as a deep and aching loneliness.

I haven't been limiting myself to a dating website, of course. Though I'm also not in a position to really go looking for a mate, isolated as I am for the most part in cottage country. However, that's no reason no to be proactive about things, and so it was sometime in the past month that I sat down one night and defined, for myself, my ideal mate. Not in overly specific terms, or at least I don't think so, but rather, in broad outlines, I described to myself the kind of person - body, mind and soul - that I wished to meet. Since then, periodically, she (whoever she may be) has come to me in the midst of my meditations (or prayers? Increasingly I make little distinction) usually at my own behest but sometimes at her own. I've seen her, seen flashes of our life together drawn in the holographic imaging system of the imagination, whilst feeling our love radiate from my heart to suffuse every moment with a its glow.

And so, of course, I set in motion the process by which the world will guide us together, knowing not when or how it will happen, simply that it will. Until such a time and for such a one I'm 'saving myself' as the euphamism goes amongst those who most often call themselves Saved, for when I meet her I want there to be nothing standing between us.

It was with this in mind that I found myself on a date this past Sunday. I found her, of course, through the aforementioned dating site and this was by stumbling upon her picture whilst searching for a suitable candidate from amidst a seemingly endless parade of deeply uninteresting faces. I was reviewing another - her friend - and saw a blurb she had written at the bottom extolling the friend's virtues and, intrigued, clicked through to see her own profile. Her picture was quite attractive and there were aspects of her profile that triggered a certain 'button' within my sexual psyche that I'm hesitant to discuss, whose disclosure I've been mulling over for some time and am currently with some difficulty forcing myself to get out because it is, I believe, of some relevence to this tale and ... I'd rather this kind of thing was revealed by my own hand, for it's utility as a potential weapon is in that way largely nullified ... and its efficacy in healing is that much more enhanced. That, and it's a quarter past two in the morning, a fine hour of the day for rash disclosures.

Well, now that I've got you all squirming in your seats wondering what terrible grinning skeleton I'm about to jerk out of the closet and and commence a macabre dance ... What, you are asking yourselves, is the big secret?

This kind of thing turns me on.

Now some of you are no doubt disgusted (as a part of my own personality is.) Others are bemused. Still others are probably chuckling to themselves thinking, 'that's all?' while others - those who know me, perhaps, in on offline context - are thinking, ah-hah! That explains some things that didn't make any sense before. It's a rare and odd kink, I know, and not something I'm proud of ... its origins and significance I've only recently started to come to terms with, though it springs from an early experience so deep and overwhelming that its effects on my psyche may well never be fully dealt with. There are quite a bit of things I could go into in that direction but it is beyond the scope of this current post and so, I'll just leave the map that territory undrawn for now and get on with the story.

So, the profile of this woman pushed that button; what was of course just as important, she seemed attractive enough; from the information available her personality seemed congenial enough and so the combination of these influences was enough to motivate me to forgive the small defect 'a few extra pounds' ('a few' to me suggesting just what it is, a numeric and not a literal handful) and the observation that she was not, perhaps, as activated a person as I might have liked (which observation later led me to have the premonition that our paths were meant to intersect perhaps precisely so my influence might help begin the process of her own activation.) I sent her a message, to which she replied; the flirtation moved to instant messaging; and before long, a date was settled upon. Throughout this she seemed perfectly charming, and my beguilement grew to a pitch of anticipation. Perhaps, I dared myself to speculate, she might be the one?

Of course I knew it would not be, as one so often does, and yet I did not listen to that inner voice and so ... the lesson began.

The night before, I slept at a friends' place, and began the day with them and their two children, a one year old boy and a four year old girl. Their daughter is a wonderful, bright, enthusiastic energetic and sunny child that I get along with effortlessly in a sort of 'cool uncle' mode, and whenever I go over there we inevitably spend some time playing together. Thus my morning featured a miniature recapitulation of my own childhood relationship with females, the uncomplicated and innocent mutual pursuit of simple fun and laughter. That the parents are high school friends of mine - and the father, an elementary school friend (with whom I spent the rest of the morning playing Magic: The Gathering, the sort of activity I loved as a child) the sense that the morning was in many ways symbolic of my childhood becomes for me even stronger.

Afternoon, of course, came, and with it the lunch date. My friends drove me into town, I bid them goodbye and went on my way to the pub, where I waited until she arrived, centering myself and going through a chakra-opening visualization in order that I might be fully centered when she came and....

She'd warned me she was short, which she was, but were you to balance us on a scale I believe she'd likely tip me in the air. I am not by any means small, so that perhaps gives you some idea. There was in addition a mustache and a hairy mole, neither of which were present in any of the (apparently dated) pictures just as the gap between every single tooth had been so artfully concealed. Of course the back of my mind immediately went into overdrive, alert for any way to draw the encounter to a close at the earliest graceful opportunity. At the same time another part of me was struck speechless, for not two days before I'd emphasized to her, over MSN, the importance to me of truth, as a principal (perhaps she'd thought I'd just been saying it because I liked the sound of the word?)

In keeping with the theme of this essay, let me mention that my first sexual experience (not my first girlfriend, mind you) was with a girl whose face was not at all unattractive, but who was quite ... husky and whom I selected as a vessel with which to put an end to my virginity due primarily to adolescent desperation. In retrospect that was a poor choice whose consequences lingered for quite some time, and my encounter with this woman was a stark reminder of that episode, though thankfully confined to an hour and a half rather than months.

Well, we finished our food - and she is lucky to have gotten my company for even that duration, for many men would not have given her even that much after their expectations were so betrayed, and one of my friends went so far as to say that she would have simply stated 'Sorry, wrong person', gotten up and left - after which I made up an excuse and fled, regrouping shortly after at my sister's house where, upon stepping in the front door, I learned that my presence was urgently required at the artists' coop where she works. Thus drafted and so with no time to mope I went over to the store, where I spent the next few hours lifting heavy things, sawing wood, and helping the artists to redecorate.

As soon as I walked in the door my sister asked, of course, how the date had gone and at my curt reply one of her friends looked over, our eyes met and a spark that I felt through my whole being seemed to jump through our gaze. I was instantly certain the attraction was mutual and over the next few hours casual touch and verbal flirtation more than confirmed that intuition. An interesting thing was that the pull was so strong that although the little button I mentioned earlier wasn't being pushed, I couldn't have cared less and ... when I later found out that she did push that button, it seemed the most natural thing, given everything about her, a normal outgrowth of who she was and thus nothing at all to be ashamed of.

In virtually every way this amazing young woman lived up to the 'ideal', as I've conceived it. Self-actualized, creative, intuitive, independent, wise beyond her years and in my eyes very attractive. That said she is also 19 and lives with her mother a fair distance from me (who in turn lives with his parents) so I don't expect anything to happen between us however ... the very fact of her age is perhaps significant because in this tale she stands in for my second girlfriend and first love, who embodied and expressed many of the same virtues, albeit in a less developed or conscious fashion (and whom I expect was in many ways perhaps a reverse temporal echo of the woman I will, I am more sure now than ever, be united ... or is it reunited? No telling what has happened in previous rounds through the material plane....)

Now, let's review. There is a key point that is being illustrated here, which is quite obvious I think once you see it, but which I want to emphasize. In the former case, I went looking for a certain set of attributes, and as a result creations of artifice lodged as figments in my imagination and I was led down a primrose path towards a dead end of disappointment. In the second, I met entirely by chance, while not looking for anything at all, a far more congenial dance partner who expressed all the attributes I am looking for, with whom our interactions and discoveries were in every respect both spontaneous and delightful. The lesson I think is a clear one: essentially, Life was telling me that the way I am going to find my soul mate is not by looking for her, but simply by being so clear about who she is that when fate draws us together I will know, well free of any creeper of doubt, that this is the One.

The story is not over yet, for our ways parted for the night long before the night, for me, was over, and I found myself at a small housewarming party whose hostess was a graduate student, slightly older than myself. She'd completely remodelled the interior of the house so that the living room was dominated not by a ring of couches around a screen but by a bar and its surrounding stools, behind which she stood for most of the evening mixing a drink I dubbed the sangrita (wine mixed with frozen organic fruit.) A few of her friends, other grad students from the same department, were present at the intimate gathering and as the ice was broken I had the opportunity of several fascinating and enlightening discussions that have strengthened my certainty in an oncoming intellectual revolution within the moribund departments of an academia fragmented by hyperspecialization, whose various incoherent disciplines profer understandings of the world that offer fantastic detail on their own but taken together make no sense at all ... an intellectual (or is it a spiritual?) revolution understood in its principls if not all of its details by many if not all of the fine minds that grace this blog with their readership, and whose nature I will thus say no more about here.

One by one those friends of hers left (at each occasion, the hostess or one of the other remaining revelers would ring a fire bell, for she seemed determine to alienate every property-value conscious yuppie neighbor within earshot ... blind as they are to the essential part people such as her play in the gentrification without which their property values would go nowhere) and as if I'd passed a test by earning at least the tentative intellectual respect of her friends I found myself in conversation with the hostess herself. Her head was shaved, and full sleeves of ink coverded both arms, a butch appearance that takes a great deal of courage for a woman to adopt (yes, it does take courage, even if she's a lesbian ... which she might be and ... well, some of my best friends are lesbians....) Beneath that appearance, as though deliberately concealed, lay a striking beauty, and as it transpired she was also entirely brilliant, not to mention aware and activated in a way few yet are. We made contact very quickly at a level that was more spiritual than physical, and before long I found myself slightly besotted (and yes, both of us were also a bit sotted, myself only a bit and her more than that but not at all to the point of embarrasment.)

You'll have noticed perhaps that I failed totally to mention a certain hot button issue ... and here, too, there was a lesson, a certain emphasis upon the crucial importance of careful attention to the deeper issues of the soul, of the necessity of looking beneath surface appearances and moving beyond the mere physical reactions of chemistry in order to make space for the more refined actions of alchemy. The former is a necessary precursor, of course, for the latter to take place but ... it cannot be the sole or even primary focus.

Thus it is that this fascinating woman represents, perhaps, some taste of what the future has in store for me and that, my dear and patient readers, is the story of how I was given a recapitulation of the significant features of my romantic history within a single day. I'm still reeling from it all myself as you can no doubt tell however ... I also feel that I have learned a great deal, or at the very least gained some small grains of wisdom with which to continue the quest that this aspect of my life has been and for now continues to be.

And that, I think, seems a good place to wrap this up.