Canto Twenty-Two – A Beach-Front Home
I followed the naked girl and her pet red panda about a mile along the beach. She skipped and sang songs in a language I didn’t recognize, but sounded a lot like the Filipino language. The panda sported about like a playful puppy, following her devotedly. I didn’t think you found red pandas on small Pacific islands like the one we were on, but it didn’t matter what I thought. I was no scientist or naturalist, so I didn’t really know. I kept looking worriedly out to sea. I mean, I did know for a fact that Chinooki the mermaid could eat people.
“We have been coming to this house, my tahanan,” she said proudly, showing me a beached submarine from World War Two. It had a large rising sun flag from the Empire of Japan painted on the conning tower.
“You live in a submarine?”
“It is where Mangkukulan wants me to stay while we wait for the volcano.”
“Oh. It’s like that, is it? Well, show me. Do you have any guns aboard? Or swords? Something to protect us from Chinooki?”
“Oh, silly captain man, Chinooki serves Mangkukulan. She will not be harming me. And she is ordered not to be hurting you also.”
I was a little worried about the actual intentions of this coo-coo man. I didn’t think he really had Malutu’s best interests at heart. Not if he meant to toss her naked into an erupting volcano. I followed her warily up the side of the submarine and down into a hatch near the nose.
“My goodness, this is certainly rusty and rather dreary,” I said as I surveyed the narrow candle-lit corridor in the center of the submarine. I followed her into the forward section where I really expected to see a forward torpedo room. I found, however, that it had been hollowed out, lined with bamboo, and turned into a cozy and rather decent living space. It had a bed in the center of the not over-large room. There was a potbellied stove that had obviously been put there for cooking. The room was also decorated with carved wooden idols. They were the kind of Tiki idols that you could buy in Honolulu if you were a tourist who liked kitschy stuff to decorate your porch back in Iowa with. Especially one large ugly idol with a man-like body and wearing a frightful carved mask.
“You have a nice home here. Didn’t you say something about clothes you could put on?”
“Oh, yes. Or… you could be getting naked too, Captain.”
“No, no. Put on a dress please. You need to be decent around me.”
She pulled out a rather nice red cloth dress with a white flower pattern on it. It was a Hawaiian sort of wrap-around affair.
“This okay? Or are you wanting the kimono?”
“That one is fine. You are very beautiful like that.”
“Yes, I am being beautiful for you. It is being important that I get you to like me very, very much.”
“Oh, yes?”
“I am liking you. But I must be telling Mangkukulan that you are here now. Chinooki has done well.”
“Um, maybe we can hold off a bit on telling the coo-coo man.”
“Why? I am supposed to be telling him immediately… faster if it is being possible.”
“Are you sure that coo-coo man has our best interests at heart? I mean, it seems to me like he might be trying to hurt us in some way.” I was imagining being tossed into the volcano along with the girl.
“Oh, no. This he will not be doing. I will be sending the juju to tell him you are here.”
She went over to the biggest, ugliest Tiki idol and tapped his tattoos, once each until she had tapped them all. And she sang;
“Juju do dah goodah… oojie-magoober!” Purple smoke poured out of the top of the Tiki’s head and filled the room with a smell like burnt sugar.
“Is that a magic spell or something?”
“Yes, it is being something. We are wanting you to be very comfortable here, Captain mans. Will you not be taking off your clothes?”
“I most certainly will not.”
“Okay. We will be doing the talking about it. You will see.”
To my utter shock and horror, the Tiki man began to glow with an unearthly greenish-blue light. He moved as if he were alive and trying to shake himself awake.
“It’s alive?”
“Don’t be being silly. It is made of wood. But, Oojie-magoober, please be telling Mangkukulan that the Captain is here.”
“Juju doo dah! Yaya!” said the wooden creature. Then it scampered out of the room and out of the submarine.
“You are liking Malutu, yes?” she asked me.
“Yes. You are very beautiful.”
“Good-good! Now you will be taking off your clothes, Captain.” And just like that she had me naked. I was as much under her spell as the wooden Tiki man.
Catch a Falling Star 
Dancing With Alan Watts
It seems sometimes, in a Judaeo-Christian society, that we are a constantly being scrutinized by a rather harsh all-knowing God who rewards getting the faith-words accurately correct, to the letter, and the faith-based actions perfect, without a single mistake. And He punishes missteps of word or deed with pain and suffering and the potential of an eternity in Sheol or Hell. And that is a tough God to live with. He is like a teacher who uses his or her God-like powers to reward or punish to lead his students all down an exacting, narrow path to a destination that does not have room for everyone when they arrive.
It doesn’t take long in childhood for a highly intelligent person to realize before childhood is over that this cosmology is actually a load of horse pucky. It didn’t even take long for somebody as semi-stupid as me.
What I like about listening on YouTube to the wisdom of Alan Watts is that he gives us an alternative way of seeing the universe and ourselves. This he can offer through his studies of Eastern and Buddhist philosophies. Everything appealing in John Lennon’s signature song “Imagine” comes from Lennon’s love of listening to the lectures of Alan Watts. He is obviously a wise-guy.
Alan Watts teaches us the pathways that lead to finding yourself, who you truly are, and how you fit into the universe as a whole. When Carl Sagan says that we are all made of star-stuff, he is not only telling us what is literally true, as the elements our bodies were formed from were literally made in the nuclear forges at the centers of stars that later exploded in nova-bursts to scatter the elements across the skies of everywhere. He is also telling us that what Alan Watts says is metaphorically true, that everything in the universe is part of the same thing and we are all one in this way.
There is plenty to worry about in my little life. I could easily drop dead at any time from any one of my six incurable diseases or even the return of the skin cancer I beat in 1983. I suffer from the consequences of disease daily, as I have for many years now. My sins are many. I broke my promise the other day to never show you the horrors of my naked body on this blog. I constantly eat the wrong thing and continue to do things that I know are bad for the environment and the health of my body. I am prejudiced against racists, stupidity, and the actions of dedicated Trump-lovers. In many ways I deserve God’s wrath and brutal correction. I have come to truly believe that climate change is going to end life on Earth. I am horrible.
But I have learned from Alan Watts that all of those concerns mean nothing. I don’t believe in Heaven or an afterlife. But I do not fear death. I am one with the universe. And the universe goes on even if I do not. And I will always be a part of it, even after I am no longer alive. The universe has a mind and is intelligent And I take part in that because one small part of that intelligence is me, and lives in my head.
There is comfort to be found in the words of Alan Watts. And living in pain as I do, I really need that comfort most of the time. That is why I have attempted to share a bit of that comfort with you.
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