Amiria of the Green Tara.

 This is a love-letter eulogy for my friend Amiria. That's her in black on the right making herself a cup of tea at my art show at Newtown Library in 2010.

In my old age I find myself weeping a lot, beautiful music, fond memories, heart-rending news items, uplifting movies, sweet friends gone to dust, oh how painfully exquisite this phenomena called human life is. When I was a young wanderer in India in 1973 an old fakir on the street read my palm and told me I'd live till I was 87 and I thought, "How fabulous!" I overlooked the old sore that I'd thus have to watch my friends leave or die, one by one, and I myself drift slowly into infirmity and possible dementia, (oh wondrous Universe, take me quickly while I'm on the road with my brains intact.)

















For all my queerness, many women played intense, influential roles in my human drama, there were 7 golden females in particular who found a special place in my heart and informed my soul. I've written about one of them already, Nicorette, Queen of the Zombies, maybe the last as I'm now tired and too fucked up to have time for any more Amazons. But I want to write of another of the 7, Amiria, who died recently, still young, beautiful, courageous, compassionate, and my life is depleted by her passing into the vale of shadows.

I met her in passing at the Piccolo Cafe on Kings Cross in the late '80s, we didn't particularly connect but had an affinity, she was a hardcore rock'n'roll gal, punk/metal, intelligent, tough and very good looking, a Maori escaped from New Zealand to try for a new life in Sydney. Then in 1993 my undoing unfolded, I was framed by two ugly, corrupt cops for an armed robbery on my local cake-shop which was my karma for being a bad cake addict. The pigs piled up lots of incriminating, circumstantial shit to hold against me when there was all the proof in the world that I didn't commit this stupid crime but the cops had it in for me because of all my "civil disobedience performance art" and being lazy, stupid dicks, they couldn't be bothered to hunt down the real perp.

One definite piece of evidence in my favour was a water-tight alibi, for at the exact time of the crime I was wandering about Kings Cross and just happened to pass by Amiria where she sat serving cigs at a tobacconists' shop outside the railway station. Thankfully I said "Hello" to which she smiled and returned my greeting. She then happened to look up at the clock to see if it was time for the commuters' rush, 3.45pm, and she remembered this clearly and swore she would go witness for my defense at my gruesomely grand trial. Most people don't want to get involved in others' troubles, especially when it involves the police, yet Amiria was a staunch defender of justice, she had to go to the copshop and give statements to the pigs over and over and she did this with amused elan, laughing at the pigs, twisting them around her little finger, the fools fell for her, she was twice as attractive as the two scrags whom they'd gotten to finger me in the line-up.

When I finally got a barrister Amiria attended his question-sessions unhesitatingly, charming him also, he was more willing to defend me pro-bono when he saw I had such good friends as her. After 2 years of house arrest and mental torture my trial came up and, without me asking her to, on day one when she wasn't needed to give testimony, (the trial was to go for 2 fucking weeks), she came all the way out to Campbeltown on the far edge of Sydney city to lend me moral support, and she was sorely needed. When I showed up outside the courthouse there was a pack of television cameras and reporters creating a huge ballyhoo and I thought they were there for horrible little me but my barrister just pushed me thru them, they parted like a shit-storm, ignoring me, they were there for someone else, Ivan Milat, the backpacker killer.

The monster was being tried in the courtroom right next to mine and all thru my short trial Amiria sneaked into Milat's undoing then reported back to me in whispers what he was like, what was going on, creeping me out and making it hard for me to concentrate on my own fucking make or break deal. The shop-assistant bitches who had colluded with the cops to frame me couldn't agree on the description of the felon who robbed them and so my trial only lasted the morning, Amiria didn't have to take the stand after all, I was acquitted and set free but eternally grateful to Amiria ever after for sticking up for me so resolutely.

And so we were best friends for the next 17 years, she bought me dinner when I was broke and hungry, soothed my nerves when I was having my 21st nervous breakdown and gave me endless gifts of treasures she'd bought at auction, for example my favorite framed print , a white stallion dancing by the sea on a stormy night by Delacroix. She was very headstrong, knowledgeable, and there were times we argued and fell out, over politics, philosophy, love, but always got back together again for we were kindred souls. She developed an especial affection for the Tibetan people and followed their version of Buddhism, meeting the Dalai Lama, working 7 nights a week as a nurse in Emergency at Prince Alfred Hospital and donating much of her wages to the Tibetan cause, establishing a temple in the Blue Mts or helping the downtrodden, ravaged people in their homeland, she was selfless and unstinting, and impressed me mightily with her dedication.

She came to my art show in Newtown to support me as she's always done, without me asking her to and, lucky for me, I took her to dinner not too long before I left on my latest sojourn to India and I got to smile into her eyes one last time. She was the definition of "friend", the Green One, and I will ever look into the passing crowd and imagine I see her and hope I can get to be in her presence one more time. Sydney already palls on me and now, without her, it will be that much harder to bear. The toughest thing in life is to say goodbye to a loved one, but if every sub-atomic particle has multiple histories then the multi-verse is a reality and there would be many versions of "us", so maybe we will meet again. In the quantum flux every particle is connected to every other particle, all is one, we can never be separated anyway. "Farewell Amiria, you are loved by many."

P.S. In the early new year I researched Tara the Green Goddess and was surprised my intuition of Her connection with Amiria rang true for She is the Protector from harm and ill will. A few days before I left India I watched as my last movie "Contact" on cable-TV, amazed at the synchronicity that has indeed followed me thru.out my life. For if you know the plot, Jody Foster gets taken deep into outer-space in an alien machine, thru endless worm-holes, and shown the vastness of the Universe, its infinite potential and beauty, and there she meets her dead beloved father on a sandy beach overhung with coconut trees. He tells her she is not alone, she is loved and will never be seperated from her loved ones for everything is connected and no energy is ever lost. This is very close to what I had written in this Blog, even the beach was similar to Vagatore in Goa where I felt her presence with me. I am a science-nut, as Carl Sagan was, but the rational Mind can't account for some mysteries of the Universe, some times it's inexplicable and magical, without being too woolly-minded about it. And I can't help being blown away by living, conscious, in an awesome world, that contains gorgeous souls like Amiria.

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How I Survived My 13th New Years Eve in Goa.

My ecstatic dancing at the parties in Goa got bottomed out by the news that one of my closest friends in Auz, Amiria, had died suddenly, unexpectedly, for she was only 45 years old and strong as an Amazon, a big shock as she was truly one of my 7 pillars of support, (after suffering a broken leg she got an aneurism.) It's great to stay alive and power on into old age but oh so painful to say goodbye to family and friends while one powers on eternally, (seemingly.) On the beaches of Goa, zooming about the rice-paddy fields on scooters, dancing frenetically at the grungy nightclubs, I thought of her and longed to be with her, just one more time, to speak of philosophy, science, politics, love.

And thus I didn't enjoy Goa so much this season, my thirteenth New Years Eve there, I should've been warned, and what, stayed at home? No!!! The crowds of foreign tourists didn't appear as hoped, a disaster for the locals, like the monsoon rains failing. Those who did come were Russians, not an easy bunch to get on with, chasing the Goan beach myth of freedom and self-expression but too late by about 30 years. And vast numbers of Indians flooded in from Mumbai and the hinterlands, thousands of them squeezing onto beach pub-sites like Shiva Valley on Anjuna Beach, where alcohol was the most desired item on the menu, all India wanting to share in the Goan paradise of inebriated hedonism. While it's interesting to watch the crowds' interactions I do fear stampedes, common in overcrowded India, they have reclaimed Goa from the firangi freak invasions, it's their country, they won it back from the Portugese, why not the hippies as well?

There were lots of parties to go to, small/intimate and big/overwhelming, the cops must have been told to lay off the local party-entrepreneurs a bit as they were scaring the cash-cow tourists away. The State/corporate body tried again to get control of the party scene by holding a 3 day "Sunburn" dance music festival inside a fenced-off compound with CCTV cameras and cops crawling all over to make sure no one was smoking cigs or pot! The crowd of sucked-in middle-class Indians were charged much money to listlessly dance in the hot sun and then go home at 10pm after visiting the big attractions like kiosks that sold laptops and a tent that sold Sunburn festival merchandise: gee, how exciting! The organisers seemed to overlook the fact that sunburn is as cancerous as smoking.

In the meantime, New Years Eve came on and I was sitting quietly in my favourite chai-shop on the beach, all day meditating upon the fragility of life and my friend Amiria, her Maori warrior strength combined with her Buddhist peacenik nature. At sunset I was reading Richard Dawkins' "The Greatest Show on Earth" and while deep inside evolutionary theory I suddenly heard a loud thunder-like clap, "Thwok!" I looked up in shock, an Indian muscle-Mary thug had just whacked my friend Prem, the chai-shop owner, very hard across the face. And then he gave him another almighty slap to which I jumped up and yelled, "What the fuck are you doing?" He had a gang of about 7 other ugly bullies with him, all of them macho queens from some brutish gym, drunk as skunks, brainless, and one of them threatened me to shut up while the beating continued.

Like all gangs of cowards, a few of them stepped forward to also give Prem a hard slap, then the first thug grabbed him by the hair with one fist and with the other repeatedly thumped him hard in the face. I kept trying to step forward and stop it but was warned off, my laptop smashed to the ground with all my other belongings. Apparently this mob of brutes had come to the chai-shop with their own booze and demanded glasses to drink from. They were now beating Prem up because he'd refused them, they had the numbers, the muscles and the blind drunken nastiness to terrorise whoever crossed their path. Then the thug who'd thrown the first punch picked up an iron bar and moved in with murderous glee.

He whacked Prem hard across the back with it and I screamed and moved forward, little old me, somehow to quash the melee. Nobody else came to our rescue, all the men and boys on the beach and from the other chai-shops kept their distance, afraid of a beating from the marauding ape-men. The thug lifted the iron bar and whacked Prem on the back of his head, a loud "thunk!" to which I groaned in helplessness, it was nasty but I could tell it was not yet a killer blow. I stepped forward again trying to think of some way to stop this brutality as it really looked like they might murder my friend in front of me, but the bastard turned on me and waved the weapon in my face, took a few swipes which I ducked, then he smashed all the glass in the counter as a warning to me before he turned back to finish off his victim.

He raised the iron bar for the third time, about to deal a blow to Prem's head that could kill him, I screamed , "No!" and knew that I could not just stand there and let my friend be murdered, I'm from working-class Australia, we are not passive, and I've been in 1001 brawls, as a queer I've been beaten all my life, the violence was nothing new but I was scared shitless, they could brain me into retardation. But at least I didn't run away, I stood nervously by thinking, "Where oh where is Jackie Chan/Sylvestor Stallone/Salman Khan when you need them, and why oh why can't I take on and beat up 7 guys at once like movie heroes do?

I thought that if he really did bring the bar down towards Prem's head I'd have to rush in with a chair as armour, it's four legs hopefully pinning the deadshit down while someone somehow came to our rescue, big hope as their were 7 others swelling their muscles up like bull-walruses on heat ready to attack. I used all my will, like a beam of tight-white light which I projected onto the carnage trying to pacify the furor, I felt the idea of Amiria beside me, her strength, her love and quietude, not that she was there in spirit as I don't really believe in life after death, but the idea of her, what she stood for, what she practiced, gave me strength, gave me power, she was with me, kind of. (I also had a vision of the Tibetan Goddess, the Green Tara, hovering next to Amiria shedding a protective green light upon the scene.)

And I think I crashed the probability wave in my/our favour, I influenced reality, the observer straightening out the uncertainty, for the thug's arm stopped in mid-air, he hesitated, wavered, looked about him as if he didn't know where he was, then just shrugged, threw the bar down and swaggered off with his mob, up the beach, lords of their domain, lord of the flies like. Prem was shaken but not too badly hurt, he had to go to hospital and get 9 stitches in the back of his head, his face swelled up like a pumpkin from all the slapping but he went straight back to work and had recovered after a week, he's a strong guy who has fallen out of coconut trees many times in his life. I myself went into post-traumatic-shock mode and was a bit of a hysterical mess for that same week, giving my good friends a hard time as I was so full of tension.

Maybe I just imagined my influence upon the outcome, the arseholes certainly didn't like witnesses to their violence. But there have been other times in my life where my willpower and voice of authority, "No, it's not gonna happen that way!" turned dangerous episodes to my favour and relief. The bastards were from Poona, had given grief on previous visits, and proceeded to go up to the cliff-tops and catch a taxi to Mapusa where they then beat up the taxi driver and smashed all the windows in his cab. They are such steroid limp dicks that surely some day they will get their come-uppence and get the shit kicked out of them so they never lift a fist again. (Looking into their beastial eyes I saw only stupidity and inhumanity, it turned me off Indians for quite awhile, sad as most of them are good souls trying hard to do their best.)

We called the cops but they never came, quite useless, too busy chasing firangis for smoking pot and looting them, or as portrayed in the media, selling the drugs themselves, caught on video in a sting operation by two Israeli girls who were fed up with the corruption. Alcohol is tax-free in Goa, to attract tourists I suppose, but all the hoopla of protecting us from terrorists is so much hogwash as it's the free flow of alcohol that's causing most of the terror in Goa, road carnage, overdoses, fights, brain/liver damage, domestic violence, the list is endless and the inhuman aliens rule as alcohol is their preferred drug.

We did eventually make it to the big New Years Eve party, as always the best venue being the Hilltop Hotel where the music is cutting, loud and clear, and the dance floor had room enough to move. And I did dance, glorious dancing, hypnotically for 5 hours straight, able to ignore the few minor teenage fights that broke out around me, I'd already seen the worst that India could offer. I danced to the full trance, let my body go in any direction the beat moved me, my muscles melted, my mind flushed, me and the crowd, mostly Indians, dancing atavistically to reclaim our long evolutionary heritage of being one with the world.

All in all it was quite a way to end 2010, a year of artistic highs, (my show at the Newtown Library, my very funny portrait of Vitto which I hung at the Piccolo Cafe and the few good stories I'd written), and emotional lows, (the death of my mother flipping me out more than I could handle, falling out with my brother and losing 7 friends, mostly from my not suffering fools gladly, yeah, yeah, and being a dick.) I survived New Years Eve in Goa, my 13th, only just. Let's hope 2011 really brings me good cheer, love and artistic achievement, no bummers please, I've had my share for awhile.

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The Night of the Snake Goddess.

Deep in the interior of the southern Indian state of Karnataka is a town called Hampi, a ghost town, for it lies in ruins and is inhabited by untold thousands of murdered phantoms. Five hundred years ago it was a bustling Hindu metropolis, famous for its sacred sculptures and cave temples. Throughout the town winds a placid river, snaking amid tumbled boulders stacked up miraculously to defy gravity, supposedly the leftover debris from Hanuman’s monumental building of the bridge to Sri Lanka to rescue the princess Sita, kidnapped by the demon Ravan.

There is a cave where Sita is said to have hidden her jewels as a sign to her husband, Rama, that she had been taken this way. And the town is dominated by a tall Mandir, covered in effigies, where Rama is said to have paid homage to a meditating Shiva before continuing on his quest of defeating the demon and reuniting with his wife. The magical beauty of the town gave its reigning Hindu monarch much hubris, he was rich, powerful and superior to the Moslem kingdoms that surrounded his territory of Hampi. With cruelty and trickery he kept the Muslim kingdoms divided and quarreling amongst themselves; raiding their villages he robbed, tortured and murdered them mercilessly. After a lifetime of oppression the Muslim kingdoms could take no more and, over-coming their differences, they united into one mighty army that swept down upon Hampi and butchered the bad king’s soldiers, lopped off his head and slaughtered every other living soul in the vicinity.

In a few nights hundreds of thousands of Hindu men, women and children were cut to pieces on the streets, in their homes or praying to their innumerable gods in the Mandir. All the temples were desecrated, the icons shattered, gods and devas having their noses, ears, arms, heads lopped off so that the city lay in ruins with no Hindu gods left intact to lend protection. As a final curse upon the place a council of Muslim seers proclaimed a fitting end for Hampi would be to cage within the city’s boundaries the pagan Hindu’s favorite monster, The Snake Goddess, who would devour any foolish trespasser into Her domain.

For hundreds of years the town lay accursed and abandoned, phantoms howled up the streets and whispered in the broken doorways, flitting in and out of the moon’s shadows, and reigning over all this was the horror of the Snake Goddess, slithering, hissing, showing up in the most unexpected places to kill unwary travelers. The local natives, Hindu and Muslim, were painfully aware of Her presence and prayed to Her fervently to leave their families and tribes alone, often sending an unwitting pilgrim into Her embrace as sacrifice to appease Her hungry wrath. But all this was kept secret, from fear and reverence, the town slumbered and was overgrown with jungle and few remembered its history.

The twentieth century rolled around and in the 1970’s western Hippies discovered the town’s existence, its bleak beauty, isolation and squatting potential attractive to their beach-bum ways. They’d heard about the lost city of Hampi whilst camping naked on the beaches of Goa, it was arcane, remote, only for the hip cognoscenti, it took many days travel into the interior of Karnataka, in those Hippie-trail times one could sit forty-eight hours on cold-concrete waiting for the next bus.

In 1973 when I was 23 I made the tedious journey to the much ballyhooed sacred city of Hampi. There were no hotels or restaurants, the few who wandered here lived in the temple-caves amidst the broken iconography, we carried our own food in and shared it, only occasionally relishing a beedie and sweet biscuit at the one grungy chai shop by the bridge over the river. At best there would’ve been 7 Hippies spread out over the labyrinth of caves; I chose to stay with the one Sadhu Baba in residence, he was famous for making black clay chillums with a snake entwined about its barrel, much desired by Western Big Babas who loved to flourish the fashionable chillums above their heads as they yelled, “Bam Shankar!” then toking down on the charas mixture within and breathing out smoke like hell-fire.

And yeah, I smoked lots of hash with them, I even dropped acid and tripped wickedly among the amazingly psychedelic statuary and bass reliefs carved upon every wall in every nook and cranny, an overload of imagery and myths so that I ending up spewing badly into the river; I felt like I was vomiting up the entire universe, Big Bang particles, galaxies, stars, a torrent of seed ideas, Platonic ideals, archetypes, brainwashes and fixations poured from me so that by dawn my Mind seemed scrubbed, detoxed, refreshed.

I even saved a drowning Hippie girl who panicked in waist-deep water and screamed her tits off while some Indian Hindu pilgrims made picnic nearby and glumly watched her drown as if they were Eloi from “The Time Machine”. I rescued her and eschewed the puffing up of my hero chest, my ego had been attenuated, my hubris quashed, I did it for the sheer love of life and the humility of a servant, thus I may have been spared the vengeance of the wrathful Snake Goddess, who lurked in the dark caves and watched every human act to see if pride intruded. I escaped Hampi with my skin intact, my Mind emptied, my heart full and from henceforth I led a life of achievement and adventure for the next 27 years. Then at the dawn of the third millennium, in 2000, I returned, grown into a big fool, narcissistic, selfish, headstrong, about to finally meet the Snake Goddess and receive my come-uppance, as if She’d been waiting for my flaws to out all that time.

I’d been called back to India after 21 years of chasing a non-career as an artist in Auz and was prancing about Goa ecstatically trying to forget my travails, then moving onto Hampi where I hoped to relive the mystique of my earlier visit. I had little money and stayed at an inexpensive ashram where I hoped to find peace and quiet but the Baba in residence was married with children and they all made an unholy racket day and night. I was unhappy and restless but somewhat consoled when I met up with the luscious Nicorette, queen of the zombies, who brought on the first misadventure. Nic was just as beautiful and as deadly as the Snake Goddess and possibly awakened Her from slumber and incited Her wrath for no female could trespass in Her domain who was more hypnotically gorgeous than She.

We were trying to get to a trance-party on the far side of Hampi and some drunken Indians offered us a lift in their jeep, they continuously maneuvered the car’s seating arrangements so that she was squashed in the front seat between their lumpy frames and groping hands with me shoved out of the way in the back, but I kept insisting on sitting in front between them and Nic or, just as they were settling in next to her in front, I would make her get in the back with me. For an hour we played musical chairs, the Indians getting drunker and more uptight, they just couldn’t get their slippery hands on her big tits and finally they threw us both out of the car and told us to walk. Though dumped in the middle of nowhere we breathed a sigh of relief for they probably would’ve raped her and then sodomized me for good measure, no port too unattractive in an intoxicated storm.

We wandered all night under a full moon through the maze of tumbled rocks and desecrated iconography, occasionally finding a carving of the Snake Goddess glaring at us from the shadows, the sibilant hissing of the river following us as we stumbled about entirely lost. I started to lose heart but Nic is an Amazonian warrior queen, nothing fazes her, she strode on resolute, confronted every beastly pagan image and laughed in its face and I hung onto the strings of her One Million Years B.C. fur bikini. Eventually we came to a huge lagoon that was impassable and I was resigned to spending the rest of my shortened life there but along came one of those basket-boats the locals are so adept at paddling and Nic called to them to rescue us and, for a small fee, they took us to the other side and safety.

This escapade should’ve warned me that Hampi had certain dangers always lurking for the unwary but I was a fool and continued my explorations while Nic went on her merry way to chase her lotus-eating in other exotic locales. I could endure the noise of the ashram no longer and had a rousing argument with the Baba on how he’d lied to me about the tranquility of his abode; I played the white nabob outraged by the medieval set-up and possibly raised the dead with my shrieking. I set off in high dudgeon with my bags to find a cheaper place but as the ashram was the cheapest I had few alternatives. Then I espied an ancient, empty temple by the riverside, though creepy like something out of a Hammer horror film, it was spacious and nobody seemed to pass close by to bother me so I determined to move in and camp there.

A local peasant saw me carrying my bags inside and, his eyes rolling, warned me to stay clear of the place; it was evil, for long it had a bad reputation for unholy incidents, robbers and worse could come in the night and murder me. I pooh-poohed his superstitions, I was strong, brave, rational, nothing could touch me, and besides, I had nothing to rob. He shook his head sadly at my Western narrow-mindedness and left me to my fate, the sun was setting and he desired to be safe indoors before darkness took over.

I was just turning fifty years old and thought the best part of life was over, the bloom of my youth withered, I was fatigued, my aspirations were evaporating, desires ever unsatisfied, I was cynical, nihilistic, reckless, I’d come back to India not to find my Self but to get lost, maybe disappear. At dusk I wandered down the main street of Hampi town to flit amidst the broken porticoes and tumbled, carved stone facades as if I were a proto-ghost, I could almost see the thousands of shadowy presences who’d once thrived and been murdered there and with them I dwelt in sorrow on the frailty of human existence.

There are many chai-shops on this desolate main-street and one of the specialties available is bhang, a drink made from crushed marijuana and, hoping for consolation, I drank a few glasses and got quite inebriated, or stoned shitless in Hampi-hippie terminology. I tripped back to my temple-ruin abode and lay down dizzily upon my bedroll on the hard stone floor. Spears of moonlight penetrated parts of the grotto but for the most it was pitch black and eerily quiet except for the tinkling of the river nearby. I was somewhat stupefied from the bhang and tried not to envision ghosts in the shards of moonlight wavering at the edges of the temple. I sang a jolly song to myself hoping its naiveté would ward off any malevolent presence.

I couldn’t fully sleep, just slip in and out of dozing, always aware of the strangeness of my environment. And as the doze was setting in, an hallucinogenic dream-state seemed to take over, and I heard a wet slithering sound followed by a piercing hiss. This snapped me awake, I sat up with my back against a cold stone pillar, and tried to see into the dark, to decipher some ghastly creature prowling there waiting for my vulnerable sleep. But there was nothing, behind me just darkness and silence, at the front only the carved portico under the moonbeams and the river gurgling not far off. I tried to stay vigilant but gradually dozed off again, and just as I slipped under once more came the squelchy slithering sound, like a long serpentine body dragged across the rock floor, then furious hissing seemingly in my face.

This continued throughout the night, I didn’t get a wink of sleep, every time I dozed off the slithering and hissing came closer and closer, from the back of the temple towards me, I sat stiff-backed, eye-balls popping, straining in the dark to see what evil approached my stupid, hallucinating form. Had the Snake Goddess come to claim my flesh and soul for daring to camp in Her sacred abode? What silly mumbo-jumbo nonsense! I’m a scientist, a rationalist, there are no snake goddesses! Yet I swear I heard these sounds, loud and clear, and even vaguely made out the horrific outline of Her gory face, just like in a Hammer horror film, the Gorgon with snakes for her hair, forked tongue tickling my nose, welling up from my unconscious, trying to turn me to stone.

Whatever It was, It approached close-by, I could almost feel Its fetid breath upon me, I held my breath ready to be swallowed whole but not without a fight, they’d hear my screams all the way to the market place. Half-conscious I felt It slither past me, undulate up the wall and across the ceiling, there to hover directly above and drop upon me with grotesque fangs bared. I snapped alert and gazed up at the ceiling imagining the horror hanging just above my head. Something fell into my eye, a piece of grit that flew about the primordial temple in the light breeze. I rubbed the irritation from my eye and, satisfied nothing else lurked above, drifted back into my fugue, it was now just before dawn and I thankfully fell exhausted into a deep sleep.

When I awoke to the glorious light of day my left eye was swollen, I had something in it that no amount of flushing would relieve. While having chai I asked other tourists to look in my eye to see if there was a foreign object lodged within but nothing could be discerned. Back in Auz I went to my G.P. and he informed me I had Blepheritis, caused by a bacterium like a tiny poisonous serpent and almost impossible to cure, I had to scrub my eyelids several times a day for months to gain temporary relief. 

Though life-weary I’ve noticed that when confronted by life-challenging dangers I’ve fought hard to live, it’s hard-wired into me, no matter the nihilistic tendencies tugging at my soul. I was made to overcome my Western spoiled brat ennui, get on with life, overcome obstacles and enjoy existence to the max. And so I believe I escaped a mental breakdown in Hampi, if you’re mentally vulnerable India has many sites to unravel you.

I didn’t believe in the Snake goddess, I fought off Her superstitious idea as just a nightmare bogey-woman, maybe a left-over from my turbulent emotional trauma with my mother in early childhood, and fear of female sexuality in general. But as mythopoesis for a bacterial infection, it was a good fit, the Mind is an amazing phenomena and plays incredible tricks upon us all, especially when it comes to an infinite universe: nature spirits, gods and goddesses, cults and superstitions, magical thinking easily takes over.

I’ve suffered from the eye infection for many years now and it reminds me to stay strong, walk with care and treat every living creature I meet with compassion, for all my fuck-ups, many other lost and hard-working people are far worse off. (I have to carry on like this as I’m a bit of a curmudgeon and most people get on my nerves, it’s the human condition, flawed, we’re all in it together.)

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If you enjoyed this story please go to the WEB address above and consider buying my book of tales about growing up anarcho-queer, rock and roll punter and mystic adventurer in Australia and India of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.