25 May 2003: Ace

I've been writing little bits and pieces of this entry for the past couple of weeks, first trying unsuccessfully to keep up with things as they happened, and then occupied with matters that didn't merit writing about but ate into the time I wanted to spend writing about the matters that did.  Tonight, though, I finish this.

Hey, I finally got around to setting up POP email for this domain.  So now you can email me at nickykaa dot com.  Nicky at nickykaa dot com, officially, but apparently mail to anything at all at nickykaa dot com will make it to my mailbox.

Okay, jumping back two weeks...

The evening of Saturday the 10th was the going-away party for Taarna and Galahad, at the Khan's house.  Went early, stayed late, saw friends, ate scary gelatinous candy that Bonky brought from Japan and that looked like it belonged in the D&D Monster Manual, and said goodbye to Taarna and Galahad even though I was going to see them again the following night. 

Most parties I'm at these days have at least two distinct environments: inside, where people hang out because it's inside, with the food and the warm and the chairs and stuff, and outside, where people hang out because you can smoke outside, or because they want a break from inside, or because they want to hang out with the cool kids and the cool kids are outside smoking.  At some point in the evening, when I'd just come back in from outside and was still hanging up my coat, Moonspice came in behind me and said, "Go outside.  Now."  Now Moonspice is a perfectly friendly and well-behaved ex-wife, and I'm her favorite ex-husband, and she's never shown any inclination to kick me out of anyplace before, so I figured that there must be something outside she wanted me to see.  Which there was, as I discovered when I did, in fact, go outside (which I did, in fact, do right away).  Just as I had been stepping inside a few moments earlier, Opsimath had shown up with Ace, who had just that very evening journeyed here from the Mysterious East (the North Jersey region of the Mysterious East, to be precise).

Ace! If you had heard only a quarter of what I have heard about him, and I have only heard very little of all there is to hear, you would be prepared for any sort of remarkable tale.  Tales and adventures sprouted up all over the place wherever he went, in the most extraordinary fashion.  I hadn't seen Ace for nearly four-and-a-half years, nor had I spoken to him nor written to him in all that time.  And the only word I had had from him in that time was a single answering machine message that he left me on November 23rd of the year 2000, consisting only of the words, "Happy Monkey Day!"  Aside from that lone Monkey Day greeting (much appreciated; there are too few of us in these dark times who still celebrate Monkey Day), there had been no contact between us since his last visit here in late 1998, except in the sense that the Clasp is a contact that is always and eternal, and is there for us whenever we tune in to it, and certainly he has often been in my thoughts and in my heart these past years.

Prior to that last visit in '98, Ace and I had maintained a prolific correspondence for seven years (starting soon after I moved out here from New Jersey).  We had been friends in Jersey prior to that, initially through his participation in my epic Amarantis roleplaying campaign (which isn't over, it's just on hiatus until the next time a bunch of us have time to make regular marathon gaming sessions a scheduling priority - which will probably be when we're all over a hundred years old and all living in the same retirement community... or when we're in Heaven... though I suppose that in Heaven, if you want to immerse yourself in a roleplaying game, the best way to do it is just to incarnate again). 

Ace visited in '94 or '95, something like that.  We played a huge marathon Amarantis session, talked endlessly, wrote, and went on a quest in which we walked from Civic Center BART all the way through Golden Gate Park so he could touch the Pacific Ocean for the first time.  He came West again some time later, to a family event in Napa, and Argus and Moly and I drove up to spend a day with him.  And then that visit in '98, with his wife (I was married too, at the time - to Moonspice, which is how she met Ace and thus knew, at the party this past Saturday, to send me outside to see him when he showed up).

And then, right after that last visit in '98, my life entered a period of accelerated intensity.  It went something like this: ParaTheatrical ritual lab; preliminary work for my physically and psychically demanding role as Daemon in Sherpa's play Hungry Ghosts of Albion; split up with Moonspice; start intense fling with Zap; Hungry Ghosts rehearsals; co-facilitate lengthy ritual lab with Bonky in which I also participate and which includes frequent supercharged ritual interactions with Zap; three-week run of Hungry Ghosts performances while the aforementioned lab is still going on; birthday visit from my parents complete with cannabis megadose on July 4th; abrupt end of fling with Zap; Crux ritual lab starts immediately after the end of the lab I was co-facilitating; the immensely powerful; difficult, and transformative experience that was Crux (video available from Vertical Pool Productions); Burning Man (complete with massive psilocybin trip and communion with Loki at the Burn, plus Crash Worship show the weekend after my return); extended climactic blowup at my sucky degrading job at the Church of Lies, along with simultaneous rapid job-hunt, ending when I find challenging and much-less-sucky new job at Accupressure Institute; start fling with severely damaged Broken Wind, another ParaTheatrical ritual lab, Christmas psilocybin trip, New Year's quickening (1999 into 2000), role in Sherpa's film Tragos, with its intensely demanding ParaTheatrical ritual lab work (video available from Vertical Pool Productions); simultaneous breakup with Broken Wind and eviction from Dover Street house; the incredibly intense Burning Man 2000 (including the great Wednesday night acid trip with Bonky, Omega 7, and Cygnus, in which we got caught way out on the playa by the apocalyptic dust storm, and in which I attained embodiment of my archetypal Yesod proto-self... plus a 2CB trip with Bonky, some deep trancework to debrief with the aforementioned proto-self, a second acid trip with Bonky at the Burn, and far too much interpersonal drama among everyone around me); start working at Ask Jeeves while couch-surfing at Taarna and Galahad's; move in with Labyrinthine; begin my big crash as it all starts to catch up with me; do the ParaTheatrical Dreaming Lab in spite of incipient crash; layoff from Ask Jeeves as the local economy continues to mirror my psyche; crash.

Which brings us to the end of 2000.  Two years in which I didn't contact Ace because I kept thinking that there'd be a point of rest at which I could give him a coherent update on everything that had happened.  But of course, that didn't even happen at the end of 2000.  Instead, I spent two months incapacitated by my psychic collapse, and then began the process of putting myself back together with all the lessons integrated, with all the major and minor life changes that this entailed and continues to entail.  The first entry of the current incarnation of this journal (27 June 2002) picks up at about the time that I made the transition from "putting myself back together" to "moving forward into my new life as (who'da thunk it) a pretty together kind of guy."  But of course, things have kept right on happening.  School, and Dragon Lady... and it was just a week ago, on the day I wrote the entry prior to this one, that I finally got around to deciding, "One of the first things I'm going to do with this summer is re-establish contact with Ace."  And 36 hours later I was hugging him on the Khan's front steps.

Ace is... hmm... there's not a word yet.  One of the Istari?  He's one of those friends with whom I have the sort of relationship that Rumi had with Shams of Tabriz.  Um... a Shams?  A Tabrizi?  Okay, until one of us comes up with a better word, he's a Tabrizi.

"[Rumi's] life seems to have been a fairly normal one for a religious scholar [...] until in the late fall of 1244 when he met a stranger who put a question to him.  That stranger was the wandering dervish, Shams of Tabriz, who had traveled throughout the Middle East searching and praying for someone who could "endure my company." [...] The question Shams spoke made the learned professor faint to the ground. [...] There are various versions of this encounter, but whatever the facts, Shams and Rumi became inseperable.  Their Friendship is one of the mysteries.  They spent months together without any human needs, transported into a region of pure conversation."

- Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi

Ace was weary from travelling, and didn't stay long at the party, but he was planning to be around for a week, so we arranged to hang out that Thursday night and all day Saturday.

The following evening, Sunday the 11th, I went out to dinner with Taarna and Galahad and then went back to their place and helped them with last-minute housecleaning and car-packing.  They left the next morning; by now they're working on putting together their new life in Kansas City.  I'll miss them.

The full lunar eclipse on the evening of Thursday the 15th made it the perfect time to hang out with Ace.  While there was daylight, we walked all over the UC Berkeley campus, and we talked.  He told me what had happened in his life in the past few years, and what was happening now, and a wonderous tale it was.  Like me, he'd lost himself for a while, and, like me, he is risen, his glory all the greater for what he learned in the underworld.  He was already losing himself back when he was here in '98; he'd begun to cut off pieces of his soul that didn't fit into the box of his new domestic life.  They're all back now.  And he's getting a divorce, which is going to be costly and not fun but which is necessary.  A man's first responsibility is to his own soul, always.

After we'd wandered the campus for a long time, and he'd told me his tale, we went to my favorite all-you-can-eat sushi joint, and ate all we could.  Ace is one of the few who can still go plate-for-plate with me in a sushi deathmatch, and of those few, he's the only one who's passed 30 and stayed as slim as me.  It's all about the walking, I think.

As we gorged ourselves on sushi (and killed a few cups of sake), we talked more.  It was dark when we finished.  We walked back up to the campus, and sat on a Student Center balcony, and watched the Moon emerge from the Earth's shadow while I told him my tale.

I gave him my copy of Last Call.  It seemed appropriate.

On Saturday (the 17th, that is), Ace and I went on a quest, the first sequel (of several if not many, I hope) to our Pacific Ocean quest back in '94 or '95.  He showed up at my place in the late morning.  We stuffed ourselves with a good wholesome Jewish brunch at Saul's in North Berkeley, and then we took BART across the Bay, got out at the Civic Center station, and, guided only by intuition and the grace of God, walked a winding improvised route across San Francisco to the Palace of Fine Arts, and then from there to the Golden Gate Bridge, and then across the Bridge to Marin.  And then back to the San Francisco side, and back to the Civic Center BART station by a different winding improvised route that took us through the wooded paths of the Presidio, and then back to Berkeley for Japanese food.  The walking phase of the quest, from the Civic Center to Marin and back, took approximately eight hours, with no break longer than three or four minutes.  We talked most of the way.  The weather was warm and perfect, the sky cloudless.

Immediately to the right of my desk, there's a big sliding glass door that leads out onto a small balcony.  Through the glass, every reasonably clear day, every time I turn my head to the right, I can see the northern span of the Golden Gate Bridge, and its terminus in the southernmost hills of Marin.  My daily view of the Marin terminus of the Bridge is forever changed now, by my journey there and back again, and by having gazed, at the attainment of the quest, along the same line of sight from the opposite end.

Until our next adventure, Ace...

"Do you know me in the gloaming, gaunt and dusty grey with roaming?"

- Robert Frost