I went down to Paia yesterday, to watch the surf and do some roaming. I hadn’t slept well and my brain was stubbornly unfocused. I went to the point I’d been shown and sat on a bluff, trying to wake up. I stared at the waves, the sea turtles, the clouds, and then the waves again, but nothing felt real.

The sun was burning my back, so I got up to find coffee instead. As I was leaving, an attractive man my age came around the corner with his dog. We talked on the path towards town. He was a carpenter and a gardener. Like me, he lived on the mountain and came down to Paia to meet people. He introduced himself as Eric. As we rounded the final corner, Eric told me he worked as a grounds keeper for Oprah—and was on his way to her estate that afternoon.

Ever since my traumatic one night stand (ambiguously described here), I’ve tried to keep my Hottieness in check. It turns out fornication is ugly and only love is pretty. I now try to wield my sexual powers for world peace only. But sometimes it’s hard to keep them in check.

This was one of those difficult times.

Every one wants to meet Oprah Winfrey! She is as fundamental a node in the map of reality as the Pope or Cheney. It’s not just a matter of power of celebrity. It’s a question of character, and power and celebrity. What has Oprah done? What does she know? Could Oprah be the wo-Man in the High Castle? Does she know that all is a fiction?

I couldn’t contain myself. I raised a seductive eyebrow. “Oh really?”

Eric turned red and shy for a moment but he recovered quickly. “Yeah…you wanna come?”

~~

Oprah lives on the far end of Kula, above the south shore of Maui. From her porch you can see both shores and the West Maui’s. By the time the road reaches her house, it has dwindled to a one lane gravel path, somehow inaccessible enough to dissuade her international hordes of admirers. I was the only visitor in sight.

Eric had to work, but he left me on the porch. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Someone will notify Oprah.”

I nodded and found some shade. I half hoped nobody would notify her, I was so nervous. What in the world would I say to Oprah? What would I tell her? Could Oprah and I talk about dead Germans? What would she look like? Sound like? Suddenly I realized I’d never even watched her show. I barely even knew her political stances! I’d never even thought about her!

I decided that we could never connect meaningfully, and that the best I could hope for was a good gift—that much I knew about her. I decided to tell her about my yoga work in the hope that she would hook me up with a free trainer. And a horsie, and a car.

As I was scheming, a short, quiet woman stepped out.

“Hi, I’m Oprah, nice to meet you.”

I almost peed my pants.

“Oh Hi! I’m Luki!” Oprah smiled softly.

I carried on. “Thanks for letting me come up here. Beautiful place you have.”

Oprah paused as if considering something.

When she spoke again, it was from deep within. “My child. The veil of Maya has descended into your world. It is thicker than it ever has been for you. Beware.”

I was speechless. Seconds ticked by. The tropical birds chirped.

“Why have you come here, Luki? What do you want from me?”

It was hard for me to think.

“I don’t know I wanted to know…”

“What Luki, what?”

“I wanted to know who shot JFK!”

Oprah paused again.

I blushed with embarrassment, thinking she had gotten the wrong idea. Then she spoke. “You want to know the web of the world. You want to calibrate your perception of causality and integrate it with the inscrutable mass of history. You want to see so that you may play your part. You wonder whether I am a mirror or a fountain.”

“Yes, Oprah, yes!”

“Follow me, child.”

She led me down. Off her sun porch, down the stairs, down a ladder, down a rope, then down an elevator. The elevator beeped and the door opened to a purple room with fire. It hummed with a mysterious energy.

“This is the womb,” she said tonelessly. She led me in.

I felt it to be a moment I had always waited for—when destiny and history would finally find my life and connect me to the greater continuum of time. Could the Maui Magic run this deep? Could I find it all? My heart thudded in my chest.

Oprah pulled out a key and opened a door. She pulled out a wheel.

“This is the wheel,” she told me.

“Oh…wow.”

She turned it around to the side with bright scribbles. “This is the wheel of LIFE.”

“Yes.”

She hung the wheel on a knob in the wall and started it spinning. “Have you ever watched the wheel of life spin, Luki? I mean, really watched it?”

“No. I never have, Oprah.”

She smiled at me then, gushing with love. “Watch, Luki!”

The wheel spun. As it turned, she wrapped her arms around me and began to hum.

Hush little child don’t say a word, momma’s gonna buy you a hummingbird…and if that hummingbird don’t fly, momma’s gonna…

The wheel’s colors twisted and merged fantastically. I tried to absorb them. But Oprah’s arms were slick around me. Her breathing was rapid and too shallow. Something wasn’t right.

A familiar pang flared in my heart. Oh Oprah, no. No. Not you too!

Winfrey stiffened suddenly. My heart skipped a beat, but she was too absorbed in the wheel to notice my doubt.

“Do you want to know who shot JFK, Luki? Do you want to know where to find the center?”

“I do.”

She cleared her throat and all was lost:

“The Golden Mean or Spiral Sequence is the name derived by the Divine Proportion or PHI ratio ‘discovered’ in all of organic nature that creates incredibly efficient growth patterns, coherence, harmonics, and inherent sustainability of all manifest energy! Source dreams the harmony of the universe into material existence through the perfect geometry of the golden spiral. Have you heard of the spiral, Luki?”

I nodded quickly, holding back tears. “Yes, Oprah.”

A major lesson of my year has been: Everybody is crazy. Everybody. It does one no good to have too much faith in one person or another, in one particular friendship, in a love, in a favorite thinker, in a wise elder, in a travel companion, or even in oneself. Eventually, through some unsealed crack, a person’s true insanity will reveal itself.

Oprah continued, gesticulating:

“The Phythagoreans, Leonardo Da Vinci, Plato, and many others intentionally used this shape for they found it everywhere in nature: the Nautilus Sea Shell, Ram’s horns, milk in coffee, human bone structure, the face of a Sunflower, a cedar pinecone, your fingerprints, our DNA, and the shape of the Milky Way Galaxy. Crop Circles are often created in various forms of the Spiral because it is the code that embeds information into the Earth Grid more than any other!”

I had just wanted the chance to forget the lesson. I had come to Maui hoping I had gotten it wrong—hoping perhaps that only in Berzerkeley was everybody crazy.

Is it too much to ask for just one sane person in a womb of fire? One enlightened soul in a trippy New Age dungeon?

But by then, Oprah’s mouth was foaming:

“If we view the universe as the nonlinear plane of clouds that encompasses all dimensions and frequencies, then the spiral is how we break into the plane of the 3D world through this energetic flightpath down into manifestation. This is the only geometric way the universe can generate charge and motion – a force that creates the Electromagnetic Spin Field that composes the entire spectrum of our reality!

“As this energy spins faster than the speed of light, a black hole is created which breaks through the linear space-time domain and unites with Source. This form is what links all units of creation with each other, generates SYCHRONICITY, perfect design, and connects us with the Quantum Field where the seemingly impossible becomes reality as the spiral of our co-creative consciousness connects with the ‘future’ desired manifestation… the manifestation which is already real and impulsing you in the mirrored ‘past’ to think of it!”

Then suddenly there was silence.

Oprah was locked in a trance, staring at the spinning colors. She had forgotten I was there.

I couldn’t take another minute of it. The disappointment was brutal. I had to get out of the ‘womb.’

I hurried back to the elevator, shimmied up the rope, climbed the ladder, jumped up the stairs, and ran outside into the sunshine.

Eric called to me immediately.

“Luki! Luki! Are you alright?”

“Yes, I just, I—”

“Oprah can be pretty overwhelming, can’t she?”

“Yeah.”

There was nothing else to say.

Eric looked bashful again and played with his toe in the dirt.

“Well. I have to do some yard work at Willie’s place next. He’s on the other side of the island…Wanna come with?”

“Willie?”

Eric laughed. “Yeah, Willie Nelson! He lives right here on Maui! You’ve got to meet him.”

I laughed too. “Well. Alright.”

In trying to determine what went wrong in a complicated situation—with, say, an old school bus, international plans, and an inscrutable Mexican guide (for example)—it is sometimes helpful to look to metaphysics. In this case, the clarifying notion comes not from the German Enlightenment but from the other Western pinnacle: modern mathematics.

December 20, 2001, in Physical Review E, Volume 65, David H. Wolpert published a paper entitled ‘Computational Capabilities of Physical Systems.’ It was nothing special. Just like thirty or forty other math papers in the last hundred years, ‘Computational Capabilities of Physical Systems’ showed the inherent limits of predictive science—which are entire.

Can one build a computer that can “process information faster than the universe” he asks? The question is equivalent to asking, “Can one construct a theory in science which will definitively predict an outcome before a process occurs?” and the answer is no. The answer has been no for awhile now, possibly since 1931. Physicists and philosophers pay no mind.

Wolpert proves the usual kinds of things. What if the computer/theory were infinitely dense and infinitely fast? No. What if we reverted back to classical mechanics? No. What if we used quantum computing? No. The relevant point for this autobiography is:

…the unpredictability results also establish that no computer can infallibly predict the past (i.e., perform retrodiction). So any memory system must be fallible, i.e. the second law of thermodynamics cannot be used to ensure a perfectly faultless memory of the past.

Why didn’t my estimable companion Andrès and I cross the Mexican-American border with a school bus full of musical instruments and recording equipment for a year-long jaunt through the Spanish speaking land?

I will never know. Already the world lines have begun to dissipate.

My apartment lease ended, the bus broke down, and I was propelled into a grim future time. It was January 2008. I was living on my friend’s couch in Berkeley, CA. It was rainy season and my back hurt. Nietzsche lay discarded under the remnants of my possessions—some dirty clothes, an old hat, my laptop. I was lovesick, and reading was impossible. Every time I found a quiet place to read in, it felt too quiet and all I could think about was decay and loneliness.

At night, my friend’s neurotic vegan roommate would sit up all night in the living room, laughing nervously to herself and drawing under a harsh fluorescent light bulb. She drew the same image in many forms. She was unconsciously obsessed with The Maiden and The Beast. Sometimes the maiden would be reclining dramatically in medieval garb. Sometimes she would be a child. The monster was menacing in some drawings, Shrek-like in others. Sometimes she gave them fantastical backdrops, sometimes they were stark portraits.

It seemed likely that I would never escape Berkeley. I would never even make it across the Bay to San Francisco. It was too late for me, I was one of them now. A psychic vampire master lives in the old sewer system underneath Telegraph Avenue. Every time you walk down it he sucks out some of your reason and optimism and replaces it with Paranoia. Eventually you are supernaturally bonded as his minion and incorporated into his foul psychic web.

One of his minions, Sunshine, almost did me in. Sunshine was a fat tweaker who would sit on the corner and whine at the top of her lungs about how life was unfair and she wanted money. If you gave her food instead of money, she would throw it in your face. One day my friends were walking to my old apartment and they saw Sunshine by the parking garage. She was standing on one foot hitting her crack pipe while another tweaker sucked her toes. She couldn’t stop laughing. From that story on, no street was safe.

Fortunately for my soul, I had long ago cultivated the habit of spontaneously purchasing plane tickets and running away from unpleasant things. Sometimes intense randomness can be the only safety net. Once when I was lovesick in college, I bought a ticket to New York and left the next day. Another time in Berkeley, when I found myself entangled with a manic depressive drug dealing nut, I bought a ticket to Boston. I told the nut, who had moved onto my floor, that I was leaving for True Love, and that this Love had to be acted on pronto.

This time I decided I would fly to Hawaii. Still in the grip of psychosis, it at first seemed necessary to find a traveling companion. I picked up Jeff from Telegraph Avenue. He had been diagnosed as schizophrenic, bi-polar, dyslexic, and ADD, and been fed drugs as a child. He was free to travel and I hired him on the spot.

But fatefully, after we hitchhiked up to Humboldt, he was arrested for a narcotics warrant. Enraged-and-thus-inspired, I bought some rope, tied my possessions to me, and flew to Maui without him.

And so, I was saved.

(go to Part 1)