The orange ball

June 29, 2005 | Share/Save

OK, I said I was going to write a post about my friend Kevin so here goes.

Kevin was a graphic designer I met at my first web development job. He was about 5 years younger than me and very technically talented. He was from Minnesota so he constantly said shit like “God Bless It!” and “Oh, I think I’d really like some supper” that really cracked me up. I had the impression he’s been very sheltered.

Anywho, around the same time I started working as an HTML coder I also made friends with Lothar. Lothar initially struck me as kind of comic-book RPG geek, but over time i got to know him and discovered that we shared many of the same obsessions. We were both reading at the same time, a half-dozen books or so by the same authors - WS Burroughs, Hakim Bey, Rober Anton Wilson, Eliade’s books on Shamanism, the Other Bible, Rigaud on Voodoo, etc.

We were both really excited about and getting geared up to explore this whole fantastic world of self-liberation and magic and imagination and the spirit that we had both been a little too sheltered ourselves to know about or open up to when we were younger.

Anywho, Lothar & I often went to lunch with Kevin and talked his ears off about spirits and God and antinomianism and aliens and conspiracies and shamanic journeying and lucid dreaming, etc . etc… Kevin was a bit baffled by all this, he had been to art school and so had a fairly narrow but deep level of technical training but didn’t know what to make of all this crazy talk about magic and religion and mythology.

So… I was the HTML guy which meant that my job, narrowly defined, was to do coding; Kevin was the designer, which meant that his job, narrowly defined, was to provide imagery for the sites we built.

It pissed my off that my boss did not trust me enough (no art school degree) to do graphics at work too, but whatever… I had my hands full learning to code already. At the end of the day I would go home and then work on the artwork for enemies.com until it was time to go to sleep, and when I came up with some thing particularly cool I would show it to Kevin the next day at work and get his feedback.

Anyway, likeI said, Kevein was very technically proficient but not particulalry imaginative… in his free time he did his own artwork and it was all just kind of a rip-off of HR Giger… well-executed but derivative and just the same thing over and over. It wasn’t really coming from his heart.

It kind of mystified me. Why is this guy even a graphic designer? It’s all surface with no soul - nothing of himself in it, no humor, no peronality, nada. Why even bother?

But Kevin was also a big fan of the Art Bell Show, so we did have that to talk about - that was the one thing that made me think there might be more beneath the surface.

One day, as Lothar and I were babbling about lucid dreaming and shamanic journeying over lunch, Kevin asked me: “Where do you get the ideas for your art?”

“Huh?” I wondered. “You’re the artist Kevin, why are you asking me?” But that was the internal monlogue.

I tried to answer him aloud honestly.

“Well, I read a lot of mythology; if you’re feeling stuck, you could try that.

Do you remember your dreams? Write them down - they are usually a source of FANTASTIC imagery and if you write them down you remember them better and the process becomes self-reinforcing.

Or - this really worked for me - start collaging. Run through a bunch of magazines and cut out pictures and use rubber cement to make larger pictures. If you can illustrate your dreams this way it will REALLY open up your subconscious. Try it!”

I brought in some books on Jung and lucid dreaming and surrealism and that sort of thing and loaned those to Kevin too.

Anyway, a month went by or so and I could see that Kevin was struggling to establish some sort of sense of purpose or leverage or belief in himself or someway to start. He was trying to storm the castle gates but wasn’t really getting anywhere. I clucked to myself but didn’t much think about it. We would still have lunch together and talk about Art Bell. “Man did you hear his show last night? That was WILD!” etc.

One day I came into work and Kevin was very excited and wanted to tell me about a dream that he had had the previous night. “I’ve never had a dream like that before - so long and so real,” he said. “It actually left me feeling a bit shaken.”

“Kevin, what was it?” I asked.

“Well,” he said “at the beginning of the dream I was on a whitewater raft coasting down a river. You were there too, on your own raft. You had a flourescent orange ball attached to your raft by a tether, and I had one too, and all up and down the river were all these people being carried in the currents by their rafts, and every one had its own flourescent orange ball attached to it too.”

“We sailed along like together for a long time and talked about a lot of things I can’t remember. At some point, we hit a fork in the river and you went off to the right and I went off to the left - we were separated. I hit a rough patch of whitewater and the going got hard.

I was tossed every which way, thrown from my raft, almost drowned, went up, down and sideways, rolled, and finally washed up by myself on a foreign shore.

I clambered onto the bank, weak, soaking and half-drowned and there was someone standing there I had never seen before but felt like I knew, and had always known. He reached out a hand and helped me up, pulled me out of the shallows and the mud, and helped me stand up. With a twinkle in his eye he handed me a flourescent orange ball, and said that it was mine, and had always been mine and now it would always be with me and I would never lose it again.

I didn’t even remember the dream until I was in the shower this morning and when I did - I don’t know why - but I started crying. I sat in the shower and cried for a long time.”

After that, Kevin began to change and quickly. He stopped doing copies of HR Giger and started making music on his computer instead. A lot of it was great stuff, very evocative and eeirie sounding. He gave a resignation date for his job and announced that he was moving to Newport Beach to surf and pursue his dream of becoming an electronic musiician. He seemed freer somehow, as though the framework of his reality was looser, things were flowing in and out of him and it was just OK. He seemed radiant, very happy - almost like a different person. Now he could BREATHE.

Kevin’s last week at work, we were driving back to the city together and the driver behind us fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into us from behind. The driver was shocked and said that had never happened to her before - she had never fallen asleep while driving before in her life.

I was fine, Kevin was fine, and what do you suppose Kevin found on the ground as we pulled over on the shoulder to wait for the cops to show up? He spotted and picked up, almost immediately…

a flourescent orange ball, I shit you not.